Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools

Bc. Jiří Kinscher

The reception of “New Atheism” among some leading British public intellectuals Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.

2017

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

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I would like to thank my supervisor Stepehen Hardy for advice and support, my wife Ivana Kafková for support and help with the formal aspects of the thesis, and the Library of Ústí nad Orlicí for safe haven and coffee

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...... 5 2 Public Intellectuals in Britain ...... 8 3 New Atheism ...... 11 3.1 Richard Dawkins ...... 15 3.2 Christopher Hitchens ...... 19 3.3 AC Grayling ...... 20 3.4 Sam Harris ...... 22 3.5 Daniel Dennet ...... 24 4 Selected Intellectuals ...... 26 4.1 John Gray ...... 26 4.1.1 John Gray - The Academic ...... 26 4.1.2 John Gray –The Public Intellectual ...... 27 4.2 Terry Eagleton ...... 29 4.3 Roger Scruton...... 31 4.4 Allain de Botton ...... 33 5 Assessing the New Atheism in Context ...... 35 5.1 Religious Dimension ...... 35 5.1.1 Theological criticism ...... 35 5.1.2 The Perspective of Social Sciences ...... 41 5.2 Political and Historical Dimensions ...... 52 5.2.1 The Politics of New Atheism ...... 52 5.2.2 The New Atheism and the Idea of Progress ...... 56 5.2.3 Harris – Chomsky “debate” ...... 67 5.3 Cultural Dimension ...... 68 5.3.1 New Atheism and the Role of Science in Society ...... 69 6 Conclusion ...... 83 7 Primary Sources: ...... 88 8 Secondary Sources ...... 91 9 Summary ...... 98 10 Resumé ...... 99

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1 Introduction

This thesis is supposed to be an enterprise in contemporary history of ideas. It sets itself the task to investigate the phenomenon of New Atheism in its various manifestations.

New Atheism is a recent development of secular thinking which is typically inclined to oppose religion on intellectual as well as on moral grounds. It differs from the mainstream ways of coexistence between religion and secular space in modern society because it tends to view religion as a threat to moral improvement and social development. New

Atheism views religion as a relic of the past and believes that it could be fully substituted for on epistemological level by science and on social level by cultivating secular discourse and nor-religious bases of morality.

These views are endorsed by some influential scientists and philosophers but also it provokes a strong reaction from others. Though perhaps not the most important public debate of our time, still it encapsulates a whole cluster of related themes which are of highly importance for every society – transcendence or the absence of it, political action and the types of its legitimating and such hotly debated topics such as terrorism and cultural changes caused by accelerating global communication. The New Atheists tend to see the latest developments with optimism because they believe in the capacity of global civilization to come to being and maintain itself. Some of them put the optimistic message forward in very bold and open terms; we seem to be on a trajectory to more peaceful and morally developed society. Democratization, retreat of violent conflict and economical improvement is expected to be the future if we manage to tame some relics of the past, religion among them. They are afraid that these desirable developments could be thwarted by those relics of the past. Not everyone shares this optimistic vision about modernity on the one hand and the strong hostility to religious thought and practice on the other, and I

5 am going to explore these critics´ views in order to learn more of what type of intellectual current New Atheism seems to be and, what is its pedigree in intellectual history.

The thesis is, thus, interested in the phenomenon of New Atheism as an example of contemporary thinking about religion and its role in society. The method I have chosen to pursue is to view New Atheism from the perspective of its critics. I chose several

British intellectuals and I am going to investigate their writings in books as well as in media to discern certain patterns in their outlook. I also will employ the comparative method in trying to outline the main features of the critical discourse about New Atheism in Britain.

The thesis will start with brief introduction of the personalities involved in the discourse and some of their relevant writings. Then I will proceed to looking at this particular kind of contemporary atheism in the context of religion, culture and history. I am especially interested in the implicit belief in Progress held by the New Atheists which is often the focus of the criticisms levelled against them. I will try to put New Atheist thought in a broader context of thinking about religion as it has been elaborated by social sciences.

A crucial question I am interested in is a cultural dimension of the New Atheism, namely the way how it understands the role of science and religion in contemporary society. The

New Atheist offer a confrontational model of relations between these two domains and the language of science is viewed as a capable framework in which people in our society of late modernity can understand themselves. Because I find his attempt to establish science as a dominant discourse about values, meaning and human condition in general, highly problematic I am going to explore the question of scientism and try to establish whether and in what way the New Atheism might be an example of scientistic thinking.

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I will compare it to similar debates concerning education and culture and the role which science should play in them.

The thinkers I have chosen for my enquiry are all British philosophers. They differ in philosophical, political and religious terms but they agree on various aspects of New

Atheism. It is of interest for me, how certain leading thinkers, whose work I value, deal with the new combative type of atheism in its various manifestation.

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2 Public Intellectuals in Britain

The word “intellectual” has a long and complicated history and different connotations in different national contexts. The standing of “intellectuals” in Britain is especially complicated because there has been a long tradition of denying the very existence of this specific human type in Britain. Intellectual historian Stephen Collini wrote a study polemicizing with this “absence thesis”1 which is connected with the self-perception of the English as practically oriented people with healthy scepticism about abstract ideas.2

The term ‘British intellectuals’, according to Collini, still sounds to a lot of people as

“contradiction in terms”.3 However, Collini´s finds out that the “absent thesis” is far from being an English peculiarity. Other European nations tends to lament the lack or decline of local public intellectuals. Idealization of the past is partly to blame, and also the

“idealisation of elsewhere”.4 Many nations lament that they don´t have the kind of intellectuals that could only be found in other countries. Intellectuals in France, where the term “intellectual” emerged in connection with the Dreyfus affair5, are sometimes considered as their true home, or Russia is often idealised as the home of the true intellectuals who serve as the “conscience of a whole people”. 6 One can remember the days when the Czechs had an intellectual-president, “a philosopher king” which was something admired by the world.7 But, as in case of numerous other countries, in the

Czech language the word “intelektuál” has very often negative connotations, denoting

1 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 3 2 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 72 3 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 51 4 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 218 5 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 27 6 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 217 7 See: KENETY, Brian. 'Philosopher King' Vaclav Havel Voted among World's Top Five Intellectuals. In: Radio Praha: in English [online]. 21-10-2005 [accessed 2018-04-15]. Available at: http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/philosopher-king-vaclav-havel-voted-among-worlds-top-five- intellectuals 8 someone cut off from the reality and lost in pointless abstractions.8 But there is a distinctive tradition in many countries of valuing positively the “outsider status” and critical voices telling “truth to power”. 9 Collini bools shows that Britain is not so exceptional in its complicated relation to people who with certain authority enter the public realm. Collini is not particularly friendly to the romantic image of a noble voice speaking truth to power: “Many years ago Raymond Williams wrote an influential essay entitled ‘Culture is ordinary’.Perhaps it’s time that someone wrote an essay entitled

‘Intellectuals are ordinary’”.10 He tries to remove both glamour and scorn from the perception of intellectuals, both “demonizing and pedestalling”.11 No group can claim special authority in public space. This view is probably influenced by his Marxist background; everybody can be an intellectual. Intellectuals, however, are believed to have

“expertise, celebrity, and reputation”12 but Collini is highly critical towards the aura of certain individual who are considered to have some special authority to pronounce judgments on matters concerning the public. The authority lies with every scholar of the academia doing their work rigorously and trying to avoid both “self-effacing specialism and selfpromoting vulgarity” and there shouldn´t be privileged voices.13

Notwithstanding Collini´s critical examination of the term and its history I am using the term throughout this thesis in a rather uncomplicated way – to denote people who have some “expertise and reputation” and who are visible in public realm (I would not call it celebrity, though). The expression “public intellectual”, in its ordinary usage, means somebody who is believed by public to have certain authority and his or her opinions

8 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 205 9 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 413 10 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 505 11 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 505 12 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 484 13 COLLINI, S. Absent Minds, p. 504 9 deserve to be listened to. When The Guardian asked a group of public intellectuals about their view on “Britain’s relationship with its intelligentsia” they did not agree on an exact definition of an intellectual but agreed on their importance.14 But if we look at a gather by a journalist we can see that people from humanities, natural sciences, arts and literature, social science are represented, with literary personalities being the strongest professional group.15

I will employ the term “intellectual” for every personality whose views will be discussed in this thesis, for people both from humanities and from sciences.

14 DE BOTTON, Alain et al. Britain's Intellectuals: Leading Thinkers have Their Say. In: The Guardian [online]. [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/may/08/public- intellectuals-britain , 15 NAUGHTON, John. Britain's Top 300 Intellectuals. The Guardian [online]. 8 May 2011 [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/may/08/top-300-british- intellectuals 10

3 New Atheism

The term “New Atheism” denotes a group of authors and public intellectuals who came to prominence in the mid-2000´s. It was probably first used in 2006 in an on-line article in the magazine called Wired16. The article called “The Church of the Non-Believers” not only gave this intellectual movement its name but also outlines the pivotal issues around which the New Atheist agenda revolves. One of the characteristic features being the rejection of mainstream, moderate religion. The article contains an interview with

Richard Dawkins where he openly declares the “either – or” character of the New Atheist discourse: “(T)he big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible” – and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes – “the `sensible` religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side.” 17 The belief in progress, another important feature of the discourse found its way into the same article through the words of Sam Harris, the next person to be interviewed.

He talks about how religion will go the way of slavery which, at certain point in history, had become untenable and unjustifiable: “At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.”18 Although the

New Atheist usually reject the accusation that atheism is just “another belief system”19, namely scientism, Harris continues, (probably) unintentionally, mimicking the ideas of

French revolutionaries and their “Festival of Reason” held on 20th Brumaire of Year II

16WOLF, Gary. The Church of the Non-Believers. Wired [online]. 11.1. 2006 [accessed 2018-04-17]. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2006/11/atheism/ 17 WOLF, G. The Church 18 WOLF, G. The Church 19 E.g.here: AITKENHEAD, Decca. AC Grayling: 'How can you be a Militant Atheist? It's Like Sleeping Furiously'. The Guardian [online]. Apr 03 2011 [accessed 2018-04-17]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/03/grayling-good-book-atheism-philosophy 11

(10th November 1793)20. To draw a complete picture, though, Gary Wolf, the author of the article, goes on to describe an evangelical religious service with all its kitschy trappings, manipulation of the crowd and undisguised worship of Mammon. This is important because violent fundamentalism and this hypocritical form of late capitalism

Christianity are the facets of religion at which the new Atheists target their criticism most frequently. But, as Wolf remarks, their strictly intellectual orientation, uncompromising endorsing of the Truth (scientific) makes them “politically hopeless”, primarily because they refuse their natural allies -liberals from within churches. The article is concluded with the views of the third prominent atheist personality, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Here we get a glimpse into a bit more moderate form of New Atheism; Dennett is not as vocal about the dangers of belief but rather evokes the Socratic tradition of seeking the truth regardless of the cost.21

There has been much debate whether the adjective “new” in the term “New Atheism” is justifiable. A number of people pointed out that it has not brought anything new in terms of arguments, the novelty lies rather in its communication strategies.22 The adjective is, perhaps, justifiable, because the phenomenon of New Atheism is distinct from previous cultural forms of religious unbelief, it is overwhelmingly Anglophone phenomenon

(Michel Onfray is sometimes included in the ranks but his thought is significantly

20 “There would be a religion of reason,” Harris says. “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it`s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit.” WOLF, G. The Church 21 WOLF, G. The Church 22 E.g. here: LEE, Lois. What does the 'New' in 'New Atheism' Really Mean?. The Guardian [online]. 19 Sep 2012 [accessed 2018-04-12]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/19/new-atheism-meaning 12 different from Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens). 23 It emerged in post 9/11 years, which is not an accident. Stephen LeDrew notes that the New Atheists react to “pre-modern” and

“post-modern” challenges at the same time. They feel threatened by resurgence of religion, creationist movements in US, Islamic terrorism and, also, by the postmodernism with its cultural relativism.24 New Atheism reacts with creating a distinctive system, which could be called an “ideology”.25 The ideology is created by a specific view of history and the role of science in society, it is a teleological vision of modernity as a universal unfolding of history from pre-scientific barbarism to scientific civilization”.26

Although some of the New Atheist thinkers had been well-known and successful writers and scientists prior to 2000´s, we can talk about them as a particular cultural phenomenon since they published their highly successful books, which mostly had a character of a manifesto of anti-religious quest. The main authors went on to proclaim themselves to be a distinct intellectual group (“Four Horsemen”) with common agenda which they began to promote in the public realm managing thus to stir up a 21st century debate about religion. This debate has its own peculiarities as the New Atheism has been up to a large extent formed by contemporary events, namely terrorist attacks on the US. The “Four

Horsemen” of New Atheism were Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, all of whom took part in a debate on September 30, 2007 in

Hitchens´s flat in New York City, a debate which was later published on DVD27. But

23 See: Michel Onfray. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 27 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Onfray 24 LEDREW, Stephen Harry. Scientism, Humanism, and Religion: The New Atheism and the Rise of the Secular Movement. Toronto, Ontario, 2014. Dostupné také z: http://hdl.handle.net/10315/27589. PhD - Doctor of Philosophy. York University, Faculty of Graduate Studies., p. 57 25 LEDREW, Stephen Harry. Scientism, Humanism, and Religion, p. 57 26 LEDREW, Stephen Harry. Scientism, Humanism, and Religion, p. 95 27 Can be watched also here: The Four Horsemen HD: Hour 1 of 2 - Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Ep 1. In: Youtube [online]. 22. 2. 2009 [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DKhc1pcDFM 13 there is a wider group of authors of Anglo-American background which do not object being included among prominent members of this loose group. Hitchens deceased in 2011 and the critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali took his place at 2012 Global Atheist Convention.

As I am mostly interested in the British context of the debate which the New Atheists initiated I should add the names of the philosopher AC Grayling, the novelist Martin Amis or the chemist Peter Atkins. There are more British personalities, though, who are sympathetic to the New Atheism combative discourse, such as the director, actor and author Johnathan Miller or the actors and authors Stephen Fry or John Cleese, but I will focus on those who engaged in the debate in a form of publishing a book or an article and are relevant to the thematic areas I am about to explore.

Some commentators believe that the New Atheism as a specific cultural and intellectual phenomenon is now already a fading away having reached its culmination sometime before the onset of the crisis of 2008. God wars may still rage on in the cyberspace but anti-God books have vanished from the bestselling lists. This might be the case but the intellectuals who entered the debate, either endorsing or criticising New Atheistic views, still keep returning to the discourse; John Gray, for example, is due to have an on-topic book published in April 2018. Another example might be Steven Pinker, an American linguist of Canadian background, who is usually counted among the New Atheist ranks and whose recent books deal explicitly with the topics of progress and the role of reason and science in society. His most recent book was published in 2018. I will dedicate some space to the idea of progress as an integral part of New Atheist thinking. It is obvious that the debate is far from over and will continue into the future. The response to New Atheism

14 came overwhelmingly from the theological perspective28 but there is a number of scattered examples of reactions from secular public intellectuals and these are the main focus of my interest.

I will focus on British intellectuals who react to a phenomenon and will have to leave the specific context of the US. The New Atheism is at, least partly, a specifically American phenomenon, and the debate in Britain is slightly different. The role of religion in public space differs significantly in both countries and the level of religiosity likewise. It might be said that Britain is neither a religious nor atheist country. A survey published by a

Christian think-tank Theos suggests that unspecified “spirituality” seems to be a widespread position.29 Another study suggests that “the traditional division of people into religious and non–religious camps is unsustainable, that 21st century Britain is marked by religious and spiritual pluralism rather than by secularism”30.

