Most people, even those who are fairly well-educated, don’t know much about humanism, what it is, its history, its elements or expressions. Atheists, agnostics, secularists, religionists of all stripes, should be most familiar with it, so also those who study such humanistic “sciences” as sociology, education, political science, economics, public administration—and about a dozen more academic “fields of study” (loose term). Yet, most of these are blithely ignorant of the origins and meaning of that which they profess to work and live for. The only people who know anything about humanism are philosophers and theologians, and the seminarians to whom they impart a smattering of knowledge about the topic.

 

When one thinks about it, this is a very odd state of affairs. Humanism is the foundation of all modern ethics. Why is it never discussed? History lectures and texts just skate over it as though it were a spot in the terrain of the Renaissance, commentators refer to it, always obliquely, with the assumption that their audience is familiar with it. But they’re not. Very few people even know what it means outside some vague preference for the general good of humanity, though some also know that it is an elevation of humanity to a status reserved in the human psyche for a deity. It’s so entangled with politics and economics now, separating out its threads would be impossible—indeed, humanism is the birth-mother of modern politics. It undergirds Marxism as much as it does free enterprise, totalitarianism as much as democracy.

 

I saw a film last night at a friend’s house. “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is a charming (though very unlikely) gentle comedy about some elderly British visitors to an obscure hotel in India. It’s humanistic. Like most of the films and novels we enjoy nowadays, those which promote kindness, understanding, love and friendship as primary virtues. There is seldom any reference to religion, and when there is, some clergyman is cast as well-meaning but ineffective, at best. At worst, a clergyman (usually Catholic) is cast as the enemy of all that is good (humanistic). For humanists, religion is either irrelevant or downright evil, tolerated only insofar as it makes itself subservient to the True Faith.

 

It isn’t secularism that’s at the root of modern anti-religion public policy, but the humanism that gave birth to it. That’s why religious people have a hard time articulating their discomfiture with the direction of that policy: It’s hard to explain that one is not opposed to secularism, per se, but to the suppression of religion that always accompanies it. Indeed, that suppression is NOT an element of secular policy, but of a humanism school of thought that disallows a deity by its own definition: Nothing supersedes humanity. Using the famous attempt of St. Thomas Aquinas to define God as “that than which nothing greater can be,” true humanists are bound to reject God. So—where is the surprise?

 

The surprise is due to the fact that nobody mentions humanism, nobody questions virtues that promote kindness, understanding, love, etc. In defense of those virtues—which we imagine to be under constant threat by various enemies (vampires, tyrants, bigots, whatever, fill in the blank)—we seldom notice that we’re zealous disciples of a religion, persecuting anyone who doesn’t adhere to our faith, and forcing them to convert. Sometimes with as much jihad mentality as the most radical Islamic terrorist. Humanism is preached on every corner and from nearly every pulpit nowadays, though no one mentions it. We seldom hear sermons on God—unless He is preached as an exemplar of humanism, our true god, the one we really worship. Our devotion to that god grows; so does our skill at avoiding mention of his Name. Now, as God’s role (as a disciple and prophet of the true god) expires, He becomes useless. And as public devotion to Him persists, He becomes recognized as “divisive,” the force which opposes unifying Humanism—which remains unmentioned—and therefore, The Enemy.

 

We were given two commandments. We have used the second as grounds for discarding the first. How foolish we are, not to notice that all things die when the source of their life is killed, not to notice that morality along with nature inverted when we inverted those two commandments: sex is now anti-life, love is euthanasia, the minority rules, funerals are celebrations, and those who retreat from the humanistic herd are seen as “dangerous”: Withdrawal into independent thought is treason and exclusion of anyone who adheres to another faith is the righteous practice of “inclusiveness.”