There is a path of truth open to human beings to which nihilists and fascists appear blind and which many humanists have ignored.
Humanism originated during the 18th century European Enlightenment. Although its roots go way back to ancient Greek and Roman civilization, our modern form of Humanism has a clearly Enlightenment flavor to it. In the 18th century, the undeniable success of science and technology in understanding the world and controlling it for human ends, led many to embrace a doctrine of endless progress. What appeared true in the dimension of physics was also transferred to the spheres of human cultural and moral development. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest Enlightenment thinker, not only confirmed the doctrine of human dignity and individual worth; he also saw in the awakening of reason in humanity, the operation of “nature’s aim” toward moral progress.
In his 1786 essay on the “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” reason operates in human life as an “expectation of the future.” It is not “merely the ability to enjoy life’s present moment,” but man’s “superiority” over nature has to do with this role of reason to envision a transformed future so “in conformity with his vocation he can prepare himself in advance for distant ends.” In his 1793 essay on “Theory and Practice,” he formulates the principles of “freedom, equality, and independence” as the foundation of governance for all nations and peoples and predicts a future “universal cosmopolitan nation” for all humanity superseding the present (in his day as well as ours) war system of militarized sovereign states which he characterizes as “barbaric.” Moral growth toward a civilizational “kingdom of ends,” in which all people treat one another with dignity and respect, is integral to nature’s aim.
Out of the work of Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the modern theories of democracy arose. Jefferson’s famous document, directed toward the tyranny of King George, spoke of certain “inalienable rights,” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These ideas became fundamental to humanism. The Humanist movement that developed out of Enlightenment thought was summed up in the Humanist Declaration by the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands in 2002. The document elaborates upon a series of Bullet Points stating that Humanism is ethical, Humanism is rational, Humanism supports democracy and human rights, Humanism combines personal liberty with social responsibility. Humanism is an alternative to “dogmatic religion” and is a “lifestance” aiming at maximum possible fulfillment for individual human persons.
Fascism has never been a serious political philosophy, although during the Nazi regime in Germany the legal theorist Carl Schmitt attempted a theoretical justification for laws dictated by Hitler—laws, he said that transcended the unworkable “normative characteristics” of bourgeois law, and converted it to an instrument of sheer, “practical power,” consistent with Hitler’s dictatorship. Nevertheless, fascism opposes Enlightenment values across the board. It opposes democratic liberalism, socialism, humanism, and communism. It is built around amassing power for a strong leader and a few of his lieutenants.
Fascism requires a myth of purity: racial purity, while supremacy, male domination over women. It consolidates force in government hands and forcibly crushes those of liberal or humanist persuasion. Its very being requires an enemy. Different political persuasions are not treated as legitimate alternative points of view, but as views of an enemy to be crushed out of existence. The mass supporting the leader feels empowered through their absolute loyalty to the fascist ideology and the leadership of the dictator. The role of government is not to protect human rights, or due process of law for citizens, but to wield the supporters into a mass who act as instruments of the absolute power of the leader and the state.
Fascism as an extreme, fanatical ideology, would not have a chance to become widespread if it were not for the power of government invested in the militarized state, which is the governing system that prevails worldwide. Under fascism, the state becomes the cohesive (purified) aspiration of the people through the vision of their leader for greatness, expansion, militarization, and war. The state uses violence to purify its ranks, and it uses violence to eliminate its ideological enemies (democrats, socialists, humanists). The world’s fragmented system of militarized sovereign states helps make fascism possible.
Whereas a constitutional democratic state includes checks and balances, bills of rights beyond the reach of state power, and an expectation of due process of law that protects each individual from an overreach of state power, the fascist state obliterates all with a sheer doctrine of absolute government power, with emoting, obedience, and hate rather than with reason and mutual respect. In a world of isolated, already militarized, “sovereign” nation-states, this remains an ever-present possibility. A truth often noted by democratic theorists: the ever-present possibility that irrational elements can take over the reigns of government to implement by force their racist or other ideological fantasies.
The parallels with what’s happening in the United States during the second Trump administration should be clear to most. Trump is obliterating all checks and balances on his power and bringing the entire federal government under his one-man rule. The federal agencies created to be independent of the President, like the FBI, have become his personal police forces.
He has militarized the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) against immigrants, and the civilian protests of these terrible devastations on life in the big cities (caused by their ravages of human rights and dignity) are cited as grounds for calling up the National Guard and military to police American cities. Fascism concentrates all in the arbitrary will of the police and the military. The ideology of making America great again (MAGA), draws on the history of US imperialism worldwide. There was a time when America had the power to interfere anywhere on the globe, the fable goes, and a newly militarized America will reclaim this greatness and glory. Countries designated as “enemies” of the US beware. We are coming for you. So-called “international law” counts for zero. Trump’s military blows up civilian boats in the Caribbean in direct violation of international law.
