11 Atheism and the Enlightenment: reflections on the intellectual roots of the new atheism
Atheism and the Enlightenment: reflections on the intellectual roots of the new atheism
In October 2005, on the eve of the appearance of the new atheism, the World Congress of the International Academy of Humanism took place in upstate New York. Its theme? ‘Toward a New Enlightenment’. To judge from the conference publicity, its organizers had no doubt of the urgency of their theme. Religion was regaining the ascendancy. A new Dark Age was about to descend on the human race. The speakers – who included Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris – addressed a series of topics reflecting concerns arising from the renewed global interest in religion. Humanism holds the answers to the world’s dilemmas. ‘We are facing a new Dark Age. Can we learn from the lessons of the British and French Enlightenment and help to bring about a New Enlightenment?’
The godfather of the new atheism is Paul Kurtz (born 1925), one of America’s most prominent secular humanists,1 who played a leading role in articulating the vision of this Congress. Kurtz was instrumental in reshaping American humanism in a specifically secular direction during the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely by suppressing its historic religious origins and continuing religious associations and commitments. The original American ‘Humanist Manifesto’ (1933) made specific approving reference to religious humanism.2 Kurtz vigorously advocated more secular forms of humanism, and formed the ‘Council for Secular Humanism’ to lobby for a change in direction of the American Humanist Association. He was one of the two primary authors of ‘Humanist Manifesto II’ (1973), setting out a vision for a form of humanism that was systematically emptied of religious possibilities and affirmations.
This insistence on humanism as a secular and secularizing movement represents a radical move away from the noble philosophy of the Renaissance, the great movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which brought about cultural renewal and regeneration throughout Europe.3 Yet the term ‘humanism’ was never then used to refer to a secularizing, Godless movement. Rather, it was about the affirmation of the importance of eloquence, especially through a return to the great sources of the classical period – ancient Rome and Athens. Christian humanists, such as the great Erasmus of Rotterdam, developed programmes for the renewal of the Church, based on a return to the ideas and practices of the New Testament.4 Erasmus himself produced the first printed edition of the Greek text of the New Testament, and published significant commentaries on many of its books.5 The use of the term ‘humanism’ to refer to a movement that was atheist, secularizing and anti-religious dates from the twentieth century, and represents a major distortion of the original sense of the term as used by the writers and artists of the Renaissance.
The new atheism, however, has little interest in the historical origins of humanism, nor of its original religious roots. This movement hijacks the term ‘humanism’ and uses it to designate an aggressively secularizing programme that would have seemed totally alien to the writers of the Renaissance. The leading themes of this secularized humanism can be seen clearly stated in an editorial that Kurtz published in his Free Inquiry magazine in advance of the World Congress. There was, Kurtz declared, an urgent and pressing need for a ‘New Enlightenment’.6 The original Enlightenment, he argued, set out to abolish ‘religious superstition and dogmatism, hidebound social traditions, and repressive morality’. After listing the Enlightenment’s many achievements with an enthusiasm unsullied by any awkwardness of historical realism, he comes to his core argument: ‘Unfortunately, there has been a massive retreat from Enlightenment ideals in recent years, a return to pre-modern mythologies.’ This must be opposed and reversed!
So what is this ‘Enlightenment’? And why does it have such appeal for modern secular humanism? The term ‘Enlightenment’ is often used to refer to a period in the history of Western culture from about 1750, which placed an emphasis upon the capacity of human reason to make sense of reality. This idea, of course, is found in classic Greek philosophy, as it is in most Christian philosophy. Enlightenment writers, however, took it a stage further. Where earlier writers saw human reason as a fallible yet helpful tool for discovering truth, many Enlightenment writers saw it as a tool for determining truth.7 If something cannot be rationally proved, it is to be deemed ‘irrational’.
Now everyone agrees that we need to look at our own beliefs critically, and make sure that we are persuaded of their reliability. Yet in its quest for reliable knowledge, the Enlightenment ended up setting standards of rational proof which were virtually impossible to achieve. It is highly significant to note that Kurtz himself regularly emphasizes the importance of ‘rationality’, interpreting this not in the cautious sense used by classic Greek philosophy, but in the more ambitious terms associated with some sections of the Enlightenment which held that all beliefs must be capable of being proved.8
So who does Kurtz identify as the enemies of the Enlightenment? In terms worthy of the best conspiracy theorist, Kurtz wrote darkly of ‘powerful forces eager to overthrow the basic premises of the Enlightenment’. Religion is resurgent, and must be opposed! His greatest scorn, interestingly, seems to be directed towards the ‘vulgar post-modernist cacophony of Heideggerian-Derridian mush’. A new global ethic is required, based on principles ‘drawn from scientific inquiry and philosophical rationality’. Those who challenge the Enlightenment are portrayed, using a depressingly superficial rhetoric of dismissal, as the enemies of reason and science, or the appeasers of superstition and prejudice.
