Right-Wing triest to DEMAGOGUE "secular," and "humanist" - WITH COMPLICITY of "major media." Just as they once turned "LIBERAL DEMOCRAT" into a SNEER

How Right Wing Ideology Threatens Western Civilization
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-right-wing-ideology-threatens.html


When did “humanism” become a dirty word? When did the recently coined phrase “secular humanism” become a code word with which fundamentalists would attack the separation of church and state, democracy, and the rule of law?

Have you heard that "secular humanists are molesting your children"? According to one pamphlet they are. Have you been told secular humanism is a conspiracy by the filthy rich to pervert American life? That's what some religious leaders claim. They portray secular humanism as an insidious cancer eating away at everything good and decent. Think this "secular humanism" sounds too bad to be true? You're right.
-Matt Cherry & Molleen Matsumura, Myths About Secular Humanism

My education was hardly elitist. Nevertheless, I grew up respecting the "separation of church and state" and considered the issue settled. To borrow a phrase from Churchill, "I got it into my bones" that religious ideology was a matter of personal conviction. I was taught to consider “learning” to be a good thing and often revered positions and convictions with which I differed. I learned to identify “humanism” with the “rebirth of learning” often referred to as the Renaissance.

Given a choice between religion and science, I would have chosen science while respecting the rights of those who chose religion. But with the ascension of Ronald Reagan, a sea change in public attitudes was a fait accompli. My position toward those who would not extend to me the same right or respect hardened considerably. What was behind this seismic shift in public morality? But during the Reagan administration, the religious right deliberately hijacked the term "secular humanism" and made of it a right wing code word.

Strictly speaking, "humanism" is a term most often associated with the Italian Renaissance, specifically, the Plato Academy supported and encouraged by Lorenzo di Medici. It was a revival of the Platonic tradition concurrent with the discovery of new antiquities in Rome, notably the Laocoön, a lasting influence on a young Michelangelo.

I might have been willing to concede certain ambiguities associated with the term "humanism". Humanism was not, after all, a specific dogma like dialectical materialism. Rather, humanism properly denotes a spirit of renewed learning. Amid Medieval Scholasticism, it was a breath of fresh air, a willingness to let free enquiry take us where it will. The opposite of inflexible dogma, it still appeals to the sense of adventure, the sheer delight in the act of learning itself.

Humanism was the dynamic clash of giant egos, intellects, and other larger than life personalities: Leonardo da Vinci, Cosimo di Medici, Michelangelo, Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo di Medici, Machievelli, Pope Julius, Cristoforo Landino, and Ficino's own student, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. So varied are those outlooks, so contradictory, that attempts by the American right wing to pigeon-hole Humanism ring hollow, pathetic and uninformed.

The members of this revived Plato Academy were Michelangelo’s tutors and mentors. Had it not been for these liberal scholars, modern Christianity might be devoid of its many “Platonic” aspects, specifically that there exist abstract and wholly non-spatial, non-temporal objects. God? Or is God simply a specific manisfestation of a pre-existing, "Platonic" ideal.

In a related development, a cache of books have been found in Lancashire. The books date to the time of the Florentine Academy of Lorenzo di Medici. Authors to be found include Ovid and Marsilio Ficino, among others. In a book of verses by Ovid are margin notes believed by some scholars to have been made by a young William Shakespeare. The notes are said to be in a "...Shakespearean hand". If that is true, they date to a time after Shakespeare left Stratford but before registering his first play in London. The margin notes, then, might have been made during Shakespeare "lost ten years".


Platonism had not gone away during the dark and middle ages. Rather, the scholars of the academy in Florence were inspired by the Plato Academy and took its name. It is fair to conclude that the scholars who gathered around Lorenzo di Medici became central to a renewed interest in learning, literally, a Renaissance. Until the heirs of the inquisition recently raised the specter of theocracy in America, one might have hoped that a combination of science and tolerance might usher in a new golden age.


The Renaissance scholars did not call themselves humanists. The term "humanism" is a relatively new invention, coined in 1808 by a German educator, F. J. Niethammer. Because it denoted programs of study not involving science or engineering, it lead inexorably to those studies that are now called “the humanities” -music, art, literature, journalism, philosophy.


More to the point, “humanism" had never opposed religion especially in its Renaissance birthplace, Italy! Characterized by openess and enquiry, it was never insidious or covert. Unlike cults -religious and otherwise -humanism is so broad, so open, so encompassing as to be very nearly meaningless. Among humanists throughout history are to be found both churchmen, scientists, atheists, and monks. Why, then, has this term, coined but recently, become such a cause celebre among the right wing? What’s the beef?


In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the mddle ages and were all those educational disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Humanism was not opposed to logic, as is commonly held, but opposed to the particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism. In point of fact, the humanists actively revised the science of logic.

Humanism, then, really begins during the middle ages in Europe; while the humanist scholars of the Renaissance made great strides and discoveries in this field, humanistic studies were really a product of middle ages. Not only that, the "rediscovery" of the classical world which was the hallmark of Renaissance humanism in reality began much earlier in the middle ages; as Europeans began to see themselves as a single ethnic group with a common origin in the middle ages, the recovery of classical literature, both Latin and Greek, became a concern for all the medieval centers of learning.
--Humanism, Early Modern, Italian Renaissance


A prominent member of Lorenzo's Plato Academy was Pico della Mirandola who claimed to have read every book in Italy. Mirandola, himself, wrote some 900 theses in which he tried to cover “all knowledge”; he offered to debate anyone on those points. Admittedly, the church in Rome considered some of the theses heretical and Pico was imprisoned for his beliefs.


It must be remembered, however, that his work in general has not been considered politically controversial since that time. Moreover, those criticizing “secular humanism” today are primarily the progenitors of “Protestantism” -not the church from which the Protestant movement eventually separated. At last, modern Protestants opposed to “secular humanism” have apparently failed to raise specific objections to specific points, only to the vague idea of “secular humanism” itself. It is, therefore, an extremely vague position unfairly demonizng the very act of investigation and knowledge seeking.


Modern reactionaries often try to equate “secular humanism” with atheism. The charge has the smell of strawman about it. Of course, it is untrue. Wikipedia entries describing an atheistic "secular humanist" movement are suspicious. I doubt such a movement exists. Who are the leaders? Where are the headquarters? Where is the membership, the meeting hall? The very notion of a top down, cult-like "movement" seems at odds with the very spirit of humanism i.e., free enquiry, open mindedness, enlightenment. Humanists are unlikely to go underground, or to wear white sheets and light bon fires. They are unlikely to scurry through alley ways to attend surreptitious meetings. They are not Illuminati. They do not wear robes and pointy hats. They do not chant.


How does one make of freedom a cult? More precisely, how does one make of freedom a cult unless with fascist means and aims? And what of charges that "humanism" is of necessity and definition atheistic? The founders of Lorenzo's Plato Academy most certainly were not if anyone in Florence at the time had been!


At its inception, “humanists” were not merely scholars, they were good Catholics. A perfect example is Michelangelo himself, a devout Catholic to the very end of his life and, likewise, a “humanist”. In fact, the very icon of humanism is his statue of David now in the Academia in Florence.