On my way to the Credit Union this morning I happened to hear something on my car radio that I found moving. During the Second World War, while the Wehrmacht was inflicting its frightful siege on Leningrad, Shostakovich composed his symphony in honor of the suffering city. When the symphony was finished, the defending Soviet forces set up loudspeakers and broadcast the performance toward the German siege lines. One of the German soldiers later recalled the effect: “It began to dawn upon us that we would never conquer this city. The besieged were motivated by something more powerful than terror and starvation: their will to remain human.”
We know now what a cauldron of horrors the besieged city was. Even the celebratory account of Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days mentions the innocent Soviet victims who fell prey to the NKVD. Fuller accounts supplement the official narrative of a truly heroic resistance by reporting the depredations that included cannibalism and brutality. One can see why historians might balk at ennobling history. But one can also see how a humanely sensitive German soldier in the siege army might have registered the cumulative effect of Soviet resistance and factored it against all that the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the Soviet people. One can imagine this hypothetical thoughtful soldier peering out of the trenches at the outer districts of that city of culture and art and listening to the taut strains of Shostakovich’s modern masterwork. One can imagine the soldier mulling over in his mind the questions, who is more resolute, who really deserves the propagandistic verdict of the subhuman Untermensch? I can imagine the whole complex equation reduced in the soldier’s mind to the formula of a “will to remain human.” Perhaps the soldier was also struggling to remain human. Perhaps we all do that in the face of death, the ultimate dehumanizer.
I’m not going to try to track down the source of the anecdote. I prefer to accept it as a proposition regarding a certain kind of humanism, one ignored by Sarah Bakewell in her new survey of the history of that concept: Humanly Possible. I mean the neglected humanism of the finest socialist thinkers and authors, of Eugene Debs, Bertolt Brecht, or Victor Serge. Social humanism is when the individual acts as part of a collective, the besieged city or the oppressed class. It is humanism by and for the people, humanism of a sterner stuff. For only the conscious collective makes such volition possible and there is no more proper object of its action than the collective whole of life that surpasses the life and death of the individual. Social humanism would encompass all previous Renaissance or modern humanists, secular or spiritual. It would render explicit what was only implicit in an individually or religiously articulated value system: that the force of each realizes the force of all life, of all human beings. It does so without transcendence. Social humanism was voiced by Eugene Debs: “While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal class I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
If I had to choose a designation for the broad front of opposition needed to advance against the forces destroying the earth and endangering all life and humanity, it would be social humanism. It would reject the post- and transhumanist fantasies and affirm the social as against the me-first specialism of capitalist-consumerist society and its individualistic or nationalistic variants. Since adherence to social humanism would be expressed in mindful socializing, it would confer on its adherents confirmation by alleviating the worst pangs of meaningless isolation, thereby creating a more humane society within our soulless system. Its ethos of solidarity should take aim at misinformation and false consciousness sustaining the system in which we now live. Determining what this means in practice could and should give rise to the open-ended debate that energizes any broad movement. Authority would accrue to those most imaginative, courageous, consistent, and effective in challenging our destructive system, our personal and national wars of all against all.
Addendum: In listing my friends, I forgot the utterly kind and reliable Sarah, so reliable that I seem to have taken her for granted. Tomorrow: my last trip, to Paris and back.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 