Yoga and Humanism

At higher states of consciousness, "humanism" appears not so different from racism, sexism, nationalism, and other forms of discrimination strongly denounced by liberal humanist ideology.

Humanism is a widely held belief system celebrating human flourishing and progress by way of scientific inquiry, reason and the intellect. It has extremely broad appeal in it suggests being transcendent of cultural, racial and gender divisions, as humanism is inclusive enough to include humans of all stripes. It sits atop a self-conferred moral hierarchy which puts human survival interests first, implying dominion over non-human animals and that which is viewed as “nature”, or those phenomenon operating outside the envelope of the collective human body and its shared interests. Humanism has an uplifting air of open-mindedness and progressivism while reinforcing a self-affirming positivity everyone can get behind, so it takes no real courage or specific insight to call oneself a humanist and will be met with acceptance in nearly every sphere imaginable— The capitalists and the corporatists like it, the progressives like it, the libertarians like it, Elon Musk likes it, the conservatives must certainly like it, for according to them man was made in the image of God, which suggests man is God-like and therefore justified in carrying out whatever edicts deemed “right” or “moral” under the purview of such a predictable interpretation.

Christianity provided the pre-humanist / pre-modernist ideology of Western culture that took rise in the Dark Ages, which proclaimed a geocentric view of the universe with humanity at its center. While geocentrism was later replaced by heliocentricism (Earth’s rotation around the sun) the humanist undercurrent was seized upon by the Cartesian logic of the Enlightenment in the 16th century when the New World was being settled by Europeans under the rubric of Manifest Destiny, which established the rugged idealism that came to embody the pioneering American spirit. Far less mentioned is this ideology led to the genocide of tens of millions of native peoples and brought with it institutionalized slavery which persisted in North America for well over four centuries.

On the scale of modernist civilization, humanism provides the unspoken social contract for business as usual in the form of liberalism, as in liberal humanism, not to be confused with the liberal / progressive ideology of the “liberals.” Liberal humanism is a much larger overarching ideology which moved many human civilizations beyond the tyranny of kings, pharaohs and the infallible, and gave way for the advent of the citizen, the individual and democracy, which allowed people to think for themselves and experience life with a far greater sense of autonomy and self-purpose. It’s thought by many scholars that the notion of an individuated “self” didn’t exist for most people prior to the onset of modernism and liberal humanism, which in today’s ego fueled world is a sense of self near impossible to imagine and one the modern liberal would go to great lengths to avoid reverting to.

If humanism stands as the ideological barrier between personal autonomy and authoritarianism then casting shade on it will strike many as off base, and the extent to which one feels this way will be directly proportional to how much they identify with their own human form and the satisfaction they derive from acting out the myth of human conquest, i.e. the more they see themselves existing apart from— and in conflict with— nature. While humanism has brought about many fascinating advances and discoveries it’s this boundary between body and everything “other” that is an important distinction to recognize as humanity goes to extraordinary lengths to contrast itself with the natural world (prakriti) and thereby absolves itself of the deleterious consequences which are in full view to anyone willing to pay attention. It should be recognized despite its widespread acceptance humanism is still an ideology existing in a sea of countless other ideologies, the overly simplistic nature of which stands as the primary barrier to all truth seeking. I’m characterizing humanism as an ideology because it’s ultimately not interested in truth— It’s interested in its own survival, which is an entirely different motivation that brings about entirely different rationalizations which lead to entirely different outcomes.

If you and I have common goals under the aegis of humanism we can bond over our shared commitment to shape the world the way we want and lay waste to anything standing in our way, whether it be the environment, animals, or even other humans whose values do not align with our own. Along with this aim of preserving human dominance, it also has embedded within it the moral and ethical justifications for all manner of horrific behaviors— War, genocide, slavery, destruction of the environment, corporate terrorism, surveillance capitalism, the horrendous treatment of animals in factory farms, animal torture in universities and labs, animals exploited for human amusement— All of this has been integrated into the collective human survival strategy, however maligned, however unconscious.

This dark side to humanism lies in its profound existential ignorance, coming about merely as a predictable extension of our egoic biases. Much in the same way a racist or a nationalist views their skin pigmentation or country of origin as superior to all else, the humanist finds the same satisfaction in our place among the natural order and the food chain, and makes appeals to the self aggrandizing hierarchy of “intelligence” created within our minds to serve our own survival strategies. This can be evidenced most clearly by people rationalizing the eating and torturing of certain animals for their perceived “lack of intelligence”, as if to suggest the less intelligent the animal the further away they are from us and the less we should be concerned with their suffering. A very convenient rationalization indeed, especially given these animals do exhibit astonishing degrees of emotional intelligence that go unrealized by the people around them. Yet you’ll see widespread outrage over the abuse of dogs and cats and other animals deemed “cute” or “smart” or who have been granted a certain value proportional to the emotional fulfillment they provide us. But if you want to eat or experiment on an animal there are a host of them who have been culturally predetermined for such fate, to allow one to participate in said behavior and be absolved of feeling any guilt, or anything at all for that matter. These speciesist assumptions are so deeply encoded into the bedrock of humanist ideology they are hardly ever acknowledged, and are furthermore protected under a nightmarish web of Ag-gag laws, corporate propaganda and a culture asleep at the wheel.

Cows, chickens and sheep are considered dumb and find themselves the butt of many jokes, all this despite exhibiting an emotional intelligence none too different from our own. Yet such kindred similarities are quick to be dismissed lest one be convinced the embodiment of such intelligence might warrant an accompanying change in behavior. Pigs show undeniable intelligence and have a genetic memory so similar to our own that their organs are interchangeable with ours, and some people refrain from eating them on account of this. If one insists on eating pigs then one must rationalize their way out of this quandary which is done by denigrating the pig as a “dirty animal,” a being not worthy of our respect or care. The pig may be smart like us but he’s dirty as fuck, not like us, which too is another cultural myth I’ll dismantle in a future post. The speciesist example I give here employs the same self-serving logic undermining much of humanist ideology and serves to embolden the prejudices of those whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo. The humanist makes these speciesist distinctions not out of some noble search for truth, but to serve their own instinctual predilections— Sensory gratification, sexual identity, convenience, and the maintenance of traditions thought to preserve a certain social order in which those less conscious find comfort and security. Again, survival over truth.

Humanism gets a D on the grading scale of cognitive development

This graphic shows the basic progression of egoic development across a number of different models in cognitive evolutionary psychology, spiral dynamics and the chakras most notably. As you can see humanist ideology and the institutions that give rise under its purview are relegated to a human-centric state of cognitive evolution and are not very evolved despite every assumption to the contrary. It’s through this over reliance on logic that you get what the German philosopher Eckart Tolle describes as, “intelligence in the service of madness,” which embodies the shadow side of humanism and is most evident in the corruption of its institutions.