As early as 1842, Marx dismissed those who trumpeted their disbelief
to children as “assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that
they are not afraid of the bogeyman”. For him, intellectual disproofs of
God were trivial; what mattered was building a world that didn’t give
rise to mystification of any kind.
That is, if you investigate the material basis of religious belief,
you immediately confront a phenomenon that operates on many different
levels. In particular circumstances and particular settings a faith may
function as a guide to morality, or an aesthetic, or a social network,
or a collection of cultural practices, or a political identity, or a
historical tradition, or some combination of any or all of those things.
You don’t have to be a believer to see that religion genuinely offers
something to its adherents (often when nothing else is available) and
that what it provides is neither inconsequential nor silly.
By contrast, the New Atheists engage with religion purely as a set
of ideas, a kind of cosmic rulebook for believers. On that basis, it’s
easy to point out inconsistencies or contradictions in the various holy
texts and mock the faithful for their gullibility.
But what happens then? You’re left with no explanation for their
devotion other than a susceptibility to fraud. To borrow Dawkins’ title,
if God is nothing but an intellectual delusion then the billions of
believers are, well, deluded; a collection of feeble saps in need of
enlightenment from their intellectual superiors.
That’s the basis for the dickishness that so many people now associate from the New Atheism,
a movement too often exemplified by privileged know-it-alls telling the
poor that they’re idiots. But that’s only part of it. For, of course,
the privileged know-it-alls are usually white and those they lampoon the
most are invariably Muslim.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We can save atheism from the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris
There must be another way for nonbelievers than to transform, as Dawkins and Harris have done, into toxic know-it-alls
hy are the New Atheists such jerks? Case in point: Richard Dawkins’
continuing pursuit of Ahmed Mohamed, the Texas 14-year-old humiliated in
school after authorities mistook his homemade clock for a bomb.
The other day, The God Delusion author called Ahmed a hoaxer
and responded to suggestions “he was only a kid” by linking to a report
about a juvenile Islamic State (Isis) fighter. “And how old is this
‘kid’?” Dawkins asked.
Dawkins has been after the teenager for some time.
When the story of Ahmed’s arrest and interrogation in handcuffs first
broke, Dawkins questioned the boy’s motives, before linking to a video
suggesting Ahmed wasn’t quite the inventor as he claimed.
“Assembling clock from bought components is fine,” tweeted Dawkins to
his 1.3m followers. “Taking clock out of its case to make it look as if
he built it is not fine. Which is true?”
The intervention exemplified everything toxic about Dawkins’ online
persona. It’s not just the unedifying spectacle of an internationally
famous biologist seeking to discredit a teenager’s science project, like
a 9/11 truther obsessing about jet fuel. It’s also Dawkins’ disgraceful
juxtaposition between Ahmed and an Isis supporter in Syria.
“How COULD you think I was likening a hoaxer to a killer?” he later
posted. “I just meant ‘Only a kid’ is not a knockdown defence. Remember
poor James Bulger?”
Except, of course, Dawkins hadn’t compared Ahmed to Bulger, who was
murdered in 1993 by two 10-year-old boys. He’d linked a youth falsely
accused of terrorism on the basis of his religion to Isis, precisely the
kind of smear that any FOX news demagogue might make.
Then there’s the author, philosopher, and neuroscientist Sam Harris – another New Atheist luminary.
A few days before Dawkins relaunched his investigation into
clock-gate, Harris explained on a podcast that Republican hopeful Ben
Carson understood the Middle East better than Noam Chomsky. The same Ben
Carson who thinks there’s a scientific consensus that aliens built the pyramids (even though Carson knows they were actually built by God as a granary for the biblical Jacob).
Why does Harris prefer Carson’s know-nothing bluster on foreign
policy to the opinions of Chomsky, one of the most influential scholars
in the world? Because, you see, Carson “understands that jihadists are
the enemy”. That’s also why Harris defends Ted Cruz’s proposal to screen
Syrian immigrants according to their religious views, since “some
percentage of Muslims will be jihadists inevitably”.
In 2011, the leftwing atheist writer PZ Myers took offence with an article I wrote
calling out the anti-Muslim bigotry of the most prominent New Atheists.
Back then, Myers denied that Harris was rightwing and complained:
These days, Myers (to his credit) devotes considerable time to denouncing Harris. My favourite of his recent interventions includes the line: “Sam Harris [is] full of paranoid, racist shit.”Sparrow condemns us because we haven’t thrown Hitchens from our
ranks, and that we’re supposed to “speak out against the Islamophobia
that’s self-evidently rife in the atheist movement,” a perfectly lovely
demand that is offensive in its assumptions; shall he also tell me that I
must stop beating my wife? There is racist Islamophobia scattered about
within the New Atheist movement ... But the outliers are not the
movement.
But the question remains: how did we get here?
Dawkins and Harris are still, by far and away, the most recognisable
frontmen for the New Atheist show. So how did a movement ostensibly full
of progressives end up so identified with writers who sound less and
less like incarnations of pure reason and more and more like your
Islamophobic uncle after he chugs his sixth pint?
The novelty of New Atheism comes from its contrast with an older
atheism, associated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries with the left
in general and socialism in particular. That’s why, for a certain generation of right-wingers, the epithet “commie” invariably follows “godless”.
By the 2000s, the old left had disintegrated, both as a movement and a
set of ideas, even as some of its doctrines became entirely mainstream.
Secularism was one of them. In 1901, it took considerable courage to
proclaim your atheism in an English-speaking country; a century later,
non-belief had become (within the intelligentsia, at least) largely
unexceptional.
