Humanism and Democratic Criticism: The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice

Said's second lecture on a new American humanism takes aim at "humanism as protective or even defensive nationalism" (p. 37). He rehearses the ways in which humanists and humanism have been used as tools (sometimes knowingly and willingly, sometimes not) of nationalistic agendas (sometimes government-sponsored, sometimes not). In this respect, the uses and abuses of the humanities in the North American context have not been unique:

"All cultures have this as a latent tendency, which is one reason why I have connected the humanities directly with the critical sense of inquiry, rather than with what Julien Benda calls the mobilization of collective passions" (p. 37).

Said emphasizes the centrality of critical inquiry to his conception of humanistic study and practice:

"... it is the mark of humanistic scholarship, reading, and interpretation to be able to disentangle the usual from the unusual and the ordinary from the extraordinary in aesthetic works as well as in the statements made by philosophers, intellectuals, and public figures. Humanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idees recues, and it offers opposition to every kind of cliche and unthinking language" (pp. 42-43).

How does this work out in practice?

"More than ever before, it is true to say that the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time. But, one is entitled to ask, what does that in fact really mean? Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of the post-Cold War world, its early colonial formation, and the frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower of today" (p. 47).

Again, speaking of the "proper role of the American humanist today," Said wrote:

"... I cannot stress strongly enough, [it] is not to consolidate and affirm one tradition over all the others. It is rather to open them all, or as many as possible, to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with the others, to show how in this polyglot country in particular many traditions have interacted and--more importantly--can continue to interact in peaceful ways, ways never easy to find but nonetheless discoverable also in other multicultural societies like the former Yugoslavia or Ireland or the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East. In other words, American humanism, by virtue of what is available to it in the normal course of its own context and historical reality, is already in a state of civic coexistence, and, to the prevailing worldview disseminated by U.S. officialdom--especially in its dealings with the world outside America--humanism provides little short of stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance" (p. 49).

These words stir me like passages in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: for they carry within them the ambition of "achieving our country"--something that Richard Rorty, towards the end of his life, hoped to do through (mistakenly) identifying Liberalism with Leftism and both with the Democratic Party. Rorty was, without realizing it, signaling his membership in the Party of Memory. Said, on the other hand, here signaled his membership in the Party of Hope.

This is not to say that memory has no role in the humanistic enterprise--far from it! But humanistic practice is not, as Said puts it so beautifully, "an ornament or an exercise in nostalgic retrospection" (p. 53). Instead, Said proposes what he calls "radical humanistic critique" which begins, for the American humanist, in a self-critique of humanism: "For one thing," Said writes,

"... too much is known about other traditions to believe that even humanism itself is exclusively a Western practice. As a particularly telling example, take two important studies by Professor George Makdisi on the rise of humanism and the Islamic contribution to it. His studies demonstrate amply and with enormous erudition that the practices of humanism, celebrated as originating in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy by authorities such as Jakob Burkhardt, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and nearly every academic historian after them, in fact began in the Muslim madaris, colleges, and universities of Sicily, Tunis, Baghdad, and Seville at least two hundred years earlier ... We now know so much about [the contributions of non-Westerners to the so-called "Western miracle"] as in effect to explode any simple, formulaic accounts of humanism ... It is little short of scandalous, for instance, that nearly every medieval studies program in our universities routinely overlooks one of the high points of medieval culture, namely, Muslim Andalusia before 1492, and that, as Martin Bernal has shown for ancient Greece, the complex intermingling of European, African, and Semitic cultures has been laundered clean of that heterogeneity so troublesome to current humanism" (pp. 53-54).

This state of affairs prompts Said to ask,

"When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them?" (p. 55).

When, indeed?