Humanizing the Times: Roses, Resistance, and the Fire of Truth
The Intimate, The Institutional, The Political, and the Enduring
Humanizing the Times is a thematically organized collection of Substack notes attempting to view timely matters of the day through the longer and wider lens of the humanities.
Index of What’s in Store
The Intimate: Human Experience & the Call to Being in Daily Life
The Institutional: Systems of (De)Humanization
The Political: Power, Violence, and Ethical Response
The Enduring: History, Memory, and Legacy
Quoting Mark Twain: What is a Radical?
“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them” ~ Mark Twain in Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935).
Read more about Twain and his support for early labor rights’ efforts in the U.S. below
I: The Intimate: Human Experience & the Call to Being in Daily Life
Stop. Smell the Roses
April 12, 2025
It’s important to take notice of the natural beauty and wonders all around us, especially as we cope with injustice and unnecessary human suffering. Here in Florida, my yard is blossoming and buzzing with life.
Sweet scented roses like this one from our yard give us a grounding reminder of the good in life and living.
They also remind us that there is wisdom in the dictate, stop and smell the roses. It is an injunction to “return to our senses,” to orient ourselves around life and the living.
The rose calls to appreciate the intrinsic value of a sweet scent and subtle variegation of color. It is an unspoken ode to life's simple joys.
Many of our problems—and the world's problems—stem from a failure to prioritize and appreciate the sufficiency of simple joys.
Extravagance has and continues to be the engine of the pain and injustice that leaves us too busy, too emotionally exhausted to appreciate a rose blossom, a cardinal's chirp, a bumblebees pollinating work, or even a pesky squirrel's acrobatic talent for stealing seed from a bird feeder.
We nurture opposition to injustice by refusing to neglect the roses, the sunshine, the water, conversations with friends, games with children, the simple life-loving joys that compose genuine utopia.
What simple joys sustain your love of life amidst the hardships?
Learning Humility from Children
March 27, 2025
There are few human characteristics that are so simultaneously necessary and lacking in us as humility. The ability to restrain surging frustration and ponder others' feelings and expressions enables us to both understand and meaningfully participate in the real world. We don't spend enough time talking about the profound opportunities—often missed—to grow within our interpersonal relationships, particularly those between parents and children.
And this is yet another aspect of the problem Eric Wright identifies in his post: an inorganic social structure that puts us in what the pioneering psychologist Erich Fromm described as the “having” mode of living rather than the “being” mode.
We become inured to passive mechanistic procedures rather than living with aliveness and relatedness to the world and those inhabiting it. (More on that distinction here.) We can all learn from such exemplifications of compassionate humility.
Human Beings are Experiencers, Not Processors
April 22, 2025
As technological innovation leads machinery to surpass human beings in “processing” and “retaining” information, we are led to a profound insight. What makes us human isn't so much our “possession” of information. Humanity is uniquely exemplified in our capacity to be changed by knowledge and understanding.
The goal should never have been understood as “gaining” or “collecting” information or even achieving some level of “smartness” or “intelligence.” The proper goal for human beings is the activation of our human potential, to become excellent and live lives of virtue and joy. This is something no machine can ever do for us. Exemplifying excellence—goodness, responsibility and responsiveness, love, wholeness, justice, understanding, truthfulness, integrity, aliveness—is a matter of personal growth and transformation. Everything else is a means to this end. Let the technology improve, but let's not forget to what end.
If these reflections resonate, join Humanities in Revolt to support independent, humanistic critique.
The Sweet Smell of… Art?
March 28, 2025
Greco-Roman statues were not only colorful, they smelled good, too.
Though the false belief that the statues were left white persists, many of these ancient works of art featured many vibrant colors. Thanks to Cecilie Brøns' work in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, we also know some of these statues were incensed with the smell of rose, olive oil, and beeswax. The perfumed statues would have enhanced the aesthetic delight and perhaps also the spiritual encounter as well.
Learning of this ancient practice invites us to reexamine the way we present and interact with art. When's the last time you remember a painting that was not only beautiful but also smelled nice?
Why shouldn't we incorporate more complete sense experiences into our artistic encounters? At the very least we should begin reforming the practice of treating art galleries like ascetic monasteries.
And if the art itself can't treat our noses, we should consider placing it in spaces we can enhance with scent. We might simply put the art in a buzzing community where the smell of good food being cooked by nearby restaurants wafts our way. Miami's Wynwood Walls model, is an example.
