The evolution of Robert Wright
When othering the ‘New’ atheists, there is no need to be too nice about accuracy. Robert Wright gives a demonstration of that to join the growing stack of such demonstrations from otherwise liberal commentators.
[T]he New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers of the anti-gospel. The point was to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers.
The usual thing – exaggeration (to put it charitably), malicious rhetoric, sheer invention. (Who says the point was to make it cool to ridicule unbelievers?) Childish stuff – in Foreign Policy. What next, Rush Limbaugh writing for The Wilson Quarterly?
Even on the secular left, the alarming implications of the “crusade against religion” are becoming apparent: Though the New Atheists claim to be a progressive force, they often abet fundamentalists and reactionaries, from the heartland of America to the Middle East.
And then we get several paragraphs about how the ‘New’ Atheists do that sinister thing. It’s sleazy, McCarthy-like stuff, as so much of this kind of thing from the ‘we hate New atheists’ crowd is. I hear the Senator’s whining voice, I see his blue-whiskered mug.
[T]here’s a subtle but potent sense in which New Atheism can steer foreign policy to the right…Most New Atheists aren’t expressly right wing, but even so their discounting of the material causes of Islamist radicalism can be “objectively” right wing.
Uh huh. They claim to be one thing, but they ‘abet’ another; there’s a subtle but potent sense in which they can do something very sinister and creepy which I can’t quite explain; they aren’t actually right wing but in fact they are, and any Stalinist would see it the same way. (Wright quotes Orwell for ‘objectively’ but Orwell was using the Stalinist term with considerable irony.)
Then he just flops all the way over into Armstrong territory, where compassion has always been at the heart of all religion.
All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected.
Bullshit. All the great religions have shown time and again that when they have unquestioned power, they use it, and they don’t use it for tolerance and civility, they use it for social control and for their own protection and well-being. Robert Wright should take a few minutes to ponder the tolerance and civility of the Irish Catholic church.
< blockquote >[OB] Bullshit.
Actually, you’re both right. The great religions ARE capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened. But they always feel threatened, so that capability remains latent.
This is the most terrible nonsense, as you point out. It’s hard to think that this actually made its way into print. People accuse the internet of this sort of silliness, and here it is in what (I had thought, in my ignorance) was a respectable publication. This demonstrates that it is not.
Your last remark is the really telling one. No, religions that are not threatened are not tolerant and civil; they are overweening, proud and in charge. Growth in toleration was fought for against the powers of confident religions, almost every time. They did not become worse when they were threatened; they actually ceded power, and fewer people suffered on their account. The Roman Catholic Church, denied the right to oppress adults, continued to oppress and abuse the small and the vulnerable.
The first step towards freedom is always, and necessarily, the critique of religion (or its analogs). The first demand of the free should be for evidence. It is surely significant that Wright’s piece is composed of sheer assertion, with not a shred of it.
It is indeed a very dreadful piece, full of rampant nonsense. Saying that the Middle East “conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land” is an especially glaring example. The Old Testament is responsible – in a manner that couldn’t conceivably be more direct – for that particular strip of land being chosen by the Zionist movement for settlement (I wonder if Wright is even aware that the Zionist movement almost imploded within its first decade due to the idea of another territory – in Uganda – being seriously floated as an alternative to the biblically specified homeland). And that, of course, is if one limits one’s focus to the largely secular Zionists.
If I hear any more rubbish by outsiders about our goals, whether short-term or long, the least I ought to be able to expect is the brandishing of an authentic-seeming atheist equivalent of the “Wedge” document.
Wright is about as convincing as Bill O’Reilly is when he says humanists are only putting up billboards at this time of year because they’re jealous of the Christians and Jews who are about to exchange presents.
A disgusting, disgraceful article from Wright. He is out of his mind with his nonsense mud slinging. This makes him just like Rush Limbaugh, a fucking creep.
Yeah, that was largely sophomoric garbage.
My question: did Wright accurately summarize Harris’s views in that summary? (I haven’t read Harris yet, unfortunately.) I would strongly disagree with the Harris-according-to-Wright, though I’d like to know if that’s the real Sam Harris or a figment of Wright’s imagination.
I think I can best characterize it in a fable.
Wright imagines there is a throne of authority, high above the fray of the debate on either side. But it’s a throne that is held up by two pillars leaning against one another, each representing the excesses of the opposing sides.
Wright really wants to sit up there. But one of the pillars is missing, and he’s trying to artificially create it. In order to create it he has to counterbalance the real excesses of uncritical faith, by leaning them against a piller that doesn’t exist yet. And try as he might, there is not nearly enough substance out there to make a pillar of a size that would truly counterbalance the other.
No, Wright (of course) did not summarize Harris’s views accurately. I’ve just looked at a few pages on Israel-Palestine from End of Faith, and he’s not as stupid and crude as Wright would have you believe.
Ok, I just did the same thing and he’s quoting from p.109 of my paperback edition.
Harris starts off the book with a description of a suicide bomber and wonders why, although we may know nothing else about him, the one thing we could hardly get wrong would be his religion.
