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

The Declaration has been translated into five hundred languages, and has influenced most of the national constitutions that were drafted in the following decades, together with many international laws, treaties, and organizations. At seventy years old, it has aged well.

Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right.

Many intellectuals who don’t sign on to these alternatives to humanism nonetheless believe they capture a vital truth about our psychology: that people have a need for theistic, spiritual, heroic, or tribal beliefs. Humanism may not be wrong, they say, but it goes against human nature. No society based on humanistic principles can long endure, let alone a global order based on them.

It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one: that the inevitable collapse has begun, and we are watching the liberal, cosmopolitan, Enlightenment, humanistic worldview unravel before our eyes. “Liberalism Is Dead,” announced the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in 2016. “The liberal democratic experiment—with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will—is but a brief interlude.”²⁷ In “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” the Boston Globe editorialist Stephen Kinzer agreed:

The cosmopolitanism that is central to Enlightenment ideals has produced results that disturb people in many societies. This leads them back toward the ruling system that primates instinctively prefer: A strong chief protects the tribe, and in return tribe members do the chief’s bidding. . . . Reason offers little basis for morality, rejects spiritual power, and negates the importance of emotion, art and creativity. When reason is cold and inhumane, it can cut people off from deeply imbedded structures that give meaning to life.²⁸

Other pundits have added that it’s no wonder so many young people are drawn to ISIS: they are turning away from an “arid secularism,” and seek “radical and religious correctives to a flattened view of human life.”²⁹

So should I have called this book Enlightenment While It Lasts? Don’t be silly! In part II, I documented the reality of progress; in this part, I have focused on the ideas that drive it and why I expect them to endure. Having rebutted the cases against reason and science in the preceding two chapters, I’ll now take on the case against humanism. I’ll examine these arguments not just to show that the moral, psychological, and historical arguments against humanism are wrong. The best way to understand an idea is to see what it is not, so putting the alternatives to humanism under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment. First we’ll look at the religious case against humanism, then at the romantic-heroic-tribal-authoritarian complex.

Can we really have good without God? Has the godless universe advanced by humanistic scientists been undermined by the findings of science itself? And is there an innate adaptation to the divine presence—a God gene in our DNA, a God module in the brain—which ensures that theistic religion will always push back against secular humanism?

Let’s start with theistic morality. It’s true that many religious codes enjoin people from murdering, assaulting, robbing, or betraying one another. But of course so do codes of secular morality, and for an obvious reason: these are rules that all rational, self-interested, and gregarious agents would want their compatriots to agree upon. Not surprisingly, they are codified in the laws of every state, and indeed seem to be present in every human society.³⁰