The Sloppy Critique of Humanism

The single most common objection to Marxist theory that one hears in college courses (and one that I am fairly sure is the bane of Dr. J's existence) is that "well, that's all fine in theory, but we know it never works in practice." In other words, Marx is ultimately a failure as a thinker because states that have been ostensibly established on Marxist principles have all been failures. While I don't think that politically this reasoning is necessarily unsound in regard to revolutionary socialism, in intellectual terms it's silly to conflate the latter day practices of Communist regimes with the actual thought and writings of Marx.

To me, the argument that liberal humanism is a theoretical failure because some categories of people have not been or are not treated as fully human is formally equivalent to this facile objection to Marxism. It is true that the conception of the human in Enlightenment rationalist terms has led the rationalisation of ill-treatment of certain groups (such as women or blacks) on the supposed grounds that they comparativiely lack characteristics such as rationality that are part of the human ideal. Yet from this it is not at all clear that systems of oppression are a result of liberal discourse. It is certainly not clear that we should have been better off without that discourse, given that our objection to practices such as slavery or the subjugation of women was and is primarily expressed in liberal humanist terms.

In any case, one can and must make the distinction between the intellectual cogency of a theory (such as the liberal notion of the human) and its application. Otherwise one would have to reject the labor theory of value on the basis of Josef Stalin being nuts, or to reject post-humanist philosophy because cyborgs are scary. The Enlightenment project does not assert that humans are only rational, only atomistic, and only independent, but it emphasizes those things because it views these qualities as uniquely human. Perhaps this conceptually sound, or perhaps not. But the fact that 18th century European sailors (probably not the most reflective or philosophical lot) had no problem dealing in human flesh has little bearing on it. To the extent that historical narrative is relevant here, I would posit that the progressive inclusion of various categories of human beings as worthy of equal treatment as such is precisely a function of the triumph of the liberal world view in the political and social spheres. Nonetheless, this happy trend itself says nothing about the abstract merits of the traditional notion of the human. So don't take my word for it.