Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

CHAPTER 23 HUMANISM

Science is not enough to bring about progress. “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge”—but that’s the problem. “Everything” means everything: vaccines and bioweapons, video on demand and Big Brother on the telescreen. Something in addition to science ensured that vaccines were put to use in eradicating diseases while bioweapons were outlawed. That’s why I preceded the epigraph from David Deutsch with the one from Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish.

The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism. (Despite the word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind.) It is humanism that identifies what we should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements the is. It distinguishes true progress from mere mastery.

There is a growing movement called Humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.¹ Its aims have been stated in a trio of manifestoes starting in 1933. The Humanist Manifesto III, from 2003, affirms:

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and developing beneficial technologies. We also recognize the value of new departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience—each subject to analysis by critical intelligence.

Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. . . . We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.

Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. . . .

Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. We . . . animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and finality of death. . . .

Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Humanists . . . strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence. . . .

Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop global community. . . .²

The members of Humanist associations would be the first to insist that the ideals of humanism belong to no sect. Like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman who was delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life, many people are humanists without realizing it.³ Strands of humanism may be found in belief systems that go back to the Axial Age. They came to the fore during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, leading to the English, French, and American statements of rights, and got a second wind after World War II, inspiring the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other institutions of global cooperation.⁴ Though humanism does not invoke gods, spirits, or souls to ground meaning and morality, it is by no means incompatible with religious institutions. Some Eastern religions, including Confucianism and varieties of Buddhism, always grounded their ethics in human welfare rather than divine dictates. Many Jewish and Christian denominations have become humanistic, soft-pedaling their legacy of supernatural beliefs and ecclesiastical authority in favor of reason and universal human flourishing. Examples include the Quakers, Unitarians, liberal Episcopalians, Nordic Lutherans, and Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic branches of Judaism.

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind. As we shall see, it is vehemently opposed not just by many religious and political factions but, amazingly, by eminent artists, academics, and intellectuals. If humanism, like the other Enlightenment ideals, is to retain its hold on people’s minds, it must be explained and defended in the language and ideas of the current era.

Spinoza’s dictum is one of a family of principles that have sought a secular foundation for morality in impartiality—in the realization that there’s nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that could justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else’s.⁵ If I object to being raped, maimed, starved, or killed, I can’t very well rape, maim, starve, or kill you. Impartiality underlies many attempts to construct morality on rational grounds: Spinoza’s viewpoint of eternity, Hobbes’s social contract, Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Nagel’s view from nowhere, Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal, and of course the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.⁶ (The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are designed to anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other sticking points for the Golden Rule.)

To be sure, the argument from impartiality is incomplete. If there were a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath who could exploit everyone else with impunity, no argument could convince him he had committed a logical fallacy. Also, arguments from impartiality have little content. Aside from a generic advisory to respect people’s wishes, the arguments say little about what those wishes are: the wants, needs, and experiences that define human flourishing. These are the desiderata that should not just be impartially allowed but actively sought and expanded for as many people as possible. Recall that Martha Nussbaum filled this gap by laying out a list of “fundamental capabilities” that people have the right to exercise, such as longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, play, nature, and emotional and social attachments. But this is just a list, and it leaves the list-maker open to the objection that she is just enumerating her favorite things. Can we put humanistic morality on a deeper foundation—one that would rule out rational sociopaths and justify the human needs we are obligated to respect? I think we can.

According to the Declaration of Independence, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are “self-evident.” That’s a bit unsatisfying, because what’s “self-evident” isn’t always self-evident. But it captures a key intuition. There would indeed be something perverse about having to justify life itself in the course of examining the foundations of morality, as if it were an open question whether one gets to finish the sentence or be shot. The very act of examining anything presupposes that one is around to do the examining. If Nagel’s transcendental argument about the non-negotiability of reason has merit—that the act of considering the validity of reason presupposes the validity of reason—then surely it presupposes the existence of reasoners.

This opens the door to deepening our humanistic justification of morality with two key ideas from science, entropy and evolution. Traditional analyses of the social contract imagined a colloquy among disembodied souls. Let’s enrich this idealization with the minimal premise that the reasoners exist in the physical universe. Much follows.

These incarnate beings must have defied the staggering odds against matter arranging itself into a thinking organ by being products of natural selection, the only physical process capable of producing complex adaptive design.⁷ And they must have defied the ravages of entropy long enough to be able to show up for the discussion and persist through it. That means they have taken in energy from the environment, stayed within a narrow envelope of conditions consistent with their physical integrity, and fended off assaults from living and nonliving dangers. As products of natural and sexual selection they must be the scions of a deeply rooted tree of replicators, each of whom won a mate and bore viable offspring. Since intelligence is not a wonder algorithm but is fed by knowledge, they must be driven to sop up information about the world and to be attentive to its nonrandom patterning. And if they are exchanging ideas with other rational entities, they must be on speaking terms: they must be social beings who risk time and safety in interacting with one another.⁸

The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end. That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people. At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.⁹ Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

As I mentioned in chapter 2 (following an observation by John Tooby), the Law of Entropy sentences us to another permanent threat. Many things must all go right for a body (and thus a mind) to function, but it takes just one thing going wrong for it to shut down permanently—a leak of blood, a constriction of air, a disabling of its microscopic clockwork. An act of aggression by one agent can end the existence of another. We are all catastrophically vulnerable to violence—but at the same time we can enjoy a fantastic benefit if we agree to refrain from violence. The Pacifist’s Dilemma—how social agents can forgo the temptation to exploit each other in exchange for the security of not being exploited—hangs over humanity like the Sword of Damocles, making peace and security a permanent quest for humanistic ethics.¹⁰ The historical decline of violence shows that it is a solvable problem.

The vulnerability of any embodied agent to violence explains why the callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath cannot remain disengaged from the arena of moral discourse (and its demand for impartiality and nonviolence) forever. If he refuses to play the game of morality, then in the eyes of everyone else he has become a mindless menace, like a germ, a wildfire, or a rampaging wolverine—something to be neutralized by brute force, no questions asked. (As Hobbes put it, “No covenants with beasts.”) Now, as long as he thinks he is eternally invulnerable, he might take that chance, but the Law of Entropy rules that out. He may tyrannize everyone for a while, but eventually the massed strength of his targets could prevail. The impossibility of eternal invulnerability creates an incentive even for callous sociopaths to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.¹¹ And he who engages in argument may be defeated by a better one. Ultimately the moral universe includes everyone who can think.

Evolution helps explain another foundation of secular morality: our capacity for sympathy (or, as the Enlightenment writers variously referred to it, benevolence, pity, imagination, or commiseration). Even if a rational agent deduces that it’s in everyone’s long-term interests to be moral, it’s hard to imagine him sticking his neck out to make a sacrifice for another’s benefit unless something gives him a nudge. The nudge needn’t come from an angel on one shoulder; evolutionary psychology explains how it comes from the emotions that make us social animals.¹² Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our own welfare, so we’re better off if we bestow good turns on one another (with no one taking but never giving) than if it’s every person for himself or herself. Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to encompass all sentient beings.¹³

A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.¹⁴ (Philosophers often refer to happiness as “utility.”) Anyone who has taken Introduction to Moral Philosophy can rattle off the problems.¹⁵ Should we indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their organs to save the lives of many more? If townspeople enraged by an unsolved murder threaten a deadly riot, should the sheriff assuage them by framing the town drunk and stringing him up? If a drug could put us into a permanent slumber with sweet dreams, should we take it? Should we set up a chain of warehouses that inexpensively support billions of happy rabbits? These thought experiments make the case for a deontological ethics, composed of rights, duties, and principles that deem certain acts moral or immoral by their very nature. In some versions of deontological morality, the principles come from God.

Humanism indeed has a utilitarian flavor, or at least a consequentialist one, in which acts and policies are morally evaluated by their consequences. The consequences needn’t be restricted to happiness in the narrow sense of having a smile on one’s face, but can embrace a broader sense of flourishing, which includes childrearing, self-expression, education, rich experience, and the creation of works of lasting value (chapter 18). The consequentialist flavor of humanism is actually a point in its favor, for several reasons.

