Are Atheists Impudent for Flouting Civilized Traditions?
The sanctimonious prejudices behind Edmund Burke’s case against atheism
The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, is often held up as a virtual prophet for predicting the reign of terror and the dictatorship that resulted from the French Revolution.
Early modern progressives had been naïve in thinking they could reason their way out of Christendom since their zeal for rationality led them to take vengeance against those who had benefited from the old regime, and one form of corruption replaced another.
Burke on the wisdom of traditions against atheism
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke casts atheism as part of the corruption that would lead France to ruin.
He speaks of the “political men of letters” who joined forces with “the monied interest” against “the noble ancient landed interest.” This “literary cabal,” he says, “had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion.” Moreover, “This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their means.”
Granted, he says, “Many of them indeed stood high in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done them justice and in favor of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar principles. This was true liberality,” but these men of letters returned the favour “by endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers.”
And Burke goes on to say
that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own, and they have learned to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life.
A zealous monopoly on behalf of reason and liberty? An industry of demonizing and discrediting opponents? Intolerance and persecution? It’s almost as though science-centered modernity were a revolutionary enterprise that was just as political as the rise of Christendom. The canard about the liberal’s intolerance can be set aside since a liberal society wouldn’t last long if it tolerated pure illiberalism, as in parasites who mean to turn a free society into a dictatorship. That’s what prisons are for even in a free society.
Burke foresaw that the liberals who meant to overthrow the French theocracy would be illiberal in disposing of the old regime. What he missed was that the chaos and the reign of terror were necessary evils because the Ancien Régime was structurally unsound and incapable of solving its budgetary issues. A “modern,” secular bureaucracy had to be put in place to maximize happiness in society, in opposition to the decadent monarchy’s self-serving schemes. Hence the violence.
Things were different in England, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was quick and relatively bloodless because the monarchy ceded its authority to the parliament. In France, the monarchy fought modernization, so power there had to be taken from the nobles. In the process, the revolutionaries fought with themselves about how to liberalize the country.
It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that revolutions can be chaotic, violent, and irrational. You just need to look at early Christendom’s destruction of the pagan world. The Catholic Church, too, demonized and persecuted its critics, and established a totalitarian regime that outlawed “heretical” thoughts and practices.
Thus, Burke defends English traditions, including Christianity, even though that tradition was established with a reign of terror that was comparable to the one that occurred in the French Revolution and that Burke condemned.
Here’s Burke boasting about his country’s traditions:
We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery through the whole course of our lives.
The problem with the Enlightenment’s atheistic rhetoric about rational progress, then, is that,
in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Regarding religion, Burke says,
We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us and amongst many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it.
The unnaturalness of all human traditions
There are several fallacies in this defense of prejudice, or in what’s called “modern conservatism.”
First, the fears of God and of liberal parliaments are contradictory, as Muslims recognize. Republics are inherently humanistic since the power is held by the people to govern their society, based not on religious revelation as interpreted specifically by a priesthood, but by people’s susceptibility to being rationally cultivated. Consequently, the monarchy’s role in modern England is symbolic, there being no real awe left for kings or queens. Traditions can become empty routines, fig leaves to please smug conservatives.
Burke says this respect for tradition is “natural,” which is preposterous. There’s nothing natural about monotheism, Christianity, monarchism, or feudalism. Those ideologies and social arrangements were compromises to assimilate masses of people to the utterly unnatural prospect of civilization. What was natural for humankind was the nomadic life of bands of hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age. What was unnatural was the ambition to domesticate plants, animals, and human slaves, and to settle in large societies that justified warring with neighbours by appealing to the will of imaginary deities.
Theistic religion is unnatural, as in perfectly anomalous throughout the universe. Political rationales for civilization are likewise unnatural. Slavery and patriarchy are unnatural for primates like us. Conservative sanctimony, too, is unnatural. You must be taught these schemes, and the masses must be tricked into accepting them. Just because these aspects of civilization are unnatural, they testify to human creativity and ambition — which are sources of the social progress that aggravates conservatives. That’s why conservatives like to call these conditions of civilization “natural,” hoping we forget about the big picture of history.
