Michael: Most people think of 'humanism' as a fluffy, feel-good word. Maybe a nice university department, something to do with the humanities. Kevin: Yeah, I picture tweed jackets and dusty libraries. Maybe some gentle poetry. Michael: But what if the original humanism was a dangerous, high-stakes treasure hunt, where finding the wrong book could get you burned at the stake? That’s the real story. Kevin: A treasure hunt? Okay, that sounds a bit more exciting than the philosophy class I definitely didn't sleep through in college. You've got my attention. Michael: It’s the world we're diving into today with Sarah Bakewell's incredible book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. And Bakewell is the perfect guide for this journey. She's not just a philosopher; she used to be a curator of early printed books. She's literally spent her life touching the very history she's writing about. Kevin: I like that. She’s not just theorizing; she’s been in the archives. The book has received a ton of praise, too, right? I think I saw it on Barack Obama's favorite books list for last year. Michael: It was. Which tells you it’s resonating far beyond academic circles. It’s a story about where some of our most fundamental modern ideas—like critical thinking, individual dignity, and even hope itself—actually came from. Kevin: Okay, a treasure hunt. Sell me on this. Where does this story even begin?

Michael: It begins in the 1300s with guys like Petrarch and Boccaccio, who felt like they were living among the ruins of a collapsed civilization. They looked around at the political chaos, the plagues like the Black Death, and the fragmented knowledge of their time, and they felt a profound sense of loss. They believed the wisdom of ancient Rome and Greece had vanished. Kevin: The classic "Dark Ages" narrative. But hold on, weren't the monks in monasteries painstakingly copying and preserving these texts? Is Bakewell's framing a bit dramatic? Michael: That's the perfect question, and Bakewell addresses it beautifully. It’s complicated. Yes, monks were the primary reason anything survived. But a lot was still lost. Sometimes they'd scrape the ink off priceless classical texts to reuse the parchment for something else. Other times, they had the books but didn't fully grasp their significance. They were preservers, but also sometimes unwitting gatekeepers of a lost world. Kevin: So the treasure was there, but locked away in dusty chests, sometimes literally. Michael: Exactly. And that brings us to the real-life Indiana Jones figures of this story: the manuscript hunters. The most famous was a guy named Poggio Bracciolini in the 1400s. He was a papal secretary, which gave him an excuse to travel. And whenever he could, he’d go digging in the libraries of remote German and Swiss monasteries. Kevin: What was he looking for? Michael: Anything and everything. But his most legendary find was in a German monastery, probably Fulda. He uncovered a complete copy of Lucretius's poem, 'On the Nature of Things'. Kevin: I feel like I should know that title, but refresh my memory. Michael: This wasn't just any old poem. This was a text that laid out a complete, coherent, and godless universe. It argued that everything is made of atoms, that the soul dies with the body, and that the gods, if they exist, have no interest in human affairs. It was philosophical dynamite. Finding this in the 15th century was like finding a blueprint for a nuclear reactor in an ancient Egyptian tomb. It contained a whole other way of seeing the world. Kevin: Wow. So this Poggio guy was basically the Indiana Jones of the library world. I'm picturing him blowing dust off a scroll and his eyes going wide. Michael: That’s pretty much it! His friend wrote about these discoveries as if the books themselves were prisoners crying out for rescue. He wrote this imaginary plea from a manuscript: "Snatch me from this prison in whose gloom even the bright light of the books within cannot be seen." They saw themselves as liberators of knowledge. They were salvaging the intellectual DNA of a lost world, one forgotten manuscript at a time. Kevin: That’s a much cooler story than 'studying the classics.' It’s a rescue mission. But what happens after you rescue the treasure? You can't just put it on a shelf. Michael: You can't. And that's where the story takes its next, even more dangerous, turn. Finding these texts was just the first step. The next generation of humanists started to weaponize this knowledge.

Kevin: Weaponize it? How do you weaponize ancient poetry and philosophy? Michael: You use the tools you learn from them. You learn how to analyze language, how to spot an inconsistency, how to think critically. And then you turn those tools on the most powerful institutions of your time. Which brings us to another incredible figure: Lorenzo Valla. Kevin: Okay, who's this guy? Michael: Valla was a brilliant, pugnacious, and utterly fearless 15th-century humanist. And he decided to take on the document that was, essentially, the legal and spiritual foundation for the Pope's earthly power. It was called the 'Donation of Constantine'. Kevin: The Donation of Constantine. Sounds important. Michael: Immensely. The story was that in the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine, after being cured of leprosy by the Pope, 'donated' the entire Western Roman Empire to the Church. This document was the justification for the Papacy's vast land holdings, its political power, its authority over kings. Kevin: And let me guess, Valla thought it was a fake. Michael: He didn't just think it; he proved it, with devastating precision. He treated it like a crime scene. He performed a linguistic autopsy on the text. He pointed out that the document used the word 'fief'—a feudal term that didn't exist for another 400 years after Constantine. The Latin was all wrong for the 4th century. It was clumsy and full of anachronisms. Kevin: That's incredible. It's like a modern-day fact-checker taking down a massive piece of state propaganda with just... grammar. Michael: Exactly! It was an act of intellectual demolition. And Valla wasn't polite about it. He addressed the Pope in his treatise with insults like, "You blockhead, you dolt!" He was dismantling the very foundation of papal authority with the power of philology—the love of words and their history. Kevin: How did he not get excommunicated and burned at the stake for this? This sounds like the most dangerous thing you could possibly do. Michael: He almost did. The Inquisition came after him. But he was protected by a powerful patron, the King of Alfonso of Naples, who was in a political spat with the Pope and found Valla's work very convenient. It shows how these humanist ideas thrived in the cracks of power. A king's protection could give a scholar just enough room to light a fuse. Kevin: So this is the big shift. Humanism goes from a nerdy book club for guys like Petrarch to a political weapon for guys like Valla. It’s about using reason to question everything. Michael: Precisely. It’s the birth of modern critical thinking. The idea that no authority—not the state, not the Church—is immune to scrutiny. You don't just accept what you're told; you investigate the source. You look at the evidence. That's a revolutionary idea, and it's a direct legacy of these humanist provocateurs. Kevin: Okay, so humanism starts as a nerdy book club, becomes a political weapon... but it's still mostly about elite, white, European men, right? I mean, the word itself is 'humanism,' but the story so far feels pretty exclusive. How does it become something for... well, all humans?