3.1 Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous living evolutionary biologist. He came to prominence with his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”, where he elaborated the way evolution works on the level of genes. In this volume Dawkins for the first time took a step towards the realm of non-biological, cultural phenomena, when he introduced the

28 E.g. BEATTIE, Tina. The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-57075-782-2.; MCGRATH, Alister. The Twilight of Atheism: the Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. New York : Galilee /Doubleday, 2006. ISBN 978-038- 5500-623. 29 Theos - Spirituality Survey. In: ComRes [online]. Setember 2013, s. 24 [accessed 2018-04-17]. Available at: http://comresglobal.com/wp- content/themes/comres/poll/Theos___Things_Unseen_Final_Data.pdf 30 SPENCER, Nick a Holly WELDIN. Post-religious Britain?: The Faith of the Faithless [online]. London: Theos, 2012, 34 s. [accessed 2018-04-17]. Available at: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/cmsfiles/archive/files/Post%20Religious%20Britain%20pdf.pdf 15 concept of the meme which is supposed to be a unit of information or a pattern of behaviour which has the tendency to replicate itself much the same way the genes do.31

The philosopher Mary Midgley criticised the “selfish gene” concept as reductionist and

Dawkins´ theory as a scientific justification of modern individualism, selfishness and competitiveness of capitalism. The exchange which followed is characteristic with mutual misunderstanding and it seems that the gulf between science and humanities is too wide to make communication possible. Midgley rightly pointed out that “selfish gene” metaphor entered everyday language and is understood literally, but according to

Dawkins, she failed to grasp the nature of his theory. Dawkins rejected her charges of promoting selfishness. 32

Richard Dawkins has always seen science as the privileged epistemological area and has always been critical of religion which he perceives to be in an irreconcilable conflict with science. He has been a vocal critic of creationism. In his 1986 book “Blind Watchmaker” he takes on religion for the first time and since then he returns to this topic repeatedly. In

2006 he published “The God Delusion” an immensely influential bestseller which could be seen as the most important document of the New Atheist movement. It received a number of reactions from theologians but not so many from philosophers or social

31 DAWKINS, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-19-929115-1., p.189 32 See for example: MIDGLEY, Mary. Hobbes's Leviathan, Part 3: What is Selfishness?. The Guardian [online]. 20 Apr 2009 [accessed 2018-04-02]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/apr/20/religion-philosophy-hobbes-dawkins- selfishness MIDGLEY, Mary. Cold Wars and Grand Conclusions. The Guardian [online]. 28 Oct 2008 [accessed 2018-04-02]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/oct/28/religion- darwin-dawkins-midgley DAWKINS, Richard. In Defence of Selfish Genes. Philosophy [online]. 1981, 56(218), pp. 556-573 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3750888, pp. 556-573 16 scientists.33 Those were sometimes harshly critical, pointing negligence of philosophy of religion and theology and distortion of some points from their domain. A lot of philosophers regarded the book as a non-philosophical, a personal view of the matter and did not enter the debate. Many have pointed out that Dawkins uses old arguments which had been debated many times before and better. Others, on the other hand, valued the book very high and debated it in detail and in full seriousness (e.g. Oxford philosophers

Stephen Law and Marianne Talbot34).

The book is intended to “raise consciousness” about the possibility of being an atheist as well as about some other matters e.g. religious upbringing of children.35 The main thesis of the book is that the existence God of monotheistic religions is a certain type of scientific or at least philosophical hypothesis about the world and scientific methods should be applied on it. He offers the hypothesis in this form: “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us” to which he proposes the alternative: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. 36 In case of the Old Testament religion, Dawkins´s rejection of the theistic hypothesis is driven by his strong

33 Some reactions to the book listed here: ANDERSON, James N. Responses to The God Delusion. In: Analogical Thoughts [online]. 2009, 5 April 2009 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: http://www.proginosko.com/2009/04/responses-to-the-god-delusion/ 34 The God Delusion Weekend. In: University of Oxford: Podcasts [online]. Oxford: University of Oxford, 2010 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/god-delusion-weekend 35 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006. ISBN 0-593-05548-9., p. 310 36 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 31 17 disagreement with its deed as presented in holy texts37 as well as with the effect on the course of history38.

The book criticises peaceful coexistence of religion and science as a hypocritical state of matters. It dismisses NOMA, the concept of modus vivendi between religion and science proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins´ fellow biologist and friend. NOMA is an acronym Non-Overlapping Magisteria, religion and science deal with different levels of reality and there is no competition between them as each one deals with a different set of questions. Science describes the world and religion asks the metaphysical questions about its origins and meaning.39 Dawkins´ claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, however, abolishes this modus vivendi because, as Dawkins insists, religion does make claims about the natural world therefore science could and should be applied on those claims.

Religion in his view has propositional character.40

Richard Dawkins has been very active in promoting secular worldview and has done a lot of work targeting broad general public audience. He has created several documentaries for the BBC television where he tackles religion and related issues, for example the problem of faith schools in Britain.41

37 „The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully“ DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 31 38 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, chap. 8, What´s wrong with religion, p.280 39 (…)“these two domains hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life; and second, that they remain logically distinct and fully separate in styles of inquiry, however much and however tightly we must integrate the insights of both magisteria to build the rich and full view of life traditionally designated as wisdom.“ GOULDN, Stephen Jay. Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. ISBN 978-034-5450-401. 40 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 54 41 See: Faith School Menace? (2010). In: IMDb [online]. IMDb.com, 1990- [accessed 2018-04-02]. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714046/ 18

3.2 Christopher Hitchens

The journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens has written on a various topics and has always been very active in public arena. Although an atheist since the age of fifteen, he made religion a privileged topic of his writings in post-9/11 era, when he joined forces with other prominent atheists and became in many ways the most vocal and provocative member of the group. Hitchens contributed to the New Atheist “canon” with a 2007 book “God is not Great”42 a passionate polemic against religion in both its written and practical dimensions.

Hitchens has been politically active all his life and represents a “public intellectual” in a pure form. He had been on the political left all his life until the post 9/11 years when he made a dramatic shift of alliance and embraced the foreign policy of president G.W.Bush.

The shift might not be such a dramatic one, though, as the reason he signed up was the revolutionary character of neo-conservative agenda.43 The 2007 book was not his first polemic with religion, in 1995 he published a critical view at the admired personality of a modern saint, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice”, where he showed her problematic political affiliations and supposed hypocrisy of her charity efforts.44

42 HITCHENS, Christopher. God is not great: how religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve, 2007. ISBN 04-465-7980-7. 43 ANTHONY, Andrew. The big showdown. The Guardian [online]. 18 Sep 2005 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/sep/18/otherparties.iraq . „'I'm not any kind of conservative.' All the same, he admires the neo-cons' willingness to confront the status quo. 'One heard people who claimed to have radical credentials say that the removal of Saddam would destabilise the Middle East. Well excuse me comrades, you like it the way it is? Destabilisation is now a bad word?' 44 As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. HITCHENS, Christopher. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. New York: Twelve, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4555-2300-9., Chapter I 19

The book “God is not Great” is in accord with other New Atheist writing in method and style. It gives numerous examples of the holy scriptures of the monotheistic tradition inciting and approving of violence, religious organisation suppressing dissent and rationality, equalling religion with totalitarianism.45 The book is concluded with a call for new enlightenment, for which getting rid of religion is the first necessary step.46

Hitchens´s book, like Dawkins´s The God Delusion, is not meant to be an academic treatise on religious history or texts but tries to present as succinct and powerful rhetoric as possible to convey its message.

3.3 AC Grayling

Grayling, together with Dawkins, represent the British branch of the New Atheist movement. As a professional philosopher and public figure he can be labelled as a “public intellectual”. He has frequently featured in public realm, e.g. on the BBC radio programmes.47 He is vice president of the Humanists UK (formerly British Humanist

Association). He has taken part in public debates along other New Atheists48 and often speaks publically in favour of humanistic, non-religious values. He has also written about the problem of violence, namely the about the “just war” theory”.49 Let it be noted, for the context of my inquiry, that he believes that humanity will be able to get rid of war completely one day. He prefers to be called a “naturalist” as the term “a-theism”

45 E.g. in the chapter 15 and 17, in HITCHENS, Christopher. God is not Great 46 HITCHENS, Christopher. God is not Great, chap. 19 47 See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?filter=programmes&q=ac+grayling#page=2 48 E.g. debating a motion: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling - We'd be Better off without Religion [2007]. In: Youtube [online]. 24. 7. 2012 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKkVPnqREbQ 49 GRAYLING, A. C. War: an Enquiry. 4th April 2017. London: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN 978- 0-300-17534-9. 20 privileges gods among other supernatural entities and Grayling doesn´t see a reason for that.50

His contribution to the debates surrounding religion is a polemical treatise Against All

Gods (2007)51, also a book of philosophical inquiry into the arguments supporting the existence of God and making case for non-religious ethics 52 followed by the book which attempts to elaborate such ethics in a form of a quasi-religious text, mimicking in its form the Bible, called The Good Book53. Individual sentences are numbered and the chapters’ names sound rather familiar - Genesis, Proverbs, Wisdom and others, it is thus possible to cite a chapter with a number of “verse”. The book is supposed to be “distillations of the wisdom and experience of humankind”54 and “its aspiration and aim the good for humanity and the good of the world”55 It draws on Greek philosophy, secular and humanist tradition of thought but also on common wisdom and morality, whose roots are quite often religious. This is supposed to be a “secular Bible” shorn completely of any religious and historical context. Timeless well of wisdom. According to some reviewers it borrowed quite a lot from religion. 56 The review in The Guardian makes the point in a

50 „Such might as well call themselves "a-fairyists" or "a-goblinists" as "atheists" in GRAYLING, A. C. Can an Atheist be a Fundamentalist?. The Guardian [online]. 3 May 2006 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/03/cananatheistbeafundamenta 51 GRAYLING, A. C. Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness. London: Oberon Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84002-728-0. 52 GRAYLING, A. C. The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4088-3743-6. 53 GRAYLING, A. C. The Good Book: A Secular Bible. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4088-1754-4. 54 GRAYLING, A. C. The Good Book, Epistole to the Reader 55 GRAYLING, A. C. The Good Book, Epistole to the Reader 56 he expresses throughout the tome is not so very different from how a Christian child would have been instructed at home or in school. Examine your conscience daily. Do not be covetous. Pursue virtue. The world is often shallow, and life always involves suffering. Achieve self-mastery. The love of money is the road to corruption. Pleasure will have its cost. Kindness is a great good. Courage is a cardinal virtue. Anonymous review : Review: The Good Book: A Secular Bible by AC Grayling. Independent.ie [online]. June 18 2011 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-the-good-book-a-secular-bible-by-ac-grayling- 26743668.html 21 rather entertaining way: “He urged the people to read it in any way they chose, and grow wise. And the people rose up in their thousands and besieged Amazon to send the book unto them that they might grow wise. And Amazon did as they sought. And lo, the people did indeed grow wise, for truly it was a good book, full of sage counsel, wise advice and comfort for the sorrowing.”57

3.4 Sam Harris

The publication of Sam Harris´ 2004 book “The End of Faith” is often considered to be the beginning of the New Atheist phenomenon and the related cultural war. The author started writing the book as a reaction to the trauma of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The book lists a range of arguments against organised religions and, surprisingly, is concluded with a chapter about mystical and spiritual traditions, especially of Eastern religions.

Unlike mainstream organised religion, these are considered to be rational endeavours which could be supported with scientific evidence e.g. from neurobiology and psychology and are worthwhile ways of transforming oneself.58 Harris has been a vocal critic of Islam and a number of (mostly web-based) controversies are connected with his name. Harris attracted a lot attention to his book especially because of certain very controversial views, namely advocating torturing of terrorist suspects59 and pre-emptive nuclear strike.60

57 HOLLOWAY, Richard. The Good Book: A Secular Bible by AC Grayling – review. The Guardian [online]. 24 Apr 2011 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/24/good-book-secular-bible-grayling 58 HARRIS, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. ISBN 03-933-2765-5., chap.7, Experiments in consciousness 59 HARRIS, Sam. The End of Faith, chap.3 In Shadow of God, 60 HARRIS, Sam. The End of Faith, chap. 4, The problem with Islam, section Jihad and the Power of the Atom 22

The first book was followed shortly by another, Letter to a Christian Nation61, in which

Harris addresses his God-believing fellow US citizens and tries to show them the problematic side of their beliefs. He uses similar strategy as in the previous volume, point out some outrageous passages in Christian religious texts, he takes on the creationist movement and repeats his views of Islam62. Using statistics he makes the point about contemporary societies and the correlation between the level of lower religiosity and being healthier and less violent. Harris concludes his argument with a call for overcoming religious beliefs, eradicating it the same way as slavery had been made unacceptable. He acknowledges that religion might have evolved for some reason but we certainly do not need it anymore: „it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity— birth, marriage, death—without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.” 63

Harris continued his work with a book on rational and evolutionary foundations of morality “The Moral Landscape” (2010), which I will briefly comment on later.

Recently, he has been occupied by exploring the “eastern solution” (which his comrade

Hitchens rejects64), trying to establish rational base for non-religious spirituality and using the tools of neuropsychology and philosophy of mind.65 He is also very publically active, takes part in debates, especially on the internet, has its own podcast programme66

61 HARRIS, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. London: Bantam, 2007. ISBN 978-0-593-05897-8. 62 The Idea that Islam is a "Peaceful Religion Hijacked by Extremists" is a Fantasy“ in HARRIS, Sam. Letter to a Christian nation 63 HARRIS, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation, Conclusion 64 HITCHENS, Christopher. God is not Great, chap. 14 65 HARRIS, Sam. Waking up: a Guide to Spirituality without Religion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4516-3601-7. 66 HARRIS, Sam. Waking up: Podcast [online]. 2018 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://samharris.org/podcast/ 23 and, considering his previous rhetoric on this topic, maybe surprisingly, engages in a dialogue with Muslim thinkers about extremism and a need to reform Islam.67 These recent activities show that Harris must have slightly weaken his dismissive position on

Islam from his older books 68 in favour of a conversation with Muslim moderates.

3.5 Daniel Dennet

Dennet is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist who regularly takes part in public debates alongside with other New Atheists. His main contribution to the discourse was a 2006 book “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”. The spell which is supposed to be broken is the reluctance of failure to study religion as a natural phenomenon.69 Religion is defined as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to he sought.”70 He tries to find the evolutionary roots of religion, e.g. in the “intentional stance”71 which is tendency in organisms to look for agents causing change in their environment. The explanatory mode which is thus set into action is in neuropsychology called “folk psychology”.72 Although

Dennett calls for rational examination of the “social system” he does not draw on social sciences in his book but employs the theory of memes invented by Richard Dawkins. He

67 HARRIS, Sam a Maajid NAWAZ. Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-674-73706-8. 68 „ The problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with “terrorism““ in HARRIS, Sam. The End of Faith 69 DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. ISBN 06-700-3472-X., p.17 „The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many“ 70 DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell, p. 9 71 „At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated that moves.“ In DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell, p. 114 72 „This virtuoso use of the intentional stance comes naturally, and it has the effect of saturating the human environment with folk psychology (Dennett, 1981). We experience the world as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies“ Dennet, D., Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006, p. 111 24 doesn’t present religion as purely a scientific hypothesis as Dawkins does, he tries to employ a wider context of examination. But the basic views are the same, including the rejection of “moderate believers” for sheltering “fanatics”.73 I will return to Dennett’s book briefly later in the chapter dealing with the role of science in New Atheism.

73 DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell, p. 300 25

4 Selected Intellectuals

4.1 John Gray

4.1.1 John Gray - The Academic

John Gray is a contemporary British philosopher who undoubtedly aspires to be denoted as a “public intellectual”. The Wikipedia puts him into the analytical school74 but he has tended towards the history of ideas throughout his academic career and after. His academic work consists almost exclusively of political philosophy, namely the exploration and evaluation of liberal tradition of thought and its main protagonists. In the

1980´s he published monographies on Mills 75 and Hayek76 and politically he embraced

Thatcherism and neoliberalism. In the 1990´s, though, he started to drift away from the mainstream liberalism of the day towards his own specific political philosophy. He built upon the work of his early teacher Isaiah Berlin and also on the conservative thinker

Michael Oakeshott and in his book Enlightenment’s Wake Gray introduced his concepts of “value pluralism|” and “agonistic pluralism”. Beginning with this book he has been a vocal critic of rationalistic, all-encompassing theories of life and society and therefore of the Enlightenment project, too. His recurrent topics since those day have been the criticism of utopic and millerianist currents in contemporary thought and politics which naturally brought him into a brief polemic with New Atheism. |It can be expected that this polemic will continue and develop because a new book dedicated solely to the topic

74 John Gray (philosopher). In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001- [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher) 75 GRAY, John. Mill on Liberty: A Defence [online]. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1996 [accessed 2018-04-25]. ISBN 0-203-74071-8. Available at: https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philosophy/mill%20on%20liberty%20defense.pdf 76 GRAY, John. Hayek on Liberty. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 1998. 26 of atheism is due to be published in April 2018. 77 As public figure John Gray soon earned a reputation of a pessimist or a “prophet of doom”78 especially for his long term criticism of the idea of progress and optimistic rationalism of humanist, progressivist thinking.

