Some Christians talk about “secular humanism” as if it were a bad thing.
It’s not.
Well, okay, the “secular” part is bad. It’s a euphemism for atheism, which is very bad.
But humanism — a system of thought that is predicated on the existence of human nature, and that accords value to what is specifically human, to human categories, needs, moral affections, culture, and aspirations — is very good.
God created human nature and invested it with its specific attributes. Isofar as we take what rightly belongs to human nature (as opposed to what is disordered due to the Fall) as a touchstone to how we should live and what we should value, we have a touchstone to truth and wisdom.
The real enemy today is not “secular humanism,” but post-humanism — the doctrine that there is no such thing as human nature except what is culturally constructed, and that we can reconstruct human nature and society in whatever way the prevailing winds of political and academic thought deem most appropriate and correct.
Camille Paglia agrees.
In a recent speech, she described herself as a “secular humanist… a lapsed Catholic and an atheist.” Yet because she is a humanist, she had some trenchant things to say about what she calls the “sickness” and “spiritual emptiness” of modern post-human culture (though she doesn’t use that term) — a point of view she acknowledges puts her in the company of Pope Benedict XVI. She also has some provocative and insightful things to say about art, politics, culture, and spirituality — including what’s wrong with modernist architecture in Catholic churches and what was right about Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.
Excerpts:
I am a secular humanist. I am a lapsed Catholic and an atheist. However, I believe, as much as the new pope, that secular humanism is sick, it is spiritually empty. Part of the problem is that the left has tried to elevate politics… over all other aspects of culture…
What I would say to conservatives is that it’s really incorrect for you to laud the canon and demand for its reintroduction without embracing the other part of the canon in Western culture, and that is the visual arts tradition in the Greco-Roman line … where the nude and where the eroticism of the body are very, very important…
But then to the left, I want to say, you have vandalized art in this period of identity politics, another part of the legacy of the 1960s. Politics began to feel that art was merely a servant of its own agenda on campus. That is when the universities went very seriously astray, when the humanities began to become corrupted, and that’s how they marginalized themselves…
Art lasts… It’s a spiritual resource. But no, no, no — over the last 30 years on American campuses, the idea of the best or the greatest was just thrown out as relative, subjective, based on political considerations and so on.
Identity politics has to go. We’ve got to bring back the idea that all of art belongs to all people. And that we don’t want a situation where young women are being encouraged to read only works by women. What is the end result of that? A lot of bad poetry…
A Catholic in the old style, if you are a Mediterranean-style or Latin Catholic, will see imagery of nudity in your church. But it’s a fact that since the 1950s, American Catholic churches have been Protestantized. They’ve been remodeled. These gory statues are considered tasteless and have been removed to the cellar or donated. The new churches all look like airport waiting stations. Even the visual nurturing of young Catholics has been cut off. That’s why there was so much interesting comment about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” because he was bringing back all the blood and the guts that were part of the old working-class ethnic view of the story of Christ.
Amen.
Having such an entrenched liberal acknowledging the spiritual sickness of society reminds me of this line from Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”, regarding the need to deal with human evil:
“The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.”
The “good news” is meaningless to those who have not first grasped the bad news.
“That’s why there was so much interesting comment about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” because he was bringing back all the blood and the guts that were part of the old working-class ethnic view of the story of Christ.”
Wow, so true. I’ll have to cite this to the more liberal people at my parish. I’m still annoyed at American liberalism’s general abandonment of labor and blue-collar folk, so this is one more arrow in my rhetorical quiver. I also have suggested emphasizing the Faith’s blood-and-guts to help catch and keep the interest of men and boys in general, but didn’t think of it as particularly applicable to the working-class.
The flight from concrete art seems to be linked to an American education system that increasingly emphasizes abstract principles of science and ethics, and a consumer system that emphasizes incredibly personal mental factors like “choice” and “desire.” Since the middle class tends to be particularly frightened by the idea of appearing uneducated, their drive towards “mature” abstract Christianity might show up in church art, and thus contribute to the resentment and the neglect shown by the lower classes.
I’ve been a Camille fan for a few years now. I posted about her book not too long ago:
http://constantlyrisking.blogspot.com/2005/04/camille-paglia-wants-to-save-poetry.html
I disagree. “Humanism” has largely been promoted at the expense of God. The “God centered” universe is replaced by a “man centered” universe. Marx and others have all considered themselves humanists in contrast to being a believer of some sort. Thought not all humanists were/are athiests they certainly for their systems as they were.
ZF
Camille Paglia often torques me off; but at least she is eminently worth being mad at.
I’ve been a closet Camille fan for a while. She makes excellent and truthful observations. I don’t care for her “lifestyle”, but at least she’s an honest libertarian.
St. Irenaeus: “The Glory of God is a man fully alive.”
Humanism has many mansions, as Christianity does. So-called “secular Humanism” was invented only around 1980, the term promoted at first by those who set it up as an enemy to destroy.
“Humanism,” on the other hand, is a word with well-established meaning, used since the Renaissance and knowingly adopted by the founders of modern organized Humanism, who called their publication NEW HUMANIST – which evolved into today’s THE HUMANIST.
What, then, is “secular Humanism”? A straw man created in order to knock it down? A shelter for atheists afraid to use the dangerous a-word? A haven for Humanists alienated from the original American Humanist Association? What does “secular Humanism” offer to justify a claim of separate identity from “Humanism”? An illustration of the nature of the Humanist movement as all leaders, no followers, hence endlessly subdividing?