Chapter 10: Is Secular Humanism Enough?

In which we ask whether woke is broke

This is the tenth chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.

Today, secular humanism remains the ideology of most physicalists. Certainly, it fills in for at least some functions formerly performed by Christianity.¹ But it may justly be asked whether it is actually a cataspect at all. I think it is one.

Secular humanism has two prongs: the universal struggle for human rights and the exercise of such rights. Each can act independently as a cataspect or, more commonly, they can be merged into one. The struggle for progress can act as an outward lens by providing such an overwhelming feeling of absorption that it succeeds in tamping down the fear of death. One sees oneself as a meaningful part of the arc of the moral universe which, though long, points toward justice. Alternatively, one may believe that the free act of authentic self-creation as enabled by human rights is itself sacred, regardless of one’s participation in the fight for progress; that, in some sense, coming to a full realization of one’s deepest self is a refutation of death, or at least an act of spiritual defiance against it. It’s akin to the idea that the physical body is just a pale shadow of one’s immortal soul. In this case, the personal self does not literally survive on a non-physical plane, but it is sacred nonetheless. I would speculate that most secular humanists incorporate both lensing strategies into their practice to one degree or another, sometimes leaning more on the struggle for progress and at other times delving more into their own self-actualization.

The concept of liberalism is closely connected to secular humanism, though they are not the same thing. Their relationship is instead nested, with liberalism being one key part of secular humanism. Liberalism is hard to define uncontroversially, but it basically boils down to the idea that the state should act as a limited framework guaranteeing a certain set of human rights thought to be necessary for a good life. The most important philosopher of liberalism in recent times, John Rawls, illustrated the function of the state through his “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. In this hypothetical scenario, one is supposed to imagine oneself among a group of people deciding how to order a society. Everyone is behind a veil which prevents them from seeing what their status in the society will be before they join it, and so, the theory goes, it is in everyone’s best interest to minimize the inequality that exists in the society. Everyone, no matter their status, should be entitled to a basic set of rights that guarantees a suitable level of dignity, autonomy, physical security and so on, and the job of the state should be to protect these rights. Secular humanism incorporates this conception of governance, but it goes further, arguing that the self has an inherent sanctity whose protection and development is the most important goal of human life.

The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre has argued that liberalism, apart from being the constitutive governing philosophy of the modern West, also provides some of its denizens with “a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual philosophy.”² He means that “liberalism through and through” can and should be considered alongside religious cataspects like Buddhism or Christianity.³ Lefebvre distinguishes liberalism from humanism as being narrower in scope, since humanism can refer to any system which places the human at the center, whether Christian, secular or otherwise, but I think his ‘comprehensive liberalism’ is the same thing, roughly speaking, as my ‘secular humanism’.⁴ Lefebvre defines ‘comprehensive liberals’ as those who take liberalism to have “the moral depth and spiritual range to redeem everyday life.”⁵ Comprehensive liberals support and fight for governments that respect liberal conceptions of rights, and, along with Lefebvre, they consider this fight for progress to be “the source of [their] soul[s].”⁶

For such people, “liberal freedoms are more than legal rules and political parameters to pursue some other conception of the good life. Those freedoms, and the liberal political subject that is their substratum, are the prereflexive framework we use to navigate the world.”⁷ Alongside the fight for liberal human rights, then, comprehensive liberals consider the living of a liberal kind of life to be important in and of itself. The development of the self as a locus of dignity is, for comprehensive liberals, sacrosanct: “Self-respect is the single most important good that liberal democracies must strive to ensure for all of their members. Without a sense of our own value and confidence that our ends are worth pursuing, nothing seems worth doing.”⁸ If the ultimate goal of free and fair people in a community based on reciprocity is to be achieved, the recognition of the essential dignity of the person within that system is critical. Lefebvre notes that these principles suffuse much of liberal popular culture, from shows like The Office that “reimagine the workplace as a setting for self-realization” to watching “Disney princesses (from Ariel to Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa and Anna, Moana, and Raya) strive to learn and become who they were meant to be.”⁹

But does merely living in a liberal fashion, respecting other people’s human rights in one’s personal life, actually work to console secular humanists about mortality? If it does not, and if there is no other way of conceiving of the sacred self, then secular humanism could only be considered a cataspect for those who find consolation in the political struggle prong rather than the selfhood prong. I am personally dubious as to whether merely acting in accordance with one’s values in everyday life is enough to provide consolation, as a cataspect must, especially given that the self, the very thing reified by secular humanism, is precisely what death unavoidably destroys. Lefebvre doesn’t directly discuss this issue, but he does obliquely suggest that it may not be so important:

