Edward T. Oakes wonders.
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Have the New Atheists Read Nietzsche?
29 Jan 2008 11:51 am
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Chris He starts with a rather absurd straw-man argument in which he distorts the claim that religion causes violence into the belief that religion is the source of all violence...
What Oakes is saying is that extreme secular and religious views are the cause of violence. He, also, argues that atheists from the time of the French Revolution through Stalin and Mao were certified religious fanatics in attempting to establish a heaven on earth.
Seriously religious people know that any sort of earthly utopias, religious or secular, are impossible, though obviously we need to strive for justice.
I haven't read much of the "new atheists" so I can't comment on how accurate Oakes' characterization of them is. But his essay has a bunch of problems.
For one thing, the idea that morality--early in the essay, "Christian morality," later on just morality--is inseparable from Christianity is obviously false, as we can observe in the world and as mainstream Christian doctrine, as I understand it, teaches. There are two narrower claims that he might have been better able to defend: 1) Morality is inseparable from belief in the divine, or at least some kind of transcendent source of moral order (e.g., the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma); and 2) specifically Christian morality is inseparable from Christianity.
The first claim is more defensible. It's obviously true that you can't make the same kind of moral claims in the absence of a transcendent order behind them as you can if you have one. That said, there are various pragmatic approaches to morality generally associated with liberalism, and while most people (myself included) find them unsatisfying, they do appear to work--that is, secular liberals don't seem more prone to doing immoral things than religious people, and there is no reason to think that a mostly secular society (which I doubt will ever exist) could not order itself morally. These are the stronger claims that Oakes seems to want to make, and I don't think he can defend them.
The second claim fails, even, again, according to Christian teaching as I understand it, which holds that all rational creatures are capable of apprehending moral law whether or not they're aware of the Christian revelation. It also fails from a secular liberal point of view; secular liberals, with a pragmatic approach to morality--which again, whatever its philosophical or spiritual shortcomings, appears to have much the same effect as religious morality--can certainly adopt moral positions derived from Christianity as easily as any other moral positions.
Oakes is also wrong to say that Nietzsche made some kind of definitive argument about the implications of atheism. In fact, Nietzsche's argument is nonsense: an atheistic cosmos does not favor Christian morality, but it does not favor Nietzsche's "natural" morality, either. It doesn't favor anything. There is no reason that the strong should wish to dominate the weak, though they well might--and, of course, religious morality has never prevented them from doing so, either.
What is admittedly irritating about Dawkins et al., from what I gather, is their failure to understand that rejecting religion poses any kind of moral problem. But Oakes seems to be saying that it's somehow illegitimate for atheists to work toward some kind of morality in the absence of God, which is silly. What else are they supposed to do?
Well, holee flurkin shite.
A teacher at some podunk seminary doesn't like atheists?!?
What a great find, Ross. Truly groundbreaking stuff.
Peter: He, also, argues that atheists from the time of the French Revolution through Stalin and Mao were certified religious fanatics in attempting to establish a heaven on earth.
Ironically (and unfortunately for Oakes' point) this is exactly what Hitchens and Dawkins argue. Stalinism and Maoism were secular religions.
Brendan, Oakes agrees with the nihilist Nietzsche that with the death of God and a moral cosmos the only arbiter of truth of necessity is power. Nietzsche was brilliant in exposing the flimsy moral ground of British liberalism. He, also, predicted what Oakes refers to as the "abattoir" of Twentieth Century wars.
Edward T. Oakes's essay is titled Atheism and Violence. Read the following lines from atheists:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
-1 Samuel 15:3
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee.
-Deuteronomy 20:16-17
Don't you love this violence-inciting atheist?
Nietzsche or Aristotle? We report, you decide.
the death of God and a moral cosmos the only arbiter of truth of necessity is power.
Right, and that is where I disagree with Oakes and Nietzsche. Without God or a moral cosmos there is no arbiter of truth or necessity--not power, either. The idea here is that, when you take away God, going on behaving morally and organizing moral societies is somehow illegitimate, and Nietzchean violence is the "legitimate" outcome. But in fact both of those outcomes are equally arbitrary.
Well... I don't believe in a personal God or savior, I don't have any desire to commit any wanton acts of violence, and I don't blame religion for the wanton acts of violence that do occur.
In the light of the cited article, what does that make me?
I don't understand this desire to blame the atrocities of the 20th century on religiosity or a-religiosity. I just don't think it's that simple.
Hmm, Brendan, but Nietzsche was not really arguing for a morality, per se (it was beyond morality, remember?). It was a reflection of the cosmos. Which is why I think you are wrong to say there is "no" arbiter--it's not an arbiter of "truth," but in Nietzsche's universe, everything is a reflection of the will to power (and in Christianity, it is turned upside down and sickened). Nietzsche was not saying "power is the only necessary morality" but rather there is no morality, and the only thing left is for and individual is will (this is admittedly crude and simplistic). When you take away God or the transcendent, all you are left is with power, with necessity, with will. And all the Enlightenment's attempts at practical reason (which you seem to acknowledge), have a hard time countering this insight.
Has Oakes read the New Atheists? I don't need to wonder, because it's pretty clear that he hasn't: his arguments are addressed, discussed, and soundly refuted by these authors, and his out of context quotes really don't make up for it. He quotes the beginnings of these arguments without seeming to have any real sense of them, and we are left then with the usual tiresome Godwinizing.
Ross, I understand that you're Catholic, but I don't see how that makes you link approvingly to such terrible and insulting arguments. First Things is a journal of cranks, not the whole of Catholicism.
And you rarely bother to defend them in follow up posts or in the comments, or even debate these issues in your own writing, so I wonder if you aren't just trolling for controversy with this stuff.
"It's obviously true that you can't make the same kind of moral claims in the absence of a transcendent order behind them as you can if you have one. "
It's not obviously true at all. References to a "transcendent order" do not a coherent argument about morality make. While religion dominated philosophy departments this sort of thing was accepted, but now people have been willing to point out that the emperor has no clothes, as it were. Folks like Oakes are merely bluffing when they claim that a world without God is a distinctly different sort of moral world: if it were, they would be able to explain how a God creates or maintains moral shoulds. And they simply, flatly, can't do it, handwaving about Nietzsche aside.