First, any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is intrinsically wrong, must we answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to know the whereabouts of Anne Frank? Is masturbation immoral (as the prototypical deontologist, Kant, argued), because one is using oneself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse, and people must always be treated as ends, never as means? If a terrorist has hidden a ticking nuclear bomb that would annihilate millions, is it immoral to waterboard him into revealing its location? And given the absence of a thundering voice from the heavens, who gets to pull principles out of the air and pronounce that certain acts are inherently immoral even if they hurt no one? At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to insist that vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial marriage, and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature.

Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is drawn too sharply.¹⁶ Deontological principles are often a good way to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Since no mortal can calculate every consequence of his actions into the indefinite future, and since people can always spin-doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross. We don’t let governments deceive or murder their citizens, because real politicians, unlike the infallible and benevolent demigods in the thought experiments, could wield that power capriciously or tyrannically. That is one of many reasons why a government that could frame innocent people for capital crimes or euthanize them for their organs would not produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Or take the principle of equal treatment. Are laws that discriminate against women and minorities unfair by their very nature, or are they deplorable because the victims of discrimination suffer harm? We may not have to answer the question. Conversely, any deontological principle whose consequences are harmful, such as the Sanctity of Life-Sustaining Blood (which rules out transfusions), can be tossed out the window. Human rights promote human flourishing. That’s why, in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in hand.

The other reason that humanism needn’t be embarrassed by its overlap with utilitarianism is that this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day.¹⁷ Even abstract rights like freedom of speech and religion were largely defended in terms of benefits and harms, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”¹⁸ Universal education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection also were advanced on utilitarian grounds. And, at least so far, Utility Monsters and rabbit gratification factories have not turned out to be a problem.

There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded: everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive. Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern.¹⁹ The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.²⁰ (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. That explains why certain reform movements, such as legal equality for women and gay marriage, overturned centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15): with nothing but custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the face of utilitarian arguments.

Even when humanistic movements fortify their goals with the language of rights, the philosophical system justifying those rights must be “thin.”²¹ A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.

History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that eight of the thirteen British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministers’ salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.²²

A century and a half later, a community of nations still smoldering from a world war had to lay down a set of principles to unite them in cooperation. It’s unlikely that they would have agreed upon “We accept Jesus Christ as our savior” or “America is a shining city upon a hill.” In 1947 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked several dozen of the world’s intellectuals (including Jacques Maritain, Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Harold Laski, Quincy Wright, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, together with eminent Confucian and Muslim scholars) which rights should be included in the UN’s universal declaration. The lists were surprisingly similar. In his introduction to their deliverable, Maritain recounted:

At one of the meetings of a Unesco National Commission where Human Rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. “Yes,” they said, “we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.”²³

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a humanist manifesto with thirty articles, was drafted in less than two years, thanks to the determination of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, to avoid getting mired in ideology and move the project along.²⁴ (When John Humphrey, author of the first draft, was asked on what principles the Declaration was based, he tactfully replied, “No philosophy whatsoever.”)²⁵ In December 1948 it was passed without opposition by the UN General Assembly. Contrary to accusations that human rights are a parochial Western creed, the Declaration was supported by India, China, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, and seven Muslim countries, while Roosevelt had to twist the arms of American and British officials to get them behind it: the United States was worried about its Negroes, the United Kingdom about its colonies. The Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained.²⁶

The Declaration has been translated into five hundred languages, and has influenced most of the national constitutions that were drafted in the following decades, together with many international laws, treaties, and organizations. At seventy years old, it has aged well.

Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right.

Many intellectuals who don’t sign on to these alternatives to humanism nonetheless believe they capture a vital truth about our psychology: that people have a need for theistic, spiritual, heroic, or tribal beliefs. Humanism may not be wrong, they say, but it goes against human nature. No society based on humanistic principles can long endure, let alone a global order based on them.

It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one: that the inevitable collapse has begun, and we are watching the liberal, cosmopolitan, Enlightenment, humanistic worldview unravel before our eyes. “Liberalism Is Dead,” announced the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in 2016. “The liberal democratic experiment—with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will—is but a brief interlude.”²⁷ In “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” the Boston Globe editorialist Stephen Kinzer agreed:

The cosmopolitanism that is central to Enlightenment ideals has produced results that disturb people in many societies. This leads them back toward the ruling system that primates instinctively prefer: A strong chief protects the tribe, and in return tribe members do the chief’s bidding. . . . Reason offers little basis for morality, rejects spiritual power, and negates the importance of emotion, art and creativity. When reason is cold and inhumane, it can cut people off from deeply imbedded structures that give meaning to life.²⁸

Other pundits have added that it’s no wonder so many young people are drawn to ISIS: they are turning away from an “arid secularism,” and seek “radical and religious correctives to a flattened view of human life.”²⁹

So should I have called this book Enlightenment While It Lasts? Don’t be silly! In part II, I documented the reality of progress; in this part, I have focused on the ideas that drive it and why I expect them to endure. Having rebutted the cases against reason and science in the preceding two chapters, I’ll now take on the case against humanism. I’ll examine these arguments not just to show that the moral, psychological, and historical arguments against humanism are wrong. The best way to understand an idea is to see what it is not, so putting the alternatives to humanism under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment. First we’ll look at the religious case against humanism, then at the romantic-heroic-tribal-authoritarian complex.

Can we really have good without God? Has the godless universe advanced by humanistic scientists been undermined by the findings of science itself? And is there an innate adaptation to the divine presence—a God gene in our DNA, a God module in the brain—which ensures that theistic religion will always push back against secular humanism?

Let’s start with theistic morality. It’s true that many religious codes enjoin people from murdering, assaulting, robbing, or betraying one another. But of course so do codes of secular morality, and for an obvious reason: these are rules that all rational, self-interested, and gregarious agents would want their compatriots to agree upon. Not surprisingly, they are codified in the laws of every state, and indeed seem to be present in every human society.³⁰

What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement: the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince everyone else that they cannot get away with murder.³¹ As with Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists. In a nonfiction appendix to her novel Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (drawing in part on Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Russell) lays out refutations of every one of these arguments.³² The most common among them—faith, revelation, scripture, authority, tradition, and subjective appeal—are not arguments at all. It’s not just that reason says they cannot be trusted. It’s also that different religions, drawing on these sources, decree mutually incompatible beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they have wrought, and what they demand of their devotees. Historical scholarship has amply demonstrated that holy scriptures are all-too-human products of their historical eras, including internal contradictions, factual errors, plagiarism from neighboring civilizations, and scientific absurdities (such as God creating the sun three days after he distinguished day from night). The recondite arguments from sophisticated theologians are no sounder. The Cosmological and Ontological arguments for the existence of God are logically invalid, the Argument from Design was refuted by Darwin, and the others are either patently false (such as the theory that humans are endowed with an innate faculty for sensing the truth about God) or blatant escape hatches (such as the suggestion that the Resurrection was too cosmically important for God to have allowed it to be empirically verified).

Some writers insist that science has no place in this conversation. They seek to impose a condition of “methodological naturalism” on science which renders it incapable, even in principle, of evaluating the claims of religion. That would carve out a safe space in which believers can protect their beliefs while still being sympathetic to science. But as we saw in the preceding chapter, science is not a game with an arbitrary rulebook; it’s the application of reason to explaining the universe and to ascertaining whether its explanations are true. In Faith Versus Fact, the biologist Jerry Coyne argues that the existence of the God of scripture is a perfectly testable scientific hypothesis.³³ The Bible’s historical accounts could have been corroborated by archaeology, genetics, and philology. It could have contained uncannily prescient scientific truths such as “Thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.” A bright light might appear in the heavens one day and a man clad in a white robe and sandals, supported by winged angels, could descend from the sky, give sight to the blind, and resurrect the dead. We might discover that intercessory prayer can restore eyesight or regrow amputated limbs, or that anyone who speaks the Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down while those who pray to Allah five times a day are free from disease and misfortune. More generally, the data might show that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people: that the mothers who die in childbirth, the children who waste away from cancer, and the millions of victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, and holocausts had it coming.

