There’s something about the ‘New Atheists’ that’s starting to bother me……..

07 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by representingthemambo in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics

I’ve been catching up with some back issues of the New Statesman the last few days. Naturally a sophisticated and popular raconteur such as myself has only such time for reading, so I’ve been taking advanatage of a quiet few days on the training front to finish reading the christmas edition of that august weekly, which of course was edited by that scourge of religion and superstition, Richard Dawkins.

Time was when I used to think Richard Dawkins was the dogs bollocks. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that I would have put him up high up in my list of favourite public figures. But in a strange way the death of Christopher Hitchens has prompted something of a rethink. That and Dawkins previous disgraceful involvement in the College of the Humanities , an utterly reactionary and elitist concept that many so called ‘liberal’ intellectuals decided, in their infinite wisdom, to pin their colours to. It got Mr Mambo a-thinking, put it that way. That this was the best they could come up with in their attempts to rescue higher education was very disturbing indeed.

And then reading the ”conversation” between the two (a method of filling pages I have always found very lazy) had a bizarre effect on me. I was overwhelmed by a sense of self-satisfied smugness emanating from the pair of them.

Of course they are both bright, well read, highly educated individuals. Of course on the subject of God and his non-existence they are correct. Of course they are right on the dangers that religion poses. 

But there are other types of irrationality. Political irrationality. Something that Dawkins and Hitchens are both guilty of.   

They both make some frankly unbelievable statements in the course of the discussion. Let’s take a look at a few of them, shall we?

RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

CH Yes; it’s broken down with me.

RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.

CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

Interesting stuff. Both of our new atheists are suspicious of left-right politics. Not surprising from Dawkins, who for all of his anti-religious stridency has never been a great radical, as I earlier highlighted, but more so Hitchens. Religion is something to get angry about but right now there are other things to get more angry about. I have more sympathy for and in common with Christians who supported (and were willing to take a stand and resign over) the St Paul’s protests than atheists (e.g. Nick Clegg) that are supporting the government’s plans.

And up until recently I thought Hitchens still considered himself an (admittedly renegade) member of the left end of that contiuum………

I share his disdain of totalitarianism, but I don’t think there is any such thing as left-wing totalitarianism. I don’t think Stalin was a left-winger, indeed any sort of totalitarianism is intrinsically not left-wing, if I can be so bold. To me, the left is committed to democracy or it is not worth being a part of. Social Democracy/Socialism/Revolution, whatever you want to call it will only come about if people have political freedom. In that sense the 1945 Labour government and the Scandinavian social democracies were far to the left of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

I can see why the distinction has broken down for Hitchens. It is because his politics have broken down in tandem with his loss of left-wing faith. I am currently re-reading The Trial of Henry Kissinger.  It is simply unbelievable that a man who so forensically destroyed the reputation of Nixon’s right hand man ended up supporting someone with a similarly large volume of blood on his hands, and a man who did infinitely more damage domestically than Nixon, namely George W Bush. Unless Hitchens thought he could still justify the Iraq debacle? 

CH: So, really, the only threat from religious force in America is the same as it is, I’m afraid, in many other countries-from outside, And it’s Jihadism, some of it home-grown, but some of it that is so weak and self-discrediting.

RD: It’s more of a problem in Britain.

So let me get this straight. The Christian right poses no violent threat in America? So I’m imagining the firebombing of abortion clinics? From such a great mind, this is an incredibly and self-evidently facile comment. The idea that “Jihadism” poses some sort of existential threat to Western civilisation is patently ludicrous. But such statements serve to subconsciously legitimate Hitchens embrace many aspects of  neoconservative discourse in his own mind I suppose.

CH: There aren’t any believing Christians in the way there were generations ago.

RD: Certainly in Europe that’s true-but in America?

CH: There are revivals of course, and among Jews as well. But I think there’s a very long-running tendency in the developed world and in large areas elsewhere for people to see the virtues of secularism, the separation of church and state, because they’ve tried the alternatives….Every time something like a jihad or a sharia movement has taken over any country-admittedly they’ve only been able to do it in very primitive cases-it’s a smouldering wreck with no productivity.

RD: Total failure.

A few things here. Firstly, I think Hitchens is exposing the narrow of his social and political circle in his beloved America, i.e. liberal Manhattan luvvies and media potentates. The idea that the Christian right pose no threat to American secularism, even if just at the margins, is ridiculous. The Republican presidential nomination race might illustrate that there are plenty of prominent politicians with an explicitly religious agenda.

It’s also interesting that he turns the discussion around to Islam even though Dawkins’ question was clearly about the Christian right in America. A freudian slip? Or evidence that he was more interested in certain types of religious fundamentalism than others……

Also Saudi Arabia is in many ways primitive but not economically. Ditto Iran. They are ‘developed’ and by no means ‘smouldering wrecks’, however much we might like them to be. These are serious regional powers run by religious fundamentalists. The implication here, that religious fundamentalism is only capable of getting traction in the likes of Afghanistan and Somalia is clearly untrue.   

There is a pretty obvious thread running through Hitchens sections the dialogue. Hitchens is rather more concerned about the threat posed by the Islamic rather than the Christian form of fundamentalism. I think this is a dangerous, narrow-minded view, and strange coming from such a cosmopolitan and politically engaged man.

I’ve picked on the bits that I want to take issue with. There is much there that is commendable. But only to a certain degree.

My beef with the ‘New Atheists’ is that they seem to regard religion as the question right now. It is a question, and a big one. But even if they decisively win the argument I don’t see that that much will change for the better. Hundreds of millions of people will still go hungry every day. The change I want, and the change that Dawkins and Hitchens both seem rather indifferent to, despite their protestations of love for humanity, is going to require a rather more thorough examination of contemporary realities that go beyond the prevalence of religious superstition.

But maybe I’m being unfair.

Maybe I’ve matured, but I’m starting to see the limitations of these chaps. They are unaware of it, but their own irrational prejudices are there for us all to see in articles like these.