Notes of an Underground Humanist

By Wright, Chris, Dr.

Book Id: WPLBN0100302243
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 1.54 MB
Reproduction Date: 1/13/2013

Title:	Notes of an Underground Humanist
Author:	Wright, Chris, Dr.
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Social Sciences, History
Collections:	Authors Community, Philosophy
Historic Publication Date:	2013
Publisher:	Booklocker

Member Page:	Chris Wright
Citation APA MLA Chicago Chris Wright, B. D. (2013). Notes of an Underground Humanist. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.cc/

Description
In a decadent late-capitalist society, humanism is under attack from all directions. It's time we fought back and reclaimed what it means to be human, embracing the best of what history and thought have bequeathed us.

Summary
This book touches on most of the important questions that arise in life. Somewhat in the manner of Nietzsche, it presents provocative perspectives on topics ranging from morality to politics, from art to religion, from capitalism to socialism. What is the "meaning of life"? What does it mean to act morally? What are the sources of modern unhappiness and social ills? How has Western society evolved to its present state, and what is its future? What is the future of capitalism itself? Such questions, and many others, are addressed. The book is also intended as literature, though, and as such contains poetry, fiction, and even satire. Ultimately its purpose is simply stated: it is meant to contribute to the collective project of dragging "humanism" out from the underground.

Excerpt
The world has changed since 2007, when I wrote the preface to the first edition of this book. That was still the age of capitalist triumphalism, of glacial politics in the U.S. and the Despair of the Activist. Cultural ennui—personal ennui for me. Aimlessness. Since 2008, though, and especially since 2011, life has taken on a new coloring. Horizons have opened; the world is in tumult, even more than it was, and nothing seems permanent anymore. Things have continued to get worse for most people and will continue to do so for decades, but now at least in activist circles there is the sense that the old world is crumbling and a new one is beginning its laborious birth. In other words, between 2008 and 2012 the world, particularly the West, began the long transition from an age of sick individualism to an age of healthy collectivism. Social movements began their long march back into the mainstream—social movements against economic injustice, the most fundamental kind of oppression. The recent evolution of economic power-structures— the institutions around which society pivots—is responsible not only for the brute material horrors of increasing class polarization and the global immizeration of billions but also for all the social atomism that has grown in the U.S. since the 1970s (or really the 1940s), the privatization of life, the human alienation, the destruction of public spaces and public discourse, the erosion of civil society so that now *churches* are practically the only functioning institutions that have some kind of positive relation to popular empowerment. Society has been gutted, because that has been in the interest of certain segments of the capitalist class. (Marx’s historical materialism, in its essence, is merely common sense.) The task for *human* beings now, as opposed to the *capitalist* beings who have brought us to the brink, is to reconstitute the public, the social. That is the way to save the world. And that is what Occupy Wall Street began in the West, with its tentative moves toward remaking public spaces and reminding the U.S. of class oppression.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Detached Thoughts Chapter 2: History, Capitalism, and Marxism Chapter 3: Experimental Thoughts on the Self Chapter 4: On Christianity Chapter 5: On Music Chapter 6: Dusk in Vietnam Chapter 7: The Book of Joe Coda