Secular Animism

I remember when “secular humanism” was seen as the great bugaboo of the religious community. Here’s what it means in my opinion (and it’s what I’ve believed for a long time, before I knew it had a label):

we owe our highest duty of care and compassion to other human beings, because we all know what it’s like to be human, we know what causes anguish physical and mental. So: don’t do that stuff! We don’t need God, nor any religious creed, to so instruct us. It’s the Golden Oldie Rule.

This might surprise you if you’ve read my callous attitude toward, say, border jumpers, but I see no inconsistency. These people seem to have been doing quite well in terms of human comfort in the countries where they were planted: they’re physically fit, they’re chubby, they’re well clothed, they’re breeding. Not everybody lives by the Golden Rule. These people don’t: they want to take away my portion for themselves. The more fortunate among us can’t coddle the rest of humanity nor deny that being human also means being violent, predatory, and avaricious. My personal spin on secular humanism just means I wouldn’t deliberately cause anybody pain and when I see real pain (as opposed to mere discontent) in a fellow human being I will try to relieve the agony.

But—irony of ironies, secular humanism itself is now under attack from the a-religious Left. Formerly, it was ok, in fact it was laudable, to “privilege” humanity as long as you weren’t doing it because God said so. Now that He’s outta the picture, the idea that humanity is in any way distinguishable from other sentient beings is comin’ in for heavy fire. I refer you to Aeon online magazine today, The Joy of Being Animal (M. Challenger).

Like the Dont Farm Bugs piece I wrote about in It’s Alive! A few weeks ago, this pleasant, sweetly reasonable essay gently chides us for our musty Ol’ Enlightenment assumption that we are more than our bodies. And that animals aren’t. We have to give this up now. I’m not sure whether it’s because the Left wants us to treat animals like people, or is prepping us for treating people like animals—meaning the elite will feed people and not torture them, and let them run free-range if possible, but it will keep humanity under control. That’s how we treat animals, and why should we demand any better? We’re just animals too after all!
(At this point I kinda had to laugh cuz it occurred to me that no creature except humans can perform the quite miraculous feat of composing, or even reading, this essay. Has anybody even tried to teach any animal to read? )
I’m totally down with the joy of being animal! Y’know how St Francis called his body “Brother Ass”? Well, I call mine “Sister Jenny” (because his woulda been a jackass and mine a jennyass) and she and I are still pretty much in sync. I can often still assume that “I” and she are one coterminous being, which makes me one lucky old human (so far) because the time comes for everybody when it becomes undeniable that their asses (in St Francis’ terminology) no longer will or can carry out their intentions. You know: “just when you get your head together, your ass falls apart “….

“Secular animism”, as I see it, means we must no longer be kind to non-human creatures upon the paternalistic rationale that mankind are superior beings and we know what’s good for them—but rather that we must be kind precisely because we’re no different than they are—certainly no “better” (I mean: value judgment? Please! That is SO humanocentric! ).

I get a whiff of CRT here. The Left is gearing up to say that it’s “white” to consider animals, including insects and maybe eventually plants, as a resource “we” can exploit. Just like we “whites” , i.e., Euroean- origin people, exploited “brown bodies” of other humans!
I major-league have to laugh at that! As if the great civilizations of the ancient world before whiteness : Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt— (and even the swarthy Greeks and Romans; those dudes just look “white” when represented in marble,) did not ruthlessly exploit the bodies of compatriots of their own race, callously starve them, torture them and murder them en masse for the entertainment of their (dark-skinned) elites, and deprive many of them of the pleasures and comforts of life based on completely arbitrary classifications like caste, irrevocably determined at birth!

Western Civ was not the problem behind these barbaric practices and cultural norms: IT WAS THE SOLUTION.

And one of its main tenets is the uniqueness and value of every individual human, simply because they ARE human.
I ain’t ready to give up on that.