Led by luminaries
God damn. Sometimes you just have to wonder…Do they have blackouts between words, or what? What can explain a grotesque juxtaposition like this in an article by Phil Torres asking if new atheism is irrelevant?
To this day — 12 years after the movement was inaugurated by Sam Harris’ compelling book The End of Faith — new atheism remains dominated by white men, even though women comprise 44 percent of the “religiously unaffiliated” demographic in the contemporary United States.
Despite these shortcomings, I would argue that new atheism — led by luminaries such as Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian — is not only more important today than 12 years ago, but that it could be one of the most important cultural movements in the coming decades.
Maybe he wrote the first paragraph a few weeks ago, and the second a couple of days ago, and didn’t bother to refresh his memory of the first before writing the second. Or maybe he was kidnapped after writing the first and the rest of the article was written by an impostor.
Otherwise…I just cannot figure it out.
Updating to add a tweet:
https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/779800751119953920
“Happy to have mentioned”? Three men already well known among people who pay any attention to atheism? “Happy to have mentioned”? Why, so that they’ll let him sit at their lunch table? Who says things like that?
And, again, why happy to have mentioned the already familiar yet again while carefully not mentioning one single god damn woman? Right after saying “new atheism remains dominated by white men” and then calling that a shortcoming? “New atheism remains dominated by white men and that’s a bad thing, but here, let me mention the same familiar white men (plus one rando) yet again while ignoring all the women…and then say I’m happy to have mentioned the men.” What is that?
People baffle me.
If Shermer and Boghossian are luminaries, I’m the fucking Queen of Romania.
Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne, ok. I mean, I have my differences with each of them, but they can fairly be described as atheist leaders inasmuch as anyone can be.
But Boghossian… really? I had to run a search to remind myself who he was.
Shermer seems to equivocate on even calling himself an atheist, and his priorities have always seemed to be (1) Michael Shermer; (2) libertarian economics; (3) traditional skepticism — taking on Bigfoot and psychics, etc.; with religion a distant fourth at best.
Well quite. Boghossian and Shermer (Shermer counts as a celebrity in this niche, for sure, but as you say, it’s not clear he’s an atheist, and he’s certainly not the “new” variety) but not Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Maryam or Katha Pollitt or Rebecca Goldstein or Susan Jacoby? Why, exactly?
Of course, it could be argued that atheism is an intellectual position, not a quasi-religious ‘movement’ and that it doesn’t need luminaries or leaders or any of that pretentious drivel.
Religiots readily characterise people like Dawkins as the ‘high priests’ of atheism. The antidotes to religion are education, science and most importantly, liberal democracy, perhaps celebrity infidels are even counterproductive in the long term.
All hail Lady Mondegreen!
:-)
I don’t think of Pollitt, Goldstein or Jacoby as primarily atheist authors, but as authors on other topics who are atheists. I may be wrong – I’m not familiar with all their work. But has any of them written an entire book on atheism as Dawkins, Coyne and Harris have done?
Well Dawkins isn’t primarily an atheist author either. And yes, Jacoby wrote an entire book on The Freethinkers – a much better book than Dawkins’s, by the way. But anyway I’m not saying he shouldn’t include Dawkins and Harris, I’m saying he shouldn’t include Boghossian and Shermer instead of for instance Ayaan HA or Jacoby…especially right after mentioning the stonewalling of women and calling it a drawback.
David,
I’ll let others speak (or you can do the Googling as well as me) on Pollitt and Goldstein. But Susan Jacoby’s book Freethinkers in 2004 (you know, the year that the linked article says is when the movement was inaugurated by Sam Harris) seems pretty clear to me.
I guess one could nitpick that as being about the history of atheism instead of being a “why god doesn’t exist” book — but then, I’m not really sure which books really qualify on that score. The God Delusion, sure, and Hitchens’ Why Religion Poisons Everything. But Dennett’s Unweaving the Rainbow more or less just takes atheism as a given and discusses why other people believe; the same is true, as best I recall, of Shermer’s only book that is really “about” religion other than incidentally. Haven’t read Coyne’s recent Faith vs. Fact book, so I can’t comment on that one. It’s been a while since I remember reading The End of Faith, but my recollection is that it wasn’t really a thorough, “here’s the case why there is no god” as much as it was a “religioun is a very very bad thing because Muslims” argument.
Okay, David, how about Annie Laurie Gaylor? She has written more than one book on atheism, and created (and still runs) an organization devoted entirely to atheism. No, her books didn’t sell as many as Dawkins, but that’s because she was not already fabulously famous for something else first. She is still as much (more) of an atheist leader than all the others mentioned, since she DOES THAT FOR A LIVING. She is regularly seen in our local, small town paper, fighting some religious intrusion somewhere…while Dawkins argues with Transportation Security over honey.
I don’t think he was mentioning the *stonewalling* of women. I think he was lamenting that women hadn’t managed to push their way forward in New Atheism to a high enough level of fame that he’d be able to think of them without doing any research whatsoever… without once thinking he’d managed to isolate his own interests to male writers.
“Women are underrepresented in terms of famous atheists relative to their actual population amongst atheism.”
“Here is my list of atheist luminaries: [male] [male] [male] [male] [male].”
A peculiar blindness in which the reason women are underrepresented amongst the leaders is patently visible. If you consider it a bad thing that women are being sidelined, go out of your way to mention some!
Oh! Another thing that I meant to comment on: new atheism was inaugurated by a particular Shermer book?? This has nothing to do with my distaste for Shermer (though it doesn’t help), but rather the idea that a single book signals some new shift in atheism, even though there have been anti-religious books going back centuries. Shermer’s book is simply one point along a continuum.
For that matter, the idea that there is even such a thing as new atheism is another irritant on top of that one.
iknklast, I had never heard of Annie Laurie Gaylor (my living in the UK might be one reason). I shall pay attention to her.
David – glad I could be of help. You might try her book, No Gods No Masters, which is a compendium of woman freethinkers through history.