Christopher Hitchens has a new book out: God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion
He and his brother had an interesting chat about it the other morning:
BBC Radio 4
Today Program
19/06/07
08:20 We debate a new book "God is not Great" with it's author Christopher Hitchens and his brother Peter Hitchens
Listen (@ 19'20") | Permalink
And here is the old boy giving some of his views in an erudite discussion program about religion:
Start The Week
Radio 4
18/06/07
This week Andrew Marr is joined by Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Hurd and Allan Leighton.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is calling for what he calls a "New Enlightenment". He argues that religion is outdated, entitling his new book God is Not Great. He describes his personal encounters with religion including Anglicanism, the Greek Orthodox Church and Judaism, and his early dislike for compulsory prayers at school. He says he has been writing this book all his life and passionately believes that religion of all kinds is a form of self-delusion.
6 comments:
Interesting sounding book here from the philospher John Gray:
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
It seems to have at its heart the paradoxical observation that the more cynical the view of human nature that underlies it, the better the society that a political philosophy will produce. Utopianism leads straight to the mass grave - be it secular or religious.
[Gray] finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”
This older book of his also looks worth a read:
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
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John Gray's apocalypse
The Sunday Times
June 24, 2007
A sceptic, a wit, and a very English thinker; is John Gray also the best theorist about our troubled world today?
Bryan Appleyard
...
So, what is he all about? What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.
Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.
Because forms of utopianism are either implicit or explicit in most human projects, Gray’s is a world-view that causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage. Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all his thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused. I think our society is better for having escaped the tightness and oppression of the 1950s. But it left conservatism incoherent. It has still not recovered.”
The collapse of communism in 1989, and the publication of an academic paper and subsequent worldwide bestseller, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, signalled the start of Gray’s next campaign against utopianism. This involved a more radical assessment of the prevailing mythologies of the West. Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy was the final political state, the end point of history, reeked of precisely the belief that history was a story with an ending that Gray so loathed in his colleagues.
“That phrase ‘the end of history’ was like a red rag to a bull. It was an apocalyptic notion, and it was to me a sign that when the Soviet Union collapsed, we would not have a move towards prudence and realism, we’d have a politics of faith. I was adamantly opposed to that – it was what I had been opposed to in communism.”
Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”
The road from Fukuyama led him directly to a series of what to future generations will seem classic works. The best are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – a coruscating statement of our inability to free ourselves from human nature – and his latest, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray was, in the later stage of this phase, driven by what seemed to him to be collective amnesia. “I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.
“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.” The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”
That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously – though the comedy is very black indeed – he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.
In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the neocons convinced themselves that the CIA, which was largely sceptical about the project, was too evidence-based. What was needed, they posited, was not empirical but rational analysis. So, Bush was told by a neocon CIA shadow organisation that Saddam had WMDs, not because there was evidence for it, but because it was logical that he must have them. A deranged Platonism had its finger on the trigger. Now, as Gray forecast, the Iraqis are blamed for the failure of the mission, just as the Russians were blamed for the failure of communism and Hitler blamed the Germans for the failure of Nazism. Nobody, he points out, seems ready to face the obvious conclusion: the goals of these projects were unattainable from the outset.
Perhaps Gray’s most controversial point is that the roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress, and we have been living with – and dying from – that legacy ever since. Al-Qaeda, he argues, is a very modern organisation, precisely because it has learnt the lessons of the West.
Gray is a great sceptic, to be judged alongside his heroes, Montaigne, Hume, Schopenhauer and Berlin. Like them, he believes our only freedom lies in the most honest assessment possible of our predicament. And in his style, his humour, his empiricism, his realism, he’s a very English thinker. He has in common with the ecologist James Lovelock an English delight in exposing misconceptions and in the comedy of human folly.
Gray is soon to retire as professor of European thought at the LSE. Perhaps he will write more, perhaps less. You can’t tell with him. But, as his work makes clear, you can’t really tell with anybody. We’re going nowhere, our rationality is largely an illusion and, to each other, we are alarmingly opaque. But at our best we learn, tolerantly, liberally and realistically, to live with that. Read John Gray, and remember to laugh.
I'm reading Richard Dawkins' brilliant The God Delusion. To describe it as Humphreys does as "the arrogance of militant atheists" is to miss most of the brilliant points made.
