The humanists talk blithely about “safeguards”, as if any legal system on earth can protect an elderly and highly suggestible person from the subtle forms of micro-manipulations with which someone can be persuaded that it is in everybody’s best interest for their death to be quick and painless. You can say “think of the children” with the tiniest inflection of the voice, make the subtlest of reference to money worries. We communicate with each other, often most powerfully, through almost imperceptible gestures of body language and facial expression. No legal safeguard on earth can detect such subliminal messaging.

And then to dress all this up as love for your mother — “We just don’t want you to suffer” — is the vilest of betrayals. Assisted dying legislation doesn’t just change the relationship between the dying and their doctors, and the dying and the state. It fundamentally alters the dynamics within families, and at the most emotionally complex period of someone’s life.

As the debate has unfolded over the past weeks, I have become less and less convinced of the noble declarations behind it. For some at least, the matter seems to be entirely ideological; namely, that the idea of choice has to be driven into every aspect of our lives. The attraction of this reasoning to our political decision makers is obvious: it exonerates them from their responsibility to keep people safe — their primary responsibility as law makers.

Consider capital punishment. Like assisted dying — or state-sponsored suicide — capital punishment is popular with the public. But whereas the opponents of capital punishment (as I am) point out that these terminations can be botched and cruel, few will make the same point with respect to assisted dying. Fundamentally, the state should not be in the death business. And making it easier and cheaper for the state to be allowed to kill people, rather than sort out the basic infrastructure of social and palliative care, and to keep people alive with dignity, is to push all the incentives in exactly the wrong direction.

The proposed legislation does not even mention the word suffering, though it is the desire to avoid suffering that is at the heart of the case for assisted dying. But suffering is so intrinsic to our existence that there is no legal or medical scalpel that is precise enough to excise it without also damaging the very things that give life its fundamental value. A radical project to rid the world of suffering, if carried to extremes, would also rid the world of love and hope, of courage and compassion. Of love, because love — love lost, love denied, love betrayed — is perhaps the greatest cause of emotional suffering; of hope, because hope walks a tightrope between success and failure, triumph and misery; of courage, because courage is so often a preparedness to suffer, risk suffering, for some greater good, and compassion, because definitionally means to suffer alongside. There is a vastly significant difference between wanting to alleviate the suffering of another through comfort and kindness and palliative care, and by seeking to alter the very terms of reference of what it means to be human. This assisted dying legislation is like introducing a zero hours contract with life.

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Yes, there is a religious point to be made — though not all opponents of assisted dying are religious. I believe human life is sacred, that we are all made in the image and likeness of God. This basic point has been a bedrock of the Western attitude towards how we are called to treat each other. It has been the fundamental starting point for our ethics for well over a thousand years. This week, though, a former personal trainer with a degree in fitness and health-related exercise from Leeds Beckett University is proposing a private members motion that will overturn perhaps the most basic of our moral and philosophical presuppositions — and Parliament will have only a few hours to debate it.

With what will we replace this ultimate theological grounding for human value? Perhaps the answer is economics. I am grateful to Matthew Parris for saying this out loud in The Times a few months back. Clarifying a utilitarian approach to human value, Parris is clear: “Social and cultural pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths so as ‘not to be a burden’ on others or themselves. I believe this will indeed come to pass. And I would welcome it.” He continues: “It may sound brutal, but I don’t apologise for the reductivist time with which this column treats human beings as units — in deficit or surplus to the collective.”

We are on the cusp of a fundamental redefinition of what it is to be human. This is one of those areas where the idea of God has served us well, a corner stone of treating human beings as of ultimate value. Opponents of assisted dying are trying to downplay this point, and I understand why. Strategically, religion isn’t a great debate winner, especially at the moment. But make no mistake, what is at stake here is a profound shift in the way we understand ourselves. Western culture has been founded on the idea that God is the ultimate guarantor of the value of human life, that human beings are metaphysically special.

We are about to trade all this in for “human beings as units — in deficit or surplus to the collective”. Human value will now be plotted on an Excel spreadsheet. Theology gives way to economics. This is the brave new world the humanists have been arguing for. And, sure, there will be a few lucky ones who get to end their last few days by slipping away quietly on a barbiturate cloud. But it will be the poor and the vulnerable who will suffer most.

***

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

For about 40 years, between the early Eighties and his death in 2021, Roberto Calasso produced a body of bewilderingly interdisciplinary work combing such fields as literary studies, political theory, religion, anthropology, philosophy, and art history, and dedicated to topics as diverse as Kafka, Tiepolo, Baudelaire, the French Revolution and the Bible, not to mention the Indian, Greek, and Sumerian mythologies. One wonders if there is anything Calasso did not write or know abundantly about. The result is a series of over a dozen closely interrelated books, starting with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and ending with Under the Eyes of the Angel, which he was still working on when he died and was published in 2022. When the former came out, Italo Calvino, in an attempt to summarise it, observed that the book was about two main subjects: the first was the French diplomat and politician Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and the second, tutto il resto (“everything else”). Calvino failed in his attempt, then, but he does get his point across succinctly: that it is almost impossible to state what exactly the book is about. And that has been the case with most of Calasso’s work ever since.

Nevertheless, whatever they may focus on, Calasso’s books very often revolve around one central topic: sacrifice. For him, sacrifice is what ties humans to the gods, what brings order into the world and meaning into our lives. In the many mythological traditions that he explores, the cosmos — and the humans within it — came into existence through a primordial sacrificial gesture. That act needs to be constantly re-enacted, through ritual and ceremonies, for the ties between Earth and Heaven to be maintained. Christians partake in such a ritual every time they attend Mass.