Read more about good smelling ancient art here. Learn more about colorful ancient art here.
Pass this along to others who believe in art, justice, and the power of the humanities.
II: The Institutional: Systems of (De)Humanization
Being Human — Not a Mechanism
May 2, 2025
Students contemplating their educational trajectories should be wary of those who insist they prioritize technical knowledge over and at the expense of the humanities. Why should humans turn themselves into machines at the very moment industry tries to make machines into humans?
We should ask ourselves why industry prizes the “human” when mechanized and instrumentalized, but routinely devalues authentic humanity in so many marginalized flesh-and-blood people? The answer likely has to do with the fact the “human” machine is made to lack the defining characteristics of a genuine person: freedom and independence. In other words, we true humans lack the “mechanism” that makes us ideally exploitable.
The mechanized “human,” on the other hand, is the perfectly controllable commodity: human-like but without the freedom of mind and action. The human being of the humanities always retains the potential to exercise liberating autonomy, even when that capacity lies dormant. As I am reminded each semester, the humanities—art, philosophy, religion, history, and the like—are uniquely and subversively capable of revitalizing precisely the latent fire of creativity, critical consciousness, and agency.
Share your unique perspective on what it means to be human and how best to utilize rather than succumb to emerging technologies
Making Education Relevant Again
March 27, 2025
As a humanities professor teaching at a few different institutions I can attest to some of the education cultural shifts articulated in this article. And I don't think educators can be held entirely responsible for resolving fundamental problems including dwindling personal responsibility, motivation, and effort.
However, I will say that I think the cultural shifts give us the opportunity to make more intrinsically motivating educational experiences. For example, the reliance on AI to author papers gives us an opportunity to begin crafting assignments that require students to write in the first person and explore personal experiences. It is more difficult to rely on AI to author such reflections.
Though I certainly see the merit of the exam question presented in this article, I think we scholars ought to ask the question, how might we make such exam questions more immediately pertinent to the human beings being asked to ponder these questions? Here's the author's exam question: “Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?”
What if we asked about how students might relate to or apply the insights from a given work in their own lives?
Such a reframing of educational objectives has the added benefit of increasing intrinsic interest in studying and discussing the course materials. I also was inspired by a student's example last semester to require all of my students to run their first few written reflections through a chat GPT plagiarism checker. The checker determines what percentage of the reflection it believes was authored by a human compared to a chat box.
Asking students to run their work through such a checker makes it clear that not only will the educator be holding them accountable, but it also shows that the educator is interested in truly human thought.
As many reading this will know, much of contemporary academic writing is just plain bad. Bad writing. Boring writing. Aloof writing, detached from the most pertinent questions and concerns of life.
And so while I cannot blame all of academia or educators for the problems outlined in this article, I do think the problem of emerging technologies and alienated students presents us with a unique opportunity to give college education and existential significance we may have gotten away from. And I say all of this as a former high school dropout who has a lot in common with students who struggle in the first years of their education experience.
Fifteen years into teaching, I continue to find that each classroom contains at least some students who will come to life in classrooms when they're educators bring the course content to life.
Baby Bonuses and Self-Deportation Stipends?
April 22, 2025
Everyday we are reading and hearing new stories of ordinary people pounced upon by undercover ICE agents and taken to detention centers for deportation.
Yet we now learn the Trump administration wants to incentivize reproduction to increase the U.S. population. The White House has proposed giving new mothers a “baby bonus” of $5,000 while offering a free airline ticket and $1,000 to migrants who “self-deport.”
If Trump wants more people in this country, why is he working so hard to kick out so many good, hard working people with no or in many instances trivial criminal records? What other than racism are we left to conclude is the determinative factor in the selection of one group for inducements to procreate and the selection of another for disappearance even when it means tearing families apart?
Stoking the Substack Fire of Support for Free Expression
March 30, 2025
Another reason to be a proud participant in the Substack community: Substack is partnering with FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to stand up to the onslaught against First Amendment rights in the U.S. exemplified by recent arrests and deportations of students for the “offense” of expressing views the Trump administration objects to.
As FIRE notes, “Earlier this week, federal immigration officials arrested a Tufts University student off the street, allegedly for an op-ed she wrote in a student newspaper calling for the university to divest from Israel. If true, this represents a chilling escalation in the government’s effort to target critics of American foreign policy.”
To combat these abuses and “preserve America’s tradition as a home for fearless writing,” FIRE and Substack are offering support to writers legally residing in the United States who are targeted for their expression.
