Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism E-Book

Michael Schmidt-Salomon

• Herausgeber: Alibri Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

We are living in a time of asynchrony: While technologically we are firmly in the 21st century, our world views are still characterized by ancient legends which are thousands of years old. This combination of high-level technical ability and highly naïve child-like beliefs could have disastrous consequences in the long run. We are behaving like five-year-olds who have been given responsibility for a jumbo jet. One of the most depressing problems of our time lies in religious fundamentalists of all stripes casually making use of the fruits of the Enlightenment (freedom of expression, constitutionality, science, technology) in order to prevent its principles being applied to the domain of their own belief. For example, to further their beliefs, the 9/11 terrorists used airplanes constructed on the basis of scientific principles; principles to which their beliefs could never stand up. In return, the "fundamentalist with other means", George W. Bush, led the world into a devastating "crusade" against "terror" and the "axis of evil" making use of a technology which could never have been developed if scientists had contented themselves with the American President's child-like faith that the Bible's creation account is true. In the face of the dangers arising from the renaissance of unenlightened thinking in a technologically highly developed era, it is a matter of intellectual integrity to speak out clearly - especially where religion is concerned. Anyone who is capable of splitting the atom and communicating via satellites must possess intellectual and emotional maturity. That certain people or groups of persons avoid exposure to criticism by establishing "holy" (i.e. untouchable) rules and uphold their fallacies as mandatory for all time, may and can no longer be accepted practice in a modern society.

Leseprobe

„We must imagine Sisyphus happy.“

(Albert Camus)

Michael Schmidt-Salomon

Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism

Plea for a mainstream culture appropriate to our times

Alibri

2014

Dr. Michael Schmidt-Salomon (born 1967), dubbed by the media “Germany’s chief atheist”, is a philosopher, author, and the speaker of the “Giordano Bruno Foundation”. He is a frequent guest on TV discussions about issues relating to religion and belief. Schmidt-Salomon’s numerous articles critical of religion have appeared in philosophical magazines and journals. His books Erkenntnis aus Engagement (Knowledge from Commitment, 1999), Stollbergs Inferno (2003), Wo bitte geht’s zu Gott? fragte das kleine Ferkel (Which is the way to God, please?, asked the little Piglet, 2007), Die Geschichte vom frechen Hund (The Story of the Cheeky Dog, 2008) and Susi Neunmalklug erklärt die Evolution (Susie Smartypants Explains Evolution, 2009) are published by Alibri.

Alibri Verlag

www.alibri.de

Aschaffenburg

Member of the Assoziation Linker Verlage (aLiVe)

First English Edition 2014

Translation: Fiona Lorenz

Copyright 2005, 2006, 2014 by Alibri Verlag, Postfach 100 361

63703 Aschaffenburg, Germany

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-3-86569-710-3

Contents

Introduction

Fundamental Dethronement

Why science is seen as a nuisance despite its successes

The Ape Within Us

On the difficult passage from traditional to evolutionary humanism

“Bread for the World – But the Sausage Stays Here!”

The anthropological foundations of evolutionary-humanist ethics

Sense and Sensuality

Why evolutionary humanism suggests becoming enlightened hedonists

Goodbye to “Tradition Blindness”

Evolutionary humanism as an “open system”

Are You Still a Believer or Have You Started to Think for Yourself?

Why a rational belief in science should not be mistaken for “science faith”

Science, Philosophy and Art

The cultural pillars of evolutionary humanism

“He Who Possesses Art and Science Has Religion”?

On the necessary conversion of the religious

On the Trail of the “Imaginary Alpha-Male”

Evolutionary humanism’s answers to the question of God

Ethics Without God

A decision for mankind

Old Values – New Stakes for Burning?

Why human rights had to be fought for against the fierce resistance of the religions

Kant Promised “Eternal Peace” – What Came Was Auschwitz

The problem of partial enlightenment

“The Spirit Is Willing but the Flesh Is Weak”?

Why naturalistic ethics can confidently abandon “morality”

Putting Self-Interest into the Service of Humanity

Rules for humanitarian cooperation

“Subdue the Earth”?

