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Secular Humanism: Our Only Hope for Defeating Radical Islam
In response to Paddy’s thought-provoking suggestion that a secularized Western culture is doomed to fall before committed barbarians, permit me to start with a statement that might shock: Secular humanism defeated radical Islam centuries ago. Everything we’re doing now, essentially, is mop-up.
The story began when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first European printing press with movable type, one of the most important events in the arc of modern history, if not the most important. Before Gutenberg, the marginal utility of acquiring skills such as reading and writing was low, because the cost of books, laboriously copied by hand, was high. The price of a single Bible could easily exceeded the economic value of a village.
His invention loosed a revolution. Literacy exploded, followed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The last came not a moment too soon. The Ottoman Turks had been on a torrid winning streak, seizing territory hand-over-fist in Eastern Europe and Spain. Then came the cataclysmic Battle of Vienna, where the tides of war changed, and the previously superior Muslim forces were handed a defeat from which they never recovered.
Long before Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha’s disastrous foray into Europe, Muslim scholars had sat atop the pinnacle of human knowledge, providing important contributions to algebra, geometry, architecture, astronomy, and medicine. They translated works from antiquity and advanced classical ideas. Intellectual disaster struck in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when adherents of the Ash’arite philosophy seized the reins of Muslim society from Mu’tazilite thinkers. With Asharism came a wholesale rejection of rationalism and an embrace of fundamentalism. The Ottoman Empire’s immense momentum and superior organization allowed it to wash up on Europe’s shores — to the point of massive overreach — centuries after the passing of Islam’s day as a leading force in the arts and sciences.
The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were irrevocable changes in trajectory of Western Civilization, just as the trajectory of Muslim society was forever changed by the collapse of Mu’tazilah philosophy. Europeans rapidly embraced rationalism as a means to improve their living conditions. Material explanations of and solutions to vexatious problems displaced explanations previously offered by religious authorities, with immensely positive economic consequences. European per capita GDP zoomed upward, along with standards of living. Muslim societies were left in the dust. This has taken place over nearly half a millennium. It should thus come as no surprise that when Westerners envision the average Muslim nation, they envision a 14th-century basket-case — because in many cases, that’s absolutely true. No similar improvement has transpired in that nation in the past 1,000 years.
Most of the nations of the world where Islam is dominant would rightly be described as third-world hellholes. The exceptions are nations that have immense mineral wealth (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait), and the larger nations at the edges of the Ummah (Turkey, Indonesia). But as a rule, if your country has been under the thumb of Islam for a thousand years, it’s now a hellhole.
The differences are not limited to the economic. There’s evidence that the improved economic success of Western European nations has had an impact upon the intelligence of its citizens. The Flynn Effect is the term used to describe a steady uptick in intelligence scores worldwide in the past century, especially in nations where the public not only values such things as infectious-disease prevention, childhood nutrition, and education, but pursues them in a fashion sufficiently rational as to obtain them.
Poor nations that lack the resources to improve their human capital are further hampered by centuries of ingrained backwardness. Still worse, 50 percent of their citizens — the female ones — are relegated to the status of chattel slaves and breeding stock, where they’re hardly apt to contribute productively. So these nations continue to fall ever further behind. A heartbreaking illustration is the hampering of efforts to eradicate polio by Islamic radicals who insist vaccination is a plot to sterilize them.
Western civilization and the Muslim world inhabit two different planets. On one is a relatively peaceful, prosperous Europe and the Anglosphere. On the other are nations dominated by people whose thoughts do not necessarily dwell upon the evils of Western civilization and their burning need to destroy it. More often, they are urgently consumed by their struggle for day-to-day survival. Their own governments, or sheer chaos, pose a much more immediate threat.
We are no more at risk of being overrun by them than we are at risk of being overrun by ants. It’s true that the insect biomass could be roughly equivalent to that of all human beings, and that if ants decided en masse to attack us, we’d have to rush down to Home Depot. But ants are not a serious threat. Ants spend more time defending their colonies than they do conquering neighboring ones.