Michael: That is the essential question, and it's the challenge that defines humanism for the next few centuries. The principles of dignity, reason, and freedom that Valla and others championed were powerful, but they were applied very selectively. The circle of who counted as 'fully human' was tiny. Kevin: So how does that circle start to expand? Michael: It expands because people on the outside of that circle grab the tools of humanism and use them for their own liberation. Think of Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, who used the language of universal rights to argue for the education and freedom of women. Or Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, an escaped slave who mastered rhetoric and reason to make an undeniable case for abolition. He famously said, "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." He was using that core humanist idea—our shared humanity—to expose the hypocrisy of a slave-owning society. Kevin: So the idea is powerful enough that it can be turned against its own creators' blind spots. Michael: Exactly. But this expansion also brings humanism into direct conflict with its most brutal enemies. And this is where the story gets incredibly dark. Bakewell tells the story of Ludwik Zamenhof, the Polish Jew who invented the language Esperanto in the late 19th century. Kevin: Esperanto! The universal language. I've heard of it. Michael: Zamenhof's dream was pure humanism. He grew up in a town torn apart by ethnic and linguistic hatred, and he believed a neutral, easy-to-learn language could foster understanding and peace. It was a rational, hopeful solution to human division. His family were passionate advocates for this vision. Kevin: That sounds incredibly optimistic. What happened to them? Michael: The Nazis happened. When Germany invaded Poland, the Zamenhof family was targeted. Not just for being Jewish, but because the Nazis saw Esperanto, with its internationalist, peaceful ideals, as a threat. Hitler himself had denounced it in Mein Kampf. Zamenhof's three children—Adam, Lidia, and Zofia—were all murdered by the Nazis. Adam was shot, and his sisters were sent to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Kevin: Wow. That's just... brutal. It feels like the ultimate failure of the humanist project. A family that dedicated their lives to hope and connection, wiped out by the most vicious anti-humanist ideology imaginable. How can you have 'hope' after that? Michael: It's the question that haunted the 20th century. And the response, in a way, was to double down on humanism. After the horrors of World War II, the world came together to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a global attempt to codify the very principles the Nazis tried to extinguish: dignity, liberty, equality. It was a statement that said, "Never again." Kevin: So the modern humanist movement is born from the ashes of that conflict. Michael: In many ways, yes. Modern organizations like Humanists International, whose 2022 declaration is in the appendix of the book, are the direct descendants of this long, often painful, history. They've learned the hard lessons. They know that humanism isn't a guarantee of progress. It's not a utopian dream. Kevin: What is it, then? Michael: It's a choice. It's the choice to prioritize reason over dogma, compassion over cruelty, and connection over division. It’s a fragile, ongoing project.

Michael: And that's the core tension Bakewell presents so powerfully. Humanism isn't a set of easy answers or a guarantee of progress. It's a fragile, 700-year-long project. It’s the belief that even after the worst atrocities, the most rational and compassionate thing we can do is, as the humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell said, "remember your humanity, and forget the rest." Kevin: So it's not a destination, it's a constant practice. A practice of choosing inquiry over certainty, and connection over tribalism. It’s less about a fixed belief system and more about a way of being in the world. Michael: Exactly. It’s not about replacing one dogma with another. It’s about embracing the messy, complicated, and often contradictory nature of being human, and still finding reasons for hope. Bakewell ends her book with so many beautiful expressions of this, but one of my favorites is from the writer Zora Neale Hurston. Kevin: What did she say? Michael: She wrote, "The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me." Kevin: I like that. It’s not about some grand, cosmic purpose. It’s about finding meaning and wonder right here, in the world we have. In the 'humanly possible.' Michael: That’s the essence of it. It’s about finding that glory in the here and now. Kevin: That's a beautiful thought to end on. What part of this 700-year story resonates most with you? The treasure hunters, the provocateurs, the modern-day activists? Let us know your thoughts. We're always curious to hear what you think. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.