Religion causes harm, says poll
The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
NEARLY half the British think that religion is harmful, according to a poll carried out by YouGov. Yet more than half also believe in God “or something”. The YouGov poll commissioned by John Humphrys, the broadcaster and writer, found that 42% of the 2,200 people taking part considered religion had a harmful effect. “One reason might be the publicity attracted by a handful of mad mullahs and their hate-filled rhetoric,” writes Humphrys in his new book, In God We Doubt, an extract of which appears in today’s Sunday Times News Review.
Only 16% of those polled called themselves atheists; 28% believed in God; 26% believed in “something” but were not sure what; and 9% regarded themselves as agnostics - like Humphrys himself, who had a religious upbringing in Wales but calls himself a “doubter”.
In God we doubt
John Humphrys
The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
He went looking for God and ended up an angry agnostic – unable to believe but enraged by the arrogance of militant atheists. It’s hard to see the purpose of the world, he says, but don’t blame its evils on religion
John Gray (mentioned above) proves himself an idiot on at least one score...
I thought this was a pretty fair review of Straw Dogs, which had some things in I liked, and a whole lot more stuff in it I disagreed with. Not a boring read at all, but far too much assertion instead of argument, and written as if he wanted every sentence to be a contender for Aphorism of the Year, which gets pretty wearing after a while.
Contempt for Life
By David Gordon
Posted on 11/18/2002
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. By John Gray
John Gray is Ayn Rand's nightmare come true. Once a classical liberal, he now finds the inanities of Tony Blair's "Third Way", as expounded by its oracle Anthony Giddens, more to his liking. His shift in belief presented him with a problem. Reason and morality strongly support a free market order, and the fallacies of the soppy socialism of New Labour require no great acumen to discern. How then can Gray defend his change of doctrine?
In Straw Dogs, Gray has at last solved his problem. I do not mean that Gray has now come up with new arguments that show we were all wrong--- that it turns out that reason and morality support soppy socialism after all. Quite the contrary, Gray suggests that reason and morality need to be abandoned. While he is at it, Gray suggests that human beings are no great shakes, either.1
Are you so benighted as to think that all human beings have natural rights to life, liberty, and property? Gray will soon cure you of your universalist predilections. Claims that morality imposes on us certain universal requirements reflect outdated religious views: "The idea of 'morality' as a set of laws has a biblical root. In the Old Testament, the good life means living according to God's will. But there is nothing that says that God's laws apply universally. The idea that God's laws apply equally to everyone is a Christian invention. . . what sense is there in the idea of laws that apply to everyone? Isn't this idea of morality just an ugly superstition?"(p.90)
I cannot think that Gray's knowledge of the Old Testament would get him through an elementary course in the Bible. Has he never come across the Noachite laws, which do apply to everyone? Gray's ignorance of scripture, though, takes us away from the thrust of his criticism of morality in the passage just quoted. Does his argument have any faults?
A couple of minor ones. Gray does not show that the idea of universal moral laws stems from Christianity. If it does, he fails to show that this is a point against the validity of such laws. Why is the idea of universal moral laws senseless and an ugly superstition? Gray does not tell us: he appears rather to "argue" by giving a dog a bad name, a dubious tactic even if one is dealing with straw dogs.
Perhaps I have here given Gray an uncharitable reading. I of course would never knowingly do such a thing, and I will soon endeavor to see if more in the way of argument can be teased out of Gray's musings. Before doing so, though, I pause to avert a possible misunderstanding. One might imagine from our quotation that Gray is an enemy of religion: he takes it as an argument against universal morality that, as he thinks, it stems from Christianity. But this is not so.
Gray does view all religion with revulsion: he has a soft spot in his heart for polytheism. "Polytheists may be jealous of their gods, but they are not missionaries.. . If the world had remained polytheist, it could not have produced communism or 'global democratic capitalism'. . . Polytheism is too delicate a way of thinking for modern minds."2 I had not realized that the early Christians fed the polytheist Romans to the lions.
