"The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection"
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Babbitt’s line is a polite sentence with a hard edge: humanism, in his view, isn’t soft-hearted approval of whatever happens to be human. It’s discipline. “Sympathy” names the modern temptation to turn feeling into a moral blank check - to excuse, to indulge, to collapse judgment into compassion. “Selection” is the corrective term, and it lands with almost Darwinian chill: the humanist must choose, discriminate, rank, prefer. Not everyone’s impulses deserve equal validation; not every cultural artifact merits the same reverence. The word “just” matters most. He’s not calling for cruelty or snobbery, but for an ethical calibration that refuses both sentimentalism and hardness.
The subtext is a critique of the early 20th-century liberal mood Babbitt distrusted: romantic faith in natural goodness, the idea that expanding empathy alone produces progress. For Babbitt, sympathy without selection becomes moral inflation - a culture that can feel for everything and therefore stand for nothing. Selection without sympathy becomes arid policing: taste masquerading as virtue, judgment severed from fellow-feeling.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a critic in an age intoxicated by “new” freedoms - psychological, artistic, political - Babbitt’s New Humanism tried to restore limits as a moral technology. He frames humanism not as a museum label or a college major, but as an internal practice: the capacity to care about people while still insisting on standards that shape character. It’s a definition designed to offend both the sentimental and the puritan, which is precisely why it still provokes.
The subtext is a critique of the early 20th-century liberal mood Babbitt distrusted: romantic faith in natural goodness, the idea that expanding empathy alone produces progress. For Babbitt, sympathy without selection becomes moral inflation - a culture that can feel for everything and therefore stand for nothing. Selection without sympathy becomes arid policing: taste masquerading as virtue, judgment severed from fellow-feeling.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a critic in an age intoxicated by “new” freedoms - psychological, artistic, political - Babbitt’s New Humanism tried to restore limits as a moral technology. He frames humanism not as a museum label or a college major, but as an internal practice: the capacity to care about people while still insisting on standards that shape character. It’s a definition designed to offend both the sentimental and the puritan, which is precisely why it still provokes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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