Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
The great Martin Luther King Junior said,
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
In other words, justice may not be here now,
and hard times may fall upon us,
but ultimately, it's going to prevail.
Our world will get better.
Raise your hand if you've heard that quote before. Anyone heard that?
Keep your hand raised if you like it.
It's powerful, right? It makes us feel good.
It reminds us of a more promising future.
What if I told you this quote was misguided?
You see, in this particular quote,
King is expressing a faith in human progress.
King, among many, many wonderful things,
is a humanist.
I think most of you are humanists too.
I am here today to talk to you about humanism,
question why we hold so many humanistic assumptions
and then hopefully challenge you a little bit
and paint you a picture of a different perspective or lens
with which you can view the world.
But before I do any of that, what is humanism?
It's an important and influential idea that stems from Greek and Roman thought,
but kind of formally established itself and got its name in the Enlightenment.
Now, there are a lot of different versions of humanism, and they're different,
but they all share the same core assumption.
And that assumption is what I am talking about today,
and it can be expressed in just five words:
the belief in human progress,
species-level progress.
Because this is not progress, say, you and I getting better at ping-pong,
if we work on our forehand, right?
Not that kind of progress.
This is not even progress in us coming up with an invention
and improving the lives of people around us.
This is species level, it is us humans, collectively,
consciously and deliberately using reason, science and technology,
moving our species toward a kind of utopia.
It's long-term human progress.
To borrow from John Gray,
a British philosopher who is deeply influential to this presentation,
humanism is the belief in our species' ability
to free ourselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals.
I'm going to stress an important point: most of us are humanists.
I think the two, like, most obvious humanists who are my favorite ones
are Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
These two men, extraordinary men,
embody and just show and unceasing, undeniable faith in humanity, right?
Humanism is everywhere.
But what if we're all wrong?
What if we're not all that special?
What if humans are "a" component,
rather than "the" component of our world's narrative?
Now, I question the humanistic assumption for two reasons.
And the first one is
there are a lot of important, influential, reasonable ideas
that paint a picture in direct contrast to this faith in human progress.
Darwinism, Gaia hypothesis, certain eastern religions
and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer in particular,
they all paint this non-human-centric worldview.
Take Darwinism, for example,
and its fundamental insights that, one, we're animals,
and two, the importance of utter randomness to our existence.
Our world is the way it is and we are the way we are because of randomness.
Now, we now know
that this random evolutionary process has been taking place among mammals
for about 200 million years.
Civilization has been around for 7,000. It's that red bar right there.
Now, that red bar is actually a lot smaller.
I just had to make it big enough for you to see.
When you combine the relative insignificance you feel
after looking at this timeline
with the insights that we're animals
and that we're kind of the process of randomness,
well, it starts to paint a picture
of a very non-human-centric worldview, right?
You start to kind of see what I'm talking about.
"But hold on, hold on, hold on," you might be saying.
"We are special!
Who cares about where we come or all that?
We're clearly different from animals, right?
We are unique in a lot of ways."
And that's an important point, and I see exactly where you're coming from.
But I would argue that some of the stuff that makes us really, really special,
the major things that do make us special, science and technology,
well, they're not inherently good.
Right now, you have many, many countries
developing artificially intelligent soldiers.
These are machines trained to kill humans without any human intervention at all.
What could possibly go wrong?
Now, I joke, but if Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking sign a letter
warning us about the eminent danger of this weapon's development,
we should be concerned.
Further, we should realize
that maybe technological development isn't always the best for us collectively.
Another great example of this is the development of nuclear technology.
What's maybe the first thing you'd think about in this king of conversation?
It's been dangerously close
to having a massively negative impact on civilization,
the Cuban Missile Crisis -
And we're kind of in a situation right now too,
if you've been looking at the news at all.
And that's not to mention the problems we have with the waste domestically
and what to do with that.
And there's a third point or a third kind of aspect of technology
that's really important to look at,
and it has to do with the impacts of climate change
that our generation and the next generation will face.
