Naomi Kanakia has some things to say about The Hedgehog Review. She’s taking some issues apart in good faith, I think, and pondering a real question for many small magazines doing Big Idea Cultural Criticism: Are you making efforts to argue for plenty of specific things to counter your arguing against?
“Right now the journal keeps saying that we need a revival of ‘humanism.’ That if people accept that human beings are ‘normatively ordered’ (i.e. that there is purpose to human existence that we can derive from reason) then our institutions can be re-organized in a more sustainable way.
But…this is exactly what the post-liberal right believes. It’s the exact same rhetoric. So…obviously there is a lot of disagreement about what ‘humanism’ really entails. Now maybe The Hedgehog Review actually does believe in Orbanism—in some right-populist takeover of liberal institutions—but if so then they ought to say that.
If they don’t believe in that, then it’s hard to really see what they want. All this mealy-mouthed stuff about how everybody else is ‘antihumanist’ is just cope. It’s saying, ‘Oh, these other people don’t actually want human flourishing, and if they wanted human flourishing then they would agree with me.’ But you yourself haven’t really articulated what you actually want or believe!”
I’m not sure I managed it successfully, but in my recent Comment piece I was trying to argue for design as a bottom-up set of humanist “arguments,” in a way, for lives worth living, for localist values embodied and enacted instead of (in addition to?) bullet-pointed and arranged rhetorically.
