Mario Bunge
Secularism, an essential component of
modernity, is retreating the world over, especially in the Islamic
countries and the United States. This is ironic, given that the
Islamic countries (along with India) were models of religious
toleration at a time when the West was ruled by Christian fanatics
and the United States was the first secular state in the history of
civilization.
Can the present regressive movement
continue? Of course it can, and more so in the United States than in
the rest of the world. American fundamentalists control the
government, which is in cahoots with the corporate world, and they
face no opposition to speak of.
If the United States continues to turn
back the clock, it will cease to be at the head of science,
technology, and industry—the pillars of modernity. A nation
increasingly committed to ideologies invented several millennia ago
cannot survive the intellectual competition of the European Union, or
even of countries that, like Japan and China, do not engage in
military adventures and instead devote an increasing fraction of
their gross domestic product to research and development.
Such a redistribution of the world’s
brainpower may be all to the good in the eyes of the humanist, who
wishes the whole of humankind to benefit from modern culture. But it
should worry the right-wing American nationalist, because nowadays
there can be no brawn without brain. Indeed, military and economic
power require much science and technology, neither of which can
prosper without free inquiry.
Will secularism survive? Who knows? Can
secularism survive? Of course, and it will if leaders stop imitating the Bible-thumping
preachers of the Colonial period and learn what Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson knew: that to be modern a nation must be secular and
dedicated to the pursuit of happiness through science and technology.
Mario Bunge is a Laureate of the
International Academy of Humanism and a chaired professor at McGill
University, Montreal. He is the author of fifty books and five
hundred papers on physics and philosophy, among them Foundations of
Physics (1967) and Treatise on Basic Philosophy, in eight volumes
(1974–1989).
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