Dispatches from Deena Stryker
Ten years ago, no one in the West would have seriously questioned the future of secularism. But apparently, that situation represented the apex of an arc leading from roughly the nineteen-twenties. During that short century, belief in God declined while sexual freedom rose to unquestioned supremacy, its only detractors being ‘old-fashioned’ religious types blind to the values of individual freedom and flowering.
Other cultures down through time have honored the body and its appetites, but they did so without falling prey to the exigencies of money. In the United States, even before the advent of the cyber world, advertising powerfully influenced attitudes toward sex. While Freud helped men accept that women should have orgasms, Madison Avenue convinced women to purchase all sorts of products so orgasms would happen, transforming the female body into a symbol for every kind of achievement.
From there it was but a small step for homosexuals to come out of the closet, just as AIDS began to threaten the lives of its male practitioners. It’s probably fair to say that the desperately colorful campaigns demanding that the dreadful illness be acknowledged and that science find a cure, heralded a much more expansive attitude toward sex. The pink bonnets who demonstrated after the election of Donald Trump were demanding continued access to abortions, the shattering of the glass ceiling in business and politics, and access to gender-related bathrooms for the LGBT community.
For a US religious right that rejected this entire project, the Trump campaign was a shot in the arm, but while all news is local, processes are more roundabout. In Europe, the left campaigned to force Muslim women to uncover themselves on beaches in order to conform to the local culture, while the New Right found an unexpected ally in the Russian President in their conviction that ‘multiculturalism’ cannot work, and that it is not too late for a revival of separate but equal religions across the globe to include the West, a development that can only hearten America’s religious right.
A recent Times article titled Moscow Cozies up to the Right, could have just as aptly been titled The US Right Cozies up to Moscow, since it reveals the American religious right’s admiration for Vladimir Putin. Its expectation of Armageddon and resulting support for Israel, could conceivably be replaced by support for Russia as the leader of a world-wide reaction against religion-trashing modernity.
In the nineteen-sixties, growing alienation had spawned an American ‘counter-culture’, that tried to turn the so-called ‘developed’ world toward recognition of the ancient wisdom that persisted in its ‘backwaters’. Inevitably, their efforts failed: the West doubled down on sex as commodity — very different from the counter-culture’s spontaneous hedonism which at its best is a form of communication.
Russian policies in support of the family are accompanied by legislation against homosexual propaganda aimed at minors (although not, as is commonly reported in the US, against homosexuality itself), and Vladimir Putin’s attitude toward religion differs from the American religious right in another way. While encouraging Russians to re-embrace their Orthodox Christian tradition, like the European New Right, he unequivocally supports every faith, seeing religion as a bulwark against the “degeneracy of the West”, and believing that the failure of multiculturalism will ultimately foster a flowering of separate but equal religions across the globe.
While secularism, backed by science, is an attractive way for the mind to view the world, when the body and its appetites are subjected to commercial and political goals, mind and spirit are degraded. God as a white-bearded man on a heavenly throne is not coming back, but the notion of sacredness is. In my book A Taoist Politics I argue that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as encompassing the entire living world is, if we are to save the planet. A retreat from modernity’s sterile ‘anything goes’ brings morality back to both individuals and the polity — perhaps even allowing the developing world to hold on to its Gods.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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“Ten years ago, no one in the West would have seriously questioned the future of secularism.” Yes, I agree. I happen to have edited a secular magazine for over 10 years and knew Prof. Paul Kurtz personally, although for a short time. “But apparently, that situation represented the apex of an arc leading from roughly the nineteen-twenties.” Again, correct. American secularism as institutionalized in the two main organizations–The American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry–has failed to live up to its significant social and political potential and is now declining. I am tempted, for the first time, to offer… Read more »
Please do, Robert!
Thanks, Deena. The topic may or may not be of much interest now that we have to deal with the horror of American neocons/militarists gone berserk. But if I have at least one interested reader—you—I will be glad to continue on this track. To set the stage, let me quote my post (with a couple of minor additions) on the Common Dreams blog in 2011: (In response to “The False Equation: Religion Equals Morality” by Gwynne Dyer) “Very sensible, “kivals” (who suggested that “some version of secular humanism” should be promoted to replace religious beliefs.”) But there is a problem,… Read more »
In times of darkness you can always count on the god-religions, especially judaism, christianity & islam, to dig in and find more ways to increase membership, wealth and power, offering as they do false hope without substance or merit, false sanctuary to those who suffer along with the never ending quest for dominance and supremacy. The secular humanist movement in the USA lacked substance and spirituality. It is nothing less than the dominion religions without all the rituals and myths, but without a sound uniting foundation for moral progress, progress which must include not just humans, but also animals. With… Read more »
“The secular humanist movement in the USA lacked substance and spirituality. It is nothing less than the dominion religions without all the rituals and myths, but without a sound uniting foundation for moral progress, progress which must include not just humans, but also animals.” Indeed. As editor of a secular humanist magazine, I coined the term “ecohumanism” to promote reverence not only for human life but animal one, as well, as you say. But the US secular humanist establishment was not interested. It seems that many, if not most, secular humanists have actually convinced themselves that man is “the measure… Read more »
I have grown weary of people who claim to promote reverence for life, then speak of ecoterrorism, and insist that hunting is a sustainable means of preserving nature and respecting animal lives. Derrick Jensen comes to mind. When I speak of reverence for life, I speak of a completely cruelty free lifestyle that precludes the slaughter of any animal and does not condone sustainable hunting. Reverence for life comes from the concept of AHIMSA, which is complete non-violence to any living being. When I first heard of secular humanism, with organizations such as good without god etc, I hoped for… Read more »