New Atheism and the intellectual climate

On ‘New Atheism’

It seems to me that the label “new atheism” is useful in that it designates something real; namely the renewed deliberate and focused pushback against the excesses of religions in the fashion led by the “four horsemen” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. The four horsemen, with many others, held a highly relevant presence in public discourse. It also had a self-conscious following of fairly educated people.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins (taking his cue from feminists) talks of raising public consciousness. One key area of consciousness-raising was in epistemology. Discrediting faith and relativism was a foundational success. Once these misleading and inhibiting epistemologies were out of the way, it became feasible to correct numerous religious excesses and injustices, which I probably don’t need to list here.

Christopher Hitchens, in particular seemed to bring a spirit of openness and willingness to engage with those he disagreed with. He was often engaged in debate with some religious apologist or other. In addition, he encouraged a generation of young people to pursue the life of the mind, including of course, books. Despite my deep disagreements with some of his ideas, these are of fundamental importance to me.

Sam Harris reported that after writing his book The End of Faith, he received thousands of emails from people – many of them fundamentalists - who had lost their faith. This is encouraging. Fundamentalist religion makes false claims about Gods, but worse, it has a stultifying picture of the good life. Liberation from the mental confines of religion was good for many people, and by extension, society.

On some progressive issues, new atheists were the most uncompromising and honest. They were also robust defenders of free expression and free inquiry. The contributions of new atheism were not only good, but unique. This is why it deserves some label – because it carves at the joints of public discourse since around 2004. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to speak of an “atheist communities”, regardless of atheism’s lack of innate properties. Atheism doesn’t need to have properties for atheists to have shared interests.   

Limitations

Some of the limits of the new atheism are those of any popular movement. Generally they are led by the most charismatic and easy to digest thinkers, rather than the most meticulous and cautious. This had been true of new atheism. The rigor and meticulousness they displayed in their professional fields was not always carried over to their pronouncements on religion.

The new atheism had a wide variety of spokespeople, but the more meticulous thinkers were less interested in claiming any sort of leadership, and though they were well respected they didn’t have as many followers or books sales as the biggest names. This led to a scarcity of sophistication, and a surplus of sound-bites. This may be a necessity. The more charismatic people tend to be the ones who can rouse audiences with rhetoric and get them to attempt difficult causes and contribute to changing public consciousness.  

For example, when the Pope Joseph Ratzinger visited England, it was probably the presence of Richard Dawkins that bumped up the number of protesters to the tens of thousands. It was hardly as if someone was going to arrest the Pope – but the fact that so many were motivated to get behind someone who seriously suggested it says a lot. Critics of the new atheism always pointed out that religion was never going to go away entirely. But obviously, there are different gradations of progress, and it helped the new atheism that it was uncompromising and willing to aim high. 

Some of the more speculative ideas of the new atheists were unsound, but this is of little consequence. For example, Dawkins’ treatment of the arguments from natural theology is not as incisive or convincing as David Hume’s, but any intelligent person is capable of thinking these things through for themselves. The same goes for Sam Harris’ attempts to argue for moral realism. The failings of these books were not in themselves catastrophic.  

Problems arise when these charismatic but less than meticulous thinkers acquire large followings, who can’t accept their mistakes. This leads to a widespread disrespect for truth – and in some cases for certain branches of knowledge. So although Lawrence Krauss’s treatment of the kalam cosmological argument is in some sense inconsequential, it probably contributed a great deal to the unfair dismissal of philosophy as unimportant. While academic philosophy may have its limitations, there is some sense in which it is of fundamental importance, since science is not only empirical, but interpretive.  So here we have a problem. The movement that is supposed to be based on respect for truth begins to undermine it.  

In the beginning of the movement, Dawkins had a very open-minded attitude to debates with his critics, which in so many words was, “let’s have the argument, and I’ll win it”. This seems, from what I can see, to have morphed into a distaste for the entire project of debating religious apologists. I believe strongly in always talking to people and trying to resolve disagreements using arguments, even if our psychology and entrenched investment in our own beliefs makes this a largely unrewarding task. This leads me to my next point.

If you have a message, is it fruitful to simply repeat it to people who already accept it? And is it fruitful to angrily denounce people who have a fundamental difference with at the expense of real engagement? Probably not. It doesn’t inform people who share your beliefs, and it doesn’t persuade those who don’t.

 The internet, and the intellectual climate now, is filled with groups of people who have devised special reasons to ignore the very people and ideas that they’re supposedly interested in correcting. Certain glorified ad hominem attacks have gained intellectual currency. “Feminazi” is used to dismiss feminist arguments. Feminists won’t listen to “mansplaining”. Certain knock-off Christian apologists won’t listen to someone who hasn’t proven the validity of reason or logic to their satisfaction. Others won’t listen to critiques of biblical passages because they believe that their atheist interlocutors lack a “moral foundation”. Even Peter Boghossian, an atheist philosopher with whom I broadly agree, dismisses the field of philosophy of religion as time wasted entertaining bad ideas and relegates both philosophers of religion and religious apologists to the children’s table. This is particularly unnerving to me – since atheists should have some idea of why the so-called “proofs” fail – yet Boghossian wants to yield pursuit of those questions to Christians.