The final, eponymous essay of the Enlightenment´s Wake volume is an important one for understanding later Gray´s writings. It is still an academic philosophical treatise but it presents in a very straightforward style the main themes of his later, more public oriented, writings, namely the criticism of rationalist utopianism and enlightenment optimism. It could be stated that starting with his highly successful 2002 book Straw dogs John |Gray embarked on a new chapter of his life, namely on being a public intellectual. Although he had contributed to mass media prior to this date (The Guardian, The New Statesman,

BBC) his appearances became more frequent after Straw dogs as he became a highly successful author. His following books were all non-specialist in nature and while still pursuing their author´s dominant topics they were aimed at the general public rather than at professional academic audience.

4.1.2 John Gray –The Public Intellectual

Let us now have a closer look at Gray´s criticism of the |New Atheism in some of his books and articles. I will now discuss some of the relevant passage of |Gray´s post-2002 books. There are only few passages explicitly dealing with the New Atheism phenomenon but Gray´s topics often oscillate around topics closely bound to New Atheist´s views and can be therefore viewed as a non-direct sort of polemic.

77 See: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/283923/seven-types-of-atheism/ 78 For example: PRESTON, John. John Gray Interview: how an English Academic Become the World’s Pre-eminent Prophet of Doom. The Telegraph [online]. 28 Feb 2013 [accessed 2018-04-25]. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9888780/John-Gray-interview-how-an-English- academic-become-the-worlds-pre-eminent-prophet-of-doom.html 27

Let us first briefly mention two books published before Straw dogs and though they didn´t reach its level of success they had already aimed at general public and were related to each other and also to Gray´s subsequent books in theme and nature. His 1998 book False

Dawn later acquired even a sort of prophetic nature and brought John Gray a reputation of a man whose words will be confirmed by events. “Today’s regime of global laissez- faire will be briefer even than the belle époque of 1870 to 1914, which ended in the trenches of the Great War” 79 writes Gray and this message was not particularly in accord with the spirit of the day. “That book was comprehensively trashed,” says Gray with gloomy relish. “Then something happened. That something was the Russians defaulting on their debt – and the phones started ringing.”80 The book openly challenges the common wisdom prevailing between the end of the |Cold war and the terrorist attacks of

9/11. The body of beliefs best represented by Fukuyama´s vision of the end of history is criticized as triumphalist and Fukuyama´s less optimistic “doppelgänger” Samuel

Huntington with his “clash of civilization” thesis, an equally fashionable author of the time, is dismissed as being too crude in his conceptualization of civilizations and his perspective as being at least as West-centred as Fukuyama´s. In Gray´s view much more complicated times had lied ahead of us and history has since vindicated his view. In False

Dawn Gray enters the conversation with the most eminent public voices of the day and argues about the condition of the world which undoubtedly makes him an important public intellectual of the Anglophone sphere. He has remained one ever since. 81 The other book worth mentioning in this context is his Two Faces of Liberalism (2000) where

John Gray develops his lifelong academic preoccupation with political liberalism and in

79 GRAY, John. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London: Granta Books, 1998. ISBN 978-1-78378-259-8., p.7 80 PRESTON, John. John Gray Interview: how an English 81 GRAY, John. False Dawn 28 a more accessible way introduces the views already published in Enlightenment´s Wake, namely his distrust to universalism and his conception of “value pluralism” and “modus vivendi”. As well as the Enlightenment´s Wake this book is to a significant extent a criticism of the paradigmatic liberal thinker of late 20th century, John Rawls and his famous “Theory of Justice”. The several ways of life that may be found in most contemporary societies do not share a conception of the primary goods of human life.

They are animated by different conceptions of the good life, which may overlap enough to make compromise possible, but which have too little in common to permit the development of a single, overarching conception of justice. 82

4.2 Terry Eagleton

“Religion is the most powerful, persistent, universal, tenacious, deep-seated form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed”83 Terry Eagleton writes in his recent book. Understandably, a cultural theorist of Eagleton´s calibre has to occupy himself with such an important dimension of culture as religious phenomena have for millennia been and given his background– Irish catholic upbringing and a lifetime of engaging with the questions of faith and religion as a part of his extensive study of culture and literature –

Terry Eagleton seems to be an indispensable personality for the inquiry I am here pursuing. Though renowned mainly as an accomplished left-wing literary and cultural critic, in the last decade he has been frequently writing and talking about religion, a development which was up to large extent provoked by the writings of the New Atheists and the ensuing debates. “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the

82 GRAY, John. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: New Press, 2000. ISBN 15-658-4589-7., p. 18-19 83 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2016. ISBN 978-0-300-21879-4., p. 141 29 technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of

Zoroastrianism or neo-Platonism?”84 Unlike John Gray, who is a self-proclaimed atheist,

Terry Eagleton has a much more intimate relation to Christianity, though he is neither a practising believer nor a theologian. However, thanks to his cultural background and intellectual development his mediations on this topic are close to an insider´s perspective, though he doesn´t refrain from harsh criticism of today´s church and religious life in contemporary society. He uses the tradition of Christian thought not to deliver a straightforward apology but to remind us of the cultural significance and immense power of religion. His critique of the “Ditchkins”85 phenomenon draws both on theology, cultural history, partly on history of ideas but it does not amount to taking a side in the

God debate. He refuses to play the rhetorical game of the New Atheists and Dawkins´s

“God Hypothesis” rhetoric is dismissed mockingly by Eagleton as a “Yeti theory” or a

“LochNess Monster” theory of God. Dawkins´s sees God: “if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized”.86 Arguing about the existence or non-existence of God is an undertaking as boring as it is pointless. New

Atheists “buy their atheism on the cheap”87 and it´s worth looking behind their vulgar simplification of such a complex issue.88

Eagleton publically engaged with the New Atheism in early days of the existence of this phenomenon; his review of Richard Dawkins´ God Delusion after it was published in

84 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2009. The Terry lecture series. ISBN 978-0-300-16453-4., p.140 85 „All I can claim in this respect is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, a couple I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the single signifier ‘‘Ditchkins,’’ is talking out of the back of his neck.“ EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p.2 86 EAGLETON, Terry. Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching. In: London Review of Books [online]. [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching 87 „It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood’s opinions of it.“ EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p.xi 88 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 98 30

2006 outlines many topics which he later elaborated in his two books dedicated to these questions. The first sentence of the review being “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology” is worth quoting in full. Eagleton continues with giving his view of Christianity and states that it is a matter of intellectual honesty to confront such an important phenomenon as religion in its most persuasive and lively forms instead of mockingly parading the examples of its worst manifestations which seems to have been what Dawkins had done.89

4.3 Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is a British political philosopher with a traditional conservative stance and a great interest in aesthetics and religion. He definitely aspires to be denoted “a public intellectual” because he is frequently invited to various media outlets, takes part in public debates and has entered the public realm several times in a controversial manner. His conservative views were not particularly fashionable in the academia for most of his professional career and the first controversy he provoked was his criticism of major post- war left leaning intellectuals in his 1985 book “Thinkers of the New Left” which he republished in a reworked version in 2015 as “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands”. The book was partly inspired by his repeated stays in communist Czechoslovakia, where he helped to organise the underground “universities”90. He felt that the western left-wing academia

89 EAGLETON, Terry. Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching. In: London Review of Books [online]. [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching 90 Roger Scruton and Special relationship, an interview for Český rozhlas Praha; VAUGHAN, David. Roger Scruton and a Special Relationship. In: Radio Praha: In English [online]. 31-10-2010 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: http://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/roger-scruton-and-a-special-relationship , Scruton also published a novel whose plot takes place in the undergournd of socialist Prague – SCRUTON, Roger. Notes from Underground. New York, NY: Beaufort Books, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8253- 0728-7. 31 completely ignores the plight of the people living in “actually existing socialism” (reálný socialismus in Czech)in Eastern Europe.91 92He remembers that the first publication of the book meant the “beginning of the end of his university career”93 and earned him a reputation of a controversial personality. The book takes on some household names among European intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century and tries to assess their merits from a conservative view and, naturally, finds most of them wanting. The debate provoked by the book is an interesting one in the context of this thesis because it is an explicit attempt to thematise the role of intellectuals in culture and society and also because one of the personalities criticised (I am using the word criticised rather in the

Kantian sense of “assessed” – because Scruton tries to find positive features of the work of the left intellectuals, too) in the book is Terry Eagleton. The literary and cultural critic is one of the group of intellectuals whose views I try to investigate here. I will return to the nature of their disagreement later, in the part dedicated to cultural dimension of the

“God debate”.

Several Scruton´s book deal with religion and related matters. One of them, the published version of Gifford lectures, “Face of God”, could be considered a direct contribution to the debate we are following here, some of its arguments addressing the cornerstone of the

New Atheism i.e. the role of science in culture and its relation to religion.94 He values science and its explanatory power but tries to show that it is not omnipotent and there are whole dimension of human reality which escape the grasp of scientific tools. Scientific explanations possess certain ‘charm of disenchantment’, always able to find the simplest

91 SCRUTON, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4729-3595-3, Introduction 92 Real Socialism. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001- [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism 93 SCRUTON, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Introduction 94 ROGER, Scruton. Face of God. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4729-1273-2. 32 underlying principle, but the nature of scientific method makes it inevitable that it fails in seeing the full complexity of human experience with its “intentionality” and “relational character”.95

Other Scruton´s books which are of interests in our context are Our Church: A Personal

History of the Church of England (2012) and The Soul of the World (2014). We will discuss these books in the chapter dedicated to cultural dimension of the “God debate”.

4.4 Allain de Botton

Born in Switzerland into a rich family he was sent to an Oxford boarding school and has remained in England ever since. He has achieved a distinctive positon in British public sphere and definitely belongs among the most influential British “public intellectuals”.

Although a philosopher by training he at a very young age embarked on a career of writer, producing in the years to follow a number of popular books on philosophy, culture and literature. He produced and presented a several TV documentaries and frequently appears in public giving lectures.96

De Botton is an interesting case in the context of religion and atheism. A self-professed atheist who is very friendly to religions, especially their lived, every day, practical dimension. The benefit of religious life are a subject of his 2012 book “Religion for

Atheists”, where, as the title suggests he shows how useful religions can be even if we lack the belief in deity.97 There are no strong emotions either positive or negative about

95 ROGER, Scruton. Face of God, chap. II (The view from Somewhere) 96 See: Alain de Botton: TV & Audio [online]. c2013 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: http://alaindebotton.com/tv-audio/ 97 DE BOTTON, Alain. Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion. London: Penguin Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-241-96405-7., De Botton writes in the Introduction: The premise of this book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless find religions 33 religion to be found in DeBotton´s work, God is safely dead for him and it doesn´t represent a problem he would like to elaborate on. Atheism is a default position for him and the interesting thing is religion in its anthropological sense.98 His book gives an insightful exposition of religious practices and their benefits and psychological significance. A substantial part of the book is dedicated to architecture. DeBotton speaks favourably about August Comtes´s Religion of Humanity and his intention to build secular churches.99 DeBotton revived this idea and proposes to build an atheistic church in the City of London.100

sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm. 98 DE BOTTON, Alain. Religion for Atheists, Introduction: (…)the real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where to take the argument once one decides that he evidently doesn’t. 99DE BOTTON, Alain. Religion for Atheists, chap. 10 – Institutions 100 GRAY, John. Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one. The Guardian [online]. 2 Feb 2012 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/02/alain-de-botton-atheist-temple-defunct 34

5 Assessing the New Atheism in Context

There are several areas where we could explore and briefly asses how successfully the

New Atheists deal with such a multifaceted phenomenon as religion. We can confront their view with the way religions understand themselves and also with views from the outside, especially the view of social sciences, namely anthropology and sociology and, naturally, with the view of the comparative religious studies. We will try to investigate

New Atheism´s relation to political sphere and its understanding of history. After contextualizing New Atheism we will investigate the opinions of the intellectuals I have chosen and see what they have to say in each of these particular areas.

5.1 Religious Dimension

5.1.1 Theological criticism

We should start with the cornerstone of New Atheist discourse, which seems to be the opinion that religion is above all a set of beliefs about the nature of the Universe and has a propositional character. Although New Atheist writing also severely criticise religious practices, they put a great emphasis on “debunking” religion on intellectual level. Richard

Dawkins makes this kind of intellectual criticism the centre of his book.

I have already mentioned Terry Eagleton´s description of this attitude as “the Yeti theory of God” which falsely assumes that believers see God as one thing among many, as, perhaps the most important, but still as one thing which exists in this or perhaps outside this Universe. But this is not the view of the mainstream traditions of theological thinking.

For theology God does not exist in the conventional meaning of the word. American theologian John. F.Haught, in his book responding to the New Atheism phenomenon, points out that this conception of God is typical for fringe movements, such as creationists 35 and Intelligent Design but it is in no way an accepted theological description of God in any major version of Christian theology101. An American catholic theologian Robert

Baron explains in his lecture titled ““Aquinas and Why the New Atheists are Right" that contemporary theology is in complete agreement with the New Atheists in the question of “existence” of a scientifically provable God - God doesn´t exists. This is because division between existence and essence in case of God does not apply. The God of New

Atheists is metaphysically on the level of Yeti (Eagleton) or the Flying Spaghetti Monster

(Barron) whose existence or non-existence in the physical world could be a subject of scientific verification. The catholic tradition considers this concept of God to be wrong because God transcends the sum of objects in the Universe. The New Atheist conception of “existing” God is, in fact, explicitly rejected as the “idolatry” heresy. Barron cites

Aquinas, the greatest catholic authority: God St.Thomas´s writings is not referred to as

“ens summum” - “the highest being” but as “ipsum esse subsistence”- “the sheer act of to-be itself”. Barron explains that God´s words addressed to Moses from the burning bush have the same significance: “I am who I am” which is not supposed to mean “don´t ask me silly questions” but “my existence is identical with my essence”. God as pure Being which sustains all other worldly existing things can from definition never “become an object of empirical or scientific investigation”.102

One of the intellectuals whose work related to New Atheism I would like to explore in this paper, Terry Eagleton, should be included in the context of theological criticism of the New Atheism phenomenon. Although not a professional theologian his 2009 book

101 HAUGHT, John F. God and the New Atheism: a Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, c2008. ISBN 06-642-3304-X. 102 Fr. Robert Barron, “Aquinas and Why the New Atheists are Right". In: Youtube [online]. [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NMex7qk5GU 36

Reason, faith, and revolution: reflections on the God debate book, a published version of

Terry lectures delivered by Eagleton in Yale University in April 2008, draw mainly on theology when commenting on new Atheism.103 As the title suggests, the book has a religious as well as a political dimension while being also a discourse in the history of ideas, a treatise employing author´s extensive erudition in the history of Western thought, culture and literature. It deals with Richard Dawkins´ and Christopher Hitchens’ books on religion but the underlying intention is to try to diagnose the cultural situation in our times of the “war on terror”.

