Are Liberal Principles Just Godless Versions of Christian Myths?

John Gray’s cheap shot at liberal atheism

John Gray is my kind of old school, existential atheist. His book Straw Dogs delves into some dark, illiberal implications of atheism, those that Nietzsche emphasized and that the “new atheists” downplayed.

For Nietzsche, God’s “death” is a catastrophe, and Gray explores the outer reaches of a nondelusional, naturalistic worldview that’s consistent with atheism. I do the same in my writings.

But one of Gray’s arguments bugs me because of its weakness and cheapness. In Black Mass and especially in Seven Types of Atheism, Gray condemns liberal secular humanism for being a mere incoherent imitation of Christianity or of monotheism. Gray relates some history about how the liberal ideas of progress emerged from sanctimonious Christian theology that the atheist is supposed to have rejected.

Thus, Gray’s heroic atheists are the darker truth-tellers: George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, and Lev Shestov. These are atheists who don’t subscribe to the liberal’s myth of progress, and whose naturalistic mysticism keeps them humble rather than dogmatic and arrogant.

I, too, have questioned the secular concept of progress, and I agree with Gray that there are darkly mystical implications of godless naturalism (such as pantheism which recasts moral values in aesthetic terms, and that treats our technological mastery of the environment as having been eerily foreshadowed by prehistoric animism).

But Gray’s particular criticism of liberal secular philosophy is flimsy. It doesn’t prove as much as he thinks it does.

Gray’s complaints against liberal atheism

Here’s a taste of how Gray makes his case. In Seven Types of Atheism, he calls progress “a Christian myth,” saying “The modern faith in progress began with shifts in Christian thinking.” More specifically, he adds, “The modern myth of progress came into being as a fusion of Christian faith with Gnostic thinking.”

Christians, of course, look forward to Jesus’s return and to God’s final judgment of humanity, which are supposed to happen as prophesied in the Christian scriptures. The world in which God rules over us directly is meant to be infinitely better than the present age, the transition between them being of apocalyptic significance.

Then in the modern period, liberals secularized that process theology. Now it was reason and technology that improve the world, and with each passing generation we approach a secular utopia or a transhuman reckoning — but one couched in natural rather than theistic terms.

Moreover, this progressive view of history, in which the appearances of various prophets are thought to have been steps towards a divine culmination, is supposed to be antithetical to the ancient polytheistic view. “Unlike the dominant view of history in the ancient world,” says Gray, “which recognized improvement but accepted that what had been gained would over time be lost, the modern neo-Christian belief in progress asserts that human life can be made better cumulatively and permanently.”

For instance, says Gray, “A mix of Gnostic and Christian myths shaped Comte’s [atheistic] religion of humanity, and shapes the liberal mind today…Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind — a vision inherited from Christianity.”

That is, Gray suggests, liberals should be humbled — with postmodernists — by the multicultural implications of the world’s godlessness. As Oswald Spengler explained, nature throws up various societies that flourish for awhile and decay and die, like organisms. Yet liberals have even stooped to making a cult out of Wokeness, condescending dogmatically to conservatives as though liberals have divine right on their side, when their atheism entails there’s no such transhistorical vantage point.

In general, then, as Gray says at one point, “monotheism gave birth to liberal values.” The implication is that liberal atheists should be ashamed of themselves because their worldviews are as incoherent and as preposterous as monotheistic religions. Liberal atheists haven’t overcome the influence of what their philosophy is targeting, so instead they should be as radical as the more pessimistic atheists.

Cultural borrowing and the common facts of evolution and history

Again, I agree roughly with the conclusion, but I don’t think it follows from Gray’s premises. So what if liberal secular philosophers borrowed from Christian theology? Christian theologians borrowed from Judaism and from Zoroastrianism, in turn. And those earlier religions were influenced by older, now extinguished cultures. There’s no such thing as perfect cultural originality. If you’ve lived in a cave your whole life, uninfluenced by anyone else, you’d hardly be able to talk or to think, so your cultural output would be like an animal’s.

Gray himself notes offhandedly that “Dualistic visions in which the world is a battleground of good and evil forces originate in the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which helped shape Manicheism, the original faith of St Augustine, and thereby informed Christianity.”

And that’s right, but Gray doesn’t realize how this weakens the point of his establishing connections between liberal atheism and Christianity. Indeed, the historical connections go all the way back to shamanic animism and beyond. Likewise, as Buddhists would say, there’s no such thing as just a leaf. A leaf is part of a plant, which comes from a seed, which is thus part of a continuous process reaching back hundreds of millions of years in the evolution of life, and which is dependent still on the formation of the solar system and so on and so forth all the way back to the Big Bang.

Gray’s criticism, then, is juvenile. Yes, our concepts and theories are limited by these historical contexts. We simplify because we can’t hold the whole picture in our head, and we can’t learn everything by ourselves, so we draw on information from our environment. Early modern secularists in Europe had only Christendom to draw from.

The question is whether the liberal synthesis, say, of Christian and Gnostic ideas stands as an independent, emergent construct. If it does, it would be churlish to commit the genetic fallacy here, as Gray seems to do when he reminds his reader that everything in the history of liberalism was preceded by Christianity.

