Thanks be to the human

This is a Thursday edition of our Friday Note. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The English language has a word for someone who, as a general trait, hates human beings and human nature: misanthropy. Molière’s play The Misanthrope depicts its titular character, Alceste, as focused on people’s superficiality and hypocrisy. A better-known example might be Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge.

Unfortunately, there is no word in English, to my knowledge, for the opposite of misanthropy. Etymologically, it should be philanthropy (philein = love, anthropos = human beings), and it does mean something like that in Ancient Greek. But in English it has come to mean someone who is charitable with money.

The closest word in English is humanistic. The term has more than a bit of ambiguity, so it’s imperfect, but when I use it I mean the opposite of misanthropy: to be a humanist is to, as a general trait, love human beings and human nature.

Humanism is one of our four core guiding lanterns at Higher Ground, one of four values that underpins our educational offerings and substantiates our educational aims. The other three are knowledge, work, and agency—the love of hard-won truth, the love of goal-directed effort, and the love of self-direction. Humanism is the love of human beings.

The love of human beings. The love of human nature, human potential, human greatness. An appreciation of human society, a positive sentiment towards one’s friends, and an intense love for one’s closest friends and family and also oneself. Humanism is an acknowledgment of human exceptionalism, of the wonder and power of human agency.

Humanism is an invaluable trait, a winning trait, a trait that makes lives go well. It’s one worth naming, worth cultivating, worth educating, worth valorizing in ritual.

Montessori stands as one of history’s greatest and most explicit humanists. Montessori wrote, immediately following the horrors of the Second World War, that

When we consider the tremendous mistakes of the adult, we wonder why all the marvelous achievements that we witnessed during childhood did not continue in the grown-up. Yet man is great.

We only have to look at civilization to realize the greatness of which man is capable. But we are focused on his errors and mistakes, not on his greatness. The fault lies with us. …

We do not consider man, the creator. Therefore, I say we must refocus our hearts. We must put the creations of man at the center, and not his defects.

Montessori has two go-to examples of the greatness of human beings. The first is the amazing capacity of children to self-create and become good—good in the sense of healthy, benevolent, attached to reality.

Children are a pure example of unspoiled human potential, and in the right environment, they can, amazingly, actualize it themselves. The attitude the humanist should have towards the child is awe. It’s reverence for the miracle of human self-creation.

Her second go-to example of human greatness is human civilization: science, art, machines, industry. The amazing “supernature” that we have built on top of nature for our own wellbeing and perfection. The humanist’s attitude towards the products of human civilization should be, Montessori thought, gratitude:

What is very necessary is that the individual from the earliest years should be placed in relation with humanity. There is no love in our hearts for the human beings from whom we have received, and are receiving so much, in bread and clothing, and numerous inventions for our benefit. … Perhaps we teach the child to thank God and pray to Him, but not to thank humanity, God’s prime agent in creation; we give no thought to the men and women who daily give their lives that we may live more richly. …

Let us in education ever call the attention of children to the hosts of men and women who are hidden from the light of fame, so kindling a love of humanity; not the vague and anaemic sentiment preached to-day as brotherhood, nor the political sentiment that the working classes should be redeemed and uplifted. What is first wanted is no patronizing charity for humanity, but a reverent consciousness of its dignity and worth.

Here’s another passage, from her San Remo lectures:

Children should be made to realize that all great achievements in culture and in the arts, all sciences and industries that have brought benefit to humanity, are due to the work of men who often struggled in obscurity and under conditions of great hardship; men driven by a profound passion, by an inner fire, to create with their research, with their work, new benefits not only for the people who lived in their times, but also for those of the future.

In sum, Montessori looked out at the human world and saw greatness—a greatness that could easily be taken for granted. It’s hard to keep the perspective that the world around us was built by humans, that civilization is a human solution to human problems. It’s easy to focus on the negative, on the mistakes, on the horrors. It takes work (aided by education) to be a humanist as opposed to a misanthrope.

So: An awe of children. An appreciation for human greatness. Uniting these two trends in her thought was the recognition that children benefit from receiving not just love but real earned gratitude, as they grew and learned to do real work:

Joy, feeling one’s own value being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.

And, in the Thanksgiving spirit, and very much in the spirit of Montessori, there is one more thing for which a humanist should be grateful: the people around her.

Montessori’s view is that each person is a self-creator. A young child actively works to grow up, to process her surroundings, to build herself.

Persistent work, clarity of ideas, the habit of sifting conflicting motives in the consciousness, even in the minutest actions of life, decisions taken every moment on the smallest things, the gradual mastery over one’s actions, the power of self-direction increasing by degrees in the sum of successively repeated acts, these are the stout little stones on which the strong structure of personality is built up.

The young child becomes older, learning more about her world and her universe, refining her mind and her interests. She becomes an adolescent, guides herself through her first murmurs of romance and her first days of work, real work, for real renumeration. She ages and matures; her horizon of intentionality expands from weeks to months to years, then across her lifetime. The “stout little stones” of repeated choices, choices to think and work and love, have formed the “strong structure of personality”—the unique person she is now.

This week and weekend, if you celebrate the harvest—or even if you don’t—take a fresh look at your loved ones. At yourself and your life, in its totality. Everything around you was built by people, including the people.

The humanist recognizes “man the creator”, in Montessori’s words. The creator of penetrating science and powerful industry and timeless poetry, yes, but also the creator of himself. Each wonderful character, each idiosyncratic personality, each life in your life was built, was gradually worked at and earned and shaped and created, by that person himself or herself. Each person has a billion genes and inputs and influences, but precisely one maestro that decides how these factors are to add up to a singular human being, and works to make it happen.

Thanksgiving is a time for appreciation, for humanistic gratitude. The harvest and feast are a symbol of our greatness and a vehicle for our mutual gratitude. The objects of that symbol, the true recipients of that gratitude, are the souls of our intimates.

Cheers to you, my wonderful fellow human beings—to whom I am more grateful than I will ever be able to properly express,

Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium