atheism

The Barn Door of Belief

By in atheism, books, foolosophy, nietzsche, religion

Many metaphysical and historical hypotheses are defended so strongly only because we are grateful for their consequences.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

Luis Parrales:

As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.” The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin.

My dad tells of being young and questioning the point of going to church rather than sleeping in on Sunday morning. My grandfather’s answer was basically instrumental: this way of life is the best one we know of, so this is what we do. You don’t have to believe, but you ought to do it anyway. Rufo and Beha are doing different versions of the same thing. Rufo is grateful to Christianity for its public consequences: order, restraint, continuity, a check on social and ideological disintegration. Beha is grateful to it for its private consequences: a way of making sense of love, gratitude, and the felt richness of a life no longer experienced as absurd or self-enclosed. One sees Christianity as civilizational ballast; the other as existential explanation.

This is understandable enough, but still post-hoc. The barn door of belief has been standing open for a long time, and the horse is far down the road, yet we still stand around arguing over whose fault it was that the latch was not secured. Meanwhile, the real problem is not retrospective blame but the peculiar modern situation itself. We find ourselves having to theorize our way into a felt social ethic. Previous moral orders were never quite as organic as nostalgia pretends; they were formed by custom, ritual, prestige, repetition, shame, authority, and no small amount of coercion. But because that machinery had become old and settled, it looked “natural.” Now the machinery is exposed, and we distrust whoever lays hands on it.

Nietzsche saw this coming too. Moral law, he noted elsewhere, had long been experienced as something standing above our own likes and dislikes, something to be discovered, inherited, or commanded, not something we openly fabricated for ourselves. That older confidence has decayed. We moderns, burdened with too much historical knowledge and too much self-consciousness, do not easily submit to a law we know to be, at least in part, our own artifact. We want obligation, but we also want to inspect its wiring. We want authority, but only after it has passed our private audit. We want thick moral formation in a culture trained to regard thick demands as intrusive, manipulative, or vaguely tyrannical.

Lichtenberg saw another part of the process with equal clarity: “Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.” That’s how moral change often works. First come the scouts, the eccentrics, the blasphemers, the people willing to test the terrain and absorb the danger of novelty. Then, once the ground has been surveyed and softened, the heavy brigade follows: institutions, schools, bureaucracies, moralizers, respectable opinion. What gets called “consensus” is often just yesterday’s audacity after it has acquired prestige, rituals, and penalties. Today’s free spirit becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

Exhortations to “just go through the motions” of belief are ultimately unsatisfying. If the old truth-claims no longer compel assent, then churchgoing risks becoming a kind of moral cosplay, a tactical re-enchantment undertaken for the sake of good consequences. Perhaps that can sustain a few people for a while. But it can also be secularized. If the real point is social cohesion, mutual aid, moral discipline, and some check on atomized self-absorption, then the obvious question arises: why could those things not be sought under some other banner? Once religion is defended primarily as useful, it forfeits any automatic exemption from replacement.

That does not mean the secular alternatives are easy to build, or likely to be better. On the contrary, that is precisely the difficulty. It is one thing to sketch a secular ethic on paper and another to create institutions, habits, loyalties, and sacrifices sturdy enough to live by. Science will not do this for us. An expert class will not do it for us. Administrative procedure will not do it for us. Stable social orders require some mixture of persuasion and coercion, affection and discipline, inner assent and outer pressure. The old religious frameworks once supplied much of that, and their weakening has left a vacuum no one yet knows how to fill without smuggling in either hypocrisy or force.

So the question is not simply whether Christianity once did this work better than its rivals, or whether some new ideology might do it worse. The question is what becomes of a society that no longer quite believes, yet still badly needs to be formed? Which faction will eventually impose a convincing social ethic, and for how long? No one knows. What is clear is only that we have inherited a vast cultural task, and that no amount of pious nostalgia or managerial optimism can relieve us of it.

Lennonism

By in atheism, religion

“Refuted.” I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Frankly, I don’t think either side has made a “novel” argument in forever, though if you’re concerned with truth over fashion, I don’t know why you’d care about novelty in any event. The only interesting thing to note here is the old double-standard. The most unsophisticated, uneducated professions of faith are always accepted as valid and genuine. The most simpleminded believer is accepted to have had some meaningful experience of the truth of God’s existence. A newly-minted faith, built on vibes, grief, longing, “I felt called,” a single sermon, a Chesterton quote, or one Lewis book — socially, that counts as real. No defenders of the faith would say, “You have no idea what you’re even agreeing to, you ignoramus. Come back when you’ve digested Augustine’s account of evil, Aquinas on act/potency, and Niebuhr on irony.” But doubt is treated like a procedural error: “You can’t possibly reject this unless you’ve read everything we’ve ever written to save it.” Suddenly you’re expected to defend a dissertation in patristics, scholasticism, and 20th-century theology before you’re allowed to have an equal opinion. It’s almost as if this is all nothing more than a social species attempting to achieve psychological security through enforced conformity.