Those who are being targeted can seek assistance through either of these links: thefire.org/alarm or pages.substack.com/defender
III: The Political: Power, Violence, and Ethical Response
Bipartisan Injustice and Civic Clarity
April 30, 2025
As is so often the case, the policies we abhor when enacted by one of the empowered political parties have the fingerprints also of the other party. This is clear from the fact “Democrats helped prepare” an immigration policy that the Trump administration has taken to new heights of inhumanity and injustice and the recent confirmation that the Biden administration allowed Israel’s historic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.
The ability of the United States to gain civic clarity and conscience requires a citizenry capable of looking upon both of the dominant political parties with fresh anti authoritarian eyes. And we need not make false equivalences. We just need to call balls and strikes when we see them.
Booker Backs Military Aid to Israel, Again
April 5, 2025
Senator Cory Booker joined all Republicans in voting against Sen. Bernie Sanders resolutions to block President Trump’s $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel. Booker did so one day before the anniversary of Rev. King’s assassination. King was unequivocal in denouncing militarism as one piece of the triplet of evil on par with racism and economic exploitation.
War Pigs and Escapist Art
April 25, 2025
The great Russian novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin, wrote, "The purpose of art... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it." Professional celebrity and music manager, Sharon Osbourne thinks art should just help us "escape."
Osbourne has decried the politicization of this year’s Coachella music festival. According to Osbourne, the 2025 Coachella will be remembered “as a festival that compromised its moral and spiritual integrity… Goldenvoice, the festival organizer, facilitated this by allowing artists to use the Coachella stage as a platform for political expression.” She added, “At a time when the world is experiencing significant unrest, music should serve as an escape, not a stage for political discourse.”
Osbourne’s statement reveals a theory of art that is as vapid as it is detached from history. If art is to be used as escapism rather than ethical-spiritual-philosophical intervention, then she must also object to everything from African American spirituals like “Wade in the Water,” literature like George Orwell's “1984,” to paintings like Picasso’s “Guernica.”
We can only guess at the disgust Osbourne would feel in hearing the English anti-war protest song, “War Pigs” (1970) by the little known rock outfit called Black Sabbath. She would've definitely not liked hearing the vocalist condemn politicians as they “hide themselves away / They only start at the war / Why should they go out to fight? / They leave that all to the poor....”
Sharon Osbourne became a formative figure in commercial heavy metal music. She helped create and manage Ozzfest, for example, from 1996 through 2018. Perhaps her opposition to “politicized” art explains why Ozzfest never featured one of the most popular, innovative, and expressly political metal bands of the 1990s and 2000s, Rage Against the Machine.
Then again another great politically engaged metal band, System of a Down, was featured on the Ozzfest lineup multiple times. Maybe Osbourne just doesn't like the kind of conscience-raising that went on at Coachella, the kind that decried what Amnesty International has called a "genocide" in Gaza carried out by Israel with the support of the United States.
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Gaza: Refusing Inhuman Quietism
April 24, 2025
We may feel utterly powerless in the face of such inhumanity, but we must continue to raise our voices for the people of Gaza—the children of Gaza. The flame of human life is too precious to be snuffed out in silence.
The starvation and militaristic annihilation of an entire population cannot be met with silent implied acceptance without costing us of our own humanity. We owe it to our own soul to refuse the anesthesia of defeatism and quietism.
Humanities for Life
April 19, 2025
What is our poetry, our music, our literature, our spirituality and our philosophy for if not the preservation and celebration of life? The humanities are nothing if not a protest against the killing of the innocent, whoever they may be, wherever they may be.
Photographs Live Longer than Bullets
April 17, 2025
Nothing so clearly reveals human impotence like targeting the creatively potent like Fatima Hassouna. The killing of a photographer is only a temporary victory for the practitioners of domination. Photographs live longer in the human heart than bullets and even tanks.
One day photographs of the injustice done to the Palestinians will live in museums that ceaselessly remind humanity of the heroism of nonviolent journalists and the cowardice of those who pulled triggers and dropped bombs.
A Children’s Graveyard
April 16, 2025
Fleeing in Advance of Fascism?