Eagleton´s view of religion, especially Christianity was formed by his catholic education, which, he claims, contrary to the agenda of the New Atheist104, did him no major harm105, but it didn´t play an important role in his early development. This changed after he arrived in Cambridge in early 1960s and became involved in the debates ensuing the Second

Vatican council. Suddenly, Christianity started to have political significance and had to be taken seriously. Eagleton did not want to “buy his atheism on the cheap” and the version of Christianity he offers in his recent books is heavily indebted to the debates which were a predecessor of later “liberation theology” movement a version of

Christianity with a strong social and political dimension106. In Eagleton´s view, though, every authentic theology is “liberation theology”.107 In this book he opposes the fundamental assumption of the New Atheists, namely, that religion in all its forms is

103 EAGLETON, Terry. Faith and Fundamentalism: Is Belief in Richard Dawkins Necessary for Salvation?. In: The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship [online]. New Haven: Yale University, 2008 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://terrylecture.yale.edu/past-lectureships/terry-eagleton-2008 104 Dawkins famously equalled religious education of children to child abuse 105 EAGLETON, Terry. The God Debate. In: Youtube [online]. 5. 3. 2010 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCqHnwIR1PY 106 MENDIETA, Eduardo. Philosophy of Liberation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]. Jan 28, 2016 [accessed 2018-04-26]. ISSN 1095-5054. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberation/ 107 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 32 37 pernicious and unjustifiable. Apart from “Ditchkins” he aims his criticism at other liberal intellectuals who, in the wake of 9/11, started expressing harsh and sweeping opinions about Islam. The public exchange with the novelist Martin Amis is also echoed in the book. In 2006 Amis called for harsh measures to be imposed on Britain’s Muslim community which “will have to suffer until it gets its house in order” and Eagleton likened his views to “ramblings of a British National Party thug”. 108

In Eagleton´s view there is no feud between God and science and Ditchkins is perfectly right in claiming that God is pointless but Eagleton adds that the same is true for humans, morality and Universe itself. God created them for the fun of it, or for the hell of it, that might be a matter of debate. Instrumental reason cannot evaluate things which are autotelic109, have their meaning in themselves. At the centre of Christianity there is the symbol of a tortured human body, and it is the human body here and now which is what matters. It is here for no reason at all and it suffers for no reason at all. Morality and reason doesn´t enter the picture, God is a fellow sufferer and his only law is love and mercy. Jesus is in no way reasonable and spends his time with the “shit of the Earth”

“anawim” and there is nothing reasonable or moral about healing their poor bodies. Jesus doesn´t have a well-planned and well-reasoned agenda for social reform and is in no sense a liberal.110 The utterly unbearable conditions of suffering are not to be relieved by reasonable action. Rationalist explanations of Christianity miss this point. It is not a

108 EAGLETON, Terry. Rebuking Obnoxious Views is not Just a Personality Kink. The Guardian [online]. 10 Oct 2007 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/oct/10/comment.religion ; SUMMERSCALE, Kate. Martin Amis Leaps back into the Ring. The Telegraph [online]. 13 Oct 2017 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1566006/Martin-Amis-leaps-back-into-the- ring.html ; KENNEDY, Maev. Enough, Says Amis, in Eagleton feud. The Guardian [online]. 13 Oct 2007 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/13/highereducation.islam 109 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p.15 110 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 24 38 consolation, it is not a law in the ordinary meaning of the word. There is nothing consoling on the total and unconditional demand of the Gospels: “If you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety.” 111

The tortured body is an utter anti-dote to any false assumptions about human condition.

It is the true symbol of human history and the idea of progress, which is the cornerstone of “ditchkinsian” criticism of religion, is a failure in recognising that. As far as bleakness of the vision of human condition is concerned, only Schopenhauer or Freud can match

Gospels´ gloom.112

Eagleton acknowledges that the “Yeti” theory of God is not just a view of atheists but of a number of Christians, too. His version of Christianity might be viewed as product of an intellectual elite loftily remote from actually existing religion and remote from the actual faith of ordinary believers.113 What the New Atheists see in religion and they refusal to see the real thing is caused to large extent by gross betrayal by Christianity of its own origins. It is no longer associated with the “scum of the Earth” and Eagleton entirely endorses the view of its starkest critics in this regard. But Eagleton claims it is still the only authentic face of it and is still understood as thus by many believers.114 When one says “I have faith in God”, it is similar to “I have faith” in you, which, obviously, is not

111 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 22 112 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 48 113 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 58 114 It is not in fact the case that this understanding of the Gospel is confined to an intellectual elite. My own father, who left school at the age of fifteen to work as a manual laborer in a factory, and who scarcely read a book in his life, would, I am sure, have endorsed it. EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 59. 39 a claim about belief in your existence. And a lot of people still do have such faith in God which is the faith of the Jews of the Old or New Testament. 115

It is love in political sense which is the core of Christianity and because love, together with religion and art, has been privatized in modern society, it is so hard for liberal, centrist people like Dawkins to understand. This concept of political love is also the basis of socialism. 116 In contrast to liberal humanism of the atheists Eagleton speaks about

“tragic humanism” of Christianity.117 It shares the hopes of liberalism humanism that humanity can achieve flourishing. While Ditchkins believes that the way to flourishing is

“to shake off poisonous legacy of superstition”, tragic humanism is maintaining hope without illusions about human condition and believes that only by a process of self- dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.118

My brief theological excurse is, of course, unsatisfactory because the evolution of the concept of God in various versions of Christian or Islamic theologies is a far more complicated discourse with a history of many centuries. But this is not a theological inquiry and suffice to say that because the New Atheism criticises a concept of God created borders on “straw man”119 and does not engage with the concept which the churches actually adhere to, it is only natural that no fruitful dialogue can take place between them and theology. This is not perceived as a problem by the New Atheists, as

115 EAGLETON, Terry. Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching. In: London Review of Books [online]. [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching 116 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p. 32 117 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p.168 118 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, p.169 119 HANS, Hansen. Fallacies. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]. 2017, Fri May 29, 2015 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/ 40 they don´t acknowledge theology as a discourse in any way challenging or interesting, in fact, they doubt its right to exist as a specific kind of human intellectual endeavour. 120

Let us now move from the theological criticism to social sciences and their concepts of religion and see how we can assess New Atheism in the context of their discourse.

5.1.2 The Perspective of Social Sciences

5.1.2.1 New Atheism and The Secularisation Thesis

The crucial framework that the social sciences set for the study of religion in the modern world is the “secularisation thesis” which begins with the classics of sociology such as

Karl Marx, Max Weber or Emile Durkheim and continued in post WW II sociology in the work of Peter L. Berger (until his renouncement of the thesis), Marcel Gauchet, Bryan

Wilson, Steve Bruce and others. The view generally shared by all these classics of the field was that religion is on the wane, fading slowly away as something which does not have a place in the modern world.121 Religion was regarded as incompatible with highly complex industrial societies. Peter L. Berger, however, is a good example of how matters seem to be a bit more complicated. Berger´s career can be divided into two parts, in the

1960´s he wrote about the secularisation process as a matter of fact but then a dramatic shift of perspective occurred in his thinking when in 1999 he wrote: “My point is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today, with some exceptions (...) is as furiously religious as it ever was (…).This means that the whole body

120 „I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all“. DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p.57 121 WOODHEAD, Linda and David G. ROBERTSON. The Secularisation Thesis. In: The Religious Studies Project [online]. April 16, 2012 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-linda-woodhead-on-the-secularisation-thesis/ 41 of literature (…) loosely labelled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken.”122 A radical change of view not to be seen commonly among scholars.

In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, Berger defines “secularization” as “….the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” 123 Or as the classic of American critical sociology Charles

Wright Mills puts it: “Once the world was filled with the sacred –in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.” 124 Weberian “disenchantment” of the world partly caused by “protestant ethics” gave rise to capitalism which would in its iron- like rationality make religion a thing of the past, Marxian vision in which religion was

“opium of the people” and though it was at the same time „the heart of the heartless world” it was destined to disappear with the arrival of further stages of his social vision.

Freudian rendering of religion as an “illusion” was a part of his project to overcome enslavement to our neurosis and fears by shedding light on them.125 The Freud´s being, perhaps, the least optimistic and most realistic, still we can say that these intellectual systems have all a common pedigree, namely The Enlightenment vision of the mankind being on a course of liberalisation and emancipation. And all of them were at a certain

122 BERGER, Peter L. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999. ISBN 978-0-8028-4691-4. 123 BERGER, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. ISBN 03-850-7305-4., p. 107 124 MILLS, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-19-513373-8., cited here: https://web.archive.org/web/20051208002707/http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~pnorris/ACROBAT/Sacred_a nd_Secular/Chapter%201.pdf 125 WOODHEAD, Linda and David G. ROBERTSON. The Secularisation Thesis 42 point of their histories strikingly close to becoming religions themselves. In case of sociology, its very founder, Auguste Comte, ended up as high-priest of a positivist church126 and Marxism a psychoanalysis played a role of ersatz religion for a great number of people in the 20th century, both systems often occurring in the form of a fusion.127 The aforementioned classical sociological or psychological insights differ in the assessment of the secularization process but they all agree on it happening. But none of them poses the question with such a poignancy as Nietzsche – “God is dead…We have killed him (…) But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?”128 The secularization thesis was rather more optimistic and didn´t perceive the

Deicide with such fatalistic intensity.

Michael Ian Borer wrote a chapter for a very interesting collection edited by Amarnath

Amarasingam129 where he distinguishes three stages on the history of the secularization thesis. The classical period described above is referred to as the first phase. As we have seen the characteristic feature of this phase was a confident conviction that the modern world is evolving towards a society without any religion at all. The second phase (lasting from 1950´s till 1980´s), however, abandons the straightforward and confident character of the sociological founding fathers and tends to see matters in a more nuanced way. Peter

126 Religion of Humanity. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001- [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_Humanity 127 Freudo-Marxism. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 17 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism 128 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Wilhelm a Walter Arnold KAUFMANN. The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. [1st ed.]. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ISBN 03-947-1985-9., pp.181-82 129 AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism: a Critical Appraisal. Chicago, Ill: Haymarket Books, 2012. ISBN 978-160-8462-032. 43

Berger´s early work belongs in this era and together with other author´s his work focused on particular changes which were occurring and the ways religion was being transformed in modern society. The early rhetoric of social sciences emphasising religion´s disappearance transformed into investigating the ways of religion´s and modernity´s co- existence. Borer cites Larry Shiner´s six possible meanings of the “secularisation” term:

1) decline of religion leading to society without religion 2) religious groups and organisation start functioning in the modern world in a way which is “indistinguishable” from non-religious social entities (they become non-religious in all but a name) 3) religion becomes totally separated from society, turning inwards and “ceasing influence on social life apart from on religion itself” 4) religion mutates into non-religion in all its manifestations and beliefs 5) de-sacralisation of the world (very close to Weber´s

“disenchantment of the world”) and, finally, the 6th possible meaning of the word: moving from traditional society to secular, modern one with “rational and pragmatic” basis rather than traditional values.130 The “secularisation thesis” in the second phase of its development in social sciences brought more ways to look at the role of religion in modern society. The authors of the third phase of the life of the “secularisation thesis”, which occurred around the same time when some scholars like Berger spoke about its death, agree with Berger about religion not going away but take a different view, borrowed form economic thinking, and try to assess how individual religious organisation and belief systems offer and market answers to universal psychological and social needs of modern people and why are some more successful than others. They notice that religions which “demand a lot” from their followers are rising in certain parts of the world. More “costly faiths” seem to offer “greater rewards”. It is no accident that the New

130 Borer, I., in AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism, p.130 44

Atheism has its roots in the US, one of the countries, where “costly faiths” are on the rise.

According to Borer, New Atheism becomes itself one of the “costly faiths” because it offers the “great reward” in the vision of a completely secular society based on science and reason.131

Borer sees the New Atheism as a return to the first phase of the development of the

“secularisation thesis”. It shares its conviction of incompatibility with a society run by scientific and rational means with traditional religions. But because over a hundred years passed between the classics of the first phase and the New Atheists they differ significantly in the style and tone of their discourse. While the classics tried to describe the change happening they didn´t prophesise a society based on science. In one sense the

New Atheists stand outside the discourse of the “secularisation thesis” of the classics or of its later stages because they see the role of religion in society as a plainly visible and easily assessable problem – we only should replace it with better ways of understanding, namely science132. Borer notices that in the strategies they use to publicise and spread their message they use similar techniques as evangelical churches or identity politics movements such as the Gay right movement. At a certain point they tried to adopt the word “the Brights” as their group signifier which was supposed to echo the success of the word “Gay”.133 The radicalism of the New Atheist rhetoric has its predecessors in the era when the first stage of “secularisation” debate took place, but, although firm believers in

Progress they lack the confidence of their 19th century forerunners that the matters are

131 Borer, I., in AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism, p.133 132 Borer, I., in AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism, p.137 133 Borer, I., in AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism, p.136 45 evolving their way and it is the reason for their adopting of ‘embattled’ minority” mentality and combative public relations strategies. 134

Let us now return to the classic of “the secularization thesis” who changed his mind about it, Peter L. Berger. The latest book he published in his life was dedicated to his new outlook of religious phenomena in modern society. 135 The “secularization theory” was replaced by a concept of pluralism. According to Berger, this condition is not wholly unprecedented, a number of situation can be found in history when pluralism was the rule of the day (Hellenism, Muslim Spain, Moghul India, and Ottoman Empire)136. Pluralism is inherent to modernity in other spheres of life; replacing “fate” by “choice” seems to one of the most significant features of modern era.137 Modern societies thus are not becoming more secular as was previously believed by sociologists but the condition in which they find themselves is one of inherent pluralism of beliefs and practices. This pluralism might relativize certain beliefs but it doesn´t necessarily lead to abandonment of belief altogether. What is essential, though, for functioning of those societies is the existence of secular discourse and secular discourse.138 People of many beliefs living in one society behave in certain contexts “as if God didn´t exist”- “etsi Deus non daretur”

139(Berger uses this quotation from a 17th century jurist and philosopher of law Hugo

Grotius) and because such situation is more prone to emergence of nihilistic relativism on the one hand and religious fundamentalism on the other, religion becomes an important issue of political management.140 To conclude this brief excurse into the work of the

134 Borer, I., in AMARASINGAM, Amarnath, ed. Religion and the New Atheism, p.137 135 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. ISBN 978-161-4517-504. 136 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity, p.4 137 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity, p.5 138 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity, p.51-67 139 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity, p. 52 140 BERGER, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity, p. 52 46 famous sociologist of religion, let us conclude with his comments on the phenomenon of

New Atheism. Berger doesn´t consider this particular, 21st century strand of atheism to be in any way “new”. His article “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names”141 notices that the New Atheists frequently call themselves “secularists” and points out that their simplified view of religion makes it impossible for them to grasp the real nature of secular space in modern societies. The view of religion as a set of logically unfounded propositions and the rigid way in which they maintain the dichotomy of faith and reason is at odds with the complicated social reality of contemporary societies. Another Berger´s article142 likens the New Atheists to revolutionary Jacobines because they strive for an absolute secularisation of society – a quest which is destined to fail. But such complete rejection of religion has its place in modern society and its own tradition, there is a lineage from Jacobines to New Atheists. Or elsewhere in American culture, e.g. by an American satirist H.L. Mencken: “The world is a huge flywheel. Man is a fly that happened to land on it. Religion is the belief that the whole thing was constructed for the fly’s benefit”.143

Although a religious believer (Lutheran), Berger calls himself an “agnostic” and claims that this term would fit most nominal adherents of religions. Faith does not reject rationality but reason is not the primary or the only tool when a believer relates to the source of his belief. Having faith means that we don´t possess firm knowledge, a believer is almost always an “A-Gnostic” – “the one who doesn´t know”.144

141 BERGER, Peter L. New Atheism and the Rectification of Names. The American Interest [online]. January 7, 2015 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.the-american- interest.com/2015/01/07/new-atheism-and-the-rectification-of-names/ 142 BERGER, Peter L. New Atheists or Latter-Day Jacobins?. The American Interest [online]. June 15, 2016 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/06/15/new- atheists-or-latter-day-jacobins/ 143 BERGER, Peter L. New Atheists or Latter-Day Jacobins? 144 BERGER, Peter L. New Atheists or Latter-Day Jacobins? 47

John Gray, one of the intellectuals whose views I try to examine in this thesis, is very close to Berger´s position on religion in modern times. Pluralism is a feature of his political theory and his later writings, too. In his first book aimed at general public, Straw dogs, he speaks in favour of ancient polytheism which, in his view, lacked dangerous universalist tendencies which later became the hallmark of monotheistic creeds.145 A model which he calls “agonistic liberalism” and concept of “modus vivendi” is based on acknowledgment of multiple contradictory forces and interests in societies which can never be ordered into static harmony but are in a permanent flux and dialogue.146 While traditional liberalism, building on a particular understanding of human nature, tries to find a theory of political life which would suit all human societies, Gray´s “pluralist perspective” takes “the conflict of goods, their uncombinability and sometimes their incommensurability” as its starting point and claims that such conflicts are a natural part of human society.147 Gray also dismisses “the secularisation thesis” 148 and his “modus vivendi” philosophy seems close to Berger´s insight about the necessity to look for ways how to live together, “makeshift” solutions and practise “experiments in living” rather than pursuing an unalterable, ideal model of society.149

Terry Eagleton dedicated a whole book to the cultural dimensions of secularisation.150

The history of secularisation could be seen as story of various surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been.151 Eagleton starts with

145 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta Books, 2003. ISBN 978-1-86207-596-2., part 4, chapter 3, 146 GRAY, John. Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. New York: Routledge, 1995. ISBN 978-0-415-12475-1., p. 96 147 GRAY, John. Enlightenment's Wake, p. 198 148 For example here: GRAY, John. Why Humans Find it Hard to do Away with Religion. New Stateman [online]. 20 January 2016 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/01/why-humans-find-it-hard-do-away-religion 149 GRAY, John. Enlightenment's Wake, p. 270 150 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God 151 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Preface 48 showing that the Enlightenment was far from anti-religious.152 But the Deism of the

Enlightenment philosophers marks the beginning of the division between scientific rationalism and faith as a feeling, which found its home in Romanticism.153 Neither later phase of European cultural development – German idealism succeeded in replacing God with a surrogate, in its case with the Spirit.154 Their vision “was too dewy-eyed about humanity” and although the Romantics retained some religious insights about human nature, the whole period was anti-tragic, the Spirit was, most famously in Hegel, incorporated in a system.155 In the ensuing phase of development the time came for the

Arnoldian vision of Culture as unifying system taking the traditional social role of religion. Culture became one of the most successful surrogates for religion of them all.156

We will dedicate space to cultural perspective in the following chapter 4.3..

