NEW HUMANISM

critical movement in the United States between 1910 and 1930, based on the literary and social theories of the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who sought to recapture the moral quality of past civilizations in an age of industrialization and materialism. Reacting against the scientifically oriented philosophies of literary realism and naturalism, New Humanists refused to accept deterministic views of human nature. They argued that: (1) human beings are unique among nature's creatures; (2) the essence of experience is fundamentally moral and ethical; and (3) the human will, although subject to genetic laws and shaped by the environment, is essentially free. With these points of contention, the New HumanistsPaul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Norman Foerster, and Robert Shafer, to name only a fewoutlined an entire program and aesthetic to incorporate their beliefs. By the 1930s the New Humanists had come to be regarded as cultural elitists and advocates of social and aesthetic conservatism, and their influence became negligible.