Pierre Manent and the Threat of Humanitarianism

Pierre Manent is widely recognized as one of the most insightful political philosophers writing today. In an ever-growing corpus, he has deeply considered liberalism (without succumbing to either adulation or undue hostility), the nation-state, modern democracy, and the nature of the EU, with constant attention to the “depoliticization” of Europe, as the self-governing citizen is increasingly sidelined in a postnational, postreligious, technocratic Europe. More recently, Catholic themes have figured prominently in his work, including studies of natural law and of Pascal, and the introduction of what he calls “the Christian mark” of the European nation, all in an effort to recall the enduring significance of Europe’s founding religion to his contemporaries.  

More pointedly, Manent is one of the most incisive defenders of “man, the social and political animal,” as well as of the Christian understanding of the imago Dei against the effort to subvert and replace both of these constituent foundations of Western civilization with the “religion of humanity.” The phenomenon itself first came to his attention in the post-1989 European scene, as a concomitant to the then-victorious notion of “democracy.” Since then, Manent has tracked its rise to hegemony over the continent, regularly analyzing its nature and works. He speaks of a Europe “sleepwalking through history,” with dire prospects in sight unless it regains a minimal awareness of “the instinct for political existence.” Intellectually and spiritually, Manent places special emphasis on the high human drama of metánoia, of conversion, common to the classical and biblical traditions of the West and among its greatest contributions to mankind. In stark contrast, a self-adoring—that is, smug and self-satisfied—humanity has no need to cultivate the soul in any rich or significant way.

These critical observations point to the scope and sweep of the religion of humanity. It falsifies political reality and impairs the intellectual and spiritual life of human beings. As the newest version of the oldest temptation of human beings to make ourselves gods, it simultaneously wars against the citizen and the believer and the two cities in which he finds his fulfillment. The French Catholic political philosopher is therefore duty-bound to subject this false faith to critique. While the treatment of this ersatz religion eventually requires a good deal of focused intellectual and political history, Manent begins where Socrates and Aristotle began: with dominant or received “opinion.”

In his foreword to Daniel J. Mahoney’s 2018 book The Idol of Our Age, Manent writes:

Under the blanket term “humanitarianism,” Professor Mahoney encapsulates a pervasive and authoritative opinion that is the single most powerful factor in the shaping of our public and private thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is an opinion that commands and forbids, inspires and intimidates: it is a ruling opinion. I would summarize it in the following way: Peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind; conversely, its fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence is the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances.

This view of the natural condition of mankind is joined with a progressive view of history by European elites, who maintain that the current European Union is the embodiment and avatar of humanity’s simply natural vocation. Assuredly, this view encounters resistance, including from those who simply open their eyes, which must be dealt with. 

“Commands and forbids, inspires and intimidates”: As the list of verbs indicates, the opinion itself is very active, and in a multitude of ways. Indeed, it is fanatical in its injunctions and instruments of enforcement:

According to this public philosophy, we see, we must see, we can only see human unity, or at least humanity in the process of unification. But if we claim to see what we do not see, if what is visible and what is visibly fragmented do not arrest our gaze, and if, on the contrary, we believe we are seeing the invisible unity of humanity, then we are indeed part of what we can only call a religion, part of what I am happy to call, following others, the religion of humanity. . . . To force someone to believe what he does not see—is this not a definition of fanaticism, and particularly of religious fanaticism?

As Manent points out, the full panoply of social ostracization, language policing, “hate speech” legislation, the outlawing of “Islamophobia,” two-tiered justice, and social media censorship are increasingly the secular instruments and inquisitorial tools of this mandated religion.  

Humanitarianism—the view of a self-enclosed, naturally harmonious humanity—has deep roots in early modern political philosophy and in the French Enlightenment’s desire to “écrasez l’infâme,” as Voltaire famously put it—to crush the “infamous thing” that was the Catholic religion. A half century later, the founder of the religion of humanity, Auguste Comte, “expressed in a particularly striking way the total substitution of the new humanity for the old Christianity.” With Comte, humanity becomes its own religious object; it defines itself by the recognition and adoration of itself. Gratitude before the Most High was replaced by various perverse efforts at human self-deification that, alas, are still very much with us.

This virtually reconciled humanity is necessarily connected by certain emotional forces. This is because “every human association is paired with a motive principle, with a moral wellspring.” Charity is the Church’s; shared “principles of justice” and “civic friendship” are the civic community’s. The religion of humanity seeks to replace both. 

In the eighteenth century, Rousseau identified pity or compassion as the bond that overcomes divisions among human beings, including those sown by modern philosophy itself, with pity or compassion replacing the demanding requirements of Christian charity. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the democratic sentiment par excellence was “the sentiment of human resemblance” or similarity, which could lead to a soul-numbing and homogenizing democratic pantheism. After 1989, that democratic possibility exploded.

Like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Manent points out the obvious, namely that this view of a unified and harmonious humanity is itself the distinctive idea of only a part of humanity, one that fails to see the rest of humanity as it is, as well as the reality within its own borders. It is not an idea that is remotely shared by the Chinese, Indians, or the Muslim world, to say the least. Even, or especially in Europe, Muslims tend to live in “spiritual and social autarky” or isolation, with deleterious civic and cultural consequences we witness every day.

As far as the Church is concerned, Manent writes, “It is very important to recognize in contemporary humanitarianism [its] character as a fully developed religion, which makes it a competitor and, to a certain extent, the adversary of the universal religion par excellence which is Catholicism.”

This is something the “official” Church used to know but has now largely forgotten. Catholicism has rivals and even enemies, and Catholics must be able to identify them, especially those rivals that ape it and have infiltrated it to some imponderable extent. In this connection, Manent’s critical dissection of Pope Francis’s quasi-humanitarian reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Fratelli Tutti is both instructive and disturbing. 

While there is sometimes some overlap between the dictates of charity and the deeds of secular compassion, the two must be clearly distinguished, so that Catholics avoid confusing the two and, worse, adopting the normative stance and values of the religion of humanity. What must always be kept in mind is that “the Catholic Church can hardly recognize the supreme authority of unredeemed humanity, considered separately from its Creator and Redeemer.”

Manent’s writings can serve as a much-needed spur to recovering an authentic Catholic self-understanding that appreciates humanitarianism as a rival and implacably hostile secular religion all its own.

---

Image by ROMUALD MEIGNEUX/SIPA