For instance, as I quoted, Gray says the pagan polytheists thought in terms of historical cycles, not of linear, cumulative, and permanent progress. This strawmans liberalism, though, since a liberal isn’t likely to insist that secular progress is irreversible. Of course there are setbacks, but the humanistic faith is that if we recognize our fragility while realizing we can solve some of our problems by cooperating and steering clear of harmful superstitions, life can steadily improve in certain respects, from one generation to the next.

Whether pagan polytheists understood this isn’t so important since what Gray misses is the possibility that in turning not just to Christianity but to the Greco-Roman traditions which underlay the dying-and-rising-god mytheme, early modern philosophers picked up on an implicit, independent sense of progress. That sense is historical rather than theological.

Thus, there was some progress from the Stone Age to the Age of Civilization. And there was measurable progress, as the early modernists saw, from the medieval period in Europe to modernity, thanks to scientific skepticism, the rise of capitalism and democracy, and the rule of law. Certainly, this progress isn’t entirely objective in that it depends on the ideals we have in mind. Nor is this progress universal since plenty of people haven’t benefitted much from it. Perhaps some of the liberal’s rationales for it are bogus, too.

But the meaning of certain trends in biological and social evolution is clear enough, and it has nothing to do with monotheistic theology. On the contrary, monotheists and early modern liberals alike are trying to make sense of the same world, speaking their different languages, and pursuing their various agendas. We speak of the facts in our limited ways, and one such fact — as I’d put it, as an existential, cosmicist, pantheistic, pragmatic, neo-Kantian atheist — is that personhood evolved from animality, and people eventually learned to build civilizations which were founded on the anti-natural ambition to tame the wilderness.

Is that ambition foolish and futile? In the long run, probably it will prove to be so. But would Gray prefer to live like an animal in a cave or like a civilized man of letters in twenty-first century London? Let’s not pretend we can’t see the forest as well as the individual trees. Let’s not just nitpick liberalism.

Progress in our existential situation

Of course there’s progress in history. That progress isn’t objective but is relative to our goals in life. Monotheists didn’t invent the concept of progress. They explained some of the data that confronted them, and they did so in dubious theological terms. Modern liberals confronted the same historic data, and they attempted to escape the discourse of medieval theism. Some secularists may have gone further than others in inventing fresh atheistic vocabularies, as Gray says.

But that’s irrelevant because the Christian/Zoroastrian conception of progress is only a theologizing of the common facts that personhood evolved from animality, and that people learned to build highly artificial civilizations. Christians theologize those facts, and liberal atheists secularize them. We each apply our culture’s conceptions to the evidence at hand, to explain what’s going on and to wrestle with our apparent existential condition.

Would a liberal be wise to think theologically about progress, to make a cult out of certain liberal fetishes for the sake of political correctness? No, probably not. But Gray’s argument that liberalism collapses into embarrassment because this ideology is tainted by its Christian origins amounts to a non sequitur. Liberals needn’t be ashamed of the fact that liberalism emerged in part from a Christian worldview. The shame would be only if liberalism were a thin veneer on what’s essentially still just Christian theology.

If we look at the secular humanism that Gray tries to reduce to monotheism, we see many differences between them. This humanism is explicitly atheistic, for starters. Yes, the secular humanist replaces God with us, and perhaps religion with science and art, while looking forward to technological and social advances (or novel, stimulating developments). But people are relatively godlike, compared to animals. And the monotheistic concept of God derived, in turn, from Jewish and Greco-Roman philosophies (such as Philo’s and Plato’s), which in turn may only have reified human mentalities.

That is, there’s an existential condition common to all civilized people. Part of that condition is our use of instrumental reasoning. We have goals and we think about how to achieve them, as we model our environment, test possibilities, and use logic and our character to sort through options and the relevance of background factors.

Who’s to say, then, that both the Judeo-Christian/Zoroastrian and the modern liberal’s concepts of progress don’t derive from instrumental reasoning itself, or from the structural relationship between means and ends, between technique and the achievement of a goal? If so, both the theologies and the philosophies would be based on the facts of our common, existential condition that we face as civilized people. And if that’s the case, it hardly matters that liberals borrowed some glosses from their Christian predecessors.

That notational observation of Gray’s pales next to the sort of existential reckoning he claims to admire in his atheistic heroes. Schopenhauer and Spinoza, for example, tried to adopt a transhistorical perspective, as they imagined how life looks from a cosmic vantage point, as it were. There’s no such ideal vantage point, but only religious, philosophical, or artistic approximations of it. Likewise, there may be no objective, divine progress, no perfect way in which history is supposed to unfold since there’s no plan behind life’s evolution.

But there are better and worse ways of completing the pattern we see in prehistory and history. And those ways can be evaluated not just according to our parochial cultural mindsets, but from a more sober, existential perspective. In the big picture, given the likely unconscious purpose of civilization, what would be best for our species to do?

One advantage liberalism has over Christianity is that liberalism is closer to that existential perspective since it’s more compatible with scientific objectivity. Scientists objectify the facts so we can exploit them to advance socially and technologically, as dictated by liberal ideals about our rights to liberty and happiness. Christianity is alien to that modern Faustian, Luciferian outlook, which is to be expected since the scientific and industrial revolutions happened along with those of liberalism (capitalism and democracy), all of which amounting to what we call “modernity” in relation to the ancient and medieval periods of civilized history.

Dismissing liberalism, then, as an imitation of Christianity is just a cheap shot.