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Unholy Enthusiasm

Jeff Sparrow May 10

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is atheism that holds much of the floor when it comes to religious debate. Led by campaigners such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the lesser-known Sam Harris, non-belief sells itself on the basis of extreme rationalism and forward-thinking. Yet where does this kind of cool logic really lead us? In the March edition of Meanjin, Jeff Sparrow puts New Atheism to task and discovers a darker vein of fundamentalist rhetoric – one that lends itself all too easily to a new breed of Western interventionalism and the ‘war on terror’. A brief extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page, as well as a shorter version with a wide range of comments on ABC’s The Drum.



When, in October 2009, Christopher Hitchens explained to a Sydney crowd how religion poisoned everything, he opened with a little joke. He’d been delighted, he said, to discover his hotel situated in a locale where, if you took an evening constitutional, you could, without fear of embarrassment, ask a passerby, ‘Am I heading for The Rocks?’ The question had often previously occurred to him—but in Sydney, at least, the answer involved directions.

That was the first of several references to Hitchens’ legendary thirst during a lecture advertised with its speaker, cigarette in mouth, glaring belligerently from posters like a drunk at closing time. Even with laughter still rippling around the hall, I found myself wondering why, in a talk about God, it should matter so very much that the audience knew that, yes, Hitchens really did like a drink.

But it was only later, after host Tony Jones insisted our lecturer recite—twice—Monty Python’s drunken philosophers song, that I thought I understood. Hitchens was opening an event calling itself the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. At some level, the organisers sensed that, insofar as the evening featured only a middle-aged Oxbridge-educated intellectual—indeed, one who’d recently been profiled in Vanity Fair, boasting, like every other tiresome baby boomer, about quitting smoking and embracing exercise—we might struggle to believe that much risk lay in an utterly conventional denunciation of a deity in whom scarcely any of us believed. The arguments against God are, after all, sufficiently well established: as long ago as 1842, Marx was comparing atheists who brayed about their intellectual courage to ‘children assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogey man’. How, then, might a self-styled contrarian provide the frisson required for an evening of danger? The more, perhaps, he hinted at whisky-soaked debaucheries (‘without God, all things are permitted’), the easier for us to persuade ourselves that we were all tremendously daring simply for listening.

These days, Hitchens specialises in slapping a veneer of militancy over arguments either entirely pedestrian or deeply conservative or both, spinning neo-con talking points to épater le bourgeois in print or on television. With the New Atheism, however, he has found his metier, a cause in which posturing, parlour-room radicalism serves as both form and content.


 

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