Monday, March 23, 2015

We Must Not Join Forces With Atheists We Must Not Be Duped Into That Disaster Again

At first glance, you might think that Steve Neumann's post at Salon,

Atheists’ self-defeating superiority: Why joining forces with religion is best for non-believers, 

is a step in a better direction but it's a really bad deal for the believers and for the left.   If there is one thing that the past thirteen or so years of intensive atheist propaganda online has taught me, it is that when you accept atheists as collaborators, that will be what you get.   They will insist, on the basis of "secularism" in politics and in the public forum, that atheism is to be taken as the norm, the default, the language of discourse and the ideological frame of everything.  As I have been pointing out, in example after example, in context after context, that is not only bad politically but it is destructive of the very basis of liberalism which cannot be separated from its metaphysical and moral roots and survive.  A mere form that is called "liberalism" or "the left" can be asserted, generally an inconsistent and selective promotion of libertarian objectives, but not real liberalism in the American, as opposed to the European, use of the term.

The atheists, never more than a few percentage points of the population, many of whom are conservatives who attack liberalism and the people who liberals have a moral obligation to support, will always insist on having it their way.  The history promoted as the history of "the left" in the media and the academic establishment is largely the atheist, pseudo-left.   The real left, which produced progress for real people in real life, is demoted to some kind of moderation or some kind of accommodation with the right.  That is, of course, best disproved by the viciousness with which the right attacks the very programs that were produced by that liberalism, quite often against the opposition of the pseudo-left as well as the right, before it was adopted and the pseudo-leftists pretended they provided the power to push it through when they never had the power to do anything.

My conclusion, reached in the past 12 years, is that atheism will always be destructive of liberalism because it cannot abide the moral and metaphysical truths of liberalism.   Atheism will always attack the real, true and absolute existence of free thought, consciousness, equality, rights, and, most of all a binding and effective moral obligation to respect those in even those you really don't like or when it disadvantages you and, on a basis of ideological interest, even when it's just a question of abstract consideration.  That is the history of atheists addressing the human mind, morality and life.   The reliance on a vestigial remnant of respect for those as a cultural habit of atheists acculturated in a non-atheist world is not nearly a sound guarantee to make those political reality or for them to endure in a secularized society.

Neumann's citations are rather telling, * the standard resources of current atheism.  Most tellingly for my contention that his call is primarily problematic for the left and not the right is his use of  Jonathan Haidt, one of the "9-11 made me a conservative" type that is so common in the young, relatively, atheists on the make today.   I share a lot of Chris Hedges' reservations and objections to Haidt's thinking and his superficial and dishonest assessment of liberalism, conservatism and institutions.   Here from Hedges' review of the book Neumann cites:

- Haidt, although he has a refreshing disdain for the Enlightenment dream of a rational world, fares no better than other systematizers before him. He too repeatedly departs from legitimate science, including social science, into the simplification and corruption of science and scientific terms to promote a unified theory of human behavior that has no empirical basis. He is stunningly naive about power, especially corporate power, and often exhibits a disturbing indifference to the weak and oppressed. He is, in short, a Social Darwinian in analyst’s clothing. Haidt ignores the wisdom of all the great moral and religious writings on the ethical life, from the biblical prophets to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to the Sermon on the Mount, to the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, which understand that moral behavior is determined by our treatment of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. It is easy to be decent to your peers and those within your tribe. It is difficult to be decent to the oppressed and those who are branded as the enemy.

Haidt, who is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is an heir of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” and who also attempted to use evolution to explain human behavior, sociology, politics and ethics. Haidt, like Spencer, is dismissive of those he refers to as “slackers,” “leeches,” “free riders,” “cheaters” or “anyone else who ‘drinks the water’ rather than carries it for the group.” They are parasites who should be denied social assistance in the name of fair play. The failure of liberals, Haidt writes, to embrace this elemental form of justice, which he says we are hard-wired to adopt, leaves them despised by those who are more advanced as moral human beings. He chastises liberals, whom he sees as morally underdeveloped, for going “beyond the equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.”

You should read the entire review because Hedges shows in his analysis of this book why it is entirely incompatible with liberalism**.

The dream Neumann sees of some kind of unity between atheists and religious people has happened already, it is the history of the American left in the 20th century and today, of the atheists bullying, coercing and duping their way into dominance and the hampering and destruction of the left as a political force in the past fifty years as the atheists have dominated it.  It was a great deal for atheists and a disaster in every other sense.  The reason for that is that they never had what it took to sustain the moral force and strength of metaphysical faith that is the essential holding of the left that can't be sacrificed without destroying it.

If we follow the pleasing looking path of niceness that Steve Neumann points to, it will just prolong our stay in the political wilderness.   Atheists sometimes have mocked the story of Moses leading the children of Israel through the wilderness for forty years.  Atheists have led us into one for longer than that and counting.  The left won't survive any more time wandering around following them.


