Phil Zuckerman, founder of first "secular studies" major at Pitzer College in California

Here is an interesting article from the New York Times about the founding of the first secular studies major in the United States at Pitzer College in California.

The very fact that a program such as this is now being offered for undergraduates signifies Western society’s progress towards becoming aware of its secular worldview (read liberal-democracy, relativism, capitalism, and materialism) as a worldview like any other, structured by metaphysical presuppositions concerning the nature and purpose of reality.  The sense for many decades has been that the secular worldview is simply a neutral perspective, a scientific view of reality, a self-evident way of seeing things, a pluralistic worldview, and thus it makes no sense to treat such ideas as we would other belief systems.  Though much intellectual energy has already been dedicated to this problem in Western thought, it is encouraging to hear the undergraduates will learn to conceptualize and examine this worldview.

Yet, if you read the article closely, you will see that the author attributes to Professor Zuckerman, the founder of the secular studies major at Pitzer, the idea that secularism is “nonbelief.”  In the very next line though, she offers a quotation in which Zuckerman speaks of wanting to study the contents of the secular belief system.  Regardless of whether the slip came from the author or Zuckerman himself, it signifies the depth to which this narrow conception of secularism still shapes our patterns of thought today.

The following excerpt from p. 89 of Century of Light has proved helpful to me in understanding the crystallization of secular society around a materialist worldview, subsequently dressing itself up as presuppositionless :

“Fathered by nineteenth century European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its assigned task.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, impulses to devise and promote any formal materialistic belief system disappeared. Nor would any useful purpose have been served by such efforts, as materialism was soon facing no significant challenge in most parts of the world.”

Materialism, through whatever associated doctrines we approach it, is one of the central issues that Bahá’ís and those everywhere seeking to root their patterns of thought and action in a spiritual view of reality must struggle against today.  As Century of Light describes our situation:

“What they find themselves struggling against daily is the pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of ‘science’, that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness. And for a Bahá’í the ultimate issues are spiritual. The Cause is not a political party nor an ideology, much less an engine for political agitation against this or that social wrong. The process of transformation it has set in motion advances by inducing a fundamental change of consciousness, and the challenge it poses to everyone who would serve it is to free oneself from attachment to inherited assumptions and preferences that are irreconcilable with the Will of God for humanity’s coming of age.”

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