NRIII
--- Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nicholas Ruiz III posted:
>
>
> The atheist delusion
>
> John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have
> got it all wrong
>
> Saturday March 15, 2008
> The Guardian
>
>
>
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html#article_continue>
>
>
> ...............
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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
>
=== message truncated ===
Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III Associate Professor Department of Humanities, Cultural and Studio Arts Daytona Beach College PO Box 2811 Daytona Beach, FL 32120-2811 Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org