5.1.2.2 New Atheism and current paradigms of social sciences

New Atheism differs markedly from the prevailing views of social sciences today. While philosophy is well represented among the prominent New Atheist personalities (Dennett,

Harris) we do not find any social scientists among the most important authors of the movement and they do not employ the perspectives on religion common in social sciences. John Gray points out that Dawkins´ “theory of memes” seems to suffice for them157. New Atheist thinking draws almost exclusively on evolutionary psychology and utilitarian philosophy. The long and rich traditions of religious studies, cultural anthropology and sociology of religion is entirely absent from their understanding of

152 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Chap. 1 153 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Chap. 1 154 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Chap. 2 155 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Chap. 2 156 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, Chap. 3 157 GRAY, John. The Atheist Delusion. The Guardian [online]. 15 Mar 2008 [accessed 2018-04-26]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/15/society 49 religious phenomena. When we think particularly of cultural anthropology, New Atheism seems to be close to the view of one of the founders of the discipline - E.B.Tylor – but entirely ignores all the later developments. The view that religion is a by-product of evolution (Dennett) seems to be a biological equivalent of the Tylorian concept of cultural

“survivals”158 from earlier, superstitious ages. In the ensuing century a number of paradigms occurred in anthropology. Be it cultural relativism of Franz Boas and Margaret

Mead or Ruth Benedict or French structuralism as well as the interpretative paradigm of

Clifford Geertz , in all these we always detect a tendency, though in each of these schools in a different way, to understand different cultures, including their religious life, as a world in itself. Regardless of which paradigm it follows (structuralist, functionalist, interpretative etc.), anthropological understanding of religion tries to make sense of beliefs and practices in the context of the given culture.159 This tendency is absent in the theory of religion as an evolutionary by-product. Daniel Dennett acknowledges that

“scientists have much to learn from the historians and the cultural anthropologists” 160 but his intention seem to understand in order to overcome. The immense literature on religion in social sciences which has been created since the time of the birth of social science is to be used to “break the spell” which means to finally put religion in its place.161

Sam Harris´s contribution to ethical theory the book “The Moral Landscape” seems to be openly hostile to the features I have described when talking about the anthropological tradition – it presents a very rigorous version of utilitarianism which aims at founding moral judgments on common sense and scientific evaluation of well-being: “(…) human

158 See: Survivals. Encyclopædia Britannica [online]. Encyclopædia Britannica, září 11, 2012 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/survivals 159 Anthropology of religion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology_of_religion 160 DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell, p. 264 161 DENNETT, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell, p. 334 50 well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain.

Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it”. 162 He openly challenges the anthropology of Boasian school as something from which “we are still struggling to awaken”.163 In his book which is nominally a work of philosophy Harris disregards all the main conceptual tools of moral philosophy and tries to base ethics on neuroscience. Harris, similarly to Dennet, employs the invention of their friend Richard

Dawkins, the theory of memes. 164 The memetic theory, though, unlike any discipline of social sciences does not have a distinctive history of conceptual developments and debates about the nature of cultural phenomena which have been going on in anthropology or sociology. According to John Gray the memetic theory is nothing but an attempt to apply something which proved successful in genetics on society using a metaphor.165 Terry Eagleton calls it a “secular myth”.166 It could be thus argued that, according to general use of the term, memetics aspires to be labelled as an example of

“scientism”. We will return to the crucial problem later, in the section dedicated to culture. Roger Scruton also criticised the “meme-theory”. Memes (“if they exist at all -

162 HARRIS, Sam. Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-7122-6., p. 163 HARRIS, Sam. Moral Landscape: Introduction 164„Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” DAWKINS, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ISBN 01-928-6092-5., retrieved from here: http://www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html 164 I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. Harris, S., The Moral Landscape, 2010, p. to which Massimo Piggliucci reacts: Harris is saying that the whole of the only field other than religion that has ever dealt with ethics is to be dismissed because he personally finds it boring - PIGLIUCCI, Massimo. New atheism and the scientistic turn in the atheism movement. Midwest Studies In Philosophy [online]. 2013, 37(1), 142-153 [accessed 2018-04-26]. DOI: 10.1111/misp.12006. ISSN 03636550. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/misp.12006 165 „Is Romanticism a meme? Is the idea of evolution itself a meme, jumping unbidden from brain to brain? My suspicion is that the entire “theory” amounts to not much more than a misplaced metaphor.“ GRAY, John. The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins: His Atheism is its Own Kind of Narrow Religion. The New Republic [online]. October 3, 2014 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/119596/appetite-wonder-review-closed-mind-richard-dawkins 166 EAGLETON, T. Reason, faith, p.88 51 and no evidence has been given by Dawkins or anyone else that they do”) cannot explain cultural change because it happens by words and deeds of conscious personalities and not some self-driven entities. And only on this level we can engage in any discourse about culture, morality, philosophy.167

5.2 Political and Historical Dimensions

5.2.1 The Politics of New Atheism

New Atheism has a significant political dimension. Richard Dawkins called on one occasion the activities of his as “a political struggle”168 and because their efforts are aimed at achieving a change in some crucial values and practices of their societies, it is obvious that he is right in this regard. The New Atheist use techniques common in other politically engaged groups and their effort to make an impact on public is sustained and deliberate.

Richard Dawkins is a sort of a headquarters for UK; The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is active in many ways, its “Bus Campaign” has been emulated around the globe.169 Numerous other ways and strategies have been used by many participants, making the point on the streets like the bus campaign, but typically on the

Internet. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for example, might not be a direct part of the New Atheist movement (it is a bit more entertaining than a typical New Atheist treatise) but it definitely travels along the same lines and pursues the same goals.170 New

167 SCRUTON, Roger. Scientism in the Arts and Humanities. The New Atlantis [online]. 2013, (Number 40), pp. 33-46 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/scientism-in-the-arts-and-humanities 168 KETTELL, Steven. Faithless: The Politics of new atheism. Secularism and Nonreligion [online]. 2013, (vol. 2), 61-72 [accessed 2018-04-27]. DOI: 10.5334/snr.al. ISSN 2053-6712. Available at: http://www.secularismandnonreligion.org/articles/10.5334/snr.al/, p.61 169 See: Atheist Bus Campaign. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 2 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Bus_Campaign 170 See: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [online]. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, 2018 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.venganza.org/ 52

Atheists themselves see their mission as being successful or at least on the right track, stating that especially in the US the years of the highest public attention to New Atheist work correlate with a growing number of atheist “coming outs”, though it is difficult to assess the real impact of books and other activists.171 The variety of media play their role and in the McLuhanian172 sense determinate cultural and social impact of the debates.

This might be considered both an advantage and liability – on the one hand a wide audience is being reached, on the other the new electronic media often favour emotion over argumentation and have contributed to certain features of tribal mentality of some

“web” atheists. There are two parallel discourses, the books and old mass-media on the one hand and the Internet activism on the other and they differ in their emphasis and style.173

As we have seen in the section about the secularisation thesis, although the “see of faith” has been ebbing174 for a long time in the European Old World, religion has remained an important factor in political life in global context. Steven Kettell, a scholar from Warwick

University, sees the New Atheism as a reaction to a surprising development of growing

171 „Isolating key factors and influences in social change is a complicated exercise, and one made all the more burdensome in this instance by the various problems involved in identifying the parameters and composition of new atheism itself“KETTELL, Steven. Faithless, p.68 172See: Marshall McLuhan. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 24 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) 173 „While, in principle, print has always played a public role in mediating between the common good and private interests, or public life and private concerns, the Internet is radically transforming this by encouraging new relationships, connections, sentiments, affections, and a fluidity between the private and public that works to short-circuit the separation between deliberation and public opinion traditionally maintained by the press. This is because the new digital media, not unlike the medium of television, are inherently concerned with mobilizing audiences.” Cimino,R., Smith, Ch., The New Atheism and the Empowerment of American Freethinkers, in AMARASINGAM, A., (ed.) Religion and the new atheism 174 ARNOLD, Matthew. Dover Beach. In: Poetry Foundation [online]. 2018 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach 53 importance of religion on the world scene.175 This development had been described for example by a French religious studies scholar Giles Kepel already in 1991.176 Ten years on things took a dramatically more sinister turn and, as a cliché has it, the world changed irreversibly. The New Atheist phenomenon would most likely never have emerged in such an influential form had it not been for 9/11. Richard Dawkins encapsulates this change and the ensuing sentiment succinctly: „Things are different after September

11th”, he said, “Let’s stop being so damned respectful!” 177 Let us now see what some of the personalities I chose to follow have to say about the historical context of New

Atheism.

Terry Eagleton sees the connection between the 9/11 attacks and New Atheism, but he doesn´t think that it is the only source of the new popular and vocal secularist movement.

The style of the debates might, according to Eagleton, have been strongly influenced by the traumatic event and it was rather an unfortunate background for a public debate about such a significant cultural issue.178 But he sees Islamic terrorism as more of a political phenomenon than a religious one. Eagleton criticises the New Atheist for failing to grasp the real nature of fundamentalism and points out that in their reading of religious texts they are closer to religious fundamentalists than to mainstream theology. 179 Instead than looking for religious roots of terrorism we should seek justice, which is the only remedy

175 „new atheism can be said to represent something of a defensive rear-guard action, an attempt to push back against the encroaching forces of faith, and a response to a world that, as Aronson (2008) observes, “no longer seems to be going our way”. KETTELL, S., Faithless, p.63 176 KEPEL, Gilles. The Revenge of God: the Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-271-01314- 5. 177 KETTELL, S., Faithless, p.63 178 (..)intellectual debate is not at its finest when it springs from grief, hatred, hysteria, humiliation, and the urge for vengeance, along with some deep-seated racist fears and fantasies. EAGLETON, T. Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p.141 179 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p.54 54 for terrorism.180 Eagleton reviews briefly the post-war history of the Arab world and the influence of Western policies and comes to a conclusion that Islamic fundamentalism has been in part, at least, caused by them. Eagleton claims that West-endorsed toppling of many secular regimes on the Arab world blocked a desirable development, delegitimized secular forces in Muslim societies and created a vacuum which was subsequently filled by radical Islam.181 Therefore we should “in Prospero’s words about Caliban at the end of The Tempest (…) acknowledge this thing of darkness as (in part, at least) (our) own.182

Richard Dawkins would not agree with Eagleton´ s explanation of terrorism as predominantly a matter of social and historical grievances. In his God Delusion he acknowledges social and historical roots of violence (in the case of the Northern Ireland) but he claims that religion is the single most powerful way of labelling people and thus perpetuates the hostilities down the generations.183 Eagleton would not necessarily disagree with describing terrorism as, at least partly, religious phenomenon. He devoted a whole book to this theme,184 but he sees terrorism not just as an expression of religious identity and out-group hostility, but in rather more metaphysical terms. He traces some

“Dionysian”185 roots in terrorism, inspired probably by Agamben,186 he uses the ambivalent meaning of the word “sacer” – “sacred” - blessed or cursed, holy or reviled187.

180 Eagleton EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p.107 181 EAGLETON, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p. 101-108 182 EAGLETON, Terry. The West Spawned Secularism, But Also Fundamentalism. Newsweek [online]. 10/5/16 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: http://www.newsweek.com/terry-eagleton-fundamentalism- isis-west-end-history-globalisation-506708 183 „And without religion, and religiously segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. From Kosovo to Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian subcontinent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for ingroups and out-groups. But it's a very good bet.“ In DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 260 184 EAGLETON, Terry. Holy terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-928717- 8. 185 EAGLETON, Terry. Holy terror, chap.1 – Invitation to an orgy p. 1-41 186Agamben, G., Homo Sacer, See: Giorgio Agamben. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 26 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben , Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) 187 EAGLETON, Terry. Holy terror, p. 2 55

Eagleton in Holy Terror employs psychoanalytical tradition, cultural history and literature to show that terrorism is not reducible to a strictly a political issue. Interestingly,

Eagleton talks about Conrad´s Secret agent, about the character of the Professor, the first suicide bomber in English literature188, and the literary personality to which also John

Gray´s returns repeatedly in his writings.189 Both Gray and Eagleton see the character as a both a product and a fanatic adversary of the society around him.

5.2.2 The New Atheism and the Idea of Progress

The New Atheism´s relation to history and especially its understanding of civilization change in time is a very interesting subject to explore. The New Atheist openly declare that religion is a pernicious anachronism, a relic which the society carries with itself from less developed and less enlightened times, from “the childhood of mankind.”190 I will, in this, section try to outline its main characteristics and confront it with the views of the intellectuals I chose to follow in this thesis who are all critical to the New Atheist understanding of history. I will focus on the Idea of Progress and will try to investigate whether the New Atheists offer a version of what is known as “Whig history”. John

Gray, Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton differ significantly in their political affiliations, which, naturally informs their view of history, therefore it might be interesting to compare their individual criticisms of The New Atheist view

Richard Dawkins in God Delusion develops his thesis of the Zeitgeist, opening that particular chapter with a set of examples of immorality of the Biblical stories. “To be fair,

188 EAGLETON, Terry. Holy terror, p. 121 189 GRAY, John. Silence of Animals: on Progress and other Modern Myths. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. ISBN 978-037-4534-660., chap.I, The Call of Progress 190 . E.g.: „Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).“ HITCHENS, Christopher. God is not great 56 much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird (…), he writes191 but as a foundation of morality it is desperately unsatisfactory. It is “barking mad” promoting

“out-group hostility”.192 Dawkins offers new Ten Commandments, taken from an atheist website, among which feature “the golden rule”193, encouragement to question and inquire about the world and he adds a couple of amendments e.g. about enjoying one´s sexuality as long as you don´t harm anyone.194 Dawkins claims that we have progressed since the Biblical times and the pace of progress is accelerating. He detects a remarkable shift in “moral Zeitgeist” just within the period of his lifetime and lists a number of examples in order to prove that even as recently as 1960´s the society was significantly more sexist and racist. 195 He mentions approvingly Peter Singer´s vision of gradually widening circles of moral consideration evolving towards encompassing all sentient beings.196

In a 2017 Guardian piece “Is the world really better than ever?”197 the author notices that a distinctive current of thought has emerged recently where the upbeat message about the condition and the future of the world tries to assert itself more confidently. Consciously mimicking the New Atheist public relation policy, a loose group of authors and commentators, such as Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley or Johan Norberg sometimes labels themselves as the “New Optimists”.

