I don't believe in Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-winning war correspondent with a background in religion (his father was a minister and he attended seminary himself). In his previous book, Hedges attacked American Christian fundamentalism. This time he's come out swinging against the "New Atheists" because (guess what's coming. You'll never guess what's coming - ) they're fundamentalists too.

This clip covers some of what Hedges is out to say in his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists (and his thoughts are explored in greater depth in this Salon interview):



Hedges' criticisms seem bracing; he comes on as a smart and measured critic. Of course, when he says human reason (which he simply conflates with technology and its potential for harm) is elevated by atheists to the status of a fundamentalist's god... well, that sounds bad, eh? I remember from way back in Phenomenology class that you're supposed to call this "scientism", and you're supposed to think it's bad. But one wonders how Chris Hedges feels we should intellectually engage the world around us. I mean, look - if religious literalism and scientific literalism are both problematic, as he suggests, and cultural relativism (which you might call anti-literalism), that's no good either - what then?

Goodness, triangulation may work as a political strategy, but I don't see how moderation among various approaches to knowing Truth in this world (ie, throw 'em in a blender) is likely to be the best approach to Truth. Shouldn't we, in engaging, judging, and assessing the world around us, hold some root principles? Or is that just to be scorned as "fundamentalism", and we'd be better off convening a committee? You know, let the midpoint between Pastor John Hagee and Doctor Steven Weinberg (however you'd define that) be called The Official Best Epistemology?

I'm curious too about the pat way in which Hedges asserts there has been no ethical progress in human history. Unspeakable atrocities do go on around us, and I cede that as a war correspondent he knows more about it than I do. All the same, there has indisputably been ethical change over history, change that you might even want to call progress.

Put it this way. It seems to me that the important variable among ethical systems is in how big a circle they draw. Who's in the circle - who's us - and who's them? Because them can end up getting whacked something terrible if us decides they're a threat. Well, there are exceptions to the claim I'm about to make (many of them in the form of world-historical ethical disasters), yet it seems to me that the circle of us has been painfully and reluctantly expanding over time. Slave emancipation, women's suffrage, the current inevitability of gay marriage, the increasing acceptance of animal rights, you name it. I don't think the fact that I think this - and that I think it's a cause for some hope in a terrible world - makes me a crazed-eyed utopian idealist as Hedges says: and to the extent that he connects the desire for a more perfect ethical world, with Pol-Potish means of achieving that world, I am gravely goddamn offended.

But Hedges is right: I don't think this circle has expanded equally all around the world. Also, I fear that this "progress" in ethics may map to our affluence better than to anything else. In other words, impose crushing poverty on France (say) and the folks there may indeed begin reenslaving one another.

Hedges says he's no moral relativist himself, that he thinks female genital mutilation, for instance, is an atrocity. He also says he knows there is a capacity for evil in every person, and that if a violently-oppressed minority turns to violence, we should not be so terribly surprised. Well hell, friend, where that's concerned I think you and I live in the same mental world. And if it weren't for the fact that you (Mr. Hedges) keep announcing that my personal disbelief in the supernatural means I'm a closet genocidal maniac - then I don't think we'd be in any disagreement here at all.

Yes, that's right. In the Salon interview and at the end of the YouTube clip, Hedges wants to tell me all kinds of things about myself as an atheist of which I had been blissfully unaware till now. For instance, that I want to murder religious fundamentalists (I deny their basic humanity. I consider them a them.). Or that I would like to join with American Christian fundamentalists in supporting a war of worldwide extermination against Muslims. Fascinating stuff. I'd had no clue I felt like that.

I'm being snide, of course, because something else is going on here and it's clear what that something is. Hedges was inspired to write I Don't Believe in Atheists because he had encountered exactly two of them. And he does pick at some genuine weirdnesses about Sam Harris (argues in favor of torture) and Christopher Hitchens (thinks the Iraq War was an outstanding idea) that there's little to argue with. These are bad things these guys said: guys whose books I've mainly read while cheering.

Which is great. If Hedges thinks Sam Harris is intellectually shallow, and that Christopher Hitchens is a solipsistic provocateur, he should write up his report of it. And he may even be right (at least about Hitchens, ha ha.). --But what about, let's say, Daniel Dennett? He's one of the "four horsemen" of the new atheism, right?, and there's no dirt out there against the guy. Dennett hasn't advocated the universal dismemberment of the Hajis, nor the replacement of the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual with scripts from 24. So - how to handle that, if you're Hedges? Just don't mention Daniel Dennett, that's how.

But you can't avoid mentioning Richard Dawkins, can you?, foremost of the horsemen and the fellow who principally set this New Atheism notion rolling in the first place. Dawkins is something of an embarrassment for a Chris Hedges. Because Dawkins is strident, vituperative, even arrogant in his disbelief, yet has been vociferously against war in general and the one in Iraq in particular from the start; and to the best of my knowledge, he advocates neither torture nor nuclear first strikes. He may not be a Bertrand Russell pacifist (note how his atheism too did not a genocidal maniac make), but he dutifully thinks George Bush is a fool and believes in peace. So good grief, Chris Hedges, what can you say about Richard Dawkins?

"Well, Dawkins is a little different, because he's British." [Salon interview]

Come again? Where the do you think Christopher Hitchens is from? Mobile, Alabama?

So we have some significant silliness going on here. Hedges takes some dumb - okay, call it "reprehensible". He takes two reprehensible things said by two men with whom he had uncomfortable scraps at public debates (Harris, Hitchens). He smears these bad beliefs warrantlessly - indeed in the face of counterexamples - across anybody who agrees with the two guys on other matters (ie, that supernatural entities don't exist. Even if it's sometimes fuzzy whether Sam Harris even agrees with that). Then Hedges goes on to say that this New Atheist "movement", swollen as its ranks apparently are with pro-torture maniacs, is somehow a social force of such scope that as soon as it throws in its lot with its sworn enemies the Christian fundamentalists, then boy, we're in for a global Muslim holocaust.

Wha...? Have you been to a Humanist meeting? First of all, their biggest concern, beyond maintaining a supply of cheese danishes, is about drawing wide ethical "circles" - a big us. These are people who are damn unlikely to advocate violence against anybody. More importantly, there are few enough Humanists and/or atheists out there that if you crammed them all into a clown car, it wouldn't even look particularly funny to watch them climb back out.

Freethinking, this is to say, is hardly a terrifying social movement. It takes a struggle to conjecure that under the most generous definition (the absence of religious affiliation), we make up 16% of the population. And it's less. Because 16% counts everybody who says, "I disagree with organized religion. But I just feel that, you know, out there somewhere, you know, there's something."

In conclusion:

It is at minimum, ironic to claim atheists are so dangerous that they may help trigger a world holocaust - and what makes them so dangerous is that they hysterically demonize groups of people.