The end of secular humanism

and the resumption of history

Around the beginning of this century I started to worry about the Tim Garton Ash problem. It was this: every few months, TGA would write an article setting out what should happen in Eastern Europe in the opinion of his intellectual friends who had with heroism and foresight led the revolutions against communism. Again and again, he would warn against the atavistic Right, and every time he did this the voters would ignore him. It was almost as if they didn’t read the Guardian. This didn’t mean he was wrong. All of the awful consequences he warned against did come about. He was still as thoughtful, as clever and as penetrating as he had always been, but now the prophet he resembled was Cassandra.

In hindsight, this was one of the earliest signs of the collapse of liberal humanism as the ruling ideology of the West. The confident belief in decent, thoughtful scepticism and gradual progress which TGA expressed was the water that I swam in as a child and a young man. But when I think of it now I don’t see the tide of history any more, but the wallpaper from a ruined house, peeling away from its backing in the damp. The pattern remains but the plaster has come away from the brick and there’s no strength to it any more.

Perhaps the belief in progress depended on a knowledge of its opposite, and in the hubris of a unipolar world after 1989, the reality of anti-progress was repressed until it became unmanageably powerful.

And so to the Conway Hall, the central shrine of progressive rationalism in England, where there used to be a stall of tatty paperbacks extolling socialism outside the Bertrand Russell room. The first time I had visited was to hear Richard Dawkins speak on Darwin’s birthday. Naturally, he denounced religion rather than talking about evolution and when I asked him over supper afterwards why he kept doing this he replied “Because I care about the truth”. Maybe ten years later I went with a BBC producer to record “The Sunday Assembly”, an attempt at godless Pentecostalism which seemed to my producer the inevitable, sensible, nice successor to Christianity: thrills and ethics without the stuff you can’t believe. That fizzled, too. On Wednesday I was there to hear Tom Holland deliver the annual Theos lecture on Humanism as a Christian Heresy. 

It felt slightly like hearing an imam issue the first call to Friday prayers in the former cathedral of Haga Sophia. A largely Christian audience occupying a room consecrated to the faith that Christianity must shrivel in the clear light of science and rationalism, all listening to an erudite demolition of all the pretensions of global humanism.

No, said Holland: there is absolutely no necessary link between science and humanistic liberalism. The Nazis proved that, as did the Communists. Both justified large-scale atrocity with science. The humanist assertion that science and rationality affirm the value of the individual demands quite as much faith as believing in angels. 
Humanists suppose that every man and woman possesses inherent worth, and that we must free ourselves from superstition, said Holland; and that these two principles were only known in one place in antiquity, and that’s the book of Genesis, even though there is no single text more of an object of humanist scorn. 

“Humanists, no less than Jews and Christians, are indelibly stamped by the book of Genesis.” Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing human beings with inherent dignity. This is also the argument which begins Auden’s potted history of Christendom, Memorial for the City. I find it entirely convincing.
In fact I used to tease humanists from my perch at the Guardian by pointing out that they were just an Anglican heresy. The question then arises — what is the heresy, exactly: what, apart from the absence of God, distinguishes humanism from Protestant Christianity? 

The answer I’d prefer is that humanists have lost the doctrine of original sin. Unfortunately, I think I’m wrong here. Large parts of Christianity seem to have lost that too: they have reached a state where “Why can’t we all get along?” is a purely rhetorical question. In that case, it’s not a distinctive heresy at all. And there are forms of American progressive thought for which Whiteness or racism appear to explain exactly the same things as original sin.

That leaves the consideration of death. It is a central humanist doctrine that we only have one life, and this is it. It is a central Christian doctrine that physical death is not the end. 

Here it seems to me that Holland has placed his chisel precisely on the weakest point of the humanist structure. It’s hardly original: Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky both made the point some time ago. But it’s still true: if there is no judgment after death; if lives have no meaning but what we give them, then indeed “everything is permitted” — if you can get away with it. Perhaps this is a liberty which could only arise in an industrialised civilisation where people can live impersonally, for in any small and interdependent group it’s very obvious that many things are forbidden, even if they are not the things (slavery, torture, and so on) that humanists would forbid. 

In practice humanists are distinguished by the number of things that they, too, forbid, and by the judgment under which they feel they live. There is no moral anxiety like the anxiety of a tofu-eating wokeratx. But this judgment, this replacement of the Puritan God by Progress, has no rational basis. Why the hell should I care whether I am on the wrong side of history if history is something that happens after I’m safely dead? 

The question is then whether humanism can survive cut off from its Christian roots. Some heresies do. They mutate into entirely new religions — look at Mormonism, or Islam. But they only do so when they acquire rituals and even prophets of their own. These are things that secular humanism lacks and does not want — the “Sunday Assembly” was an attempt to provide them, but why go to godless Pentecostalism when you can have the real thing? 

For a belief to seep into the foundations of society it needs to seem self-evident: not a belief at all, but something that everybody knows. But history is a solvent of everything we take to be self-evident. That includes the ideals of a secular democracy, for they are not timeless truths that were just waiting to be discovered, any more than are their opposites. They were the response to particular challenges, the lessons learned from particular horrors. And when the memory of those horrors is no longer alive and vivid, and threatening, so too do the answers lose their urgency and life. 

As a German intellectual once said, secular democracy arises out of circumstances which it cannot itself guarantee. Perhaps it only makes sense when the alternatives are constantly being tried, and seen to fail. When I was growing up we did not think that secular humanism was the inevitable future. We knew it. In some way it’s exhilarating to have been proved so wrong.