Writer Christopher Benson reviews The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, by John Carroll, in the Weekly Standard. The book, which I haven’t read, appears to lodge the familiar conservative attack on the alleged pretensions of secular humanism to improve the world without reference to God:
[The] rallying illusion [of humanism], [Carroll writes,] is bred deeply into us by now–that knowledge will make us better and happier, and that we are free, free to improve ourselves.
At the risk of being accused of shallowness, may I suggest that knowledge in fact can make us happier and that more knowledge is always better than less. The Brooklyn Museum contains a painting called Her First Born (1888) by the American Robert Reid. A young woman from the working or agricultural class lays her head and arms over a small draped casket in a simple, white-washed room. Two candles burn next to the casket; a crucifix hangs on the wall between the candles.
This image is no longer a familiar one, but the death of children was once a constant agony of life, as artists from Ben Jonson to Gustav Mahler have memorialized. So, too, was the death of mothers during childbirth. The accomplishments of medical knowledge have all but eliminated these sources of sorrow and suffering from the Western experience, and we are better off—and yes, on average, happier–for it. Of course, children generate many other ways of being miserable for their parents, and perhaps we always define unhappiness up, but I’d rather have the option of being unhappy about more trivial matters than about premature death.
The time of the Black Death was one of impeccable religiosity, untouched by humanist hubris. I doubt whether many critics of the humanist and Enlightenment projects would trade places with 14th century Italians during the plague.
The internet is a happiness-generating device. Faust sold his soul for the knowledge that the internet puts at our fingertips for free; anyone who is not happy with such power—at least every now and then–is insensate.
Carroll writes:
Without God, without a transcendental law, there is only death.
Gee! That seems to be selling human creativity and companionship pretty short.
And I would say that we have “improved ourselves,” as Carroll puts it. We have reined in the human propensity for violence over the centuries, Steven Pinker has shown. Western society is less corrupt and more rule-bound and humane than it ever was.
Yes, yes, I know. There’s the nuclear bomb. But the benefits to human society generated by nuclear physics are enormous, and it’s not clear to me that earlier, religion-saturated societies would have had any more scruples about using it than we do, given the willingness of war-making or heresy-eliminating believers to use all the technology of destruction available to them at the time.
Conservatives who argue that the secular striving for human progress and knowledge is a poor substitute for “the ‘I am’ of Jesus,” as Benson terms it, are making a worthy argument that deserves respect and close attention. Perhaps they are ultimately right. Yet I confess that sometimes they strike me—perhaps unfairly and ignorantly–just a little bit like liberals who rail against corporations, bankers, and entrepreneurs, while benefiting from the risk-taking and drive of such suspect capitalists at every minute of their lives.