“Sure, we liberals have our wobbles. A tragedy or sudden illness may for a time lead us to wonder about cosmic justice or the endurance of the soul… but most of the time such matters are not live for us… An atheist – someone whose comprehensive doctrine denies transcendence and attacks religion – vigorously shakes their head when asked about immortality or providence. We liberals merely shrug, indifferent and unconcerned.”¹⁰

Whatever Lefebvre’s actual views on the matter, I don’t think secular humanists who are not politics junkies must just try not to think too much about death or tragedy. Secular humanism actually does have a more transcendental aspect that can offer consolation even apart from political struggle. Viktor Frankl, a psychologist, neurologist and Holocaust survivor, is an enduring example of a person who not only theorized that such consolation was possible but also lived out his own theory. He argues in Man’s Search for Meaning that authentic self-creation can provide solace even through horrible suffering or inescapable doom. In his estimation, sacredness is the foundation of consolation, and authentic self-creation is the foundation of sacredness. Frankl recalls that one strategy he used for consoling other concentration camp inmates was to try and convince them to have some purpose rooted in the future (a more mundane, non-cosmic type of meaning), but that this would often end with the bare pronouncement that “I have nothing left to expect from life anymore.”¹¹ In view of this, Frankl developed a method that turned the usual strategy on its head: “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”¹² The idea is that one should see life as a series of situations in which one’s task is to determine the best choice for oneself, and in so doing craft the unique person that one is.

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”¹³

Elsewhere, he puts it slightly differently:

“We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.”¹⁴

Through all of this runs the sub-specie aeternitatis, cosmic quality of this sense of sacredness. All of one’s moments matter, not just in view of some goal in the world, but on a higher plane. In seeking to console the other prisoners, Frankl recalls conveying this sense with a metaphorical invocation of the spiritual:

“…someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die… It was in the nature of sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning.”¹⁵

The foundation of this consolation is Frankl’s focus on human life as a locus of dignity, its sacredness inhering in its uniqueness rather than some kind of utilitarian calculus. Each moment of a human life, with its inherent capacity for meaningful self-actualization or, perhaps even more preciously, its already-realized meaning in the past, has inherent dignity beyond the sphere of everyday materiality.¹⁶ It is in this sanctity of every unique conscious experience, including the knowledge that one’s past experiences are “irrevocably stored up and treasured” in the sense that one’s life resolves itself into a meaningful whole,¹⁷ that a person can find solace even when one’s future days can be counted on one’s fingertips. The task for those days is to live bravely and suffer gracefully, knowing that one will be “worthy of one’s sufferings.”¹⁸

As a physicalist cataspect, however, Frankl’s more metaphysical vision of secular humanism finds itself hobbled by the impersonal, mechanical and frankly quite uninviting universe popularly associated with the outlook of science (I will have much more to say on this topic in Part IV). A cataspect based on the sacredness of the human self from a cosmic perspective must necessarily find it hard to coexist with an orthodoxy that is at least ambivalent about the importance of humanity in the grand scheme, let alone any particular human life. This contradiction has tended to make more progress-focused secular humanisms more appealing than those of Frankl’s type, since they can admit that cosmic meaning may not exist and instead conceive of the sacred at the level of world history. But this has its own problem: humans are instinctively tribal. For cataspects that situate their concepts of the sacred in political struggle, it is difficult for those based on individualism to compete with those based on the sacredness of some tribal group. Tribal cataspects are simply more emotionally compelling.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of two rivals of secular humanism: Nazism and Marxism-Leninism. Each of these accepted some version of “science” (though, in practice, rejected physicalism and elevated party dogma to the status of scripture) and drew its power from the sacredness of a tribal identity in world historic rather than cosmic terms. Nazism salved the alienation of physicalism with the ointment of misty-eyed, quasi-occult nostalgia and racist obsession. Marxism-Leninism replaced the goal of liberal human rights with that of the classless society. Meanwhile, secular humanism was able to thrive in the United States, but its days were numbered. A coalition of conservative Christians, resentful white identitarians and their rich backers grew in the shadows across the last century, waiting for its chance to recapture the heights of orthodoxy. It is this history of secular humanism’s rivals that will be the subject of Part III.

1. The historian Tom Holland’s excellent book Dominion is an interesting exploration of this phenomenon.

2. Lefebvre, Alexandre. Liberalism as a Way of Life. Princeton, 2024. p. 16.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. 99.

5. Ibid. 236.

6. Ibid. 237.

7. Ibid. 164.

8. Ibid. 90-91.

9. Ibid. 15-16.

10. Ibid. 97-98.

11. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon, 2006. p. 77.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid. 77-78.

14. Ibid. 112.

15. Ibid. 83.

16. Ibid. 151.

17. Ibid. 150.

18. Ibid. 67.