What New Atheism Says
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Over at Slate Star Codex, Scott (*waves*) has a post about New Atheism, titled How Did New Atheism Fail So Miserably? He writes:
The Baffler publishes a long article against “idiot” New Atheists. It’s interesting only in the context of so many similar articles, and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting “BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fundies don’t have” as the living run away shrieking. But everyone else has long since passed them by.
The New Atheists accomplished the seemingly impossible task of alienating a society that agreed with them about everything. The Baffler-journalists of the world don’t believe in God. They don’t disagree that religion contributes to homophobia, transphobia, and the election of some awful politicians – and these issues have only grown more visible in the decade or so since New Atheism’s apogee. And yet in the bubble where nobody believes in God and everyone worries full-time about sexual minorities and Trump, you get less grief for being a Catholic than a Dawkins fan. When Trump wins an election on the back of evangelicals, and the alt-right is shouting “DEUS VULT” and demanding “throne and altar conservativism”, the real scandal is rumors that some New Atheist might be reading /pol/. How did the New Atheists become so loathed so quickly?
The second article presents a theory:
It has something to do with a litany of grievances against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.
[...]
So the problem with New Atheism was that its whole shtick was repeating obviously true things that everyone already knew? [...] I could be misreading the article. The article could be wrong. But I don’t think so. This is my intuitive feeling of what was wrong with New Atheism as well. It wasn’t that they were wrong. Just that they were right in a loud, boring, and pointless way.
I quite disagree; I think something very, very different than that is what happened.
If you think that all the New Atheists were saying is "there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings", "obvious banality", "obviously true things that everyone already knew" that nobody in the circles they talked to disagreed with, allow me to propose an alternative.
A key point of the New Atheists – the sharp and pointy one which stuck in the craw of the liberal left – was that religion wasn't merely false, it was bad.
The New Atheists contend that the beliefs we hold have consequences for our conduct. That contention, just in and of itself, offends against certain philosophical commitments most on the left have without really being aware they have them.
The New Atheists contend that religious beliefs have consequences for the behavior of those who hold them, and that these consequences are dangerous – to the individual, to others around them, and to society as a whole.
I'm not making this up, and I'm not scrying some deep, implicit meaning between the lines. They are pretty forthright about this. Here's Sam Harris, one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, from his The End of Faith, right at the beginning:
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human being. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:
1. You have only two weeks to live.
2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.These are mere words – until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior.
There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.
Now, one may disagree with his proposition that religion is bad, but it's hard to disagree that that is what his proposition is. He's awfully clear about what he's saying: he's arguing why it matters what people believe.
And he has to argue that because it most definitely does not go without saying among godless liberals.
The cultural norms of the left are that it's fine to be of the opinion that no gods exist, but not fine to be of the opinion that it's bad to believe in gods. Disagreeing about the validity of religion is fine; disagreeing about its value is unacceptable.
The culture of the left maintains that the only decent, moral position to take is to maintain that whether or not one believes in religious propositions is entirely and solely a matter of personal conviction, to insist that religious belief is just a personal feeling, and it's perfectly fine for people to believe in religions if they want, because there's no harm in it if they do. The left likes to quote Jefferson, "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
The New Atheist point is that Jefferson is precisely, grotesquely wrong: that if one's neighbor believes their god considers pocket-picking a sacrament, one's neighbor will be as likely to pick one's pocket as they are devout, and that if one's neighbor believes their god requires leg-breaking, they will break legs as much as they are pious.
It would be hard to overstate what a violation of liberal norms this contention is. To say that religion is bad and people should not indulge religious beliefs flies right in the face of the beloved liberal moral values of cultural tolerance and intellectual freedom.
Among liberals, it is unacceptable to criticize religion itself, as a whole, or find moral fault in it; it is also unacceptable to criticise specific religions as sources of antisocial behavior, unless they are already extremely unpopular (e.g. Westboro Baptist) and very, very small, very marginal sects. It is a serious violation of liberal norms to insist there are propositions about the supernatural that are morally bad to agree with.