All of these people have contrived reasons to refuse to listen. They all mistaken their fallible opinions are constitutive of rationality itself.  And they are all wrong. And in acting this way, they relegate their own beliefs to mere dogmas. The new atheist movement isn’t the only one guilty of this, but as a self-styled promoter of critical thinking, it should have been the exception. And now instead of ten thousand person protests against the Pope, we have people recycling the same obvious memes about Pascal’s wager and biblical morality on social media. New atheism became insulated and stagnant – another whiny voice in the marketplace of outrage only interested in the injustices perpetrated against “its own”. And this brings me to Atheism Plus, which attempted – and failed - to correct this.  

Atheism +

It was really inevitable that the new atheism would experience some manner of division. Having gained a strong foothold in the public consciousness and having made some progress with secularist and humanist concerns, some of their interests changed. This is as it should have been. Slavoj Zizek has a nice line - “what you don’t get is part of what you do get”. If secular humanism is to be more than another special interest group in the marketplace of outrage, it should be ready to address a wider variety of problems and injustices. Eventually, focusing exclusively on the evils committed by religious people comes off as unserious and inauthentic. The things you don’t say matter. Eventually, if we have our way, the number of atheists will be extremely high, and educational and social concerns such as creationism, religious homophobia, opposition to contraception and tax-payer funding of abstinence based sex education will be well addressed. Perhaps then it would be time to also address other problems. When the movement was coming together it made perfect sense to set aside differences in order to achieve common goals. But this could only be a temporary state of affairs.

Eventually, some of the new atheists had perhaps similar thoughts, and created Atheism Plus with the aim of addressing a wider range of injustices than those stemming directly from religion. Given that many Western corrective institutions and thinking processes are either explicitly religious or have strong religious undertones, providing secular alternatives is a worthy project. Atheism itself says nothing, except that God does not exist - but that need not stop atheists, people, who are moral agents, from addressing injustices wherever they see it. It didn’t stop the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, from speaking out on a wide variety of important issues. Not every individual can match his prolific output – but a large movement of intelligent and well-read people can.

Atheism Plus had laudable goals – but it was executed with abysmal incompetence. It had a broadened interest in correcting injustice, but inherited and intensified the dogmatism of the previous new atheism. It held itself above criticism, which made it alienating and reduced its effectiveness. It had insufficiently interesting personalities – which sadly matters, and that isn’t likely to change. Moreover many of these personalities were resentful that they were something like the B team of the new atheism. When it addressed the mistakes of some of the original “four horsemen” regarding issues such as the Iraq war and arguments for torture and racial profiling, it was done poorly. What should have been a meticulous and painstaking analysis was just a hasty mess of invective and imprecision. As someone who views the Iraq war as a horrible mistake, I view this as a missed opportunity for much needed self-correction. Bertrand Russell would have taken the arguments Hitchens made for the Iraq war, improved them for the sake of charity and then refuted them.

Popular movements depend in part on moral outrage. If they are to succeed, they have to move people to action. This is in part why activists tend to dislike speculative arguments and debate. But outrage without critical thinking is a mistake. It’s not a waste of time to debate the truth or interpretation of data, because we have to be sure what is the case to be sure what decisions we should make. Deriving norms from facts is problematic enough - but trying to derive them from untested truths, lies, or dogmas is even worse.

Given that most issues are more complex than say, the viability of homeopathy and that large numbers of people don’t tend to agree on very much very easily, a wisely put together movement should balance its outrage with a heavy dose of critical thinking and self-doubt. Diversity of beliefs and concerns were both inevitable and good, but the resulting reduction of political effectiveness spawned by dogmatic factionalism was neither. 

I view the atheist movements as on the whole, a good thing. The new atheists helped a lot of people reassess their values and their intellectual commitments. But it didn’t take its own values seriously enough. So many atheists who should have remained critical friends, or friendly critics, dismissed one another as intellectually and morally beyond the pale. Instead of agreeing to disagree, discuss and move forward with shared goals, they drank the dogmatist cool-aid and refused to consider ideas they rejected or to associate with those they disagreed with. What should have been self-correction simply turned into mutual exclusion.  

It’s a shame that new atheism disintegrated into antagonistic factions. But the atheists who made videos and blog posts haven’t all died. It’s still possible for them to be responsible intellectuals and use their talents to address collectively a wide variety of injustices, religious or not. And it can be done without factionalism, and without the insistence that one group is either right or wrong about everything, and without pointlessly hysterical denunciations.

It’s hard to give a criterion for knowing when to engage a person or an idea. But I would rather risk wasting my time refuting some immoral or unlikely idea than being a raging partisan whose life’s project consists of repeatedly asserting about six distinct ideas. 

Perhaps one of the reasons for the stagnation of atheism is that debunking religion and correcting religious injustices were considered ends in themselves rather than as a means. Demolishing Christianity and Islam no longer holds widespread imagination because it’s so easy. Instead of spending so much time arguing that their particular brand of injustice is the most pressing, public intellectuals could together address a wider variety of injustices, in a way which would hold the attention of the public, the way new atheism once did.