BY JOHN GRAY
An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion.
Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in
society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of
many of the world’s worst evils. As a result, there has been an
explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism.
The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only
partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as
martyrs in a religious tradition and western opinion has accepted
their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced
by liberal societies in the 20th century.
For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin
Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is
a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history,
right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their
anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as
significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has
turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of
religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development,
which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In
the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were
changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable
assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that over
the long run the advance of science will drive religion to the margins
of human life but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory
based on evidence.
It is true that religion has declined sharply in a
number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped
everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of
Europe is clearly post-Christian. However, there is nothing that
suggests the move away from religion is irreversible or that it is
potentially universal. The United States is no more secular today than
it was 150 years ago when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its
all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly
illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were
vehicles for myths inherited from religion and it is no accident that
religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The
current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout.
Secularisation is in retreat and the result is the appearance of an
evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.
Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of
Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a
project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never
doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their
view of things and they are certain that one way of living – their
own, suitably embellished – is right for everybody. To be sure,
atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely
reasonable to have no religious beliefs and yet be friendly to
religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that
is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when
they demonise religion.
A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some
of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to
sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic
against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in
Dennett’s view of religion which for him means the belief that some
kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed
to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are
efforts at doing something science does better – they are rudimentary
or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that god
exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory". But religions do
not consist of propositions struggling to become theories.
The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart
of eastern Christianity while in orthodox Judaism, practice tends to
have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in
spiritual matters, truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam.
Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a
creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the
influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into
an explanatory theory.
The notion that religion is a primitive version of
science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer’s survey
of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in
Magic and Religion. For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were
closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of
human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge.
Dennett’s atheism is not much more than a revamped
version of Frazer’s positivism. The positivists believed that with the
development of transport and communication – in their day, canals and
the telegraph – irrational thinking would wither way along with the
religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century,
Dennett believes much the same. In a piece entitled ‘The Evaporation
of the Powerful Mystique of Religion’, he predicts that: "In about 25
years almost all religions will have evolved into very different
phenomena, so much so that in most quarters, religion will no longer
command the awe that it does today." He is confident that this will
come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of
information technology (not just the Internet but cellphones and
portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not
reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban or the
emergence of a virtual al-Qaeda on the web.
The growth of knowledge is a fact only postmodern
relativists deny. Science is the best tool we have for forming
reliable beliefs about the world but it does not differ from religion
by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science
and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs – in the
case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served
many purposes but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is
met by myth rather than explanation. A great deal of modern thought
consists of secular myths – hollowed-out religious narratives
translated into pseudoscience. Dennett’s notion that new
communications technologies will fundamentally alter the way human
beings think is just such a myth.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to
explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes,
vaguely defined conceptual units that compete with one another in a
parody of natural selection. He recognises that because humans have a
universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some
evolutionary advantage but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly
through bad education. From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role
Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed
greatly over recorded history and if religion is hardwired in the
species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education
could alter this. Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not
inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a
view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist
theology than with Darwinian theory and I cannot help being reminded
of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a
chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.
Dawkins’s "memetic theory of religion" is a classic
example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is
applied outside its proper sphere. Along with Dennett, who also holds
to a version of the theory, Dawkins maintains that religious ideas
survive because they would be able to survive in any "meme pool" or
else because they are part of a "memeplex" that includes similar
memes, such as the idea that if you die as a martyr, you will enjoy 72
virgins. Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the
sense that intelligent design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not
even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of
ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.
Dawkins compares religion to a virus: religious ideas
are memes that infect vulnerable minds, especially those of children.
Biological metaphors may have their uses – the minds of evangelical
atheists seem particularly prone to infection by religious memes, for
example. At the same time, analogies of this kind are fraught with
peril. Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion,
which is real enough. He gives less attention to the fact that some of
the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that
claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism"
and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable
complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific
formula. In each case, the science was bogus but it was accepted as
genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science
is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human
institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the
risk of it being used in this way is greater.
Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked
lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the
American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief
source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that
secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand
scale but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do
with their ideology of "scientific atheism" – what was wrong with
their regimes was that they were tyrannies.
But might there not be a connection between the
attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely
that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet
with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his
atheist world view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was
worshipped as a semi-divine figure – as Stalin was in the Soviet
Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were
not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what
happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable
result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical
means.
Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins
dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked
with atheism. "What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were
atheists but whether atheism systematically influences people to do
bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does." This is
simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science,
Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of
eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of
materialism. He used Christian anti-Semitic demonology in his
persecution of Jews and the churches collaborated with him to a
horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific
category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history.
Hitler’s world view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar
Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards
religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of
atheism or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible.
Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they
want – so they will tell you – is not an atheist regime but a secular
state in which religion has no role. They clearly believe that in a
state of this kind, religion will tend to decline. But America’s
secular Constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian
fundamentalism is more powerful in the United States than in any other
country while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an
established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further
than demanding disestablishment. It is clear that they want to
eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions. Awkwardly,
many of the concepts such critics deploy – including the idea of
religion itself – have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular
fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.
AC Grayling provides an example of the persistence of
religious categories in secular thinking in his Towards the Light:
The Story of the Struggles For Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern
West. As the title indicates, Grayling’s book is a type of sermon.