(As an aside, I'd like to point out where this leaves us: the left, having forbidden itself cultural explanations like "They do this because they believe that", has left itself with only essentialist explanations like, "They do this because they are that." See how studies that purport to show personality or genetic(!) differences between liberals and conservatives go viral among liberals. Perversely, essentialist explanation of conservative behavior is far more socially acceptable to liberals right now, than cultural explanation that considers religious culture.)
Right now, among liberals, "religion is bad, it's a force for evil in the world" is a "you can't say that" thing. And is what the New Atheists are saying. It should come as no surprise that the New Atheists have alienated almost the whole left.
Liberal norms insist that religious conviction is a personal matter of conscience, and everyone should be free to believe whatever they like. Not just legally free, but free from any social censure whatsoever. No one's religious beliefs must ever be subjected to critical examination, and, most especially, nobody should ever have it suggested to them that they shouldn't believe as they do.
There are some good reasons for this position. For one thing, it's a detente that allows rival religionists – whose religions tell them they are right and everyone else is wrong – to cohabitate a nation without murdering one another. Or at least that's the hope.
Americans, perhaps you recall that thing you may have heard in grade school about the country being founded by "Pilgrims" who came for "freedom of religion"? You may never have had it explained to you what that meant, what with it being about European history, which is something American schools are notoriously slack on. Allow me.
The reason the "Pilgrims" needed "religious freedom" was because for almost a hundred years at that point, Europe had been convulsed in what are now called the Wars of Religion, in which Catholics and Protestants attempted to drown Europe in each other's blood. The Protestant Reformation, in case you hadn't heard, involved genocidal mass slaughters, and vast die-offs from warfare and subsequent famine and illness. By the time a tub full of obstinate Congregationalists dropped anchor off Cape Cod in November of 1620 AD, this homicidal nonsense had been going on for just shy of a century and claimed somewhere between (depending on whose estimates you use, thank you Wikipedia) five and fifteen million lives. By the time, 150 years later, America's Founding Fathers started setting forth the principles of their proposed new state, not only had Europe had another century and a half of religious oppression, often lethal, the American colonies, themselves, had been through their own grim history with religion: Salem, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
Given the horrors implacable religious antagonism had wrought in Europe, and loomed in North America, it's not surprising how prized religious tolerance as a moral value came to be in the nascent US. The intelligencia of what became the US saw religious tolerance as a crucial position for keeping the civil peace – by which I mean "keeping what happened in Europe from happening here" – in the form of a cultural doctrine of You Know What We'll Just Agree To Disagree About God And Not Talk About It Any More Because Everybody's Super Touchy About The Issue.
As a side note, there was nothing, to my knowledge, about the Wars of Religion that was good for the economies of any of the involved states. Even if you're not a bleeding-heart humanist who has a sentimental thing against mass murder, the hardest-hearted beancounter will have to observe that sectarian violence isn't good for most business, and completely sucks for an agrarian tax base. The Wars of Religion provided ample examples of how civil war in one nation provided opportunities for other nations to march right across borders to help themselves to the broken pieces. To anyone in Revolutionary America even a little aware of current events and recent history, the fact was blazingly evident that preventing sectarian violence was a matter of national security.
This doctrine of You Know What We'll Just Agree To Disagree About God And Not Talk About It Any More has a kind of intellectual humility to it: an admission that judging the rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness of faiths is very tricky, what with people being super biased about them and given to using any excuse whatsoever to turn the machetes on their neighbors. It's based on a recognition that when people have tried to do that in the past, lots and lots and lots of people wound up dead. It says, "You know what? We mere humans can't possibly tell which of these exclusive belief systems about unknowable supernatural powers are right, so we're not going to try to sort it out. Everybody's on their own to follow their own conscience."
Arguably, the prudence of this position is demonstrated by how Harris and many other New Atheists who do not share it slid so rapidly into an islamophobia which bears a suspicious resemblance to hating brown skinned people, as opposed to merely considering religion bad.
Unfortunately, putting religion in a special epistemological bubble where it is beyond reproach has unhappy consequences of its own. For one thing, doing so proceeds on the supposition – the hope – that it really doesn't matter what someone believes, and that it really is okay for everyone to believe whatever they want, because it won't really effect anything. It relies on that being true, a priori – but it's not.
