Meet
the latest critics of the new
atheists: the
old humanists. It is not
enough, they say, to take a
stand against religion—we must
stand up something in its place.
Humanists are right to think
that there is more to life than
atheism, but wrong to think that
they are the ones to provide it.
It is not the job of
religion’s critics to organize
a replacement.
Just
to show you how serious I am,
I’ve christened a new fallacy
to give a name to this mistake
in thinking: I call it the fallacy
of decomposition. The
fallacy of decomposition is the
mistake of supposing that as the
estate of religion collapses,
there must be a single new
institution that arises to
serve the same social functions
it served—that the social
space vacated by religion must
be filled by a religion-shaped
object. Instead, it could be
that in the lot once occupied by
faith there springs up a
variegated garden, a patchwork
of independent institutions,
each of which fulfills one of
those functions. Out of one,
many.
Thus,
for our education, we attend the
university; for cosmological
clarity, we visit the
planetarium; for therapy, the
therapist; for beauty, the
museum, the concert hall. Good
stories? We read the Good Book,
sure, but also the good
books.
After
all, it was something like this
phenomenon that characterized
the secularization of Western
Europe. The dramatic drop in
regular church attendance in
Europe was not accompanied by a
dramatic spike in the membership
of organized atheism or
humanism, which remains
marginal. For post-religious
Europeans, the point was to not
show up anywhere once a week to
seek absolution, but to stay out
late on Saturday nights and
sleep in late on Sunday
mornings.
When
you think about it, organized
humanism is a hard sell. Do you
like paying dues and making
forced pleasantries over
post-service coffee cake, but
can’t stand beautiful
architecture and professionally
trained musicians? If so,
organized humanism may be for
you. Greg
Epstein (the “humanist
chaplain” at Harvard and the
author of Good Without God)
is a lovely person, but I’ve
heard him sing, and I think
I’ll stick to Bach, Arvo Pärt,
and Kirk Franklin for my
spiritual uplift. Do we really
need an institution for people
who find Reform Judaism and
Unitarian Universalism too
rigid? Yes. It’s called the
weekend.
Let
me be clear. I am not
criticizing humanists for
getting together to fight for
the ideals of a secular, open
society. For the better part of
a decade, I proudly worked for
an organization (the Center for
Inquiry, publisher of Free
Inquiry magazine) that does
just that. But even there, I
encountered tension between
those of us who saw the Center
primarily as a think tank and
advocate addressing the general
public in the marketplace of
ideas, and those who saw it
primarily as a congregation
whose purpose is to gather up
all the self-identifying
refugees of traditional religion
and offer them a secular
alternative to everything it did
for them. Compare: you might
support Médecins
Sans Frontières because
you believe in their work, but
you wouldn’t expect them to
officiate your wedding. I always
maintained that the point should
be to make the mainstream
culture more secular and
humanistic, not to create a new
secular humanist subculture.
Neither
am I arguing against
disorganized secular humanism,
of which I am both perpetual
student and ardent lover. For
disorganized secular humanism is
practically identical to the
ethos of modern, liberal
democracy. Here lies the real
embarrassment of the fallacy of
decomposition. When humanism is
equated with organized
humanism, an entire civilization
is reduced to a fringe group of
dyspeptic rationalists who
gather once a year in hotel
ballrooms (as Sam Harris
observed a few years ago before
a group of dyspeptic
rationalists gathered in a hotel
ballroom). According to this
impoverished self-concept,
humanist “literature” does
not embrace the better part of
all letters but instead only the
relatively few writers like Kurt
Vonnegut or Isaac Asimov who
have turned up at conferences of
the American Humanist
Association to accept awards.
Apparently,
in thinking about what might
come after religion, it is hard
for humanists to see beyond a
kind of telecom model, in which
a conglomerate bundles together
all of these services, so that
the same people who put us in
touch with metaphysical truth
also provide us with community
and morality.
It
is all the more ironic that this
model itself is an invention of
religion, a sort of meta-dogma.
It is a vestige of the
contingent historical fact that
after giving up its dreams of
theocratic control, Western
Christianity contented itself
with claiming for its territory
everything that fell outside of
the civil sphere of government
and politics and the commercial
sphere of market activity. Why
else would learning, art, food,
sex, and the meaning of life all
be handled by the same religious
monopoly?
The
promise and the peril of the
open, liberal democratic society
lies precisely in the
possibility of a civility and a
solidarity untethered from any
unitary philosophy or
community—it doesn’t all
have to hang together. The
secular house has many mansions.
Austin
Dacey is former representative
to the United Nations for the
Center for Inquiry and the
author of "The Secular
Conscience: Why Belief Belongs
in Public Life