Other components of theistic morality, such as the existence of an immaterial soul and a realm of reality beyond matter and energy, are just as testable. We might discover a severed head that can speak. A seer could predict the exact day of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Aunt Hilda could beam a message from the Great Beyond telling us under which floorboard she hid her jewelry. Memoirs from oxygen-starved patients who experienced their souls leaving their bodies could contain verifiable details unavailable to their sense organs. The fact that these reports have all been exposed as tall tales, false memories, overinterpreted coincidences, and cheap carny tricks undermines the hypothesis that there are immaterial souls which could be subject to divine justice.³⁴ There are, of course, deistic philosophies in which God created the universe and then stepped back to watch what happened, or in which “God” is merely a synonym for the laws of physics and mathematics. But these impotent Gods are in no position to underwrite morality.

Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk. But since our scientific understanding is never complete, the pseudo-argument known as the God of the Gaps is always available as a last resort. Today the more sophisticated theists have tried to place God into two of these gaps: the fundamental physical constants and the hard problem of consciousness. Any humanist who insists that we cannot invoke God to justify morality can expect to be confronted with these gaps, so let me say a few words about each. As we will see, they are likely to go the way of Zeus hurling thunderbolts as an explanation for electrical storms.

Our universe can be specified by a few numbers, including the strengths of the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces), the number of macroscopic dimensions of space-time (four), and the density of dark energy (the source of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe). In Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees enumerates them on one hand and a finger; the exact tally depends on which version of physical theory one invokes and on whether one counts the constants themselves or ratios between them. If any of these constants were off by a minuscule iota, then matter would fly apart or collapse upon itself, and stars, galaxies, and planets, to say nothing of terrestrial life and Homo sapiens, could never have formed. The best-established theories of physics today don’t explain why these constants should be so meticulously tuned to values that allowed us to come into being (particularly the density of dark energy), and so, the theistic argument goes, there must have been a fine-tuner, namely God. It is the old Argument from Design applied to the entire cosmos rather than to living things.

An immediate objection is the equally old problem of theodicy. If God, in his infinite power and knowledge, fine-tuned the universe to bring us into being, why did he design an Earth on which geological and meteorological catastrophes devastate regions inhabited by innocent people? What is the divine purpose of the supervolcanoes that have ravaged our species in the past and may extinguish it in the future, or the evolution of the Sun into a red giant that will do so with certainty?

But theodical speculation is beside the point. Physicists have not been left dumbstruck by the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, but are actively pursuing several explanations. One is captured in the title of the physicist Victor Stenger’s book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning.³⁵ Many physicists believe that it’s premature to conclude that the values of the fundamental constants are either arbitrary or the only ones consistent with life. A deeper understanding of physics (particularly the long-sought unification of relativity and quantum theory) may show that some of the values must be exactly what they are. Others, we might learn, could take on other values—more important, combinations of values—that are compatible with a stable, matter-filled universe, albeit not the one we know and love. Progress in physics may reveal that the constants are not so finely tuned, and a life-supporting universe not so improbable, after all.

The other explanation is that our universe is just one region in a vast, possibly infinite landscape of universes—a multiverse—each with different values of the fundamental constants.³⁶ We find ourselves in a universe compatible with life not because it was tuned to allow us to exist but because the very fact that we exist implies that it is that kind of universe, and not one of the vastly more numerous inhospitable ones, that we find ourselves in. Fine-tuning is a fallacy of post hoc reasoning, like the Megabucks winner who wonders what made him win against all odds. Someone had to win, and it’s only because it happened to be him that he’s wondering in the first place. It’s not the first time that a selection artifact has fooled thinkers into searching for a nonexistent deep explanation for a physical constant. Johannes Kepler agonized over why the Earth was 93 million miles away from the sun, just right for water to fill our lakes and rivers without freezing solid or boiling away. Today we know that the Earth is just one of many planets, each at a different distance from our sun or another star, and we are unsurprised to learn that we find ourselves on that planet rather than on Mars.

The theory of the multiverse would itself be a post hoc excuse for an explanation if it were not consistent with other theories in physics—in particular, that the vacuum of space can spawn big bangs which grow into new universes, and that the baby universes can be born with different fundamental constants.³⁷ Still, the very idea repels many people (not least some physicists) because of its mind-boggling profligacy. An infinity of universes (or at least a number large enough to include all possible arrangements of matter) implies that somewhere there are universes with exact doppelgangers of you except that they married someone else, were killed by a car last night, are named Evelyn, have one hair out of place, put the book down a moment ago and are not reading this sentence, and so on.

Yet however unsettling these implications are, the history of ideas tells us that cognitive queasiness is a poor guide to reality. Our best science has repeatedly insulted our ancestors’ common sense with unsettling discoveries that turned out to be true, including a round Earth, a slowdown of time at high speeds, quantum superposition, curved space-time, and of course evolution. Indeed, once we get over the initial shock, we find that a multiverse is not so exotic after all. This is not even the first time that physicists have had a reason to posit multiple universes. Another version of the multiverse is a straightforward implication of the discoveries that space appears to be infinite and that matter appears to be evenly dispersed through it: there must be an infinity of universes dotting 3-D space beyond our cosmic horizon. Still another is the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the multiple outcomes of a probabilistic quantum process (such as the trajectory of a photon) are all realized in superimposed parallel universes (a possibility that could lead to quantum computers, in which all possible values of the variables in a computation are represented simultaneously). Indeed, in one sense the multiverse is the simpler theory of reality, since if our universe is the only one in existence, we would need to complicate the elegant laws of physics with an arbitrary stipulation of our universe’s parochial initial conditions and its parochial physical constants. As the physicist Max Tegmark (an advocate of four kinds of multiverse) put it, “Our judgment therefore comes down to which we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words.”

If the multiverse turns out to be the best explanation of the fundamental physical constants, it would not be the first time we have been flabbergasted by worlds beyond our noses. Our ancestors had to swallow the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, eight other planets, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy (many with planets), and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. If reason contradicts intuition once again, so much the worse for intuition. Another advocate of the multiverse, Brian Greene, reminds us:

From a quaint, small, earth-centered universe to one filled with billions of galaxies, the journey has been both thrilling and humbling. We’ve been compelled to relinquish sacred belief in our own centrality, but with such cosmic demotion we’ve demonstrated the capacity of the human intellect to reach far beyond the confines of ordinary experience to reveal extraordinary truth.³⁸

The other supposedly God-fillable gap is the “hard problem of consciousness,” also known as the problem of sentience, subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, and qualia (the “qualitative” aspect of consciousness).³⁹ The term, originally suggested by the philosopher David Chalmers, is an in-joke, because the so-called easy problem—the scientific challenge of distinguishing conscious from unconscious mental computation, identifying its substrates in the brain, and explaining why it evolved—is “easy” in the sense that curing cancer or sending a man to the Moon is easy, namely that it is scientifically tractable. Fortunately, the easy problem is more than just tractable: we are well on the way to a satisfying explanation. It’s hardly a mystery why we experience a world of stable, solid, colored 3-D objects rather than the kaleidoscope of pixels on our retinas, or why we enjoy (and hence seek) food, sex, and bodily integrity while suffering from (and hence avoiding) social isolation and tissue damage: these internal states and the behavior they encourage are obvious Darwinian adaptations. With advances in evolutionary psychology, more and more of our conscious experiences are being explained in this way, including our intellectual obsessions, moral emotions, and aesthetic reactions.⁴⁰

Nor are the computational and neurobiological bases of consciousness obstinately befuddling. The cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his collaborators have argued that consciousness functions as a “global workspace” or “blackboard” representation.⁴¹ The blackboard metaphor refers to the way that a diverse set of computational modules can post their results in a common format that all the other modules can “see.” Those modules include perception, memory, motivation, language understanding, and action planning, and the fact that they can all access a common pool of currently relevant information (the contents of consciousness) allows us to describe, grasp, or approach what we see, to respond to what other people say or do, and to remember and plan depending on what we want and what we know. (The computations inside each module, in contrast, like the calculation of depth from the two eyes or the sequencing of muscle contractions making up an action, can work off their own proprietary input streams, and they proceed below the level of consciousness, having no need for its synoptic view.) This global workspace is implemented in the brain as rhythmic, synchronized firing in neural networks that link the prefrontal and parietal cerebral cortexes with each other and with brain areas that feed them perceptual, mnemonic, and motivational signals.

