Since 11th september, political leaders have struggled to define the sides in what is clearly a kind of war. Is it a war between radical Muslims and the US? Is it a war between the Christian west and Islam? Or is the conflict an even larger one-between secularism and fundamentalism around the world?
The most influential attempts to define the post-cold war world have been those of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Samuel P Huntington, in his essay "The Clash of Civilisations" (1993). Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political evolution. Huntington emphasises the persistence of pre-modern linguistic, cultural and religious divisions, like those between western and eastern Christendom and Confucian and Hindu Asia.
Each of these schemas captures aspects of reality. But an alternative that deserves consideration is one that defines "civilisations" in terms, not of technological development or culture, but of world view. This approach gives us fewer civilisations than those listed by Huntington-but more than the single end-stage civilisation proposed by Fukuyama.
From this perspective, the most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world's territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.
On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.
Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette's France, Atat?rk's Turkey, Yeltsin's Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.
Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a "rational" social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the "reasonableness" of Renaissance humanists and the "rationality" of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The "secular humanists" who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).
Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.
The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.
My claim is that the civilisation shared by most Prospect readers is humanist, a relatively young global civilisation based on the post-medieval, Italian-Dutch-Anglo-American tradition of the constitutional, commercial society. Needless to say, this definition of humanist civilisation differs dramatically from conventional catechisms about the "rise of the west."
For example, the familiar idea that there is a unitary liberal "west" that is defined by the RRE tradition-Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment-is untrue. Renaissance humanism is incompatible with Reformation Protestantism, while Enlightenment rationalism is alien to both. The fact that these three traditions have coexisted in Britain, the US and other countries does not mean that they are three phases of the same tradition.
Another version of the "rise of the west" story, more sympathetic to Catholicism than the RRE approach, holds that the "west" is a synthesis of the "Greco-Roman" and "Judaeo-Christian" traditions. In fact, the "Judaeo-Christian" tradition has little to do with the tolerant, individualist, commercial society.
Consider the claim that Christianity is responsible for the liberal ideal of political equality. In reality, early-modern liberal republican theorists derived this from Cicero and the Stoics. Christians and Muslims believe in the equality of believers before God, a conception which was not interpreted until recently to mandate equality. Indeed, Paul admonished slaves to return to their spiritually-equal masters. The Christian churches only turned against chattel slavery after secular philosophers like David Hume had begun denouncing it. Southern Protestants in the US defended slavery throughout the civil war, and the Catholic church defended it until it was abolished decades later in Catholic Cuba and Brazil.
Popular sovereignty, republicanism, democracy, the rule of law rather than the rule of men, the idea of a natural law transcending the conventional law of nations-these, too, are part of a pre-Christian, Greco-Roman heritage familiar to educated Europeans and westerners from the Renaissance until the 19th century. Credit for these concepts can no more be given to Moses and Jesus than to Muhammad.
But didn't Protestantism produce capitalism? The intellectual historians who vulgarise Max Weber's nuanced discussion of the affinities between Protestantism and capitalism into a cause-and-effect relationship are easily refuted. Commercial capitalism, in a remarkably familiar form, evolved in Catholic Europe, particularly in northern Italy, for half a millennium, between the 1100s and the 1500s. Only the political repression of Italy by counter-Reformation Spain gave the lead to northwestern Europe-and there capitalism and industry burgeoned in pluralist Holland and in Britain after the invasion of "Dutch William" in 1689. It did not happen in Puritan societies like Calvin's Geneva or Cromwell's England or the Scotland tyrannised by the kirk. In the US, the centre of capitalism has been not Puritan New England or the Southern Bible Belt, but polyglot, secular, permissive Manhattan-formerly known as New Amsterdam.
What about natural science? Christian apologists nowadays claim that Christianity cleared the way for natural science by demythologising the world. This would come as news to Pope John Paul II, who in September 2000 performed a 30-minute exorcism on a 19-year-old woman who began shouting at him during a public audience. Evangelical Protestants, as well as Catholics, believe in demons and engage in exorcism. The conservative Protestant JF Cogan says that the growth in the human population, relative to the fixed number of fallen angels, means that some overworked demons are forced to commute among a number of possessed individuals at "the speed of electricity." Even more innovative is the Rev Jim Peasboro of Savannah, Georgia, who in his book The Devil in the Machine: Is Your Computer Possessed by a Demon? explains that "any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit." All this is justified by reference to Jesus whose many successful exorcisms are recounted in the New Testament.
Modern natural science was built in the last several centuries on the surviving foundations of ancient Hellenic science-the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus (310-230 BC). Like Muslims, Christians repeatedly have tried to repress science when it threatened their dogmas, from the days of Galileo until the present, with Protestant fundamentalists in the US still waging a campaign to ban discussion of Darwinian biology from classrooms or to pair it with Biblical "creation science." According to Stephen Hawking, who attended a 1981 Vatican conference on cosmology, "the Pope told us that it was fine to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the work of God."