I'm not quite sure what it says about Oakes that he has so much respect for Nietzsche and such a thorough appreciation of early Twentieth Century history while being so blithely clueless about the era he actually lives in.
Sure, the demise of Christian morality is arguably tied up in utopian Marxism, nihilist Fascism, and all the other false idols of the Twentieth Century that led to so much tragedy. But the dialectical end state of those clashes turned out to be the European Union, a largely secular society that can hardly be described as a malevolent amoral monstrosity of hopelessness and despair. The primary threat to the new moral order comes from those who are still laboring under delusions of transcendence.
Nietzsche accurately foresaw that the "death of God" foretold strife led by secular forces, but this does not negate the increasingly obvious conclusion that this was a temporary phase.
When you take away God or the transcendent, all you are left is with power, with necessity, with will.
Yes, but Nietzsche obviously thought this power should, or at least would naturally, be used in a certain way, by the strong to subjugate the weak. That's what doesn't follow from the absence of God.
It's not obviously true at all. References to a "transcendent order" do not a coherent argument about morality make.
I didn't say you couldn't make moral claims, I said you couldn't make the same kind of moral claims, which I meant in a purely definitional way. A moral claim predicated on a transcendent order is not the same kind of moral claim as one dependent on, say, Richard Rorty-style pragmatism, by definition.
Brendan: "Yes, but Nietzsche obviously thought this power should, or at least would naturally, be used in a certain way, by the strong to subjugate the weak. That's what doesn't follow from the absence of God."
Hmm, well we'll have to disagree on whether or not the "strong ruling the weak" would "naturally" follow from the absence of God, given the way are universe is set up (evolution, survival of the fittest, etc.). You are right that it might not "should" follow, but it certainly seems "natural" to follow in such a way (if you follow me, ha). Of course, I also think it's somewhat unfair to characterize Nietzsche as seeing the "strong subjugating the weak"...His ideal of the ubermensch was an artist, I think. But that says nothing to what his followers and people who practice his argument end up doing.
Ugh, please excuse the poor grammar.
Brendan: A moral claim predicated on a transcendent order is not the same kind of moral claim as one dependent on, say, Richard Rorty-style pragmatism, by definition.
Well,how do you answer the eugenic proposition that it would be pragmatic to opt for a genetically designed superior child, or to kill off genetically inferior human trash, either before or after birth, other than with what Nietzsche would regard as some sort of liberal sentiment?
but this does not negate the increasingly obvious conclusion that this was a temporary phase.
Some of us suspect that the current state of the EU is the more clearly temporary phase. I don't expect a return of the convulsions of the first half of the 20th century (though I wouldn't be shocked by Chaos and Old Night loose again), but I doubt the current Deicide Peace has any staying power. For one thing, technology, given the semi-utilitarian, pseudo-Christian, "human rights" morality of contemporary Europe, will uproot the very nature of what is human and what have-and-have-not mean, before most of us are in our graves.
Dogs are laying down with cats, water is running uphill, and the Sun is revolving around the Earth, because Peter Leavitt wrote: "What Oakes is saying is that extreme secular and religious views are the cause of violence. He, also, argues that atheists from the time of the French Revolution through Stalin and Mao were certified religious fanatics in attempting to establish a heaven on earth.
Seriously religious people know that any sort of earthly utopias, religious or secular, are impossible, though obviously we need to strive for justice. "
And I agree. Though I think the comment about the French Revolution is partially misplaced, Maoism and Stalinism were certainly secular religions. You can't run a sane society when you're running it based on a doctrine of a future utopia in exchange for current obedience. This is the essential flaw in authoritarian governments of this sort - as well as theocratic versions - they're unjust and delusional.
Brendan: "I said you couldn't make the same kind of moral claims, which I meant in a purely definitional way. A moral claim predicated on a transcendent order is not the same kind of moral claim as one dependent on, say, Richard Rorty-style pragmatism, by definition."
Saying that a moral claim is predicated on a transcendent order is pretty much not saying anything coherent about morality at all.
I'm not a logical positivist, but I also don't think that word-salad excuses which never get to any sort of coherent point or explanation can count as moral philosophy anymore. "Transcendent" is essentially an excuse for not being able to provide any sort of coherent argument.
And, in fact, it's worse than that. If you want to allege a transcendent order that undergirds religious morality, then what is to stop be from asserting that there is a naturalistic "transcendent" order that undergirds Rorty? Certainly that would be silly... but no more or less silly, and no more or less supportable than when you might make such an appeal.
You can't deny me the use of an untestable tool that you cannot yourself explain or definitively identify the operation of.
It's very convenient for Dawkins and Hitchens to define Stalinism or Maosim as secular religions, then the atrocities in Russia and China can fall under the banner of "religion."
But this is a particularly idiosyncratic definition of "religion."
Religion must at least involve some sort of supernatural component, whether that component is monotheistic or not, personal or not.
If you go about categorizing atheistic Communism as a religion, then you benefit illegitimately from the ambiguity in the word religion, which is not an admirable or straight-forward way to argue. You may as well blame soccer (football for those outside the U.S.) riots on religion, since the fans had a "religious" devotion to their sport and their team.
That's not what people mean when they normally talk about religion, and it's not what Htichens, Dawkins, etc mean when they criticize monotheistic or even supernatural forms of religion.
Calling Maoism or Stalinism a religion is silly and sneaky, and talking about Stalin's childhood is... grasping at straws.
There is a reasonable alternative to views about religion and atheism in general, and that is that grand ideologies, religious or not, can be very dangerous. The problem is with humanity, and its tendency to craft utopian ideologies, and inflict them on large groups of people. Religion has obviously been a major avenue for this, but the sheer size of the atrocities in Russia and China should cause us to doubt whether religion, per se, is at fault, or if harmful ideologies can spring themselves on people in varying forms... religious, political, cultural, tribal, etc. An ideology would be define as set of firmly held beliefs somewhat impervious to evidence and persuasion, and a harmful ideology would be defined as an ideology which people wish to inflict on everyone else, in the belief that a type of utopia will arise. This way of viewing the matter would explain BOTH religious fundamentalism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, as opposed to what Hitchens and Dawkins offer, which is something that explains religious threats nicely, but has nothing illuminating at all to say about some of the most atrocious mass-scale acts of modern history: Stalinist Russia and Moaist China.
