What is it about?
This is the last chapter of my book The Treachery of Realities (Brill, 2025) which targets the contemporary atmosphere of lies, post-truths, and alternative facts. Previously, we had no reason to think humanity was about to have its dinosaur moment; we could be confident of surviving for millennia. It now seems that humanity's future might be a matter of decades, given the variety of existential threats we face, from climate change and asteroids to robots and AI. We are not going to save ourselves driven by faith, belief, hopes, prayers, and wishes in an atmosphere of science deniers. What is required is an investment in a renewed and re-energized secular worldview, guided by the sociological imagination and opposed to conventional reasoning and action.
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Why is it important?
In an era of converging ecological and political existential threats our policies are still dominated by the physical sciences and technology "fixes" that contributed to this crisis in the first place. We need to base our policies on the social sciences not only for their methods and theories but for their capacity to guide the uses of the physical sciences and technology.
Perspectives
Conflict and deadly competition are considered a natural, God-given way of life. This is at the root of the existential crises we are now facing. We are not going to solve these crises with hopes, wishes, prayers, the myth of individualism, and science denial. If we have any chance of recovering compassion, community, and solidarity it rests on the cooperative mutualism (anarchism as understood by Peter Kropotkin) found among our primordial ancestors and in a variety of historical episodes. I consider whether the evolutionary characteristic of humans as the most radically social of the social species can be reconstituted. The reality we are faced with is frankly grim. If there is any chance that we can survive our contemporary era of crises it will depend on whether we can recreate on a global scale what the Polish workers created in the shipyards of Gdansk in August of 1980 – Solidarność.
Dr Sal Restivo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Secular Humanist Worldview: Prologue to Anarchy, March 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004721579_013.
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