Yet for Calasso, sacrifice is not only religious. Indeed, before being a religious event or sacramental practice, sacrifice is life at its most fundamental. In an illuminating interview for The Paris Review, Calasso sketches a philosophy of sacrifice that casts a helpful light on some of the main arguments of his work. The fact is, observes Calasso, that we have “a surplus of energy” which we have to “dispose of”. It all starts with that excess.

“That surplus is simply life. There is no life without surplus. Whatever one does with that surplus, that decides the shape of a culture, of a life, of a mind. There were certain cultures that decided they had to offer it in some way. It is not clear to whom, why, and how, but that was the idea.”

Calasso’s books act as so many signposts on one’s way to the kind of true knowledge that formal education promises but cannot provide — knowledge that will eventually redeem us. That road is long, solitary, and arduous because we are so remote from where we should be. (If this sounds Gnostic, that’s because it probably is.) The problem with our secularised world is that, while sacrifice lies at the heart of life itself, we are no longer willing to accept it. In an age where everything is done for a clear reason, or for certain profit, sacrifice as a supremely gratuitous act has become “entirely useless and obsolete”.

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And yet, suggests Calasso, since such acts “have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years and have thus left their traces in our minds”, ignoring them comes at a price. Deprived of the deeper significance of sacrifice, we can no longer make sense of a series of fundamental human experiences: of loss and grief, of transience and impermanence, of our fundamental precariousness and finitude, and in general of all that makes us what we are. In the ancient kingdom of Kasch, when people stop making sacrifices and following rituals, it seems to make their lives easier, but certain ruin follows.

In The Unnameable Present, another important piece of his multi-volume project, Calasso describes the contemporary secularised society as one largely relieved of religious duties and rituals, and yet eaten up by the sense of its own insubstantiality, by spiritual disorientation, and a lack of clear purpose. For all their religious emancipation, “the secularists are not happy”, he observes. “Nor do they feel relieved of great burdens. They feel the insubstantiality of all that surrounds them. At times they recognise something ominous in it… The same insubstantiality exists in they themselves.” The fact that we no longer follow explicitly religious rituals does not mean that we don’t practice other, disguised rituals. “Tacitly, though firmly, the secular brain has resigned itself to thinking that it cannot do without repeated and rigidly formalised acts,” writes Calasso. “Secular life is increasingly interspersed with situations that must involve behaving in a certain way.” We are religious without knowing it. Which is not without its irony, considering how anti-religious we usually think we are.

Calasso wants to do something about this situation. In his books, he seeks to “unearth”, as he put it, the deeper significance of sacrifice and to show that we have much to gain — spiritually, intellectually, culturally — from a renewed relationship with it. His monumental body of work is meant to teach us a novel way of approaching the world by giving the unknown and the mysterious — all that which transcends us — their due. Such humility should do us some good. He writes:

“In the act of sacrifice, you establish a relation with something that you recognise as enigmatic and powerful… The unknown itself is in our own mind as well — our mind is in its largest part totally unknown to us. Therefore, it is not only a relation to the exterior world, it is a relation to ourselves.”

Key to Calasso’s programme of re-enchanting the world is a better relationship to myth. As he says in another interview, “myths are a special way of knowledge” — one that’s based not in argument, scientific methodology or empirical evidence, but in stories, storytelling and, in general, in a narrative mode of making sense of the world. “Knowledge is made not only with concepts, not only with experiments, it’s made with stories.” In a godless world like ours, only storytelling, as a reflection of myth, can reconnect us not only to the gods, but to our deeper selves.

Not only does Calasso operate primarily as a storyteller, regardless of what he writes about, but much of his work is also a re-telling of the great mythical narratives of the past. That’s what writing is all about; as he puts it in the same interview, “literature is, from the beginning, re-telling”. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, he retells the Greek myths, in Ka and Ardor, the Indian ones, and in The Book of All Books, he re-tells much of the Bible.

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And that’s where The Tablet of Destinies, the last book-length work Calasso published in his lifetime, comes in. Calasso re-tells here some of the Sumerian myths we know from other sources (such as The Epic of Gilgamesh), but with some twists. “Shortly before the Flood, I was king of Shuruppak. It wasn’t the centre of the world, but it wasn’t far off.” That’s how the narrator, Utnapishtim, introduces himself. The god Ea entrusted him with the mission of building a ship that would allow the human race to survive the Flood. The Mesopotamian Noah dutifully obliges and escapes not just the Flood, but somehow death itself. He now lives, in a perpetual present, in a deserted place called Dilmun, from where he observes, with ironical detachment, the unfolding of the human and godly affairs. That’s how he met Gilgamesh, as he was desperately seeking immortality: “I was the one who would have to explain to Gilgamesh that his adventures were to no avail. Man is as fleeting as a dragonfly that flits for a day over the waters of the Euphrates and is gone.” And that’s also how he meets Sindbad the Sailor, of Arabian Nights fame (anything is possible in the timelessness of storytelling), to whom he recounts the story that is the object of The Tablet of Destinies.

Like any great mythical narrative worth its salt, the story starts with — and the world it brings into being relies on — a series of sacrificial events: “Apsu was killed by his son Ea. Then Tiamat by Ea’s son Marduk. The world continued to be made up of their measureless bodies, from the fresh subterranean waters to the vault of the havens, Tiamat’s back, which Ea neatly flattened out and studded with stars.” This is a cosmogonic story, about how the world came into being, but also the story of its gradual disenchantment. The tamer the gods become, the emptier the cosmos. Eventually, the gods withdraw altogether. After Marduk, Utnapishtim says, “all other gods ceased to appear, as if they had become extinct, or killed one another off”. But if you think humans miss the gods, you are wrong. “Living without gods, people found, was not only acceptable, but easy.”

