Curiosity and hope

The history and meaning of humanism

Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope

C H AT T O & W I N D U S , £ 2 2

Man was formed of dust, slime and ashes … conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the … stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin”. So wrote Pope Innocent III in his 12th-century On the Misery of the Human Condition. In 1452 Giannozzo Manetti answered Innocent point by point in his own On the Dignity of Man. But as early as the 1300s, Italians were enthusiastically quoting Psalm 8: “Man is only a little lower than the angels.” The passion for finding, collecting and imitating ancient

Greek and Roman texts had readjusted moral priorities – away from arduous obedience to supposedly God-given rules and towards celebrating and fostering human happiness. Increasingly, morality’s concern was to alleviate suffering, not to justify

God for inflicting it.

To date the rise of “humanism” to the early Renaissance is, strictly speaking, anachronistic; there was no such term until the 19th century. But Humanly Possible traces a lineage, less of theories than of kindred spirits, over seven centuries in Europe. This runs from medieval umanisti (students of humanity), who remained Christian even while resurrecting “the flowering, perfumed, fruitful works of the pagan world spring” (as John of Salisbury called them), to today’s (more secular) self-declared humanists.

Along with intellectual developments, Sarah Bakewell gives us their material background – books, book-selling, printing, corpse dissection, plagues and sprezzatura (courtly nonchalance). Among figures both well known and not are Christine de Pisan, with her redoubtable defence of women’s worth; Erasmus, praising the “folly” of love; the erudite Montaigne, wondering what on earth he knew; Spinoza, challenging the accuracy of biblical narratives; Voltaire, lampooning “the best of all possible worlds” and ridiculing the notion that “whatever is, is right”; Thomas Paine, who deemed religion “irreligious” in its claustrophobic gloom; John Stuart Mill, with his incisive analysis of the oppression of women; and Bertrand Russell, sent to prison for opposing war.

Free thinking, inquiry and hope – these, says Bakewell, are perennial humanist principles. Petrarch rejoiced in “the former pure radiance” transmitted through rediscovered classical texts, but the authority of these would in its turn need to be questioned. Books should be signposts, not destinations, wrote EM Forster (he is referenced often and affectionately).

What actually is a “human”? In the 14th century, Humanitas (being human) implicitly involved refinement, civility, erudition and being articulate. And certainly, says Bakewell, we “occupy a field of reality that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual”, which includes talking, drawing, telling jokes, passing on memories, trying to do the right thing, worshipping in temples, building pyramids, art, literature, culture. People often, and sententiously, quote the line from an old Roman play: “Nothing human is alien to me.” Bakewell makes it a running motif, but it is surely an ambivalent one. Those who quote it are usually vaunting their urbanity and open-mindedness, but aren’t they being smug and overoptimistic? After all, shouldn’t much that is human be ostracised? Pico della Mirandola, in the 15th century, like the existentialists in the 20th, celebrated our “indeterminate nature”. He called us chameleons – able, as “maker and moulder” of ourselves, to become “whatever shape [we prefer]”. But, he admitted, we are therefore free to “become brutish”.

Bakewell quotes William Golding’s line “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey”, and perhaps he does this more easily than he secretes sympathy. Humanly Possible is not just sweetness and light. It shows how often humanist attempts to counteract war, oppression, persecution and censorship have been in vain. LL Zamenhof’s invention of Esperanto, a universal language that would bridge division, turned out to be a touchingly “quixotic fantasy”; his children and other relatives were murdered by the Nazis. Attempts to end the slave trade were for decades pitifully inadequate. The “human” that humanism trumpets has for too long been essentially white, male, able-bodied and educated, with females and people of colour omitted, or sidelined. Far from triumphalist, Bakewell nonetheless urges that humanism is a work in progress, and its advocacy more necessary than ever. Having achieved the death of

God, and taken on, as she says, “the task of the murderee”, now we are threatened with the death of man.

Like Bakewell’s previous two books, Humanly Possible skilfully combines philosophy, history and biography.

She is scholarly yet accessible, and portrays people and ideas with vitality and without anachronism, making them affecting and alive.