Its aim is to reaffirm what he calls "a Whig view of the history of
the modern West", the core of which is that "the West displays
progress".
The Whigs were pious Christians who believed divine
providence arranged history to culminate in English institutions and
Grayling too believes history is "moving in the right direction". No
doubt there have been setbacks – he mentions Nazism and communism in
passing, devoting a few sentences to them. But these disasters were
peripheral. They do not reflect on the central tradition of the modern
West, which has always been devoted to liberty and which – Grayling
asserts – is inherently antagonistic to religion: "The history of
liberty is another chapter – and perhaps the most important of all –
in the great quarrel between religion and secularism." The possibility
that radical versions of secular thinking may have contributed to the
development of Nazism and communism is not mentioned. More even than
the 18th century Whigs, who were shaken by the French Terror, Grayling
has no doubt as to the direction of history.
But the belief that history is a directional process
is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular
thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence but they
continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal – a
civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the
entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as
a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than
redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed
that history had a predetermined goal which was human salvation.
Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists
continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone
the consolations of a faith but it is obvious that the idea of
progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.
The problem with the secular narrative is not that it
assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is
the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science
can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific
knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in
society. Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th
century but it returned on a vast scale in Nazism and communism and
still exists today. Torture was prohibited in international
conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an
instrument of policy by the world’s pre-eminent liberal regime at the
beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased but it has been
repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and
kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows but human beings
remain much the same.
Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of
history as a universal narrative and an intellectually rigorous
atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when
he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century but
almost none of today’s secular missionaries have followed his example.
One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The
reason no doubt is that he did not assume any connection between
atheism and liberal values – on the contrary, he viewed liberal values
as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that
reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves
as defenders of liberal freedoms – rarely inquiring where these
freedoms have come from and never allowing that religion may have had
a part in creating them.
Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only
the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of
departure. In some ways, Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism is
superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the
subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is
an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: "Many militants of the
secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures
of clergy." More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray
understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking.
Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for
granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism.
The key liberal theorists of toleration are John
Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms,
and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic. Yet
Onfray has nothing but contempt for the traditions from which these
thinkers emerged – particularly Jewish monotheism: "We do not possess
an official certificate of birth for worship of one god. But the
family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence,
cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people." Here Onfray
passes over an important distinction. It may be true that Jews first
developed monotheism but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In
seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with
Christianity and Islam.
In today’s anxiety about religion, it has been
forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century
was secular in nature. To some extent this is also true of the current
wave of terrorism. Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all
violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaeda, most of them
partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic
traditions while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas
from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of
Islamofascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with
interwar fascist movements, including anti-Semitism. But Islamists owe
as much, if not more, to the far left and it would be more accurate to
describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of
terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The
executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail
from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that
staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime
minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
The influence of secular revolutionary movements on
terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great,
Christopher Hitchens notes that long before Hizbollah and al-Qaeda,
the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the
disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the
Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the
island’s Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger
suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they
will be rewarded in any post-mortem paradise. Nor did the suicide
bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the
1980s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the
Lebanese Communist Party. These secular terrorists believed they were
expediting a historical process from which will come a world better
than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote
from human realities and more reliably lethal in its consequences than
most religious myths.
It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of
progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending. No
one can doubt that they are superior to the tyranny imposed by the
Taliban on Afghanistan, for example. The issue is one of proportion.
Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and
Nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those
that were faced down in the 20th century. A greater menace is posed by
North Korea which far surpasses any Islamist regime in its record of
repression and clearly does possess some kind of nuclear capability.
Evangelical atheists rarely mention it. Hitchens is an exception but
when he describes his visit to the country, it is only to conclude
that the regime embodies "a debased yet refined form of Confucianism
and ancestor worship". As in Russia and China, the noble humanist
philosophy of Marxist-Leninism is innocent of any responsibility.
Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which
he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I
miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need
not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to
believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver
most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an
Islamist elective theocracy in which women, gays and religious
minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq’s history. The
idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy – which Hitchens
ardently promoted – was possible only as an act of faith.
Some neocons – such as Tony Blair, who went on to
teach religion and politics at Yale – combine their belligerent
progressivism with religious belief though of a kind Augustine and
Pascal might find hard to recognise. Most are secular utopians who
justify pre-emptive war and excuse torture as leading to a radiant
future in which democracy will be adopted universally. Even on the
high ground of the West, messianic politics has not lost its dangerous
appeal.
Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like
repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when
it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender
totalitarianism. Today the result is a climate of hysteria. Not
everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is
an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the earth
exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is
the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to
decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility
and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody
should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways and no religion has
the right to break the peace.
The attempt to eradicate religion however only leads
to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief
in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of
mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of
religion and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet
Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of
faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing and it is the apostles
of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.
(John Gray is emeritus professor of European thought
at the London School of Economics and the author of several books,
including The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange
Quest to Cheat Death, Penguin, 2011. This article, an edited
extract from Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Penguin, 2009,
was published on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website on
January 9, 2012.)
Courtesy: Australian Broadcasting Corporation;
www.abc.net.au