Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible (Penguin, 2023) *****

When reading the short description of the book's content, I was hesitant. I am already convinced of the value of its contents. Second, I have read already so much on the subject that I wondered whether it would convey anything new. The reality of reading proved me wrong. Even if you consider yourself a 'humanist', and maybe because you are, you should read this book. It is extremely well-documented and extremely well-written. Bakewell starts the book with the 'credo' of humanism, as penned by Robert G. Ingersoll in the 19th Century: 

Happiness is the only good. 

The time to be happy is now. 

The place to be happy is here. 

The way to be happy is to make others so. 

Even if I was well aware or vaguely aware of the content of the thinkers and authors that she describes in this book, the real novelty is how these thoughts were received in society and how they evolved to become part of broader political and philosophical thinking. 

Her journey starts in the early 14th Century with the writings of Petrarch and Boccacio ("When his father contemplated training him for the church as 'a good way to get rich' it turned out he had no liking or aptitude for that either"). Both authors raided libraries to re-discover the ancient Latin authors, revived them, wrote about them. Bakewell mentioned that Bocaccio at one stage considered abandoning his literary endeavours because "a monk, Pietro Petroni of Sienna, warned him in 1632 that he would imminently die if he did not get rid of all the non-Christian books in his library and stop writing books himself. This had been revealed to him in a vision". Luckily, Petrarch used smarter arguments to convince him of the opposite: 'ignorance is not the path to virtue". He advocated for knowledge and learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas. 

We take it for granted today that we have immediate access to the works of Cicero, Epicurus, Terentius and Democritus, but that is of course not the case. Very few scholars even spoke Greek, so they had no way of understanding or valuing whatever Greek texts still existed in hidden libraries across Italy or elsewhere. The geneaology goes further: Poggio rediscovered Lucretius' "On The Nature of Things". Printing was invented and became a great power to share old and new ideas about broader groups of people. Lorenzo Valla is the next in line. 

"His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah. All these assets were necessary to Valla, because he was daring to attack one of the church's central modern claims: its justification for having complete power over all of western Europe. It could be a short step from that to questioning its other claims to authority, too, including the authority it held over peo­ple's minds. Valla seems to have been a man who had no fear and could never be persuaded to keep quiet. He traveled all over Italy, working for a series of patrons and supporters-at this point he was living in Naples-but he made enemies everywhere as well. The poet Maffeo Vegio had already warned him to seek advice before writing things that would hurt people's feelings, and generally to restrain his "intellectual violence." (p.87)

It takes courage to have intellectual curiosity, to be open to ideas that challenge beliefs and established authority: "Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life. And crucially, Valla did not merely tell people they were wrong, he gave the reasons why they were wrong" (p.93). 

On Vesalius: 

"He blamed both himself and other anatomists for having been too Galen-reliant: "I shall say noth­ing more about these others; instead I shall marvel more at my own stu­pidity and blind faith in the writings of Galen and other anatomists." He ends the section by urging students to rely on their own careful examina­tions, taking no one's word for anything, not even his own. This was a good warning, since Vesalius himself did not get every­thing right. One error was that he failed to identify the clitoris cor­rectly, misdescribing it as part of the labia. It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it ''amor Veneris, vel dulcedo" ("love of Venus, or thing of pleasure"), gave details of its role in women's sexual experiences, and remarked, "It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility." (p. 130)

On education and Erasmus schooling in a monastery: 

Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aver­sion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: "The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible." That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks' attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlight­ened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live." (p. 142) 

Other luminaries who are part of the genealogy: Pico della Mirandola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andreas Vesalius, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglas ("There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him"), Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt ("The State that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human"), Matthew Arnold. Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernest Renan, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell, ...

Bakewell is also very conscious of the value of humanism to all humans and not only to the male part of it. 

"Pericles (told) Athenian free men in 430 BCE that they are excel­lent because they are harmonious, responsible, and politically active - only to add that this does not apply to women, whose only virtue is never to be mentioned by anyone at all. That continued to be the norm for millennia: instead of the mainstream of human excellence, women were offered a rivulet of negative side virtues: modesty, silence, placidity, innocence, chastity. Each of these is characterized by the absence of some positive quality (confidence, eloquence, active responsibility, experience, and - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what the virtuous opposite of chastity is, but whatever we call it, it is surely more fun)." (p.203) 

There

"Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of ar­bitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.  The old Golden Rule, associated with several religions as well as with secular morality, has much to offer here: "Do as you would be done by." Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diver­sity: Don't do something to others if you wouldn't like it yourself. It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don't like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either. Or, as Kongzi said: "The Master's way consists of doing one's best to fulfill one's humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity." (p 218, 219)

This book is a great overview of humanist thought: inquisitive, inclusive, caring, ethical, motivated by a happiness for all, in diversity of thought and the right of each individual to personal freedom and fullfilment and happiness. For me this overview is the absolute hope and despair of humanity. Hope because it offers a clear perspective and a way of thinking, despair because over the centuries of expanded thinking on the subject, we have not moved significantly further at a global level. Our technology has advanced exponentially over the last two centuries, mainstreaming it across the globe, yet humanist thinking has despite its obvious value and benefits barely created strong understanding and use in most of the world. 

Bakewell is an excellent guide, erudite and entertaining and truly committed. 

Not to be missed.