Please note that I would be the last person to blame atheism for any atrocity, it's only that I don't see any view, religious or secular, as being insured against ideology by itself. Resisting ideology is a bit messier than simply being religious or secular.
LaFollette Progressive
"Nietzsche accurately foresaw that the "death of God" foretold strife led by secular forces, but this does not negate the increasingly obvious conclusion that this was a temporary phase."
Yes, Nietzsche predicted the "barbaric brotherhoods" of the twentieth century; and yes he saw this as a but one phase in the death of God.
However, his power of prediction went further. He predicted an era after this phase that would be the most terrible yet - an area of the "total eclipse of all values".
Almost like a dictatorship of relativism.
"For one thing, technology, given the semi-utilitarian, pseudo-Christian, "human rights" morality of contemporary Europe, will uproot the very nature of what is human and what have-and-have-not mean, before most of us are in our graves."
This is at least a more worthy topic of discussion than Oakes's ramblings, but I can't quite see how Pre-Enlightenment Catholic morality is any better equipped to deal with the implications of such technology in a world where a powerful demand exists for said technology and it can easily be shipped to your shores from China.
I'll chime in with agreement here.
And note that this question of utopia may be a central distinguishing point between myself and Hector.
It's worth noting that First Things is an overwhelmingly pro-war religious magazine. That may just be a coincidence.
"He predicted an era after this phase that would be the most terrible yet - an area of the 'total eclipse of all values'.
Almost like a dictatorship of relativism."
Fortunately for all of us, Nietzsche, unlike you, understood what the words "relativism" and "values" actually mean, and therefore few observers would conclude that The Twilight of the Idols predicts a future where France and Germany would share an undefended border, a common currency, and a strong regard for human rights.
Bad,
What would you consider a coherent argument for the truth of a moral position?
By the way, I'm not religious myself.
"That's not what people mean when they normally talk about religion, and it's not what Htichens, Dawkins, etc mean when they criticize monotheistic or even supernatural forms of religion."
If that's the case, then calling atheism a religion gets pretty hard as well. Stalin and Mao were anti-religious, and atheists, but putting them in the same boat with other atheists makes even less sense than putting Hitler in the same boat with theists. (Hitler was, wholly and unambiguously, a theist, not an atheist, as Oakes tries to massage away the implications of: he was even a theist who's central appeal was not to Neitzsche, but to virulent Christian Antisemitism like that of Martin Luther.)
This is where Oakes plays an extremely dishonest game, though a common one for First Things writers, who tend to have little intellectual integrity on this subject. He pretends that there is theism, an affirmative philosophy, and then there is atheism, also an affirmative philosophy. Thus he can try to lump all the sins of all atheists together.
But this is sophistry. It is an argument designed to ignore the reality that non-belief is not itself an affirmative philosophy at all. It is merely a category, and a negatively defined category at that, not a shared anything. Mao is an atheist like I am an atheist only in the sense that Mao is a non-professional baseball player the way I am a non-professional baseball player. The fact that neither of us is a god believer has no implications at all for us sharing any similar values or philosophies.
The fact is, people like Oakes and his admirers (I still wonder: is Ross among them? Is he going to actually comment on or defend these pieces he's linking to from First Things?) can spin this yarn only because they see all of reality as a sort of us them scenario, where the faults of "THEM" are all amenable to a single Satanic interpretation. Back in reality, however, Oakes views are just one amongst a great many philosophies, not all of which are linked or share a common basis. And that is never more the case than with "atheism" which even he uses as a catch-all term for non-believers as a whole (and note how dishonest his usage is: he defines atheism broadly when he needs to include all of the secular world, but then when he attacks atheism, he carefully narrows the definition down to whatever straw man assertion he wishes to attack).
Jay J: "There is a reasonable alternative to views about religion and atheism in general, and that is that grand ideologies, religious or not, can be very dangerous. The problem is with humanity, and its tendency to craft utopian ideologies, and inflict them on large groups of people. Religion has obviously been a major avenue for this, but the sheer size of the atrocities in Russia and China should cause us to doubt whether religion, per se, is at fault, or if harmful ideologies can spring themselves on people in varying forms... religious, political, cultural, tribal, etc."
Hmmm... where have I heard this before. Oh yes: Harris and Dawkins both make this very same point: you know, the one you are faulting them for missing the boat on.
Their point is also that such tribalism and totalitarianism are buttressed by the willingness of people to accept things on faith rather than being reasonable and skeptical. As Harris said: no society has become worse off for becoming more reasonable and less faith based. Whether you call these things religion or not is beside the point.
Bad,
What's your definition of the word "coherent."
I'm not trying to be too nit-picky, and I know on a forum like this, colloquialisms do just fine, but it seems like getting a firmer handle on the word might help, or at least it might help me.
Coherence has to do with how well all the propositions of a position fit together, yes? Logical interconnection, consistency, etc, this is what coherence really is.
If this is true, then a position can be completely coherent and completely untrue. As a matter of fact, the specific assertions in a position can be obviously untrue, but if they logically connect with one another, in other words if they are consistent with one another, then the position is "coherent."
The reason for bringing this up is not to critique anyone's use of the language, lord knows I have plenty of problems in this area.
The reason I bring this up is to say that positing some sort of supernatural order may be the only way to coherently be a moral realist. Of course people can talk about the evolution of cooperation all they want, but that doesn't tell us about what we "should" do.
The quagmire is, one the one hand, in a completely naturalistic or materialistic view, moral realism cannot be made coherent, and in a supernatural view, belief in the metaphysical realism of morality cannot be shown to be sound (or true).
It's not intellectually obvious to me which one is better between soundness or coherence, I'm simply saying, morality is a tough one for everyone, yes?
We could just wash our hands of it and be pragmatic, but of course when we insist that others adhere to some objective standard of belief, we're already making claims about obligation which is, at the end of the day, a moral claim.
"but I can't quite see how Pre-Enlightenment Catholic morality"
You can’t see it because your axiom is a Non sequitur. "Pre-Enlightenment Catholic morality" existed in & only during the Pre-Enlightenment.