It's important, really important for us to realize
this harm is the direct causational result
of what was labeled as progress in the 19th and 20th century.
Think about that.
And while science is probably our best bet to solve all this,
definitely our best bet maybe,
I can't help but wonder
what long-term consequences will flow from our solutions.
We don't know,
and there lies the problem!
The people implementing this science and technology,
us,
we are also flawed!
We cannot predict the future, like, at all,
and we make a lot of mistakes.
"Okay, wait, hold on, hold on.
But look where we are now.
We've gone through a lot for a really, really long period of time,
and we're okay!
Our lives are better than our parents' and their lives are better than theirs."
Well, that's a pretty solid point.
In fact, that's the point
that a brilliant psychologist at Harvard, Steven Pinker, makes,
and he's probably humanism's biggest and fiercest supporter, I would say.
And he lays out the evidence showing, you know, throughout civilization,
humans, you know, we have been flowed, but we've gotten better.
Ethically, just collectively, we've gotten better.
And it's a really good point and it's worth considering.
But the problem with this point,
and one that you simply can't answer and this point can't address, is:
Will our past be emblematic of our future?
Should we be looking in the rearview mirror
to see whether there's a turn ahead?
I don't think so.
Now, at the very, very least,
we deserve to question, rather than just blindly assume,
in human progress.
Now, why am I here?
Am I here just to bomb you out?
I promise I'm not, right?
There are two major important practical consequences
to the rejection of humanism,
and the first one is related to public policy.
When we reject our faith in human progress,
we might advocate for different kinds of public policy than we're used to.
This is a dominant western ideology.
It obviously impacts the policy we put forth.
A few examples that come to mind are far more armaments treaties;
maybe regulation of certain kinds of technology, like AI,
which we don't know so much about,
or at least slowing it down a little bit;
or perhaps just the straight elimination of our space program.
These are just a few possible consequences,
they could be debated,
but it shouldn't surprise you
that maybe what I'm advocating for makes you feel weird
or it wouldn't be what you'd traditionally want.
But I think, as I've shown,
we deserve to look at these things from this new resting assumption.
Maybe I'm partially wrong,
or maybe it's somewhere in the middle, or something like that,
but we want to look at this from another perspective.
And as fascinating as the implications to public policy are,
it's not the reason I'm here.
I'm here today because the rejection of humanism
can change the way we find meaning in our life.
Humanism and many followers of world religions, certain religions,
see meaning as singular, one big meaning,
or an ultimate purpose, right?
Now, we do lots and lots of different things,
but ultimately, what we do, what it's for
is flows into serving a higher power,
in the case of religion.
In the case of humanism, it's the progression of our species.
That's why we do what we do.
There seems to be something we like about a grand narrative,
about stories, right?
They give us answers and they just make us feel good.
And I'm not the first one to point this out.
Thinkers as far back as Plato
have recognized the importance of this larger meaning or narrative to life,
and that led him to advocate for his famous Noble Lie.
That's right: Plato, lover of truth, thought that justice,
justice,
consisted of lying to the vast majority of the public
about where they were coming from and their origin.
And even though he knew this was wrong,
he thought it was necessary for them to find happiness and meaning.
But what if he's not right?
Do we need this singular meaning, this ultimate purpose,
to live and to be happy?
I think the answer is it simply depends, and it's up for you to decide,
but I think we owe it to ourselves to make that conscious decision.
Because a world without humanism is not as sad or nihilistic
as you may be thinking, right?
I know "destruction of ultimate purpose" sounds a little bit dreary,
but there is something freeing about the removal of a grand narrative.
Suddenly, these smaller meanings, these smaller purposes,
they become more valuable, they elevate themselves.
Right?
Our day-to-day actions become ends in themselves.
We shouldn't help people because helping people will progress our species.
We should help people because helping people is fundamentally good.
Do we need more than that?
Ask yourselves,
"How will I find meaning?"
Thank you.
(Applause)