The Quest for Godless Honour

The myths of liberal humanism and the shallowness of new atheism

When militant Islamists attacked the United States on 9/11 — the advances of science and technology retaliated by launching books & works that were meant to eradicate religious ideologies once and for all.

They weren’t supposed to be just another salvo of forgettable, disposable books on religion. Since each intellectual atheist fantasizes that he or she can produce the equivalent of the great American novel, namely a book that exposes the heart of religion’s absurdity, demonstrating the fulsome irrationality of beliefs in gods and miracles.

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was first off the launching pad, which was followed by others such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Hitchens’s God is not Great, and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

To the mass media’s satisfaction, those established that the four horsemen of the apocalypse had arrived, and so-called “new atheism” took off as a fad. But there were plenty of other publications in the arsenal, such as Michael Onfray’s In Defense of Atheism, Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis, and Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists.

Of course, there were atheistic books written prior to 9/11, such as George Smith’s Atheism: The Case against God. Theists launched their counterattacks while others declared a pox on both houses. See, for example, John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism and Chris Hedges’ When Atheism Becomes Religion and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.

The fad ended when new atheism splintered along political lines that may also mark a division between male and female or at least masculine and feminine secularists. For some reason, the recent well-known books on the war between believers and nonbelievers were generally written by men. Still, there are zealous female theists and atheists; it’s just that the female new atheists preferred to organize against religion on feminist or otherwise political grounds rather than on philosophical ones.

In any case, progressive and liberal humanistic new atheists formed the Atheism Plus movement, dragging hyper-liberal politics into the discussion, on the “postmodern” assumption that everything is political.

In response, the masculine or nerdy atheists, who were more interested at the time in philosophy and science than in politics withdrew their support for the new atheism brand, retreating to the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and presupposing more radical politics that branches off into libertarianism, anarchism, and Trumpian populism.

The Wisdom of Old Atheism

As though they were unearthed time capsules, Gray and Hedges present us with the older atheistic and theistic philosophies, those that flourished before the war between faith and reason was commodified and trivialized by corporate and social media or before theists were burdened with managing their compromised religious institutions. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as well as Kierkegaard, the Buddha and the Jesus of the gospels pursued radical critiques that uncovered hypocrisies on all sides.

Begin with the obvious: new atheism castigated monotheistic religions for their irrational tribalism, but new atheists behaved as just such tribalists by subscribing to a craze and to a media fiction, by revering their leading intellectuals and by making a pretentious sport out of their debates with theists.

Moreover, the collective behaviour of late-modern secular societies is hardly enlightened, since the last century saw the world embroiled in wars, dictatorships, and imperial plutocracies. We’re all still helping to destroy the planet’s ability to support complex life, thanks precisely to scientific and technological advances — the chief measures of our alleged “progress” — and to the liberties afforded by capitalism and democracy, liberties which infantilize and corrupt us.

“But atheists are only human and therefore subject to the same primitive social dynamics as anyone else,” the new atheist may retort. “Still, what rankles isn’t just the anachronistic behaviour, but the dogmatic beliefs of theists. And atheistic philosophies are far more rational.”

That distinction won’t save the new atheist from being the victim of an irony. As rigorous as critical thinkers and scientists may be, the assiduous application of their methods has undermined the ideal of rationality. Western philosophers have led us from the arrogant, utopian, positivistic pronouncements of the Age of Reason, to hypermodern relativism, cynicism, and rampant scepticism, while scientists have discovered that the universe is fundamentally counterintuitive and preposterous.

Life evolves not according to any rational plan but as a result of blind and pointless natural developments. Space and time are relative, the quantum world is absurd, and black holes are pits of anti-nature; thus, the positivist’s hope for an absolute Theory of Everything is as obsolete as a biblical fairy tale. In short, philosophy has been reduced to a set of pragmatic strategies for clarifying what we mean and for inspiring radical questions with poetic speculations, while scientists should take themselves now to be offering only efficient explanatory models for the (short-sighted) empowerment of our species.

What the old atheists realized is that a godless world is more absurd and intolerable than one that would be created by a personal deity.

Marx, for example, said that religion is a set of illusions that protest against real suffering —

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

This implies the source of real suffering and of the class warfare on which Marx fixated is the world’s mere naturalness, that is, its impersonality, amorality, and effective indifference to whether we suffer or are at peace with our situation.