Today we have a thoroughly modern and engaged Catholic morality more than sufficient to meet the considerable demands that technology places upon our humanity.
Bad,
In response to your 2:40 post, which was a response to me:
The thing I think you're supposed to notice is, IF it is grand ideologies, rather than religion per se, which causes so much trouble, what is the evidence that religion is somehow a peculiar institution which, once eliminated, would result in the net loss of ideology?
This claim seems to rest on the assumption that it is religion, rather than ideology in general, which is the problem.
I also think you're supposed to notice, that since I went out of my way to say that atheism itself was not to blame for Stalinist Russia and Moaist China, that religion itself isn't to blame for the atrocities it has committed.
Religious fundamentalism is an ideology, and it certainly carries the blame for quite a bit, but Barack Obama's church the United Church of Christ, is a religion, and I would hesitate to call it an ideological institution.
Saying the elimination of religion will cause the decline of ideology strikes me as quite like saying that the elimination of atheism will prevent another Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Brendan: "What would you consider a coherent argument for the truth of a moral position?"
One that began with a common premise of some shared value and then used that premise to argue for a set of shoulds conditional on that premise. You know, how virtually all moral arguments work in practice when we try to convince each other that this or that action is wrong.
If there is no shared value, then there is no basis on which to have a moral conversation of course (humans have all sorts of shared values, which is why we can have coherent moral debate).
But calling up "transcendence" as a principle adds nothing to that picture other than handwaving. It's a common theological bluff that attempts to bypass having to state or acknowledge the actual, implied premises of theistic moral views, which function exactly the same once exposed (i.e. they assume some value as a premise and then work from there).
"Fortunately for all of us, Nietzsche, unlike you, understood"
I'll ignore that.
"Fortunately for all of us, Nietzsche, unlike you, understood what the words "relativism" and "values" actually mean, and therefore few observers would conclude that The Twilight of the Idols predicts a future where France and Germany would share an undefended border, a common currency, and a strong regard for human rights."
So your saying that Nietzsche's predictive powers were wrong. He had exhausted himself in the Will to Power - and mans "revaluation" of morality; rather than ending in a "total eclipse of all values" would instead end in an easy, cafe sitting, European (sustainable?) welfare state with a single currency?
"what is the evidence that religion is somehow a peculiar institution which, once eliminated, would result in the net loss of ideology?"
If you read the works of the people in question (instead of folks like Oakes, who think that calling them brutes and imbeciles is enough) you'd see their answer: religion happens to be one of the greatest cultural defenders of faith as an epistemology. It supports, praises, and protects the idea that it is good to believe passionately in something utterly regardless of the degree of evidence supporting it, and that we should all look down upon skepticism against such assertions as something nasty and mean, rather than the sort of appropriate critical eye that we apply to most other aspects of life these days.
"I also think you're supposed to notice, that since I went out of my way to say that atheism itself was not to blame for Stalinist Russia and Moaist China, that religion itself isn't to blame for the atrocities it has committed."
Religions don't commit atrocities: people do. The question is why people come to think that atrocities are justified. And the reason they argue against religion in particular is that it is one of the primary and specially protected-from-criticism means by which people come to decide that this or that view is correct and beyond all criticism. This isn't to say that irrational hatred is impossible without it, and none of these authors claim it would be.
"Saying the elimination of religion will cause the decline of ideology strikes me as quite like saying that the elimination of atheism will prevent another Chinese Cultural Revolution."
Again, the issue here is really religious faith and the aid it delivers to factual positions that would be otherwise unsupportable.
Atheism isn't a position or a claim at all. It is the lack of theism. Different atheists have all sorts of affirmative philosophies, and if we want to criticize them, then we must deal with them individually.
Bad:
so, have your "values" have anything to do what you understand to be real, or not? If not, I don't understand how you can hope to have any shared value with anybody else.
BTW, this remains then whole point about "God," "transcendence" etc. At the philosophical level they are all really statements about the reality of the world and the reality of being a person, which of course you think are non-questions.
"so, have your "values" have anything to do what you understand to be real, or not? If not, I don't understand how you can hope to have any shared value with anybody else."
I don't need to hope, because it's been a basic reality for most of human history. If human beings didn't have basic values that they recognize as common, there would be no society or moral debate. But we do and so we do have those things.
"BTW, this remains then whole point about "God," "transcendence" etc. "
What whole point? What's the point here with "transcendence?" How is it anything other than "My way is better, but I don't feel any need to explain how"?
Anyone can play that game. I could simply claim that the basic values of empathy and attachment are "atheistically transcendent." What does that add to our understanding of anything?
Bad,
As I'm sure you're aware, this leaves us unable to say that some values are better or worse than other values. When confronted with something like Nazism, for example, the best we can do is point out that it represents an aberration in history, a radical departure from the shared values that most people at most times have held.
But, unfortunately, our own liberal democratic values are also such an aberration.
You would be perfectly right to point out that it doesn't really matter whether we can coherently say that our liberal democracy is better than Nazism, in practical terms. But do you feel entirely comfortable with this?
I also reject your claim that people with different moral values can't have a conversation. It seems to me that the most important moral debates--over abolition, women's liberation, civil rights, and so on--are clashes of values, and they are won when people are persuaded to change their values. Being persuaded to change one's values is of course nonsense in your terms, since values don't correspond to anything other than themselves.
Bad,
It didn't seem like the Marxist or Communist ideology which caused so much suffering was particularly vulnerable to any argument. It's epistemology was stubbornly ironclad...and atheistic I might add.
Religious people also come with all sorts of affirmative philosophies. Saying that aBrack Obama's church is somehow impervious to reason strikes me as pretty hasty.
The conscious choice to not focus the critiques on fundamentalism, but rather religion in general, speaks volumes.
Most of my experience with religion has not been that skepticism needs to be looked as as something mean and nasty, and I actually find that assertion to be a little ironic coming from someone who presumably approves of Chris Hitchens' methods. I know that fundamentalists often preach faith as an unassailable quality that other people cannot question, but many religious people simply draw comfort from their religious experience, and leave it at that.
