Choice in Dying

Another wannabe polemicist has decided to take down the “New Atheists”* a peg or two. Today’s issue of The Chronicle Review includes an article entitled “The New Atheists’ Narrow Worldview“, in which a teacher of philosophy Stephen T. Asma — it only needs a ‘th’, and it suggests the kind of intellectual congestion involved in what he has to tell us — suggests that “most friends and even en­e­mies of the new athe­ism have not yet no­ticed the pro­vin­cial­ism of the cur­rent de­bate.”

After casually insulting the so-called Four Horsmen, in which he calls them “soldiers of reason”, and suggests that, “[l]ampooning the anx­i­eties of evan­geli­cals, these best-sell­ing athe­ists are em­brac­ing their “dan­gerous” sta­tus and dar­ing be­liev­ers to match their for­mi­da­ble philo­soph­i­cal acu­men,” he goes on to point out that most of the world’s people are animists, and that the contemporary New Atheism scarcely touches on this type of religion which dominates the developing world, in which people pay their respects to local nature spirits, belief in which, Asma claims, “may be ev­ery bit as em­piri­cal and ra­tional as West­ern science, if we take a clos­er look at life in the de­vel­op­ing world.”

*I’ll leave the quotes off ‘New Atheism’ and its variants, but they should be understood, since it is not really clear what Asma means by speaking of new as opposed to (what must now be assumed to be) old atheists.

The world, for most people in the undeveloped parts of the world, suggests Asma, is capricious and unpredictable, and life is, if neither solitary nor short, in Hobbes’ grim words, then at least poor, nasty and brutish, and placating the spirits provides some sense of meaning and comfort amidst the buzzing confusion of lives otherwise devoid of meaning. Even he, he says, found himself praying when his back was against the wall:

I’m an ag­nos­tic and a cit­i­zen of a wealthy na­tion, but when my own son was in the emer­gen­cy room with an ill­ness, I prayed spon­ta­ne­ous­ly. I’m not naïve—I don’t think it did a damn thing to heal him. But when peo­ple have their backs against the wall, when they are tru­ly help­less and hope­less, then grov­el­ing and ne­go­ti­at­ing with any­thing more pow­er­ful than themselves is a very hu­man re­sponse.

Yes, and even Marghanita Laski, the atheist broadcaster and novelest, as I recall, found herself praying, once, on a visit to the hospital. Which is very strange, because, though a priest myself, I did not once pray for Elizabeth when she was struck down by primary progressive MS — not once, because I knew that prayers are just a dream of hopefulness, and provide neither comfort nor hope when once you know this. Those who find comfort in them have not quite given up belief in their effectiveness. As a priest, of course, prayer could still be used as a kind of pastoral hug, as Don Cupitt suggests, but belief that they alter the mind of God? Well, precisely!

But why, I wonder, does Asma take the New Atheists to task because they do not take animism into account? Why did he not point out — which would have been a more reasonable thing to do — that the entire Western philosophical tradition does not take animism into account any more than the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse do. It seems that, for some undiscriminating critics like Asma, the New Atheism simply functions as a cautionary example, not because of anything new, particularly, and not for any of the arguments they use, but simply as a cultural whipping boy that makes their own small contributions stand out against contributions to the cultural conversation much more distinguished than their own.

For what more does Asma say, in such a distinguished publication as The Chronicle Review, that merits attention? After the requisite genuflection before the image of Marx, who said, we are told, with only marginal relevance, that religion is the opiate of the people, Asma goes on to speak of the Khmer Rouge, who rooted out the good as well as the bad in trying to obliterate Buddhism from the minds of Cambodians, and reminds us, with astonishing irrelevance, that “Re­li­gion is not the only ide­ol­o­gy with blood on its hands.” Did he want, I wonder, to draw a parallel between the Khmer Rouge and the New Atheism? If so, it got lost in the confusion somewhere.

However, this seems to be the heart of Asma’s argument:

Not only should the more rational and therapeutic elements be distilled from the opi­ate of re­li­gion. But the wacky, su­per­sti­tious, cloud-cuck­oo-land forms of re­li­gion, too, should be cherished and preserved, for those forms of religion some­times do great good for our emo­tion­al lives, even when they com­pro­mise our more-rational lives.

And while, he suggests, Western critics think of animism as primitive, and of animists as uneducated, it is reasonably held (in words I quoted at the start), Asma believes, that the “an­i­mis­tic ex­pla­na­tions of one’s dai­ly ex­pe­ri­ence may be ev­ery bit as em­piri­cal and ra­tional as West­ern science, if we take a clos­er look at life in the de­vel­op­ing world.”

Isn’t there something missing here? It is one thing to find consolation in imaginary entities. Asma reminds us that Roger Scruton said that

The consolation of imag­i­nary things is not imag­i­nary con­so­la­tion.

Well said, no doubt. Placebos work. Yes, we knew that already. The question is: Why does this make the New Atheists wrong or animism rational and empirical? Or has the consolation of imaginary things the ability suddenly to create the entities imagined? But animism is not a serious concern of the New Atheists. Not only are the New Atheists writing within the Western tradition (where the critique of animism plays a very small part, as Asma must know, if he really does teach philosophy), they are also taking exception to religion in so far as it has become politically entangled with governance, and is a continuing threat to peace and security. We know, or at least we think we know, that religion tends to flourish where life is insecure and unpredictable. One explanation for the continued vitality of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States — the odd one out in the developed world — although Canada seems to suffer somewhat by contagion — is that there is an inadequate social safety net in the United States, where disparity of income, and insecurity of employment, remain very high, thus increasing people’s sense of insecurity. And American religion may well feed on this insecurity, just as Third World animism feeds on the capriciousness and unpredictability of life lived on the edge of survival.

In these situations, as Asma points out, the consolations of religion play an important role, but none of the New Atheists — so far, anyway, as I am aware — questions this. Their main attention and concern has been directed towards the very powerful monotheisms, and the increasingly intrusive role they are playing on the world stage, at the United Nations and in international UN organisations such as the Human Rights Council, as well as in national politics and governance. These are the issues that the New Atheists address. New Atheism does not offer a theory of religion. What it does offer is a critique of religion in so far as it intrudes itself where it should not.

Asma’s article is, in a sense, a complete non sequitur. It pretends to address the New Atheism, but then fails to do so in a way that actually makes sense. He talks a lot of irrelevant boiler plate about the comforts of animism, but that is all. It is, as I suggest in the title, a matter of taking random shots in the dark. Before Asma sets out to criticise something, he should at least have thought about it. It almost always helps.