Rooted in Sumerian mythology, The Tablet of Destinies is about prehistorical happenings, or even about worlds that did not come to pass. From time to time, however, we are jolted when we realise that Utnapishtim is describing us. As when he talks of the withdrawal of the gods, and what the world is like without them. “When they do reappear, very likely no one notices. For some they have become an object of curiosity. Chance, on the other hand, is now dominant, it is worshiped. And is no less inflexible. It does no one any favours. This is all that I have been given to see.” The story that Calasso, through Utnapishtim’s mouth, tells us here, then, is also our own story — from enchanted, if bloody beginnings, to a disenchanted and awfully bland end.

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Unlike other books in his multi-volume corpus, in which Calasso routinely engages with specialist scholarship and unfolds complicated theoretical trappings, The Tablet of Destinies is a slim and straightforward work. Pure, unadulterated narrative, it draws a straight line between storytelling and keeping the world in continuous existence. One day Utnapishtim realises that his compulsive narration was the reason why the gods kept him immortal. They “had wanted this; they had arranged it all”. The gods needed “a voice to tell the stories that had happened before the Flood. And I was the only one still alive. I had been part of those stories, or they had been told to me”.

Roberto Calasso is certainly one of the great unappreciated minds of our time, but beyond the strictly intellectual worth of his work, which is considerable, we detect here a heightened spiritual sensitivity that allows him to sense, like few others, the great dangers lurking beneath the joyous surface of our time: self-idolatry and self-deception on a planetary scale, doubled by the sense of our own insubstantiality, a great propensity for inessential and boundless vanity, as well as a fundamental inability to place ourselves within a larger frame of reference. There is indeed something of the doomed prophet about Calasso. In a conversation with his translator, Tim Parks, he speaks at one point of a “terror of election”, of one’s designation for a higher mission as “gift and condemnation” at once. He must have known something about this terror from personal experience. He must have known, too, how important doomed prophets are when “time is out of joint”, as it seems to be now. Not necessarily as teachers, but because the incandescence of their sacrifice may bring, at last, some light into our lives.

This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin did not, in his foundational work on evolution, focus on Homo sapiens. Only with the publication, 12 years later, of The Descent of Man did he explicitly address the question of “whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form”. Nevertheless, the implications of his theory, for humanity’s claim to a special status, had been evident enough from the start. Bishops might mock, and demand to know whether Darwin’s followers were descended from gorillas on the father’s side or the mother’s side, but humans ranked, in the final reckoning, as organisms just like any other. For them to imagine otherwise, to regard themselves as somehow superior to the rest of creation, was a conceit verging on the ludicrous.

Darwin was not, of course, the first to have undermined the notion that humans might stand at the centre of the universe. In 1638, the young John Milton, in Florence, “visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought”. It was not the sun that revolved around the Earth, so Galileo had taught, but the Earth that revolved around the sun. Time came to prove his hypothesis right.

Today, we know that the sun is an undistinctive star in an undistinctive corner of an undistinctive galaxy in a universe so stupefyingly vast that it can hurt the brain even to try and comprehend its size. Set against the icy immensities of space, what is humanity, then, but the merest speck of a speck of dust? What scope is left us as a species to claim any dignity at all? “In science,” as the astronomer Seth Shostak has put it, “if you think you’re special, you probably aren’t.”

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as “humanist”.

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The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands, issued what its delegates presented as “the official defining statement of World Humanism”. The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed, “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others”. Religions — dismissed as “dogmatic” — were condemned for their ambition “to impose their world-view on all of humanity”. Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo-jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but “through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision”.

To accept the truth of all these various propositions — one might almost call them dogmas — requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values are where “a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision” is bound to lead — so much so that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be, but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the 18 subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the headquarters of Humanists International is in London. Its understanding of “universal” is, then, a somewhat culturally contingent one.

Humanists, unsurprisingly, tend to reject this characterisation. They prefer to see themselves as the heirs of traditions of intellectual enquiry that embrace the globe, and reach back millennia. In ancient India, in Confucian China, in classical Greece, writings have been identified by humanists that appear to prefigure the very things that they themselves believe. Yet the risk of this approach is not merely that it results in cherry-picking, but that it can obscure the very alien quality of those texts which are being cherry-picked.

Take, for instance, ancient Greece: a civilisation for which humanists have long had a particular fondness. Epicurus, for all that he featured in a list of famous atheists drawn up by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus, believed in gods. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is less Richard Dawkins than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.

But how common, in antiquity, are the fundamental tenets of humanism: that humans — no matter their sex, their place of origin, their class — are all of equal value; and that those who walk in darkness must be brought into light? Not common at all, I would say. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that their fusion was pretty much a one-off.

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing humanity with an inherent dignity. Quite the opposite. “I will make man, who shall inhabit the world, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.” So spoke Marduk, who according to the Babylonians created humanity out of a sticky compound of dust and blood to be the slaves of deities. Here was an understanding of man’s purpose, bleak and despairing, that it would have been very easy for the exiles brought to the banks of the Euphrates from sacked Jerusalem to accept: for it would certainly have corresponded to a sense of their puniness before the immensity of Babylon the Great.

But the exiles from Judah did not accept it. They clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being, per Genesis. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, were endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, had been created on the godh day.

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The corollary of this was, of course, very clear: that the cult of Marduk ranked as the merest superstition. So too did the pantheons worshipped by other peoples: the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: they were all of them, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “less than nothing”.

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions which served to define them; but in Europe there was only the odd community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Church. Just as humanists do today, it cast its values and ideals as universal — “catholic”. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones.

Even when, in the 16th century, Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers, and in their attempts to convert the inhabitants they found there.

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical re-alignment, our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as most of us in the West had assumed them to be. The need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are, and not to confuse them with “human nature” is, perhaps, more pressing than it has ever been. To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries — and in many cases millennia — has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.

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So it is, for instance, that the Amsterdam Declaration can airily dismiss the dogmas of religion, even as it simultaneously takes for granted the existence of “universal legal human rights”. Yet to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology.

