The Myth of Secular Neutrality

On the Loss of Secular Mystique

Everything changed for me when American cities were burning in 2020. It wasn’t the burning so much as the hypocrisy of the experts. For months, Americans had been subjected to the unlawful suspension of their civil liberties and we were continually lectured that it was due to “the science”, “expert opinion” and the need to protect poor ol’ grandma. But as soon as there was an opportunity to exploit a tragic death to throw a grenade into race relations, all in support of progressive political interests, the supposed “science” and “experts” were suddenly transformed, like lizard people, into apparatchiks, brazenly working in service to the progressive cause. Magically, racism was declared a greater risk than Covid, and so long as your protesting and burning and looting was useful to progressives, the prior suspension of your civil liberties was lifted. Not so much for anyone else.

It wasn’t the George Floyd issue or the Covid issue individually that changed everything for me. It was how the confluence of these two events revealed that, whatever it was the American government was up to, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual welfare of all Americans; nothing to do with science; nothing even to do with the neutral application of real expertise. It became impossible to avoid the conclusion that the so-called expert class - at least the ones with their hands on the levers of Washington power - were neither expert nor particularly scientific. They had flown their actual colors and anyone paying attention could not unsee it. It changed…everything.

Of course, these events were quickly followed by conspicuous non-enforcement for the burning of pro-life clinics, while engaging in over-the-top enforcement directed at such threats as middle-class fathers who showed the temerity to pray at abortion clinics. What’s going on here is not really that the embedded progressives who dominate government really intend to arrest everyone on the other side. They lack the resources. The point is to psychologically condition Americans until they believe that they cannot afford to exercise their civil rights. From Jack Phillips to Donald Trump, the law-fare being run by progressives is less about winning those cases than about publicizing the cases so that other non-progressives will think twice before exercising their own civil rights, or doing anything that has a practical political impact that is negative for progressives.

The reason the left is in such dither over Elon Musk and X/Twitter is that Elon has somewhat undermined their scheme to inflate the cost of civil rights beyond affordability for regular people. As it happens, the richest man in the world can afford civil rights even at their presently inflated price, and his $44 billion purchase of Twitter covered the costs for millions of others besides. And progressives hate him for it.

Hilary Clinton’s famous remark, referring to millions of Americans as “deplorables”, was not misspoken but was truly reflective of a prevalent view held by the progressive elite regarding much of American society. Since Covid, they have become increasingly open with the extent to which they hold their fellow citizens in contempt. Here we have Nancy Pelosi, in a recent Oxford Union debate with Winston Marshall, explaining how Americans’ commitments to civil rights (“guns” - 2nd amendment, “God”, 1st amendment) “cloud” our receptivity to progressive arguments that she alleges are really in our own best interest.

Just this past week, two geriatric climate fascists snuck into the British library with hammer and chisel and tried to destroy the Magna Carta, one of the most foundational documents for civil rights in all of history. It contains one of the earliest known outlines for establishing the rule of law and individual rights. I myself have had the privilege of gazing into that very display case. There are many other treasures of Western culture on display in that room as well.

The hammer and chisel were needed to break through the glass case which held that invaluable treasure. The natural response to this kind of effrontery is, of course, to be outraged at the old ladies’ stupidity and malevolence. But today,

Mary Harrington

, in her inimitable way, reframed the event:

“What if the boomers are accidentally right here, and the best thing in our current political crisis would be breaking the glass to retrieve England’s constitution of last resort”

Ms. Harrington’s reframing hints at a poignant conceptual model for understanding what is actually going on in America’s own political crisis. It goes something like this:

There is a constitution. It enumerates our civil rights. It is on display and we can look at it. We can admire it. We can even praise it.

But it is a relic of history and we just can’t actually have it.

So the cost of exercising any actual civil rights, those which run afoul of progressive goals, is being intentionally inflated beyond all affordability. Progressives know exactly what they are doing.