So, does liberty of conscience have Christian roots? It was only after they failed to create theocracies on the territories that they controlled in the wars of religion that Catholics and Calvinists resigned themselves to the idea of a secular state (to this day, ultramontanist Catholics and Protestant theologians dream of theocratic government). After Mussolini came to power in Italy, Pope Pius XI declared: "if there is a totalitarian regime, it is the Church regime, given that man belongs wholly to the Church." (The Vatican did not make its peace with liberal democracy until the 1960s.) The major Protestant reformers were just as tyrannical. "Those who object to the punishment of heresy are like dogs and swine," Calvin thundered. Martin Luther was moderate by comparison, writing in 1528: "I can in no way admit that false teachers should be put to death: it is enough that they should be banished." Of the Jews, the relatively tolerant Luther wrote: "Burn down their synagogues... force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness, slaying 3,000 lest the whole people perish... There it would be wrong to be merciful."
Apart from maverick Christian minorities like Quakers, Anabaptists and Jehovah's Witnesses, the major champions of freedom of thought and religious tolerance have been secular thinkers and statesmen like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, "our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry." Jefferson stated that the legislators who passed the Virginian statute protecting religious freedom "meant to comprehend within its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."
Far from being the source of humanist civilisation, then, Christianity in its traditional forms is incompatible with a liberal, democratic, secular society that has an economy based on applied science and commercial exchange. Indeed, conservative Christianity, in both its Protestant and Catholic forms, has always had far less in common with humanist civilisation than with orthodox Islam. Both orthodox Christianity and orthodox Islam are intolerant religions which divide humanity into believers and infidels. Both Christianity and Islam hold that reason must be subordinated to irrational faith. "Reason is the Devil's whore," Luther declared. Paul said, "the wisdom of the Greeks is the foolishness of God." The true source of humanist civilisation, including natural science, democracy and the spirit of free inquiry, can be traced back through the Romans to the ancient Greeks, who first replaced mythological thinking with reasoning about humanity and the universe.
In the interest of social peace, political elites in the English-speaking world, as well as in continental Europe, have abandoned intellectual consistency by assigning each of these three rival secular traditions authority in a different sphere. When discussing politics, Americans use the language of Renaissance humanist republicanism; when discussing business, science and technology, they are Cartesian rationalists; when discussing morals and religion, they tend to speak a Calvinist language of public confession and repentance; and in the arts, they use the German romantic categories of genius, originality and inspiration. Now and then there are collisions as when, every year or two, an exhibit of "blasphemous" art illustrates the conflict between Christian and romantic conceptions of creativity.
Even before 11th September, this uneasy compromise showed signs of breaking down. In the US, the number of secular and only nominally religious individuals has been steadily growing, while the number of active believers has slowly declined. But as a proportion of the shrinking religious population, fundamentalist Protestantism, conservative Catholicism and orthodox Judaism have been expanding, while mainline Protestantism, liberal Catholicism and reform and conservative Judaism are losing adherents, mostly to non-belief. The collapse of liberal denominations promises an increasing polarisation between consistent secularists and devout believers.
By the 1990s, right-wing Protestants, Catholics and Jews were setting aside their differences to wage political war on secularism and humanism. The extension of the political alliance of "people of faith" to reactionary Muslims, who share their opposition to feminism, gay rights, abortion, contraception and freedom from censorship is the logical next step. Pressured by fundamentalist Christians, US delegations to international family-planning conferences have found themselves allied with Muslim theocracies and the Vatican against European and east Asian delegations on issues of contraception and abortion.
In the past two decades, many conservative Christians in the US and elsewhere have expressed sympathy for aspects of reactionary Islam. In 1989, when a caller to Larry King Live asked then-drug czar William J Bennett, "Why build prisons? Get tough like Arabia. Behead the damned drug dealers. We're just too soft," Bennett replied, "morally, I don't have any problem with that," and went on to call for more executions in the US. Another conservative Catholic, Patrick Buchanan, denounced Salman Rushdie for writing "a blasphemous assault on the faith of hundreds of millions." In 1998, as the Taleban in Afghanistan was banning women from working, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution declaring that wives should "submit graciously to the servant leadership of their husbands."
Two days after 11th September, Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, told Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson (on the latter's television show), that "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." They agreed that the attack was God's punishment for American toleration of pagans, abortionists, feminists and gays: "I point the finger in their face," said Falwell. "You helped this happen."