When, in the 12th century, Christian scholars sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system, they naturally turned to the Bible for guidance. There, they read that all men and women were endowed with an inherent dignity. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how, that being so, were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in the Latin West.

The solution, arrived at by 1200, was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, iure naturali — “in accordance with natural law”. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. He was merely taking what was properly owed him.

Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers decreed, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered something novel: a legal obligation. That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, however, was a matching principal: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was — in a formulation increasingly deployed by lawyers in medieval Christendom — their ius: their “right”.

Yet this doctrine — despite its origins in Christian jurisprudence — was one that would come, in time, to slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owned nothing at all to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. They were instead eternal and universal. “The Declaration of Rights,” proclaimed anti-clerical French revolutionaries, “is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.” A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

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The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.

Yet this in turn veiled a further irony: for what was the contempt displayed by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution for Christianity if not a sign of Christianity’s influence? “The old has gone, the new has come!” So Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, had proclaimed. Change, in the opinion of the Romans, was by definition sinister. The phrase res novae — “new things” — served as a synonym for everything in society that was most menacing. Christianity, on the other hand, glorified revolution. Just as Isaiah had condemned the gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians as mere idols, fit to be toppled into the mire, so had Christians in the early Middle Ages equated progress with the banishment of superstition. Trees sacred to pagan gods were exultantly felled by missionaries, and churches planted where blood-stained altars had originally stood.

Humanists, when they celebrate the liberation from dogma and superstition that is to be gained, in their opinion, from “the application of the methods of science”, are bearing witness to the enduring hold on Western civilisation, not of Greek philosophy, but of Biblical prophecy. It was certainly no accident that many of Darwin’s most enthusiastic defenders should have borne the unmistakeable stamp of radical Protestantism. “Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist and biologist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as “Darwin’s bulldog”.

That it was his duty to bring light to the world was Huxley’s devoutest conviction. His sense of himself as a member of an elect had — as contemporaries were quick to note — a familiar quality: “He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.” Huxley’s conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics — a term coined by Huxley — have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. He is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.

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It is hardly surprising, of course, in a society that has increasingly abandoned the institutional practice of Christianity, yet still clings to its assumptions, its values, its myths, that we should shrink from staring the implications of our current predicament fully in the face. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

Such was the warning given almost a century and a half ago by Friedrich Nietzsche: the most radical, because the most unsparingly honest, of modern atheists. He gazed unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. Humanism, despised by Nietzsche as an ideology to which the English were peculiarly prone, was dismissed by him as palpable idiocy:

“When the English actually believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment.”

“For the English,” Nietzsche concluded witheringly, “morality is not yet a problem.”

It was not from reason that the doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith which humanists believed themselves — in their conceit — to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead — but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell. The myths of Christianity would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilisation. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. “In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,” he wrote, “before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.”

And yet Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. “After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.”

Half a century after Nietzsche wrote this, and almost two decades after the outbreak of the Great War, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed how Christian his movement was, had come increasingly to share in Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity. Its morality, its concern for the weak, the Führer viewed as cowardly and shameful. Christian teachings had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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How Hitler killed the Devil

By Tom Holland

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words — with which I opened — were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide.

He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism — “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” — finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

The above is an abridged version of the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture, “Humanism: A Christian Heresy”. 

Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.

“Let no damn Tory index my history!” Such, it’s said, was the declaration of the historian Thomas Macaulay on his deathbed. It may surprise some to learn that the innocuous piece of apparatus that you barely notice in the back of a book could inspire such vehemence. But in the 18th century, when the “index wars” raged, it was a political weapon. Whig and Tory partisans took to circulating home-made indexes to their opponents’ works; and, as a hilarious chapter in Dennis Duncan’s new history of the index makes clear, they didn’t even pretend to objectivity.

Here, for instance, is a flavour of “A Short Account Of Dr Bentley, By Way Of Index,” written by one of the theologian Richard Bentley’s opponents:   

The index is also a way of solving the problem of Big Data. As soon as you accumulate even a moderately large collection of written material, the important question becomes not what it contains, but how you make it navigable. That’s where the interpretation comes in: indexers make a body of data useful to its reader. This problem is not new: Duncan’s book draws a historical line that connects Google to the Great Library of Alexandria.

His white whale is the modern subject index. Nowadays, it’s done — or should be — by skilled professionals. I have the honour to serve as honorary president of the Society of Indexers, which trains and accredits the people who do this vital work. Many people — among them, alas, some publishers — seem to think any fool or, ideally, a computer, can do the job. They are wrong. As the words Macaulay uttered on his deathbed make clear, indexes are always — at least if they’re any good — the product of a human hand and a human mind.

Indexers will know as no computer can when “Number Ten” is a metonym for the Prime Minister and when it refers to a building, or that the “Charles” on page 36 refers to the Holy Roman Emperor and that the “Charles” on page 37 refers to the river in Boston. They will have thought about what’s important in the text — what the reader might need to find — and what is not. And indexers specialise: you need to know a bit about physics to index a book on physics, just as knowing a mirepoix from a mirabelle is handy if you’re indexing a cookbook.

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The English scholar and preacher Robert Grosseteste, who was said to have “got his surname from the greatness of his head, having large stowage to receive, and store of brains to fill it” created a Tabula distinctiones — a list of 440 concepts or subjects with locators (there being no page numbers, he had to use his own set of symbols) identifying where they were to be found in his library. Here was an index not to a single book, but to a lifetime’s reading — and the prototype of the modern subject index.

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That distinction, in one story Duncan tells, saved a man’s life — a 16th-century scholar working on a Biblical concordance escaped execution for heresy only when he could demonstrate that he was doing the mechanical work of reordering the Bible text rather than in any way adding, altering or retranslating it.

