What is Wrong with Humanism?
Humanism is a philosophically based ideology centered on reason and responsibility aimed at creating a better world.
It seeks to develop human values using science and critical thinking rather than blind faith in a supernatural worldview.
There are three fundamental difficulties with humanism.
1. It reinforces human separateness from nature on which humanity depends.
2. The transition from faith-based belief systems to humanism leaves a moral vacuum that returns humans to power politics, tribalism, and destroys human cohesion.
3. Fails to recognise evolution as the dynamic governing life on Earth by clinging to out dated mechanistic thinking and its reliance on economic theory.
Taking these in turn.
Human separateness involves privileging humans over nature. It is grounded in tribal notions of being chosen, selectively saved, or technologically superior. In modern times it manifests itself as power over principle.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche announced the death of God because of scientific advances and expanding democratic principles. For him this was not the triumph of reason over superstition, but the emerging loss of a global moral compass.
Humanists have tried valiantly to bridge this gap, but the scale of ideological conflicts during the Nineteenth Century and the breakdown of the international rule-based order in the first quarter of this Century demonstrate that humanism has not delivered the moral framework that was hoped for it.
While humanism shares the idea progress with the older faith-based traditions, it sees change as a predictable mechanistic process. Worse, by adhering to thinking of the world as mechanistic and seeking to force human activities into a mindless economic machine, it destroys the human sense of purpose, meaning and love that underpin human well-being.
Evolution, on the other hand is dynamic, it prefers diversity over efficiency, quality over quantity, and build resilience, rather than unsustainable exploitation.
John Schooneveldt
