From the sixteenth-century tradition of studia humanitatis, we first encounter what we now call humanism. A humanist was simply a practitioner—someone who devoted their work to that field. Their tasks were teaching, researching, and dedicating themselves to the cultivation of the same domain. Moral philosophy, grammar, and literature—especially poetry—were their central areas of concern. Mathematics and natural philosophy were not part of a humanist’s responsibilities, much less the business of breeding laying hens.
So if I spend my days managing egg-laying hens, selling their eggs, trading their feed, turning their manure into a business, and making feather dusters from the rooster’s tail, and if my ideology is the ideology of crowing chickens, and my social habits resemble a strutting rooster—then I am, by all reasonable definitions, a poultry expert, not a humanist.
More than that, early humanists did not only deal with moral philosophy or grammar or literature—they were concerned with the classics, especially Latin and Greek sources. They were fluent in reading and writing both languages. The recovery of texts (rewriting or restoring them) and the creation of detailed commentaries (akin to explanatory treatises) were their greatest contributions to the world. We benefit enormously from their labor without ever fully realizing it. They formed the intellectual bridge that connects us to the thinking of the past. Even the Renaissance as we know it would not have been possible without their tremendous work.
For this reason, one should not call themselves a humanist if they have never felt at home with the ABCs of Latin and Greek or possessed the ability to craft commentaries on them. If one’s only gift is conversing with ants and worms, that is not humanism but animalism, pure and simple—a kind of instinctual scholarship. And perhaps such a person once believed that Melisa Trisnadi’s song—“semut-semut kecil… saya mau tanya…”—was a sacred verse from the lost Book of Prophet Solomon, revealing divine knowledge about ants and the soil. And if someone can speak only with angels, without caring whether their congregation understands anything at all, then that is a false muhaddath, for a true muhaddath—one who claims to hear the barzakhic, the unseen—must also hear the voices of those standing before them. There are, after all, many lecturers who, during class, face the board as if conversing with invisible whispers behind the chalk dust.
Today, those who can no longer be called humanists are often the graduates of one- or two-day training workshops. Their minds are filled not with Latin and Greek, nor with the Enlightenment that followed the Renaissance, but with endless PPTs—Pura-Pura Tahu, “pretending to know.” And it is these PPT graduates who now regulate and instruct the people who still linger willingly in libraries, in study nooks, in quiet rooms, demanding tasks from them while the recipients respond with muffled scoffs.
Yet because true humanists remain somewhat distant from revealed truths—focusing instead on the internalization of values and the lived complexities of being human—in Indonesia we might say that a humanist should also be a Pancasilaist. At the very least, this parallels Renaissance humanists, who were pious Christians (though they conveniently overlooked the subtle resurgence of pagan inspiration, especially in artistic spirit).
It seems we rarely hear anyone here being called an “Islamic humanist,” while in Western literary history we know that Philip Sidney was a Christian humanist. We may add Edmund Spenser in the same sixteenth century, or John Milton in the following one, the seventeenth.
Today, those who can still be counted among humanists are the ones who carry the spirit of the humanities while confronting the relentless growth of sciences that too often harm rather than help human flourishing. Humanities alone are insufficient without understanding the shadowy tactics—what we might call the “black-horse maneuvers”—of modern technoscience.
In the eighteenth century, we meet a headmaster named Samuel Johnson, author of The Life of Milton, whose pages express deep worry about what he called “external sciences,” geometry being one of them—fields that had become major intellectual pursuits of his time. Through that book, he urged his readers to recall Socratic philosophy: that becoming a good human being is more important than becoming a geometric human. It does not mean geometry is bad—otherwise Pak Anwar Mutaqin, our philosophically gifted mathematics lecturer, would be quite offended—but Socrates clearly emphasized that the highest lesson to learn is the lesson of goodness.
Thus, even if I study geometry, I must also learn to shape myself along the lines of a good human being. It is not enough to understand Euclid or Archimedes; I must avoid becoming a twisted figure that contributes to the growing landfill of corrupt humanity. Otherwise, one day I may find myself greeted by worms and ants rejoicing above my grave, shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” while I fail to understand a single word of their celebration—simply because I remain weak in the grammar of worms. []