(Hmmm, I could have sworn I just read something on what it does to a society to insist on endorsing a falsehood by policy.)
It makes discussion of the very concept of religious culture socially unacceptable. Speaking as someone who is very interested in the phenomenon of culture, generally, and subculture (which is how religious culture in the US usually works) in particular, and who deals with religious culture professionally on a daily basis, let me tell you, this is an amazing intellectual hole in our greater culture.
I recently started reading Weber's famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, because I figured I should finally get around to finding out what it really said for myself. It is, it turns out, as pointed a work on comparative religious culture as there possibly could be; Weber situates the source of observed economic disparities between Protestant and Catholic communities smack dab in their differing theologies. I found myself musing, "Hey, why don't people write this sort of thing anymo– Oh, right."
Frankly, I think there's probably an argument to be made – though I haven't got the case for it yet – that part of why the early part of the field of anthropology was so colonialist was because white supremacy insisted that white peoples had to be spared having their culture, especially their religious beliefs, subjected to objective recording and critical, analytic contemplation. The only people it was acceptable to consider the behavior of whom in light of their belief systems were distant, presumed irrelevant and subhuman, "primitive" brown people. If you wanted to explore the forbidden question of how people's beliefs shaped how they behaved, especially on a societal level, especially religious beliefs, you'd better do it on the most disposable "unimportant" population you can find.
But I digress.
Harris is hardly the only leading light of the New Atheists arguing that religion is not just false but bad.
Christopher Hitchens, from his "Letters to a Young Contrarian":
"I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. "
Richard Dawkins, from The God Delusion:
"Colleagues who agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement. Why are you so hostile? What is actual wrong with religion? Does it really do so much harm that we should actively fight against it? Why not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal energy and ley lines? Isn't it all just harmless nonsense?
I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their sckyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement."
Daniel Dennett is more covert and round-about in his approach, elaborating a notion of "believing in belief", by which he means valuing religious belief, with which to obliquely undermine religion's privileged social status. Here, in "The Folly of Pretence":
Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the "I'm an atheist but" crowd, who publicly deplore our "hostility", our "rudeness" (which is actually just candour), while privately admitting that we're right. They don't themselves believe in God, but they certainly do believe in belief in God. [...]
I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it.
That doesn't sound like a ringing condemnation, but observe he has slyly reframed the debate to be "whether or not we need to preserve religion", supposing a priori that getting rid of religion is the topic on the table and that the argument against is one of necessity, which is a neat bit of rhetorical sleight of hand.
Nor is it just the leadership. One of the aphorisms – I used to hang out in several of LJ's atheist comms – popular among New Atheists, and I rather like it myself, is Voltaire's "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Pretty much what "New Atheist" means is "that subset of atheists who hold that religion is not just false but bad, and argue against the value of religion and its privileged social status."
Which is to say, they've been saying something very much more than "god doesn't exist", and that something squarely violates one of the most liberal of the liberal values.
The claim that they are saying "something" that everyone on the left agrees with, and that's why they're "boring", is a very interesting claim. It seems wildly obvious to me that it's not the case that the New Atheists' primary contention is something many liberals agree with, and I'd very much like to hear it if any of the people claiming that really do mean, "Yes, the liberal bubble totally believes that religion is terrible and we'd all be better off without it." (The religious right certainly believes that of the liberal bubble!)
And while I am totally willing to concede that one can be bored by the New Atheists – God knows, I am – I am dubious that their being boring is the source of any animus at all. Generally boringness leads to being ignored. That's the nice thing about boringness: it's so easy to stop paying attention to it.
No, I think the antagonism they elicit has far more with being boorish than boring.
That does seem to be the concept critics are usually grasping for in describing the New Atheists as irritating, loud, arrogant, contentious, sententious, tedious, etc. At the risk of putting words in others' mouths, it does seem that the complaint on the left about the New Atheists is that they're boors.
