In this recent article in The Guardian, John Gray points to the racist and intellectually dishonest roots of the New Atheism. Following are some excerpts (bolding is mine):
In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series
established by the Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking
and counter the influence of religion in Britain, published an English
translation of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the
Universe. Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most
influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies in Germany
alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages. Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel devised his own
“religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated an anthropology that
divided the human species into a hierarchy of racial groups . . . .
The Thinker’s Library also featured works
by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known
as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A
proponent of “evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without
revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including advocacy
of eugenics. In 1931, Huxley wrote that
there was “a certain amount of evidence that the negro is an earlier product of
human evolution than the Mongolian or the European, and as such might be
expected to have advanced less, both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then
commonplace: there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG
Wells, also a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a
time when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else vanish
from the world.
. . . . The racial theories promoted by
atheists in the past have been consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most
influential atheists would no more endorse racist biology than they would be
seen following the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the
conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal values
which receive that accolade. There are disputes, sometimes bitter, over how to
define and interpret those values, but their supremacy is hardly ever
questioned. For 21st century atheist missionaries, being liberal and scientific
in outlook are one and the same.
It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In
fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between
atheism, science and liberal values. When
organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist
ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to
be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities
and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to
assert a basis in science. All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the
attempt continues in atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values
can be scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.
As an organised movement, atheism is never
non-committal . . . . It always goes with an alternative belief-system –
typically, a set of ideas that serves to show the modern west is the high point
of human development. In Europe from the late 19th century until the second
world war, this was a version of evolutionary theory that marked out western
peoples as being the most highly evolved. Around the time Haeckel was promoting
his racial theories, a different theory of western superiority was developed by
Marx. While condemning liberal societies
and prophesying their doom, Marx viewed them as the high point of human
development to date. (This is why he praised British colonialism in India as an
essentially progressive development.) If Marx had serious reservations about
Darwinism – and he did – it was because Darwin’s theory did not frame evolution
as a progressive process.
. . . . The predominant varieties of
atheist thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to show that the
secular west is the model for a universal civilisation. The missionary atheism
of the present time is a replay of this theme; but the west is in retreat
today, and beneath the fervour with which this atheism assaults religion there
is an unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the new
atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.
. . . . Sam Harris, the American
neuroscientist and author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future
of Reason (2004) and The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral
Values (2010), who was arguably the first of the “new atheists”, illustrates
this point. Following many earlier atheist ideologues, he wants a “scientific
morality”; but whereas earlier exponents of this sort of atheism used science
to prop up values everyone would now agree were illiberal, Harris takes for
granted that what he calls a “science of good and evil” cannot be other than
liberal in content. (Not everyone will agree with Harris’s account of liberal
values, which appears to sanction the practice of torture: “Given what many
believe are the exigencies of our war on terrorism,” he wrote in 2004, “the
practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only
permissible but necessary.”)
Harris’s militancy in asserting these
values seems to be largely a reaction to Islamist terrorism. For secular
liberals of his generation, the shock of the 11 September attacks went beyond
the atrocious loss of life they entailed. The effect of the attacks was to
place a question mark over the belief that their values were spreading –
slowly, and at times fitfully, but in the long run irresistibly – throughout
the world. As society became ever more reliant on science, they had assumed,
religion would inexorably decline. No doubt the process would be bumpy, and
pockets of irrationality would linger on the margins of modern life; but
religion would dwindle away as a factor in human conflict. The road would be long and winding. But the grand march of secular
reason would continue, with more and more societies joining the modern west in
marginalising religion. Someday, religious belief would be no more important
than personal hobbies or ethnic cuisines.
Today,
it’s clear that no grand march is under way. The
rise of violent jihadism is only the most obvious example of a rejection of
secular life. Jihadist thinking comes in numerous varieties, mixing strands
from 20th century ideologies, such as Nazism and Leninism, with elements
deriving from the 18th century Wahhabist Islamic fundamentalist movement. What
all Islamist movements have in common is a categorical rejection of any secular
realm. But the ongoing reversal in secularisation is not a peculiarly Islamic
phenomenon.
The resurgence of religion is a worldwide
development. Russian Orthodoxy is stronger than it has been for over a century,
while China is the scene of a reawakening of its indigenous faiths and of
underground movements that could make it the largest Christian country in the
world by the end of this century. Despite tentative shifts in opinion that have
been hailed as evidence it is becoming less pious, the US remains massively and
pervasively religious – it’s inconceivable that a professed unbeliever could
become president, for example.
. . . . For secular thinkers, the
continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history
underpins their values. To be sure, there is disagreement as to the nature of
these values. But pretty well all secular thinkers now take for granted that
modern societies must in the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never
well founded, this assumption is today clearly unreasonable. So, not for the
first time, secular thinkers look to science for a foundation for their values.
It’s probably just as well that the current
generation of atheists seems to know so little of the longer history of atheist
movements. When they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they
overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this
way. There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today
than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values
that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with
atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge
validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of
these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker
of all time argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in
monotheism.