191 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 237 192 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 253 193 The Golden Rule, Internet Encyclopaedia of philosophy, available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/goldrule/ 194 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 264 195 DAWKINS, Richard. The God Delusion, p. 268 196 See. http://www.stafforini.com/docs/Singer%20-%20The%20expanding%20circle.pdf 197 BURKEMAN, Oliver. Is the World Really Better than Ever?. The Guardian [online]. 28 Jul 2017 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/28/is-the-world-really- better-than-ever-the-new-optimists

57

The most outspoken advocate of moral progress is Steven Pinker. The renowned linguist and cognitive psychologist has argued that the world has been gradually becoming a more peaceful place, especially thanks to science, reason, communication and commerce.198

The decline of violence is supported by statistical evidence and, according to Pinker, it shows that the human species has achieved an advanced kind of understanding of morality, the same way as we progressed in “logic and geometry”.199 According to Pinker we have been living for several decades in a period of “Long Peace” which could be described also as “Liberal Peace” or “ Democratic and Capitalist Peace”.200 The world has undergone “the humanitarian revolution” during which the world has got rid of slavery, torture, violent religious rituals. We have, eventually, started to put into practice the Kantian vision of “perpetual peace”.201 The reason for this happening are manifold,

Pinker uses a concept the “civilisation process” borrowed from the sociologist Norbert

Elias who wrote a classical study about how self-restrain of impulses and a growing regulation and distance from corporal, biological necessities among the higher classes were gradually adopted by aristocracy in mediaeval culture and copied by the lower classes.202 Growing empathy for other people and decline in tribalism and out-group hostility have occurred thanks to growing level of communication and education, standard of living, leisure (time to read and think etc.).203

198 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. New York: Penguin, ©2012. ISBN 978-0-14-312201-2., chap. 5 199 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature, Chap. 10 200 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature, Chap. 10 201 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature, Chap. 4 202 Norbert Elias. In: Encyclopædia Britannica [online]. Prosinec 16, 2011 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norbert-Elias 203 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature, Chap. 4 58

Steven Pinker speaks of the “nonrandom direction of history (…) rooted in an aspect of reality that informs our conceptions of morality and purpose”.204 This is a claim which stands in direct opposition to what one of my chosen personalities, John Gray has been writing about for many years. Criticising utopian projects is probably a theme which most people associate with the name of John Gray. But the “rational optimists”, to use Matt

Ridley´s expression205, certainly don´t see themselves as representing utopian thinking.

“A better world, to be sure, is not a perfect world.” says Pinker.206 But the hopes the

“rational optimists” invest in scientific and rational solutions of the grave problems of civilisation are, for Gray, a typical feature of utopian scientism. He questions the validity of Pinker´s data and sees his statistics rather as “state-of‑the-art tablet generating meaning from numbers”207 While Pinker writes in his book about torture having become unacceptable a and illegal in most countries a long time ago and if it still reoccurs, it is universally condemned, 208 John Gray has repeatedly pointed out the irony of the fact that the worlds “first democracy” has de facto legalised torture as a part of the war of terror.

Even before the 2003 invasion to Iraq took place and the gruesome realities of Abu Ghraib surfaced, some pundits (including the atheist Sam Harris209) advocated torture on terrorist suspects. In reaction to that, three weeks before the invasion of Iraq, John Gray wrote a spoof article for New Statesman in which he, in Swiftian fashion, calls for necessary measures to be taken in order to create the right framework for practising torture - this

204 PINKER, Steven. The Better Angels of our Nature, Chap. 10 205 RIDLEY, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010. ISBN 00- 614-5205-X. 206 PINKER, Steven. Humankind’s best Days lie Ahead... Intelligent Optimism [online]. 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.intelligentoptimism.com/steven-pinker-moral-progress 207 GRAY, John. Steven Pinker is Wrong about Violence and War. The Guardian [online]. 13 Mar 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven- pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining 208 “sporadic, clandestine, and universally decried eruptions of torture in recent times cannot be equated with the centuries of institutionalized sadism in medieval Europe” PINKER, S., Better Angles of Our Nature, chap. 4 209 HARRIS, S., The End of Faith, Chap.6 59 last innovation of liberal democracy and freedom.210 A surprising number of people did not detect the sarcasm (even though the text was accompanied by a photo of Gray in a

Jonathan Swift’s wig) and took the article seriously, some even cancelled New Statesman subscriptions – an interesting illustration of the state of public discourse of that time.211

There seems to be a very deep and significant psychological gulf at play here between believers in Progress and people like Gray who find such a belief to be delusional wishful thinking and even morally highly problematic212. Although Pinker meticulously gathers statistics to support and document his optimism, Gray dismisses them using among others a “Black Swan”213 argument214: the peace might be a fact, but to presume that it will last is rather naïve. Although Pinker gathered substantial amount of data to support this view,

215 Gray doesn´t accept it because he doesn´t see the world improving at all216. Old evils

210 “we will need a trained body of interrogators, backed up by a staff of doctors, psychiatrists and other specialists. A new breed of lawyer will have to deal with the tricky cases that are bound to arise when people suffer injury or death under interrogation. We shall need expert social workers, trained to help the families of subjects under interrogation. Universities in particular must show they are capable of delivering the skills that will be required.” GRAY, John. A Modest Proposal. New Statesman [online]. 17 February 2003 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/node/194640 211 OBRIST, Hans Ulrich. John Gray: Post-American Age. 032c [online]. 2009, (#16 — Winter), 140 - 149 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://032c.com/2008/post-american-age/ 212 Gray for example points out implicite racism of some of Pinker´s ideas: (young black males) seem to be „imprisonable class in the United States, largely composed of people that Pinker describes as decivilised, and once they have been defined in this way there is a kind of logic in consigning this category of human beings to the custody of America’s barbaric justice system.“ GRAY, John. Delusions of Peace: Steven Pinker Argues That We are Becoming Less Violent. Nonsense, Says John Gray. Prospect [online]. 2011, September 21, 2011, (October) [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review 213 Black swan theory. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 13 March 2018 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory 214 GRAY, John. Steven Pinker is Wrong about Violence and War. The Guardian [online]. 13 Mar 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven- pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining 215 PINKER, Staven. Guess what? More People are living in Peace now. Just look at the Numbers. The Guardian [online]. 20 Mar 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict- peace?CMP=share_btn_tw 216 GRAY, John. Steven Pinker is Wrong about Violence and War. The Guardian [online]. 13 Mar 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven- pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining 60 re-occur under in new disguises or under new names because the human animal remains the same. 217 Moral progress doesn´t exist. Unlike in science and technology, progress in civility and morality is not cumulative and what has been achieved can be lost in a blink of an eye. Perennial evils have not gone away, they were merely rebranded: “Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking.”218

This is the main message of John Gray´s first non-academic and hugely successful book

Straw Dogs. It is an open polemic with the humanist outlook which the New Atheistic thought quite explicitly endorses. The title of the book is an allusion to the sacred Taoist text Tao Te Ting ascribed to the founder of the Taoist tradition, Lao Tze: “Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.”219 The citation refers to a Taoist religious ritual in which dogs are made of straw and revered during the ritual only to be discarded in the end. Gray chooses this theme to open his book which earned considerable fame for this non-anthropocentric perspective. It is not Taoist, though, but rather eclectic in nature. The composition of the book rests mainly on arranging various insights from the history of thought and culture in a manner which helps to communicate author´s view of the world. This worldview, though, is far from a coherent concise body of thought. Gray´s aim is to challenge easy and commonplace assumptions and prevailing wisdoms of the day but doesn´t present a doctrine. Gray obviously touched a nerve of

217 „For me politics is a series of temporary remedies for recurring human evils.“ This is a statement repeated by Gray on number of occasions, e.g here: GRAY, John a Eveline VAN DER HAM. John Gray on Man, Beliefs, and Changes. In: Open Transcripts: Nexus Conference 2012 interviews [online]. The Nexus Institute, 2012 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/john-gray- man-beliefs-changes/ 218 GRAY, John, Silence of animals, chap. “Humanism and flying saucers” 219 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs 61 contemporary cultural situation and represents a radically different view of the human condition from that offered by New Atheists. John Gray deems the rationalism and humanism of New Atheism to be more or less the contemporary orthodoxy. The crucial theme here therefore is the criticism of the idea of progress and rationalist optimism. The book achieved high acclaim especially among people from cultural sphere e.g. novelists

JG Ballard and Will Self.220 The book, though, was reviewed rather unflatteringly by

Terry Eagleton, who saw in it the flip-side of Gray´s former infatuation with liberalism from which he had sobered up. Eagleton called The Straw Dogs “a dangerous, despairing book” and “ugly right-wing ecology”221. Gray, according to Eagleton sees only the dark side of the “Fall”. We are deeply flawed animals, in this regard both thinkers agree, but

“the Fall”, Egaleton reminds us in the review, was also a fall upwards, towards freedom and creativity. For Eagleton Gray´s pessimism and indifference towards human animal is unwittingly funny and hopelessly one-dimensional. 222

The non-anthropocentric perspective of “Straw dogs” is in correspondence with James

Lovelock´s Gaia theory which Gray briefly outlines in chapter 1.223 Lovelock is an original scientist and his Gaia theory remains controversial or, according to some, even untenable.224 John Gray has debated Lovelock publically several times and found in the

“Gaia Theory” the biological underpinning for his views on human condition. In accord with the Gaya theory Gray takes a sort of cosmic vantage point from which he observes humanity. Our extremely destructive and violent species, which he calls Homo rapiens,

220 LEZARD, Nicholas. The Importance of being wrong. The Guardian: Books [online]. 13 Sep 2003 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/13/society 221EAGLETON, Terry. Humanity and other animals. The Guardian: Books [online]. 7 Sep 2002 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/07/highereducation.news2 222 EAGLETON, Terry. Humanity and other animals 223 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 1, chapter 1 224 https://aeon.co/essays/gaia-why-some-scientists-think-it-s-a-nonsensical-fantasy 62 is a sort of parasitic plague, “Disseminated Primatemaia, a plague of people”

(Lovelock´s term) from which the Earth will undoubtedly be cured one day225. Gray doesn´t dread such a prospect, rather takes it as a matter of fact, even a sort consoling undertones could be detected in his prose. Gray employs insights from various other fields as well, cognitive psychology for example, when he talks about “self” being and illusion.226 In very simple language and short paragraphs his vision becomes gradually visible. This brevity and terse manner of writing reminds one of some famous, canonical works of philosophy and I suspect that the style was the decisive factor in the book receiving such a wide acclaim; a one might call it “Nietzsche effect” in reminiscence of the German sage´s aphoristic style of writing. Nietzsche himself is also present in chapter three as well as Heidegger in the following passage. Freud is the last of the great thinkers of the sceptical tradition and is mentioned as being of Schopenhauer´s sceptical lineage.

Gray generally values thinkers who don´t strive for any kind of redemption, at least not in any utopian way.227 After Gray had ridden through the western tradition of philosophical thought there comes the turn of religions. They are generally viewed as deluded attempts to overcome our animal constitution which is in essence utopian striving. But the word delusion used in the context of Gray´s thinking about religion is very far away from Dawkins´ use. Gray doesn´t believe in any possibility to escape our delusions, so the word doesn´t have the critical charge of Dawkins´s usage of it. Gray concludes the section about religions with a passage about modern atheism, which he considers to be the last offspring of Christianity.228 Among religions only polytheism receives a little praise229, which seems in accord with Gray´s late political theory of

225 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 1, chapter 3 - Disseminated Primatemaia 226 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 2, chapter 2 227 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 2, chapter 2 228 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 4, chapter 4 229 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs, part 2, chapter 3 63

“modus vivendi” and “value pluralism”. Another passages are inspired by literature not philosophy, Joseph Conrad´s Jim and Bruce Chatwin´s Utz and more examples from the world of fiction are mentioned. Making an extensive use of quotations from literature and poetry would become a hallmark of Gray´s style also in the books to come after Straw dogs. Finally, contemporary social and economic situation is considered in later passages and the book is concluded with a recommendation to abandon all false promise of redemption and learn to value life as it is and learn “simply to see”.230 In Straw Dogs

Gray developed a style of writing of his non-academic texts which is erudite but not too specialised, obviously intended to address a wider public, and all the following books could be considered as an attempt of a public intellectual to communicate with his audience about essential issues of the age.

John Gray´s 2007 Black Mass is explicitly about utopian thinking and deals with religion in political context. “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion” claims

Gray.231 Gray is inspired by the work of Norman Cohn and his study The Pursuit of the

Millennium, a book which examines millenarian movements in history. Gray seems to find areligious/utopian currents to be ubiquitous in modern politics. He pleads for dystopian thinking: “If we seek to understand our present condition we should turn to

Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K.

Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin’s We or Nabokov’s Bend

Sinister, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ballard’s Super-Cannes – prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealizable dreams.” 232 In accord with his earlier

230 GRAY, John. Straw Dogs 231 GRAY, John. Black mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007. ISBN 978-0-374-10598-3., part 1, chapter 1 232 GRAY, John. Black mass, part 1, chapter 1 64 writings he claims that after the fall of the communist bloc utopian thinking moved to the

Right in a form of a vision of a free-market capitalism spreading all over the globe. After

9/11 this trend shifted from Fukuyama to Donald Rumsfeld; i.e. capitalism and democracy which in the 1990´s had been deemed the only game in town and the winner of the evolutionary battle of ideas now had to be spread by force. Millenarian violence was thus given “a new lease on life” in the policies of the world´s greatest democratic state. 233 Gray in Black Mass presents most political forces of modernity as in certain ways formed by religion or being outright secular religions themselves. He claims: “The most necessary task of the present time is to accept the irreducible reality of religion.”234

The book was criticised by one of the New Atheists – Anthony Grayling.235 He criticises

Gray´s usage of the term “religion”, blaming him for widening its meaning to such an extent that it cease to mean anything. He defends the Enlightenment tradition against

Gray´s accusations that has been strewn with disastrous utopianism. In Grayling´s review of the book we can detect the essence of the fundamental difference in perceiving history by John Gray and the New Atheists. While Gray in his books maintains that there is no such thing as permanent moral Progress, and values the way traditional religions functioned as source of meaning, connection to mystery and socially cohesive factor236,

Grayling has it that the negative examples of Enlightenment utopianism listed in Gray´s book re in fact “counter- Enlightenment” currents but still there has definitely been a remarkable progress in politics and society in modern era.237

233 GRAY, John. Black mass, 2007, chapter: „The Utopian Right as a modern millenarian Movement“ 234 GRAY, John. Black mass,Chapter -Post-Apocalypse 235 GRAYLING, A. C. Through the Looking Glass. New Humanist [online]. 3rd July 2007 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/1423/through-the-looking-glass 236 GRAY, John. Black Mass, chapter:Post-Apocalypse 237 GRAYLING, AC, Through the looking glass 65

Terry Eagleton also wrote a book about related themes.238 In his Hope without Optimism he, similarly to Gray, rejects the optimism of the current atheist thinkers such as Pinker and Ridley. He describes optimism as such as banal.239 He praises Ridley for his passionate will to overcome social ills of the world but claims that Ridley´s vision of remedy – more scientific rationalism – is one-sided and mechanistic.240 Ridley, according to Eagleton, endorses more of the same – the virtues of modernity: barter, trade, exchange, technology, the division of labor, pooled inventiveness, and the swapping of bright ideas but fails to acknowledge that the very same features of modernity are at the root of the social ills he is so outraged by.241 Eagleton´s vision emphasises hope without optimism – it is a vision of “tragic hope”. He speaks approvingly about Walter

Benjamin´s view of history. While rationalist progressivist mostly condemn the past and look forward to the future which is opened, Benjamin and Eagleton see the past as something which we endow with meaning and our deeds will determinate its redemption.242 The true hope cannot be optimistic because it is fully aware of the limitations and precariousness of the present and catastrophes of the past but hope in spite of it all. “The concept of progress, Benjamin insists, must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential.243

John Gray´s vision of history is not so charged with the need of redemption. The pposite is true. Gray repeatedly writes about the very striving for redemption as a malaise typical for the human animal. In his Silence of Animals he writes that animals are not “world-

238 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism 239 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism, Chapter 1 240 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism, Chapter 1 241 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism, Chapter 1 242 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism, Chapter 1 243 EAGLETON, Terry. Hope without Optimism, Chapter 4 66 poor” as Heidegger claimed. The fact they don´t seek salvation doesn´t make their life less worthy. On the contrary we humans need animals to be able look out of ourselves and our perpetual confinement in the noise of language. We need to learn to be silent but this contemplation is not directed at achieving salvation. Gray offers a sort of a godless mysticism: “Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed.244

5.2.3 Harris – Chomsky “debate”

An interesting example of a debate with strong political charge was a peculiar exchange of e-mails between American New Atheist Sam Harris and the famous linguist and anarchist Noam Chomsky.245 Harris approached Chomsky in order to debate certain earlier remarks addressed to New Atheism whom Chomsky called “religious fanatics who believe in the state religion”. 246 Harris, naturally, rejects this description himself. The debate turns to Chomsky´s area of expertise (he has been consistently mapping and commenting the crimes of US government for over 50 years). He wrote a short book in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Harris takes issue with his view that “state terrorism” is responsible for far more atrocities than other kinds of terror and on 9/11 “the chickens came home to roost”247. The debate turns to a Chomsky´s example from the aforementioned book, the bombing of Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998

244 GRAY, John. Silence of Animals, Chap. The Stranger in the wings 245 E-mails by Harris and Chomsky can be read here: HARRIS, Sam a Noam CHOMSKY. The Limits of Discourse: As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. In: Sam Harris [online]. May 1, 2015 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://samharris.org/the-limits-of-discourse/ 246 Chomsky on Hitchens, Harris and Skinner. In: Youtube [online]. 29. 10. 2011 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt9QCAUPPeY 247 „For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere.” 67 by Clinton administration. 248 In the ensuing exchange concerning the ethical significance of intentions, Chomsky rejects Harris´s opinion that the US are a “well-intentioned” giant who only causes unintended “collateral damage” because it seems to inhabit a higher moral grounds than other parts of the world. “It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth”.249 Chomsky, as he has done for five decades, refuses this type of argumentation and the debate does not follow much further beyond this disagreement.250 Sam Harris later published it on his website as an example of “limits of discourse”. The exchange, indeed, represents such an example and also an illustration how the idea of moral advance is deeply embedded in New Atheists thinking.