Kurtz’s piece is as historically important as it is historically lightweight, as it can be seen as presaging the core themes of the new atheism, particularly as found in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Most media interest has focused on their withering ridicule of religion as toxic superstition; after all, this makes for good headlines. Yet the media has been virtually silent over the other leading features of Kurtz’s programme for a ‘New Enlightenment’ – most notably, his critique of postmodernism as irrational nonsense, and a vigorous reaffirmation of the ethical and social vision of the Enlightenment.9
It is not difficult to see how a plausible link can be suggested between the rise of modernity and that of atheism. The Enlightenment’s quest for intellectual and social liberation, when linked with the social and cultural situation of western Europe, often took the form of a critique of belief in God and of the Church as an institution. Both were held by some Enlightenment thinkers (though in different ways) to represent a challenge to human autonomy. Indeed, historians of modern atheism often interpret it as an integral aspect of the Enlightenment project.10 These issues urgently need fuller analysis if we are to gain an understanding of the cultural factors which led to the emergence of the new atheism in the first place, and shape its reversionary appeal to the Enlightenment in the second.
In this chapter, I want to look at the Enlightenment in ways that are unlikely to please the advocates of the new atheism. Much criticism has already been directed against the extraordinary selectivity which characterizes Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ critique of religion. The well-known failings of faith are trenchantly asserted as if that settled the matter. In most trials, it is customary for the defence to be represented. But not, it seems, here. As Terry Eagleton commented, with a sarcasm reflecting his obvious exasperation at The God Delusion’s risible caricatures of religion: ‘Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.’11
But rather than focus on this extraordinary partisan bias, let us consider the equally extraordinary selectivity evident in the appeal to the Enlightenment characteristic of the new atheism. We find the Enlightenment presented as a lost golden age, a time of intellectual prosperity and social progress. Small wonder that Hitchens yearns to return to it. But is this vision sustainable? Is not the historical reality of the Enlightenment rather more troubling? In what follows, I want to offer an account of the Enlightenment which celebrates its virtues, but also highlights its failures and problems. I shall do this in dialogue with three leading critics of the Enlightenment: the influential British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, and the Polish philosopher and intellectual historian Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009).
1. Subjecting the Enlightenment to critical historical inquiry
One of the more puzzling features of the new atheism is its dogmatic affirmation of the excellence of the Enlightenment. Yet this bold claim is simply asserted, using diversionary rhetorical flourishes and prejudicial historical caricatures to cover up its decidedly skimpy evidential basis. These soundbites never become serious historical arguments. Yet serious historical inquiry is absolutely necessary, not least on account of the new atheism’s proposed reshaping of the future after its likeness.
In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, entitled ‘The Idolatry of Politics’, Kolakowski commented: ‘We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.’12 Kolakowski, while carefully acknowledging the good political and social outcomes of the Enlightenment project, insists upon telling the whole story. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, he insists upon drawing attention to its darker side, so easily overlooked by its apologists, lifting the veil on what the new atheism would prefer to remain concealed. For example, Kolakowski notes with concern that particular sections of the Enlightenment came to believe that certain truths had been established beyond question. On account of this hubris, he argues, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism and ‘other fanatical sects’ became inevitable.
These comments are especially important on account of Kolakowski’s intellectual background. By the late 1940s it was obvious that Kolakowski was one of the most brilliant Polish minds of his generation. Although initially strongly committed to Marxism–Leninism, he became disillusioned with its intellectual failings and political excesses. His ‘revisionism’ led to his expulsion from the Polish Communist Party and the loss of his teaching position at the University of Warsaw. He settled in the West, where he offered penetrating critiques of the naïve assumptions that he saw as underpinning many Enlightenment ideas.
Kolakowski’s point about truth is familiar to postmodern critics of the Enlightenment who argue that it offers a totalizing view of things, with the potential for fostering oppression and violence. Kolakowski’s analysis of the history of the modern era exposes its complexities, challenging the simplistic narrative of progress and ascent found in Paul Kurtz. Instead of Kurtz’s utopian idealism, we find a sobering realism about the human condition.