March 29, 2025
While I empathize with their decisions, I worry that these prominent historians are betraying Prof. Snyder’s first principle in combatting tyranny: “do not obey in advance.” Though some might say they aren't really “obeying Trump,” they are complying with the administration’s wish to purge institutions of critics. To the extent their absence is a loss to the institutions they serve, it is a form of what Snyder refers to as anticipatory obedience in which people “freely give” power over to authoritarians. Now more than ever those of us with the privilege of U.S. citizenship must courageously exercise our liberties. I also think a case can be made that solidarity demands a commitment to standing with those who cannot help but remain here and who are, at least for now, protected by their citizenship.
A Reporter Talking to Civically Engaged Citizens?
April 5, 2025
Ken Klippenstein talked to people at a Madison ”Hands Off” protest. Many had straightforward, sensible criticisms of the Trump administration. A few also felt the Democrats were behaving like “cowards.” Reporting like this should be the norm. When hundreds of thousands of people pour into the streets to express their political will, journalists across the country ought to be there to ask them what brings them out.
No, Seriously: Get Greenland
March 29, 2025
President Trump continues to disprove any notion he's joking about his imperial land grab.
The notion that the administration would and could schedule a publicity event in another country without coordinating with them or getting their approval evidences the administration's refusal take Greenland's autonomy seriously.
The first step in compromising another nation's autonomy is its permission to host another nation's military. We can easily imagine how the US would respond to any country seeking to station its military within our nation's borders. That it has become ordinary for our nation to do so in other nations is itself imperial in character.
IV: The Enduring: History, Memory, and Legacy
Slavery Cannot Be Washed Out of a Nation’s History
April 6, 2025
The National Park Service’s removal of references to Harriet Tubman and a reference to “resistance to enslavement” from its Underground Railroad webpage is a betrayal of the truth. Scrubbing records of our nation's systematic oppression of black people through slavery betrays those agents of change like Tubman who sacrificed so much to combat white supremacy and racialized terrorism.
A nation does not redeem itself by embracing ideologies of denial and false excellence. Greatness is achieved, in part, by honoring the truth and owning up to one's greatest mistakes. Lovers of truth, history, and the wider humanities must decry this falsification of our past through omission.
Update: After public outcry, the National Park Service restored the removed website content pertaining to the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman.
Pope Francis and the Christian Origins of (Some) Communist Values
April 21, 2025
In an 2022 interview published in America Magazine, Pope Francis was asked how he responds to those critical of his criticism of capitalism and who charged him with being “a socialist, or they call you a communist, or they call you a Marxist.”
Francis responded:
“I try to follow the Gospel. I am much enlightened by the Beatitudes, but above all by the standard by which we will be judged: Matthew 25. ‘I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was in prison, and you visited me. I was sick and you cared for me.’ Is Jesus a communist, then? The problem that is behind this, that you have rightly touched on, is the socio-political reduction of the Gospel message. If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus. Behind these Beatitudes and Matthew 25 there is a message that is Jesus’ own. And that is to be Christian. The communists stole some of our Christian values. [Laughter.] Some others, they made a disaster out of them.”
When it’s Dark Enough to See Clearly
April 4, 2025
With keen dialectical awareness, King observed that it is often in darkness that the light of truth radiantly penetrates the human heart.
Mr. Fish has Entered the Pond
April 23, 2025
Ladies and gentlemen,
has entered the Substack pond. Those of you who read Chris Hedges’ Substack are familiar with Fish’s work. Some of his work has also been featured in Humanities in Revolt.Mr. Fish may well be the most controversial, fiercely independent cartoonist in the U.S. But the controversial character cartooning isn't born of an arbitrary love of shock for this sake of shock. Fish is an artist motivated by a deep commitment to justice and human liberation. His art suggests that nothing is more ugly or profane than the trampling of human dignity.
Fish puts into pictures what many won't date out into words. Though occasionally fireable he has proven uncancellable. Those genuinely committed to the still radical principle of free expression, can do their part in subscribing to The Independent Ink with Mr. Fish.
A Thought for Revolting Against Defeatism
April 9, 2025
We may not know when the fires of truth and righteous outrage will unleash the seeds of transformation. But we do know that those seeds do not open in the cold of apathy and indifference.
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Thank you for your reminder to broaden our perspective and take a step back from helplessness.
Whenever life’s horrors become too much for me, I shut down, take a deep breath and ask myself, “what do I love right now, this very minute?”
I love the squirrels who steal my tomatoes. I love the birds at my feeders and the trees that shade my yard. I even have favorite weeds in my garden.
I especially love my good neighbors who have no use for hate.
Quite remarkable collection of reflections - it's all there, you just need to put it together in the right way to see how redemption would look like - and how it could be initiated.