New Humanism

I'm sitting in a cafe right now, and I just heard what, apparently, was a guy trying to pick a chick up, because I engaged him after she went inside to get her coffee, he acted like I was being a douchebag, and she went rushing back past him to her car without stopping to be reengaged in the conversation, which, after all, was a continuation of what they'd been talking about.

Anyway, they actually had an interesting enough conversation, she's studying Anthropology and he was a History B.A. and now pursuing Economics.  He claimed, and I may also have snickered or done something else audible or visible to him at this point (my back was turned), knowing only the Economics thing and not the History-side background, that Econ is the intersection of human interaction, and I'm forgetting his precise perspective and wording here, but human interaction probed or described or moderated by and I do think these were his words, 'solid math.'

Anyways, my disdain for people who think technology, and especially computer programming, is mathematical and 'scientific' to an exclusive degree is of course not something I'm pratty enough to write about at length, this post is about the inspiration they gave me after he half-recovered himself (in my eyes: she, apparently, was having none of it) by revealing a History background and with the insightful observation about where the new wave that is swelling to replace Postmodernism needs to go in Economics.  To say, however, that Economics is that Social of a Science in the post-Modern era is to disassociate from the fact that he was bragging to a woman with an Anth background about how his discipline was particularly mathematized among the Social Sciences, as if that were its strength, which, from a SOCIAL SCIENCE perspective, is opposite to reality.

So she, of course, insisted that just because it was human, instead of price based did not make information any less quantifiable.  He only barely heard her, but if finally made something click in my head.

This new wave that I'm referring to is obviously the normal succession of one intellectual outlook succeeding another in roughly generational chunks, only slightly deferred and a bit more angst fueled by the imminent Baby Boom retirement disaster coming up; their natural wish to push that genuinely dangerous moment in American (dare I say, Human) history and their own lives off as long as possible; and their own (some of them) actions in the Florida nightmare allowing the financial collapse that pushed their retirements necessarily closer (if you're offended by the Florida thing, its because you understood it, which means there's some truth to it, doesn't it?).

That new wave, as it usually is made up of the not quite young (but younger than the current crop of tenure holders) age set that is graduating advanced degree programs now, having studied Postmodernism as the status-quo, some of them having grown up in professional households, where philosophical post-Modernism was normative, says "FUCK Postmodernism, you're stupid. Yes, its useful to take an attitude of non-judgement into circumstances where your values are an anachronism.  Duly noted, teaching it in the schools.  No, that does not mean that there is no right and wrong, that everything is relative with people and that I have no right to judge You, used, both, in the capital word sense.  It means that human behavior is based on far more complex schemes of decision making than Hobbes and Locke, Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Elect and Sinner, and that you have to understand the entire schemes first before judging which element of, yes, WRONG THINKING leads, say, a Palestinian twelve-year-old to pick up the working-condition rocket launcher from the dead hands of the Hamas-offshoot fighter lying in the ruins of his family home.  You can, however, if you actually give a fuck, isolate that belief (wrong thinking), understand its roots and devise a strategy for re-teaching the instinct to understand the world through a self-righteous, vengeance-fueled rage."  The anti-bougie, -cause-celebre 'Palestininan' humanitarianism choice of example is personal, of course, but the attitude of "No, with care and study, the truth is discernible and, complex as the description may need to be, reproducible,"is what I'm referring to as the new wave attitude.

Anyways, that new wave, which, I feel certain public and academic figures (Rachel Maddow, Jared Diamond for instances) represent early steps toward, will need a name, and I want to propose a candidate, New Humanism.

Humanism is that discipline that led Adam Smith to write Wealth of Nations, Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia and Locke Two Treatises on Government in such unbelievably boring, endlessly droning, monotonously completionistic style, taking every different way of studying the world and people that Medieval scholars had begun to devise, astronomy, alchemy, geology (which was the same thing as alchemy, believe it or not), and throwing them all down on a page in, essentially, a deliberate, if unsystematic, list.

The interdisciplinality of contemporary Social Sciences demands a similarly encyclopaedic look at any subject you truly wish to cover thoroughly, and it particularly demands a mentality that considers all of the sciences, physical, social and natural law (math, physics) a part of a single overarching manner of looking at the world.

Ergo, New Humanism.  This will remind us that, despite the petty (anachronistic) prejudices of Modern scholars, the knowledge base built by that nameless Witch from ninth century Francia who first called Galen's humors idiocy was as fundamental to their own work as the great classical authors that were prompting them to call for wholesale rejection of such Medieval chicanery, and that, at base, all science, even Math is about understanding one thing, ourselves.