So there's an easier way to go about it, and Thomas Paine showed the way. I can't speak for allot of what Paine wrote, but one thing he said that rings true with me is that even if we grant that someone else had some kind of divine revelation, there's no way for us to have epistemic access to that experience. If someone had a divine epiphany, that makes no difference to us.
But Hitchens and Dawkins go much further than that. Hitchens goes out of his way to include Buddhism in his critiques, and Dawkins goes out of his way to trumpet his commitment to a materialist ontology. In the case of Buddhism, Hitchens is straying from critiques of monotheistic or personal gods, and applying his methods on more abstract metaphysical systems. In the case of Dawkins, a materialist ontology would preclude the possibility of ANY metaphysical system beyond raw, purposeless, matter.
So if the New Atheists are a movement at all, they certainly aren't careful in approaching their target. Michael Shermer, the head of the Skeptics Society, strikes me as someone who is more sensitive to the issues I'm raising.
But Dawkins, Hitchens, etc, aren't. Atheism may be a lack of theism, but all religions aren't theistic, and some theistic ones are quite abstract and progressive. Hitchens and Dawkins don't limit themselves to theism.
And the point you make about atheists being diverse in their commitments to affirmative philosophies is a point for my argument, not yours. Because if religion was eliminated tomorrow, Chris Hitchens and George W. Bush would still be major Iraq War cheerleaders, and Sam Harris and Dick Cheney would still be in favor of the use of torture. Michael Shermer would still be a libertarian and the hoards of people who read Dawkins and Hitchens would be left of center, and the mass of evidence still points to the fact that ideology would still creep up and bite us, one way or another, see Stalinist Russia for details...
Your view of human history is naive. 100 years ago in this country many people thought that we can own other human beings. Go read some history and tell me what values you recognize in common, say, with the Ottoman Turks or with the Aztecs or even with our own good old classical Romans.
The point you stubbornly refuse to see is that, even though of course every human being is endowed (by God!) with a moral conscience, in practice our behavior is utterly conditioned by what we perceive to be real and desirable. Just wait and see...
LaFolette Progressive: But the dialectical end state of those [20th Century] clashes turned out to be the European Union, a largely secular society that can hardly be described as a malevolent amoral monstrosity of hopelessness and despair. The primary threat to the new moral order comes from those who are still laboring under delusions of transcendence.
Actually, anyone who knows or has dealt with the European Union understands that it is basically a vast, merciless, unelected bureaucracy inhabiting those modern steel and glass towers in Brussels and Strasbourg, issuing reams of abstruse and pathetic regulations. Nietzsche fully understood that Europe was heading in this direction and preferred some sort of nihilistic ubermensch to this sort of spineless humanity.
The "new morality' of which you speak has to do with men with neither faith nor nuts.
My 3:34 comment was directed to Bad, of course.
There was no way it was going to last. Peter Leavitt returns to the Way of the Stupid: "Actually, anyone who knows or has dealt with the European Union understands that it is basically a vast, merciless, unelected bureaucracy inhabiting those modern steel and glass towers in Brussels and Strasbourg, issuing reams of abstruse and pathetic regulations. Nietzsche fully understood that Europe was heading in this direction and preferred some sort of nihilistic ubermensch to this sort of spineless humanity.
The "new morality' of which you speak has to do with men with neither faith nor nuts. "
Peter's preferred morality, favored by his sort of "men of faith with nuts," involves chortling right-wingers crowing proudly as they murder hundreds of thousands of people on spec and torture for the sport of it.
If this be morality, hand me my shotgun, boy. It's time to go hunting French Revolution-style, because the old order sucketh.
Actually Moe, I prefer strong men and women of faith capable of acting freely and capably in their various fields who wouldn't be capable of grievous harm, including an abortion, though willing to fight well in a necessary and just war.
though willing to fight well in a necessary and just war.
...and torture the darkies....
Nietzsche fully understood that Europe was heading in this direction and preferred some sort of nihilistic ubermensch to this sort of spineless humanity.
The "new morality' of which you speak has to do with men with neither faith nor nuts."
Thank you, Peter, for clearly encapsulating everything I despise about American conservatism in two sentences.
Any moral philosophy that sneers at peace and broadly shared prosperity, but pays tribute for the moral clarity of the Medieval Church and the "nuts" of fascist Nietzschean ubermenschen, is one that deserves a far worse fate than merely rotting away in pathetic obscurity.
But I'll settle for that.
I was going to respond to Peter Leavitt's 4:22 post, but Soma did it succinctly.
But, ah, hell - if the past four decades of American history have revealed anything, it's that the Peter Leavitts no longer have any real concept of "necessary and just war." This is why they continue to bend reality in order to pretend Iraq qualifies as both, and why some of them remain the only people who still think Vietnam wasn't a mistake.
If Dumbya ordered a massive airstrike on Iran tomorrow, who would be cheering? Petey would be, and others like him. They just can't manage moral equations any more after years of letting their Great Leader do it for them.
Any moral philosophy that sneers at peace and broadly shared prosperity
Well, we might respect Nietzsche more as a philosopher (and if Oakes' tribute doesn't float anyone's boat, I think Alasdair MacIntyre puts forth Nietzsche's arguments more effectively), but I think most American conservatives clearly would prefer the Euro-state to anything resembling Nietzsche's ideal state, whatever that might look like (I still have no terribly coherent idea -- at heart, he's not precisely a political philosopher in _that_ sense).
I think conservatives in general have doubts that the kind of peace and prosperity, built on these premises, that Europe currently offers will be genuinely enduring. And, admittedly, at least some conservatives (not all American "conservatives," surely? many are the most gross sort of prosperity-uber-alles folks) think that man does have higher ends than material prosperity, and that while broad-spread prosperity is a (largely) positive in itself, it doesn't speak to the humanity or goodness of an age. I'd rather be in the company of good men and women than prosperous but empty-souled men and women.
Fair enough, Marquis. I should point out that Peter Leavitt was, in fact, sneering at a peaceful and broadly prosperous society while commending Nietzsche's genitalia. This sort of thing is all too common among a specific subgenre of American conservative, and it is indeed what I despise most about the movement. But, naturally, there are a great many different strains of American conservatism.