The so-called hard problem—why it subjectively feels like something to each one of us who is conscious, with red looking red and salt tasting salty—is hard not because it is a recalcitrant scientific topic but because it is a head-scratching conceptual enigma. It includes brainteasers such as whether my red is the same as your red, what it is like to be a bat, whether there could be zombies (people indistinguishable from you and me but with “no one home” who is feeling anything), and if so whether everyone but me is a zombie, whether a perfectly lifelike robot would be conscious, whether I could achieve immortality by uploading my brain’s connectome to the Cloud, and whether the Star Trek transporter really transports Captain Kirk to the planetary surface or murders him and reconstitutes a twin.

Some philosophers, like Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained, have argued that there is no hard problem of consciousness: it is a confusion arising from the bad habit of imagining a homunculus seated in a theater inside the skull. This is the disembodied experiencer who would temporarily tiptoe out of my theater and drop in on yours to check out the red, or visit the bat’s and watch the movie that’s playing there; who would be missing from the zombie and either present or absent in the robot; and who might or might not survive the beam ride down to Zakdorn. Sometimes, when I see the mischief that the hard problem has caused (including the conservative intellectual Dinesh D’Souza brandishing a copy of my book How the Mind Works in a debate on the existence of God), I am tempted to agree with Dennett that we’d be better off without the term. Contrary to various misunderstandings, the hard problem does not consist in weird physical or paranormal phenomena such as clairvoyance, telepathy, time travel, augury, or action at a distance. It does not call for exotic quantum physics, kitschy energy vibrations, or other New Age flimflam. Most important for the present discussion, it does not implicate an immaterial soul. Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity.

In the end I still think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual problem, but agree with Dennett that it is not a meaningful scientific problem.⁴² No one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether the same Captain Kirk walks on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of Zakdorn. And I agree with several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a solution at all, precisely because it is a conceptual problem, or, more accurately, a problem with our concepts. As Thomas Nagel put it in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” there may be “facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type.”⁴³ The philosopher Colin McGinn has run with this idea, arguing that there is a mismatch between our cognitive tools for explaining reality (namely chains of causes and effects, analysis into parts and their interactions, and modeling in mathematical equations) and the nature of the hard problem of consciousness, which is unintuitively holistic.⁴⁴ Our best science tells us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals, memories, and surroundings, implemented in synchronized neural firing in fronto-parietal circuitry. But the last dollop in the theory—that it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry—may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops. This should not be entirely surprising. As Ambrose Bierce noted in The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.

Whatever we make of the hard problem of consciousness, positing an immaterial soul is of no help at all. For one thing, it tries to solve a mystery with an even bigger mystery. For another, it falsely predicts the existence of paranormal phenomena. Most damningly, a divinely granted consciousness does not meet the design specs for a locus of just deserts. Why would God have endowed a mobster with the ability to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, or a sexual predator with carnal pleasure? (If it’s to plant temptations for them to prove their morality by resisting, why should their victims be collateral damage?) Why would a merciful God be dissatisfied with robbing years of life from a cancer patient and add the gratuitous punishment of agonizing pain? Like the phenomena of physics, the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves.

And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the middlemen. If they don’t, we should not take their dictates seriously. After all, thoughtful people can give reasons why they don’t kill, rape, or torture other than fear of eternal hellfire, and they would not suddenly become rapists and contract killers if they had reason to believe that God’s back was turned or if he told them it was OK.

Theistic moralists reply that the God of scripture, unlike the capricious deities of Greek mythology, is by his very nature incapable of issuing immoral commandments. But anyone who is familiar with scripture knows that this is not so. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. All this was par for the course for Bronze and Iron Age civilizations. Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false.⁴⁵ It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.

Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral. Invisible gods can command people to slay heretics, infidels, and apostates. And an immaterial soul is unmoved by the earthly incentives that impel us to get along. Contestants over a material resource are usually better off if they split it than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal—indeed, it may be a small price to pay for an eternal reward in paradise.

Many historians have pointed out that religious wars are long and bloody, and bloody wars are often prolonged by religious conviction.⁴⁶ Matthew White, the necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.⁴⁷ (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.⁴⁸ The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.⁴⁹ (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)⁵⁰ Defenders of theism retort that irreligious wars and atrocities, motivated by the secular ideology of communism and by ordinary conquest, have killed even more people. Talk about relativism! It is peculiar to grade religion on this curve: if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero. And obviously atheism is not a moral system in the first place. It’s just the absence of supernatural belief, like an unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu. The moral alternative to theism is humanism.

Few sophisticated people today profess a belief in heaven and hell, the literal truth of the Bible, or a God who flouts the laws of physics. But many intellectuals have reacted with fury to the “New Atheism” popularized in a quartet of bestsellers published between 2004 and 2007 by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.⁵¹ Their reaction has been called “I’m-an-atheist-but,” “belief-in-belief,” “accommodationism,” and (in Coyne’s coinage) “faitheism.” It overlaps with the hostility to science within the Second Culture, presumably because of a shared sympathy to hermeneutic over analytical and empirical methodologies, and a reluctance to acknowledge that dweeby scientists and secular philosophers might be right about the fundamental questions of existence. Though atheism—the absence of a belief in God—is compatible with a wide range of humanistic and antihumanistic beliefs, the New Atheists are avowedly humanistic, so any flaws in their worldview might carry over to humanism more generally.

According to the faitheists, the New Atheists are too shrill and militant, and just as annoying as the fundamentalists they criticize. (In an XKCD webcomic, a character responds, “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”)⁵² Ordinary people will never be disabused of their religious beliefs, they say, and perhaps they should not be, because healthy societies need religion as a bulwark against selfishness and meaningless consumerism. Religious institutions supply that need by promoting charity, community, social responsibility, rites of passage, and guidance on existential questions that can never be provided by science. Anyway, most people treat religious doctrine allegorically rather than literally, and they find meaning and wisdom in an overarching sense of spirituality, grace, and divine order.⁵³ Let’s look at these claims.

An ironic inspiration for faitheism is research on the psychological origins of supernatural belief, including the cognitive habits of overattributing design and agency to natural phenomena, and emotional feelings of solidarity within communities of faith.⁵⁴ The most natural interpretation of these findings is that they undermine religious beliefs by showing how they are figments of our neurobiological makeup. But the research has also been interpreted as showing that human nature requires religion in the same way that it requires food, sex, and companionship, so it’s futile to imagine no religion. But this interpretation is dubious.⁵⁵ Not every feature of human nature is a homeostatic drive that must be regularly slaked. Yes, people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions that lead to supernatural beliefs, and they certainly need to belong to a community. Over the course of history, institutions have arisen that offer packages of customs that encourage those illusions and cater to those needs. That does not imply that people need the complete packages, any more than the existence of sexual desire implies that people need Playboy clubs. As societies become more educated and secure, the components of the legacy religious institutions can be unbundled. The art, rituals, iconography, and communal warmth that many people enjoy can continue to be provided by liberalized religions, without the supernatural dogma or Iron Age morality.

That implies that religions should not be condemned or praised across the board but considered according to the logic of Euthyphro. If there are justifiable reasons behind particular activities, those activities should be encouraged, but the movements should not be given a pass just because they are religious. Among the positive contributions of religions at particular times and places are education, charity, medical care, counseling, conflict resolution, and other social services (though in the developed world these efforts are dwarfed by their secular counterparts; no religion could have decimated hunger, disease, illiteracy, war, homicide, or poverty on the scales we saw in part II). Religious organizations can also provide a sense of communal solidarity and mutual support, together with art, ritual, and architecture of great beauty and historical resonance, thanks to their millennia-long head start. I partake of these myself, with much enjoyment.

