Introduction

Climate change, poverty, war. The biggest problems facing the modern secular world are getting bigger all the time. Mountains of literature detail what needs to be done but it remains undone. The governments of our modern democracies fail to achieve it, and perhaps do not intend to.

This book breaks the most sacred taboo of secular society by arguing that the problem lies with secularism itself. This is the principle that religious belief can be permitted in private but must be excluded from public debate about what society should be like and how governments should govern. There were good reasons why it came about, but the long-term effect is disastrous. By denying any moral authority higher than humanity, at least on public matters, it leaves the ruling classes as the decision-makers not only on what we do but on what we ought to do. What they want becomes right by definition. Being humans, just as flawed and selfish as the rest of us, they view the world's problems through the lenses of their own vested interests. Until we admit — publicly, not just behind church doors — that there are better ways of doing things, we shall continue to destroy ourselves and our children's future.

Being different from each other, we want different things. If a society believes there are no answers except the ones we think up for ourselves, there is no reason for supposing we shall ever agree on what should be done. We are trapped in endless conflict. If, on the other hand, a society believes there are right answers that transcend the desires of any one group of people, it has reason to believe that consensus on the right answers is worth looking for. In the process a consensus may develop about some of the wrong answers: torture, or slavery, or genocide. Progress becomes possible.

The biggest problems we face are well known. The most urgent is environmental destruction. Scientists have been drawing attention to the damage done by human activities since the nineteenth century, and their concerns reached popular awareness in the 1960s. Species are now being driven to extinction at the fastest rate for 65 million years. Soil is being lost as deforestation and over-farming turns topsoil into dust that gets blown away by the wind. Non-renewable energy resources like oil are being used up at an increasing rate. The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture poisons the soil. Industrial processes pump poisons into air and water. All these are major threats to human well-being and our future. Yet scientific observers of environmental change have been telling us that they are overshadowed by the greatest threat of all, climate change, as greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere in ever-greater quantities.

Vested interests in the old ways work hard to prevent change. Transnational corporations award lavish grants to scientists willing to deny that climate change is caused by human activities. The continuing focus on economic growth leads to the impression that the main environmental problem is access to energy supplies. What governments tell us is possible is nowhere near what environmental scientists tell us is necessary.

Much the same can be said of poverty. At the end of the Second World War many governments set out to ensure basic provision for their populations. The British Welfare State was designed to provide everyone with good housing, food, health care and a guaranteed minimum income. To achieve it high taxes were imposed on the rich. In response to opposition, however, high taxation was gradually supplemented, and then replaced, by economic growth. Governments came to see it as their task not to create jobs and provide incomes, but to manage the economy so as to achieve these aims indirectly. Economic growth has become the dominant aim of governments. Because governments focus on the size of the economy, not its distribution, even the most extreme destitution is consistent with growth. There is much evidence that the quality of life is best in more equal societies, not in the richest ones, but it is the economy that governments measure, not the quality of life.

Militarisation continues apace, despite all attempts to restrain it. After 'the war to end all wars' Europeans, horrified at the destruction of the First World War, produced a generation of pacifists determined to turn their backs on military conflict. It was not to last. The League of Nations proved a failure as governments jockeyed to secure advantages against each other, with blatantly unfair results. After the Second World War a successor organisation was established, the United Nations. Again the populations on both sides longed for peace, but again governments jockeyed for advantages against each other. The Cold War began. Both sides piled up so many nuclear weapons that the entire population of the world could have been obliterated many times over. Some couples felt it would be irresponsible to bring children into the world since an early death by radiation sickness would be their inevitable fate. When the Cold War ended, around 1991 when the USSR was disbanded, there were over 65,000 nuclear warheads in the world. Since then the stockpile has decreased but still stands at 17,000. An alien from outer space might have asked whether it would have been better to learn how to live together in peace before we learned how to split the atom.

It seemed that the West had won and the USA was the only remaining superpower. However this did not bring in an era of peace. The flight of refugees is now greater than ever since the Second World War. With a few honourable exceptions most governments are determined to keep them out, even if it means sending them back to a certain death. It is one thing to believe, like John Pilger in his speech of March 2016, that 'a world war has begun', another to recognise that despite all the self-congratulation about modern progress with its science and technology, we have not learned to live in peace. Losers often learn lessons: winners rarely do. Steven Pinker has argued that over the millennia violence is gradually decreasing. The last few decades have not provided evidence for his thesis.

So we live at a time of competing crises. Countless publications tell us the things we need to do, but we do not do them. The most determined attempts to solve one only make another worse. Naomi Klein describes our present situation:

Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model...