RSS
Home
Robert Wright brands the New Atheists as right-wingers
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Richard Dawkins, wingnut?
They don't ask me to, but I do it anyway. Once again, I come to the defense of the New Atheists.
In the Huffington Post this week, Robert Wright (author of The Evolution of God, which I'm currently reading, and Nonzero, which I highly recommend) claims that the New Atheists are right-wingers in terms of foreign policy. He is certainly not the first to make this assertion, and it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that this is not meant as a compliment.
I understand where this line of thinking comes from--the New Atheists on the whole do not don the conventional liberal attitude of live-and-let-live pluralism when it comes to some of the more egregiously backward religious cultures out there. They acknowledge--rightly, I think--that some systems of morality are in fact better than others, and that some are downright bad and dangerous. The idea that a religion can be the justification for burning people alive, for the arbitrary infliction of violence on women, or for the mass murder of innocents is something that really shouldn't be allowed to stand, should not be "tolerated." If that is a illiberal position, I am prepared to face the Lefty Tribunal.
Having said that, I think Wright--someone who I normally find to be extremely thorough and meticulous in his explanations--is too eager to diss the New Atheists in his post, and too casually overlooks or misrepresents some things. I'll just hit a couple of them. First, Wright goes after Richard Dawkins:
Consider Dawkins's assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli-Palestinian wars."
Well, that's true, isn't it? Not so, says Wright, who states:
The problem here is that two ethnic groups disagree about who deserves what land. That there was so much killing before the dispute acquired a deeply religious cast suggests that taking religion out of the equation wouldn't be the magic recipe for peace that Dawkins imagines.
Two problems. One big, enormous reason that at least one of those groups thinks they deserve that land is because it says so in their holy book. To be the chosen people is to have been chosen by, well, the man upstairs, not, say, the DC Lottery. Is that all that's going on? Of course not. But divine claims to this scratch of earth are a pretty big motivating factor.
Wright asserts that the right wing and Dawkins like to pin the religious zealotry unfairly on the Muslims in the area, and I am sure that is true of the American right, but not of Dawkins. For here is the entire quote from which Wright derives Dawkins' position:
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian Partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of the Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honor killings', no shiny suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give til it hurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.
It is one tiny snippet of an introductory piece of prose, helping to set the tone of his larger work. It is not an essay in the Economist--it is not a full-scale examination of that or any other conflict. In fact, in the very same book (p. 133), Dawkins calls out not the Muslims in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but, that's correct, the American right, as he denounces . . .
. . . American 'rapture' Christians whose powerful influence on American Middle Eastern policy is governed by their biblical belief that Israel has a God-given right to all the lands of Palestine. Some rapture Christians go further and actually yearn for nuclear war because they interpret it as the 'Armageddon' which, according to their bizarre but disturbingly popular interpretation of the book of Revelation, will hasten the Second Coming.
So why Wright jumps on Dawkins by name on this issue, I cannot say. Perhaps Dawkins has other writings on this topic that prove Wright's point, but they're not in the book Wright himself cites. Okay, let's do another.
Sam Harris has been explicit in rejecting material explanations of Islamic radicalism. In The End of Faith, while discussing terrorism, he pondered such roots causes as "the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships...the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world." He concluded: "We can ignore all of these things, or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf, because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism."Yes, and the world is full of people who smoke and never get lung cancer. So, by Harris's logic, there's no chance that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer -- and we never should have investigated that possibility!
Of course that's ludicrous. What Harris is saying is that there is a common denominator among those who gleefully commit acts of mass slaughter against those who aren't members of their supernatural club: they subscribe to a theology that tells them that God wants them to kill those in the out group, and that those who do so will be rewarded in the afterlife. The (mostly) common denominator among those with lung cancer is the smoking, not the other way around. Harris doesn't say that religion itself always causes violence, but that the enabling factor is the supernatural justification.
Ironically, to refute Harris, Wright makes a point that Harris has made over and over again, that any dogma, be it secular or religious, is a scourge:
People are survival machines built by natural selection. (This Dawkins gets.) When they sense threats to their interests, they can not only get violent, but wrap themselves in a larger cause that justifies the violence. Here they're as flexible as you'd expect well-built survival machines to be: that larger cause can be religion, yes, but it can also be nationalism or racialism. Hitler whipped up more fervor with the latter two than the first. Whatever's handy.
Harris would agree! I'm inclined to be perplexed as to why these weirdly uncharacteristic misrepresentations would appear in Wright's work. But it seems to be endemic of a larger backlash of nonreligious public intellectuals who are uncomfortable with the styles of the New Atheists. I find the vast majority of their substance difficult to argue with, and it seems to me that anyone who's read their books would not be so scared of them (but how rarely this actually happens).
Regardless, it seems that many high profile rationalists would prefer not to be associated with the New Atheists, and go to great pains to separate themselves publicly. This is a great shame, because impressive minds like those of Sam Harris and Robert Wright ought to be on the same side more often than not.
P.S. I want to answer a rhetorical question Wright asks in his piece.
Anyway, the question is how to reduce the number of suicide bombers. And I have to wonder: If some Jihadists are motivated partly by fear that the west threatens their religious culture, is the optimal counter-terrorism strategy to have know-it-all westerners tell them their God doesn't exist?
Answer: If they'd believe us? Yes. But less flippantly: Of course the guy who's got the explosives strapped to his chest is probably not movable just now on theological points. But ought we encourage the secular political movements, and encourage science, education, and critical thinking so that radical and fundamental religious thought becomes marginal, less vitriolic, and less self-assured? It can't happen overnight, but after enough time, might that reduce the number of suicide bombers? I would guess that the answer is yes.
* * * *
Related Posts:
- Does atheism need a moral justification?
- Heavyweights of science worry over religious appeasement by pro-evolution group
- Evangelism vs. normalcy: A delicate balance for atheist Americans
Related Articles:
Comments