If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case. It’s long been known that churchgoers are happier and more charitable than stay-at-homes, but Robert Putnam and his fellow political scientist David Campbell have found that these blessings have nothing to do with beliefs in God, creation, heaven, or hell.⁵⁶ An atheist who has been pulled into a congregation by an observant spouse is as charitable as the faithful among the flock, whereas a fervent believer who prays alone is not particularly charitable. At the same time, communality and civic virtue can be fostered by membership in secular service communities such as the Shriners (with their children’s hospitals and burn units), Rotary International (which is helping to end polio), and Lions Club (which combats blindness)—even, according to Putnam and Campbell’s research, a bowling league.

Just as religious institutions deserve praise when they pursue humanistic ends, they should not be shielded from criticism when they obstruct those ends. Examples include the withholding of medical care from sick children in faith-healing sects, the opposition to humane assisted dying, the corruption of science education in schools, the suppression of touchy biomedical research such as on stem cells, and obstruction of lifesaving public health policies such as contraception, condoms, and vaccination against HPV.⁵⁷ Nor should religions be granted a presumption of a higher moral purpose. Faitheists who have hoped that the moralistic fervor of Evangelical Christianity might be channeled into movements for social improvement have repeatedly gotten burned. In the early 2000s, a bipartisan coalition of environmentalists hoped to make common cause with Evangelicals on climate change under rubrics like Creation Care and Faith-Based Environmentalism. But Evangelical churches are an anchor faction of the Republican Party, which adopted a strategy of absolute noncooperation with the Obama administration. Political tribalism carried the day, and the Evangelicals fell into line, opting for radical libertarianism over stewardship of the Creation.⁵⁸

Similarly, in 2016 there was a brief hope that the Christian virtues of humility, temperance, forgiveness, propriety, chivalry, thrift, and compassion toward the weak would turn Evangelicals against a casino developer who was vainglorious, sybaritic, vindictive, lewd, misogynistic, ostentatiously wealthy, and contemptuous of the people he called “losers.” But no: Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic.⁵⁹ In large part he earned their votes by promising to repeal a law which prohibits tax-exempt charities (including churches) from engaging in political activism.⁶⁰ Christian virtue was trumped by political muscle.

If the factual tenets of religion can no longer be taken seriously, and its ethical tenets depend entirely on whether they can be justified by secular morality, what about its claims to wisdom on the great questions of existence? A favorite talking point of faitheists is that only religion can speak to the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Science will never be adequate to address the great existential questions of life, death, love, loneliness, loss, honor, cosmic justice, and metaphysical hope.

This is the kind of statement that Dennett (quoting a young child) calls a “deepity”: it has a patina of profundity, but as soon as one thinks about what it means, it turns out to be nonsense. To begin with, the alternative to “religion” as a source of meaning is not “science.” No one ever suggested that we look to ichthyology or nephrology for enlightenment on how to live, but rather to the entire fabric of human knowledge, reason, and humanistic values, of which science is a part. It’s true that the fabric contains important strands that originated in religion, such as the language and allegories of the Bible and the writings of sages, scholars, and rabbis. But today it is dominated by secular content, including debates on ethics originating in Greek and Enlightenment philosophy, and renderings of love, loss, and loneliness in the works of Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, the 19th-century novelists, and other great artists and essayists. Judged by universal standards, many of the religious contributions to life’s great questions turn out to be not deep and timeless but shallow and archaic, such as a conception of “justice” that includes punishing blasphemers, or a conception of “love” that adjures a woman to obey her husband. As we have seen, any conception of life and death that depends on the existence of an immaterial soul is factually dubious and morally dangerous. And since cosmic justice and metaphysical hope (as opposed to human justice and worldly hope) do not exist, then it’s not meaningful to seek them; it’s pointless. The claim that people should seek deeper meaning in supernatural beliefs has little to recommend it.

What about a more abstract sense of “spirituality”? If it consists in gratitude for one’s existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy. But “spirituality” is often taken to mean something more: the conviction that the universe is somehow personal, that everything happens for a reason, that meaning is to be found in the happenstances of life. In the final episode of her landmark show, Oprah Winfrey spoke for millions when she avowed, “I understand the manifestation of grace and God, so I know there are no coincidences. There are none. Only divine order here.”⁶¹

This sense of spirituality is considered in a video sketch by the comedienne Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:

NYE: The Universe. For centuries, humankind has strived to understand this vast expanse of energy, gas, and dust. In recent years, a stunning breakthrough has been made in our concept of what the universe is for.

[Zoom to the Earth’s surface, and then to a yogurt shop in which two young women are chatting.]

FIRST WOMAN: So, I was texting while I was driving? And I ended up taking a wrong turn that took me directly past a vitamin shop? And I was just like, this is totally the universe telling me I should be taking calcium.

NYE: Scientists once believed the universe was a chaotic collection of matter. We now know the universe is essentially a force sending cosmic guidance to women in their 20s.

[Zoom to a gym with Schumer and a friend on exercycles.]

SCHUMER: So you know how I’ve been fucking my married boss for like six months? Well, I was starting to get really worried he was never going to leave his wife. But then yesterday in yoga, the girl in front of me was wearing a shirt that just said, “Chill.” And I was just like, this is so the universe telling me, “Girl, just, like, keep fucking your married boss!”⁶²

A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.

Arguments aside, is the need to believe pushing back against secular humanism? Believers, faitheists, and resenters of science and progress are gloating about an apparent return of religion all over the world. But as we shall see, the rebound is an illusion: the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.

Measuring the history of religious belief is not easy. Few surveys have asked people the same questions in different times and places, and the respondents would interpret them differently even if they did. Many people are queasy about labeling themselves atheist, a word they equate with “amoral” and which can expose them to hostility, discrimination, and (in many Muslim countries) imprisonment, mutilation, or death.⁶³ Also, most people are hazy theologians, and may stop short of declaring themselves atheists while admitting that they have no religion or religious beliefs, find religion unimportant, are spiritual but not religious, or believe in some “higher power” which is not God. Different surveys can end up with different estimates of irreligion depending on how the alternatives are worded.

We can’t say for sure how many nonbelievers there were in earlier decades and centuries, but there can’t have been many; one estimate put the proportion in 1900 at 0.2 percent.⁶⁴ According to WIN-Gallup International’s Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, a survey of fifty thousand people in fifty-seven countries, 13 percent of the world’s population identified themselves as a “convinced atheist” in 2012, up from around 10 percent in 2005.⁶⁵ It would not be fanciful to say that over the course of the 20th century the global rate of atheism increased by a factor of 500, and that it has doubled again so far in the 21st. An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as “not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down from close to 100 percent a century before.

According to an old idea in social science called the Secularization Thesis, irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.⁶⁶ Recent studies confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.⁶⁷ The decline is clearest in the developed countries of Western Europe, the Commonwealth, and East Asia. In Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries, religious people are in the minority, and atheists make up a quarter to more than half of the population.⁶⁸ Religion has also declined in formerly Communist countries (especially China), though not in Latin America, the Islamic world, or sub-Saharan Africa.

The data show no signs of a global religious revival. Among the thirty-nine countries surveyed by the Index in both 2005 and 2012, only eleven became more religious, none by more than six percentage points, while twenty-six became less religious, many by double digits. And contrary to impressions from the news, the religiously excitable countries of Poland, Russia, Bosnia, Turkey, India, Nigeria, and Kenya became less religious over these seven years, as did the United States (more on this soon). Overall, the percentage of people who called themselves religious declined by nine points, making room for growth in the proportion of “convinced atheists” in a majority of the countries.

Another global survey, by the Pew Research Center, tried to project religious affiliation into the future (the survey did not ask about belief).⁶⁹ The survey found that in 2010, a sixth of the world’s population, when asked to name their religion, chose “None.” There are more Nones in the world than Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, or devotees of folk religions, and this is the “denomination” that the largest number of people are expected to switch into. By 2050, 61.5 million more people will have lost their religion than found one.

