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The uncompromising quest for truth is a spiritual journey, which can seldom remain within the confines of either religious or scientific establishments.
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.
Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness.
Funds were scarce because there was little credit in those days; there was little credit because people had no belief in growth; and people didn’t believe in growth because the economy was stagnant. Stagnation thereby perpetuated itself.
Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential.
Yet is economic growth more important than family bonds? By presuming to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science into that of religion.
capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth.
But in truth there are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge.
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.
The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology.
People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons. And what about the poor? Why aren’t they protesting? If
According to humanism, humans must draw from within their inner experiences not only the meaning of their own lives, but also the meaning of the entire universe. This is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world.
Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.
Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad.
So even while saying that I believe in God, the truth is that I have a much stronger belief in my own inner voice.
In practice, this means that we seek knowledge by spending years collecting experiences, and sharpening our sensitivity so we can understand these experiences correctly.
Experiences and sensitivity build up one another in a never-ending cycle. I cannot experience anything if I have no sensitivity, and I cannot develop sensitivity unless I undergo a variety of experiences.
Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond,
Whereas liberalism turns my gaze inwards, emphasising my uniqueness and the uniqueness of my nation, socialism demands that I stop obsessing about me and my feelings and instead focus on what others are feeling and how my actions influence their experiences.
Rooting itself in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory, it insists that conflict is something to applaud rather than lament.
namely that the experience of war pushes humankind to new achievements.
War allows natural selection free rein at last. It exterminates the weak and rewards the fierce and the ambitious. War exposes the truth about life, and awakens the will for power, for glory and for conquest. Nietzsche summed it up by saying that war is ‘the school of life’ and that ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’.
The experience of war revealed to Hitler the truth about the world: it’s a jungle run by the remorseless laws of natural selection. Those who refuse to recognise this truth cannot survive.
Evolutionary humanism played an important part in the shaping of modern culture, and is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the twenty-first century.
Even worse, by encouraging people to view themselves as isolated individuals, liberalism separates them from their fellow class members and prevents them from uniting against the system that oppresses them. Liberalism thereby perpetuates inequality, condemning the masses to poverty and the elite to alienation.
Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war.
Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires.
Liberal democracy increasingly looked like an exclusive club for ageing white imperialists, who had little to offer the rest of the world, or even to their own youth.
Liberal democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons.
Behind this monstrous shield, liberal democracy and the free market managed to hold out in their last bastions, and Westerners got to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll, as well as washing machines, refrigerators and televisions. Without nukes there would have been no Beatles, no Woodstock and no overflowing supermarkets.
The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.
If a liberal had fallen asleep in June 1914 and awakened in June 2014, he or she would have felt very much at home.
liberalism itself smarted from the experience and is less conceited than it was a century ago. It has adopted various ideas and institutions from its socialist and fascist rivals, in particular a commitment to provide the general public with education, health and welfare services.
because for all their fervour the zealots don’t really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and have nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.
factory hands fantasised about different paradises than peasants and why the revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds.
Radical Islam may promise an anchor of certainty in a world of technological and economic storms – but in order to navigate a storm you need a map and a rudder rather than just an anchor.
History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.
according to which the Pope can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species).
because Marx and Lenin devoted more attention to understanding the technological and economic realities of their time than to scrutinising ancient texts and prophetic dreams.
The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds,
If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.
In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries.
Billions of people, including many scientists, continue to use religious scriptures as a source of authority, but these texts are no longer a source of creativity.
The Bible is kept as a source of authority, even though it is no longer a true source of inspiration. That’s why traditional
Yet the third and final part of the book will argue that attempting to realise this humanist dream will undermine its very foundations by unleashing new post-humanist technologies.
To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’.
But the million-dollar question is not whether parrots and humans can act upon their inner desires – the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place.
Yet people erroneously jump to the conclusion that if I want to press it, I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.
In reality, there is only a stream of consciousness, and desires arise and pass away within this stream, but there is no permanent self that owns the desires, hence it is meaningless to ask whether I choose my desires deterministically, randomly or freely.