Gray's complaint against morality I think emerges more clearly elsewhere. He has a genuine point to make, but he crudely mistakes its significance. Supporters of universal morality think that all persons are entitled to be treated as ends in themselves. But this idea is provincial: "A person is someone who believes that she authors her own life through her choices. That is not the way most humans have ever learned. . .Are we to believe that bushido warriors in Edo Japan, princes and minstrels in medieval Europe, and Mongol nomads were lacking because their lives failed to square with a modern ideal of personal autonomy?"(p.58)
Gray confuses two very different things. Traditional societies have many virtues, and Gray seems to me right to think that a good life need not involve detachment from the customs of one's society. But the claim that everyone is in himself a moral end does not imply that everyone should abandon his traditional way of life. People who are ends in themselves can live by custom rather than choice. Why does Gray think otherwise?
If you think that this is confused, wait until you see what is coming next. Gray spends a great of time telling us about various atrocities, the Gulag not least among them. In spite of my sarcastic tone, much of what he says is moving. But in what way does the fact that people have been tortured and murdered in vast numbers show that universal morality must be rejected? I should have thought that our revulsion at cases of contempt for human life counts as evidence in favor of moral standards that transcend social practices.
Can it be that Gray has fallen into a mistake that would disgrace a tyro? A moral rule tells us what we ought to do: it is not a description of the way people in fact behave. Is it a good reason to reject the principle of self-ownership that many societies have practiced slavery? Judged by what he says in Straw Dogs, the Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics would have to say that it is.
So much for morality. Free will also has to go: "We can be free agents only if we are authors of our acts; but we are ourselves products of chance and necessity. We cannot choose to be what we are born. In that case, we cannot be responsible for what we do."(pp.65-66)
What is going on here? Supporters of free will claim that our choices are free, not that our characteristics arise from free choice. No doubt we are born with certain natural traits, and are much influenced by chance events. But how do these facts show that we do not act freely? How do the facts, e.g., that I have a brain, arms, and legs, none of which I have created, imply that I am not responsible for what I do?
Gray is not yet ready to close the Department of Implausible Claims. Someone so incapable as he of philosophical argument is not likely to value logic highly, and our expectations suffer no disappointment. "Classical logic", he claims, "tells us that the same event cannot happen and not happen. Yet in 'many-worlds' interpretations of modern physics, that is precisely what does occur."(p.24)
I'm afraid not. The alternatives at issue in many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics occur in different possible worlds; no violation of classical logic is involved. Indeed, the wish to avoid violation of classical logic is one of the chief motives behind the view.
Morality is a sham, freedom an illusion, and logic a superseded relic. Such views do not suggest that Gray will advance a social philosophy congenial to readers of The Mises Review; and, true to form, he has a number of wacky suggestions on offer.
For one thing, he maintains that leaving the Stone Age was a mistake. "We think of the Stone Age as an era of poverty and the Neolithic as a great leap forward. In fact the move from hunter-gathering to farming brought no over all gain in human well-being or freedom. It enabled larger numbers to live poorer lives. . Almost certainly, Paleolithic man was better off."(p.156) Almost certainly? How does Gray know this? A brief reference to the left-leaning anthropologist Marshall Sahlins hardly suffices.
Gray's contempt for humanity and civilization is limitless. He acknowledges that economic growth has brought us many useful inventions. He cites Thomas de Quincey, who, when he claimed early in the nineteenth century that "a quarter of human misery was toothache, may have been right. Anaesthetic dentistry is an unmixed blessing. So are clean water and flush toilets. Progress is a fact."(p. 155)
So far, so good; but now comes the twister. Technological progress enables vast increases in human population to take place. But this, Gray holds, is disastrous. The balance of the earth has been upset. "The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is the consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate."(p.7)
Fortunately, human beings will be stopped before they can destroy the earth altogether. The Gaia hypothesis, devised by James Lovelock, shows that the earth is an organism. Its self-regulating mechanisms will strike back against humanity. How dare human beings think themselves special? "For Gaia, human life has no more meaning than the life of a slime mould."(p.33) This view, we are informed, "is consistent with the narrowest scientific orthodoxy"(p.33)
I am very glad to have read this book. John Gray's frequent changes of opinion have puzzled many, but at last we see the ultimate basis of his outlook. The answer has been concealed from those who know him, because he is a charming and genial companion. But the matter admits of little doubt. He is a misanthrope, pure and simple.