Arguments are beside the point anyway. It’s largely a matter of temperament. At the thought of death, you’re either sin-haunted like Samuel Johnson or you’re placid and accepting like David Hume. Note, though, that Hume’s calm acceptance of death wasn’t threatened by the existence of people like Johnson worrying himself sick over what awaited him on the other side. Johnson, in contrast, can’t concede that the unbeliever might die in peace, because that would imply peace is possible without his particular terror and his particular cure:

(It must be acknowledged that it was undoubtedly clever of Johnson to ironically turn Hume’s own reasoning against the probability of miracles back upon him.)

In his notebooks, Camus wrote, “I often read that I’m an atheist and I hear people talk of my atheism. Yet such words mean nothing to me, they make no sense to me. I don’t believe in God and I’m not an atheist.” Likewise, I don’t believe in gods or immortal souls and I think that Reddit atheists and Twitter Christians deserve the hell of each other’s argumentative company. Maybe I’m just a Lennonist in the end: whatever gets you through the night is all right with me.

The Prodigal Son of Christianity

By in atheism, political philosophy, religion, the great awokening

I have to say, Thiel is closer to the truth than Rufo.

You don’t have to buy Nietzsche’s entire “slave morality” melodrama to see that Christianity overturned the classical moral order. In Rome, you could of course find private pity, personal kindness, and the odd Stoic sermon about universal reason, but public virtues were still honor, courage, strength, victory, dignity. The weak could be pitied, but they were not morally privileged as such. Christianity changes that. It puts a tortured, humiliated victim at the center of the cosmos and announces that “the last shall be first.” It insists that God identifies with “the least of these”: the poor, the slave, the outcast. As Tom Holland explained in his book Dominion, this is a radical moral revolution.

Viewed in that light, Thiel’s basic point is straightforward: modern egalitarian instincts, including the sort that animate “woke” politics, grow in soil prepared by that Christian revolution. Two thousand years of preaching that the weak, the oppressed, and the marginalized are God’s special concern have left their mark. Even people who despise “organized religion” generally take it for granted that siding with the “victim,” however defined, is the default moral stance. A Roman aristocrat would have found that obsession baffling, if not perverse.

Of course Christianity isn’t the only ingredient. The stew we now call “woke” has other ingredients: Enlightenment rights-talk, Romantic authenticity, Marxist and post-Marxist theories of power, therapeutic culture, and, more recently, the incentive structures of universities, HR departments, and social media. But the underlying stock – the moral grammar in which “the victim” has a special claim on our conscience – is recognizably Christian. Take that away and the whole thing becomes much harder to imagine.

Rufo’s response doesn’t touch this genealogical point. First, he notes that Christian civilizations were “heroic and martial” and that colonization marched under Christian banners. All true, and all beside the point. No one seriously thinks Christian history is a tidy story of meekness and mercy. The tension between ideals and behavior is precisely what made Christian doctrine so explosive: a society that proclaims the blessedness of the poor while building empires on slave labor is piling up moral contradictions that later generations can and do exploit. The existence of crusaders and conquistadors doesn’t disprove the Christian revaluation of values; it shows how often humans fail to live up to it.

Second, Rufo points out that “woke isn’t really a thing in Italy, which is the seat of Christianity.” This confuses genealogy with cartography. The claim is not that wherever Christianity is, woke must follow; it’s that the specifically Western and especially Anglo-American moral sensibility – with its intense concern for distant victims, its habit of dividing the world into oppressed and oppressors, its missionary zeal – is unintelligible without Christian inheritance. That history runs through Northern European and American Protestantism, through abolitionism, social-gospel movements, civil-rights rhetoric, and so on. It is more plausible to describe woke as a secularized, deracinated descendant of Anglo-Protestant Christianity than as an inevitable outgrowth of whatever the Vatican is doing in Rome.

The Italy example actually undermines Rufo’s point. If a heavily Catholic country can remain relatively immune to the full American strain of wokeness, that suggests that something more specific than “Christianity” in general is at work – some particular blend of Christian moral grammar, Anglo-liberal individualism, American race history, and 21st-century university culture. The right conclusion is not “Christianity has nothing to do with this,” but “Christianity is one necessary ingredient, not the whole recipe.”

What’s especially disappointing in Rufo’s reply is how far below his usual standard of argument it falls. He’s normally incisive and to-the-point; here he fires off two rather obvious rejoinders – “Christians were warriors!” and “Italy isn’t woke!” – that don’t actually engage what Thiel is saying. It looks less like analysis and more like a reflexive move to shield Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, from any hint of responsibility. Thiel’s framing may be rough, but Rufo’s counterpunch doesn’t land.

