On the essay, personal or not – Zadie Smith in the New Yorker:

‘Then something happened. An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below. “Six points,” this teacher said. “Going clockwise, first arrow is the introduction, last arrow is the conclusion. Got that?” I got that. He continued, “Second arrow is you basically developing whatever you said in the intro. Third arrow is you either developing the point further or playing devil’s advocate. Fourth arrow, you’re starting to see the finish line, so start winding down, start summarizing. Fifth arrow, you’re one step closer to finished, so repeat the earlier stuff but with variations. Sixth arrow, you’re on the home straight: you’ve reached the conclusion. Bob’s your uncle. That’s really all there is to it.” I had the sense I was being let into this overworked teacher’s inner sanctum, that he had drawn this little six-arrowed rectangle himself, upon his own exam papers, long ago. “Oh, and remember to put the title of the essay in that box. That’ll keep you focussed.”’

(…)

‘I’d been told a different story: that, every year, two or three exceptionally bright kids out of a school of two thousand—or a whole village!—wrote the best essays and therefore went on to the best universities. (An immorality in and of itself, but at least comprehensible to the pathetic teen-age striver I was back then.) As it turned out, it was never really about the essays. This wasn’t about merit. The very few black and brown students, the small clusters of state-school kids, the even tinier smattering of working-class kids from outside London or the home counties—we were just the exceptions that proved the rule. My sudden and total exposure to this truth left me feeling demented. Impostor syndrome doesn’t begin to cover it.’

(…)

‘Full disclosure: these strands are drawn, essentially, from four big isms. Feminism, existentialism, socialism, and humanism. Only the first is still fashionable, and the last has been so debased, misused, and weaponized over the centuries as to be almost unspeakable in polite company. Still, these were the ideas that formed me as a teen-ager, and they linger on in the way I think and write. No matter what the topic in the rectangle may be, they lie in wait, nudging me, correcting me, reminding me of what it is I really think. What I actually believe.’

(…)

‘If it were up to me, for example, I would very happily switch that rickety, always ill-fitting term “humanism” with something broader, more capacious. A bright, shiny neologism that would still place human flourishing at the center of our social and political processes, but which also encompassed the supremacy of all living things—including the natural world. As a philosophy, it would stand in pointed opposition to the current faith in the supremacy of machines, and of capital. Philoanimism? But the name is not good. (I’d be glad to hear alternative options!) It would be the work of many hands, this discourse, and it would understand that in these fractious times, although our commonalities may prove dispiritingly tiny or difficult to locate, they still exist. We’ve managed to locate them before, and not so long ago, using language as our compass. For example, the most inspiring (to me) political slogan of the past twenty years managed to create a common space in a single phrase: “the ninety-nine per cent.”’

(…)

‘Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love.’

(…)

‘I personally feel like an outsider who belongs nowhere—and have never really minded this fact—but in the commons of my essays I understand that many or even most of my readers feel otherwise about this thorny matter of “belonging,” so I am often trying to write the kinds of sentences that remember this key fact, too.’

Read the essay here.

Humanism is Christianity without Jezus.
How to revive Jezus minus Jezus?

Humanism is universalism. How to revive universalism while we know that all “we” demands a “they”. How to create a “we”? Create an enemy.

The ninety-nine per cent summarizes it neatly.

Kill the one percent. And paradise is there, right under your feet.

Now the essay can begin.