* Chris Mooney is one of them.  I like him and had hope for Mooney in the last decade as he seemed to be a reasonable atheist who was opposed to the worst excesses of neo-atheism but who has since gone back to working with such groups as Center For Inquiry and whose agenda, including the promotion of GMO the foods industry, is remarkably consonant with them.   I'm afraid that while I still respect some of his work, I don't trust that his other work won't undermine the left in other ways.   He, like Haidt and Neumann is a real sucker for pseudo-science and some really bad analysis.

** Even more illuminating is this passage in Hedges' review:

“People should reap what they sow,” he writes. “People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.”

Haidt lists six primary concerns of those he considers morally whole—care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He believes liberals, because they do not sufficiently value fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity, are morally deficient. The attributes he champions, however, when practiced among social conservatives, often mask a rapacious cruelty to the weak and oppressed. Slaveholders in the antebellum South, courteous and chivalrous to their own class, church going, fiercely loyal to the Confederacy, in short morally whole in Haidt’s thesis, created a hell on earth for African-Americans. One could say the same about many German Nazis and members of most cults. Haidt, although he acknowledges this dilemma in his moral constructions, would do well to ask himself whether there is something deeply flawed in a model of moral behavior that a slaveholder, a member of a cult or a fascist could attain.

5 comments:

  1. I'm happy to join forces with non-believers, or even atheists. The problem is the atheists insist my thoughts and beliefs are invalid, at least judging by the very judgmental atheists one meets on-line. It seems to be their raison d'être, the core of their identity, the source of their being.

    Not all atheists, of course, just the "new atheists." What's funny is that they cannot tolerate that label. Of course, they can't tolerate anyone who doesn't think just as they do. They're pretty much fundamentalists that way.

    Interesting that Haidt is a professor of "Ethical Leadership" at a business school. No wonder American business is so ethically challenged. Of course, as I never tire of pointing out, before economics became a 'dismal science' in order to be more respectable (science = truth, donchaknow! Tyson (N deG) said so!), it was considered a moral philosophy. Which goes a long way toward burying the idea that all we need for ethics is reason. Even Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics didn't have a word to say about the poor and the defenseless; of course, his ethic had nothing to with religion, either. As I recall, concern for the marginalized in Greek culture came along several centuries after Aristotle, and at the point when Greek culture was on the verge of collapse and had pretty much squandered its influence.

    Couldn't have had anything to do with an ethic of "Me first!", could it?

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  2. While I liked the idea of collaboration with atheists out of feelings of fairness and niceness, the study of atheist thought and atheists in history and today have led me to these conclusions. I don't think any kind of left will work without a potent and effective belief in the moral requirements that are the only things a real left consists of. It is hard enough to get those made real in real lives with belief in it, they won't become reality as they are being undermined within the group that is the only one promoting them in politics and society.

    Reading the primary literature of biology and its extension into assertions made about human minds and society has been a real shocker about how it is an obvious danger, which has informed the worst governments in our history but which is, by the materialists among us, insisted on as how to produce the opposite effect. That is such total nonsense and so dangerous that I think opposing it is among the most important things that could be done, today.

    We can't learn from history if it is lied about or covered up or ignored. I used to buy the labeling of the Jewish tradition as discredited by its assertion of God at work through history but I have come to think it is one of its major insights. I don't think things happened in the places those happened and through the people it happened through as some random accident or some universal characteristics that, somehow, don't seem to work other places. I have come to conclude that the people who produced liberalism in those places it rose and became effective had the requisite metaphysical beliefs in the strength that allowed that to happen. That American liberalism rose, against great opposition, to, briefly, dominate would never have happened in a place not prepared for those ideas through their religious beliefs. Liberals were invoking ideas present, though generally latent, in that mindset, they advocated their universal application through a similar holding of justice and the equality of all people asserted in that tradition. That will never happen in a secularized, atheistic culture.

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    1. There was at least one comment at that Salon article throwing out the baby with the bathwater by arguing there is no basis for a "universal" ethic.

      Which pretty much tosses "human rights" out and kicks it to the curb. Because with that "reasoning," ethics are pretty much "whatever I want and can get away with."

      Of course, "reason" will solve this problem; provided everyone reasons the way I do. And if you don't, well, you're just unreasonable.

      Which apparently isn't the same thing as not being the right kind of Christian, but it's exactly like that, too. Only better, somehow. I dunno; I don't think they've worked that out yet.

      Maybe we should ask a professor of "ethical leadership".....

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    2. I think "ethicist" has come to men an academic who says outrageous things to get interviewed and mentioned in the New York Times and on NPR.

      One of the inescapable results of that non-universal "ethic" would be to toss out the moral requirement to practice moral behavior, equally. And with that any kind of democracy would go, immediately, as everyone would decide they were due a higher level of treatment than other people, larger groups would decide that for themselves as would those with more power and resources.

      Every way I look at it, materialism is destructive of even a moderate level of egalitarian democracy, never mind the more exigent morality that liberalism consists of.

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    3. I guess the "ethic" would be everybody agrees with me, and those who don't, are undeserving of democracy.

      Why does "Medea" keep going through my head?

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