10 Tenants of Liberal Humanism

Having just posted my blog entry for the week on my thoughts and feelings on the Helena Echlin/ Tenured Radical articles as well as my two cents on Marxist Theory, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be writing about one of the ten tenants of liberal humanism. So here we go, sorry if this one's late,

The first thing that really caught my eye when I was reading the list in the Barry book was #4, the idea that, "Continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation." This is a terrible idea, but before we get to that, let's start at the beginning. First, this tenet starts off with "Human nature is essentially unchanging," which when you break it down doesn't actually work. Human nature is based on the idea that there is an essence to all people, than there is something deep down inside, at least part of which happens to be the same for everyone. Lots of people don't believe this is true, and there is no definitive evidence to prove its existence anyway.

Evolution has proven that the experience of any species changes over time, including the brain functioning of human beings. Humans 100,000 years from now will probably be very different than we are, and that human nature we don't really know much about will be different too, if it ever existed at all. And even if you don't believe that evolution is real, you can't deny that a primitive human just wasn't capable of the same thoughts and experiences that we are, because he/she was dumber than we are. And if you don't believe that cave men and fossils and science are real either, then I really don't know what to tell you.

Anyhow, the part of this tenet that really bothered me was the idea that the purpose of literature is to reinforce continuity over innovation. As I understand this, it means that texts are meant to recreate what is all ready in the world, and the texts that recreate reality the best are considered better texts. This means that the purpose of literature is to always keep the world the same, to maintain a status quo and never invent anything new and cool ever. If everyone believed in this kind of conservative mindset, we'd still be scribbling in the dirt with sticks because no one ever made the crazy innovation of paper. Literature has a seemingly infinite potential for innovation and creativity, and to leave that potential unused would be a horrible waste. Nobody cares about texts than make us think the same way we used to, we care about texts that opened our eyes to new ways of thinking. Creativity and innovation should be considered as important as recounting reality, arguably even considered higher. How are people ever supposed to make texts that make their audience think in new ways if they can't think in new ways themselves? Also, things written by uncreative people are boring.