The left-wing rationalist Chomsky could not accept Harris´s bright-eyed vision about some nations accumulating “moral wealth”.

5.3 Cultural Dimension

In this section I would like to explore the cultural dimension of New Atheism and will try to place it in a broader context of the debates about the role of science in society, the problem of “scientism” and the relation between culture, religion and science in the work of the intellectuals selected for exploring in this thesis. Especially, I will draw on the work of the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton in this chapter because he dedicated one

248 „take the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan“ in CHOMSKY, Noam. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. ISBN 978-1-58322-489-2. 249 HARRIS, Sam and Noam CHOMSKY. The Limits of Discourse 250 HARRIS, Sam and Noam CHOMSKY. The Limits of Discourse 68 of his recent books fully to the relations of culture and religious belief/unbelief in modern times. 251

5.3.1 New Atheism and the Role of Science in Society

The cultural dimension also entails the questions raised by New Atheism´s relation to science. The accusations of scientism which are sometimes held against New Atheism could be viewed in a broader perspective of the debate about the role of science in society and its relation to other branches of human understanding namely the humanities. In

English context, which primarily interests me, the debate has a long pedigree. There had been, of course, many earlier examples than CP Snow in 1959 or even Huxley and Arnold in 1880s of thematising the rift between instrumental reason, which made itself manifest with increasing intensity in industrial developments, and artistic or religious sensibility.

William Blake´s rejection of the “satanic mills”252 of modernity and the Romantic

Movement as a whole is an obvious case in point. The philosopher Simon Critchley, when writing about the “two cultures problem in philosophy”, puts the debate in the context of the gulf between Anglo-American Analytical tradition and the Continental philosophical tradition. He, interestingly for the context of our explorations in this thesis, outlines a prehistory of the 20th century “two cultures” debates taking it back to the times of J.S.Mill who thought that the combination of Bentham and Coleridge gives one the entire English philosophy of the age. These twin tendencies are then ascribed with two questions

(...)Bentham asks of any ancient doctrine or received opinion, ‘Is it true?; whereas

Coleridge asks, ‘What is the meaning of it?’. So, ‘the Continental philosophy’ is

251 EAGLETON, Terry. Culture and the Death of God. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-300-21233-4. 252 And did Those Feet in Ancient Time. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 24 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time , "Dark Satanic Mills" 69 concerned with meaning, whereas its Benthamite opposite is concerned with truth. 253

Critchley establishes wider context for the debate; it doesn´t seem to be a peculiarly

British affair. He quotes the philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin who claims that we could trace the gulf to the very birth of modernity254. In this context one can also think of hermeneutical tradition in philosophy whose founder Wilhelm Dilthey made a distinction between Naturwissenschaften – the natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften the

”sciences” of the Spirit, humanities. Dilthey deems it necessary for understanding humane affairs, the world on the level of experience, history or psychology etc. to introduce other methods than those which serve us in natural sciences (such as mechanistic explanation). The central category for the humanities is “Verstehen” a form of hermeneutical understanding to be distinguished from “Verstand” – a purely intellectual understanding. Understanding in humanities must always include some prior understanding and experience with the world and employs imagination, emotions, or for example in studying history one should apply “re-creation or re-experiencing”.255

The debate seems to be in progress to this day and its last chapter has featured Steven

Pinker a scientist who is usually counted among the New Atheists ranks. The divide between scientific knowledge and “humanistic” understanding also seems to be underlying much of the criticism levelled against the New Atheism from the group of intellectual whose work I explore in this thesis.

253 CRITCHLEY, Simon. Continental Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-19-285359-2., p. 42 254 „If the Two Cultures are still estranged, then, this is no local peculiarity of 20th-century Britain: it is a reminder that Modernity had two distinct starting points, a humanistic one grounded in classical literature, and a scientific one rooted in 17th Century natural philosophy.“ CRITCHLEY, Simon. Continental Philosophy, p. 52 255 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wilhelm Dilthey, available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dilthey/#N190HistUndeHerm (accessed April 18, 2018) 70

5.3.1.1 Huxley-Arnold debate

The first round of science vs humanities debates took place in early 1880´s and the participants were the most prominent voices from either side – Matthew Arnold, who gave the word “culture” the meaning prevalent in the period, and T.H. Huxley, the

Darwin´s Bulldog and the single most vocal advocate of natural science. Huxley delivered a lecture titled “Science and Culture” in 1880 and Arnold responded with an essay

“Literature and Science” in 1882 in the very same room were CP Snow would deliver his

77 years later. It should be noted that, according to the intellectual historian Stefan Collini the term “science” itself did not acquire its contemporary meaning until the mid- nineteenth century. The meaning typical for English speaking countries is “natural and experimental sciences”.256 Prior to that time scientific endeavours were referred to as

“natural philosophy”.

The debate itself was a rather amicable one compared to what happened seventy-odd years later. Huxley´s lecture was delivered on the occasion of the opening of the Mason

College, Birmingham, England, which later became the University of Birmingham. The main focus of the debate was education, namely the importance to introduce modern science and technology into university curricula. This intention was opposed from two sides, from the practical men of business (the founder of the college, Sir Josiah Mason, himself a “self-made” man was an exception as he saw the importance of scientific education) and from classical scholars whom Huxley calls “Levites in charge of the ark

256 SNOW, C. P. a Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Canto classics. ISBN 978-1-107-60614-2., p. xi „This distinctiveness was reflected in the linguistic peculiarity by which the term 'science' came to be used in a narrowed sense to refer just to the 'physical' or 'natural' sciences. This appears to have become common in English only in the middle of the nineteenth century. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, setting to work in the late-nineteenth century, recognised that this was a relatively recent development; the dictionary gives no example of this sense before the 1860s(…) 71 of culture and monopolists of liberal education”257. Huxley acknowledges the importance the Classics as the Antiquity was the time of the highest cultural and scientific achievement prior the Renaissance. But he suggests that the educational system of his day had been neglecting any later developments which had had a crucial impact on the life of the civilisation. It seemed to him as if the scholars of his day still lived in the times of

Erasmus. Due to their focus on literary heritage the modern humanist scholars also neglected the achievements of the Antiquity in understanding the natural world and the foundations they gave to modern science. The study of ancient literature should not constitute the single one and privileged source of knowledge and mental training. It has become unsatisfactory and unjust towards the sciences because they can provide equally good (or even better) mental training and have a direct connection to modern life. He spoke in favour of a more extensive instruction in modern languages such as German and

French which, in his view, were essential for a pursuit of a scientific or industrial career but also opened the door to modern European literatures. He argues the importance to educate people to be able to fully participate in the industrial development of the nation, the sole and crucial source of its well-being. In this he anticipates almost literary the words of CP Snow many decades later. Huxley speaks in favour of teaching sociology, a very young science in his time, and the arguments he gives to support this suggestion are very interesting because they give us a glimpse of his view of history and politics. He believes in the possibility of scientific approach to societies´ problems and their potential so that “anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom”.258 This view of history seems to be an interesting feature of the discourse

257 HUXLEY, Thomas Henry. Science and Culture. In: Bartleby.com [online]. [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: http://www.bartleby.com/28/9.html 258 HUXLEY, Thomas Henry. Science and Culture 72 which would resurface in the New Atheism related debates and we have covered it in the previous chapter.

Matthew Arnold responded two years later with a lecture delivered also in Birmingham.

He presented his view of culture as encompassing all achievements of human spirit, culture as was famously defined in his Culture and Anarchy as the “the best which has been thought and said in the world” and education as striving to get oneself a part of this achievements which helps us “to know ourselves and the world”.259 Arnold remained convinced that the study of the classics will maintain its privileged position even in the future forms of education. Arnold did not reject the idea of incorporating more science into education. He doesn´t perceive them as a competitor for students´ time and attention.

He rather re-defines the works of science as literature, as a specific achievement of human spirit which should be studied and developed alongside with the study of the classics. But the study of classical languages, especially Greek, remains indispensable because it is the only way how to imbibe the source of supreme beauty – Greek literature. In general,

Arnold expects that the two branches of learning will co-exist peacefully alongside each other because: “humane letters have an undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane letters in a man's training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls "mediaeval thinking."260 The cultural historian Stefan Collini remarks that Huxley-Arnold debate bears some significant features telling us about the culture and society of Britain, namely the difference of social and institutional background of the two participants. The questions of education which is debated “appeared to be inextricably entangled with

259 ARNOLD, Matthew. Literature and Science. In: CHASS [online]. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996 [accessed 2018-04-27]. Available at: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ian/arnold.htm 260 ARNOLD, Matthew. Literature and Science 73 elusive but highly charged matters of institutional status and social class.” And, in different historical context, the same will remain true about the Snow-Leavis debate.261

5.3.1.2 The Two Cultures of CP Snow and F.R. Leavis

The lecture of 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution' delivered by CP Snow in

Cambridge on 7th May 1959 became a seminal moment in history of the debates about the role of science in modern society and the supposed gap between science and humanities. The famous question about The Second Law of Thermodynamics and

Shakespeare262 has become a part of general cultural heritage, which many people have heard of even if they haven´t read Snow´s lecture or don´t know anything else about the debate. CP Snow believed to be entitled to pronounce judgments on this topic because he claimed a position of an insider in both environments. 263 But Snow embarks in his lecture on a much broader and further reaching criticism than just the problem of university curricula which was the focal point of the Huxley-Arnold debate. Although the need to

“rethink our education”264 is an essential step to be taken, he aims to address the most serious problems on a global scale, especially poverty, which in his view is directly connected to scientific and technological development, or rather the lack of it.265

The split between scientific and literary knowledge seemed for him to lie at the heart of the problems which Britain faced in those years. He likens Britain to the Venetian

Republic in its decline; Britain is living from its old glory and success and finds itself in the grave danger of falling out of sync with the modern world.266 Snow makes some

261 SNOW, C. P. a Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.XV 262 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.15 263 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.1 264 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.18 265 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.41 266 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.40 74 unfavourable comparisons in terms of number of trained scientists of Britain and the US and the USSR. 267 Britain seems to be lagging behind those countries and that is the reason it is losing its importance in the world. The scientists “have the future in their bones”268 while the literary intellectuals are “natural Luddites”269 who have not understood the scientific revolution and don´t even try to understand the necessities of a scientific and industrial age. In this sense, although Snow doesn´t make reference to it, we can clearly see the continuity with the Huxley-Arnold debate which took place at the time of most intensive industrialisation.

The “Two Cultures debate”, though, differs from its 19th century precursor in the tone of the reply. The most notable reaction to Snow´s lecture came from the literary critic F.R.

Leavis and represents a famous example of rather belligerent rhetoric employed in a public debate. This might be of some interest in the context of our inquiry because the charges of being vitriolic and fundamentalist are a permanent part of the debates surrounding New Atheism.270

Leavis responded three years after Snow´s lecture by a lecture delivered in Cambridge at the Downing college with publication of as an essay in the Spectator (9th March 1962) following. The tone of Leavis´ polemic has been of such nature that Spectator´s editors

267 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p. 37 268 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.11 269 SNOW, C. P. and Stefan COLLINI. The Two Cultures, p.22 270 E.g. of a debate whether New Atheism is fundamentalist here Atheism is the New Fundamentalism, with Richard Dawkins and Richard Harries. In: Acast: Intelligence Squared [online]. Aug 25, 2017 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://www.acast.com/intelligencesquared/atheismisthenewfundamentalism or even en example of charges of inciting violence: AREL, Dan. The New-Atheist Blame Game has Begun. Patheos [online]. February 11, 2015 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2015/02/the-new-atheist-blame-game-has-begun/ 75 seriously feared that a libel suit might follow271. Leavis opens his talk with a casting a serious doubt on Snow´s qualification to speak on the topic, especially on the literary side of the divide. Leavis aims at unmasking what in his view is a scandalous case of condescension, conceit and ignorance on Snow´s part. Leavis seems to be very irritated with the whole culture of reverence for people of Snow´s kind. In Collini´s words, Leavis starts with “kicking away both legs” on which Snow based his authority to speak with inside knowledge of both “cultures”. He first challenges Snow´s credentials as an author and then questions his merits as a scientist. According to Leavis, Snow is not a novelist, he only thinks of himself as one. Leavis´s words are worth quoting in full: "as a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is."272

And scientific rigour is also absent in Snow´s lecture; Leavis sees the only presence of science in a form of “external reference, entailed in a show of knowledgeableness”273.

The gist of Leavis´s criticism, in my view, lies in Snows confidence that science is the sole source of wealth and wealth is an aim in itself. Snow´s contribution is not significant because he fails to see (due to his condescending attitude and social background) the real problem of modern society. The problem is the same which was faced by every society in every historical period– to understand ourselves in the specific historical context and strive for a fuller and deeper life. This problem cannot be solved by science alone which can only promise “more jam tomorrow”274.

271 LEAVIS, F. R. and Stefan COLLINI. Two Cultures?: the Significance of C.P. Snow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-61735-3., p. 8 272 LEAVIS, F. R. and Stefan COLLINI. Two Cultures?, p. 57 273 LEAVIS, F. R. and Stefan COLLINI. Two Cultures?, p. 59 274. What we need, and shall continue to need not less,is something with the livingness of the deepest vital instinct;as intelligence,a power–rooted, strong in experience, and supremely human – of creative response to the new challenges of time;something that is alien to either of Snow’s cultures. LEAVIS, F. R. and Stefan COLLINI. Two Cultures?:, p. 73 76

5.3.1.3 “Two Cultures” in the context of the New Atheism debates

The debates and criticisms about the “hard sciences” and humanities continue to this day.

We can briefly mention the “Sokal affair” which was a challenge to post-modern philosophers from the scientists. 275 It could be also said that the role of science in society is the pivotal point all the debates surrounding The New Atheism. The New Atheist are very often criticised by people from humanities, because of their treatment of science as a privileged source of knowledge. Current atheism is explicitly scientific which was and is not necessarily true for older versions of disbelief.276

Another round of the two cultures debate has taken place recently and featured one of the prominent “new atheists”, Steven Pinker. In his article “Science Is Not Your Enemy”277 in which he dismisses the term “scientism” as rather “boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine” and claims that humanities are rather in a bad shape and should yet

“recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness”278 His argument is that humanities should open up to sciences, get rid of its “self-inflicted” isolation and gain the new dimension of scientific knowledge which will enrich increase their “explanatory depth” and make them more progressive and successful. Pinker uses the term “consilience” which echoes one of the important voices who tried to bridge the gulf between the “two

275 Sokal Affair. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001- [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair 276 PIGLIUCCI, Massimo. New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement. Midwest Studies In Philosophy [online]. 2013, 37(1), 142-153 [accessed 2018-04-02]. DOI: 10.1111/misp.12006. ISSN 03636550. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/misp.12006 277 PINKER, Steven. Science is not Your Enemy: An Impassioned Plea to Neglected Novelists, Embattled Professors, and Tenure-less Historians. The New Republic [online]. August 7, 2013 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities 278 PINKER, Steven. Science is not Your Enemy 77 cultures” – E.O.Wilson279. He continues by giving examples of usefulness of scientific contribution in individual disciplines. Pinker wants to travel back in time because he seems to believe that the knowledge of 21st century science would help out such people as Spinoza or Kant, which implies that Kant´s Critiques or Spinoza´s Ethics could, in his view, use a little updating.280 He finishes with a claim that our understanding of human affairs could gain a lot form our “understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species”.281

Leon Wieseltier, an American critic, writer and the editor of The New Republic magazine reacted to Pinker´s article and his replay bears reminiscence to Snow-Leavis debate282.

