Humanism, Religion, and Disney Vacations too
I had this thought while trying to make sense of all the week’s news. Recent stories about the chaos of business and the greed of tech are an almost weekly feature these days. It's so exhausting. That thought I had: when did humanism go out of fashion?
Which is also to say: how did I end up here?
I never imagined a life for myself in tech and business. It was an accident, the kind of accident born from a conflagration of circumstances. One thing leads to another, then consumes your life, and here you are.
As a kid, I thought I’d write or draw comic books. I was a little artsy nerd. Then I found music, and the world opened for me, both literally and figuratively. I left home to be a touring musician. After a few years of that, I started to split time between touring and going to school for an English degree. College brought me back around to writing. I’d like to think I started to take writing seriously. I imagined then that I would write literary fiction and be a teacher. Maybe even a professor.
During that time, I took a geography class to satisfy some core curriculum requirement. The geography professor was excited by the early web, and for a couple weeks, we learned to build web sites by hand to host our class projects. I was hooked on web development. I imagined using the web as a means to share my writing. I was one of those naive 90s web enthusiasts. I saw the web as a tool in the hands of artists, professors, and writers. It was more text than technology for me.
I started to grad school, while also doing more and more on the web. I was an older student, already married a decade at that point, and my wife and I were ready to have children. I better get a real job, I thought, and after a year of teaching high school English, I took my first technical job at Auburn University Libraries.
From there, it was a developer role for a small newspaper. Then, the Washington Post. Canonical. Amazon. Disney. Apple. Some others sprinkled between, and now, CNN at Warner Bros. Discovery. (God rest its soul.)
The web has been good to me. I really shouldn’t complain.
Liberal arts degrees, like an English degree, spend a lot of time on the early Renaissance and the beginnings of humanism. It’s that moment in time when modern, rational thought took hold. You can draw a straight line from the Renaissance to classical liberalism, from rational thought to modern science, from humanism to democracy.
It makes sense to focus on it. We are who we are today because of humanism.
You cannot, however, truly understand humanism without understanding the context into which it was born. It seems simplistic today, but back then, it was religion versus reason. Religion granted authority to kings. It forced servitude. You didn’t matter. The church mattered. Land mattered. Your relationship to the land as nobility or peasant mattered.
Humanism came along and said everyone mattered because of individual worth and agency. It wasn’t God who gave you meaning. It was your own existence. It was a radical idea, and though modern churches still denounce humanism, especially in evangelical circles, most religious folks — at least here in the western world — recognize individual liberty and personal autonomy as basic human rights.
That’s humanism.
When I say I never thought I’d build a life for myself in tech and business, I mean that it wasn't even imaginable to me. I grew up splitting time between two households. My parents were divorced. In my dad’s house, it was the Wall Street Journal over breakfast. In my mom’s, it was tears of regret over coffee and a cigarette.
I never wanted much to do with either approach, largely because both seemed hollow. Business felt like a stuffy, greedy endeavor. Those tears of regret for my mom — they were born in religious superstition.
Religion and business were things best avoided at all costs.
I had to attend Christian school from ages 10-14 years old. It was oppressive and insulting. A pastor who was also my teacher at school told me I would never be a real man because I lived alone with my mom. The pastor didn't know, or couldn't be bothered to learn, that I spent Christmases and summers with my dad. People select facts that fit the narratives they want to tell, both then and now.
I have this vivid memory from my days in Christian school. I don’t remember the exact age, but I was young. I’m guessing elementary school aged.
I took a trip to Disney with my grandparents on my dad’s side. They were the best, the one part of my family that seemed normal and loving. I was excited about this trip and talked about it at school. I’ve always been a talker, always loved a good story. Then, the first Sunday after sharing my excitement at school, the pastor — the same one who said I would never be a man — preached on the evils of Disney and how good Christians would boycott that filth.
Boycotts are the modern age’s religious sacrament, a way to advertise one’s devotion via the most consumer-friendly means possible. I grew up with boycotts. I also see boycotts regularly employed by my circle of liberal, technological friends. Don't drive a Tesla; Elon is evil! AI, the end of humanity! And, of course. Social media is the cause of all that ails society!
It’s funny how there isn’t much daylight between the religious fundamentalists I grew up with and the techno-fundamentalists who make up my professional circle. Fundamentalism is convenient. It’s a way to draw a line in the sand. Us versus them. Heathen versus religious. Owner versus employee.
I guess the path I’ve taken has made it less clean and easy for me. I think of myself as a person of faith, at least in the "substance of things hoped for" sense, but I still see the harm organized religion causes. I’m an intellect and welcome deep, thoughtful engagement with life, but I don’t feel trapped in my mind. I’m a creative person, I hope an artist even, but I earn my living from a mostly boring, corporate job. I'm equal parts writer and web developer.
I’m an individual, all messy and complicated and hard to pin down, and that’s ok. That’s how it should be. We need more of that. More individualism, less dogma. More learning and understanding. More celebration of what makes us unique as human beings. If we had more of that, there'd be less corproate greed, less desire to see humanity replaced by computers. That’s what humanism taught me. So more of that please, and more Disney vacations, too.
FWIW, Disney vacations are still my favorite.