More recently, Terry Eagleton describes the Enlightenment dream of ‘untrammelled human progress’ as a ‘bright-eyed superstition’,13 a fairy tale which lacks any rigorous evidential base. ‘If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal–rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.’ The myth of a lost golden age, it seems, persists in this most unlikely of quarters. Yet we are surely called to question fictions about both human individuals and society, even if these fictions are deeply embedded within the secular Western mindset.
The new atheism often accuses those who believe in God of holding on to ‘unevidenced beliefs’, in contrast to the rigorously proven factual statements of enlightened atheists. Yet what of its own unevidenced belief in human progress? Eagleton dismisses this myth as a demonstrably false pastiche, a luminous example of ‘blind faith’.14 What rational soul, Eagleton asks, would sign up to such a secular myth, which is obliged to treat such human-created catastrophes as Hiroshima, Auschwitz and apartheid as ‘a few local hiccups’ which in no way discredit or disrupt the steady upward progress of history? The difference between Christianity and the new atheism seems to lie in their choice of so-called ‘unevidenced beliefs’ and ‘controlling myths’. Neither can be proved, nor even disproved; this, however, does not prevent us from making an adjudication as to which appears to be the more reliable and compelling.
Kolakowski saw history as a mirror in which human identity was disclosed. We study history, as we noted above, so that we might ‘know who we are’. History, however, does not disclose the simple Übermensch that Kurtz would like us to acknowledge. In fact, Kolakowski’s reading of the history of modernity leads him to the conclusion that the concept of original sin offers at least a partial explanation for humanity’s darker side.15
As a species, humanity may indeed have the capacity for good; this seems matched, however, by a capacity for evil. A recognition of this profound ambiguity is essential if we are to avoid political and social utopianism, based on naïve, ideologically driven, non-empirical value-judgements about human nature. As the great novelist J. R. R. Tolkien wrote so presciently in 1931, on the eve of the rise of Nazism, a naïve view of humanity leads to political utopianism, in which ‘progress’ potentially leads to catastrophe.16
I will not walk with your progressive ages,
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends.
Nobody yet knew of the depths of depravity and cruelty that would be created by the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the 1930s. Yet Tolkien saw something that most Enlightenment writers failed to see – that everything rests on the moral character of human beings. Technological developments can be used to cure or to kill. Sadly, the choice is made by human beings, and the choices they make can be disastrous. As Theodor Adorno wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, human progress seemed to be measured by the weapons it used to kill and maim other human beings. It is profoundly uncomfortable to think of human progress in terms of evolution from a sling to an atom bomb.
2. Recognizing the failings of reason
Kolakowski rightly acknowledges that the Enlightenment can be seen as a passionate quest for true, reliable knowledge. This quest is something that all can admire, in principle. But can our admiration extend beyond the principle, to include its attempted implementation? I continue to find myself inspired by John Locke’s famous words in his letter to William Molyneaux, dated 10 January 1697: ‘I know there is truth opposite to falsehood, that it may be found if people will, and is worth the seeking, and is not only the most valuable, but the pleasantest thing in the world.’17 Yet can reason and science deliver such reliable judgements?
An important criticism of the Enlightenment at this point is to be found in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre. The Enlightenment agenda is here presented as something that is to be honoured and respected. Yet for MacIntyre there is a serious problem. The Enlightenment quest for a universal foundation and criterion of knowledge faltered, stumbled and finally collapsed under the weight of a massive accumulation of counter-evidence. It simply could not be done; the vision simply could not be achieved. MacIntyre’s historical research into the outcomes of the Enlightenment project convinced him that its legacy was an ideal of rational justification which it proved impossible to attain in practice.18 The goal it set out to pursue was fundamentally correct; the problem was that its methods and resources could not ultimately sustain that quest. The pursuit of truth can hardly be abandoned because one particular strategy is now recognized to have failed; the point is to find new strategies, or modify existing ones.
This may seem a harsh judgement. It may be softened, of course, by pointing out how the excessive confidence in the capacity of pure reason found in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Wolff was subjected to a penetrating critique by writers of the late Enlightenment, especially Kant. As Mark Chapman rightly points out:19
Alongside such triumphalist rationalism there were also those strands which aimed to set limits to human reason … Although human reason may have been defined as supreme, in the sense that no other authorities were allowed, there were at the same time limits set to the extent to which human reason could be sovereign.