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IRECALL THAT I AM extremely forgetful ,” announces the narrator of Percival Everett’s Dr No in the novel’s opening lines. “I believe I am. I think I know that I am forgetful. Though I remember having forgotten, I cannot recall what it was that I forgot or what forgetting feels like.” No sooner has the reader crossed the threshold of the narrative than it begins to reveal itself as a labyrinth of mirrors, an elaborate and joyously rickety construction of philosophical gags and structural paradoxes. The novel, Everett’s 23rd, follows last year’s Booker shortlisting of 2021’s The Trees and is a kind of metaphysical caper. The narrator, Wala Kitu, is a professor of mathematics at Brown University, whose area of expertise is nothing. Which is to say that his entire academic career has been devoted to the study and explication of complete absence. Even his name means nothing: Wala is Tagalog for “nothing”, while Kitu is Swahili for the same thing – or non-thing. (His real name, he reveals early on, is Ralph Townsend – an admission that will lead readers familiar with Everett’s earlier work to recognise the now thirtysomething mathematician as the ingenious polymathic toddler at the centre of the 1999 post-structuralist satire Glyph .)

It’s hard to think of any American fiction writer since Thomas Pynchon who is as committed to excavating a novel’s themes through cerebral jokes. Everett derives near-infinite eggheaded wordplay from the linguistic absurdity of nothing as a subject. “I just received a grant that I hope leads to nothing,” Kitu tells a fellow professor at one point; elsewhere, contemplating his failure, despite years of study, to capture the white whale of nothingness, he says: “I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.”

It is Kitu’s strange area of mathematical interest that draws him into the orbit of John Sill, a billionaire with the explicit desire to become a Bond villain. Sill’s Goldfinger-ish plan is to break into Fort Knox and steal a shoebox containing a small quantity of nothing he believes to be sealed in a vault therein. He offers Kitu $3m to act as a sort of consultant to his dastardly project.

Sill intends to use this quantity of nothing as a weapon of mass nullification, to reduce America itself to nought – not to destroy it, as such, but to cause it to never have existed. Sill, who Kitu describes as “slightly racially ambiguous”, reveals a villain origin story that is deeply embedded in his country’s racial wounds: his father was an innocent collateral victim of the plot to assassinate Martin Luther King and, years later, his mother was killed by police. As Sill puts it to James Earl Ray, the man who shot MLK, when he visits him in prison, “I won’t take your life. That doesn’t have much value. I’m going to take your world.”

But this rationale for his villainy is, like everything else in Everett’s novel, gleefully subverted. At one point, Sill is asked whether it bothers him that his plan to zap the country will also wipe out an awful lot of his fellow Black Americans. “Sacrifices must be made,” he says. “If there’s one thing all this money has made me, it’s White.”

One of Everett’s many gifts as a novelist is his ability to balance his wild comic sensibilities with an unmistakable seriousness of purpose. In his 2001 novel Erasure, an Everett-esque author, under relentless pressure to conform to the publishing industry’s expectations of Black writing, dashes off a novel called My Pafology. The book is an absurd satire of those culturally reductive expectations; it is taken at face value and becomes a publishing phenomenon. My Pafology, the entire text of which is included in Erasure, is both savagely funny and embedded in a complex and sophisticated commentary on the idea of a “Black literature”. The Trees mined, by means of crime fiction, a dark thematic seam of racism and revenge. Dr No returns to these themes, but its approach is more determinedly antic.

Everett’s commitment is absolute; the plot proceeds by way of a funhouse gauntlet of spy-thriller cliches, with Kitu, having turned against his former supervillain boss, acting as a kind of anti-Bond – a mathematician “on the spectrum” who has no interest in sex, and who spends quite a lot of the novel standing guard valiantly over his own virginity. There are sexy female bodyguards. There are shark-infested pools, in which people are dispatched by way of trapdoors. There are submarines, vast compounds in remote locations, a constant succession of plot reversals occasioned by people pulling guns on each other.

It’s all a great deal of fun, and Everett gets a lot of comic mileage out of his narrator’s affectless reactions to the increasingly absurd situations he finds himself in. At one point, as he hangs by his fingertips from an eighth-floor balcony, Kitu pauses to consider the mechanics of narrative tension: “The suspense here is strange, as of course one would know that I did not fall to my death, though I suppose it is possible that I could have survived to write this from my wheelchair.”

With its relentless philosophical jokiness and its joyfully involuted narrative, Dr No feels lighter and brisker than much of this lavishly prolific and talented writer’s other work. But even when he seems to be writing about nothing, Everett is always up to something interesting.

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