What we face is in some ways harder to accept. The mass murder of European tourists on Tunisian beaches makes the headlines, but the vast majority of the victims of Islamist violence live in the Muslim world. We don’t yet know exactly how many people have died in the Syrian conflict, but I’m sure historians will one day find the numbers staggering. Perhaps it will not be as high as the toll of the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps it will be close.
What can we do? Unfortunately, the only thing we can do, realistically, is wait it out. The radicals can’t win forever, and they employ only the simplest of tactics to incite terror. Obviously, we need to try to limit the damage they inflict upon us, because a hornet can sting painfully in its death throes. But we are at no risk of losing our society to Muslims scaling the walls, nor are we in any danger of losing a war of ideas. We could certainly lose our sense of security if they’re lucky enough to land a sucker punch and bloody our noses. But as people worldwide are exposed to the idea that there can be a better life, they will want it. They will be willing to fight and die for it. This might take centuries — after all, we didn’t get here overnight — but happen it will.
The only question is how much worse will it get for them, and for us, before it starts to get better?
Published in Foreign Policy, General, History, Religion & Philosophy
The philosophical ground of science posits a universe where each natural occurrence is explainable, and therefore understandable. It doesn’t assume that God created such a universe, or even that God exists. That’s retrofitting. Consider the initial response to Darwin, in fact consider the present day movement to teach Creationism as science rather than religion. Who supports that and why?
The Islamic Golden Age lasted for about five hundred years, during which time Islamic civilisation was deliberately opened to knowledge from other cultures – an approach which was underpinned by theology and which supported scientific inquiry.
The collapse of this approach was illustrated not just by the halt of internal inquiry (theological and scientific – imho linked), but by the cessation of external inquiry – ie an active interest in the knowledge and products of other cultures and other civilisations.
Is there correlation/causality between the rise of intelligence and the rise of unbelief?
Yes, I was going to say this sounds a lot like the liberals in my family with their stunted view of man as exclusively an “economic” creature. It also credits all people as “rational actors.” Islamists put the lie to that!
No. The modern scientific view assumes atheism. All the notable early scientists in western history (arguably the only culture which could have developed the scientific method, as it was the only one that did) were believers. For heaven’s sake, Newton wrote more Biblical exegesis than he did on physics! /see what I did there?
You’re truncating again.
Scripture is a problem with the family tree comparison. While Christians include Jewish scripture, Islam replaces it. It uses similar names, but the Jesus of Islam is not the Jesus of Christianity (or history).
God did tell Israel to conquer Canaan, but it was not an open ended instruction to conquer the world and convert by force.
With the coming of Christ, God sends his people into the world as witnesses, not killers. The church has not always followed God’s instructions, but it’s an important distinction that violence in the name of God by Christians goes against scripture. That is not the case for Islam.
So… the title’s claim is completely unaddressed in the post. Obviously it would be silly to expect every possible alternative to be raised and rejected, but one or two might be in order.
Why not totalitarianism (hard or soft), corporatist authoritarianism, Christian humanism, new urbanism (attention check), anarcho-capitalism, democratic socialism, or if you’re inclined to date the “defeat” of Radical Islam as you do… European imperialism and mercantilism?
Look, we can reasonably note the defeat of the Chinese by European imperialism (and claim that secular humanism was a key factor). Is Western Civ currently mopping up Chinese expansionism? Perhaps, though I have my doubts.
I have nothing against secular humanism per se. I have noticed the unfortunate tendency of folks who describe themselves as secular humanists to incorporate Native American poetry in their destination wedding ceremonies, but whatevs, different strokes for different folks. And that is the point: pluralism matters, not secularism.
If we lose the pluralism, we lose Liberal Democracy (or Constitutional Republicanism, or whichever label you prefer). There are almost certainly many ways to defeat Islamists, but how many have happy “endings?”
It shouldn’t assume anything.