Freud agreed, in effect, with David Hume and Nietzsche, in showing how reason is the “slave of the passions.” The unconscious drives our behaviour, and our vaunted intelligence is forever in conflict with our irrational desires, which makes the egoistic pretenses of secular and religious institutions alike comical.

Nietzsche said that because we’re animals after all, we seek power in all our affairs, even when we’re pretending to care about truth and morality. He was a cynical social Darwinian except that he agreed with Schopenhauer that art and an aesthetic sensibility have the potential to elevate us, by inspiring us to create transcendent, anti-natural value systems.

Meanwhile, Schopenhauer sided with the pantheism of Spinoza, but substituted for the stale, pseudo-rigors of Scholastic metaphysical categories the terms of process theology, anticipating the Darwinian view of life’s origin, by positing a blind, struggling Will as the basis of nature’s self-creation. This view led him to the Eastern solution, which is to renounce nature and human willing as sources of tragedy.

That a godless world is horrific and absurd is precisely what the new atheists could not concede, because rather than getting to the heart of the conflict between religious faith and secular reason, what they were after was to sell books and to start a protest movement. A surefire way to fail in either endeavour is to be pessimistic and subversive, and to lament both theistic and mainstream secular enterprises as being equally wrongheaded.

Secular humanists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson had to be upbeat about the prospects of science and technology, and new atheists like Richard Dawkins waxed poetic about the privilege of being alive. Even as we retreat from globalization, recognizing the neoliberal frauds that produced so many plutocracies in advanced societies, the wealth of which was sustained by cheap labour, Third World conditions, and Middle Eastern oppression; even as science-centred disenchantment with godless nature has reinforced mass infantilization by the corporate media and by “deregulated,” functionally-sociopathic corporations, Dawkins had to pretend we could “stop worrying” and enjoy life now that God is dead.

Critique of the Secular Enterprise

There’s no need to play word games to win a pyrrhic victory in showing that atheists have their faith-based “religions” (their irrational ideologies and lifestyles) too, namely their scientism, optimism, consumerism, nationalism, or something as pedestrian as their personal privileging of their families.

Every time an atheist has sex, he or she does something foolish and humiliating. That’s why in polite society sex is kept secret or “private,” because it belies the secularist’s self-image as a civilized rationalist.

Sure, theistic irrationality has resulted in archaic creeds that give free rein to our childish impulse to entertain imaginary friends. But the obviousness of those anachronisms doesn’t entitle us to overlook how the politician’s platitudes flatter us into flaunting our lame civic religions or how secular lunacy is rationalized with bureaucratic efficiency, such as with slick and shameless associative ads that sell the parasitic capitalist mindset.

Show me someone who doesn’t debase herself by deferring to a noble lie and I’ll show you a social outcast who’s counted as a loser by all conventional measures.

Atheism itself is just the rejection of theistic, god-based religions, but there’s no such thing as a worldview made up only of atheism. Atheists replace theocracy and theistic social clubs with secular institutions that they’re obliged to defend. Those institutions are typically as underhanded and dehumanizing as religious ones.

Just ask yourself what atheists tend to value most, to see whether those values are honourable or self-negating and fraudulent. Secularists who reject gods and miracles, scriptures and the prospect of a supernatural afterlife often revere reason, human nature, pleasure, wealth/power, or art. We’ve already seen how reason in philosophy and science has negated itself, so let’s consider the merits of the other ideals.

Human nature seems tragically heroic at best since we’re using our liberty and intelligence to extinguish or to enslave all other animal species and to destroy the ecosystems that support us. Could anyone esteem the wisdom, compassion, and creativity of Homo sapiens if we were honest about how comparable we are, functionally speaking, to viruses and to other parasites? In any case, human nature is defined by other fundamental interests, such as reason, pleasure, and domination.

Our greatest pleasure is sex, and again we’re ashamed of that because it conflicts with reason. Libertines who are consistent and open about prizing pleasure would include those creepy hippies who drugged themselves into realizing they’d better straighten up and sell out so their counterculture could be co-opted by transnational corporations. Neo-hippies likewise subscribe to the woo and pseudoscience of New Thought and are subject to the cults that exploit the loopholes in that kind of shaky reasoning. As for those who specifically value sexual pleasure, if they’re men, they’re persecuted as toxically-masculine alpha males, and if they’re women they’re demonized as nymphomaniacs or whores.

