Last month’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia have been a sad reminder as to how racial hatreds can quickly spring up within a society. White supremacists – with their hatred of non-whites – have rightly drawn condemnation from across the political spectrum, both in the United States and abroad. Racial bigotry is always an ugly sight and can easily bring to mind terrible crimes committed during the twentieth century in the name of establishing so-called racial purity.
And yet in the midst of all the media chatter and indignation, how often do we hear any discussion of why racial bigotry is wrong? More often than not, it’s just assumed that it’s universally wrong to treat someone differently on the grounds of their skin colour. But I want to ask the question, in societies where a secular worldview underpins almost the whole narrative of human life, why is racism wrong?
I guess that if we asked people on the streets of London or New York, they would most likely say that it’s self-evident that racism is wrong: “Every decent person knows it”, we’re likely to hear. But the fact is that when we think about the almost universally-accepted account of human origins present in secular societies, it’s far from self-evident that racism is wrong. Let me explain what I mean.
The cornerstone of the secular worldview is the rejection of the supernatural in any form; there is only the natural. Matter, time, energy and chance; that’s about all there is. No God, no devil; no heaven, no hell; no angels; no demons; no word from God and so no final right and wrong; no good and no evil. And what are human beings in this worldview? Highly evolved pond-slime, here by chance and who in the end only exist to survive and pass on their genes. What’s the destination for humanity and the whole universe? Extinction. Nothing of what we do will finally last.
In our generation, the leading evangelist for atheism is the Oxford professor, Richard Dawkins. For the majority of the twentieth century it was the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Listen to what Russell wrote in A Free Man’s Worship (1903):
“That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
For all the talk of optimistic humanism that we hear from today’s outspoken atheists, Russell’s words are an honest and realistic appraisal of the secular worldview. But here’s the question that we must ask of our secular friends and colleagues, “How do you get morality out of that world and life view?” Or to put it another way, “How do you get to the view that anything is right and wrong rather than just personal preference?” And in the context of race, “How can we say that treating all human beings as having equal value is right and not to do so is wrong?”
Let’s ask another question. In the secular worldview, why are we humans here? The given answer is that we’re just an accidental collection of atoms who happen to be the lucky ones who’ve hit the jackpot and survived. And how have we survived? Because your and my ancestors were the fit ones, who crushed the weak and used their resources for their own benefit. Now, in this worldview, isn’t it logical to say that some people are going to get hurt and it hasn’t anything to do with right and wrong? Big fish will eat small fish to survive and the small fish will die. Big trees will grow tall to survive and the small trees will not get the sunlight they need and they also will die. Men will use their physical strength to control women and use them for their advantage. And in the context of this blog post, some races will assume dominance over others in order that they may survive at their expense. In the end what we’re dealing with is only atoms jostling for power. Some make it and some don’t. That’s just the way it is. A worldview full of hope? Not according to my reckoning.
So what explains the secular society’s concern for morality? Why do we have moral expectations of human beings when we expect none of other collections of atoms, be it lions, trees or rocks? What explains our moral outrage at racism? Why do most of us think it right that we should share our goods with the poor and use our power to assist the powerless? Where does the good that we do come from and why do we seek to do it in an impersonal and amoral world? Why love your neighbour rather than eat him?
There seems to me to be only one serious answer to that question; memory. People in the West are living with the memory of Christian morality. Human societies have a remarkable ability to transmit values from one generation to the next and although most people in the West no longer attend church (and often call themselves non-religious), in some senses they take for granted much that has been established in the past by people who believed the Bible and set in place a Judeo-Christian framework.
Today most people assume the correctness of the dignity of all people regardless of skin colour or gender. The reason for this is that they’ve inherited the idea that all people are made in the image of God. Most hold to the virtues of compassion and kindness and assume the wrongness of corruption and power which tramples the weak. These things don’t come from collective wisdom nor from the collective will to survive. Instead they come from the Biblical narrative which was sown into European nations in years gone by. The secularist who defends these ideas is really a thief. He’s stealing from Christianity to defend his position and perversely in many cases claims he invented them.
It’s this memory of what Christianity has bequeathed to us that we need to get across to the millennium generation, who – according to surveys – seem to have little understanding about these things at all. And we need to explain to them the disintegration that will inevitable come if we fail to understand and – more importantly – rediscover the heritage that’s been left behind by our God-fearing ancestors. We extinguish our Christian memory at our peril.
The man who – perhaps surprisingly – understood this most clearly was the Christianity- despising philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In his book, The Antichrist (1888), Nietzsche argued that if a person still believes in pity, in compassion, in assisting the weak and sharing power with him then the reality is that he or she is still a Christian. I suppose more accurately we might say that he/she is still thinking as a Christian. Nietzsche knew that such virtues had come into Europe from Christianity. He also understood what the eventual impact of European society abandoning God would be: it would be the end of morality and the triumph of the powerful over the weak. He celebrated this destination; most of us would not.
Title Photo: By Anthony Crider – Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61769434
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2017-09-04. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.