Abstract

Contemporary humanism maintains a healthy suspicion of god and the supernatural but also tends to uncritically rely upon naturalized, self-evident, and universal assumptions about humans’ potential for progressive moral and ethical stances. Such tensions transform social differences into social “problems” needing redress. This chapter begins with discussion of human difference and particularity to consider the cultivation of humanizing strategies that recast social difference as expressions of human variability rather than problems to be overcome. Using the 2016 US election as a case study, this chapter explores the capacity and potential for the employment of intersectional techniques across difference in an increasingly turbulent twenty-first-century US social context. What epistemological changes are necessitated in order for humanism to take up, and take on, the challenge of human difference?