Burke says that the opposite of English conservatism would teach “us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence,” making English people “fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery.” But what are those opposing ideas supposed to be when Burke’s conservatism is self-contradictory enough to include both Christendom (fear of God, awe for kings, respect for nobility, and reverence for priests), and modern republicanism (affection for parliaments and duty to magistrates)?
What do the values of Christendom have to do with the modern conservative’s supposed “primary moral” of desiring “rational liberty”? Didn’t Burke read his Bible? Was he unaware of how the Church preached blind faith over the “pride” of reason? Didn’t he read how Jesus said his followers should be childlike in their faith, to be worthy of God’s kingdom (Mark 10:14)? Or of how Christians should expect to be longsuffering in their faith, the evidence of hardships at hand going constantly against them (as in the Epistle to the Hebrews)? Or of how doubting Thomas was chastised for needing to touch the risen Christ’s wounds (John 20:29)?
Why is a conservative here even speaking of the ideal of rational liberty as if the latter weren’t a matter of revolutionary progress in the big picture of history, which makes conservatism a nonstarter? No, it was Christendom’s religious tradition of demonizing foreigners that justified Western slavery, and it was modern, progressive humanism that eventually spread the concept of personhood to all humans, based on a scientific account of the rough equality of human bodies.
So, Burke’s appeal to “tradition” in support of classic liberalism is a farrago of Orwellian casuistries.
Burke himself wasn’t an enslaved person, but he lived in England when slavery was still an institution. Yet he speaks as though Enlightenment rationalism would usher in a zeal for slavery, as though slavery weren’t the norm in most ancient, theocratic kingdoms.
The humane cultivation of people
Hoping again to make his self-serving prejudices seem natural and inevitable, Burke says, as quoted above, that “we are generally men of untaught feelings,” and that “instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them.”
Right, we’re generally people of “untaught feelings” — until we’re taught to think for ourselves. Those who aren’t so taught become an underclass, unless they happen to live in a modern liberal society that prizes general education rather than an inhumane caste system. And those like Burke who are taught to think and to write, and who’ve learned to be duplicitous and casuistic in muddying the waters, to prevent the majority from enjoying the benefits of modernity, might resort to the devious tactic of calling literacy and liberal ideology “prejudices.”
Liberalism isn’t a prejudice because it’s based on science and philosophy. Prejudices are found, rather, in all the conservative sophistries that support the inequalities of Christendom, patriarchy, monarchy, feudalism, and slavery. Prejudice is an opinion or a feeling that’s formed before any rational assessment. Reason tells us that all humans are roughly equal in our ability to become noble through cultivation. English prejudice says that kings deserve awe whereas peasants or the working class don’t, or that Christian faith is respectable whereas the animistic myths of tribal folks are savage superstitions.
So, when Burke says he’s afraid to let people generally live based off their “private stock of reason,” what he misses is that reason can be cultivated through public education. Burke didn’t learn how to pontificate in longwinded fashion all by himself. Others taught him how to defend his sophistries and prejudices by treating those practices as being as “natural” as rainfall. Why couldn’t everyone be taught how to read and to write, and how to think critically? Why couldn’t that be the aim of a humane society? Obviously, it could be because that’s the way it is in late-modern republics that have high rates of literacy.
Then there’s the naturalistic fallacy of saying that “the longer they [some prejudices] have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.” That may explain causally why conservatives are entrenched in their prejudices, but it does nothing to justify those self-serving irrational opinions. Might doesn’t make right, so just because something is normal in nature doesn’t mean it’s good. Nature is full of unjust suffering because the wilderness is a godless place.
