Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

 
An amusing commentary on Richard Dawkins' self description as being culturally christian from Mark Vernon:

"The deeper and philosophically interesting point, missed in the comments, is the possibility that Dawkins is not only culturally Christian, he's a Christian atheist too. For example, he believes we are like the animals bar being able 'to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators'. Note the 'rebel' against nature. It's straight out of the story of Adam and Eve. As far as I know, the concept doesn't exist outside of Judeo-Christian religion.

Similarly the effort to reconcile scientific materialism with free will, hard line Darwinism being deterministic. This is a Reformation concern. It was only then that the issue of free will became so crucial, people having to be free to choose their salvation. Before free will was a marginal philosophical concern, it being fairly obvious when you think about it that we are free in some respects, influenced by all sorts of factors in others, and able to become conscious of at least some of them, of course... Perhaps Dawkins would say he was Christian atheist if asked. He'd increase the column/blog inches again, since, of course, that implies his atheism is not truth in black and white, but is coloured in a certain way. Relative, in other words - another charge that troubles the doctrinally-minded."


I've often thought it would be interesting to observe what Hindu or Islamic versions of texts like The God Delusion might look like; I suspect rather different from their Western counterpart (for instance, Sanskrit has a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language). With that said, while the above point about Dawkins' attachment to a rather narrowly defined correspondence theory of truth is amusing, I'm not sure that the idea of Christian atheism is quite as outlandish as Vernon suggest. After all, Bertrand Russell did write an article entitled On Catholic and Protestant Sceptics:

"To the Protestant the exceptionally good man is one who opposes the authorities and the received doctrines, like Luther at the Diet of Worms. The Protestant conception of goodness is of something individual and isolated. I was myself educated as a Protestant, and one of the texts most impressed upon my youthful mind was, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." I am conscious that to this day this text influences me in my most serious actions. The Catholic has quite a different conception of virtue: to him there is in all virtue an element of submission, not only to the voice of God as revealed in conscience but also to the authority of the church as the repository of Revelation. This gives to the Catholic a conception of virtue far more social than that of the Protestant and makes the wrench much greater when he severs his connection with the church. The Protestant who leaves the particular Protestant sect in which he has been brought up is only doing what the founders of that sect did not so very long ago, and his mentality is adapted to the foundation of a new sect. The Catholic, on the other hand, feels himself lost without the support of the church. He can, of course, join some other institution, such as the freemasons, but he remains conscious, nonetheless, of desperate revolt. And he generally remains convinced, at any rate subconsciously, that the moral life is confined to members of the church, so that for the freethinker the highest kinds of virtue have become impossible. "


Update: John Gray takes a similar view in this piece:

"The Golden Compass - is a good example. Pullman's parable concerns far more than the dangers of authoritarianism. The issues it raises are essentially religious, and it is deeply indebted to the faith it attacks. Pullman has stated that his atheism was formed in the Anglican tradition, and there are many echoes of Milton and Blake in his work. His largest debt to this tradition is the notion of free will. The central thread of the story is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine Lyra Belacqua sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity...

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... 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... 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.

There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. 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 Hizbullah and al-Qaida, 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 postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, 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. "


I'm not particularly sure that any of this should be especially troubling; Like James and Dewey (or even Eliot and Mill) I tend to think we can retain certain aspects of christian heritage whilst discarding others and the broader metaphysical superstructure. I might have more time for Nietzsche than Gray apparently does but that still leaves me far from advocating a revaluation of all values. The central problem with Gray's arguments is that on the one hand he describes atheism as having inherited many of its central concepts from its christian heritage while on the other denouncing communism and fascism as exemplars of the dangers of atheism and scientific worldviews rather than (as I would see them) secularised forms of religions. In Gray's worldview atheism's religious basis is only apparent when it is most useful as a stick to beat atheism with; when it is not, he quietly elides it.

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posted by Richard 9:42 pm