I don't think that prosperity, per se, speaks to the goodness of the age, nor do I truck with the prosperity-uber-alles folks. But the more equitable distribution of wealth, the dismantling of walls, the enhanced individual autonomy, and the lasting peace amongst former enemies speak very well of the morality of our age... even by the standards laid out in Christian scripture.
Peter may have access to the Director's Cut of the Bible, in which Christ commends the nut size of the Roman legions. I, alas, do not.
Brendan "As I'm sure you're aware, this leaves us unable to say that some values are better or worse than other values."
Really? Why? What exactly makes me incapable of judging the Nazis as evil? I seem perfectly able.
"When confronted with something like Nazism, for example, the best we can do is point out that it represents an aberration in history, a radical departure from the shared values that most people at most times have held."
No: we can point out that it is murderous, insane, and cruel. And anyone that agrees that those things are bad can agree. But if people do not already think that pointless cruelty is wrong, by what argument could you possibly persuade them that it is? What would such an argument even look like?
"You would be perfectly right to point out that it doesn't really matter whether we can coherently say that our liberal democracy is better than Nazism, in practical terms. But do you feel entirely comfortable with this?"
I don't know what you think you are trying to say. What do you mean by "practical terms?" We can say its better by pointing to all the things we value and showing that our society is far better at delivering them, and more broadly.
"I also reject your claim that people with different moral values can't have a conversation."
They can converse, but unless they have something to appeal to, there is nothing that can convince. You cannot convince a sociopath that murder is wrong, because they have no basis for considering it wrong: no root in any concern for anyone else in the first place. You can threaten or bribe a sociopath to not murder, but you can't get them to care via a logical argument, because caring isn't a conclusion, it's a feeling.
"It seems to me that the most important moral debates--over abolition, women's liberation, civil rights, and so on--are clashes of values, and they are won when people are persuaded to change their values. Being persuaded to change one's values is of course nonsense in your terms, since values don't correspond to anything other than themselves."
I think you are misrepresenting what's going on in those cases: these changes were predicated on convincing people that a) certain factual claims (women intellectually inferior, etc.) were false as well as b) arguing from the same basic premises of happiness and empathy and showing that it was more compelling to reach different conclusions.
Oftentimes these arguments consisted of showing serious contradictions in people's professed values, such as caring about the suffering of some people but not of others: something that ultimately proves indefensible if you wish to cast your moral rules in terms of absolutes.
But none of the people having these conversations were so radically dissimilar in their basic values of empathy, concern for other people, and so on, that they couldn't appreciate the points being made.
LaFoletteProgressive, I far from sneered at peaceful and broadly prosperous society; my concern is about the the soulless EU bureaucrats whom you claim to be part of some "new" morality.
Also, being a Christian, I abhor Nietzschean nihilism, though, as Fr. Oakes points out, Nietzsche brilliantly pointed out that British liberalism and "progressivism" having essentially slain God, were barren of any moral foundation.
Leaving the nuts aside, I prefer strong, moral, faithful Christians as opposed to the "men without chests" that C.S. Lewis, equally as prescient as Nietzsche, feared were taking over the West.
Peter leavitt writes: "Leaving the nuts aside, I prefer strong, moral, faithful Christians as opposed to the "men without chests" that C.S. Lewis, equally as prescient as Nietzsche, feared were taking over the West."
Petey prefers Dumbya Bush to Franklin Roosevelt, which tells you all you have to know about his actual views on morality.
Jay J:
It didn't seem like the Marxist or Communist ideology which caused so much suffering was particularly vulnerable to any argument.
Which is precisely the point: it wasn't rational or reasonable and so is hardly a relevant example of a the "dangers" of less faith and more reason.
It's epistemology was stubbornly ironclad...and atheistic I might add.
You realize, of course, how meaningless it is to call it "atheistic," right? It's no different than calling is "avideogamistic" because they didn't play videogames.
The conscious choice to not focus the critiques on fundamentalism, but rather religion in general, speaks volumes.
Not really, because the authors actually discuss this matter and this choice in detail, so we don't really need you putting words in their mouths.
Most of my experience with religion has not been that skepticism needs to be looked as as something mean and nasty, and I actually find that assertion to be a little ironic coming from someone who presumably approves of Chris Hitchens' methods.
I've made no secret that I'm not a huge fan of Hitchens' tone or of him as a thinker, but I also find most critiques of him to be incredibly lazy and mis-representative.
I'm not sure it makes much difference whether Hitchens is nice or nasty. Plenty of lazy thinkers will portray atheists and skeptics as nasty and disrespectful no matter what, as well as being utterly blind to how trivial and placid these criticisms are compared to the SOP at places like, say, First Things.
I know that fundamentalists often preach faith as an unassailable quality that other people cannot question, but many religious people simply draw comfort from their religious experience, and leave it at that.
But the point is, it's not left at that. Moderate defenses of faith help legitimate extremist uses of it, because once you've endorsed the method, it can be used for justifying anything at all.
Granted, I think this point is largely overblown, which is why I spend very little time worrying about religious moderates, who are by and large my allies in every respect.
For more on my basic position on atheism, and why its incidental to what I really care about, see
here.
But Hitchens and Dawkins go much further than that. Hitchens goes out of his way to include Buddhism in his critiques, and Dawkins goes out of his way to trumpet his commitment to a materialist ontology.
No he doesn't. And you'll have to explain why Buddhism is a worthy sacred cow, beyond criticism: certainly its not a system of belief without its share of bad ideas and institutions, no? Also, Harris happens to be somewhat of a defender of Buddhism, so there's hardly some sort of unified critique of everything here.
In the case of Dawkins, a materialist ontology would preclude the possibility of ANY metaphysical system beyond raw, purposeless, matter.
That's not actually what he argues. He doesn't rule those other things out. They don't work out, pragmatically, because they are untestable.
So if the New Atheists are a movement at all, they certainly aren't careful in approaching their target. Michael Shermer, the head of the Skeptics Society, strikes me as someone who is more sensitive to the issues I'm raising.
I admit that I like Shermer quite a bit.
But Dawkins, Hitchens, etc, aren't. Atheism may be a lack of theism, but all religions aren't theistic, and some theistic ones are quite abstract and progressive. Hitchens and Dawkins don't limit themselves to theism.