Kolakowski illustrates Chapman’s point superbly. His disarmingly frank critique of the very limited achievements of philosophical reasoning goes far beyond a critique of the inflated notions of rationality entertained within some sections of the Enlightenment, and extends to the philosophical enterprise in general:20
For centuries philosophy has asserted its legitimacy by asking and answering questions inherited from the Socratics and pre-Socratics: how to distinguish the real from the unreal, true from false, good from evil … There came a point, however, when philosophers had to confront a simple, painfully undeniable fact: that of the questions which have sustained European philosophy for two and a half millennia, not a single one has been answered to general satisfaction. All of them, if not declared invalid by the decree of philosophers, remain controversial.
Yet Kolakowski’s critique of reason goes further than this. He insists that the human need for religion cannot be ‘excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation’. Human beings, he argues, do not live by reason alone. Life is more complex than rationalism allows. For Kolakowski, reason has its limits, and can never displace the deeper level of engagement with reality that is of the essence of religious belief and practice. The rationalist lives in an impoverished, restricted world, defined by what reason alone can prove. Yet beyond those restrictions lies a whole new vibrant world, awaiting discovery and disclosure. It does not defy or contradict reason; it simply lies beyond its scope. Kolakowski encourages us to trespass into forbidden pastures, to transgress boundaries, to defy arbitrary limits. Paul Kurtz writes darkly of sinister and ‘powerful forces eager to overthrow the basic premises of the Enlightenment’. Maybe some of those premises need to be challenged. And Kolakowski is much better placed to make that judgement than Kurtz.
3. The re-emergence of the transcendent
A frequent theme of new atheist writings is that of the inevitability of secularism. Religious is outmoded, a relic of a more credulous age. The future is secular; the erosion of religious belief and presence is simply a matter of time. We should embrace the future now, instead of waiting for history to take its inevitable course. It is a familiar argument, involving the same conflation of fact and value characteristic of Marxism.21 Where Marx proclaimed the historical inevitability of socialism, the new atheism proclaims that of secularism.
Marx’s proclamation was prophetic rather than scientific. The new atheists, however, believe that their declaration that religion is on its way out is scientific, resting on sound social analysis. Yet the idea of ‘historical inevitability’ is a sociological judgement which has little to do with what is intellectually or morally right or wrong.22 Whether a sociological development is ‘inevitable’ has little bearing on whether it is right. In any case, a given historical or cultural development may be inevitable only as a passing historical phase, rather than as a permanent development.
The new atheism seems wedded to precisely the same Eurocentrism that became characteristic of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Western Europe is unquestionably the exception to the global resurgence of religion in personal and public life in recent years.23 It was, after all, western European sociologists who predicted the future secularization of the world back in the 1960s; some have even lived long enough to see their predictions shown to be hopelessly naïve.24 Yet even in western Europe, despite a formidable array of attempts to reduce, deconstruct, recategorize or simply evade the notion of the transcendent, it remains central to contemporary cultural and philosophical reflection.25
Indeed, the history of ideas suggests that the assertion of the supremacy of materialist and cold rationalist approaches to reality invariably creates a backlash, generating a new interest in the domain of faith, imagination, the feelings, and especially the transcendent.26 The quest for the transcendent is so deeply embedded in the history of human thought that it will survive political and intellectual attempts to suppress it. The reaction of Romanticism against the soulless rationality of the Enlightenment is an illustration of this trend, but it is much more widely encountered than this specific example.27
Kolakowski both affirms the continuing importance of the transcendent and offers an explanation of this development. ‘God’s unforgettableness’, he argued, ‘means that He is present even in rejection.’28 Developing this point further, Kolakowski suggests that the ‘return of the sacred’ is a telling sign of the failure of the Enlightenment pseudo-religion of humanity, in which a deficient ‘godlessness desperately attempts to replace the lost God with something else’. In his 1973 lecture, ‘The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture’, Kolakowski further suggests that the category of ‘sacred’ is essential for culture, in that it offers an ordering or organizing structure which cannot adequately be grounded in secular systems.29
Kolakowski’s reflections on the persistence of transcendence are clearly grounded in the Polish experience under various forms of Marxism, where any recognition of the transcendent (especially when framed in terms of God) was seen as politically unacceptable. Indeed, Kolakowski’s insight can be seen to have been anticipated by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who pointed out that the metaphysical pressure to discover ‘God’ never departs, but lingers within human culture and experience.30 Nietzsche’s own assertion of his freedom from such ‘metaphysical needs’ may well reflect what Peter Poellner calls the ‘heroic posture’ of many atheists, which deliberately courts rejection and cultivates the posture of ‘standing alone’.31
The new interest in the transcendent is easily dismissed as a deplorable lapse into irrational beliefs, reflecting an indefensible resurgence of superstition. Yet this rhetorical façade is ultimately a projection of core Enlightenment values, reappropriated by the new atheism, which aims simply to stigmatize, rather than engage with, this significant cultural development. The new interest in the transcendent can be interpreted in a number of manners – one of which is a justified reaction against the spiritual aridity of modernity.32 Romanticism, for example, can be seen as a protest against the imaginative bleakness and spiritual dullness of a rationalist world which limits reality to what reason can determine.