The radical partisanship of the government bureaucracy, brazenly on display in 2020, unmasked the ideal of secular neutrality to reveal only a delusion. There can be no secular neutrality because no such thing exists. Every so-called expert operates within a moral framework of some kind. Whether the framework is right or wrong, there exists, nevertheless, some axiomatic moral assumptions upon which the alleged experts are operating.

I’m afraid that secularism may be many things, but neutral can never be one of them.

The problem, of course, is that placing power into the hands of so-called government experts has always been sold to the public on the very basis of experts being politically and morally neutral. But the Covid tyranny and BLM riots of 2020, followed by the now commonplace and habitual persistence of American prosecutors offering lenience to progressives, while throwing the book at conservatives, has unveiled secular neutrality for the mirage that it actually is.

This past week

Holly MathNerd

wrote a sharp and trenchant post entitled “The Disappearance of Secularism”. In her post, she ponders the recent and repeated phenomenon of high profile media personalities making public confessions of their Christian faith. I have pondered the same phenomena in one of my own posts, although my own ruminations were over the preference these high profile converts have shown for high church manifestations of Christianity rather than, say, non-denomination evangelicalism.

When I saw the title of Holly’s post, I was immediately interested in reading her take. I’m a subscriber of Ms. Mathnerd’s Substack and find I am sympathetic with many, though not all, of her views. Interestingly, she concludes the recent surge of Christian conversions is due to the loss of confidence in secularism as providing any sustainable basis for civil rights.

COVID revealed the truth. I do not have any rights at all. Nor do any of you. What we have are privileges, and they are dependent on one thing only. If, at any time, people with PhD after their name are willing to interpret data in a way that justifies taking our privileges away, then they will be gone…The fundamental axioms of the world I thought I lived in — the things I didn’t question, didn’t doubt, didn’t consider debatable — were all shown to be fiction.

Indeed.

Holly goes on to observe that the lack of any sort of accountability for the harm inflicted by the “experts” on millions of innocents - no one in government has suffered any kind of consequences at all - only confirms for her that we have no rights at all, only privileges.

If there had been any kind of reckoning — Nuremberg 2.0, prosecutions, etc. — then maybe I could have gotten some of my faith in those things back, to some extent. If some redemptive process had occurred, then it might have been possible to integrate the events of COVID into a new normal that wasn’t so horrifying.

I feel compassion for Holly, because though her confidence in secular neutrality has been blown to smithereens, she nevertheless has, so far at least, been unable to find her own way back to a Christian faith. She admits that she would like to, but there are obstacles, she says, that she finds in her way.

I have, myself, done a lot more reading and exploring than I used to, questioning my atheism and trying very hard to talk myself into faith. It didn’t work, but I tried very hard. I know other people, including one friend I’ve discussed this with many times, who have done the same. We’ve all been reading C.S. Lewis and even praying occasionally, hoping someone is listening, though we’ve no reason to believe anyone is doing so.

The reality that she and the rest of us face, of course, is that absent a transcendent basis for rights, the very idea of rights is illusory — a mere ephemeral artifact of whoever happens to hold power in the passing moment. The Marxist analytical lens, that all relationships are nothing more than power dynamics, is actually kind of true if God is not real. The implications for ideals like justice and human rights are dire in the absence of any explicitly transcendent basis for them. I think many of these high profile Christian conversions are due to a growing realization that the congenial benefits of civil rights that the West has enjoyed are entirely an artifact of Christian ideas.

And some things that should not have been forgotten, were lost. - JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

In the West, we are so accustomed to having Christian assumptions silently inform our thinking about human rights that we forget just how much water Christianity has been carrying for us, lo these thousands of years. (See the meme at the top of this post.) Alas, if God is not real, then rights can never be anything more than contingent privileges, doled out to their friends by capricious experts and self-important bureaucrats.

There is some morbid comic irony in the way that the mask came off the government’s own malevolence at the very same moment they were forcing the rest of us to don masks of our own. It’s bad enough to be mistreated by one’s own government. But one gets the impression that we are also being laughed at.

Western governments have been playing a dangerous game of “let’s pretend” with the myth of secular neutrality for one hundred years at least. In 2020, the secular chickens began coming home to roost.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

- Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings