Terry Eagleton presents an unusual challenge to the new atheism

[rug]

New atheists and old leftists



Oct 9th 2016, 15:01
BY ERASMUS

AMONG the public intellectuals of the Western world, a significant camp believes that only one really important battle of ideas is now in progress: between liberal, rational, law-bound modernity and the dark forces of Islamic jihadism. Most of the so-called "new atheists" have espoused that view in one form or another. Some, like the late Christopher Hitchens, have insisted that all religions have the propensity to darken the mind and encourage bad behaviour; others, like Sam Harris, have put particular stress on what they see as the capacity of Islam to inspire terrible misdeeds. Some, like the ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are prepared to accept a liberalised, anodyne version of Christianity as a foot-soldier in the modernist army; others are not. But they all see the battle over humanity's future in more-or-less binary terms. As a prediction of intellectual trends, and perhaps also of geopolitical ones, the title of a book published in 1995 seems quite prescient: Jihad versus McWorld.

Whenever some people are trying to organise their view of reality around a single faultline, it's worth paying attention to provocative figures who insist that things aren't quite so simple. One such provocateur is Terry Eagleton, one of the world's best-known literary and cultural theorists. An emeritus professor of Oxford University, he is the nearest thing anybody operating in this arcane area can be to a popular guru; one of of his 40-plus books sold 750,000 copies. Brought up in England by Irish-Catholic parents, he acknowledges the influence of both Marxism and Christianity.

This week he gave the annual lecture organised by Theos, a London-based think-tank which studies religion and society. Elaborating on one of his favourite recent themes, he poked at the new atheists from several angles, while also back-handedly acknowledging that they were onto something. Especially when observing societies different from their own, he began by asserting, secular humanists greatly underestimate the importance and resilience of faith. After all

(Religion) has…proved to be by far the most tenacious, enduring, widespread, deep-seated symbolic system humanity has ever known, not least because it is able to connect the everyday practices and customs of billions upon billions of ordinary people with the most august, transcendent, imperishable truths.

And yet, near-indestructible as religion may be, capitalist society has almost managed to destroy it; Friedrich Nietzsche was guided by a sound instinct when he discerned the "death of God" in the bourgeois age. With the advent of capitalism in its contemporary form, with its infinite variety of private choices, the coup de grace was delivered. "A consistency of self and belief doesn't sit particularly well with the volatile, adaptive, mutable human subject of advanced capitalism." That, in Mr Eagleton's view of things, helps to explain how ill-prepared the Western world was for the 9/11 attacks and the emergence of global terror perpetrated in the name of religion. As he puts it, in a flight of sharp-tongued irony:

No sooner had a thoroughly atheistic culture arrived on the scene...than the deity himself was suddenly back on the agenda with a vengeance. Not, however...a suitably blue-blazered, short-haired, white-collar, golf-playing God but a God who had shifted over to the side of so-called barbarism, a wrathful, alien, brown-skinned deity.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/10/new-atheists-and-old-leftists

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Odd thing is that an Eagleton article with all these quotes, but not really about 'new atheists'

can be found here, from 2014 https://oxfordleftreview.com/olr-issue-14/terry-eagleton-the-death-of-god-and-the-war-on-terror/

It says Western culture is a postmodern culture, and that advanced capitalism is what provoked Islamic fundamentalism, and blames postmodern culture for not having any convictions to resist it (it uses as an example a joke by the British Tory Boris Johnson that his convictions consist of a driving offence). It does, towards the end, criticise Sam Harris for his idea of nuking Islamic fundamentalists if they were about to get hold of a nuclear bomb themselves; and says

old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens may well have other reasons for arguing against religion; but it is significant, even so, that we should once again be hearing the clapped out language of Reason, Science and Progress at just the point where the West, confronted with radical Islam, seems in need of some rather more robust selfjustification for its activities than postmodemism can provide it with.

But that's it for the "new atheists" (I can't tell from that if he thinks Reason ought to be a good way of providing some self-justification, but doesn't think Dawkins or Hitchens did it well enough; or that he's against Reason and Science too). There's much more about capitalism, the bourgeois, and a general lack of faith in the West. Either Eagleton has recycled his quotes from a couple of years ago word for word, while radically altering what's around them, or 'Erasmus' has fairly badly misdescribed the lecture.

[rug]

2. His critique of "new atheism" goes back at least ten years.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching

The contrast as I see it is between a criticism of an ideology because it is unmoored from demonstrable reality, religion, and a criticism of an ideology because it is unmoored from economic and political reality.