Can One Be a Humanist?

The Built Environment Is Local

One thing that makes the built environment so amazing is that it is local. Our local environment dictates the way that we live, which ultimately dictates the way that we interact with the world around us physically and culturally. Think about that. In a world that has been transitioning to so many digital variations and digital communities, the thing that remains is your local proximity. Reality is relative, and the built environment can be a perfect analogy for this.

Say you end up on a stranded island alone, naked, or not naked. Actually, yeah, not naked. Many survivalists mention remembering the rules of 3 of survival. The big rules of 3 being: 3 minutes needed to find air, typically that’s easy; the next is 3 hours to locate shelter in harsh environments, then 3 days to locate water, and 3 weeks to locate food. These are basic requirements that assist someone in a dire situation to potentially last longer.

Now, other than air, the most important thing for humans to find is shelter, more important than finding food, more important than locating water. Going back all the way to the caves of yesteryear, humans need a form of shelter.

From Shelter to Culture

As we have developed and created shelter into the built environment, we build cultures around it. For example, the architecture in Bali is different from the architecture of Timbuktu, and the architecture of Mexico is built specifically for its environment but is different from the architecture built in Iceland. Completely different climates. Because of these climates, they have an effect on the society that those local environments bring to fruition.

In the United States specifically, our culture is oftentimes very individualistic, and our homes even show this. Suburbs are very common here. Individual homes and non-shared spaces are very common. Though compare this to a more communalistic environment like Japan, where shared spaces are a little more common even though they still maintain their individuality. As we know, I am an advocate of the Humanistic design approach that Thomas Heatherwick has tried to create a movement behind. Though when I think of Humanistic, yes, we have our human species, but it leans as a more collective ideology rather than an individualistic ideology.

The Conflict Between Humanism and Individualism

So the question remains: if the world does move toward this hyper-humanistic design and urban planning, what does that mean for cultures who have for years been influenced by their environment in a certain way to lean more individualistic? Would they embrace a change of this magnitude, or, like Ouroboros, consume itself? Maybe it’s my bias coming through and the culture in which I was born and raised, the United States, where individualism is embedded within how we move. Oftentimes, an attack on that individualistic ideology could feel like a personal attack on one’s livelihood. Now replicate that amongst millions across the nation and it becomes a cataclysmic assault on a country’s way of life. Other countries deal with this as well, but I’d argue that the United States is the greatest caricature of this response.

Blurring the Line

So where can collective spaces be appreciated and celebrated? It could linger in the thresholds of life. The requirement may be something like a porch. A porch allows someone to be both disconnected in their own domain as well as connected to the world outside. Now, is the response to put porches everywhere? Maybe. But more definitely, the response is finding, on a societal scale, that comfort which will slowly, in due time, give people that collective support from the community because lines have, for generations, been getting blurrier and blurrier.