Nearly 100 pages later he starts discussing Islam and refers back to his starting point, saying he expects it to exasperate readers because he ignores what is mentioned in the three direct quotes Wright uses. He then says he “will argue that we can ignore all of these things – or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf – because the world is filled with poor, uneducated and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism…”
He does indeed provide this argument over the next 43 pages. His endnote for that particular paragraph, the one containing everything Wright used, ends with “Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least… is no more a secular activity than prayer is.”
“All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected.”
That is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. It is only when they are threatened that religions start to behave themselves.
When they are completely unthreatened they start inquisitions and burn heretics because they know they can get away with it.
Ah – well done, Stewart; you were more thorough than I was.
Wright puts it too crudely, perhaps because he misses Harris’s point. Harris doesn’t “dismiss” other contributing factors, as Wright says; his point is that they are not sufficient, while religion is.
That’s probably wrong, but it’s not as simple-minded as Wright’s gloss.
Yes, it seems I’d definitely disagree with Harris-via-Stewart as well (though we probably don’t need to have that argument again).
I think jacob’s “two pillars” image captures my feelings about Wright’s position very well. It is very good and fine to mediate between justifiable principled norms when sufficiently informed, but I don’t think Harris’s determinism generalises to other new atheists or their fellow-travellers. I don’t get a deterministic view from Dawkins, for instance, yet his name shows up here for some reason because he made that Israeli-Palestine quote and said without religion you wouldn’t have the conflict. And of course Dawkins is entirely correct, because what Wright attributes to an “essentially secular argument over land” is to be taken as distinct from claims of religious heritage. This is… remarkable… because if we want to talk about the basis of the land claim over that section of the middle east, it bloody well isn’t secular. Wright must know this if he’s written a history of God, or is even minimally aware of the circumstances involved in the formation and legitimation of the state of Israel. And one would expect the editors of Foreign Policy to be aware of the fact, too.
I spelled out my views in detail over at Jerry Coyne’s blog, where I said something to the following effect (slightly edited):
I take no delight in the impolite spite of Robby Wright. His screed is in need of some serious mothereffin’ rigour. It’s got vigour, but I figure that it’s not worth a widow’s mite – no! It’s kind of a slow bleed of real thought. It’s caught in error. It’s trite .. a kind of thinking-lite, yeah – an unpedigreed stampede of special pleading for creeds and unholy deeds and religious terror. It’s like Wright has smoked too much weed or got too much greed, and now he’s a satellite. An acolyte. A parasite on superstition. He’s turned off the light of reason, looking for a coming season when it gets him a treasonous prize, a kind of commission. His ambition has made him unwise: so now he’s a temporiser, when he ought to be a despiser and a pulveriser. It’s a hideous sight, a benighted blight that we must fight without remission. Thank Jerry [and Ophelia] for his[her] demolition!
Jakob is right that Wright has misstated by 180 degrees. Maybe to be even more succint: it is true to say of religion in general that it is only not threatening when it is threatened.
Having someone (like us) be a threat to religion is a necessity, not a luxury.
When I first read Wright’s piece, I thought how terribly shallow and spiteful it is. I didn’t bother, as some have done, to check what Harris and Dawkins actually said. But I have spent a few minutes doing it in a fairly cursory way. Wright says:
Yet here is a quote from The End of Faith
And of course Wright’s claim about Dawkins and there being no Palestinian-Israeli dispute without religion comes from the first page of TGD, where he asks the reader to imagine, with Lennon, no religion, and then immediately goes on to say: “Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, … no Israeli/Palestinian wars,” etc.
So he said it, in a sense. But would this ‘essentially secular argument over land’ (to use Wright’s words) have existed without religion? Even granting Wright’s point, which I don’t think we can, religion surely plays a key role in this otherwise ‘secular argument’. But how do you turn anything into a secular argument, when Muslims have turned Palestine (all of it!) into waqf? Or where fundamentalist Jews have turned Arabs into Amalekites?
Yes, absolutely, thank Jerry and Ophelia for opposing this blight on the intellectual landscape. How did he achieve this kind of prominence through lies?
Apologies: by “Jacob” I meant “Josef”.
Ooh, Russell, you de man.
Yes, Russell is de man. Did you see his next prose poem on someone with the unfortunate name of Gross?
It would be silly to deny that there are aspects other than religious ones to the Mid-East conflict. It is also silly when people don’t realise (and many don’t) that the religious basis is the only really intractable part of it. I presume most here have read the Hitchens anecdote about Abba Eban getting everyone’s attention by saying how simple the solution ought to be.
Hitchens: “Two peoples of roughly equivalent size have a claim to the same land. The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it.”
Dividing up territory is easy, if one is only talking about land. It gets tricky (and violent) if any of the land is “holy,” especially to both parties.
Well… in fairness, there’s a bit more to it than that. For example, the water that is rather unevenly distributed across the disputed lands to be divided between the two states. But that too could be resolved by rational negotiation if the parties involved were interested in rational negotiation – but faith perpetually rules out reason and rational options. That’s really always the problem with faith, innit? It’s never negotiable.
I think neither Eban nor Hitchens were suggesting simply drawing a line through the territory. Nor were they (or Harris) suggesting that many other complex issues don’t exist. But those claims that trace back to something supposedly decreed by a god or his human puppet cannot be dealt with at the negotiating table. And as long as the political leaders of the two sides pay lip service or more to the religious leaders of their respective constituencies, that is not going to change.