Prager vs. "Secularism"

Award winning blogger Gus van Horn writes today that

Ann Coulter, when she attempts to pretend that there is no such thing as a "religious right", will sometimes cite hit counts from Lexis-Nexis searches for "religious right" in left-wing media reports. I wonder what a similar search of "secular left" among her own writings (or those of other conservatives) would yield. As I have pointed out here before, "secular" and "leftist" do not mean the same thing, but conservatives are working overtime to make you think they do.

Dennis Prager is certainly one of these conservatives. In his new column entitled Secular Europe or Religious America, there is a continuous, frustrating missing of essentials with regard to the issues involved. It seems that Prager, being a religious person, regards the presence or absence of religion as the primary factor in any historical event or social change, even when the evidence shows that this is not the case. For example, Prager writes:

There is no doubt that Western Europe abandoned religion and opted for secularism largely because of the blood spilled in religious wars, just as it abandoned nationalism because of all the blood it spilled in the name of nationalism during World War I.

However, Cohen and others who argue for a secular society ignore the even heavier price in blood Europe has paid for secular fervor. Secular fervor, i.e., communism and Nazism, slaughtered, tortured and enslaved more people in 50 years than all Europe's religious wars did in the course of centuries.

Is the essential point about communism and Nazism that they were both secular systems? Is that what led to the death of millions? That's what Prager wants you to believe here. Religion is a minor killer in comparison to the secular killers. Prager continues:

This point is so obvious, and so devastating to the pro-secularists, that you wonder how they deal with it. But having debated secularists for decades, I predicted Cohen's response virtually word for word on my radio show the day before I spoke with him. He labeled communism and Nazism "religions."

This response completely avoids the issue. Communism and Nazism were indeed religion-like in their hold on people, but they were completely secular movements and doctrines. Moreover, communism was violently anti-religious, and Nazism affirmed pre-Christian -- what we tend to call "pagan" -- values and beliefs.

I would agree that strictly, communism and Nazism were not religions. However, it is also clear as Prager admits, that they had much in common with religions. To term something as "pagan" is not deny its religiosity, merely its connection to monotheism. But leaving that aside, how do we know it was not the religion-like elements within these two movements, perhaps in conjunction with other factors, that are the cause of the greatly increased deaths that resulted when they came into power? In fact, it was exactly the religion-like elements of mysticism, altruism, combined with collectivism and the fact that these totalitarian regimes were able to rely on the capitalist technological base that had been absent when religious regimes had previously ruled Europe, that led to the mass murders. Numerous otherwise religious Germans supported the Nazis (as Paul Johnson documents in his History of Christianity) and the similarity of many elements of Communist doctrine to Christianity is not at all unknown. Stalin, in fact, studied for the priesthood.

I would not deny that these totalitarian regimes were worse than anything Europe had seen during the Middle Ages. However, they were worse because they were more irrational and collectivist not because they happen to be secular. It is not at all inconceivable that a similarly irrational and collectivist religious regime would commit similar atrocities. Certainly, the Islamic regimes today seem to aspire to such a goal.

On today's Dennis Prager show, Prager read from his weekly column. This week's column makes a very good point about people's talents in art not guaranteeing their having any wisdom in other fields such as politics. Prager wrote: "As a rule, over the last few centuries, artists have been more likely to be morally confused than members of almost any other profession (except academia). " This is certainly quite true, although I can think of a few examples from the field of science that would not imply much wisdom in that profession either, but then Prager did say "except academia." Of course, as usual what I find frustrating, is not Prager's main point, with which I agree but Prager's comment on why this is in fact the case, namely artists secularism. In fact Prager went on to say that he has hardly met any secular people that he concluded possessed wisdom. Apparently by its very nature secularism makes the presence of wisdom highly unlikely. He thought that of course occasionally there were very nice secular people and everybody knows there are many religious "jerks" but wisdom is generally absent among the secular.

First, it is unclear what Prager means by religious "jerks." Does he mean that these people would be wise if it weren't for the fact that they are bad? Why can't I as a secular person say that just as there are religious "jerks," there are secular "jerks" and yet at the same time there are numerous wise people among the secular? There are in fact numerous secular people with a great amount of wisdom. Wisdom is not some special mystic quality that only religious people possess. Two things are necessary for wisdom: Knowledge and thinking. Neither is the exclusive prerogative of either religion or secularism. Once again it is necessary to recall that secularism simply means: "indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). It does not say anything about what in fact one does not reject, is not indifferent to, or does not exclude. Ayn Rand, Sydney Hooke, Karl Marx and Jean Paul Sartre were secular, in fact, they were all atheists. But they didn't have much in common otherwise. Ayn Rand was an Objectivist with all that implies, Sidney Hooke was a Pragmatist, while at the same time being somewhat of a socialist but also an fervent anti-communist, Karl Marx was the father of Marxist Communism, Jean Paul Sartre was an Existentialist and in some moods a Marxist. (By the way, of the four, I would say the first two possessed some wisdom, the last two very little).