Personally, this is why I will keep a skeptical eye on the development of the right, especially post-Trump. Rufo is one of the most effective political activists on the right, and he’s likely to have real influence over whatever replaces fusionist conservatism. He currently talks the language of classical liberalism and pluralism, and on many concrete issues he’s a welcome counterweight to the left’s cultural dominance. But when someone that intelligent starts defending his preferred religion with arguments this sloppy, it’s a reminder that political movements have a way of subordinating principle to passion once they gather enough momentum or power. The temptation to decide that unbelievers and skeptics are “corrosive to the body politic” is never far away in a self-consciously religious populism or national conservatism.

I Blew Up the Church, But I Did Not Break the China

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Technically, I think the church collapsed due to structural weaknesses (like trying to make moral behavior contingent upon acceptance of dubious metaphysical assertions, for example), but either way, what fancy-pants church is he going to where they use fine china? The ones I’ve been in for various events were serving potluck casserole on paper plates with plastic utensils and Styrofoam cups.

Oh, I’m aware he’s trying to make some deep metaphorical point about how morality didn’t exist until it was invented during the Council of Nicaea, but I’ve already given this more thought than it’s worth. I swear by all the fucked mothers of epithetical yore, this guy is one dumb motherfucker.

The Fool Hath Said In His Tweet

By in atheism, nihilism, ohferfucksake, religion

It is untrue that religion should have provided morality — the converse! We prove religion true or untrue with morality.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

1. “The universe is cold and uncaring” — True, but melodramatic and self-pitying. Warmth and caring are social traits, so, as the cosmologist Johnny Lee noted, expecting “the universe” to relate to you in that manner is looking for love in all the wrong places.

2. “Just animals like all the others” — Again, true in a banal sense, in that we are biological beings, products of evolution, sharers of DNA with other animals, but still melodramatically dismissive. There are clearly relative differences between species, and even between individual members of species. The phrase implies it’s some kind of demotion or degradation to be “merely” an animal. The whining tone is undignified.

3. “And therefore” — I wince whenever I see a moron preparing to draw sweeping conclusions from dubious premises.

4. “There can’t possibly be anything like Right and Wrong” — Well, true in the sense that morality is not a gift from God, but egregiously stupid insofar as moral instincts are present even in “mere” animals; as Nietzsche wryly noted above, they predate religious concepts. Right and Wrong” with capital letters is just a demand for moral bullion from the Cosmic Treasury; alas, all we’ve got is the fiat-morality standard, backed by the full faith and community credit of our neighbors. Luckily, that functions well enough for our purposes.

5. “You genuinely are permitted to do whatever you want” — “Permitted” by whom? “Everything is permitted” equivocates between metaphysical permission (no cosmic judge) and institutional permission (what people, laws, and norms will tolerate). Technically, you’ve always been free to “do whatever you want,” but it has never been the case that you are therefore free from earthly consequences.

6. “There will be no final accounting.” Yes, that at least does follow from disbelief in monotheism.

7. “And yet almost no atheists admit to it.” Strange; I can’t imagine why anyone would object to being caricatured.

And this is the “tamest, most obviously true thing” he’s ever posted.

Here the Ways of Men Divide

By in atheism, nihilism, religion

Leaving aside the ridiculous absurdity of trying to force the ancient debate over the God of monotheism’s existence onto the Procrustean bed of post-1789 politics, both Ash and Heiens are trying to wring a should out of metaphysics. Ash: if there’s no Creator, evolution is the only engine of value, therefore you should accept Social-Darwinist hierarchy. Heiens: if you oppose a world of Socialists and National Socialists exterminating entire populations of racial or class enemies, you should accept Christian metaphysics. In each case, a contested premise about atheism is smuggled across the is/ought bridge and cashed out as duty.

Underneath is the same motivation: the submission impulse. If Christian dogma won’t do, we’ll substitute Nature, History, or any other proper noun of our own invention. What’s being sought isn’t truth so much as guarantee: a rule outside the self that absolves the self of agency. “Tell me what binds me — God, Cosmos, the Law of the Jungle — so I can stop weighing, considering, judging and choosing, and simply obey.”

This is why so much self-described “nihilism” is only inverted universalism. When “God’s word” can no longer legislate everywhere for everyone, some people simply replace the regent: now Nothing legislates everywhere for everyone. They reify the void and enthrone it. The middle ground — meaning as contingent, plural, revisable — is skipped because it offers no total guarantee, only the work of fallible judgment. Adult life is precisely that: living without a cosmic permission slip, accepting that our “shoulds” are stitched from experience, memory, and bargaining, and that responsibility can’t be outsourced to a grand axiom. “Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”

Call It What You Want, It’s All the Same to Me

By in atheism, religion

Life is hard. Circumstances, conditions, and even our own perspectives change through time. It’s hard to know what the right thing is to do in any given scenario, and we can get weary of exercising judgment and simply want to outsource our agency to a rulebook — which only asks a new question: how do we choose which rulebook; and isn’t the “choosing” the very thing we’re weary of and trying to avoid?

