The atheist delusion
John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong
Saturday March 15, 2008 The Guardian
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Suddenly, it started to rain, driving me inside.
Which gave me a chance to read Gray's article. I'd much rather be outside instead of in front of the computer. But being inside, it was either John Gray or cleaning the bathroom.
The choice was difficult but Gray won.
Over 4,000 words, all to say that the "radical atheism" of Dawkins and his fellow travelers is a secularist mirror of the religious extremism they decry. That's correct and lightly insightful (by now, everyone and her whiskey swilling grandmama has reached this conclusion). Did we really need 4,000 plus words to say it? Oh, and Gray calls the Nazis into service to make his point. It's almost always a mistake to call the Nazis into service to give your argument punch.
Here's the quote:
Dawkins compares religion to a virus: religious ideas are memes that infect vulnerable minds, especially those of children. Biological metaphors may have their uses - the minds of evangelical atheists seem particularly prone to infection by religious memes, for example. At the same time, analogies of this kind are fraught with peril. Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough. He gives less attention to the fact that some of the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.
[...]
Which teaches us that both the "virus" of religion and "evangelical atheism" very often lead to grief. Sure, we know that. But hold on, didn't the Nazis try to replace the old churches with something called 'Positives Christentum'? It seems they weren't so much "evangelical atheists" as evangelical remixers of religous ideas.
Gray is a smart fellow but reading his stuff gives me a headache. I think Carlin Romano gets to the heart of why:
The Triumph of 'Smugism'
The philosopher John Gray's certainty is certainly unwarranted Article tools
By CARLIN ROMANO
"Smugism" doesn't turn up as a separate entry in dictionaries of ideas, probably because it permeates so many other -isms. Yet it can be isolated and delineated. Consider it the jaunty declaration of large philosophical beliefs with a smack of magisterial certainty, and absence of argument, that's breathtaking.
The picture that belongs next to this -ism in any lavishly illustrated reference work is that of John Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. To Gray, every significant issue is black and white. If there's a prize for two books by a humanist intellectual that contain the most false generalizations, the most blithe offenses against what we mean by conceptual words — dub it the "Mad Booker" — it goes to Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, both recently published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, perhaps as a kind of Dada stunt.
Gray is an egotistical true believer who flip-flops across the old right-left ideological chessboard, while maintaining the attitude that led William Lamb to say of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian: "I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything." Having grown up poor, the son of a shipyard worker in Northern England, Gray won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, received his D.Phil. there, and then taught political science at the Universities of Essex and Oxford, before joining the London School of Economics in 1998.
In the 1980s, influenced by Isaiah Berlin and F.A. Hayek, he blared the trumpets for Thatcherism. Then in the 1990s, he turned on Thatcher, angered by post-cold-war "triumphalism" à la Francis Fukuyama's "the end of history." He became an early New Labour fan of Tony Blair, whom he now treats as a mental defective. More recently Gray came under the sway of George Soros and the Gaia environmental theorist James Lovelock. Having written a number of competent academic books in his area of expertise — English political philosophy — he took the true public-intellectual plunge with Straw Dogs (published in England in 2002 by Granta), unleashing a farrago of broadsides about utopianism, religion, free will, and more.
The rest is a case study of how a tenured intellectual, lured by the footlights, can toss away all academic rigor as he spouts off on radio, contributes one-sided tirades to newspapers, and becomes a pointy-headed hack for hire. Today, at 60, Gray writes as an antipragmatist and nihilist critical of all sorts of politics to make a better world — in short, a crank. He touts a slightly green, Gaia-conscious passivism and favors an Eastern form of contemplation shorn of mysticism. Politically — that is, the kind of politics in which moving one's mouth counts as activism — he's a dyed-in-the-wool hater of Bush and the allegedly "utopian" project of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Gray makes Michael Moore sound like a polite assistant professor.
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full -
<http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=n621j4rm7gbg5x0mwsnz9s5mxky38d0x>
There now, I feel much better.
.d.
-- "I keep trying to tell you people: The sharks are everywhere and they crave human meat! "
Ian Spiegelman
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/