On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Kevin Robert Dean wrote:
> > But nationalism was the original secular humanism, no? And in its
> > origins it was consciously meant to be a substitute religion -- to
> > replace god with society, and the the worship of god with the worship
> > of the nation.
>
> I used to work for the Council for Secular humanism (just as a simple
> mailroom boy) and I don't ever remember nationalism in the history of
> SH....Where are you getting that from?
Rousseau, the French Revolution, the Left Hegelians -- you know, the originators of secularism. The foundations of secularism and modern nationalism were laid at the same time and are intertwined. The flipside of arguing that God is the alienated essence of (collective) man is that society is the reality of God -- it is omniscient and omnipotent, it creates us in its image and we are a part of it. And most of the time since the French revolution, when people have said "society" they have meant national societies. So when the old guard argued, as it inevitably did, that the decline of religion must necessarily mean a decline in morality, secularists argued that wasn't true because society would become the new source of morality -- as in fact it had always in truth been. Durkheim was perhaps the most explicit on this point. But he was codifying arguments that were deeply a part of 19th century nationalist thought, which saw national liberation and unification as moral regeneration, and the nation as an object of revererence.
Now of course that has all faded into dead common sense. We no longer have to prove that life without religion is possible. We no longer think that there is anything paradoxical in saying morality is based on society; it seems obvious to us. But there is certainly no contradiction between flag waving nationalism and secular humanism. It's rather a case of it getting back to its roots -- a kind of secular humanist fundamentalism :o)
Michael