Why we should say goodbye to speciesism

Humanism and Enlightenment as Mainstream Culture

Beyond fundamentalism and “anything goes”

An Animal, So Clever and FriendlyWhy there is a “right life in the wrong one”

Appendix A

The Ten Commandments of the Bible

(Exodus 20:1–21)

Appendix B

Epilogue to the second edition

Notes

Introduction

We are living in an age of asynchrony. While technologically we are firmly in the 21st century, our world-views still owe much to archaic myths and legends that are thousands of years old. This combination of advanced technical competence and highly naïve child-like beliefs could have disastrous consequences in the long run. We are behaving like five-year olds who have been given responsibility for a jumbo jet.

One of the most pressing problems of our time lies in religious fundamentalists of all stripes casually making use of the fruits of The Enlightenment (freedom of speech, constitutionality, science, technology) in order to prevent its principles being applied to the domain of their own belief. In return, the “fundamentalist with other means”, George W. Bush, led the world into a devastating “crusade” against “terror” and the “axis of evil”, making use of a technology that would never have been developed if scientists had contented themselves with the American President’s child-like faith in the Bible’s account of creation.1

In the face of the dangers arising from the renaissance of unenlightened thinking in a technologically highly developed era, it is a matter of intellectual integrity to speak out clearly – especially where religion is concerned. It cannot be denied: to develop today a logically consistent (i.e., contradiction-free), ethically workable view of humanity and the world, and one that isin agreement with empirical knowledge (i.e., corresponds to our systematic experiential knowledge), the results of scientific research must be taken into account. Traditional religions, which until now have shaped human self-conception, can no longer achieve this task. They have not only been sufficiently disproved in theory, but have also been found in practice to be poor advisors for humanity, as demonstrated by Islamic fundamentalism2 or Christianity’s “criminal history”.3

The present “Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism” was commissioned by the Giordano Bruno Foundation.4 It will attempt to formulate the basic positions of a “contemporary enlightenment” appropriate to the modern world. The publication of the manifesto serves the intention of supporting those who already feel committed to a mainstream culture of humanism and enlightenment, as well as the hope that some of the arguments presented here may yet reach those who, even today, are of the opinion that they have to take their “wisdom” from archaic myths.

Fundamental Dethronement

Why science is seen as a nuisance despite its successes

“Science” – there is scarcely a word that is as closely associated with the promise of progress in modern times as this one. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, science has been regarded as the silver bullet for improving our standard of living, for liberating us from superstition and tradition, and for solving the great puzzles of the world. And the numerous successes of the scientific search for knowledge have always seemed to confirm this hope. Science has enabled those lucky enough to be able to use it to increase their material welfare as never before. It has broken the chains of tradition and solved many puzzles that our ancestors never even knew existed.

It is thus not surprising that science nowadays is all but omnipresent – if only on account of the resultant technology (from solar-panels to smartphones). We meet science not only in universities, libraries and laboratories but also in the pub, at the gym, at the hairdresser’s, at the cinema; and football commentators bombard us with facts from sport medicine and statistical correlations. Even those attempting to bash science use scientifically polished arguments in their criticisms. Life without science has become unthinkable. Ulrich Beck is undeniably correct when he sums up: “We are […] damned to be scientific, even where the scientific is damned.”5

Despite its ubiquity, it would be wrong, however, to describe science as the perfect success story, as its triumphal progress has always been accompanied by vigorous defensive reactions (e.g. Luddites). One need only recall the keen attacks that Darwin’s theory of evolution attracted from the very beginning. Even today, the theory is denied in large parts of the US, and in Germany we are witnessing an increase in religiously inspired attempts to oust the theory of evolution from school curricula and to integrate the biblical creation story as a serious explanatory model in biology classes (!).6

The believers’ protest against the scientific instruction of their children is quite understandable, since nothing reveals the errors of outdated explanatory models more relentlessly than a scientific illumination of the actual facts. It cannot be ignored, however, that not only devout religious people (regardless of their origin!) have severe problems with the sobering perspectives of science, even the majority of the population who are indifferent to religious matters can have a hard time coming to terms with the fundamental dethronement of humankind that is inevitably associated with the progressive process of scientific demystification.