Lest I be accused of being one as well, I had better note some good things in the book. The discussion of George Bernard Shaw on mass extermination of the "socially useless" is well worth reading,(pp94-95) as is the account of the influence of Fedorov's technological superhumanism on the Soviet regime.(pp.137-138). I applaud his attention to that great and neglected thinker Leo Shestov (p.83) and his recommendation of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith.(p.209). I do not applaud his mistaken claim that Nietzsche died in 1890. (p.45)
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1 The book's title reflects Gray’s disdain for our species: “In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were often used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside. . .If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside.”(pp.33-34)
2 Our erudite author, to my surprise, has not noted that William James sympathized with polytheism.
An excellent article found by Dan.
I don't believe that believers really believe
The Times
September 16, 2008
Jamie Whyte
How can so many people accept pre-Enlightenment gobbledegook? Actually, they don't
Many atheists behold the persistence of religion in the West - and especially in America and its politics - with something close to incredulity. How can it be, they lament, that despite the absence of any evidence for the central tenets of Christianity, despite the enormous progress of science in explaining the origins of the Earth and its inhabitants, that so many people continue to believe pre-Enlightenment gobbledegook?
That the world was created by an invisible deity, that He later impregnated a virgin who then bore a son who was His own father, that we have immortal souls and will live for ever in Heaven if we are good and love Jesus - how can anyone who has even attended high school believe such things? And how can agreement with this nonsense be a prerequisite for winning the support of the American electorate? It defies belief.
So it does. And if something defies belief, a good starting position is not to believe it. That is my position. I am not shocked by the persistence of religious belief in the West because I do not believe it exists. It is simply not possible for people who know as much as modern Westerners do to believe in the central tenets of Christianity or the other major religions.
Of course, religious assertion persists. But there are many reasons for saying religious things other than actually believing them. Most often, I suspect, people are expressing their hopes rather than their beliefs - substituting “I believe” for “I wish” in the unconscious endeavour to convince themselves. The real test for genuine belief is not what people say, but what they do. To believe something is to be disposed to act upon it. The vast majority of Western Christians fail this test. Imagine this. Recognising that many people find their children an unwelcome burden, the Government creates a network of slaughterhouses. Each year, about a million unwanted children are dropped off for extermination.
It is a horrifying idea. Anyone who believed it to be happening would surely rise up against the regime, with violence if necessary, or at the very least passively resist by not paying taxes or refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the State. To do nothing while millions of children are murdered would display despicable moral complacency. Yet British Roman Catholics allegedly believe that such slaughter is really happening. They claim that humans have immortal souls from conception, and that killing a foetus is no less murder than killing a ten-year-old. From the Catholic point of view, abortion clinics are slaughterhouses for children.
Is the lack of anti-abortion militancy - at least in Britain - not then strange? If they believe what they claim to, they are no better than those who turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities. But I do not think they are that wicked. It is just that they don't really believe the things they say about foetuses and immortal souls.
I do not mean to pick on Roman Catholics. All Christians fail to act on their avowed beliefs. Suppose you believed that Heaven exists and that only some of us will qualify to live in it for ever, as the vast majority of Christians claim to. How would this affect your behaviour? It would depend on what you thought were the admission criteria for Heaven. But whatever you took these virtues to be, they would utterly dominate your life. When everlasting bliss is on offer, nothing else matters at all. People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not.
Yet the expected behavioural difference is not to be observed. The vast majority of Christians display a remarkably blasé attitude toward their approaching day of judgment, leading lives almost indistinguishable from those of us open non-believers. Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.
So do American politicians. All claim to be Christians but they approach policy exactly as non-believers would. Consider John McCain and Barack Obama, to take the most topical examples. Both recommend policies on grounds that weigh only earthly costs and earthly benefits. The afterlife consequences are never mentioned. By the light of their avowed Christianity, this is perverse. If we have immortal souls, then earthly costs and benefits are an infinitesimal fraction of the total. For true believers, the first question to ask about any policy ought to be: How does it affect people's chances of getting into Heaven? But this is never even the last question asked.
American politicians obviously do not really believe that we have immortal souls. And they know that voters do not believe it either. They know that, contrary to popular mythology, a politician who approached policy from a truly Christian perspective would be considered an unelectable lunatic. The persistence of religious profession is irritating. It is a sign of something intellectually unserious in the professor and his appreciative audience. But it is not alarming once you realise that it is all just talk.
Jamie Whyte is the author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking
I now do believe in dickheads.
Dr Andrew Parker: The Bible got everything right
Metro
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
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