The Anti-God Squad
A recent article from Foreign Policy.
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By Robert Wright
Three years ago Wired magazine popularized the term “New Atheism” with a cover story about the “crusade against belief” launched by Richard Dawkins (No. 18), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. (Christopher Hitchens, No. 47, filled out the roster later.
Now the crusade is encountering powerful and possibly pivotal resistance.
It isn’t that the citadels of faith are rolling back the tide of unbelief. Among intellectuals—a target audience of the New Atheists—professing traditional faith is no more common than it was three years ago, and may even be less common.
But the New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers of the anti-gospel. The point was to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers.
And this year doubts about that mission have taken root among the New Atheists’ key demographic: intellectuals who aren’t religious and aren’t conservative. Even on the secular left, the alarming implications of the “crusade against religion” are becoming apparent: Though the New Atheists claim to be a progressive force, they often abet fundamentalists and reactionaries, from the heartland of America to the Middle East.
If you’re a Midwestern American, fighting to keep Darwin in the public schools and intelligent design out, the case you make to conservative Christians is that teaching evolution won’t turn their children into atheists. So the last thing you need is for the world’s most famous teacher of evolution, Richard Dawkins, to be among the world’s most zealously proselytizing atheists. These atmospherics only empower your enemies.
So too with foreign policy: Making “Western” synonymous with “aggressively atheist” isn’t a recipe for quelling anti-Western Islamist radicalism.
And there’s a subtle but potent sense in which New Atheism can steer foreign policy to the right. Axiomatic to New Atheism is that religion is not just factually wrong, but the root of evil, which suggests that other proposed root causes of the sort typically stressed on the left aren’t really the problem. Sam Harris, in discussing terrorism, wholly dismisses such contributing factors as “the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,” “the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships,” and “the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world.” The problem, Harris states, is religion, period.
Most New Atheists aren’t expressly right wing, but even so their discounting of the material causes of Islamist radicalism can be “objectively” right wing (as in George Orwell’s assertion that pacifists were “objectively pro-fascist” regardless of their views about fascism).
Dawkins, for example, has written that if there were no religion then there would be “no Israeli/Palestinian wars.” This view is wrong—the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land—but it’s popular among parts of the U.S. and Israeli right. The reason is its suggestion that there’s no point in, say, removing Israeli settlements so long as the toxin of religion is in the air.
All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don’t have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility.
Maybe this is the New Atheists’ biggest problem: As living proof that religion isn’t a prerequisite for divisive fundamentalism, they are walking rebuttals to their own ideology.
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Robert Wright is Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God.
If one thinks of religion as a purely material phonomenon, as do the atheists, then one cannot but have contempt for it. But as a theist myself I cannot quite make the “reasoning” of atheists in having contempt for one trend of human behavior and not all of them: If religious sentiments are a result of certain combinations of purely material systems, so should be other phenomena such as loving feelings, sense of purpose (or not), and so on. But we don’t see atheists ridiculing couples exchanging flowers on wedding anniversaries, or mothers who cry over the loss of suicide children.
The New Atheists have not done their homework beyond the emergent extremist Islamic crisis. What they are addressing is not religion as an intrinsic and indeed defining element of the human being. They are rejecting human emotions where they have (indisputably) gone wrong, but are doing so in quite emotional terms of their own, and not making things right at that, not by a thousand evolutionary miles.
Indeed.
From what I understand, they do recognize religion to be “hardwired” into the human psychology, but for them the problem is that people take religion to be something else than these other material emotions and that is what creates the problem.
I believe Hitchens said that it would be fine if religion was done like a knitting club and it wouldn’t affect the society in anyway but people who get that emotional satisfaction from it would still have a possibility to feel it. Of course from our perspective that kind of approach is ridiculous, but I do think it shows that they have considered the objection you just raised.
I’m not sure about that. I mean – people love each other and weddings are performed and laws enacted for the benefit of couples and families – no seperation of state and emoton there. People commit suicide and laws are enacted, the issue is brought before the whole society and not kept within a simple ’suicide society’. The obvious implication is that the bigger the emotional impact and the bigger the commitment of time, resources etc. that the particular psycho/physical phenomena creates the more it will be taken from a smaller circle of individuals to the larger circle of humanity in general.
So even if you think that Hitchen’s comments shows they have considered the objection, it is quite obvious that the comment does not adequately address it.
Audarya-lila, I’m not sure if I follow your reasoning.
Love and suicide are spontaneously occurring things in human society that require no dogma or external power-structures to be maintained, as opposed to most religions. I personally think that religion as a social institution can be very susceptible to corruption and abuse and can have much further-reaching implications because of its “absolute” nature, than suidice or marriage.
And I think the absoluteness of religion is the reason the new atheists see it as so dangerous, because superstitious and hateful customs can be upheld for generations because of the apparent absolute nature of a dogma.
On one level it could be said that a religious person is demanding that others must have the same emotional reaction than oneself, because that emotional reaction is absolutely true. That’s what religious fanaticism is: force-feeding one’s own experience to make it a universal truth. If a knitting club would start insisting that I have to love knitting or I’ll burn in hell, of course I would resist.
Robert Wright: “Dawkins, for example, has written that if there were no religion then there would be “no Israeli/Palestinian wars.” This view is wrong—the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land—but it’s popular among parts of the U.S. and Israeli right. The reason is its suggestion that there’s no point in, say, removing Israeli settlements so long as the toxin of religion is in the air.”
Actually Wright gives the support to Dawkins argument: Had it NOT been for the religious connotation, this would have been a secular argument over land. But it is not a secular argument – you can’t separate religion from it, because Jews claim the right to this land on religious reasons and the RELIGIOUS right in US stands firm in their support of Israel.
As long as the religious people have dirty hands on account of their religion, all kinds of people will propose that religion itself be rejected.