[MD] Critique of Humanism

[John Carl]

I was introduced to David Eherenfeld's "Arrogance of Humanism" by my logic
teacher at that time, George Sessions, and it was a sneaky move on George's
part, since by assigning it as our problem in logical-analysis, we had to
read it very carefully.  More carefully, perhaps, that most Jr. College
students are inclined, ordinarily.

George was a good philosopher, his thesis had been on Anthropocentricism and
the Environment and his problem with Humanism was ontological -  that it
puts Humans as its source of value.

Eherenfeld's book was about how "Source of Value" is really what religion
has always been about.  How a society decides things, relates to what they
value.  Humanism, by stating value exists only in humans, is actually thus,
according to Eherenfeld, a religious stance.

His criticism of this stance, is entirely empirical - offering us the
evidence of the way things work out when humanistic reasoning is in charge
of society.  Communism, Socialism, Capitalism - all variations of humanistic
thinking.  All reactions against feudal outgrowths of theistic thinking, but
all of them missing a vital point - that humans are part of an organic
whole, and taking out the humans from the rest of nature, and
technologically amplifying their egoistic needs, has a disastrous effect
upon the health of the whole.

He further critiques the "technocracy" the intellectual elite who are
supposedly going to fix all the problems when they occur.  His critique here
is pretty total.  The evidence of man causing more problems with his
"solutions" than he'll ever be able to solve.  Meanwhile, the growth of
technological power in an exponential arc, gives more and more power to
human social systems of control - the academy, the media and the government.


In short, the net effect humanism, multiplied and amplified technologically,
spiral dangerously toward destruction of the planet and natural human
relationships.

And of the two things, I'd say the planet is probably a lot more resilient
than human society, so really it's the destruction of society that is the
looming problem.  All caused by intellectual meddlings that were
ill-conceived and little understood.  This was written in 1978, during the
cold war, and that looming problem lent a certain amount of doom and gloom
to a lot of predictions, but he spent a deal of time talking about one
thing, that did - the effect of evolving bacterial resistance to
antibiotics, and his doomy-gloomy stance about the possibility of nature
evolving viral reactions to our immune manipulations certainly rang a bell
with me when the AIDS virus came to my attention, years later.

That these tools of social manipulation are in the hands now of supposed
do-gooders, I do not find comforting in the least.

The defect in American Humanism is quite simple to explicate from an MoQ
perspective.  Humanism teaches that Quality resides in the subjective horn,
and nowhere else.  It is within us to save ourselves from ourselves.  Which
is ridiculous.  If we could save ourselves from ourselves, we wouldn't need
to be saved in the first place.

Although it's sorta funny, because sometimes it seems to me that since I
don't feel like I need to be saved, other people think I need to be saved
from myself.   But I don't know where you'd even start on that one.  That's
why I'm no Humanist.

I'm a Qualityist.