Bad book revisited
For some reason I feel like giving you another dose of Chris Hedges. It’s a morbid interest, because really his book (I Don’t Believe in Atheists) is so bad it makes more sense to ignore it than to spend time saying what’s bad about it. Its badness isn’t what you’d call subtle or hidden. But I’m interested in these displays of determined stupidity, for some reason.
Page 6.
Hitchens and Harris describe the Muslim world, where I spent seven years…in language that is as racist, crude and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.
No they don’t. That’s such an absurd claim that it’s stupid to make it, when it’s so easy to check just by googling. You don’t have to agree with Hitchens and Harris to find that statement laughable. Also, what does Hedges mean by saying he spent seven years in ‘the Muslim world’? Where is that exactly? He means he spent seven years in some countries where Islam is the majority religion, not that he spent those years in all such countries, much less that he spent them on some other ‘Muslim’ planet. His language is (in this book at least) considerably cruder and sloppier than anything Hitchens would write even on a bad day.
Continuing from the previous quotation, or rather, hail of abuse.
They are a secular version of the religious right. They misuse the teachings of Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology just as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. They are anti-intellectual.
What the hell does that mean? Other than that Chris Hedges is really pissed off. And what ‘teachings’ of Darwin? He seems to be confusing him with a church; clerics like to talk about ‘the church’s teachings,’ especially when they are trying to justify some mildewed old bit of irrational hatred like rules against HoMoSekShuality; but Darwin doesn’t have ‘teachings,’ he’s not a dang priest. And as for anti-intellectual – that’s just imbecilic. It ignores most of what they say, or simply turns it on its head.
Pages 6-7 – the new atheists don’t have the power of the Christian Right but
they do engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism. They sell this under secular banners. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by human reason.
It’s very noticeable that Hedges never offers any evidence for this kind of crap (which continues for page after page, and recurs throughout the book). He repeats it ad nauseam and offers zero quotations to back it up – which is not surprising, since there aren’t any, since they don’t believe any such fucking thing. This is grossly irresponsible unwarranted garbage, and it’s a sign of something or other that a reputable publisher failed to throw it back in his face. I don’t think the Times would have let him publish this dreck in the paper – except possibly on the Op-ed page; it’s somewhat shocking that a division of Simon and Schuster published it.
There’s a great deal more of this kind of thing, but you get the idea. He’s beside himself with rage, he makes no effort to be accurate, he considers himself entitled to make wildly exaggerated claims, he can’t think, he can’t read carefully, and he’s overflowing with malevolence. (Which is funny in a way, because one of his chief claims is that religion is somehow necessary for or intimately connected to goodness, compassion, generosity, that kind of thing – yet he himself displays a remarkably unpleasant belligerence coupled with carelessness with the truth.) I looked for scathing reviews but didn’t find any – if anyone sees any, point them out to me.
Well, thanks, Ophelia, for this additional look at Hedges’ book. I hadn’t really paid much attention, since, from what I had read, and from the title itself, I didn’t think it was worthwhile. But you sent me searching around the net and I came upon an ‘original essay’ by none other than Hedges himself, with what I take is a precis of his book. It’s on the Powell’s book site. Here’s a quote from it:
‘They urge us forward into a non-reality-based world, one where force and violence, where self-exaltation and blind nationalism go unquestioned and are considered good. They seek to make us afraid of what we do not know or understand.’
He’s talking here of both the new atheists and what he calls Christian radicals (I always thought the radicals were people like Don Cupitt and the Jesus Seminar — well, anyway). Now, I don’t know a lot about the right wing Christians Hedges is talking about, but does this sound like Dawkins or Dennett to you? And he plays the same interesting game with Darwin, except that he has one statement that’s just got to be a contradiction. Here it is:
‘Darwinism, which pays homage to the final and complete mastery of our animal natures, never posits that human beings can transcend their natures and create a human paradise.’
Really? If we can completely master our animal natures, haven’t we, in a sense, transcended our nature (since we are animals, after all)? We should be well on the way to paradise by now.
The problem with Hedges is he thinks we’re not going anywhere. In fact, he says it:
‘There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving toward a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.’
You have to forgive the man. He graduated from Harvard theological school, so he’s got original sin deeply embedded in his mind, and once you’ve played the theology game it’s hard to get anything straight. But he must think we can do something, and move somewhere, because he thinks believing that we can go somewhere is dangerous, and we should fight against it, and don’t we have to be able to go somewhere if this is what we are to do?
I really have to wonder if this man reads over what he writes before he pushes the send button! Surely, editors should pick this sort of thing up on a first pass!
‘Now, I don’t know a lot about the right wing Christians Hedges is talking about,’
But that doesn’t stop you denying that they and people like Hitchens and Harris are alike in any way. Belief without evidence? Sounds familiar. It seems you have a faith-based belief in the goodness of Harris and Hitchens. I you read more/any of Hedges’ work you’d find that he has a lot of respect for the antiwar Dawkins, unlike the others who are warmongers.
‘Resistor’: Did I say anything at all about Hedges’ so-called radical Christians? I did not. I asked whether, while I don’t know much about right wing Christianity, what Hedges wrote sounded like Dawkins and Dennett? It didn’t sound like Dawkins and Dennett to me. But that’s all I said. I did not say anything remotely faith-based. I never mentioned Harris or Hitchens. And Hedges doesn’t single them out, though whether even they could be accused of arguing for a ‘non-reality-based world, one where force and violence, where self-exaltation and blind nationalism go unquestioned and are considered good,’ is open to question too. All I’m saying is that Hedges (in the piece I’m quoting) is careless and unfair. I think he is, not as a matter of faith, but of fact. Read what I said over again.