The consequences of these developments for the lives of millions of people are, of course, horrific. Fascism has no conception of the dignity of the individual as formulated by the UN Universal Declaration of Rights. The state is understood as an institution of sheer power to be used by whomever is able to control it. There is no moral law, as Kant thought. There is no external Truth to be violated by the brutal use of power to achieve arbitrary ends. The well-known “Postmodern” thinkers who have called truth into question lend themselves, perhaps unintentionally, to this denial of all foundations other than power. Nevertheless, there is a crucial development in human thought that is missing from this narrative.
The history of human thought since the Enlightenment of the 18th century has seen a revolution rarely taken into serious account by the institutions of the sovereign state and its political mirror in the unlimited accumulation of private wealth by persons and corporations. It is a pervasive paradigm-shift across all the sciences, including both the natural and social sciences. This revolution has unveiled the pervasive holism of the cosmos and of all existence. We are part of one another. There is only one humanity that unites us all.
There is a path of truth open to human beings to which nihilists and fascists appear blind and which many humanists have ignored. Philosophically there has been this major conceptual development that supersedes the famous postmodern deconstruction of truth. This conceptual transformation needs to be embraced by all who value human rights and dignity. I do not see recognition of this sea-change in human self-awareness in the Humanist Declaration of 2002. Humanist self-understanding needs to expand to embrace this development if we want to remain true to our commitment to human rights and dignity along with the faith that a decent human future is possible.
The sea-change in philosophical awareness involves the conversion from the “Newtonian” paradigm in which the world was looked at as a collection of “bodies in motion” analyzable into their atomic parts to the “Einsteinian and Quantum Paradigm” which understands the world holistically, that is, there are no separate parts that serve as building blocks but rather a universal principle of order that is immanent in every part and bespeaks the inseparability of that part from the whole. This is a holism that not only makes the part possible but that is reflected within it. Each of us is, so to speak, a “hologram” of the Cosmos. As I have documented in such places as chapter six of Human Dignity and World Order (2024), many thinkers have concluded that the cosmos has come to consciousness of itself in and through us. This is not so distant from Kant’s conception of a moral telos in nature as one might think, for the great insight of the past century in virtually all sciences is that of cosmic evolution resulting in a creature self-aware of the entire process.
The institutions that humanism affirms—in the form of constitutional democracies within sovereign nation-states—are historically outdated and lend themselves to fascist takeover. Fascist takeover requires a separate, militarized nation-state to give it the enemies it needs to galvanize its people—other nations are enemies, those persons who resist or disagree within are “internal enemies.” If human thought ascends to the holism that has been the trumpet-call of each of the sciences, from physics to biology to psychology, and our institutions are converted to reflect this holism, then there will be no place for fascist initiatives to get a foothold. Humanity will unite in a democratic world system that mirrors our cosmic status.
Humanity is One, the Cosmos is One, our planetary Biosphere is One. Most of us have heard these truths many times. Yet we cling to our fragmented institutions (such as the militarized sovereign nation-state or the capitalist system of the unlimited private accumulation of wealth) and wonder why people continue to cry that “God is dead” and “there is no truth.” On the philosophical basis of fragmentation (which informed the Enlightenment through the Newtonian Paradigm), one can never derive a coherent understanding of truth, nor of morality. Truth and morality are restored through a deep conversion to the holism discovered by 20th and 21st century science, which has proved the Newtonian view to be limited and incomplete.
There is no space in this article to cite the vast literature confirming the rise of holism in human awareness of itself and the cosmos. Much of this literature has been written by the scientists themselves. It has been summarized and thematized by top philosophers such as Errol E. Haris, in his book The Restitution of Metaphysics (2000) or by physicist David Bohm in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1983). I have written about the new holistic paradigm in all my books including the one focusing on our planetary environmental collapse, The Earth Constitution Solution: Design for a Living Planet (2021).
Our humanist values are based on correct instincts, so to speak, for we do affirm the dignity of each human being and the need for democratic protection of human rights and personal freedoms. But if our metaphysics is wrong, if we are clinging to an outdated conceptual framework that itself gives rise to fascism, endless wars, and ongoing environmental collapse, we need to wake up and smell the daisies before it is too late. We need to bring our philosophical foundations beyond their Enlightenment roots to their contemporary blossoming in the holistic tree of wisdom and understanding. Let me conclude by quoting Errol E. Harris who, in the above-named book, beautifully sums up what I have been attempting to say in this article.
[Today’s situation] is the sorry aftermath of renaissance science and the Enlightenment, the deleterious consequences of an outmoded scientific paradigm—outmoded, because it has now long been superseded by the physics of relativity and quanta and an organismic biology, whose dominant concept is an all-embracing unity that has reversed and cancelled out the atomism of Newtonianism. The new conceptual scheme has not yet borne fruit in philosophical thinking, nor has it permeated the social structure of our culture. If it were to do so, the holism characteristic of the new physics would revolutionize all our thinking, would produce a new metaphysic and with it a new moral philosophy. Our current problems are global in scope and can be solved only by adopting a global outlook, by instituting global government, and by taking global action. The social and political world, like the biosphere and the physical universe, must be seen as a single whole, and global social solidarity has become the prerequisite of human salvation. (p. xiii)