The very opening of Dawkins' book, for one, makes it clear exactly what sort of religious beliefs he's addressing, and which ones he's not. Did you miss this?
And the point you make about atheists being diverse in their commitments to affirmative philosophies is a point for my argument, not yours. Because if religion was eliminated tomorrow, Chris Hitchens and George W. Bush would still be major Iraq War cheerleaders, and Sam Harris and Dick Cheney would still be in favor of the use of torture. Michael Shermer would still be a libertarian and the hoards of people who read Dawkins and Hitchens would be left of center, and the mass of evidence still points to the fact that ideology would still creep up and bite us
Reasonable people can come to different conclusions, in part because they don't agree on what's best for society. The point is that when they are tied to reason, they are forced to come up with evidence and argue sensibly for their positions, rather than hiding behind cultural taboos and unearned protection for unsupportable claims.
I would like to praise Bad's comments both for their content and commendable rhetorical restraint, a rare commodity on Internet discussion boards.
Beyond that, I only have two somewhat related points to make:
1. Oakes' article has all the lucidity and incisiveness of a Scientology tract. Does anyone else feel this way, even if generally favorably disposed to his point of view? What to make of this:
This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice—true justice—would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” This would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead.
Admittedly, that was the pope speaking, but Oakes own writing is of a similar tenor. What does any of this even mean? As prose, does this even compile? It has the look of aleatorically composed writing, with a dash of Mad Libs mixed in.
2. I'd like to echo others' request for Ross to defend this link, and try to surpass the low bar of semantic content set by Oakes' article.
hw:
funny, to you it looks aleatorically composed, to me it is crystal clear. I guess we come from different backgrounds...
bad:
your understanding of faith as an irrational assent to untestable propositions is a cartoon. What is worse, it is a deeply intolerant cartoon, because essentially you feel entitled to expel from the public discourse every viewpoint which does not conform to your pseudo-scientific understanding of "rationality."
Carlo:
Differing backgrounds or not, is there something I'm missing? I assume I have a pretty good grasp of the agreed-upon meaning of English words, as well as their appropriate contextual usage. I have both an academic background (in mathematics, not the humanities, to be sure), and a family history of Christianity (hmm, this makes it sound like a hereditary disorder), so I doubt that there is some specialist theological or academic argot here whose meaning eludes me.
I'm afraid theological writing generally strikes me as so much blather, so maybe I'm missing a gene somewhere, as with red-green colour-blindness. I'm used to long and difficult arguments (lemma, lemma, main theorem, corollary etc.), but a certain foundation of clear base notions is necessary to make any headway, which seems utterly lacking in this article.
On a related note, it's striking to me how much the pope's writing resembles that of Alan Sokal's parody essay "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
hw
But Sokal's essay was a jibe at postmodern decunstruction; not theology.
As prose, does this even compile?
This is partly because, while "admirable" in some ways, Adorno and Horkheimer were also posing a rather incoherent position, if you ask me.
Fitz:
Yes, but do you agree with my comparison? When writing and thought takes leave of concrete notions, there is a danger of producing reams and reams of turgid, belabored prose with no actual semantic content. This is what Bad referred to earlier as 'word-salad', I suppose.
Abstractions are extremely useful (indeed essential), but one should be mindful of the thin lifeline, easily severed, that connects an idea with reality and reason. In mathematics, this is a particular occupational hazard. I recall a case where a Ph.D. student wrote a very standard dissertation about some set of functions with a given set of properties, and was able to prove some interesting results about them. Unfortunately, the list of properties constrained the set so severely that it contained only constant functions, which aren't particularly interesting! Had he tried first to construct actual functions in the set, his suspicions about the whole project might have been raised much earlier, and a disastrous defense might have been averted. Caveat abstractor!
"[n]ot Nietzsche’s Zarathustra but John Lennon’s “Imagine.”"
Ouch.
Bad,
Speaking of tone, yours is quite "bad." Do you really have to say stuff like "did you miss this?" You're not arguing with a fundie here, chill out.
I've seen Dawkins say several times that belief in ANYTHING supernatural is not intelligent, and that the universe has all the characteristics of an purposeless universe, with neither good nor bad in it. It's known that he's committed to a materialist ontology, it's a fact. Chris Hitchens has declared himself a materialist as well. I agree that this ontology is untestable, but that doesn't stop people from committing to it. I realize that there are atheists with an agnostic bent on metaphysical matters, but Dawkins isn't one of them. It doesn't matter if he said in the beginning of one of his books that he's not targeting alternative religious conceptions. We don't have to take him at his word, we can look at the things he says over time. Besides, he may have been very disciplined in his book about who he was targeting, but he's not that disciplined all the time.
The point I was making about the people who leave their faith as a private matter was not that they mount defenses of their faith at all, so your point about moderate defenses of faith doesn't really apply. If fundie's push their faith on people, that's not "defended" by religious liberals.
And I'm not putting words into anyone's mouths. The authors in question have a much larger body of work than the few books that have been released in the last few years. That body of work matters.
My point about Buddhism was that it avoids many of the characteristics that Western Monotheistic religion exhibits. As you mentioned Sam Harris is quite fond of it. I'm sure there are SOME versions of it which need to be critiqued, but apparently Chris Hitchens is unable or unwilling to do any subtle thinking at all, and instead must clump everything with the same name in together.
I didn't say that Communism is an example of "less faith and more reason." The meaning of what I said is that Communism is an example of the negative (not as in "bad" but as in negating) feature known as non-theism. It's not obvious that the lack of theism is a good thing. The assertion that a lack of theism is a good thing is a hypothesis, a dream. It's not obvious, in other words, but it's asserted as if it is.
If it's reason that we need more of, then I would say that it isn't at all obvious that reason favors a materialistic ontology, which I maintain that Richard Dawkins is publicly committed to. And reason certainly doesn't seem to be on the side of Chris Hitchens' figuring much of the time. Much of religion doesn't fall into the category of "harmful ideology." You yourself admit that religious moderates are your allies. Simply adding the word "fundamentalist" in front of the word religion would avoid much of this confusion and unfair categorizing, but just attacking fundamentalists wouldn't grab nearly as much attention, and it wouldn't be nearly as "sexy."
