Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. . . .

Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. We . . . animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and finality of death. . . .

Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Humanists . . . strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence. . . .

Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop global community. . . .²

The members of Humanist associations would be the first to insist that the ideals of humanism belong to no sect. Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman who was delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life, many people are humanists without realizing it.³ Strands of humanism may be found in belief systems that go back to the Axial Age. They came to the fore during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, leading to the English, French, and American statements of rights, and got a second wind after World War II, inspiring the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other institutions of global cooperation.⁴ Though humanism does not invoke gods, spirits, or souls to ground meaning and morality, it is by no means incompatible with religious institutions. Some Eastern religions, including Confucianism and varieties of Buddhism, always grounded their ethics in human welfare rather than divine dictates. Many Jewish and Christian denominations have become humanistic, soft-pedaling their legacy of supernatural beliefs and ecclesiastical authority in favor of reason and universal human flourishing. Examples include the Quakers, Unitarians, liberal Episcopalians, Nordic Lutherans, and Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic branches of Judaism.

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind. As we shall see, it is vehemently opposed not just by many religious and political factions but, amazingly, by eminent artists, academics, and intellectuals. If humanism, like the other Enlightenment ideals, is to retain its hold on people’s minds, it must be explained and defended in the language and ideas of the current era.

Spinoza’s dictum is one of a family of principles that have sought a secular foundation for morality in impartiality—in the realization that there’s nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that could justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else’s.⁵ If I object to being raped, maimed, starved, or killed, I can’t very well rape, maim, starve, or kill you. Impartiality underlies many attempts to construct morality on rational grounds: Spinoza’s viewpoint of eternity, Hobbes’s social contract, Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Nagel’s view from nowhere, Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal, and of course the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.⁶ (The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are designed to anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other sticking points for the Golden Rule.)