Some conservative Christian intellectuals in the US now openly flirt with sedition. In 1996, the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus hosted a symposium in which religious right activists, including Judge Robert Bork, argued that the US government was so immoral that revolution might be legitimate. Two years earlier, at a religious conference in Florida devoted to "Reclaiming America," ex-Vice-President Dan Quayle joined the audience in reciting a theocratic parody of the Pledge of Allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands. One Saviour, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe."
Today the Christian right is far more powerful in American politics than it was in 1800 or 1900. In 1787, Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr, "question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of blindfolded fear..." Jefferson, who edited a version of the gospels without the supernatural parts, reassured his nephew that belief in God was not necessary for virtue. Such sentiments did not prevent him from serving two terms as president. Of Jefferson's rival Alexander Hamilton, the historian Karl-Friedrich Walling writes, "nothing distinguishes Hamilton from Oliver Cromwell more than his hatred of Puritanism, religious and political. Largely because of the humanity he absorbed from the atheist Hume, he was less worried that Americans would become decadent or corrupt than that they would become exceedingly self-righteous."
By contrast, in 2000, both the Republican and the Democratic presidential candidates claimed to be evangelical Protestants who had personally "found Jesus." Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate was an orthodox Jew who refused to work or travel on the sabbath and claimed that non-believers could not be good citizens. That claim by Joseph Lieberman would have surprised George Washington, who emphasised the religious neutrality of the US government in a letter to a Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, written in 1790: "for happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W Bush made the astonishing assertion that "on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth." One of his predecessors in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, asked 78 years earlier about his views on evolution, replied "that of course like very other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised." Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech delivered to the American Historical Association in 1912, referred to "the great Darwin." In "My Life as a Naturalist," published in The American Museum Journal in May 1918, Roosevelt wrote of his childhood education: "Thank Heaven, I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley."
Although Christian conservatives now control the national Republican party, ensuring that no supporter of evolutionary biology, most forms of biotech research, abortion or gay rights can be nominated for president or vice-president, they are not powerful enough to impose their vision on society as a whole. The Christian right is finding new allies, however, on the environmental left.
Dan Quayle's former chief of staff William Kristol, a crusader against abortion and gay rights and editor of Rupert Murdoch's Washington magazine The Weekly Standard, has teamed up with leftist Jeremy Rifkin to persuade Congress to ban therapeutic cloning, which is legal in Europe and East Asia. Under pressure from the religious right, Bush has crippled US stem-cell research, causing research projects to move to Britain and other countries. Rifkin has also joined the Southern Baptists in an effort to outlaw the patenting of plant and animal genes.
Will Protestant and Catholic abortion-clinic bombers soon be comrades-in-arms of Greenpeace activists who destroy the genetically-modified? The fundamentalist-green alliance against technology and scientific research is not surprising. After all, for the past quarter century, Darwinian evolutionary psychology has been attacked by the left (which believes that human nature is infinitely malleable) and by the religious right (which believes in the Hebrew creation myth). Both the religious right and a large part of the romantic left share an Arcadian vision, similar to that of secular fascists and Muslim conservatives, of a static, pre-modern, rural community of spiritual people who have not been alienated from nature and God by secularism and capitalism.
The fundamentalist-green alliance has already found a spokesman in former vice-president Al Gore. Gore, a divinity school student and born-again Baptist whose desk had a sign with the motto WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?), fused Christian and environmentalist clich?s in his 1992 bestseller, Earth in the Balance. Calling environmental problems an "ungodly crisis," Gore echoes both the religious right and the Luddite left when he declares, "the froth and frenzy of industrial civilisation mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself." Praising ecological activists as "resistance fighters," Gore predicts "a global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilisation's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction."
The greatest villain in history, according to Gore, is none other than Francis Bacon, philosopher of the scientific method. "Bacon's moral confusion-the confusion at the heart of much modern science-came from his assumption, echoing Plato, that human intellect could safely analyse and understand the natural world without reference to any moral principles defining our relationship and duties to both God and God's creation." According to Gore, science must be returned to supervision by religious elites.
The dismissal of Charles Darwin by George W Bush and the denunciation of Francis Bacon by Al Gore show how far the US has drifted from the enlightened humanism of the founding fathers. Jefferson's three greatest heroes were Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and John Locke. Hamilton's was Julius Caesar. Neither Jefferson nor Hamilton considered listing either Moses or Jesus. That oversight was remedied during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W Bush, asked to name his favourite philosopher, replied, "Jesus Christ."
Humanist civilisation, then, is threatened today both from beyond its borders and from inside them. Liberal democracies may be able to resist Muslim terrorism, but the greatest long-running threat to secularism, democracy and science could come from within, from the emerging coalition of the religious right and the romantic left brought together by a loathing for open society that they share with each other-and with Osama bin Laden. n