A Christian and an atheist-Epicurean-Buddhist may look at the world together and see things in common: joy, pleasure, selflessness, generosity, beauty. We agree that these things are good and should be preserved and encouraged. We also recognize that they are fragile and can be damaged or destroyed by the forces of evil. I accept this as the price of living. These things only persevere so long as we work to make it so. There are no ultimate guarantees. He, perhaps, contemplates the possibility that these precious things could be lost or destroyed and thinks, “No, that’s too horrible to accept!” So he tries to “ground” them in some sort of abstract ultimate necessity, like God’s existence, which supposedly cannot be undermined or destroyed. To my perspective, this is just a self-told fairy tale, in which everything ends “happily ever after.”

“Something solid” comes from within, not without. People who claim to “believe” in God can still prove by their actions to be awful people. People who profess no belief can live exemplary lives. Clearly, whatever it is we’re talking about, it’s more fundamental than any particular dogma. However you derive your values, whatever they may be, you can only “ground” them in discipline, contemplation, and practice, and reinforce them in a like-minded community. Looking for “something solid” in the realm of belief (or ideology) is just a way of digging up treasure that you yourself buried under cover of darkness.

Whirl Is King

By in atheism, books, political philosophy, religion

The human capacity to reason gives us the power to manipulate aspects of the world, and this power has achieved wonderful ameliorative effects. But human beings, always in the grip of unfulfilled desires and destined for death, must come to terms with limitations. Optimists, disposed to expect continuous improvement, are set up for disappointment. As Dienstag says, “The pessimist expects nothing.” Free from what one pessimist has called the “idolatry of tomorrow,” a pessimist has an “openness to the music of chance” which can give the pessimist a kind of “equanimity.” And a pessimist experiences “the vitalization of life that comes through the embrace of uncertainty.” Whirl is king? Excellent.

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

We live in a faith-saturated world.

You may scoff; you may point to statistics showing a decline in church attendance, or the rise of the “nones.” But what else is transgenderism if not a modern Gnosticism, a faith-based attempt to transcend the false world of the biological demiurge? What is the revived socialist dream if not an undying belief in an ideal impervious to evidence? What is the general mania for political awareness and activism if not the inevitable rush of spiritual meaning into a vacuum? “Organized religion” may be in decline, but the do-it-yourself variety is as robust as ever. The altar has merely moved from nave to newsfeed, from sacristy to street protest.

Will, like me, is an atheist and a conservative, a somewhat lonely position to hold. The Venn diagram here is basically two circles on opposite ends of the page, glaring at each other. When pessimism is added to the mix, we might as well have black fur with a white stripe on it. But optimism, whether religious or ideological, is fragile. It depends on constant progress, constant reassurance. The moment the arc of history fails to bend on schedule, despair creeps in. Pessimism is immune to such shocks. It expects setbacks, it counts on human fallibility, it works with the imperfect raw material at hand. It doesn’t demand that the world be remade or console itself with guarantees of ultimate victory; it asks only that what exists be preserved and improved where possible, knowing that “possible” is a narrow gate. Optimism is a porcelain faith: glossy, fragile, and dependent on ideal conditions. Pessimism is stoneware: plain, durable, and ready to serve when the fine china has shattered.

As for atheism, I have no missionary zeal. The Dawkins/Hitchens era assumed that dismantling religion would produce a society governed by logic and reason; they failed to anticipate that a secular society’s educated class would profess to be stymied by such metaphysical conundrums as, “What is a woman?” My sensibility is closer to what might be called apatheism: the absence of belief as a shrug, because I simply see no convincing reason for it and lose nothing by doing without it. I’ve read the apologetics, I’ve listened to the interminable debates, and none of them made a profound impression on me. If there is no benevolent creator and no eternal afterlife, then meaning must be fashioned here and maintained daily — an unending task with no guarantees of enduring success.

Likewise, my conservatism is not ideological but temperamental. Michael Oakeshott said the conservative prefers “the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried.” That suits me. I detest utopians—left or right—who claim to know how to redesign the world from scratch. Pessimism, properly understood, is not gloom but clarity. Freedom from the “idolatry of tomorrow,” a refusal to stake your happiness on distant, uncontrollable ends. Expect nothing, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when a little good comes your way.

The irony is that this modest, unromantic posture can outlast the grand creeds whose followers insist that life is impossible without them. When the lofty ideals have cracked under the weight of reality, and the optimists have turned into their nihilist mirror images, there will still be the humble work of tending the garden, of keeping what’s good from being lost for a little while longer.