The distinction between these two types of index continues to this day. Google, for instance, is not indexing the web in quite the sense that an indexer indexes a book. Rather, it’s compiling a sort of global concordance. No coincidence that its parent company is called Alphabet. Yet, as Duncan observes, the now ubiquitous hashtag on social media is a sort of subject-indexing tool. We still need technologies to make vast data collections navigable — and digital or analogue, those technologies haven’t changed in their underlying nature.

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Harry, the Prince of PR

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Nonbelievers may be tempted to celebrate this prospect. They shouldn’t. In pulling loose the religious thread in our national settlement, we’ll unravel the whole fabric — and we may not like what’s underneath.

Though I wasn’t raised in a churchgoing family, my husband and I joined our small-town Anglican church when we moved here. I’ve come to treasure it: the slow turn of the liturgical year, the opportunity to sing with others (a rare pleasure in the age of headphones and Spotify) and space to be serious with no particular goal in mind.

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How HR is strangling the Church of England

By Giles Fraser

I was surprised at my own grief and anger when we were locked out of all this. In Mexico, worship mattered to large enough groups of people that clandestine lockdown services were organised, their times and locations passed on by word of mouth like illegal raves. But in Britain, faith is not considered worth the risk of illness — even by the church itself. Nevertheless, lockdown seems to have given faith a boost, at least in its ersatz digital form: a quarter of Britons attended some form of online religious service during lockdown.

No one knows, though, if that revive the fortunes of in-person Sunday services in Britain – or kill them dead. If the latter, it will be the culmination of a long-term trend. From a peak of over 10 million in the 1930s (then some 35% of the population), the proportion of Britons who are church members has been declining steadily. And the slump is not just in active church members, but believers in general. A 2019 British Social Attitudes poll suggested only 38% of Britons today even describe themselves as Christian, down from 66% in 1983. This fall is especially steep among the young: 2018 research shows that only 22% of UK young people today describe themselves as Christian.

This rings true. When we returned to church last Sunday, for the first time since lockdown, our daughter was the only child there — in fact, she was the only person under 40. This is par for the course. Parents keen to get their young children into the attached Church of England school show up once a month to the religion-lite family service (which is mostly biscuits and Pritt Stick) and otherwise on Christmas Day at a pinch. There are never any teenagers. Twenty-somethings turn up sometimes, but generally only for a few weeks as the banns for their wedding are read.

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Counting the grey heads around me in the pews (25 in total), it struck me that this church will probably cease to be a living community in my lifetime. Because ultimately a church isn’t its surroundings, it’s the people who turn up — and if that doesn’t renew, then it’s not a church at all, just a building.

Today there are many such buildings. Some have been repurposed as gyms, restaurants, houses or even offices. Others have been left to crumble, or maintained, empty, by volunteers. Ed Sirett, an elder in Britain’s last Mennonite church summed it up sadly in 2016 when the last, ageing remnants of his Wood Green church ended Sunday worship for good: “As with many Christian churches, we failed to convince the next generation that following Jesus was the best way. We lost the next generation.”

I fear the same fate is approaching the Church of England. I feel acutely sad about it. But another part of me wonders if I’d have loved it in its heyday as much as I do now. For our established Church wasn’t always the mild-mannered institution it is today, desperate for bums on seats, with congregations that smile indulgently when your toddler demands Pom Bears during the Eucharist.

In 1533, Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church to marry Ann Boleyn, and installed himself as head of a new Church of England. It was a time of religious ferment: Henry dissolved the monasteries, doling their property out to allies and triggering a pro-Catholic peasant rebellion. Meanwhile, radical Protestant sects multiplied, each with its own idiosyncratic take on the right way to believe and worship; names such as the mystical “Ranters”  and the group of Protestant sects referred to as “Enthusiastic”, convey a sense of a Christianity full of zeal and fiery vigour.

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Barely more than a century after Henry VIII secured his royal succession at the price of excommunication, this heated atmosphere caught fire in the English Civil War. The conflict, which lasted from 1642 until 1651, was more a series of civil wars: bloody internecine struggles over the proper roles of faith, the monarch and the established church that divided families and killed 200,000 people — around 2.5% of the then eight million inhabitants of the British Isles. The equivalent death toll today, as a proportion of the population, would be close to two million.

The scars left behind by the Civil War were unimaginably deep. In the ensuing decades, people blamed the febrile religious climate for its horrors. Fearful of relapsing into intra-Protestant infighting, the battle-weary of the 17th century establishment opted instead to unite against an easy outgroup: Catholics.

In 1688, facing the prospect of a Catholic dynasty under James II’s newborn son, seven politicians and an Anglican bishop mounted a coup against him — an event referred to since as the “Glorious Revolution”. In effect, they booted James II out of London, then replaced him with his son-in-law, the Protestant William II, claiming that James’s deposition was an abdication. Having gifted William the throne, they took the opportunity to clip his royal wings: under the Bill of Rights English monarchs would be constrained by Parliament, while the 1701 Act of Settlement barred Catholics from the throne. And thus was born the modern constitutional monarchy, with Anglicanism (and anti-Catholicism) baked in.

We get a hint of the deep fear of religious sectarianism this era left behind from the way the word “Enthusiasm” became a pejorative term, denoting religious excess or displays of elevated feeling, religious or otherwise. Other countries stereotype the British as emotionally uptight. What’s less well understood is the way our national aversion to heightened emotion dates from the horrors of the English Civil War. Buried in our collective national memory is wall-eyed terror at the possibility that we might one day get overexcited and start fighting each other again.

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The end of secularism is nigh

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Against this background, the Church of England’s militant centrism is easier to understand. In its pomp, it was like a tyrannical patriarch, banging cousins’ heads together and expelling dissenters — Catholic or otherwise — to enforce something like cohesion across a quarrelsome extended family. In middle age, it was sure of its righteousness and sternly conventional. In its latter years, it’s been criticised for a new and incongruous wokeness.