No no ‘resistor,’ it’s no good trying to defend Hedges by imitating his way of reading and writing – that won’t convince anyone here. Eric indeed did not deny ‘that they and people like Hitchens and Harris are alike in any way.’ Zero points for reading skills.
Eric, funny you should mention original sin, he says some incredibly stupid stuff about sin in this book – I was going to comment on that too, and maybe will if I can summon up the energy. I mean it’s just really…so…mindless.
I read the whole thing (not sure why, but I did). I was struck by how much Hedges sounds like Jonah Goldberg (you know, Liberal Fascism), or (more precisely) what Jonah Goldberg would sound like if you took away his Cheetohs and he fell into a profound depression. The road to utopia leads to Auschwitz, that sort of thing – as if that had anything to do with what the Four Horsemen say.
That’s a point. For that matter he sounds not unlike Bill O’Reilly.
Eric. A very minor correction – perhaps.
‘Darwinism, which pays homage to the final and complete mastery of our animal natures, never posits that human beings can transcend their natures and create a human paradise.’
I think Hedges is saying that it is our animal natures which have complete mastery rather than us. Not that this reading, if correct, is very enlightening without an extensive gloss of ‘animal natures’; and his placement of ‘never’ in front of ‘posits’ rather than ‘transcend’ makes this something of a non-assertion.
Whew – if that is what he meant, what a clumsily ambiguous sentence. And what a dopy thing to say – ‘Darwinism’ (which is a pejorative used by hostile witnesses) ‘pays homage’ to the mastery of animal natures. Yeah right, evolutionary biologists regularly fall to their knees and knock their heads on the ground before the mastery of animal natures. What a silly man.
Kiwi. Do you think that’s what he really meant? See what I mean by careless? Well, then, if it’s no a contradiction, it’s not even a non-assertion. It doesn’t make sense. But, more to the point, where does Dawkins, say, to take one of Hedges’ whipping boys, even come close to suggesting that we can transcend our nature?
This guy Hedges is a real turkey. I assume that’s because be started out in theological school. There you do learn how to tie yourself up in knots so that you say almost the opposite of what you want to say, with a few false leads thrown into the mix to set the thought police off your scent. There’s almost always a kind of double deniability built in to theological utterances. Don’t forget, everyone in a religious group, sect or church, from bishops down to ordinary believers, is on the prowl for defaulters. If what you say is complex enough, everyone will happily argue about what you said, and you can walk away while they’re still squabbling. Meanwhile, since it’s generated so much excitment, it will seem very profound.
I seem to be seeing more use of “utopianism” as a term of abuse recently. If this is real and not just my impression I wonder where it is coming from? The rhetorical move seems to suggest that any attempt to improve the world however small (i.e. adjusting bus timetables to make it easier for people to get to the shops during the day) will inevitably lead to some sort of post-revolutionary terror.
Ken, it’s the usual way of saying that the Enlightenment experiment (or project) has failed. Actually, very few of the Enlightenment philosophes thought in terms of the perfection of man (humankind), but that hasn’t prevented all sorts from holding that they did, and condemning them for it. Alister McGrath does it in “The Twilight of Atheism”. In fact that seems to be his main argument. Godless Enlightenment thought and practice has failed. All we got out of it was the Terror, plus the first and second World Wars, plus the Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. These are all parts of making the world safe for reason. So now, it’s all down to God. All you have to do is sign on the dotted line. Hedges seems to have gone to the same school.
John Gray is one source for this ‘utopianism’ as term of abuse – I think Hedges has taken much inspiration from Gray. David Horowitz is another fan of the idea. There was an amusing clash of minds when Norm Geras and Nick Cohen agreed to be interviewed for Front Page and Horowitz and his sidekick kept insisting that Norm and Nick were utopians who believed in the perfectibility of blah blah – no matter how many times Norm and Nick pointed out that no they weren’t.
It’s just so stupid – because Dawkins and the others don’t say anything even resembling belief in human perfection. Hedges’s book is a disgrace to publishing and he’s a disgrace to journalism. People should be rubbing his face in the mud.
I had suspected Michael Burleigh, but I haven’t read enough of his work to be sure. I’m not sure clash of minds is the right phrase there, though amusing certainly is.
Of course there have, but that’s beside the point, because Hedges doesn’t charge the ‘new’ atheists with being rationalist humanists who really believe in improving things as part of an enlightenment ‘project’ – he makes exactly the stupid exaggerated absurd charge I quote him as making. Believing in improving things (whether as part of an enlightenment ‘project’ or not) is very very different from believing ‘that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by human reason.’ The wildness of the second claim is the point, so noting the truth of the much more reasonable first claim is beside the point.
Actually, there is nothing wrong with this bit: “Darwinism…never posits that human beings can transcend their natures and create a human paradise.’
Apart from the fact that Darwinism (as OB points out, a term always used as a perjorative) doesn’t purport any sort of transcendence. The ToE is a biological explanation. That’s all.
If you wish to describe those who utilise that explanation as Darwinists, in order to set up your so-called opposition as fellow organised zealots, well, that’s your problem, Mr Hedges.
I heard Hedges on the radio a month ago and he was not very impressive.
http://kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=14588