Modern scientists can perfectly well be believers (ie they can make that assumption about God) – they just don’t pretend that their belief in God is testable/provable by the scientific method.
Iow: it may (or may not) be true, but it isn’t science.
Well written! Really appreciated the comments on keeping women tightly controlled and losing half the population’s contribution. For mothers at home will be very unhappy when fearful of their males in the family. that impacts on the upbringing and IQ of the children.
Give it time.
Did the West have a Confucian revolution or did China have a Marxist (a Western secular ideology) revolution?
Did America have to shoot down Maoist American students on the Mall or did the Chinese Govt shoot down Chinese students rallying around a styrofoam statue of the Goddess of Democracy (Liberty)?
When a society becomes rich and educated enough, and has any kind of choice, it eventually chooses some version of secular humanism. Always. Because it’s that attractive.
That’s not at all what I said. I never said anything about western scientists using science to prove God. I said the western worldview (of a created (contingent), ordered, intelligible universe) was the philosophical ground from which science developed.
And, btw, atheistic scientists who try to disprove God are a discredit to the discipline, just as much as a believing scientist would be to try to prove God through science. God is outside the universe, and not within the scientific purview. Good scientists would not misuse the tools at their disposal.
I don’t agree that ‘created’ was a necessary component of the world view, though it was certainly present (in most of the world views of the time).
[Also – people have been thinking about this stuff for a long time and in many places. It didn’t just drop entirely new into Europe – though that’s where it met circumstances which led to its flowering.]
Ah, but the Babylonian and Egyptian “advancements” (specifically medical) came through trial and error — Not science. Science involves observation, but its most defining features: testable hypothesis, experimental repeatability, etc, etc. — in short, the systematic method, only ever developed in the West.
Okay, insofar as I’m in a hurry, little of it has to do with Chinese policy.
The latter, certainly. Though I’m not sure that longer term trends favor old-school Western concepts of rights which inherently assume human dignity and are built upon property, as opposed to say, legalistic, bureaucratic, semi-Confucian claims of expertise.
Looks aren’t the end-all-be-all. Sure, they’re important. The problem with your claim is that the number of societies to which it could plausibly apply is so vanishingly small in the course of human civilizations to date that it is, at best, an interesting footnote.
And it is interesting. What it is not, is dispositive.
Perhaps you’re right, Western, though trial and error is an essential part of the scientific method, imho. I confess it’s hard (for me) to tell when exactly something like alchemy becomes systematic enough to morph into chemistry, or even metallurgy.
How about suggestive?
This sounds like Obama’s strategy. I don’t think it’s sound. It concedes the heart of the middle east from which in time they can unite huge numbers of muslims. And how does this fit into secular humanism? If you’re going to go back to Gutenburg and the printing press to make some sort of point on today’s Islamic terrorism, then we might as well go back to Socrates and Plato.
A book that will fascinate anyone interested in these questions is Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. No one should wade into the collapse of the medieval church in England without it.
Maybe it is less a matter of religion vs secular humanism, than a matter of a society’s own success creating a sense of emptiness:
The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew into richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they-this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.
–Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Majestyk,
I have to say that, with respect to the OP, it seems as though you’re identifying every potentially advantageous development in Western culture and society over the past several centuries to secular humanism, in what amounts to a petitio principii. A full-length rebuttal would necessarily begin with a discussion of Gutenberg as emerging with knowledge acquired from the church mint, printing church documents (including, famously, the Bible), etc., and then move on to point out that the Reformation was not a very secular movement. And even without bringing Max Weber out to bat for the general Protestant population, it would not be very difficult to find lots of good examples of religious ideas informing and motivating many movers and shakers in the Industrial Revolution. I Wikipedia’d Newcomen, the inventor of the steam engine, and found that he was a Baptist lay preacher.