Not in the belligerence, Wieseltier is far friendlier than Leavis had been, but the charges levelled against Pinker are very similar. Namely the failure on the part of Pinker´s to acknowledge the independent, autonomous and self-determining status of humanities.

Wieseltier makes the point explicit, the similarity between the tone of Snow and Pinker is striking. Snow´s “future in the bones” of scientists and Pinker´s “humanities have failed to define a progressive agenda” are rhetorically almost identical. Pinker´s demanding that humanities should save themselves by scientification is perhaps even beyond Snow in its condescending tone. Wieseltier, similarly to Leavis, he argues in favour of critical distance and effort to understand the times we live in, contrary to

279 Consilience (book). In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 9 December 2017 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience_(book) 280 PINKER, Steven. Science is not Your Enemy 281 PINKER, Steven. Science is not Your Enemy 282 WIESELTIER, Leon. Crimes Against Humanities: Now Science Wants to Invade the Liberal Arts. Don't Let It Happen. The New Republic [online]. September 4, 2013 [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism 78

Pinker´s “dawn-is-breaking scientistic cheerleading” which “shows no trace of the skepticism whose absence he deplores in others”. 283

5.3.1.4 Is New Atheism an example of Scientism?

“It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions” Sam Harris claims in The Moral Landscape284. The philosopher Massimo

Pigliucci, though, does not see this happening in Harris´s book on ethics, the scientific approach does not be particularly useful in studying moral values.285 This, of course, is the subject matter of an old debate in moral philosophy, Hume´s IS-OUGHT distinction.286 Harris combined scientific method with utilitarist approach – science can give us exact data about the brain which we can relate to well-being, because well-being happens in the brain, – and it seems that he assumes that thus he made the leap from IS to OUGHT. I am not writing a thesis in moral philosophy and this is not a place to pronounce judgments on how successful he was in his solution. What we are interested in, is an approach of a leading New Atheist to science and the way he thinks about the role of science in philosophy and more broadly in society.

Let us now turn to Roger Scruton, the one of the group of the intellectuals we follow in this thesis who occupied himself with the problem of scientism in the greatest extend, and

283 WIESELTIER, Leon. Crimes Against Humanities 284 HARRIS, Sam. Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-7122-6., p. 7 285 (..)the reader will await in vain throughout the book to find a single example of new moral insights that science provides us with. Harris, for instance,tells us that genital mutilation of young girls is wrong.I agree,but certainly we have no need off MRI scans to tell us why: the fact that certain regions of the brain are involved in pain and suffering,and that we might be able to measure exactly the degree of those emotions doesn’t add anything at all to the conclusion that genital mutilation is wrong because it violates an individual’s right to physical integrity and to avoid pain unless absolutely necessary (…) PIGLIUCCI, Massimo. New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn 286 COHON, Rachel. Hume's Moral Philosophy. ZALTA, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]. Fall 2010 Edition [accessed 2018-04-28]. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/ 79 see what he has to say about it. Scruton has been thinking about these matters for a long time, he reacted to Patricia Churchland´s 1986 book Neurophilosophy at the time of its publication and returned to the theme in his latest book on religion “The Soul of the

World”.287 Churchland claimed, anticipating Sam Harris, that neuro research and measurements of the brain activity can give us more valuable answers than traditional philosophy which engaged human self-understanding merely on a verbal level. Scruton is suspicious of the high ambitions of the book, he refuses to become a

“neurophilosopher” and argues in favour of the philosophical tradition which operates with the presumption that we are persons not just brains; subjects capable of arguing moral questions and make free decisions.288 When we are looking at the Botticelli´s painting “The Birth of Venus” the visual perception of the image might be perhaps measured and its effect on the brain observed and recorded but the data gathered will have nothing to do with the enormous contextual richness which give the painting its significance (the Goddess of Love, Platonism, the model - Simonetta Vespucci a girl from

Renaissance Florence etc.) A person perceiving the colours on the canvas maybe or maybe not aware of all those layers of meaning but in any case her relation to the piece of art cannot be reduced to brainwaves.289 Steven Poole290 talks about "neuroscientism" as a significant subcategory of a wider malaise of scientism.291

287 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-691-16928-6. 288 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World, part III – Looking at the Brain 289 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World, part III – Looking at the Brain 290 Steven Poole is a writer and a critic of contemporary condition of language use in public space. His „Unspeak“ is an improtant book comparable to works of Victor Klemperer and other authors who undestood that bad policies begin with bad language. See: http://unspeak.net/ 291 POOLE, Steven. Steven Poole Takes Issue with Linguist Steven Pinker's Language. The Guardian [online]. 23 Aug 2013 [accessed 2018-03-15]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/steven-pinker-language-poole 80

”Scientism”, as defined by Webster dictionary, is “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation, as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities.”292 Steven Poole, who commented on the Pinker-

Wieseltier debate in the The Guardian, after consulting the OED, offers two definitions: one, taken from G.B. Shaw is “kind of cultish puffery”293, some kind of back slapping among scientists or the stories they tell among themselves around the campfire because science in Shaw´s words is not free from legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers”294 ; and the other meaning, which is the usage I employ here, is taken from

F.A Hayek through the work of the philosopher Karl Popper and means: “the slavish imitation of the method and language of 'natural science', especially by social scientists”.295 The important distinction to be made, according to Scruton, is between the undoubtable explanatory power of science and the human condition as experienced as

“persons” with its own ways of explaining and understanding, which is relational and dialogical in nature and cannot be dismissed as mere “folk psychology” “which will give way in time to a proper neuroscience”.296 In the chapter of his book dedicated to music, he finds evolutionary “adaptation approach” “trivial”297 because it doesn´t give any valuable understanding, only strives to explain things (such as “art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty”) away as evolutionary successful adaptations (simply because they

292 See: Scientism. In: Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [online]. San Francisco (CA): Wikimedia Foundation, 2001-, 12 April 2018 [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism , Webster (1983), "Scientism", New Collegiate Dictionary (Ninth ed.). 293 POOLE, Steven. Steven Poole Takes Issue with Linguist Steven Pinker's Language. The Guardian [online]. 23 Aug 2013 [accessed 2018-03-15]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/steven-pinker-language-poole 294 POOLE, Steven. Steven Poole Takes Issue with Linguist Steven Pinker's Language 295 POOLE, Steven. Steven Poole Takes Issue with Linguist Steven Pinker's Language. 296 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World, part III – Looking at the Brain 297 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World, part 7 – The Sacred Space of Music, section Scientism and Human Understanding 81 are still here) but don´t give us anything in terms of real understanding these dimensions of human experience.298

298 SCRUTON, Roger. The Soul of the World, part 7 – The Sacred Space of Music 82

6 Conclusion

As we have seen New Atheism represents a distinctive current of thought with a desirable cluster of opinions about culture and society. My aim has been to present some examples of this particular type of thought in current society and confront it with views of a selected group of their critics. Those critics all for slightly different reasons reject New Atheist description of what religion is and identify their striving for elimination in the life of society of religion as an uncritical, reductionist, scientistics project which is in itself a closed belief system not unlike religions at their worst. New

Atheist reject this claim and speak of their project as a continuation of the best traditions of the Enlightenment which should be projected further to the future and finally fulfilled.299 My group of critical sees this commitment with scepticism, although individual thinkers differ in their concept of modernity, progress and the role of religion in society. While the radical Terry Eagleton, a Marxist with a great sympathy to

Catholicism, perceives religion, specifically Christianity, as a tradition (however betrayed and deformed) full of potential for a radical change in society. The other two thinkers, John Gray and Roger Scruton do not share this view. They both value religion for its cultural richness and its ability to fulfil deeply rooted human needs but do not see religion as a potential source of a radical political change. Allain deBotton agrees with

Gray and Scruton about immense value of social, practical dimension of religion, but his concept of religion shorn of all its metaphysical rhetoric and reduced only to practice is in the view of the other thinkers rather another example of a Enlightemnent utopia, a remake of the Comtian religion of humanity. We have seen that the group of

299 PINKER, Steven. Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2018. ISBN 978-0-525-42757-5. 83 intellectuals I chose cricise the New Atheist for their overrating of science as a privileged source of knowledge. It could be said that they all would advocate the division of the religious and scientific “language games” as S.J. Gould suggested.

Interestingly, we have seen instances of strong disagreement between some of the intellectuals I chose, although they agree in their criticism of the New Atheism phenomenon. Eagleton in a review of Gray´s book strongly rejected his view of humans as animals which strive in vain for a better predicament as cynical. This is probably because Eagleton himself still, however critically, and moderately to one of the grand narratives of modernity – Marxism. Gray has renounced all of these but didn´t not embrace post-modern relativism. He is an intellectual eclectic who doesn´t seek to create a great coherent system, in fact he doesn´t believe, that there is any point creating any system at all. Humans are not rational animals. Gray is a Darwinist but not of

Dawkinsian type. Dawkins seems to believe that we have the chance to overcome our predicament by developing all the goods that modern rationalism has given to us. Gray doesn´t deny the existence of progress and many successes of instrumental reason, but claims, nevertheless, that to invest any hope in them for the future is only another chapter in self-delusional wishful thinking because our animal nature cannot be transcended in historical time. It is difficult to say whether Gray rejects all kinds of transcendence of human predicament, probably yes, however, he finds humans so fascinating and culture they have created so enriching, that he might said to endorse some cultural vision of transcendence. Not in Arnoldian sense, perhaps, but in a peculiarly new, modest way formed by experience of late modernity. Gray is obviously interested in human beings and human matters to the extent of fascination, so when he is rejected by some atheist thinkers as a misanthropic doom-monger, it is not a correct assessment of his work.

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Because I am neither a Marxist as Eagleton nor a country gentleman like Scruton, I feel to be closest in my views to John Gray. Like Gray I an atheist and as him I am of the opinion that religion is not going away and prefer the real thing to modern reductionist versions, regardless if disguised in scientific or political rhetoric. Gray is close to

Nietzsche who understood that the death of God in modern culture is the single most important event in millennia but doesn´t feel tempted to replace to fill the God-shaped hole in our culture with another metaphysical creation as Nietszche did (Übermensch).

Gray rather advices to learn to live with it. Eagleton sees Gray as a lofty adherent of

“Hollywood spiritualty without content”300 but I find it a bit too harsh a condemnation.

Unfortunately, I didn´t have the chance to obtain his most recent book on the very topic

I have covered in this thesis – atheism. John Gray´s Seven Types of atheism will undoubtedly an entertaining read as all his books are, but according to a recent interview, New Atheism is not dealt with in too much detail, as Gray doesn´t consider it to be very intellectually stimulating strand in atheism.301

I tried to cover different dimensions of culture and society, with the emphasis on public discourse taking place in newspaper (mostly on-line) exchanges among the atheists and their critics. Because the topic I was covering consist of a whole cluster of interconnected themes (Progress, science, morality, education, culture) I managed to offer a mere compilation whose purpose is to approximate and evaluate the discourse on

21st century atheism discourse in its complexity. I tried, however, to structure the discourse into religious, cultural and political-historical spheres because I believe it has

300 “Gray belongs to that group of contemporary thinkers, of whom George Steiner is the doyen, who disdain the secular but can’t quite drag themselves to the church or synagogue.” 301 BROOKS, Michael. Philosophies Of History Are Rationalisations For Mass Murder: An Interview with John Gray. The Quietus [online]. April 28th, 2018 [accessed 2018-04-30]. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/24484-john-gray-interview-seven-types-of-atheism 85 proved to be useful and fruitful for understanding such a multifaceted phenomenon which the New Atheism undoubtedly represents.

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“Humans seek silence because they seek redemption from themselves, other animals live in silence because they do not need redeeming.” JOHN GRAY Silence of Animals

Gray’s twenty-one-year-old cat, Julian302

302 "Humans Never Learn”: the Philosopher John Gray on New Atheism, the God Debate and Why History Repeats Itself. In: The Sunday Times [online]. April 22 2018 [accessed 2018-04-29]. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/humans-never-learn-the-philosopher-john-gray-on-new-atheism-the- god-debate-and-why-history-repeats-itself-h9v6xvfmc , Photo: Gray’s cat, Julian 87

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9 Summary

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of New Atheism as it emerged in the work of certain Anglo-Saxon intellectuals shortly after the break of the new millennium. The aforementioned phenomenon is viewed from the perspective of a group of British intellectuals of which most space is dedicated to the work of the British philosopher

John Gray and literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton.

The thesis briefly introduces the main works of the atheist and their critics respectively and notices similarities among individual critics responded to the atheist discourse. It also tries to contextualise the writings about atheism in the context of their work and intellectual development.

The thesis tries to investigate the similarities and differences between individual atheists and their critics, too. The personalities the thesis focuses on differ in various aspects, such as political affiliations, concept of history, religious background.

The thesis tries to contextualise New Atheist thought in a wider context of thinking about religion. It focuses on the role of science in society as promoted by the atheist authors. It takes a brief look at some predecessors of today´s atheists and their critics in debates about the role of science in society.

Another important feature of the thesis is the question of historical development and the

Idea of Progress and tries to look into the relation of New Atheist to Enlightenment tradition of rationalism and establish how well they understand this tradition. We will also have a brief look at the critics´ view of historical change and their opinion about the idea of Progress.

The works attempts to achieve some deeper understanding of the relation of religion to modernity and thus to better understands some crucial questions of our times.

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10 Resumé

Tato práce se zabývá fenomeném současného anglosaského ateismu, který bývá nazýván New Atheism. Dotyčný fenomén nahlíží z perspektivy vybrané skupiny současných britských intelektuálů a snaží se tímto způsobem zmapovat podobu diskursu týkající se tohoto typu ateismu. Vybraní inelektuálové, mezi nimiž se práce zabývá předvším dílem filosofa Johna Graye a kulturního kritika Terryho Eagletona, jsou kritčtí k pojetí náboženství a jeho role ve společnosti které, New Atheism reprezentuje.

Práce má rovněž širší ambici, a sice nahlédnout skrze debaty o New Atheism hlouběji do do problematiky vztahu náboženství a modernity, humanitních disciplín a přírodních věd, významu náboženské tradice pro moderní společnost apod.

Práce představuje stručně základní knihy publikované novými ateisty i jejich kritiky a snaží se je uvést v dialog. Všímá si podobností a rozdílů v tom, jak jednotliví krtitici

New Atheism hodnotí. Tyto rozdíly se snaží zhodnotit v širším kontextu práce jednotlivých autorů.

Práce se zaměřuje na vztah dotyčného typu ateismu k tomu, jak náboženství nahlíží samo sebe, jak je nahlíží tradice moderních sociálních věda a snaží se ohodnotit do jaké míry se pohled New Atheism liší od jiných typů sekulárních diskursů o náboženství.

Významnou dimenzi práce tvoří snaha prozkoumat pojetí role vědy ve společnosti, tak je New Atheism prezentuje. Jde předevšímo otákzu, zda věda je privilegovaným zdrojem vědění v modern společnosti, a co z toho plyne náboženství a kulturu jako celek.

Druhým důležitým tématem práce je vztah k dějinám a k myšlence pokroku, která se zdá být mezi ateisty tohto konkrétního intelektuálního proudu velmi živá. Na druhou stranu,

Britští intelektuálové vybraní k analýze mají k myšlence pokroku s velkým P velmi rezervovaný postoj. Skrze výše zmíněné dimenze má práce ambici dospět k nějakému

99 hlubšímu porozumění současnému světu, vztahu tradi0ce a modernity a vědy a společnosti.

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