Humanism's false hope

This is a good review of a piece at Salon.com::

In order for Enlightenment Humanism to realize its dreams, it must wield state power, because the state is the means of human organization in Modernity. And various forms of it have wielded state power, from Naziism to Soviet Communism to Liberal Democracy. Lind quotes both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt as convinced believers is Darwinian evolution, comparing their 100-year-old confessions with the unwillingness of today's Republicans to confess much of anything other than a literal reading of Genesis as factual truth (as opposed to poetic truth). But Lind fails to mention that both Wilson and Roosevelt were also strong believers in Social Darwinism. Indeed, 100 years ago, people did not believe in Darwinian evolution without believing in Social Darwinism. They were a bundled pair. And that was Darwinism in power.

And the Liberal Church -- the church which surrendered to the truth claims of The Enlightenment -- has been the chaplain of Humanism in action, chaplain to the state, muddling a theology of the Kingdom of God from the promises of the Enlightenment and the ability of industrialization to create wealth never before seen in human history. Human beings became good enough to create the Kingdom of God and welcome Jesus upon his return. So the Liberal churches have abandoned an understanding of human beings as grounded and trapped in their sinfulness and needing that relationship with God in order to relate in love with each other for a tawdry and sentimental anthropology grounded in the hope that, once freed of superstition, human beings would become good enough -- on their own -- to be less selfish and cruel and more altruistic and self-sacrificing. Less like monkeys, more like ants.

Considering the fruits of various Enlightenment thinking -- the French Revolution, Marxism and such -- one would think we could say observation has proven the Humanist theory of social organization to be a failed experiment. But since pursuing such utopian dreams provides opportunities for power (which, in our fallen, sinful state is irresistable to many), the experiment never quite seems to get abandoned...