But throughout that evolution, it’s remained committed to the normie bourgeois morality and political establishment of its day. And by installing a degree of doctrinal flexibility and (importantly) middle-of-the-roadness in our moral and political centres of power, while expelling other beliefs to the margins, the Church of England has for centuries made it difficult for religious radicals to get a grip in the British Isles. In effect it functioned as a kind of vaccine against more extreme religious passions.

But even the most determined family peacemaker gets old eventually. It’s hard to make a case for political legitimacy when only a handful of retirees turn up every Sunday. This isn’t to say that faith is disappearing from Britain — as I argued recently, religiosity is growing weirder and more vigorous — but it’s no longer finding expression in our established Church.

I’m not optimistic about that changing. Towards the end of lockdown, a group of people finally agreed that something moral mattered enough to risk spreading infection by gathering in public. But that group wasn’t a church; it was Black Lives Matter. Whatever you think of that development, movements which change the world are those whose members are willing to risk death for their cause. In Britain right now, Christianity isn’t on that list.

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Why Britain needs Christian politics

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Humanists have long called for the Church of England to be stripped of its role in our political establishment. The smaller its congregations become, the harder it is to defend. And yet we underestimate at our peril the historic role it’s played since Cromwell’s day in keeping our religious passions in check.

I suspect the humanists will get their way, and also that we’ll end up regretting their victory. I’ve seen no evidence to date that the decline in Christian belief and church membership is delivering a less credulous, less volatile, more rational and more measured public life. We may find that our departure from Anglicanism doesn’t so much liberate us from faith as trigger a new proliferation of sects and pseudo-religions, all competing for dominance.

Without the relatively low-key hegemony of the Church of England, all limp handshakes and theological mildness, we can only hope we turn out to be less enthusiastic (in both old and new senses) than our 17th century forebears. Otherwise, the passing of Anglicanism as a political force may not be the end of English theocracy, but the moment it became a possibility.

My recommendation is a slim book that fits in a pocket, and speaks of “anguish, abandonment and despair”. It’s not exactly holiday reading, but summer’s over, and many Brits will be feeling a combination of all three as the end of the furlough scheme looms and whispers of a second wave proliferate.

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre’s subject is not the anguish of ordinary citizens, though, but the anguish of leadership: of taking on responsibility, in the knowledge that every choice you make will lead to suffering or death. At a time when our politicians have to decide between reducing the risk of more deaths from Covid-19, or reducing the society-wide destruction caused by anti-Covid policies, they need reminding that this anguish is inescapable. Hard choices must be made, and inaction is itself a choice.

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But there’s far more for our Government to learn from Sartre than simply how to grasp the nettle of leadership. If Twitter is anything to go by, lockdown left many of us grappling with the existential — wondering how to give meaning to our closed-off worlds — and Sartre was the man who first popularised the philosophy. “Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or cauliflower,” he writes. Contrasting existentialism to mechanistic philosophies of human behaviour, Sartre casts a harsh light on theories which “make man into an object”:

All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object — that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone.

Does this remind you of discussions about how best to nudge the population into following government guidelines to prevent infection? It should. Politicians took advice from behavioural psychologists — as Sartre notes, to seek advice, and from whom, is itself a choice — and decided to use fear as a motivating force. The psychologists even warned that fear for personal safety might, in the long run, backfire. Having galloped into lockdown with an air of “we have no choice, people will die!” the Cabinet must now choose the path out, knowing that there is no easy option, and accepting responsibility for their decisions. Could this little book help?

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The danger of safetyism

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Existentialism is often criticised as individualistic and abstract; Sartre wrote Existentialism and Humanism as a corrective to these claims. Yes, each person is condemned to be free, to make their own choices and find their own meaning, but we must also recognise that humanity in everyone else. Writing in 1945, with the war against Nazism still ringing in his ears, Sartre spells out that recognising the existential freedom of each individual human must also mean defending the freedom of all humans. “We will freedom for freedom’s sake, and in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends on our own.”

Before you rip off your mask and put your foot down in a 20mph zone, read on. This principled stand, inconveniently, does not imply any specific course of action. The actions you choose in the real world are still your own responsibility. You might decide that wearing a little piece of cloth is preferable to rising infection and consequent lockdown, or that mask-wearing contributes to a culture of fear which constrains us all psychologically.

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It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

How do you weigh the value of every human life that might be cut short by Covid (or by another cause while Covid dominates health provision and government attention) against the value, to each and all of us, of living life as fully as possible? “Life is nothing until it is lived;” says Sartre, “but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”

Staying alive is not enough. We also need sense, purpose and value in our shared human life. Our leaders must protect not just our lives, but our freedom to live. That is the anguish of leadership. It is the anguish of being human, and therefore free.

Centre-ground politicians have accepted that some kind of action, more radical than any that has been implemented so far, has become urgently necessary. Everyone but the most stubborn climate denialists realises that an unprecedented change is taking place in the world that humans have inhabited throughout their history.

At the same time, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “humankind cannot bear very much reality”, and thinking on the subject is increasingly delusional. A by-product of worldwide industrialisation based on fossil fuels, the shift that is underway was set in motion by human beings. It does not follow however that humans can stop it.

