Is Hollywood’s Identity Politics “Humanistic”?
How religious and secular humanisms nullify the American culture war
What’s the relation between humanism and identity politics?
In her entertainment column for Globe and Mail, Johanna Schneller effectively identifies the two. Reacting to Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, she says that Smith (with my emphasis)
turned himself into the embodiment of toxic masculinity, on a night that was built to celebrate Hollywood’s humanism. For the first time, the ceremony had an all-Black producing team. The three hosts (Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes) mocked Florida’s disgusting “Don’t Say Gay” law. Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer Latinx person to win best supporting actress. Troy Kotsur became the first deaf best supporting actor winner, for playing a salty fisherman whose love for his daughter trumps his own needs in CODA. Jessica Chastain won best actress for playing Tammy Faye Bakker, who may have robbed her parishioners blind, but preached love for AIDS victims. Smith’s act buried all of that in its wake.
Schneller goes on to add another example of this Hollywood “humanism,” when she says that “The most nominated film going into the ceremony was Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a long look at how brutalizing toxic masculinity is,” and that “Campion won best director for it.”
Later in the article, Schneller repeats that the Oscars’ ceremony in 2022 was meant to be humanistic: “Hollywood’s humanism sure tripped over itself after the slap. The room went silent, unsure how to handle this particular intersection.”
So Schneller’s article is about her lamenting that Hollywood’s humanism was overshadowed by Will Smith’s “toxic masculinity.”
Humanism and slavery
Schneller’s assumption seems to be that recognizing the civil rights of these various minorities is humanistic. Taking affirmative action to respect and to reward Blacks, women, “queers,” “Latinxes” (as Schneller puts it), and deaf people is humanistic.
The paradigm for that assumption is how African Americans were freed from slavery out of recognition for their equal personhood. Surely the abolition of slavery and even the Civil War fought over the issue were humanistic, because slavery was explicitly the opposite: slave-holders defended their practice by demonizing Blacks and denying that Blacks and Whites are the same species or “race.” Whites were distinguished people or nobles with the “burden” to lead civilization, whereas Blacks were somehow inherently defective, an inferior race, according to the racists in the Southern slave states.
Slavery thus contradicted the Declaration’s “self-evident” premise “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Unfortunately, that premise technically excludes women from the universal condition of being “created equal,” so women, too, had to fight for their equal standing in American society, in the women’s suffrage movement. But the point is that African American men, at least, had the right to “Liberty” even a century before the Civil War, according to the Declaration’s principles.
If the abolition of slavery was quintessentially humanistic, can the same be said, though, for affirmative action and virtue signalling, for the Hollywood Academy’s going out of its way to honour minorities with token victories because those minorities often aren’t treated equally with heterosexual Whites?
Let’s look at the roots of both religious and secular humanisms to arrive at an answer.
Religious Humanism
Humanism seems to have been based originally on monotheistic or monistic theologies, according to which all the apparent multiplicity and changes in the universe are united in so far as they’re creations of a single God or they arise from a single metaphysical ground of being, such as the Tao or universal Way of nature, or the identity of Atman and Brahman.
In the West, religious humanism traces back to Jewish monotheism, the point of which was to repudiate and satirize the tribalism that followed from polytheism. Each society had its local gods and mythos or ethnic brand, and societies clashed over those cultural differences. Jews saw themselves as a tribe that was divinely chosen to undergo a saga of sacrificial sufferings that would testify to a higher moral calling. Jews announced, after all, that there’s only one true God, and that everyone is subject to the same spiritual or moral condition of having to atone before that Supreme Being.
Jews held themselves apart as the vanguard of God’s kingdom that the Messiah would eventually establish with God’s guidance. As the Zoroastrians said, influencing Judaism towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, all things were being guided towards an apocalyptic unification, when the powers of good would defeat those of evil. Christianity and Islam spread this message of unification; ironically, though, and infamously, these monotheistic religions succumbed to politics, formed exclusive monotheistic religions, and historically clashed over the nuances of their creeds.
Still, the essence of religious humanism is that there’s a common religious situation that overrides all ethnic, gendered, political, or other cultural differences: whether we’re men or women, gay or straight, Black or White, rich or poor, healthy or sick, young or old, we will all face the same Creator in the afterlife, and have to atone for our actions according to God’s revealed moral standards.
Secular Humanism
Secular humanism has an ancient pedigree, too, going back to Greco-Roman philosophy and protoscience. Using reason instead of faith, the Presocratics substituted some conception of matter or of a natural process for an anthropomorphic God. The point was that all intelligent animals are united by the prospects of their progress in relation to the naturalness and therefore the inhumanity of the underlying elements, forces, and processes.
This humanism was based on a naturalistic philosophy, so the unity in question was due to a rational vision of a cosmos, of a universal order. Instead of a personal deity, there were abstract, impersonal elements and forces, from Logos, to atoms in a void, to an ultimate form of goodness that indirectly assigns everything in nature its form or natural purpose.
As Western philosophy and science advanced in the “modern” period, Rene Descartes said that people share a mental substance that enables them to think. John Locke said that the capacity for memory is crucial to consciousness, and that that’s what distinguishes us as individual persons. Immanuel Kant elaborated on how our species’ mental capacities limit our experience of the world.
More empirically, Charles Darwin explained how all species have a common evolutionary origin, and later, geneticists would decode the human genome. And neurologists began to understand the common features of the human brain.
These were some philosophical and scientific developments of the modern concepts of personhood and of a common human species. And modern novelists and existential philosophers, from Henry James to James Joyce, and from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre expressed the upshot of this secular humanism.
