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Premature HumanismSeptember 23, 2005 "Premature humanism" has driven me nuts for years. Can't remember if I overheard the phrase or made it up; if the latter, it definitely owes a debt to "premature anti-fascism," which meant opposing fascism before Stalin said it was OK to oppose fascism. In my student-activist days, we tossed this around tongue-in-cheekily to suggest that a previously dogmatic leftist was showing signs of thinking for himself. "Premature humanism" isn't exactly analogous, of course. It's really just a variation on "I'm not a feminist, but . . ." where the "but" clause is generally something like "I do support equal pay for equal work." All you can say in response is "Then you are a feminist," or, following the lead of Ursula Le Guin in an exasperated moment, "Then you are a feminist butt." The humanism version is "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist." In the piss-me-off sweepstakes, it's right up there with "post-feminism." I haven't heard "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist" in at least a year, either because people know better than to say it around me or because locally feminism is such a negligible force that few women feel the need to dissociate themselves from it. But I just came across a passage that perfectly expresses why these non-feminist humanists annoy me so. From Michael Wood's introduction to a collection of essays by the late Edward Said: "It's true that dreams of reconciliation, in music or in the Middle East, are often merely a means of failing to think about difficulty and difference. But that doesn't mean such thinking isn't possible, and reconciliation may in any case not be exactly what we need." Me, I'd change "possible" to "utterly essential," but that's a quibble. The guy got it right the first time.
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