The History of the Humanist Gay Lobby

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I think anything that happens after I'm born is the modern world. Can we think of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism in some sense as fundamentally anti-humanist movements? They're sort of valorizing the state or the system rather than the individual human being. There's something profoundly out of culture about human life as we find it. What's needed is a strong authoritative other thing. Inevitably, because it's an abstract idea, it's imposing the state again.

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.

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Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.

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