With all these numbers showing that people are becoming less religious, where did the idea of a religious revival come from? It comes from what Quebecers call la revanche du berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Religious people have more babies. The demographers at Pew did the math and projected that the proportion of the world’s population that is Muslim might rise from 23.2 percent in 2010 to 29.7 percent in 2050, while the percentage of Christians will remain unchanged, and the percentage of all other denominations, together with the religiously unaffiliated, will decrease. Even this projection is a hostage to current fertility estimates and may become obsolete if Africa (religious and fecund) undergoes the demographic transition, or if the Muslim fertility decline discussed in chapter 10 continues.⁷⁰

A key question about the secularization trend is whether it is being driven by changing times (a period effect), a graying population (an age effect), or the turnover of generations (a cohort effect).⁷¹ Only a few countries, all English-speaking, have the multidecade data we need to answer the question. Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians have become less religious as the years have gone by, probably because of changing times rather than the population getting older (if anything, we would expect people to become more religious as they prepare to meet their maker). There was no such change in the British or American zeitgeist, but in all five countries, each generation was less religious than the one before. The cohort effect is substantial. More than 80 percent of the British GI Generation (born 1905–1924) said they belonged to a religion, but at the same ages, fewer than 30 percent of the Millennials did. More than 70 percent of the American GI Generation said they “know God exists,” but only 40 percent of their Millennial great-grandchildren say that.

The discovery of a generational turnover throughout the Anglosphere removes a big thorn in the side of the secularization thesis: the United States, which is wealthy but religious. As early as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on how Americans were more devout than their European cousins, and the difference persists today: in 2012, 60 percent of Americans called themselves religious, compared with 46 percent of Canadians, 37 percent of the French, and 29 percent of Swedes.⁷² Other Western democracies have two to six times the proportion of atheists found in the United States.⁷³

But while Americans started from a higher level of belief, they have not escaped the march of secularization from one generation to the next. A recent report summarizes the trend in its title: “Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back.”⁷⁴ The exodus is most visible in the rise of the Nones, from 5 percent in 1972 to 25 percent today, making them the largest religious group in the United States, surpassing Catholics (21 percent), white Evangelicals (16 percent), and white mainline Protestants (13.5 percent). The cohort gradient is steep: just 13 percent of Silents and older Boomers are Nones, compared with 39 percent of Millennials.⁷⁵ The younger generations, moreover, are more likely to remain irreligious as they age and stare down their mortality.⁷⁶ The trends are just as dramatic among the subset of Nones who are not just none-of-the-abovers but confessed nonbelievers. The percentage of Americans who say they are atheist or agnostic, or that religion is unimportant to them (probably no more than a percentage point or two in the 1950s), rose to 10.3 percent in 2007 and 15.8 percent in 2014. The cohorts break down like this: 7 percent of Silents, 11 percent of Boomers, 25 percent of Millennials.⁷⁷ Clever survey techniques designed to get around people’s squeamishness in confessing to atheism suggest that the true percentages are even higher.⁷⁸

Why, then, do commentators think that religion is rebounding in the United States? It’s because of yet another finding about the American Exodus: Nones don’t vote. In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the populace but 12 percent of the voters. Organized religions, by definition, are organized, and they have been putting that organization to work in getting out the vote and directing it their way. In 2012 white Evangelical Protestants also made up 20 percent of the adult population, but they made up 26 percent of the voters, more than double the proportion of the irreligious.⁷⁹ Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote. Similar patterns apply to populist movements in Europe. Pundits are apt to mistake this electoral clout for a comeback of religion, an illusion that gives us a second explanation (together with fecundity) for why secularization has been so stealthy.

Why is the world losing its religion? There are several reasons.⁸⁰ The Communist governments of the 20th century outlawed or discouraged religion, and when they liberalized, their citizenries were slow to reacquire the taste. Some of the alienation is part of a decline in trust in all institutions from its high-water mark in the 1960s.⁸¹ Some of it is carried by the global current toward emancipative values (chapter 15) such as women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and tolerance of homosexuality.⁸² Also, as people’s lives become more secure thanks to affluence, medical care, and social insurance, they no longer pray to God to save them from ruin: countries with stronger safety nets are less religious, holding other factors constant.⁸³ But the most obvious reason may be reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically literate, they stop believing in miracles. The most common reason that Americans give for leaving religion is “a lack of belief in the teachings of religion.”⁸⁴ We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.⁸⁵

Whatever the reasons, the history and geography of secularization belie the fear that in the absence of religion, societies are doomed to anomie, nihilism, and a “total eclipse of all values.”⁸⁶ Secularization has proceeded in parallel with all the historical progress documented in part II. Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.⁸⁷ American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.⁸⁸ The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.⁸⁹ Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.

However baleful theistic morality may be in the West, its influence is even more troubling in contemporary Islam. No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed by the rest. Muslim-majority countries score poorly on measures of health, education, freedom, happiness, and democracy, holding wealth constant.⁹⁰ All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.⁹¹ As we saw in chapter 15, emancipative values such as gender equality, personal autonomy, and political voice are less popular in the Islamic heartland than in any other region of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Human rights are abysmal in many Muslim countries, which implement cruel punishments (such as flogging, blinding, and amputation), not just for actual crimes but for homosexuality, witchcraft, apostasy, and expressing liberal opinions on social media.

How much of this lack of progress is the fallout of theistic morality? Certainly it cannot be attributed to Islam itself. Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.⁹² Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some of the problems are found in other resource-cursed strongman states. Still others were exacerbated by clumsy Western interventions in the Middle East, including the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, support of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.

But part of the resistance to the tide of progress can be attributed to religious belief. The problem begins with the fact that many of the precepts of Islamic doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic. The Quran contains scores of passages that express hatred of infidels, the reality of martyrdom, and the sacredness of armed jihad. Also endorsed are lashing for alcohol consumption, stoning for adultery and homosexuality, crucifixion for enemies of Islam, sexual slavery for pagans, and forced marriage for nine-year-old girls.⁹³

Of course many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too. One needn’t debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents take them. Like the other Abrahamic religions, Islam has its version of rabbinical pilpul and Jesuitical disputation that allegorizes, compartmentalizes, and spin-doctors the nasty bits of scripture. Islam also has its version of Cultural Jews, Cafeteria Catholics, and CINOs (Christians in Name Only). The problem is that this benign hypocrisy is far less developed in the contemporary Islamic world.

Examining big data on religious affiliation from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel observe that “self-identifying Muslims stick out as the denomination with by far the largest percentage of strongly religious people: 82%. Even more astounding, fully 92% of all self-identifying Muslims place themselves at the two highest scores of the ten-point religiosity scale [compared with less than half of Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals]. Self-identifying as a Muslim, regardless of the particular branch of Islam, seems to be almost synonymous with being strongly religious.”⁹⁴ Similar results turn up in some other surveys.⁹⁵ A large one by the Pew Research Center found that “in 32 of the 39 countries surveyed, half or more Muslims say there is only one correct way to understand the teachings of Islam,” that in the countries in which the question was asked, between 50 and 93 percent believe that the Quran “should be read literally, word by word,” and that “overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land.”⁹⁶

Correlation is not causation, but if you combine the fact that much of Islamic doctrine is antihumanistic with the fact that many Muslims believe that Islamic doctrine is inerrant—and throw in the fact that the Muslims who carry out illiberal policies and violent acts say they are doing it because they are following those doctrines—then it becomes a stretch to say that the inhumane practices have nothing to do with religious devotion and that the real cause is oil, colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, or Zionism. For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.⁹⁷ Within non-Muslim societies, so does mosque attendance (in Muslim societies, the values are so pervasive that mosque attendance doesn’t matter).⁹⁸

All these troubling patterns were once true of Christendom, but starting with the Enlightenment, the West initiated a process (still ongoing) of separating the church from the state, carving out a space for secular civil society, and grounding its institutions in a universal humanistic ethics. In most Muslim-majority countries, that process is barely under way. Historians and social scientists (many of them Muslim) have shown how the stranglehold of the Islamic religion over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has impeded their economic, political, and social progress.⁹⁹

Making things worse is a reactionary ideology that became influential through the writings of the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the inspiration for Al Qaeda and other Islamist movements.¹⁰⁰ The ideology looks back to the glory days of the Prophet, the first caliphs, and classical Arab civilization, and laments subsequent centuries of humiliation at the hands of Crusaders, horse tribes, European colonizers, and, most recently, insidious secular modernizers. That history is seen as the bitter fruit of forsaking strict Islamic practice; redemption can come only from a restoration of true Muslim states governed by sharia law and purged of non-Muslim influences.

Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.¹⁰¹ Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some are intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Some fit into a long history of Western intellectuals execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies (a syndrome we’ll return to shortly). But many of the apologetics come from a soft spot for religion among theists, faitheists, and Second Culture intellectuals, and a reluctance to go all in for Enlightenment humanism.

Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims. Islam is not a race, and as the ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider has put it, “Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.”¹⁰² Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party platform.

Can the Islamic world have an Enlightenment? Can there be a Reform Islam, a Liberal Islam, a Humanistic Islam, an Islamic Ecumenical Council, a separation of mosque and state? Many of the faithophilic intellectuals who excuse the illiberalism of Islam also insist that it’s unreasonable to expect Muslims to progress beyond it. While the West might enjoy the peace, prosperity, education, and happiness of post-Enlightenment societies, Muslims will never accept this shallow hedonism, and it’s only understandable that they should cling to a system of medieval beliefs and customs forever.

But this condescension is belied by the history of Islam and by nascent movements within it. Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a hothouse of science and secular philosophy.¹⁰³ Amartya Sen has documented how the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar I implemented a multiconfessional, liberal social order (including atheists and agnostics) in Muslim-ruled India at a time when the Inquisition was raging in Europe and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy.¹⁰⁴ Today the forces of modernity are working in many parts of the Islamic world. Tunisia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia have made long strides toward liberal democracy (chapter 14). In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the young, and the educated.¹⁰⁵ The emancipative forces that liberalized the West, such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women’s advancement, are not bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.¹⁰⁶

Also, ideas matter. A cadre of Muslim intellectuals, writers, and activists has been pressing the case for a humanistic revolution for Islam. Among them are Souad Adnane (co-founder of the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Humane Studies in Morocco); Mustafa Akyol (author of Islam Without Extremes); Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar (founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement); Sarah Haider (co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America); Shadi Hamid (author of Islamic Exceptionalism); Pervez Hoodbhoy (author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality); Leyla Hussein (founder of Daughters of Eve, which opposes female genital mutilation); Gululai Ismail (founder of Aware Girls in Pakistan); Shiraz Maher (author of Salafi-Jihadism, quoted in the introduction to part 1); Omar Mahmood (an American editorialist); Irshad Manji (author of The Trouble with Islam); Maryam Namazie (spokesperson for One Law for All); Amir Ahmad Nasr (author of My Isl@m); Taslima Nasrin (author of My Girlhood); Maajid Nawaz (coauthor, with Sam Harris, of Islam and the Future of Tolerance); Asra Nomani (author of Standing Alone in Mecca); Raheel Raza (author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad); Ali Rizvi (author of The Atheist Muslim); Wafa Sultan (author of A God Who Hates); Muhammad Syed (president of Ex-Muslims of North America); and most famously, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Malala Yousafzai.

Obviously a new Islamic Enlightenment will have to be spearheaded by Muslims, but non-Muslims have a role to play. The global network of intellectual influence is seamless, and given the prestige and power of the West (even among those who resent it), Western ideas and values can trickle, flow, and cascade outward in surprising ways. (Osama bin Laden, for example, owned a book by Noam Chomsky.)¹⁰⁷ The history of moral progress, recounted in books such as The Honor Code by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests that moral clarity in one culture about a regressive practice by another does not always provoke resentful backlash but can shame the laggards into overdue reform. (Past examples include slavery, dueling, foot-binding, and racial segregation; future ones targeting the United States may include capital punishment and mass incarceration.)¹⁰⁸ An intellectual culture that steadfastly defended Enlightenment values and that did not indulge religion when it clashed with humanistic values could serve as a beacon for students, intellectuals, and open-minded people in the rest of the world.

After laying out the logic of humanism, I noted that it stood in stark contrast to two other systems of belief. We have just looked at theistic morality. Let me turn to the second enemy of humanism, the ideology behind resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thinking, even fascism. As with theistic morality, the ideology claims intellectual merit, affinity with human nature, and historical inevitability. All three claims, we shall see, are mistaken. Let’s begin with some intellectual history.

If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).¹⁰⁹ Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn’t matter: the lives of the mass of humanity (the “botched and the bungled,” the “chattering dwarves,” the “flea-beetles”) count for nothing. What is worthy in life is for a superman (Übermensch, literally “overman”) to transcend good and evil, exert a will to power, and achieve heroic glory. Only through such heroism can the potential of the species be realized and humankind lifted to a higher plane of being. The feats of greatness may not consist, though, in curing disease, feeding the hungry, or bringing about peace, but rather in artistic masterworks and martial conquest. Western civilization has gone steadily downhill since the heyday of Homeric Greeks, Aryan warriors, helmeted Vikings, and other manly men. It has been especially corrupted by the “slave morality” of Christianity, the worship of reason by the Enlightenment, and the liberal movements of the 19th century that sought social reform and shared prosperity. Such effete sentimentality led only to decadence and degeneration. Those who have seen the truth should “philosophize with a hammer” and give modern civilization the final shove that would bring on the redemptive cataclysm from which a new order would rise. Lest you think I am setting up a straw Übermensch, here are some quotations:

I abhor the man’s vulgarity when he says “What is right for one man is right for another”; “Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you.”. . . . The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine.

I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.

Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. . . . Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.

A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed. . . . A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary. The annihilation of the humbug called “morality.” . . . The annihilation of the decaying races. . . . Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type.

That higher Party of Life which would take the greatest of all tasks into its hands, the higher breeding of humanity, including the merciless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical, would make possible again that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state will grow again.¹¹⁰

These genocidal ravings may sound like they come from a transgressive adolescent who has been listening to too much death metal, or a broad parody of a James Bond villain like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. In fact Nietzsche is among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, continuing into the 21st.

Most obviously, Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to the First World War and the fascism that led to the Second. Though Nietzsche himself was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite, it’s no coincidence that these quotations leap off the page as quintessential Nazism: Nietzsche posthumously became the Nazis’ court philosopher. (In his first year as chancellor, Hitler made a pilgrimage to the Nietzsche Archive, presided over by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister and literary executor, who tirelessly encouraged the connection.) The link to Italian Fascism is even more direct: Benito Mussolini wrote in 1921 that “the moment relativism linked up with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to Power.”¹¹¹ The links to Bolshevism and Stalinism—from the Superman to the New Soviet Man—are less well known but amply documented by the historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal.¹¹² The connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and the megadeath movements of the 20th century are obvious enough: a glorification of violence and power, an eagerness to raze the institutions of liberal democracy, a contempt for most of humanity, and a stone-hearted indifference to human life.

You’d think this sea of blood would be enough to discredit Nietzsche’s ideas among intellectuals and artists. But he is, incredibly, widely admired. “Nietzsche is pietzsche,” says a popular campus graffito and T-shirt. It’s not because the man’s doctrines are particularly cogent. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, they “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.’” The ideas fail the first test of moral coherence, namely generalizability beyond the person offering them. If I could go back in time, I might confront him as follows: “I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve heroic glory by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, Shorty. And I might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless, that is, you can think of a reason why I should not.”

So if Nietzsche’s ideas are repellent and incoherent, why do they have so many fans? Perhaps it is not surprising that an ethic in which the artist (together with the warrior) is uniquely worthy of living should appeal to so many artists. A sample: W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene O’Neill, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and (with reservations) George Bernard Shaw, author of Man and Superman. (P. G. Wodehouse, in contrast, has Jeeves, a Spinoza fan, say to Bertie Wooster, “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) Nietzschean values also appeal to many Second Culture literary intellectuals (recall Leavis sneering at Snow’s concern with global poverty and disease because “great literature” is “what men live by”) and to social critics who like to snigger at the “booboisie” (as H. L. Mencken, “the American Nietzsche,” called the common folk). Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.¹¹³

As Mussolini made clear, Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists everywhere. Disdaining the commitment to truth-seeking among scientists and Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche asserted that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and that “truth is a kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.”¹¹⁴ (Of course, this left him unable to explain why we should believe that those statements are true.) For that and other reasons, he was a key influence on Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.

