Secularization, the most primitive ideology of humanity

We had asked: is the fact that traces of secularization are found in the earliest times a sign of its universality, or of its being an utterly archaic attitude? To us, of course, this is a question that contains its own answer, an answer that is clear. They present secularization to us, embellished and adorned, as a lofty philosophical formulation, as one of the brand ideologies of Western hegemony. They try to present it as a higher stage of humanity's history of progress and evolution, and to depict it as the end-of-history scene at which all developments in the world will arrive.

There are, of course, those who believe this story. But the truth of the matter, as the obvious answer to our question as well, is that all the meanings loaded onto secularization correspond to the most natural states of humanity in the oldest times of the world. Perhaps from this angle secularization really is universal, but as universal as the disbelief, the jahiliyya, the human inclination to be immersed in worldly desires into which humanity can fall.

Seen from this angle, universality is not in itself a positive value. For evils, like goods, have a universal prevalence and validity. From the moment the human being fell into the heedlessness of deceiving God, of forgetting the hereafter and planting a stake in this world, he began to secularize, and its history is not new at all. This attitude, this inclination, this style goes back to Cain, who fancied that he could deceive God with sacrifices of rotten plants that he offered.

To grant secularization the status of a modern-times discovery and to see it as a sign of the level of knowledge and consciousness humanity has reached is also a new manifestation of the human being's most ancient and archaic pride, his delusion. That it is a pride and delusion is, in any case, plainly manifest in the face of the fact that the claim of secularization is not valid at all.

The truth is that the story that the human being is in an evolution from religiosity to worldliness appears as a quite fantastic fiction in the face of the realities we are living today and throughout history. For throughout history humanity always has undergone, did undergo, and is undergoing comings and goings from religiosity to secularity. There is no irreversible, one-way movement in this regard. We can see it in the history of a society, we can see it as a development at the global level, we can see these comings and goings, these ebbs and flows, or pendulum movements in the life line of an individual as well. The inclination toward the world, or the anxieties or religiosities directed at taking into account what comes after death because one will die, do not constantly direct the life of the world, of a society, or of an individual with the same weight.

Indeed, however much the claim of secularization may be the subject of philosophical embellishment today, it is being rendered void by the opposite developments. Seen from this angle, we see, for example, not a "Secular Age," as is claimed today, but an age that is becoming immersed in religiosity more with each passing day. The world falls more and more every day into religious bigotry.

Across the whole of the European continent, where the highest examples of secularity were first seen, the popularity of right-wing conservative parties is growing ever more. This increase also brings with it the strengthening and becoming effective of religious identity, though perhaps not in proportion to religiosity. On the other hand, the fact that the bringing into existence and securing of the security of Israel, whose sole reference today is the Torah, has taken the international policies of the whole world hostage shows how detached the claim of secularization is from the realities of the world.

Today the course of international relations is being directed by religious causes more than in any period of history. It may be said that the bond between these religious causes and more otherworldly concerns is not as strong or authentic as it seems. Undoubtedly this is a separate matter. There can of course be no objective authority that everyone can accept to decide which religious behavior, feeling, and stance is sound/authentic. Indeed, today religiosity easily forms alloys with ethnic identities and nationalisms, and in the name of a sound religiosity these can be seen as deviations. But even this does not support the claim of secularization; on the contrary, it weakens it.

In the individual's world too, religion, religiosity, and concern for the hereafter come and go. Seen from this angle, pessimistic discourses about the worldliness of Muslims, while serving the narrative that secularization is an evolutionary stage, miss a most basic human condition. The human being is exposed to very different influences, and these influences force him into continual change. In this world no story can be written that closes in advance all the possibilities of what kind of experiences the human being may have to go through. A wave comes and puts the human being through one state after another, and changes the whole spiritual state of societies.

Haven't we witnessed enough of the developments that have made a joke of all the states of self-sufficiency into which modern man has fallen?

How long could humanity, having witnessed these states, have kept up the same self-sufficient condition? Indeed, it did not.

At the very peak of those self-sufficient states, a tiny little virus comes and puts the human being into an altogether different state. In this state, in which the playful and amusing dimension of the world has been seen in the human perception in all its clarity, how can secularization look like a higher stage of evolutionary development?