Conclusion
This brief engagement with the leading ideas of the Enlightenment is enough to raise serious doubts about whether the simplistic new atheist vision for a return to the Enlightenment can be sustained. Many modern writers who championed the Enlightenment have subtly altered its visions and goals, partly to relate it more clearly to their own goals and objectives, yet partly also to purge it of ideas and associations that are increasingly seen to be problematic.33 Sociologically, the ideas of the Enlightenment must be regarded as deeply embedded in their original cultural context, and cannot simply be transplanted to a radically different environment. The ideas and values of the original Enlightenment cannot be dissociated from the historical, social and cultural context of the movement. Those schools of social theory which emphasize that ideas emerge from and are shaped by their social context have noted the historically situated character of fundamental Enlightenment themes. It is a sociological truism that there can be no going back to the Enlightenment, no uncritical transfer of its ideas and values to another moment in history, such as our own.
I need therefore to stress that Kolakowski, MacIntyre and Eagleton were all once informed and committed Marxists, fully aware of the sociological location and conditioning of ideas. All three held that the early Enlightenment was corrected by its later forms – above all, Marxism, which they saw as the flowering of this intellectual movement. I do not see this sociological sophistication, or anything remotely approaching it, in the leading writings of the new atheism.
A close reading of new atheist writings suggests that it is wedded to the idea of returning to a highly idealized and sanitized ‘Enlightenment’. Yet many would argue that this is fundamentally utopian. What if the new atheism is questing for a social and intellectual order that is little more than an illusion – a ‘dead time’s exploded dream’ (Matthew Arnold)?34 The new atheists show no recognition of the Standortsgebundenheit, the historically situated character, of the Enlightenment project, leading to the curious belief that the ideas and values of the Enlightenment can somehow be transplanted into the twenty-first century, as if they were detachable from their originating context. Or that, because they were so widespread, they are correct for that reason. As the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once wisely remarked, we must challenge any ‘prevailing ideological fashion of the day whose commonality is taken for the proof of its sense’.35 Social contexts change, and with them prevailing intellectual fashions. Cultural fashions change; what seems to be permanent and globally accepted today is discarded tomorrow.
For reasons such as these, it is deeply problematic to argue for a ‘New Enlightenment’, a concept which assumes almost totemic significance for writers such as Christopher Hitchens. While the new atheism is more concerned to criticize others than to construct its own positive proposals, the relatively few proposals that it does offer must be evaluated. Kolakowski is a powerful and informed voice in this conversation, raising serious doubts about whether the new atheism has a defensible positive vision to offer as a means of displacing religious belief and institutions. Given the defining iconic role the Enlightenment plays in shaping the atheist vision of the future, its merits must be evaluated with the same critical acumen that the new atheists direct against religion.
Towards the end of his career, as he reflected on the rise and fall of the myths and worldviews he had known and which had shaped his own life, such as Marxism and the Enlightenment, Kolakowski commented: ‘We are living through the realization that many rationally constructed predictions made in the nineteenth century are more wrong than the so-called illusions they were trying to dispel.’36 His comment leaves us with a nagging question that cannot be ignored – namely, whether the new atheism is itself offering an illusory remedy for the tragic situation of a humanity that refuses to acknowledge its shadow side. The humanists of the Renaissance knew better than this.
It’s not really surprising that the new atheism calls for a new Enlightenment, meaning a reversion to an older way of thinking as a way of challenging postmodernism. The old intellectual frameworks that gave atheism such stability in the past are crumbling. The new atheists’ only solution seems to be to try and put them back up again. But culture has moved on in the West, and has bypassed the Enlightenment altogether in many developing parts of the world. The new atheism shows an astonishing lack of interest in history, which it seems to treat as little more than a convenient source for its own ideas, selectively quarried. Those who so mistreat and disregard history will simply end up repeating its many past failures. The new atheism aspires to create a Godless New Jerusalem; if Kolakowski is right, it will merely end up creating yet another dysfunctional utopianism.