faith

What happens when a humanist loses faith in humanity?

“You’re angry. All the time. For the last year and more, you’ve been so angry and I just don’t understand why. Your life is good, so much better than it has been, and yet you’re still angry. I can’t understand it.”

With great frustration, my partner lamented the massive shift in my personality over the last year and a half. He’s right. I am angry. I carry it around on my person now. It clings to me, wraps around every part of me like a cloud of sickly sweet perfume I can’t walk out of. It’s been absorbed through my skin and filtered through my heart. It feels as natural and as part of me now as my smile once was.

“You used to have a girlishness about you, an innocence that just isn’t there anymore.”

I cannot argue that. A large part of my personality has been my indomitable yet realistic optimism, an unshakeable hope that believed in the inherent goodness and possibility of being a human. 

I see it now as a kind of naivety, the sort of blind faith that I simply cannot muster, or afford, any longer.

I am a humanist who has lost faith in humanity. This unwavering faith had been my moral lodestone. I was steeped in it, raised from birth to recognize the goodness in people, to focus on the great potential for human progress. I lived it every moment, with an open heart and an unwavering willingness to understand.

As I rebelled against organized religion and even drifted away from spirituality, my belief in The Great Arch of Human Progress eventually became the only faith I had left. It was based as much on blind hope as it was on study and observation, as faith often is. It gave me purpose and the drive to continue to serve, to push through even the lowest points, when humanity bared its nastiest bits. 

It pulled me through all-consuming depression and guided me through the darkest places, giving me tiny slivers of hope that I clung to with my last drops of strength. It inspired me to teach, to travel, to push myself harder to help, even when the tasks at hand were beyond anything that could be fixed.

My iron-clad belief was that the seemingly impossible could be brought within reaching distance if only the world could recognize the benefits of seeing the humanity in each other, of seeing our very personhood reflected across cultures, borders, races, experiences, ages. In my view, the common thread that runs throughout humanity was strong, resilient, and flexible. I believed that as more people recognized this thread, saw its immense value and latched onto it, progress would eventually snowball and those who stood in the way would be trampled in the dust of history.

I wanted to believe, I needed to believe.

I can’t believe. Faith now feels like pulling on blinders, broad and thick with delusion. Humanity has revealed to me an insatiable capacity for cruelty based in self-interest beyond anything I imagined, a widespread sickness that infects and consumes far more than it spares. I once felt that I had a true grasp of the depths of human depravity and grossly destructive self-interest. I was wrong.

I had believed that there was at least a kernel of ability to see beyond the self in most people, an ability to empathize with the greater good. If we just fed this seed with the nourishment of exposure to those different from oneself, of making real connections between people, the similarities we all share would inspire us to look beyond the gulf of differences separating us and focus instead on building bridges of empathy. People’s better natures would be activated or expanded and the connections we share would serve as guideposts along the journey towards progress. We would be inspired to seek a better way to exist, one was based on common good, that served the human race as a whole.

While I still see this as the path forward, I just can’t muster enough faith to believe that this is anything more than yet another impotent theory of change, limp with impossibility. Rooted in naivety, this worldview is the result of a lifetime of feel-good optimism and an unshakable belief in the possibility of goodness. The belief that if you don’t seek out positivity, the horrors of human existence will overwhelm you and hack away savagely, insistently at the best parts of your own humanity.

This is where I am now. What I once saw as the best parts of myself are now just bits and pieces leftover from a different time.

Am I a worse person now? Or am I just more clear-eyed? Personal fulfillment is now far less about the question of how I’m helping advance humanity with my every move and is far more about engaging with the world at large as an observer. I have to detach myself for my own sanity, for this anger and my gross disappointment with humanity will ultimately consume me and leave behind a cynical, self-interested shell of human potential.

So yes, I am angry. I choose now to focus not on how I can contribute to broad change, but rather on how I can continue to be true to what I do still believe in without giving into total cynicism.