The problem with this sort of analysis, though, is that it’s so easy to deploy the term “secular humanism” to mean anything that involves learning and development which is not overtly connected with the broader Christian church. The steam engine was not invented or built, so far as we know, inside a church building or as a result of a papal encyclical, but what does that prove? Anglo-American culture is steeped in Christian (esp. Protestant) concepts and values – such as that we are custodians of the earth and everything in it – which allowed the rise of industry and so forth, in contradistinction to Islam, which forbids innovation, but is it reasonable to overlook this and other factors which have roots in our shared religion?
I saw a documentary recently that argued against the idea that the Muslim empires were responsible for safeguarding human knowledge during the middle ages. Instead, according to this doc, it was actually the Eastern Christian monks who lived within the Muslim empires who kept this knowledge alive. They were the ones who were employed by the Muslim big-wigs to translate the classics from Greek into Arabic.
Very well reasoned.
George Bush operated on the same idea – that given exposure to liberty, no one will want to resist it.
Excellent piece, Majestyk.
I was thinking the same exact thing. It has been Christianity that has separated western civilization from the rest of the world.
Actually, “doing nothing” isn’t Obama’s Strategy, which might have been preferable to what he actually did. The ruins of Obama’s Strategy now lie in Libya and Syria.
Candidate Obama and President Obama’s rhetoric don’t line up very well. At least when President Bush activated his “flypaper strategy” he committed to it – with mixed results.
Obama simply made a complete hash of the situation (with Hillary’s help) and chaos has been the result.
I have to confess that I’ve never liked or understood this line of reasoning. What exactly is it about the assumption of a rational, ordered universe which is unique to Christianity? Nothing that I can detect. In fact, the notion of miracles, which are sought by Christians through prayer and devotion militate against the idea of a rational, ordered universe by saying that under certain conditions the laws of nature are suspended by a supernatural authority.
This is much like the claims regarding Newton – the man was actually extraordinarily unpleasant – that because he was a Christian and a noted scientist that this puts Christianity under the umbrella of scientific discovery.
Nothing could be further from the truth. By any relevant measure, there were practically no non-Christians (or non-Jews) in England at that time anyways, so this again tells us nothing about the credibility of Christianity, as any discoveries made would have been made (by default) by… Christians.
A person’s discoveries or contributions to any human endeavor say nothing about the veracity of their beliefs or worldview. Those beliefs are entirely incidental.
I am not one (I’m sure you know) who places a ton of stock in the idea that XX% supermajorities of scientists don’t believe in God or what-have-you – such pronouncements seem beyond their ken.
As someone else on this thread already pointed out, never under-estimate another’s thirst for power. That exists too. That’s the good v evil struggle in the case of the middle east – lust for freedom vs lust for power.
A person’s discoveries and contributions to human endeavors are strongly linked to their worldview. Whether the beliefs are right or wrong, being Jewish makes one much, much more likely to win a scientific Nobel Prize, for example. Muslims don’t make these advances.
Israel’s ridiculously overweighted contributions to science and technology suggest that cultures and faiths make a huge difference (unless you think it is really just genetic). The list of Israeli contributions to the world is way, way over the top. Here. More. And More.
So from a utilitarian perspective, certain religious beliefs, regardless of their veracity, seem to be quite un-incidental to human endeavor.
Again, I have to disagree – Eratosthenes of Alexandria’s career is decidedly pre-Christian and employed a number of ideas which we would recognize as scientific.
Christianity is not irreducible to such ideation. In fact, one might argue that the irreducible thread which is woven throughout western civilization is Classical Greek thought. It shows up practically everywhere you look in the West.
That worked out well…
I wondered if anyone was going to bring up the Museum of Alexandria! And there were certainly scientific achievements in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany which were both hostile to organized religion outside of the worship of the state.
In any case crediting or discrediting Judaism and Christianity for the rise of modernity, particularly what we call Western Civilization, seems a little chicken-and-egg to me.
The fact of the matter is that the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and then the Industrial Revolution came out of a world built on Christian ideas about the universe, the world and the primacy of man over nature. The idea that Christianity is incidental to this time of change is non-provable, as much as it is non-provable to assert that Christianity is necessary to the same change.