My basic point is really that goodness and wisdom are not special to religion at all. Religion is a set of beliefs, customs and instituitions. Over the millenia there have been a wide variety of religions and religious movements some with more wisdom and some with considerably less. It is not so much that the most wise periods were the least religious, but more importantly, the most wise periods were the most rational, whether most people were religious or secular. I believe religion cannot ultimately be as rational as a proper secular philosophy such as Objectivism but unfortunately most secular philosophies ever since Kant have been considerably more irrational than the mainstream religions. It is a common mistake to consider the 20th century as somehow illustrating the hazards of secularism. What it in fact demonstrates are the hazards of irrationalism, an irrationalism that is clearly making its influence felt on both religious and secular people of many varieties.

Prager often accuses people in the secular left of not having any good arguments because they are not exposed to any real criticism of their position. Prager certainly seems to have much experience debating people of the secular left. However, it does seem that he does not have much experience debating people of the secular right and thus he cannot take their views very seriously, much as he accuses that the left cannot take religious views very seriously.

Now on to the meat of the matter. Prager spent the last hour of his program today attempting to clarify his views on the consequences of the decline of Judeo-Christian values and the rise of secular ideas. Specifically, Prager maintained that it is only the belief that man is created in God's image that could be a valid basis for believing in human moral superiority to animals. He further blamed the decline of marriage and reduced desire to have children on secularism. His third example consisted of foreign policy where the morality of the war in Iraq is to be decided by a UN consensus rather than the fixed viewpoints of religion. And finally he pointed to the absence of wisdom at the university, a largely secular institution, which has the distinction of discussing and advocating some of the most foolish ideas in society.

Interestingly Prager insisted he was not trying to convert any atheists or encourage anyone to believe in God. He was simply trying to make clear the consequences of what he termed secularism. He was arguing in effect that no matter what side of the issue one is on, one has to acknowledge that without religious Judeo-Christian values the consequences he enumerated are inevitable. Prager as usual is merely insisting on "clarity."

I will begin by commenting that not all the consequences mentioned by Prager are bad in my view. For example, the issue of whether or not one has children, everything else being equal, is not a moral issue in my view. Context can make it a moral issue in both directions: There are people to whom children would be a great value and there are people who should never have had their children. But human beings as such do not have a moral obligation to have children, notwithstanding the biblical view.

Prager is quite correct on the university as the source and instigator of numerous foolish (and in fact worse than foolish) ideas. They are in fact the source of his two other examples: The consensus view of morality and the moral equivalency of human and animal suffering. The consensus view dates back to the pragmatists such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, who ultimately derive their ideas from Immanuel Kant. The moral equivalency of humans and animals is a view pushed by Princeton's Peter Singer, among others. Singer's utilitarianism traces its roots to the original utilititarians Mill and Bentham who themselves in effect combine the views of Epicurus and Kant. Ultimately the reason for the presence of these ideas is not secularism as such but a long philosophical development of increasing irrationality that started all the way back in times when most people (and universities as well) were still quite religious. It was the errors and absurdities of the various early religious philosophers which then culminated in the errors and absurdities in the later secular ones. There were parallel trends: The increasing secularism and the increasing tower of irrational errors. Initially, various religious ideas were quite properly rejected in the name of reason. Later on as philosophers made crucial mistakes in understanding how reason works and concluded that reason is impotent, they started to reject almost all abstract principles and concepts due to their initial mistakes. Religion was rejected at the same time as reason. This unfortunately doomed proper secular morality until the arrival of novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand's Objectivism in the 20th century.

Today Prager interviewed a representative of PETA. This interview occured because PETA has a campaign comparing the treatment of chickens in industrial farms with the treatment of Nazi concentration camp inmates using images of both with the slogan "the holocaust on your plate." The representative interviewed was the creator of the campaign. Prager followed the interview with a cultural analysis of the United States from the perspective of the increasing influence of secular ideas and declining belief in religious ideas. In terms of the issue raised by PETA, Prager presented his view that the idea of human beings being more valuable than animals derives from a belief that man is created in God's image. He then proceeded to give several examples of what he considers to be the perverse consequences of the decline of Judeo-Christian values and rise of what he termed "secularism" and thus secular values. Among the examples were the decline of marriage and increasing number of people choosing not to have children, the large number of people looking to the United Nations as a moral authority, and the absence of wisdom in general and specifically at the University, the premier secular institution.