Is Progress a Revolt Against Nature’s Wildness?

A dialogue on the implications of secular humanism

Benjamin Cain
Grim Tidings
Published in
14 min readOct 7, 2024

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Crop of AI-generated image by Sabrina Belle from Pixabay

Here’s a dialogue I had over email with the great writer Pierz Newton-John, on the nature of progress for secular humanists. If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and check out Pierz’s outstanding articles.

Benjamin Cain

Secular humanists have been in the vanguard of modernity, as it were, in standing up for human rights against the oppressive norms of ancient and medieval civilizations. The societies that enshrine human rights are supposed to be “progressive,” whereas those in which an elite minority exploits the majority as though they were enslaved cattle are regressive.

But what could those value judgments mean in the secular context that dispenses with a theistic basis of morality and rights? If there’s no God, can there be any real progress, or is this concept of progress a vestige of an obsolete worldview?

Of course, we can think of progress as subjective, just as we can think of aesthetic judgments about art or food as being dependent on our interests. Indeed, theism makes our purposes similarly subjective since they’d likely derive from God’s intentions.

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