"Reason" seems to have very little to say about some of the more abstract religious thinking, and you're simply wrong if you think Dawkins and Hitchens avoid criticizing these types. They criticize these types not only because the category of "religion" goes well beyond fundamentalism, and they choose not to use the wowrd fundamentalism, but instead use the all-encompassing word religion, but also they critique all types of religion by the implication of their words, and at times, by specific critiques. I realize that they say otherwise, but they're contradicting themselves.
"First Things is a journal of cranks, not the whole of Catholicism."
I'd agree it's not entirely representative and I don't even think it's all Catholics. They do get cranks, but I think some of the people they get are respectable. Cardinal Dulles seems mostly level-headed and well-reasoned.
"As Harris said: no society has become worse off for becoming more reasonable and less faith based." Bad
What's "reasonable" is open to interpretation and besides this you are making an unproven assertion. In much of Eastern Europe faith is rare and reason valued. The people are unhappy and development is generally stagnant. Society would have difficulty functioning without some unreasonable faiths. For example most marriages are based on an unreasonable faith that love will last or other irrational emotion-based needs. They are not usually based on studies showing married people are healthier and only sometimes on the desire to have their offspring be in a more stable situation. If they were people would be marry for companionship or financial benefit much more than they do.
In addition faith likely has a survival value in many cases as I think even Dawkins concedes. There are many actions beneficial to the species which would probably not get done without faith. In addition faith is a kind of trust that builds social connections, which are useful in social animals. "Faith", of a kind, presumably exists among chimps. Atheist and disbelief itself would provide no such connections on its own.
In some ways what Harris is saying sounds like a throwback to the Pre-WWI H. G. Wells way of seeing the world. This was essentially abandoned before Wells even died. It was clear humans are not reasonable creatures and that making them into such would cause more harm than good.
"Atheist and disbelief itself would provide no such connections on its own."
I should probably add that the notable atheist groups in history do provide such connections by being a movement of some kind. In this case they do manage some kind of interpersonal connection by having a faith in something. Whether that be a faith in reason or progress or utility or Marxism.
Something that's just going to be a bunch of disparate individuals, such as atheism itself, is not capable of being a force for harm or for that matter good. Hence people in the Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina weren't sheltered or saved by atheism. Likewise people in Iran or Sudan aren't killed by atheism. This can be seen as positive, I suppose, if one so desires it be so.
hw:
well, being a university math professor myself, I guess we have something in common...
Anyway, are you asking me to paraphrase what the Pope said? Are you familiar with the concept of "negative theology"?
Bad,
I'm not sure we even disagree. You're basically saying that morality is always contingent on values agreed to between people. I'm saying that presents some problems, and you're saying those problems, inasmuch as they exist, are not so bad, because the vast majority of people have similar values.
I do want to address this though:
I think you are misrepresenting what's going on in those cases [moral debates over abolition, women's liberation, civil rights, etc.]: these changes were predicated on convincing people that a) certain factual claims (women intellectually inferior, etc.) were false as well as b) arguing from the same basic premises of happiness and empathy and showing that it was more compelling to reach different conclusions.
But this suggests that if we can make some kind of empirical claim that some people are intellectually inferior, we're justified in subjugating them. It seems to me that the recognition of the political and moral equality of women, or anyone else, can't be contingent on empirical beliefs about their intelligence or strength or any other characteristic.
Empathy can't be a basis for a moral argument either. People often fail to feel empathy. That's why we need moral rules in the first place.
People share a lot of characteristics and tastes. Some of them are things that most of us would hesitate to call values, like envy, selfishness, tribalism. Does calling something a "shared value" depend on a prior set of norms regarding what does and doesn't constitute a value?
"First Things is a journal of cranks, not the whole of Catholicism."
"First Things is a journal of cranks, not the whole of Catholicism."
First yes, First Things is a theologically orthodox & politically conservative.
If that makes them “cranky” then they are cranks. Its is an ecumenical (inter-religious) journal on religion and public life. It publishes articles from Supreme Court Justices, Ross Douthat, and multiple respected academics, theologians, and others.
While its editor is a catholic and it has an (admittedly) Catholic flavor – its board and subject matter covers the range of opinion.
The author of the article is Edward T. Oakes,a respected Jesuit and theologian he teaches at University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago. (One of the largest & most important Catholic Seminaries in the Country)
> "the only people who still think [American military involvement in] Vietnam wasn't a mistake"
What moron would think that? A few moments' consideration of the history of Korea post-1949 would show anyone with half a brain that
(a) it's impossible for US military force to prevent the Communist North of a country from invading and conquering the right-wing southern half, if the former realy, really wants to; and
(b) it's - what's MoeLJ's favourite adjective again? - "pointless" to do so, since even if the US did succeed in preventing the invasion, it would make little difference. After half a century, both sides would converge on a Swedish-style middle way with ample food, generous civil liberties, free safe legal abortion on demand, socialised healthcare and strict controls on campaign spending.
Look how the Vietnam hawks embarrassed themselves with their flatly wrong predictions. The flood of millions of Vietnamese who fled their country during the racist American war abruptly stopped once kindly Uncle Ho reunified their country. Nearly all the Vietnamese refugees who fled to the West in leaky boats after 1963, voluntarily returned home after April 1975. Nor did the Communists take over any adjoining countries. Nor were the Soviets emboldened by the US defeat to grab any more real estate. Indeed, the Vietnam peace movement can be extremely proud of its role in defeating its own country and moving the world closer to peace, justice and the autonomy of small nations against their imperialist neighbours.
Rod Blaine writes: "Indeed, the Vietnam peace movement can be extremely proud of its role in defeating its own country an
He raises some interesting arguments, but it is a rather poor critique of the work of the authors mentioned. He starts with a rather absurd straw-man argument in which he distorts the claim that religion causes violence into the belief that religion is the source of all violence and then almost completely avoids addressing anything any of the authors said or wrote. He picks one or two of the more out-there quotes or weak arguments from their collective works, but has little more to say. He never mentions a single actual argument from Hitchens' or Dennett's work, choosing simply to assert that they are ignorant or not clear-thinking. Which may be the case, but I certainly am not convinced by this article.
Posted by Chris | January 29, 2008 12:14 PM