But the thing is, a boor is someone who is rude, not someone who is wrong. Which does seem to be what the alluded to article at The Baffler (which I haven't read and have no intention to read) is indirectly getting at: "NNNG, it's not even that they're wrong, it's just like, shut up already, we don't want to hear it."
By liberal mores, the New Atheists are terribly, terribly gauche for constantly going on with their anti-god-bothering. It's not just that what they're saying offends against the treasured principle of religious tolerance, but because it puts liberals in what is for many of them a terribly uncomfortable position.
When confronted with an argument that amounts to, "Hey, so, about that religious tolerance thing... have you noticed that religion actually seems to be really detrimental to peace and prosperity? Did you need some examples?" liberals (and, for that matter, libertarians) are put in the position – if they're going to engage the actual argument – of having to defend religion.
There are liberals who are happy to defend the honor of religion. Those who believe in religions, for one. Among the godless left, there are those who will happily pipe up to defend religion, usually as a "source of comfort".
But among liberals who don't believe in gods or belong to religions, even those who believe religion is mostly harmless, many find that being put in a position of having to defend religion doesn't feel too hot.
The fact is, in most English-speaking countries (and perhaps all of Europe), if you do not believe in gods, you are presented endless little reminders that you are expected to defer to religion, to tolerate its impositions, to perform respect to it. From god-talk in supposedly secular civic institutions, to your tax money going to religious institutions, to casual assumptions on others' parts that of course you'll go along with – or wait decorously silently during – their public religious observance: you get a constant little stream of messages that you're a second-class citizen. And here in the US, it's that you're a second-class citizen to the people that want to legislate your uterus and abolish your marriage and ban science and history from the schools.
No, it doesn't feel so good to a lot of unbelievers to have to croak out the very pieties – like that religion is a good thing and is therefore to be cultivated – that the would-be theocrats demand. It curdles on the tongue. It feels like capitulating to the conservative social force that relentlessly demands acquiescence to its dominion.
Atheist liberals put up with all of this because of the strength of their conviction as to the necessity of religious tolerance for civic peace. Not because they're okay with it. I think it is for many a constant low-grade irritation, shrugged off for the greater good.
When the New Atheists come along with their HOW ABOUT HOW RELIGION SUCKS (Y/N)? it puts many – most? – atheist liberals in a bind: they cannot, by their adherance to the principle of religious tolerance, agree, but they aren't really feeling like disagreeing.
Much better to side-step the whole issue by castigating those who bring it up for the insensitivity of bringing it up. Easier to roll one's eyes and just deny there's any point they're making by saying they don't actually have a point, they "just say things everyone agrees with", they aren't actually saying anything.
Rhymes with "la la la I can't hear you."
Worse than that, the problem is it's still a problem: the liberal solution of religious tolerance has some unresolved issues. It seems it is having unintended side effects (e.g. on intellectual freedom) and may yet be proven to not actually work to maintain civic peace. It seems to leave democratic states vulnerable to religions that preach their members should infiltrate and take over the government, for the purpose of doing away with religious tolerance. And if, you know, religion is actually bad, then it comes with whatever societal cost religion imposes.
Then on the other hand: history and its lessons about the demonic forces that religious tolerance wards against.
I don't have a solution for this. Some ideas that might help. But at the end of the day, as far as I know, with the cultural resources we have available, this is not a solvable problem.
When the New Atheists insist on their contention that religion is not merely false but bad, it pulls up the rug under which this whole issue was swept. And that, too, is super uncomfortable for liberals, especially mostly godless liberals, to confront.
I'm not surprised when the New Atheists are characterized in ways which attempt to erase what they are saying or just get them to shut up. They're forcing a conversation that most on the left really don't want to have.
Finally, I would add that I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to grant that the New Atheists have failed. I totally agree with Scott's description of their social status, and the thoroughness with which they antagonized what is ostensibly their own side.
The New Atheists aren't here to make friends. They're here to open the Overton window. They're here to demand that the unthinkable be considered.
I think it's working.
Sure, it's slow. They're playing a long game. That's why they won't shut up.
So while I wouldn't say that they have succeeded, I wouldn't say that they have failed, either.
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