At Spiked Online, Frank Furedi wants to defend humanism against its greatest enemy…”secular misanthropes.”

In this year we have seen attacks on the church-state divide across the entire Western world. The US has banned embryonic stem cell research. In the UK there’s been a trend towards legitimising fringe religions by allowing them to run “faith schools” on their own agenda. And in Australia, where my son’s school can’t afford air-conditioning in its subtropical classrooms, we’ve just heard that federal funds will be available to pay for chaplains in schools. In Nicaragua, the Catholic Church shepherded through laws banning abortion in all circumstances, even when it is to save the mother’s life and there is no hope for a live birth. We have seen school boards across America stacked with religious hardliners trying to force their mediaeval views upon all the children in the community. We have seen the Iraq War degenerate into a Death Race 2000 between a President who thinks God wanted him to invade and a jihadist movement that sells suicide and mass death as a path to Heaven, while a civil war between Muslim sects boils around them. Then there’s Iran, with its neo-Holocaust propaganda and its own home-grown Manhattan Project. There’s the imams’ injunctions against vaccination in Nigeria. The Catholic campaign against effective HIV prevention in Africa. On and on it goes.

But Furedi can see right through that naive facade:

…the real challenge facing humanists does not emanate from organised religion. Probably the most important challenge facing humanism today is the growing culture of misanthropy: the powerful mood of disenchantment with humanity and its potential for playing a positive and creative role. And the sources for this sentiment are mostly secular, not religious.

Who on Earth could he be talking about? Turns out he has the environmental movement and post-modernism in mind. This is a fair description of the so-called “Deep Greens,” who actually do believe the world would be better without people in it, and also the more extreme post-modernists, who seem to think that abysmal despair and moral paralysis is a state to be admired. But it is a complete misrepresentation to apply this tiny margin to the other 99.9% of environmentalism and post-modernism, let alone the entire secular world.

And even if Furedi was right about the philosophy, he’s absolutely wrong about the size of the threat. Where, for instance, is the secular Nicaragua, with the ruling Peter Singer Party forcing through compulsory infant euthanasia laws? Which country has a Deep Green bloc trying to acquire biological weapons for the purpose of eradicating humanity while leaving nature to itself? Where are the post-modern activists infiltrating school boards in order to inflict Derrida and Judith Butler onto schoolkids? Quite simply, these groups don’t exist outside Furedi’s fears. Secular misanthropes are real, to be sure, but they are in no great position of power outside some university humanities departments, where their influence is waning anyway.

And one has to wonder about Furedi when he says this:

Many influential theories – intelligent design, Gaia theory, chaos theory – self-consciously seek to make the human subject marginal. And yet, the humanist critics of religious obscurantism such as creationism are oblivious to these more influential tendencies which regard human beings as just another species.

Now let’s just get this straight. Intelligent design is not a theory, and contra Furedi, is self-consciously about elevating the importance of humanity rather than marginalising it. What’s more, although intelligent design is influential, it is most certainly not so in secular or scientific circles. It is in fact a religious movement camouflaged as a scientific theory to fool non-scientists. The Gaia hypothesis is also not a theory, and Furedi might like to know that it comes in many variations, from the semi-mystical (“the Earth as a whole is a living organism”) to the unexceptional (“any planet with a biosphere will not be in chemical equilibrium”). At least chaos theory is actually a theory, or at least a set of scientific principles, but I am at a complete loss to understand how it marginalises humans any more than, say, atomic theory, thermodynamics, or a train timetable for that matter. Furedi doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One gets the feeling that he has seen What the Bleep Do We Know? and rejected it without understanding why its science was wrong.

I fully agree with Furedi on the folly of Deep Greens and extreme post-modernists. They are a part of the rise of dogmatism. But the secular dogmas are a very small subset of all dogmas, especially if measured by political power. Secular misanthropes are a real problem, to be sure, and regular readers will know well my opinion of them and the pieces I have written against them, but to try to make them the centre of attention is nothing but a distraction. You don’t send your entire army to defend Hatay while the Wehrmacht rolls through Poland.