The novelists delve into the psychological idiosyncrasies of their characters even at the expense of plot, to highlight how folks who are alienated under industrial or postindustrial conditions struggle to be the protagonists in their life, and to build empathy in the reader. Existential philosophers substituted the problem of existential authenticity for the religious one of our relationships to a supreme divinity. However unique we may be as individuals, especially in a free society, there are universal themes and conditions that define us as people rather than as animals or physical objects.
Modern art, empathy, and identity politics
Clearly, then, there’s a difference between emphasizing (a) what we have in common and (b) what sets us apart. Humanists do the former even if they sometimes seem to be doing the latter. Nietzsche, for example, ended up with a conservative philosophy that divided people into “orders of rank,” and into masters and slaves. But he also posited a metaphysical struggle for power as our universal predicament, and his contempt was for anyone — regardless of gender, skin colour, or other circumstance — who fails to rise to the existential challenge.
The abolition of slavery was humanistic, then, because the liberators’ emphasis was on the rights of personhood, not on the unique features of African American culture.
Perhaps, though, the identity politics that Schneller celebrates in her article about the Oscars can be compared to the modern novelist’s focus on characterization.
Again, the point would be to build empathy by presenting different kinds of people in all their idiosyncrasies. This would be a test of the liberal, multicultural principle of tolerance. The Gay Pride Parade, for example, would work like a modern novel in showcasing the uniqueness of gay people only to ironically show why heterosexuals should sympathize with this group that seems to differ so much from them: the superficial sexual differences would be implicitly contrasted with the underlying, existential commonality of gays and straights.
Crucially, then, there would have to be two steps in this literary humanist exercise:
- displaying our personal or social differences, and
- adding the implicit commentary that those differences are relatively minor since they result from ways of grappling with our universal condition.
Suppose the second step is left out altogether. Suppose, for example, that Hollywood’s allegiance to humanism is superficial, that the Hollywood entertainment industry is cynical and interested mainly in making money. To achieve that goal, the industry might offer token gestures of political correctness to avoid alienating its liberal base of consumers.
In the case of the Oscars, this cynicism would be apparent from the Academy’s subordination of art to politics. Rather than presenting movies as so many works in which the artistic filmmakers struggle with universal themes, and rather than judging the works on that basis — or better, avoiding the superficiality of judging and ranking them at all — the Academy would be using art as a pretext for virtue signalling.
Hollywood’s question would be the tactical one of how many psychological and social differences can be checked off on a list of grievances and underprivileged groups. The Academy would check the boxes, deferring to a wide enough selection mainly to avoid being labelled as bigoted on Twitter, since that criticism would tarnish Hollywood’s brand as a cool place to be.
You’d cover the first step by presenting that variety, in line with Schneller’s description of the 2022 Oscars, and that would so far be consistent with the modern novelist’s practice of writing from the perspective of multiple characters. But the second step would be lacking precisely because Hollywood’s motives are cynical and nihilistic rather than humanistic.
Humanism, culture war, and the disintegration of modernity
My point here isn’t to demonstrate that Hollywood is cynical; rather, it’s that the possibility of such cynicism and of a half-hearted attempt to fulfill both conditions of that form of secular humanism shows that humanism isn’t the same as identity politics.
To be sure, humanism can support the elimination of discriminative practices and even a preoccupation with personal or social differences, as it did in the abolition of slavery and in the advent of the modern novel. But humanist religion and philosophy don’t license the re-imposition of tribal grievances in a relativistic free-for-all. Indeed, far from overshadowing Hollywood “humanism,” Will Smith’s slap is the culmination of anti-humanistic identity politics.
Arguably, male psychopathy is the model of evil, but Schneller’s “toxic masculinity” label goes on to demonize practically all straight male self-assertions, in service to a dubious culture war between rural and urban American tribes. That culture war has been exacerbated by monopolistic Big Tech companies and their corrosive social media platforms and is far from a humanist enterprise.
Far from keeping in mind our common humanity, politically correct liberal elites treat old, white male European culture as the root of all evil, so anything that approximates Western patriarchal oppression, even a so-called “microaggression” or a slap in the face is construed as irredeemable, “toxic masculinity.”
Granted, just as monotheism ironically imploded in political persecutions and crusades, secular humanism may have contributed to this “postmodern” predicament by supporting capitalism and democracy which are social systems that can evidently deteriorate. But in so far as humanism is still a meaningful principle, the humanist’s point must be that we should see through petty late-modern culture wars, tribalism, and cynical pandering, to expose more profound conflicts and virtues.
Thus, the humanist’s question about identity politics is whether highlighting the differences between social groups is meant to remind us of our common humanity or personhood, or whether those differences are supposed to be ends in themselves.
This is so regardless of whether the humanist is religious or secular. A religious one will insist that the universal problem of atonement overshadows our tribal squabbles and vanities. And the secular humanist appeals to the moral upshot of the philosophically and scientifically-explained capacities of all people.
The humanist’s question is this: Are we wallowing in our small-minded social identities because our high-tech environment infantilizes us and conditions us to want to be politically, that is, superficially correct in our flatteries and our celebrations of symbolic social equalities that gloss over the natural costs of human progress?
Or has modern progress taught us to appreciate the bigger picture, the one in which we’re not fundamentally men or women, gay or straight, Black or White, One Percenter or Ninety-Nine Percenter, Millennial or Boomer, but “spirits” or intelligent, tragically heroic, anomalous animals struggling to create a meaningful world in a monstrous wasteland?
There’s all the difference between (a) humanistic enlightenment, or the alertness to the existential problems faced by all self-conscious, intelligent beings, and (b) wokeness as a Big Business-coopted, feel-good performance that encourages us to overlook those problems, and to boast about the narrowness of our personas.
