Is humanism Utopian?
You really have to think about it.
Or is it rather more dystopian?
No, then I think you’d never doubt it.
It seems that disbelief is best.

Humanism owes a debt
to thinkers of the Enlightenment,
although I haven’t paid it yet,
I think of it as my entitlement
to settle it at some behest.

I very early cleared my mind of Kant,
experiencing a vast relief,
approaching his chef d’oeuvres extant;
removing knowledge to allow belief;
the opposite of what he had expressed.

It occurred to me I ought to dig up
(or should I say instead ex-hume?)
what constitutes at least an egg-cup-
full of wisdom that I might consume
with non-platonic zest.

But wondering how on earth to do so
and thinking he might hold the key,
I fixed my sights on Jean Jacques Rousseau
and set sail for my destiny,
while trying not to feel depressed.

Voltaire’s voices loudly rang in deaf ears
as did the Persian Letters of Montesquieu
and failed to still my latent fears.
And thus I felt no need to rescue
Adam Smith (morality-obsessed).

To put Descartes before the Horse-
men of the Apocalypse
War, famine, pestilence and worse.
Who could guess it would eclipse
my thought, wherefore I was oppressed.

Or take the case of Denis Diderot
a friend of Hume and others seedier.
and one you might consider so
rash as to produce an encyclopedia
to get his knowledge off his chest.

That precious quality of truth
was Mary Ann’s# description of it.
It would not take a Sherlock sleuth
to simply thus produce a conviction of it:
an elementary request.

I cut my questing teeth on Russell.
His secular logic had a profound effect
and seemed to stir each red corpuscle
inhabiting this fervid non-sect-
arian but doubting breast.

I later turned my eye on Dawkins,
and his concern with my divine delusion.
A sceptic whose inspiring squawkings
validate my disillusion
and emphasise an ill-starred quest.

And so I felt the pointlessness of it.
Progress is the best end for a man to see
And belief simply produced less profit
for reality’s dispelling of my fantasy.
So, in the end, I acquiesced.

#Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, in *Adam Bede