New Atheism is rather poor
Image via WikipediaBy Scott Stephens ABC.
They just don't make atheists like they used to. The form of divine disbelief popularized today as the "New Atheism" is a far cry from the more robust and morally serious tradition that runs from Xenophanes and Qoheleth - and perhaps even the writer of the Book of Job - reaching its apogee with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, but still retaining vestiges of its original vitality in the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and, somewhat differently, Francois Laruelle.
What made the atheist tradition proper so potent was its devotion to the tasks of flushing out the myriad idols, often unperceived, that clutter human society, and dismantling all the malign political, economic and sexual uses which those gods were made to serve.
But there was another aspect of this tradition - frequently overlooked and now almost forgotten - that immunized it against the excesses and indiscretions which will almost certainly consign the "New Atheism" to the status of an early twenty-first century fad, like the recent spate of Hollywood remakes.
There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it.
Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life - one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx's great observation about the "theological" dimension of Capital).
By comparison, the "New Atheists" look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.
But is there not is a kind of implicit acknowledgement of inferiority in the tone so many of the "New Atheists" have adopted? The air of contemptuous flippancy reduces atheism to a form of light entertainment and petit bourgeois chic.
In other words, this is not a "New Atheism" but rather an "Atheism Lite" (perhaps "Lites" would be a better designation for adherents to the "New Atheism," rather than Daniel Dennett's proposed "brights").
Let me try to demonstrate the difference between "Atheism Lite" and atheism proper by means of a brief analysis of what is arguably the most powerful argument ever advanced for the eradication of religion: the introduction to Karl Marx's A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Marx famously writes:
"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion."
His point is that religion acts as a veil draped across the cold severity and injustice of life, making our lives tolerable by supplying them with a kind of "illusory happiness."
Hence, for Marx, religion is a palliative. But tear away the illusion, remove those narcotic fantasies to which people cling and from which they derive a sense of contentment, and they will be forced to seek out true happiness through justice and self-determination. And so he goes on:
"The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act and fashion his own reality as a disillusioned man come to his senses; so that he may revolve around himself as his real sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself."
It is here that the great paradox of Marx's critique lies. The only way to effect change on earth is by waging war against heaven, that is, by abolishing religion and its every arcane form. In this way, Marx says, "the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth."
But Marx's critique of religion has an unexpected twist, a barb in the tail that implicates the "Lites" by exposing the deeper complicity concealed by their cynicism.
For, to be "dis-illusioned" in Marx's sense is not heroically to free oneself from the shackles and blinders of religious ideology and thus to gaze freely upon the world as it truly is, as Dawkins and Harris and even Hitchens would suppose.
Rather, to be "dis-illusioned" is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called "the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth".
In Capital, Marx demonstrated that the advent of capitalism itself had the effect of denuding the world by ripping off the shroud of religion and dissolving the communal and familial ties that bind.
But the mechanistic world laid bare by industrial capitalism induced madness among those that prospered from the wealth it generated and among those that found themselves dispossessed of the fruits of their labour.
Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its devotees.
Walter Benjamin developed this further, suggesting that "capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement ... A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind."
And yet even the atonement for guilt comes within the purview of capitalism. This religion now has its own acts of penance for one's economic debauchery in the form of tokenistic charity, delayed gratification and the production of "green" or "fair trade" commodities.
The great irony of capitalism is that its progress has seen the corruption and fragmentation of morality and the decimation of institutional religion, but in their place persists the menagerie of pseudo-moralities and plaintive spiritualities (often in the form of so-called Western Buddhism or what Martin Amis calls "an intensified reverence for the planet") that somehow sustain, or perhaps lubricate, its global machinations.
To paraphrase Marx, the abolition of these false moralities and neo-paganisms would constitute the demand for the rediscovery of authentic reason, integral morality and sustainable, virtuous forms of communal life. And here the "New Atheists" fall tragically short.
By failing to pursue the critique of religion into the sanctum of global capitalism itself, by reducing discussion of morality to a vapid form of well-being and personal security, and by failing to advocate alternate forms of virtuous community - all in the name of "reason" - they end up providing the pathologies of capitalism with a veneer of "commonsense" rationality.
However noble the goals of the "New Atheism" may be, armed with nought but an impoverished form of commonsense rationality (of which Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape and the rather unwieldy The Australian Book of Atheism are the most opprobrious examples I've yet seen - but more on these books in a later piece) it is simply not up to the task of confronting the idols and evils of our time. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has recognized as much and has thus proposed - though not unproblematically - an alliance between atheism and Catholic Christianity.
Christianity and atheism have been intertwined from the very beginning, such that their relationship is rather like two sides of a Moebius strip - follow one side far enough and you suddenly find yourself on the other.
It was, after all, the first Christians that ripped the mouldering shroud of paganism off the cultures of late-antiquity by their scandalous declaration that God raised Jesus from death, thereby redefining what it might mean for God to be "God" in the first place. The resurrection of Jesus was thus the death of "God" and the destruction of the unjust and idolatrous politico-social edifice constructed around him.
In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart has described the original Christian revolution in terms of the stripping bare of the pagan life-world with its pantheon of gods, demigods and spirits who guaranteed the proper order of things, established political authority and provided life with meaning.
"In such a world, the gospel was an outrage, and it was perfectly reasonable for its cultured despisers to describe its apostles as 'atheists'. Christians were ... enemies of society, impious, subversive, and irrational; and it was no more than civic prudence to detest them for refusing to honor the gods of their ancestors, for scorning the common good, and for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that all gods and spirits had been made subject to a crucified criminal from Galilee ... This was far worse than mere irreverence; it was pure and misanthropic perversity; it was anarchy."
By continuing to ignore its debt to the Christian intellectual and moral revolution, and by severing itself from the profoundest insights of its own tradition, the "New Atheism" will find it impossible to avoid becoming a fad, a pseudo-intellectual trifle.