The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich
Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because
Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality
– an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in
science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of
contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with
morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many
mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist should serve.
. . . . It’s impossible to read much
contemporary polemic against religion without the impression that for the “new
atheists” the world would be a better place if Jewish and Christian monotheism
had never existed. If only the world wasn’t plagued by these troublesome
God-botherers, they are always lamenting, liberal values would be so much more
secure. Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern
liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a
classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had
shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient
Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the
belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality
that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar.
Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and
Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He
was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values.
To be sure, evangelical unbelievers
adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism. If they are
philosophers, they will wheel out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert
that those who think liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion
are guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John Locke
and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are not falsified
because they originate in errors. The far-reaching claims these thinkers have
made for liberal values can be detached from their theistic beginnings; a
liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any
mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a
universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human
that has been borrowed from theism. The belief that the human species is a
moral agent struggling to realise its inherent possibilities – the narrative of
redemption that sustains secular humanists everywhere – is a hollowed-out
version of a theistic myth. The idea
that the human species is striving to achieve any purpose or goal – a universal
state of freedom or justice, say – presupposes a pre-Darwinian, teleological way
of thinking that has no place in science.
At this point, the dread spectre of
relativism tends to be raised. Doesn’t talk of plural moralities mean there can
be no truth in ethics? Well, anyone who wants their values secured by something
beyond the capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If
you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have
to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring
values.
This isn’t the relativism celebrated by
postmodernists, which holds that human values are merely cultural
constructions. Humans are like other animals in having a definite nature, which
shapes their experiences whether they like it or not. No one benefits from
being tortured or persecuted on account of their religion or sexuality. Being
chronically poor is rarely, if ever, a positive experience. Being at risk of
violent death is bad for human beings whatever their culture. Such truisms
could be multiplied. Universal human values can be understood as something like
moral facts, marking out goods and evils that are generically human. Using
these universal values, it may be possible to define a minimum standard of
civilised life that every society should meet; but this minimum won’t be the
liberal values of the present time turned into universal principles.
Universal values don’t add up to a
universal morality. Such values are very often conflicting, and different
societies resolve these conflicts in divergent ways. The Ottoman empire, during
some of its history, was a haven of toleration for religious communities who
were persecuted in Europe; but this pluralism did not extend to enabling
individuals to move from one community to another, or to form new communities
of choice, as would be required by a liberal ideal of personal autonomy. The
Hapsburg empire was based on rejecting the liberal principle of national
self-determination; but – possibly for that very reason – it was more
protective of minorities than most of the states that succeeded it. Protecting
universal values without honouring what are now seen as core liberal ideals,
these archaic imperial regimes were more civilised than a great many states
that exist today.
For many, regimes of this kind are
imperfect examples of what all human beings secretly want – a world in which no
one is unfree. The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in
human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today.
But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout
history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their
freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and other
minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready
to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human beings have been hostile
to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any
different in future.
An older generation of liberal thinkers
accepted this fact. As the late Stuart Hampshire put it:
“It is not only possible, but, on present
evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life,
which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialised societies will often
seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies and
even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies … As
a liberal by philosophical conviction, I think I ought to expect to be hated,
and to be found superficial and contemptible, by a large part of mankind.”
Considering the alternatives that are on
offer, liberal societies are well worth defending. But there is no reason for
thinking these societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular
civilisation of the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
In ancient Greece and Rome, religion was
not separate from the rest of human activity. Christianity was less tolerant
than these pagan societies, but without it the secular societies of modern
times would hardly have been possible. By adopting the distinction between what
is owed to Caesar and what to God, Paul and Augustine – who turned the teaching
of Jesus into a universal creed – opened the way for societies in which
religion was no longer coextensive with life. Secular regimes come in many
shapes, some liberal, others tyrannical. Some aim for a separation of church
and state as in the US and France, while others – such as the Ataturkist regime
that until recently ruled in Turkey – assert state control over religion.
Whatever its form, a secular state is no guarantee of a secular culture.
Britain has an established church, but despite that fact – or more likely
because of it – religion has a smaller role in politics than in America and is
less publicly divisive than it is in France.
. . . . Evangelical atheists at the present
time are missionaries for their own values. If an earlier generation promoted
the racial prejudices of their time as scientific truths, ours aims to give the
illusions of contemporary liberalism a similar basis in science. It’s possible
to envision different varieties of atheism developing – atheisms more like
those of Freud, which didn’t replace God with a flattering image of humanity.
But atheisms of this kind are unlikely to be popular. More than anything else,
our unbelievers seek relief from the panic that grips them when they realise
their values are rejected by much of humankind. What today’s freethinkers want
is freedom from doubt, and the prevailing version of atheism is well suited to
give it to them.
You may find the full article here:
What Scares the New Atheists
You may find the full article here:
What Scares the New Atheists
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