That’s why a species of highly intelligent and ambitious primates chose to build an alternative domain, an artificial refuge from many natural norms, governed by fictional laws. Again, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the civilizations that accumulate so-called traditions (psychological and social innovations) as opposed to genuine natural necessities are inherently revolutionary and progressive, nullifying conservatism.
Specious propaganda and the conservative’s prejudice against atheism
Finally, regarding atheism, Burke says, “man is by his constitution a religious animal,” so that “atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts,” in which case atheism “cannot prevail long.”
Again, so many fallacies. To begin with, “religious animal” is oxymoronic. Religiosity is a sign of what anthropologists came to call “behavioural modernity,” since this social practice involves the use of abstract symbols, as in the appeal to imaginary spirits or the chanting of mantras. When our species became religious, we became people rather than just animals in the biological sense. We evolved mindsets and cultures that made us artificial and anomalous rather than natural. Conservatism, then, is obsolete in pretending that human norms are natural.
Also, atheists aren’t necessarily opposed to religion in the sociological sense. What’s denied is theism, the ideology that prevails especially in monotheistic religions. Secular humanism or liberalism might be religious in some sociological sense that’s consistent with atheism, in that these secularists can hold certain principles as sacred without resorting to archaic theologies to justify them. Thus, Burke’s conflating theism with religion.
It goes without saying, too, that even if Burke were right here, he’d be showing that religion is socially useful, not that atheism is false or that the Christian creed, say, is rationally justified or probably true.
Moreover, Burke’s presupposing that human instincts are coherent. Instead, due to the haphazard nature of a species’ godless evolution, it’s possible that some instincts might conflict with others. Religion might have a natural basis in us, but so might skepticism. One side of us longs to dominate or to submit to a higher authority, while another might promote the search for rational explanations to satisfy our curiosity. We have biological capacities for irrational faith and for rational exploration. Calling the one “natural” and “safe,” and the other “uncouth” and “degrading” is cherry picking.
And Burke resorts to mere name-calling when he worries that the French system that would replace Christendom, the “boast and comfort” of Christians, would be a mere “superstition” by comparison. That very condescension that’s fuelled by Burke’s Christian prejudice is what the atheist applies to all theistic belief systems. As Richard Dawkins says well, the atheist merely denies one more god than the monotheist. Burke would dismiss whatever civic religion rationally enlightened liberals might establish, but what Burke lacks is the higher objectivity that would set his cherished religion in its historical context.
He thinks this objectivity is dangerous since it threatens to make liberals cynical and jaded. Indeed, that’s a downside of modernity, but Christian irrationality and sanctimony are just as dangerous — to the practitioners of other religions and to women, indigenous people, enslaved people, and critical thinkers. Burke’s Christian prejudices were self-serving since he was a white male who benefited from Western Christendom. He thought that a long line of descent is a reason to trust a tradition, but even if that were so, this conservativism would be impugned by Burke’s all-too personal reason for defending certain traditions.
It’s no accident that the peasants revolted against Christendom in Europe, or that indigenous Americans rebelled against that social order since these people hardly profited from Christianity. Burke’s Christian prejudices were too convenient in coming from him, because of his lordly station in early-modern England. One problem with Christianity, then, is that this religion doesn’t promote the critical thinking needed to tell the difference between Burke’s obnoxious sophistry and a good-faith, rational pursuit of truth.
Burke didn’t want the truth. He wanted propaganda to support the kind of society that made him a Member of Parliament. Would the impoverished lower class likely have been as proud of Christendom as the nobles that lived in luxury? Indeed, on strictly Christian grounds, the peasants should have been because amoral feudalism or mercantilism would have afforded them the chance to sacrifice their worldly happiness so they could live like Jesus. But that kind of fundamentalist Christianity is at odds not just with progressive liberalism but with civilization itself.
But again, you need to clear the conservative’s muddying of the waters to see how all civilized endeavors are relatively liberal and progressive, not natural or prejudicial.
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