Sigmund Freud already pointed out this issue several decades ago. Freud noted three fundamental blows that science had delivered to human self-infatuation, namely:7

– The Copernican dethronement that follows from the knowledge that the earth is not the centre of the universe;

– the Darwinian degradation resulting from the knowledge that humans are only a random product of natural selection and have to be classified as primates; and

– the psychological dethronement stemming from the understanding that we are steered by our unconscious minds, and thus not even “master of our own home”.8

– In the meantime Freud’s list of fundamental blows has been extended in some respects and made more precise.9 On today’s hit list of insults we will find (in addition to Freud’s), for example:

– The ethological degradation (humans are not only connected with the animal kingdom by descent, they also demonstrate this relatedness every day in their behaviour)10;

– the epistemological comedown (we have to recognize that we – like all other animals – are equipped with a merely relative, restricted cognitive ability that does not deal with “reality as such” but with those aspects which, within our own ecological niche, have proved necessary for us to survive);11

– the socio-biological insult (all life is founded on self-interest, even the highest altruistic virtues can be reduced to “genetic-memetic selfishness”12);13

– the ecological humiliation (we are dependent on a biosphere whose structure is so complex that – as is painfully clear from the latest flood catastrophes around the world – we can neither understand nor control it);14

– the cultural relativistic or political-economical dethronement (our ideas, ideals, religions and art forms are by no means “eternally valid” or “outside of history” but depend to a large degree on the historical state of development of production technology, as well as on the ownership and balance of power in the society in which we live);15

– the cosmological-eschatological degradation (life is a temporally limited phenomenon in a universe heading for “death from freezing” or a similar eschatological fate);16

– the paleontological dethronement (humankind appeared only in the last minute of planetary time and will one day become extinct as all species that went before);17

– the evolutionary blow to our expectation of progress (neither biological nor cultural evolution follow linear trends towards the better, the more complex, or the more highly developed, but rather they meander, blind to progress, “along a zigzag path on the narrow ridge of life”;18 and finally

– the neurobiological dethronement (our so-called autonomous “ego” is a product of unconscious neuronal processes, “mind” is a product of “body”, “free will” – in the strictest sense! – is an illusion, religious “visions” can be attributed to hyperactivity in the temporal lobes, etc.).19

In the course of scientific progress and particularly in recent decades, Homo sapiens, that supposed “pinnacle of creation”, has demystified itself: The knowledge we have obtained, and the fundamental revision that this brings to our images of ourselves and the world has, however, until now, only reached certain more or less exclusive circles. Most people still hold on to notions which, in view of the current state of research, look about as outlandish as the once widely accepted idea that the world is flat.

It cannot be denied that, together with the demystification of humankind, the diverse man-made conceptions of God and the related metaphysical prospects of salvation have also become obsolete. It has to be clearly stated, even at the risk of shocking religiously sensitive people: None of the existing religions can be brought into harmony with the results of scientific research! Never before in the history of humankind has the irreconcilability of religious belief and scientific thinking been so obvious as it is now.

In this respect, however, it should not be ignored that many a traditional humanistic concept has also come into conflict with this expanded knowledge of man and nature. Julian Huxley, who decisively shaped not only modern evolutionary theory but also the UNESCO as its first director-general,20 therefore proposed developing a new system of ideas to reconcile humanism with science. Huxley also gave this new system of ideas a suitable name: Evolutionary Humanism.21

The Ape Within Us

On the difficult passage from traditional to evolutionary humanism

The concept of “humanism” applies to any school of thought that, first of all, is not based, either in theory or in practice, on the existence of imaginary gods or stories about salvation, but rather takes as its starting point actually existing human beings; and secondly, sets itself the goal of shaping living conditions so that a free personal and personality development is possible for all people (regardless of sex, origin, abilities, etc.). Originating from the conviction that freedom and equality are human values that must be universally upheld, the categorical imperative of humanism demands that we “overturn all conditions under which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being …”.