Humanism

There is a mood that settles over you if you read the news for long enough. It is the conviction that the world is sliding backward, that whatever decency the twentieth century managed to assemble after its catastrophes is now coming apart, and that we are entering an age of cynicism and brute force from which there is no return. I feel the pull of this mood as much as anyone. When cities are bombed and children are buried, when liars are rewarded and the brave are imprisoned, it seems almost obscene to suggest that humanity is, on balance, becoming gentler. And yet I want to argue exactly that. Not as consolation, and not by closing my eyes to the horror, but because I think the despair is partly a trick of perspective, and that the genuine direction of history, seen across centuries rather than weeks, is the slow and stubborn deepening of humanism. ...

When the migrants began to mass in the forests of the Belarus-Poland border in the autumn of 2021, the world reached almost automatically for the only category it had ready: a migration crisis, a humanitarian problem, a question of how a wealthy Europe ought to treat the desperate people arriving at its edge. That framing felt natural, and it was a trap. What was happening on that border was not a flow of refugees that a generous policy might have absorbed. It was an attack — a deliberate, engineered assault on a sovereign state — and the migrants freezing in the forest were not its authors but its ammunition. A cornered dictator had discovered something genuinely new: a weapon no air-defence system can intercept, no sanctions list can ground, no radar can see coming, because the weapon is made of human beings. To read that November as a migration problem is to mistake the projectile for the conflict. The projectile, in this case, was alive, deceived, and dying, and that was the entire point. ...