As climate scientists have pointed out, global warming will continue for hundreds or thousands of years after its proximate causes have been removed. The demands made by Extinction Rebellion – net zero carbon emissions for the UK by 2025, for example – are impossibly draconian. But even if they could be enforced, they would make little impact on greenhouse gases worldwide, or prevent the climate disruption that is already baked into the system. Green movements at the present time are expressions of magical thinking – attempts to ignore and escape reality, rather than understand and adapt to it.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

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One of the realities Green thinking passes over is geopolitics. Consider the fashionable idea that the world – or at least the capitalist West – should stop burning fossil fuels. From an environmental point of view, this may be highly desirable — even though it will not arrest disruptive climate change. In geopolitical terms, it is a recipe for global upheaval. Some of the world’s most pivotal states depend on fossil fuels for their existence. Saudi Arabia would collapse without the revenues the kingdom receives from the oil market. Iran and Russia rely on high oil prices for much of their national income. For all of these countries, abruptly ending the consumption of fossil fuels would mean a massive drop in living standards and large-scale political disruption. All the better, Greens may say – these are hardly desirable regimes.

But it would be folly to assume that what emerged would be any better. The Saudi kingdom would fragment or be replaced by a more radical Islamist regime. An impoverished Russia could well be more belligerent and adventurist in its foreign and defence policies. With Iran starved of income from fossil fuels and no prospect of revenues being resumed, any prospect of democratic transformation in the country would diminish not increase. Regime change induced by Green policies is no more likely to work than regime change imposed by military force.

Another reality disregarded in Green thinking is 20th-century history. Climate protests such as Extinction Rebellion are spin-offs from the anti-globalisation movements of a decade or so ago, and like them they believe contemporary western capitalism is dysfunctional and headed for history’s scrap heap. In this they are right. A global free market was always a fanciful project, and the rickety structure of debt-financed asset prices and escalating trade rivalries is fragile. Another credit crunch on the scale of that in 2007-8 would most likely destroy it.

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That does not mean a socialist economy will do any better in protecting the environment. The worst ecological catastrophes of the last century occurred in the former Soviet Union and Maoist China, where – under the influence of a Marxian ideology in which the natural world must be “humanised” – the natural world was damaged and degraded more than in any western country.

Among these assaults on the environment was one of the fastest decimations of another animal species in history. Fifty years ago, around 180,000 whales disappeared from the waters around the Soviet Union. In an extraordinary environmental rampage that was covered up at the time and for decades later, the Soviet whaling industry killed off the mammals simply in order to meet production targets required by the five-year plans.

Barely 30% of the whales that were slaughtered were put to any economic use. Ships would regularly return with rotting whales that could not be used for food. Meeting the five-year plan depended only on how many whales were killed. Crews that failed to meet the quotas were punished with demotions and firings, while those that exceeded what the plan demanded received bonuses. Other than crews that met or surpassed the quotas, no one profited from the massacre. Some types of whale were driven to the edge of extinction, and the effects of the system on whale populations continue today.

Of course, Greens will tell you they want an economic system different from a state socialist command economy. But how this new system would work has never been made clear, and in practice their demands amount to little more than what they call ‘sustainable development’. The trouble is that Green proposals involve a drop in material living standards for large numbers of people, and any such fall will be unsustainable in political terms.

Macron’s tax on petrol fuelled the rise of the gilets jaunes in France, while the principal beneficiary of Hilary Clinton’s election pledge to shut down the coal industry has been Donald Trump. When Green policies impose heavy costs on the poor and the working majority – as they often do – the result is a popular blowback.

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You're reaping what you sowed, liberals

By John Gray

In theoretical terms, the solution to the environmental crisis is what John Stuart Mill in his prescient Principles of Political Economy (1848) called a stationary-state economy – one in which technical progress is used not to expand production and consumption but to increase leisure and the quality of life. The trouble is that a zero-growth economy is politically impossible. Populist backlash and geopolitical upheaval will derail any transition to a stationary state.

Lying behind these obstacles is another reality that has been excluded from current thinking. Despite much talk about declining fertility in many countries, human population growth continues to be the root cause of the mass extinction that is in progress. Species are vanishing on a vast scale because their habitats are disappearing, and the chief reason for this is human expansion. It may be true that population growth will level off later this century somewhere around nine or 10 billion. By that point, however, the biosphere will have been gutted. If human numbers then fall, it will be in a world that has been hideously impoverished.

Interestingly, Mill foresaw this prospect when he envisioned the stationary state in the book. There is “not much satisfaction”, he wrote:

…in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up; all quadrupeds or birds not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population must extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it”.

Over 170 years later, there is no prospect of anyone being content to be stationary. Nothing in the current climate of ideas is as unpopular as Mill’s neo-Malthusianism. True, he linked it with female emancipation, even spending a night in prison for the crime of distributing pamphlets on birth-control to working-class women. But for liberals today that hardly excuses what they condemn as Mill’s dark misanthropy in preferring a world with a small population and large tracts of wilderness over one choked and desolated by billions of struggling human beings.

It is at this point that the extinction crisis looms into view. The industrial economy will not accept limits on growth because the civilisation it serves has rejected any constraints on what it can achieve. The fact that an objective is impossible to realise is, according to current attitudes, no reason not to attempt it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Impossible dreams – so we are told by countless secular sermonisers – are what make humans unique and special. In this modern religion, accepting any final limits on human power is the worst sin. As a corollary, magical thinking – which rests on a belief in the omnipotence of the human will – is obligatory.

Surviving the climate crisis is not an inherently unrealisable goal. What it requires is not sustainable development but something more like what James Lovelock in his book A Rough Ride to the Future (2014) has called “sustainable retreat”. Using the most advanced technologies, including nuclear as well as solar energy, and abandoning farming in favour of synthetic means of food production, the still growing human population could be fed without making further intolerable demands on the planet. High-intensity urban living could enable rewilding of land that had been vacated. Resources would be focused on building defences against the shift in climate that will occur whatever now humans do. Hubristic dreams of “saving the planet” would be replaced by thinking how to adapt to living with a planet that humans have destabilised. If humans do not adjust, the planet will reduce them to smaller numbers or consign them to extinction.

