Arrogance of Humanism

The Arrogance of Humanism by David Ehrenfeld, 269 pages

Humanism, as defined somewhat idiosyncratically by Ehrenfeld, is the belief that human reason can solve every problem, and human powers can transcend all limits.  In this sense, the vast majority of Americans, left and right and center, are humanists.  The West as it emerged from the Enlightenment is a humanist culture increasingly exclusively, through the long nineteenth century, focused on technical and technological solutions to the world's ills.  This has only been strengthened by the unprecedented success of this approach, ushering in the wealthiest era in human history.  As the twentieth century waned, however, it was already being perceived that human ingenuity was beginning to find its limits, and that the Western way of life was becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Ehrenfeld, an ecology professor, casts the crisis of late modernity as a tragedy of hubris.  Human societies are only susceptible to so much engineering, solutions to increasingly narrow problems create new problems that compound each other, systems become increasingly complex and therefore increasingly brittle.  The true costs and dangers are hidden by a quantitative approach that ignores the qualitative entirely and creates a false sense of security and control.

Ehrenfeld saw little hope at the time of this book's publication in 1978 of any systemic change.  At the end, the best hope he could offer was that some Gollum might take the Ring into the fire at the cost of only a finger.