Liberalism as we know it came of age in the nineteenth century and was a product of the Enlightenment, that skeptical and revolutionary humanistic cultural tradition that emanated from eighteenth century Western Europe which “…promoted the belief that critical and autonomous human reason held the power to discover the truth about life and the world, and to progressively liberate humanity from the ignorance and injustices of the past.” [Smith, p. 54.]
For the humanist-liberal-progressive, man is continuously perfectible, a process whereby he will become progressively better and better. Progress is possible because man is not fallen and does not need redemption. Therefore, humanists assert there is no limit to the perfecting of the powers of man other than the duration of the globe upon which nature has spawned us.
Progressives believe that through human reason alone, truth about life and the world can be discovered and pave the way to liberate humanity from ignorance and injustice. How is this to be achieved? Perfect justice, prosperity, and equality are possible if enlightened elites are given the power to organize and run society according to scientific knowledge about human nature and behavior.
Therefore, in the humanist worldview, the liberation of humanity from ignorance and injustice rests on three assumptions:
• Power must be surrendered to the elites to organize and run society. This is achieved through socialism and big government based on man’s laws.
• Reliance on reason and scientific knowledge alone. There is no room for a supernatural God or His laws.
• Man’s nature is basically good and therefore perfectible.
But the liberal chant of progressivism is a flight from reality. If reality is objective truth (and it is), then progressivism is a lie. The humanistic worldview’s pillars of human reason, scientific advancement, flawed understanding of human nature, and organization of society contrary to man’s innate thirst for freedom crumble under the weight of objective truth.
Denial of the progressive’s assumptions does not mean that those with a Christian worldview are unprogressive or deny the value of progress. They only assert that the source of that improvement must come from God and not man. And this improvement must first occur within the individual as he orders his soul by returning to a right relationship with God. For those that look to those universal truths revealed by the Creator in his creation and the biblical revelations to order their souls, they neither progress nor regress but move to the center. It is a matter of being, not becoming. As like-minded citizens order their souls accordingly, order comes to society.
Those holding the biblical worldview focus on the eternal beyond time—not regressing nor progressing in an ever frustrating march to some unknown, unknowable, and unattainable destination. The progressive labors on the treadmill of time, always moving but never arriving at his destination for the goals of infinite progress always recede into the future and therefore are never attainable. In fact, the goals of such progress are not even identifiable apart from the pliable platitudes of the current conditioners of society. For the progressive, time and matter are paramount, but such are rudderless, temporal, and pass away. However, the things of the highest value rest with eternal truths, and without eternal truths man becomes purposeless.
The progressive may even equivocate that although the goal of perfectibility of the human condition will never be attained (something not admitted), the process of self-improvement is still worthwhile and thereby mankind will become better and better. However, an understanding of human nature and history defeats this assertion. Civilization is an intermittent process with some cultures descending from a high state of organization to dissolution. History is replete with societies that achieved great stature in past eras only to fall to ruin—Egypt, Greece, Venice, and Germany to name a few.
In modern times the humanistic worldview in organizing society continues to fail—the greatest example being the socialistic variant of communism in the twentieth century. There is an intimate relationship between the communist ideology espoused by Karl Mark and humanism with regard to the nature of man, the non-existence of the Creator, and the need for a socialistic form of organizing society run by the elites. Both had their roots in the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy. Marx’s ideas presented in The Communist Manifesto ultimately were responsible for the enslavement of a third of humanity for three-fourths of the twentieth century, the consequences of which were failure, misery, and death unparalleled in the history of mankind. So we see that regardless of the era examined, the humanistic philosophy fails to sustain its promise of infinite progress and perfectibility of man.
To summarize, the humanistic formula for the perfectibility of man is this: the innate goodness of man + progress over time = perfectibility of man. But the fatal flaw of progressivism in achieving perfectibility of man is that he has a fallen nature, and no amount of psychologizing or social engineering will change that truth.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 103, 213, 219-220, 387.
Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 54. Quoted in Ye shall be as gods, p. 213.