Nietzsche, to give him credit, was a lively stylist, and one might excuse the fandom of artists and intellectuals if it consisted of an appreciation of his literary panache and an ironic reading of his portrayal of a mindset that they themselves rejected. Unfortunately, the mindset has sat all too well with all too many of them. A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla calls tyrannophilia.¹¹⁵ Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-honored principle “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” But many were Nietzschean. The most notorious were Martin Heidegger and the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who were gung-ho Nazis and Hitler acolytes. Indeed, no autocrat of the 20th century lacked champions among the clerisy, including Mussolini (Ezra Pound, Shaw, Yeats, Lewis), Lenin (Shaw, H. G. Wells), Stalin (Shaw, Sartre, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Brecht, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pablo Picasso, Lillian Hellman), Mao (Sartre, Foucault, Du Bois, Louis Althusser, Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin), the Ayatollah Khomeini (Foucault), and Castro (Sartre, Graham Greene, Günter Grass, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and, as we saw in chapter 21, Susan Sontag). At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milošević, and Hugo Chávez.

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.

Though Nietzsche’s romantic heroism glorifies the singular Übermensch rather than any collectivity, it’s a short step to interpret his “single stronger species of man” as a tribe, race, or nation. With this substitution, Nietzschean ideas were taken up by Nazism, fascism, and other forms of Romantic nationalism, and they star in a political drama that continues to the present day.

I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase “intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.”¹¹⁶ Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.”¹¹⁷ And Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals. Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary—not in the common left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their original, technical senses.¹¹⁸

Fascism, from the Italian word for “group” or “bundle,” grew out of the Romantic notion that the individual is a myth and that people are inextricable from their culture, bloodline, and homeland.¹¹⁹ The early fascist intellectuals, including Julius Evola (1898–1974) and Charles Maurras (1868–1952), have been rediscovered by neo-Nazi parties in Europe and by Bannon and the alt-right movement in the United States, all of whom acknowledge the influence of Nietzsche.¹²⁰ Today’s Fascism Lite, which shades into authoritarian populism and Romantic nationalism, is sometimes justified by a crude version of evolutionary psychology in which the unit of selection is the group, evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest group in competition with other groups, and humans have been selected to sacrifice their interests for the supremacy of their group. (This contrasts with mainstream evolutionary psychology, in which the unit of selection is the gene.)¹²¹ It follows that no one can be a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world: to be human is to be a part of a nation. A multicultural, multiethnic society can never work, because its people will feel rootless and alienated and its culture will be flattened to the lowest common denominator. For a nation to subordinate its interests to international agreements is to forfeit its birthright to greatness and become a chump in the global competition of all against all. And since a nation is an organic whole, its greatness can be embodied in the greatness of its leader, who voices the soul of the people directly, unencumbered by the millstone of an administrative state.

The reactionary ideology is theoconservatism.¹²² Belying the flippant label (coined by the apostate Damon Linker as a play on “neoconservatism”), the first theocons were 1960s radicals who redirected their revolutionary fervor from the hard left to the hard right. They advocate nothing less than a rethinking of the Enlightenment roots of the American political order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the mandate of government to secure these rights, are, they believe, too tepid for a morally viable society. That impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immorality, including illegitimacy, pornography, failing schools, welfare dependency, and abortion. Society should aim higher than this stunted individualism, and promote conformity to more rigorous moral standards from an authority larger than ourselves. The obvious source of these standards is traditional Christianity.

Theocons hold that the erosion of the church’s authority during the Enlightenment left Western civilization without a solid moral foundation, and a further undermining during the 1960s left it teetering on the brink. Any day during the Bill Clinton administration it would plunge into the abyss; no, make that the Obama administration; no, but for sure it would happen during a Hillary Clinton administration. (Hence Anton’s hysterical essay “The Flight 93 Election,” mentioned in chapter 20, which compared the country to the airliner hijacked on 9/11 and called on voters to “charge the cockpit or you die!”).¹²³ Whatever discomfort the theocons may have felt from the vulgarity and antidemocratic antics of their 2016 standard-bearer was outweighed by the hope that he alone could impose the radical changes that America needed to stave off catastrophe.

Lilla points out an irony in theoconservativism. While it has been inflamed by radical Islamism (which the theocons think will soon start World War III), the movements are similar in their reactionary mindset, with its horror of modernity and progress.¹²⁴ Both believe that at some time in the past there was a happy, well-ordered state where a virtuous people knew their place. Then alien secular forces subverted this harmony and brought on decadence and degeneration. Only a heroic vanguard with memories of the old ways can restore the society to its golden age.

Lest you have lost the trail that connects this intellectual history to current events, bear in mind that in 2017 Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord under pressure from Bannon, who convinced him that cooperating with other nations is a sign of surrender in the global contest for greatness.¹²⁵ (Trump’s hostility to immigration and trade grew from the same roots.) With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for neo-theo-reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt. I have already discussed the absurdity of seeking a foundation for morality in the institutions that brought us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the European wars of religion. The idea that the global order should consist of ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states is just as ludicrous.

First, the claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human nature) is bad evolutionary psychology. Like the supposed innate imperative to belong to a religion, it confuses a vulnerability with a need. People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation-state, which is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia. (Nor could it be a race, since our evolutionary ancestors seldom met a person of another race.) In reality, the cognitive category of a tribe, in-group, or coalition is abstract and multidimensional.¹²⁶ People see themselves as belonging to many overlapping tribes: their clan, hometown, native country, adopted country, religion, ethnic group, alma mater, fraternity or sorority, political party, employer, service organization, sports team, even brand of camera equipment. (If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a “Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group.)

It’s true that political salesmen can market a mythology and iconography that entice people into privileging a religion, ethnicity, or nation as their fundamental identity. With the right package of indoctrination and coercion, they can even turn them into cannon fodder.¹²⁷ That does not mean that nationalism is a human drive. Nothing in human nature prevents a person from being a proud Frenchman, European, and citizen of the world, all at the same time.¹²⁸

The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide. This explains why Eurasia, rather than Australia, Africa, or the Americas, was the first continent to give birth to expansive civilizations (as documented by Sowell in his Culture trilogy and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel).¹²⁹ It explains why the fountains of culture have always been trading cities on major crossroads and waterways.¹³⁰ And it explains why human beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.

Finally, let’s not forget why international institutions and global consciousness arose in the first place. Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness. It didn’t turn out so well. It’s particularly wrongheaded for the reactionary right to use frantic warnings about an Islamist “war” against the West (with a death toll in the hundreds) as a reason to return to an international order in which the West repeatedly fought wars against itself (with death tolls in the tens of millions). After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

As for the lamentation among editorialists that the Enlightenment is a “brief interlude,” that epitaph is likelier to mark the resting place of neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and related backlashes of the early 21st century. The European elections and self-destructive flailing of the Trump administration in 2017 suggest that the world may have reached Peak Populism, and as we saw in chapter 20, the movement is on a demographic road to nowhere. Headlines notwithstanding, the numbers show that democracy (chapter 14) and liberal values (chapter 15) are riding a long-term escalator that is unlikely to go into reverse overnight. The advantages of cosmopolitanism and international cooperation cannot be denied for long in a world in which the flow of people and ideas is unstoppable.

Though the moral and intellectual case for humanism is, I believe, overwhelming, some might wonder whether it is any match for religion, nationalism, and romantic heroism in the campaign for people’s hearts. Will the Enlightenment ultimately fail because it cannot speak to primal human needs? Should humanists hold revival meetings at which preachers thump Spinoza’s Ethics on the pulpit and ecstatic congregants roll back their eyes and babble in Esperanto? Should they stage rallies in which young men in colored shirts salute giant posters of John Stuart Mill? I think not; recall that a vulnerability is not the same as a need. The citizens of Denmark, New Zealand, and other happy parts of the world get by perfectly well without these paroxysms. The bounty of a cosmopolitan secular democracy is there for everyone to see.

Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people (including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

The case for Enlightenment Now is not just a matter of debunking fallacies or disseminating data. It may be cast as a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with more artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it farther. The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. It goes something like this.

We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.

Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy—for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.

These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason: intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma, and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.

As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing, and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains, and tremendous peril. But ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.

We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true—true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. We believe it because we have reasons to believe it. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false—as any of them might be, and any could become.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.