The New New Atheism
PETER BERKOWITZ
Attacking "God" has become a lucrative book business. But there's not much substance behind the latest atheist tracts.
"There is nothing new under the sun," proclaims the Book of Ecclesiastes. The rise of the new new atheism confirms this ancient biblical wisdom.
Of course the famous words of Ecclesiastes should not be taken in a slavishly literal sense, a technique that is all-too-common among those who think they can refute belief in God by showing that the Bible abounds in demonstrably false and self-contradictory statements.
But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist (2007).
Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.
So Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing.
The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently and most forcefully and wittily in God Is Not Great by my friend Mr. Hitchens. It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart.
But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil. Consider Mr. Hitchens's contention, elaborated at length and with gusto, that religion by its very nature compels people to behave cruelly and violently. According to Mr. Hitchens, religion educates children to hate nonbelievers, encourages grown-ups to engage in slaughter and conquest for God's greater glory, and obliges the "true believer" to restlessly circle the globe subduing peoples and nations until "the whole world bows the knee."
The bloody history of oppression and war undertaken on behalf of the gods and God, from time immemorial, makes all decent people shudder. But Mr. Hitchens knows perfectly well that human beings are not born in Rousseauian purity and freedom, and then made savage by the imposition of the chains of religion. Therefore, he should have asked whether and to what extent the varieties of religion have inflamed or rather disciplined humanity's powerful built-in propensity, attested to by social science, to fight and kill. But he didn't.
Such a question opens intriguing possibilities. Mr. Hitchens mocks the crudity of the biblical principle known in Latin as lex talionis, or an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot." But suppose, as Jewish teaching suggests, that the biblical principle put an end to the practice of taking a leg for a foot and a life for an eye, and in its place established a principle that, though differently interpreted today, remains a cornerstone of our notion of justice—that the punishment should fit the crime.
Similarly, Mr. Hitchens heaps scorn on the biblical story of Abraham's binding of Isaac, in which, at the last moment, an angel stays Abraham's hand. What kind of barbarian, wonders Mr. Hitchens, would prepare to sacrifice his son at God's command, and what kind of morally stunted individuals would honor such a man, or the deity who made the demand? Yet Mr. Hitchens's categorical claim that religion poisons everything is undermined by the common interpretation according to which God's testing of Abraham taught, among other things, that the then widespread practice of child-sacrifice was contrary to God's will, and must be put to an end forever.
At the same time, Mr. Hitchens has next to nothing to say about the historical role of religion, particularly Christianity, particularly in America, in nourishing the soil in which our widely and deeply shared beliefs in liberty, democracy and equality took root and grew strong—a subject dealt with perceptively by Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter in his recent book Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion.
Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity, dwarfing religion's sins, committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He attempts to deflect the challenge with sophistry: "It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists." But who is behaving defensively here? Mr. Hitchens is the one who unequivocally insists that religion poisons everything, and it is Mr. Hitchens who holds out the utopian hope that eradicating it will subdue humanity's evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
Nor is his case bolstered by his observation that 20th-century totalitarianism took on many features of religion. That only brings home the need to distinguish, as Mr. Hitchens resolutely refuses to do, between authentic and corrupt, and just and unjust, religious teachings. And it begs the question of why the 20th-century embrace of secularism unleashed human depravity of unprecedented proportions.
Even were he to concede that religion doesn't poison everything, Mr. Hitchens presumably still would cling to his claim that the findings of modern science prove that God does not exist. Thanks to the knowledge we have attained of how the natural order actually operates—in particular the discoveries of Charles Darwin and modern physics—he concludes that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule."
This conclusion, however, contradicts that of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Mr. Hitchens himself refers as a "great paleontologist" and whose authority he invokes in support of the proposition that randomness is an essential feature of evolution. Noting surveys that showed that half of all scientists are religious, Gould commented amusingly that "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
These lines are quoted in The Dawkins Delusion, by Alistair McGrath, who holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Oxford, where he is now professor of historical theology, and by his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who studied experimental psychology at Oxford and is currently a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. According to the McGraths, Gould was correct to think that both conventional religious belief and atheism are compatible with natural science, in part because "there are many questions that by their very nature must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method." Such questions—toward which the mind naturally wanders, though it is susceptible to ambush by the crude scientism of which Mr. Hitchens occasionally avails himself—include: Where did the universe come from, and is it governed by purpose?
As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man. Yes, traditions teach that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, yet the Pentateuch refers to Moses in the third person and tells the story of his death. Yes, Matthew and Luke disagree on the Virgin Birth and the genealogy of Jesus. And so on. The literalness of Mr. Hitchens's readings would put many a fundamentalist to shame.
However, isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible from the communities and interpretive traditions that have elaborated its teaching is invalid. It is like deriving the meaning of the Constitution today by reading its provisions without reference to The Federalist Papers, which provides authoritative commentary on its principles; without reference to the two centuries of cases and controversies through which the Supreme Court has sought to construe its meaning; and without reference to the two centuries of experience through which the American people have sought to put the institutional framework it outlines into practice.
In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.
Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.
Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.
Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings—woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes—are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).
That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women—a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation—is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.
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Monday, July 16, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" by Ross Douthat
Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
link
ROSS DOUTHAT
Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege.
For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case "g" throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. "I have been writing this book all my life," Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, "and intend to keep on writing it." One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.
The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity.
In this vein, he is exhaustive but largely unpersuasive. I remain unconvinced, for instance, that religious practice has no significant effect on moral character, though all I have to support my intuition is a heap of academic studies suggesting that churchgoing boosts marital happiness, private generosity, and various other indicators of a life well lived, while Hitchens has the devastating rebuttal that Robert Ingersoll, the noted freethinker, was a better husband and father than the Catholic Evelyn Waugh. Similarly, I'm unpersuaded that the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has been a major factor in the spread of AIDS around the world, though again I'm merely relying on statistics—African infection rates, for instance, are highest in heavily Protestant countries; most studies suggest that serious religious practice correlates with lower rates of risky sexual behavior, even among people already infected with HIV—while Hitchens has the irrefutable power of anecdote on his side, specifically a few dumb statements about condoms from Third World churchmen.
I'm also unconvinced that male circumcision is quite the species of totalitarianism that God Is Not Great makes it out to be, though I am perhaps suffering from what Hitchens, in his Marxist phase, would have described as "false consciousness." Nor do I believe that the doctrine of hell has wrecked quite so many millions of childhoods as he claims (though he does have citations from James Joyce and Mary McCarthy on his side); or that religion has likewise ruined the act of coitus (a difficult thing to do, one might hazard) for untold numbers of believers; or that the difference between the Spanish Inquisition and the U.S. military chaplaincy is a matter of degree and not of kind. Although Hitchens may be entirely correct that an atheist need "never again confront the impressive faith of an Aquinas or a Maimonides," because faith of "the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason" no longer exists, I wish he had risked the confrontation, instead of writing an entire book about religion that includes exactly two quotations from religious intellectuals born since 1800, both taken from the same C.S. Lewis pamphlet.
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts.
Perhaps one should be grateful when Hitchens cites any authority at all, since his artful prose is forever rushing on to the insult and skipping the argument, and sometimes the facts as well. He claims that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ stars a "lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota," a jibe calculated to amuse anyone who's never set eyes on Jim Caviezel, the lead actor in question, who looks exactly like the dark-haired, dark-skinned Italian-Slovak-Irish mongrel he is. Of the Gospels themselves, Hitchens notes that "the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,' has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired' it"—a good line that reveals at best a passing acquaintance with biblical scholarship, since the hypothetical Q is only envisioned as a source for Matthew and Luke, not Mark and certainly not John.
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."
This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.
Hitchens's own temptations lie in the latter direction. Though he casts himself as a chastened ex-Marxist, he slips all too easily into a boasting utopianism. There is the dream of near-immortality, thanks to "stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our elementary stem cells." There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion. And inevitably, there is the fantasy of a sexual utopia, since "the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse." (This last bit is the kind of nonsense that only an intellectual could believe—that religion, rather than biology and human nature, is responsible for making sex physically and emotionally perilous, or linking promiscuity with disease, or intertwining the personal and the political.)
At one point, summoning his readers to the salons and barricades of a new Age of Reason, Hitchens adds the caveat that "only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of ‘progress,' in a straight line." This sounds admirably humble, until you read the next sentence—"we have to first transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars"—and realize that the only people standing between us and this "new humane civilization" are the unenlightened types who don't agree with Christopher Hitchens about the ultimate purpose of human affairs.
We've heard this kind of talk before—transcending the past, building a new humane civilization, escaping the outworn moralities and metaphysics of yore—and its results have tended to be unhappy for those unfortunate enough to be identified with the "prehistory" that needs to be transcended. Perhaps a more modest utopianism will be less pernicious than its predecessors; perhaps Hitchens really means it when he protests, in between the insults, that he only dislikes religion because it won't leave him well enough alone. But there's nothing, either in recent history or in the pages of this smug, incurious book, to give one any confidence of that.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Ross Douthat "Lord Have Mercy: A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Claremont Review of Books (Summer, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the Claremont Review of Books.
The Claremont Review of Books offers bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism, which draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. By engaging policy at the level of ideas, the CRB aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of our noblest political traditions.
THE AUTHOR
Ross Douthat is an associate editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and The Party of Sam's Club, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington D.C.
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