Humanism in an Age of Anti-humanism

This essay argues that the partisan divide of America’s culture wars is one of the primary strategies by means of which the society of spectacle aims to distract us from the anti-humanist and deeply nihilistic tendencies of our time. Accordingly, this essay analyzes the two forms of fake humanism by means of which the left and right have historically advanced their anti-humanist agenda—the Christian humanism of America’s imperialistic evangelicalism and the techno-scientific humanism of American pragmatism. This negative critique is complemented by a critical reconstruction of aspects of the humanist tradition that can serve to revitalize intellectual life today, from Emerson’s Bildung-inspired ideal of self-reliance and Thoreau’s primitivist anarchism to Mumford’s critique of the megamachine and his defense of values for survival in a terminal age.