A programme of this kind is the opposite of that proposed by Greens. It is also profoundly uncongenial to the prevailing culture. A consequence of the decline of religion is a parallel decline in the idea that the natural world imposes any limits on human will. Rather than humans being seen as one animal among many, the dominant species at the present time but like all others in having no secure tenure on the Earth, they have been encouraged to see themselves as having the power over nature of the God in which they no longer believe. If God did not make the world, humankind can – and should – remake it in its own image. That is the basis on which our supposedly secular civilisation stands, and it is also the ultimate source of the extinction crisis.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

In these circumstances, any programme based on the fact that humans face unstoppable climate change will be condemned as despairing fatalism. For a civilisation that prides itself on its devotion to science this is a curious attitude. Science aims to formulate universal laws that are independent of human beliefs and values. If these laws deflate our hopes and ambitions, so be it. If the point of the exercise is objective truth, subjective emotions must be set aside. So must faith, religious or otherwise. If we are to believe its ideologues, science is an inquiry into the natural world of which the human animal is an integral part. In fact, science has become a channel for the belief – inherited from monotheism –  that humankind can transcend the natural world.

The paradox of today’s Green movements is that they promote this anthropocentric religion. The extinction crisis can be mitigated only by turning our minds to deal with reality. But realistic thinking is almost extinct.

At the back of that, there’s an insidious, creeping uniformity in how we think – both about technology and about what it means to us. The startlingly candid motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, one of the 20^th century’s great expositions of human achievement, sums it up. ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.'[1.  The World’s Fair: Ron Grossman, May 26, 2013] Is this really what’s going on? First the lab makes the discovery; then the corporation comes up with the product; and then ‘man’ – all of us – do our duty and ‘conform’ by buying the product. If this seems like an exaggeration, just remember that there are now two billion people using Facebook at least once a month. That’s a number more than six times the population of the United States; 30 times that of the UK. It’s close to half the adults on the planet outside China (where it’s banned).[2.  Report from Anita Balakrishnan, June 27, 2017]

Conformity?

The vision set out in the World’s Fair motto is, frankly, chilling. And the tendency of the digital revolution to encourage conformity, not least through the growth of vast corporations with a narrow product focus and enormous – sometimes monopolistic – profitability, both captures the World’s Fair vision and actually makes it creepier. Because the two billion who are ‘conforming’ to the Facebook product would never dream of thinking of themselves as naïve conformists. They are making personal choices, and they have chosen the product because they like it. Just as they do when they check their mobile phones during family dinners, or business meetings, or first dates.

Though it’s worth noting that since they don’t pay cash to get it, few Facebook users think of it in quite those terms. The largely invisible barter system by which they trade data for service makes everyone’s thinking a little foggy.

Machines ‘r’ us?

Behind our consumer engagement with digital technology another debate is in progress. It’s many years since inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil came up with his model of the ‘singularity’ – that future point when machines become smarter than we are and rapidly ascend an exponential curve of smartness that will leave us humans in the dust. Kurzweil has proposed various dates for this extraordinary event, though 2045 is the most recent.[3.  Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology New York: Viking Books, 2005]

More important than his prediction, though, lies the fundamental idea that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence, and that humans should be looking forward to living digital lives. Years back the term ‘wetware’ was coined to describe brain matter – by analogy with software and hardware. Of course, as we know, the human brain is not only smart, it is extraordinarily complicated. But machines have beaten us at chess, and at the even more complex game Go. Should we accept the superiority of the machine and aspire to a digital future? Or, to rephrase that, while the machine is plainly better at some things than we are (that’s why we have machines, from the adze and the plough onwards!), does this mean that we should all aspire to be like machines?

When we are looking at our digital devices, it may be helpful to think adze. Obviously, machines are better at doing what they do than a human would be. But can a machine be better than we are at what we do as a whole? Can they be better humans than we are?

That is a very different question, and it’s one that people taking Kurzweil’s view can answer only by defining what we humans do – defining it down – in machine terms. For example, of course machines can have sex with humans (and indeed with each other, which is maybe an even weirder idea), but can they in any sense make love? This approach is in logical terms called a petitio principii – an argument that assumes its conclusion from the start. If we abstract the things that humans do in machine-like terms, it should scarcely surprise us that machines can do what we do. Whether they can be entranced by the beauty of a sunset, enjoy a children’s birthday party, or read Keats and weep is a different question altogether. And while, per Moore’s Law, circuits certainly keep being crammed onto chips and quantum computing suggests that even as cramming becomes impossible ramping up machine intelligence won’t, not everyone agrees that replicating the complexity of the human brain equals producing people.[4.  On Moore’s Law see here. Quantum computing: Abigail Beall, March 23, 2017, summarizes the latest in Wired Magazine.]

The Question of Us

As technology continues to explode around us there’s no more significant question to address than this one: Can we develop and manage our technologies in a manner that will enable and enhance our capacity to live human lives? Behind that, can we think about them in a manner that will keep the human vision – of a human community sustained and empowered by the latest adzes and ploughs – at the forefront? Or is it inevitable that our human story will ultimately be superseded by the story of machines that are ever smarter and faster?

It’s plain that there’s no value in a return to ‘Luddism’. But while progress may be inevitable, what we make of it – in our personal lives and our families and our businesses and our communities and on our planet – is up to us. Does the future offer us privacy – and do we care? Will these vast new technologies drive wealth for all or exacerbate inequity and division? Do we all need to train in STEM or do we suspect that the future will hold a new golden age for the humanities (the stuff that machines will find it hardest to do)? In other words, are we up for a long campaign for a human future?

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Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Books, 2005) offers a substantial manifesto for his thesis that Moore’s Law will lead to a machine takeover.

Here’s a critique from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in MIT Technology Review.

And a summary of criticisms in tech online newspaper Pando Daily.