That was part of what made the New Atheists new. An earlier
generation of atheists were brash and offensive but their provocations
were generally directed at a church that still possessed considerable
institutional power. The New Atheists were, by contrast, insiders rather
than outsiders, writing and speaking in societies where manifestations
of fervent religiosity largely occurred on the cultural fringes rather
than the intellectual centres.
(Even in America, something of an anomaly on these matters, religious
presidential candidates direct their evangelical huckstering at
Smallville, USA and not the sophisticates of the big cities).
As a philosophical tendency, the New Atheists were popularisers
rather than innovators, using advances in biology and neuroscience to
illustrate pretty well-worn arguments against religion. Indeed, in some
crucial ways, they represent an intellectual step backward from a left
that had recognised atheism as necessary but scarcely sufficient.
As early as 1842, Marx dismissed those who trumpeted their disbelief
to children as “assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that
they are not afraid of the bogeyman”. For him, intellectual disproofs of
God were trivial; what mattered was building a world that didn’t give
rise to mystification of any kind.
That is, if you investigate the material basis of religious belief,
you immediately confront a phenomenon that operates on many different
levels. In particular circumstances and particular settings a faith may
function as a guide to morality, or an aesthetic, or a social network,
or a collection of cultural practices, or a political identity, or a
historical tradition, or some combination of any or all of those things.
You don’t have to be a believer to see that religion genuinely offers
something to its adherents (often when nothing else is available) and
that what it provides is neither inconsequential nor silly.
By contrast, the New Atheists engage with religion purely as a set
of ideas, a kind of cosmic rulebook for believers. On that basis, it’s
easy to point out inconsistencies or contradictions in the various holy
texts and mock the faithful for their gullibility.
But what happens then? You’re left with no explanation for their
devotion other than a susceptibility to fraud. To borrow Dawkins’ title,
if God is nothing but an intellectual delusion then the billions of
believers are, well, deluded; a collection of feeble saps in need of
enlightenment from their intellectual superiors.
That’s the basis for the dickishness that so many people now associate from the New Atheism,
a movement too often exemplified by privileged know-it-alls telling the
poor that they’re idiots. But that’s only part of it. For, of course,
the privileged know-it-alls are usually white and those they lampoon the
most are invariably Muslim.
For the extraordinary contemporary popularity of the New Atheism also
relates to something else that happened at the dawn of the new century –
namely, the terrorist attacks on 2001. It’s 9/11, more than anything
else, that divides the old atheism from the new.
The best illustration is Christopher Hitchens, a writer who built his
stratospheric literary career by transitioning between the two atheist
traditions. As a young man, Hitchens was a Trotskyist and for many years
he remained a leftwing polemicist. During that time, his atheism
attracted no particular attention: it went almost without saying that a
prominent representative of the British left didn’t believe in God.
By 2001, Hitchens was already beginning his shift to the right. 9/11
provided the catalyst for a complete break. He signaled the shift with
an extended polemic against – you guessed it! – Noam Chomsky, the man
Sam Harris distrusts so much.
Chomsky insisted (then as now) that bin Laden arose from a particular
context and history, that al Qaeda wasn’t merely the result of
inexplicable Muslim rage. Hitchens, like Harris, would have none of it.
It was actually Chomsky who had “lost or is losing the qualities that
made him a great moral and political tutor”.
Hitchens, for his part, wrote “that the forces represented by Al
Qaeda and the Taliban are fairly easy to comprehend, but not very easy
to coexist with”. He deployed a vulgar critique of religion, along lines
that are now so drearily familiar.
The problems in the Middle East stemmed, not from imperial meddling
in an oil-rich region but from Islam itself, a faith that resulted from
(and then fostered) delusional thinking. On that basis, Hitchens was
increasingly able to ally himself with the worst elements of the
American right while insisting he remained a progressive.
You can see how the argument works. If belief in God stems from
intellectual inadequacy, then all believers are feebleminded – and the
most devout are the most feebleminded of all. All religions are bad but
some religions – especially those in the Middle East, by sheer
coincidence! – are worse than others.
In the name of enlightened atheism, you thus arrive at an
old-fashioned imperialism: the people we just happen to be bombing are
simple-minded savages, impervious to reason and civilisation. That was
the secret of Hitchens’ success: he provided a liberal rationale for the
“war on terror”.
You can proclaim you’re an atheist, a freethinker, a devotee of the
enlightenment – and yet somehow still end up backing rightwing
Christians like George W Bush and Ben Carson in their campaigns against
the Muslim hordes.
Which is why it’s not enough to denounce Dawkins and Harris. If we’re
to save the good name of atheism, we need to popularise a fundamentally
different approach, one that seeks to understand religion rather than
simply sneering at it.
As my colleague Jason Wilson argues,
denunciations of other people’s “stupidity” are a particular temptation
of our age. By way of contrast, he puts the case for solidarity,
writing that:
That doesn’t entail abandoning a critique of religion. But it doesSolidarity requires listening: to stories of the structural
deformation of individual lives; to the ways that popular culture makes
people feel like they are living against the grain; to analyses that
have not yet and may never become wholly coherent, or even depart from
common sense.
mean adopting a certain humility when coming to terms with why ordinary
people believe the things they do.
In a different world, religion might not be necessary. But we’re not
in that world yet. In the struggle for social change, the religious will
play just as important role as anyone else. If you don’t believe in
God, that’s great. But you’re not helping by being a jerk about it.