The upshot is that science-powered secular society can’t afford to venerate pleasure without giving traditional religions a pass, since pleasure and religious faith are both irrational and often shamefully pursued.

To indulge in pleasure and in happiness or contentment in general, you have to ignore everything that would make you sad, afraid, angry, or disgusted. That means you have to ignore the bulk of the universe — which should be intolerable to a so-called enlightened atheistic naturalist. Therefore, pleasure and happiness can be only inauthentic, fraudulent ideals for the secularist, since they deprive her of her intellectual integrity much as the rationality of theistic beliefs can’t be sustained without egregious incoherence. So much for honour in secular pleasure.

As for our lust for power over others and for our yearning to be fully in control, to overcome all obstacles to the satisfaction of our desires, that too ends up being incoherent and faith-based. We rationalize our instinct for domination because we also rely on our civility, which requires that we train to domesticate ourselves.

We must be pacified to sustain our enormous population centres, just as ants must automate their interactions for the good of the colony. Once domesticated, we have to compromise and repress our antisocial impulses. Those who can’t repress them end up in prison or go far in business or politics as sub criminal psychopaths.

We have to pretend we don’t care about dominating others, whereas in fact we do, and that internal conflict makes for irrationality. We divide into conservatives and liberals, depending on the noble lie that accommodates us to our closeted savagery. Conservatives are boldest in spinning their will to power in the most maudlin and hypocritical terms, whether their excuse takes the form of xenophobic patriotism, as they dominate vicariously through their military, or whether they opt for archaic religion as they identify with their omnipotent master in the sky. Conservatives are social Darwinians in sheep’s clothing, and “conservative philosophy” and “conservative thought” are oxymoronic.

Liberals are humanists and they spin our antisocial instinct as a means of progressing as a species. Thus, they emphasize science and technology which enable us to dominate and reshape the wilderness — until nature snaps back and we’re reminded that that parasitic venture is woefully arrogant. Liberals are passive-aggressive and feminized, so they dominate with subtle signs of smugness and as consumers who deem themselves superior and entitled because of their education, their profession, and their middle-class lifestyle.

These are the genius liberals who didn’t see Trump coming after they’d backed Obama, who was only a fake progressive but whose innocuous platitudes and dark skin tone still offended the conservative trolls and troglodytes. In 2020, liberals in many countries facing backlashes against neoliberal imperialism or “globalization” find themselves powerless even as science teaches us in ever-greater detail about our cosmic insignificance, while technology soothes us with more and more infantilizing distractions.

Artistic creativity is perhaps our least-destructive fundamental value, but it’s no less absurd. We speak of the death of art, because we’ve entered a hypermodern phase of jadedness, apathy, and confusion. We know we’re supposed to trust something to give our life meaning, but we can no longer figure out what that’s supposed to be, since modernity amounts to incredulity towards all the myths that sustain our peace of mind. Artists need a purpose supplied by ideology or vision or else their work is the spinning of wheels in midair.

Thanks to technological empowerment, there are more novelists, poets, painters, film-makers, and musicians than ever before, and we care so much about their endeavours that we flock to the social media platforms that gobble up and pirate their work, preventing the vast majority of artists from making a living with their art. Someday soon, computer programs will produce art that rivals human products and the devaluation of art will be complete.

Art may be the preeminent way of making sense of the world, but we can create meaning only because there’s no prior design that constrains our inventions. Our frenzied attachment to story-telling, to painting pictures and to singing songs testifies to the absurdity of everything in nature we’re thereby trying to simplify and humanize.

I don’t mean to suggest that secularism is as bad as religion in all respects, since such a broad generalization would be baseless and empty. But I do think we should dispose of phony debates, to focus on the important questions we all face regardless of our brand of noble lies: If religion is foolish and life is absurd enough to steer us towards inventing invisible friends even as we adults condescend to our carefree children, how shall we pass the time with honour?

What should intelligent creatures be doing in a universe that couldn’t care less whether we live or die?

The problem with new atheism is that its heroes are mainly scientists, and science makes for a poor substitute for philosophy. Scientism is just as vulgar as fundamentalist monotheism. Seeing through that secular ruse means entering philosophy proper, whereupon you may find that the melancholy visions of existentialism, cosmicism, and tragic heroism are more worthy companions than the new atheist’s hypocritical advertisements for liberal humanism.

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