The Significance of This Fight

By in atheism, religion

Rachel Lu:

There are obvious benefits to a rejuvenated religious landscape. Maybe people will be happier, less lonely, and better able to form healthy families and communities. That, in turn, might diminish the attraction of less-healthy fixations, from violence to porn to unhinged social causes and political ideologies. Perhaps we could even expect more moral rectitude from our politicians and cultural influencers! Dare to dream.

It seems strange to me how often arguments for religious belief, particularly Christianity, rely on this sort of instrumental reasoning. Go to church! It’ll lower your blood pressure, give you an expanded social network, and who knows, maybe you’ll even meet that special someone! Okay, but aren’t you supposed to believe in this stuff because it’s true? Wasn’t that the original point? Does anyone want to try to make that argument anymore? Don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to encourage true-believing fanaticism or aggressive proselytizing, but as a happily-unchurched person and the target for this type of pitch, I have to say, you sound tentative and unsure about what you’re trying to sell me. I don’t sense any strength in an argument that starts off on the back foot.

Having presented his arguments for the basic rationality of religious belief, Douthat goes on offense more aggressively with a chapter on religious experience. The world, he contends, is not at all “disenchanted.” Again he spreads his net wide, discussing a range of supernatural or mystical phenomena: visions, charismatic raptures, naturally inexplicable events (miracles?), and near-death experiences. Offhand, this might seem like one of the easiest chapters for the skeptic to dismiss. Almost all of these occurrences are anecdotal, subjective, and prime fodder for hoaxes or embellishments. Douthat acknowledges this, but still raises some thought-provoking points. The one that most stuck with me concerned near-death experiences, which have been reported by people across many different countries and cultures. There are some fascinating similarities in the various accounts, and while one could hypothesize that this is just a bracing byproduct of almost dying, there is something rather strange about that. Why would people so frequently have intense, lucid experiences at precisely the time when their brains are barely functioning (to the point where some were ruled medically dead or believed to be dead)? Is it not reasonable to see this as at least some evidence that there might be something waiting for us on the other side?

“Something” waiting for us? What if we just wander aimlessly around Hades as restless shades? Would anyone be excited about that? This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s quip that if people had to choose between believing in God or believing in personal immortality, they’d take the latter in a heartbeat. More specifically, it illustrates my long-standing opinion that with religion, as with most complex subjects, people are using motivated reasoning to argue for several unexamined assumptions at once without even being aware of it. Seriously, what if there is a God or gods, but no souls or afterlives? What if there is an afterlife, but it’s just a variation on our current confusing existence, and God never makes an appearance to clarify anything? What if, as people like me suspect, there is a form of immortality, but without personal memory, like Aldo Leopold’s atom X? Logically, and evidentially, these options are no less viable. Ah, but none of this is about logic or evidence to begin with.

I’m sure there will be plenty of examples of people who were raised without religion who take it up as adults. That’s just human nature, to keep wandering back and forth in search of the grass than which there is none greener. But they’ll eventually encounter the same implausibility that has sent many people in the opposite direction. It may be good, it may be beautiful, but is it really true? And what happens when the impulse for truth has also proved to be a life-preserving power?

What Hath Dawkins to Do With Wokism?

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Sometimes I envy the stupid their certainties. The midwit moron hath said in his heart, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” and who can deny the satisfaction he receives from reducing complex phenomena down to a Twitter-friendly slogan?

“New Atheism” was a media phenomenon. Like everything else created and nurtured by journalists and media-savvy intellectuals, it was a narrative. Whether narratives are true or not is never important. They exist to give vacuous people something to chatter about until the next narrative comes out. But okay, fine, let’s humor this idiotic statement. How did New Atheism travel back in time to create identity politics, or postcolonialism? How did it create the Great Recession of ’07-’08, and by proxy, a large class of disaffected, downwardly-mobile young adults who channeled all their angst into the status competition we call wokeness? How did it inform Barack Obama’s “whole of society” approach to social change? What did it have to do with the new social media platforms that allowed performative radicalism to become trendy among a younger generation? Here we are, following the baby-boomer template to the letter. We had our cultural revolution, which is — right on schedule! — petering out into Manson Family-style cult psychosis. The energy behind the street protests and riots has dissipated. We’ve had a Republican Restoration. I suppose millennials are going to rediscover New Age navel-gazing next, and maybe there will be a trans Jonestown or something. None of this is new. All of this was done sixty years ago, and with better music. Doesn’t this strange cultural repetition suggest something much more fundamental than a passing media fad from the mid-’00s?

