Humanism is liberal because it draws from the same well of ideals as John Locke, an Enlightenment-era thinker who was foundational to liberalism, and in fact, it actually hews closer today to those ideals than liberalism does. Humanism is
idealist not because it promises that things could be better maybe if we just work hard enough, but because it forms its ideas without regard to the material conditions and then imposes those ideas on physical reality, rather than extracting principles observed from the material world. This stands in contrast to historical materialism & physicalism, which assert that material conditions shape our minds rather than the other way around.
If you're wondering how it took on the fascistic connotations it does in
Tyrants, well, the fascism was in the
House liberalism all along. Humanism has a fundamentally anthropocentric, universalizing character to it, defining rights as a thing that is fundamental strictly to
humans. Since
at least the Enlightenment, if not earlier, "human" meant the straight, white, cis, landowning male, and universalized outward from that narrow definition. This generalization has always been conditional on approved behavior, and is swiftly retracted when you become inconvenient. It's rarely ever spelled out so plainly, but it's not enough that you must act white, act straight-passing, go stealth to avoid being dehumanized, you must also dehumanize the brown, queer, the non-binary yourself to reinforce your position in the hierarchy and show that you're truly integrated into the humanist
kyriarchy. But that's today's humanist liberal order. What about the future?
Tyrants asks the question, "What if people took the prescriptions Francis Fukuyama laid out in
Our Posthuman Future and got militant about it?" Fukuyama asserts that anything and everything not fully human, whether that be posthumans, AGI, uplifts, or cyborgs, can and should be treated as subhuman, enslaved, tortured, exploited, and abused as necessary to provide humans with better living. Where Fukuyama prescribes this as a solution to preserve the neoliberal order and the end of history, (post-
Meltdown) Nick Land observes that what he calls hyper-racism will happen
anyways as a consequence of the accelerating feedback mechanisms in society reacting to augmentation and furthering the siloing between humans and the variously augmented. The end result of this siloing and increasing militancy is fascism, crushing the "degenerate" and the subhuman augment out of the fear of their slow loss of power and the projection that the Enemy will commit the same oppressions, the same horrors on the Humanists as soon as the Other gains power.
The trends that will create this fascistic Humanism are already visible in today's strains of Humanism.
The animal liberation movement and the voluntary human extinction movements both start from humanist morals, extending the definition of "human" to animals, which necessitates coming up with tests of "humanness" to assert that these
particular animals and not others are worthy of receiving extended human rights, typically taking some measure of sentience and sapience. But there can be no measure of sentience and sapience that includes all humans and excludes livestock, or even successfully excludes all flora. If humans cannot survive fully extending the umbrella of human rights to animals, the voluntary human extinction movement asserts that thus humans are the problem and must die for nature to live.
Transhumanism is humanism, simplified. It extends human rights to the transhuman, but the moment you look into the discourse around transhumanism, it is
rife with arguments over who and what qualifies as properly transhuman versus the inhuman. If we do not exclude the inhuman, transhumanists say, they in their alien mindsets will visit upon us such horrors that have never been seen by white man, only perpetrated by him. Yudkowsky's own assertion in the linked article, that removing exceptions and limitations can only be a good thing, eventually led him down the rabbit hole of trying to formalize human morality and founding a cult of rationality. Without exceptions and limitations, he had no means of checking whether his moral assertions actually made any
sense, because he rejected intuition right alongside them.
We can also see the flipside of these in TERFs and the GOP today. Where transhumanists and animal liberationists seek to extend the umbrella of human rights, they seek its retraction, dehumanizing trans*, queer, and brown people, and as with all fascists, Jewish people as well. The European groups also actively dehumanize Roma, but that's never particularly been particularly prominent in the American ones. If the umbrella of human rights is retracted, they can secure their place in the racial hierarchy at the low, low cost of the lives of the millions of people they've already made into monsters in their minds.
Centering (the cis, white, heterosexual, landowning conception of) the human has always been the fatal flaw of humanism. It asserts the human as good, and all others can only exist in relation to the "human," either by conditional acceptance or by contrast as monsters. Yet throughout history it's always been the
human who is responsible for the great depravities, dehumanizing the other as a means of making it easier to steal from them, kill them, and grind them under your boot. Much as in Mary Shelly's
Frankenstein, it's not the Creature who is the monster, but Victor Frankenstein himself. The monsters are innocent, and humanity, proclaiming its innocence, the monster.
So why should I apologize for being a monster? Society has never apologized for making me into one.