Religious, i.e. Christian, belief has been declining in the US for decades. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris were the fleas riding on the back of an elephant, getting credit for steering it. If anything, most of the liberals and leftists who would later become woke attacked New Atheism at the time for being Islamophobic, or even neoconservative, thanks to Hitchens’ and Harris’ support for the Iraq war. But sure, people just stopped believing in God around 2006 because of a couple of bestselling books, and wokeness was the inevitable consequence. I wish people had the decency to be embarrassed when they say something so goddamned stupid in public.

The Head of Some Old God

By in atheism, books, religion

I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: superficial they all seem to me, and shallow seas…Alas, I cast my net into their seas and wanted to catch good fish; but I always pulled up the head of some old god.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tyler Hummel:

Enter Spencer Klavan, the Oxford-educated classicist, editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and previous author of How To Save The West. His newest work Light Of The Mind, Light Of The World: Illuminating Science Through Faith directly dives into the bizarre transitionary moment we are living through, asking the same questions McGrath asked prematurely two decades ago with the added benefit of hindsight. Klavan is digging into the tidal movements of this moment and asking if the forces of secularism and materialism have become a spent force.

When a book review titled “Materialism on the Ropes” appeared in my inbox, I clicked on it with interest. Frankly, I’ve been feeling quite jaded and bored, intellectually speaking. I find it hard to escape the conviction that everything of interest has been thought and said already. So, did I miss some new developments in religious thought over the last lost decade of political idiocy? Did someone come up with a way to breathe new life into the old arguments over religion?

On this evidence, no. It was kind of fun to see some of my old opponents again, but they’re showing their age. The “God of the gaps” argument makes an appearance (quantum physics can’t be satisfactorily explained yet, therefore…monotheism must be true). There’s the old argument from consequences (materialism logically leads straight to totalitarianism and death camps). There’s even the appeal to (if not authority) fame that we saw a few weeks ago: several high-profile names have recently embraced Christianity (so therefore you should, too). Assuming the review is comprehensive and fair, Klavan’s book isn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. There may well be some sort of religious revival as the center of cultural and political gravity swings back toward the right in the near future, but human beings are never content anywhere for very long. Faith or no faith, the human condition remains.

Death Is Unanswered

By in atheism, religion, the geist of the zeit

Peter Savodnik:

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

When Savodnik contacted me a while back, he said he was writing an article about prominent secular intellectuals turning toward religion, and he wanted to know if I, an important philosopher and public intellectual, had any thoughts about it. I replied:

He sighed, and asked if I’d mind elaborating. Well, I said, no offense, but journalists are no better than marketing executives, and as such, I don’t take their proclamations seriously, whether the hot new thing is religion or those Stanley tumblers that people were fighting over in the aisles of Target. The media exists to create ephemeral narratives in a desperate attempt to stave off an unguarded moment of crushing self-awareness, and this one will soon be replaced by the next. Life will continue on much as it has. I don’t think there will be any significant return to that old-time religion, but if Crawford, Ferguson, and Hirsi Ali are satisfied with their new Christian outlook on life, good for them. As for me, I don’t feel like I’m lacking meaning, I still don’t believe in deities or immortal souls, and even if I calculate in utilitarian fashion that church attendance is a better thing for society overall than social justice activism, I think it would be a patronizing insult to go through the motions myself as a “faitheist.” As always, whatever the current enthusiasm, I just ask to be left out of it.

I see my remarks didn’t make the published article.

The Thoughtless Prejudice! The Thoughtless Error!

By in atheism, nietzsche, religion

No, no, a thousand times, no. Idiot! I’m going to have to officially become a Zen Buddhist just so I have a socially acceptable excuse to go around whacking imbeciles over the head with a bamboo stick every time they let their cleverness prevent them from seeing what’s right in front of their nose and thinking clearly about it. And this, this is not “thinking.” This is more like someone mindlessly connecting dots, hoping a coherent pattern emerges. “If you’re not 100% for, you should be 100% against.” There’s an intuitive rhetorical symmetry to “thoughts” like this that make them appealing despite their utter stupidity. They’re not even unreasonable so much as pre-reasonable. That’s why you don’t argue them out of someone’s head. You just…*whack*

I assume this is in response to the recent thing about Richard Dawkins declaring himself a “cultural Christian.” I’m not interested in any of that, but until I’m ordained and receive my bamboo stick, I feel like I should do my part to demystify the atheist perspective. Otherwise, fatheads like this will be presumed to speak for me.

Morality, like all human traditions, is a hodgepodge derived from our nature as a social species, refined over the eons through trial and error. As the late, great, Frans de Waal wrote about in many books, the rudiments of morality are present and obvious in many other species. You don’t need to accept, reject, or, indeed, have any opinion at all about virgin births, resurrected God-men, immortal souls, or afterlives to recognize morality and participate in the maintenance of it. You don’t simply “chuck it out” any more than you change into another species through an act of will. That’s one of those notions that only an intellectual could be stupid enough to believe. The kind of moron who says, “I reject Christian dogmas, so I guess I have to become a psychopath” is not thinking about what morality and immorality mean; he’s just bouncing between logical axioms like a pinball. He’s still reflexively allowing others to determine his response. He’s practicing what we might call “herd morality.” Speaking of which…

“Be like Nietzsche.” Now, this is the part where I storm the stage like Will Smith and slap my philosopher’s name out of FischerKing’s effing mouth. Here’s what the man himself had to say about what it means to “deny morality.” You can tell this was important to him, because he went to much greater effort than usual to idiot-proof his perspective (not that it helped):

Thus I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them.  I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but there is any true reason so to feel. It goes without saying that I do not deny — unless I am a fool — that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged, but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.

“I do not deny — unless I am a fool — that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged…” That, right there, could immediately shut down most of the nonsense, pro and con, that you read about Nietzsche. I’m not saying this is a definitive representation of his true or ultimate view on morality — for that kind of text-obsessed dogmatism, one would need to be an academic — but it goes to show that it was part of his perspective, one that always gets overlooked in favor of the more dramatic utterances of his later years when the tumor was destroying his brain. (Dominic Green, for what it’s worth, advances the view that all of Nietzsche’s bombast about “immorality” was just the overheated self-aggrandizement of a closet case.)

Nietzsche has been one of my closest literary companions for over thirty years now. I’ve returned to his books over and over because of the exquisite prose and the constant thought-provocation. I write about him here because, as with lifting weights, it’s a fun challenge to try to focus on a topic that a dozen other bookish bloggers haven’t already covered in depth, and to emphasize some under-appreciated aspects of his thought. And yet, I would never, except maybe in jest, tell anyone to “be like Nietzsche.” Read him, think with him, argue with him, but slavishly imitate him? Especially when you clearly don’t even understand what you’re imitating? “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”

Self-Command

By in atheism, books, bricolage, political philosophy, religion

Another luminary of mid-twentieth-century conservatism, Russell Kirk, said, “Until human beings are tied together by some common faith, and share certain moral principles, they prey upon one another.” To which three responses are required. First, religion can be socially useful without being true. Second, human beings can share many ethical principles without sharing the same faith, or having any faith. Third, people who share a faith or moral principles frequently have preyed upon one another, and on others. It is false, and politically ruinous, for conservatives to assert that conservatism requires a shared religion or even ubiquitous religiosity. The assertion that particular virtues depend, or that virtue generally depends, on religion is an empirical claim, and demonstrably false. There are many virtuous unbelievers, and many virtues with no religious provenance, and many religious people who are not virtuous.

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

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The men who built our political system tended to mildness in religion but sounded like evangelists on morality. Jefferson believed the pursuit of happiness inseparable from “the practice of virtue.” Madison placed “national policy” on the shoulders of “private morality.” Washington affirmed that “virtue or morality” was “a necessary spring of popular government.” The reconquest of the past must return to us the Founders’ clarity of vision. An ideology of freedom can work only if wedded to a morality of restraint.

It may be objected that a fractured society will explode into conflict over incompatible moral ideals. In fact, pluralism is impossible without some kind of shared morality. The ideals particular to this country borrow heavily from Christianity, as refracted through Enlightenment values—but they are transparent and stand on their own merit. In their most basic form, they are a call to act with integrity and to deal straight, with friend and stranger alike. At a higher level, they uphold the claims of the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, and the individual against the might of the state. This is a language that every American can speak.

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed a limit to how many personal relationships each of us can sustain: about 150. Morality is about behavior inside the Dunbar number. Before trying to save the earth or overthrow the patriarchy, we should examine our conduct among those who live and work with us. We should judge ourselves first—and more strictly than we do others because that is the privilege of freedom: the capacity to hold sovereignty over our actions and direct our lives to a higher plane. Self-judgment, far from being self-punishment, is the lone viable path to liberation.

— Martin Gurri, “Prologue to an Ideology of Freedom”

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Both the civic republican and the Christian traditions had assumed that society was held together by some shared vision and purpose. In the civic tradition, that purpose was the preservation of collective liberty, which required the cultivation of military virtue; in the Christian tradition, it was the shared devotion to Christ which made virtue possible and which united the power and upper orders of society. Smith’s vision, while allowing for military virtue and for religious institutions, envisaged a society held together in part by market relations of mutual self-interest, in part by deference, and in part by a culture of respectability which would extend to all social orders, encouraging men to treat one another with decency and increasing the respect of the upper classes for the lower classes.

The framework of Smith’s work is perhaps best understood as the institutionalization of neo-stoicism, in which the ethic of self-command is universalized and transformed from a moral injunction addressed to a political and intellectual elite into a policy objective for the entire society. It was a stoicism transformed by modern psychological institutionalism. In the seventeenth century, French moralists such as La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld had derided the possibility that passionate man could ever achieve the stoic virtues of self-command. Smith set out to show how — in a moderated and indirect form — such virtue could become widespread.

— Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

The Things We Do For Love

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion

Man must either fall in love
with Someone or Something,
or else fall ill.

— W.H. Auden

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

We had the annual charity women’s powerlifting event at the gym yesterday. The Lady of the House handled the spreadsheet duties, as usual, and this year she generously volunteered my services to help with spotting and loading the bar. A good time was had by all, though it was a bit disconcerting for me, an average student in math, to have the other guys ask me to check behind them to make sure they loaded the correct plates. Still, under my stewardship, the weights were all correct and the squat rack was adjusted to the correct height each time, so it was a personal success.

Before we started, everyone involved gathered in the group fitness room for a few quick words of encouragement, followed by a brief prayer. The gym owner thanked the Lord for our health and the ability to “do what we love here today,” and asked to keep us safe (given the date, there were words of thanks for our veterans as well). Of course, I’m all for expressions of gratitude, even if I don’t believe in the literal existence of the intended recipient. The ritual, the habit, of being appreciative is good enough for me. I looked at the two ladies in front of me, their heads bowed, one woman’s arm across the other’s shoulder, their other hands clasping those of the women beside them, and thought However we got here, it’s good to see it. Personally, I can reinterpret Christian ideas and practices in a symbolic or metaphorical way, but one way in which I differ from the spiritual-not-religious is that I think it would be condescending to act as if I understand the true symbolic essence of the faith, while all those devout believers are just benighted. I respect the truth claims enough to openly say I disagree with them and call myself an atheist, even if that raises someone’s ire, rather than act like a cuckoo, secretly laying my eggs in Christian nests.

I’m sure Hirsi Ali’s announcement will ruffle some rational feathers. Stuart Ritchie calls it “daft” and wonders how she could possibly be ignorant of all the obvious rebuttals to these silly, uniformly terrible arguments. Well, I don’t know exactly how one would go about arguing decisively, pro or con, that the West is becoming dangerously decadent, self-loathing, and incapable of withstanding challenges from its enemies. How would one “prove” that our nation has used up its allotted great deal of ruin, except after the fact? Likewise, as with Athens and Jerusalem, what does argument have to do with a desire for spiritual solace?  There are certainly many conversations to be had there, but what do I care if we ultimately arrive at different conclusions? She may be incorrect, but is she wrong? I’ll resist the urge to elaborate and trust that you get the distinction I’m making.

If Hirsi Ali were a friend of mine, I would say something like this: most of what you see as good and beautiful, I do, too. I can’t tell you how to handle your need for solace; all I can say is that in my own case, my resolution to the existential angst of my youth didn’t come in the form of an answer, like a religious doctrine, but in the realization that I’d been asking all the wrong questions. The angst disappeared on its own, just like the frustration before I realized I’d been reading the instructions wrong while trying to assemble the bookcase. Of course that bolt doesn’t fit there! This may be more of a logical or intellectual approach than you’re looking for, but hey, there’s a spiritual version of that, too.

As for the meaning and purpose of life, well, I think it’s partially the wrong question, in the sense that meaning and purpose aren’t “out there,” pre-existing, waiting to be discovered or commanded to us. They do exist. In fact, we all largely recognize them when we see them. But no, I don’t think they are inherent to existence. Some assembly is required. On a biological level, it’s all just fighting, feasting and fornicating until we die. Humans, though, ask “Why?” and set about providing justifications. All of those provisional answers — art, music, writing, sport, religion, communal tasks, and the basic care and maintenance of the conditions necessary for them — are something we create and share with each other. Those things all exist and have meaning as long as we keep them alive by practicing them. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of meaning and purpose, you might say. It may seem bleak to say that, no, I don’t think there are any guarantees involved. Good and beautiful things can disappear forever, especially if we fail to work for their preservation. All I can say is, well, you know me. I don’t find it depressing or demoralizing. And anyway, whatever you believe, you still have to show up and put in the necessary work.

So we gather together and do the things we love. We put aside self-centeredness and petty concerns and create something beautiful and meaningful to share. I think that’s good enough.

Cosmic Libretto

By in atheism, bricolage, religion

The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?

— Konstantin Kisin, “The Atheism Delusion”

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Recognizing the hollowness of the Enlightenment quest for some absolute and perspectiveless objectivity, the pragmatist is content to make do with all that is left — which, of course, was all there ever was from the very start — which is that ‘we think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing.’

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

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As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any: I do not at all ask what it is, for I suspect it has none, and this is a source of great comfort to me – we make of it what we can, and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some deep, cosmic, all-embracing, teleologically arguable libretto or god are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.

— Isaiah Berlin, letter to Irving Singer, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure

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