One of the consequences of living long enough to get old is that, if you're paying attention, you notice the attrition rate in the consequence of people held in high esteem in your youth but whose influence and even reputation sinks like a stone at their deaths. I've mentioned a number of authors of would-be serious novels and other works who were all over the place in my young adulthood but who I doubt anyone reads anymore. I've said I suspect that Gore Vidal will be one of those. I strongly suspect Harper Lee's first published novel will be read even as her friend and mentor Truman Capote fades.
I remember talking with a lady I knew in her mid-80s, so more than forty years older than I was, she was lamenting that this particular author I'd never heard of and whose name I don't recall, was someone no one read anymore. One of his novels was in the library donation box and I was in charge of culling out the ones which would go into the book sale or to be pulped. I looked at the book and its c 1920s, entirely conventional, Brit academic post-war high purpose and entirely conventional Brit secularism was something I knew wasn't going to ever circulate. I didn't discard it out of respect to his admirer and out of not wanting to have to put up with the consequences of not putting it on the shelf. That sweet little old lady could operate like Louella Parsons if you crossed her. I strongly suspect it hasn't stayed there as now other people are in charge of culling the collection and she's long dead.
That's a long way round to saying I doubt most of the current big names in new atheism are going to be any more durable and for what you can say about them that goes double for the literature of "Humanism". How many people do you really believe read anything that Paul Kurtz [five years dead] wrote? The younger up and coming atheists had already started scrapping him while he was still alive and cognizant enough to complain about it. And even more so the scribblings of his sugar-daddy, the owner of "Humanism" after he bought it in a sort of friendly buy-out, Corliss Lamont. The literature of "Humanim" is, by and large, intellectual pablum which, as the sour-putrid but more honestly and misanthropically nihilistic critic of it, John Gray is based on a dishonest discrepancy between its two legs. Naturalism is at basic and total odds with the melioristic progressive sugar coating that people like Kurtz* and even some of the real philosopher who pushed it, such as John Dewey (before the Lamont buyout) put over what was irredeemably the nihilism that must come with materialistic naturalism. None of them, even Gray, is willing to really take their monistic ideology to its logical conclusions - and in order for it to be true, it MUST be taken to its end or it is false.
“Today, liberal humanism has the pervasive power that was once possessed by revealed religion. Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.”
John Gray: Straw Dogs
I disagree with everything Gray says about that topic, though, because he, like all advocates of naturalism, holds out that there is such a thing in the holy religion of naturalists and materialists, science, when to be logically rigorous, the basic claim that everything is a product of material causation, including our thoughts are determined, the same regime of debunking the significance of all of our thinking must include science since that is just another application of the same debunked minds. He did claim that, he said, "Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.” How he could claim that the same deluded minds he debunks, individually and especially in the common consensus among a collection of deluded minds, could have in that one frequently applied, frequently debunked methodology have achieved the progress he denies in all other instances, is a colossal failure of honest rigorous thought. I haven't come across how Gray proposes the methods of science (which were invented by people and whose boundaries formal, professional science often transgresses) escape his program of discrediting but it must be by resort to a claim of real magic or it is merely dishonest.
If you haven't read any of Gray, and if you do you might want to keep the suicide hotline number as the bookmark, you can get some inkling of his thinking in this interview in the New Humanist, but an even better take on it is this critical review of his most read book, Straw Dogs, by Terry Eagleton.
I think Gray's effective critique of such neo-atheists as Richard Dawkins and such other "Humanists" as A. C. Grayling is, actually, a debunking of Gray's own claims. In his writing, he isn't an entirely rigorous practitioner of his own, claimed methods. What he has done is attempted to free himself of beliefs, perhaps of dispelling the "shadow of the Buddha" that Nietzsche said would be the shadow of the dead God which would loom over humanity for, perhaps many centuries and, as Nietzsche knew, but few others dared to carry on as far as he did, leads to complete moral and intellectual nihilism, nothing survives it but power and will. Gray stops short of the logical end of his programe because he's set up science as a shadow of the very same thing he derides.
Looking back over my own progress away from such elite academic bull shit over the course of the last quarter century or so, the more the entire enterprise of modernity, which was based in a similar illogical, overextension, overselling, misrepresentation of what science was, what it could do and what it could not do, and a misrepresentation of huge numbers of claims which could not meet a rigorous definition of science and an attempt to impose its hegemony over the entirety of academic and human thought and life, all of that was no more than an illusion of light. They didn't get rid of a shadow or drive back a "dark age" which is more a polemical ideological lie than anything else, they replaced the enhanced ability of some of science to make things on the success in figuring out some basic means of predicting and controlling physical regularities. It's not magic and its extension past where it can really be done achieves what success it does on the basis of hunches and people forgetting when such hunches and the sometimes catastrophic results were sold as science.
The Selfish Gene and the rest of Dawkins' production will, I am fairly confident, be less and less read in the future but I'm thinking of going through it to find more examples as dishonest and bad as Dawkins' famous "first bird to call out" nonsense and the claim I noticed that at one time genes enjoyed the "freedom" to swim about independently in the sea - something so incredibly stupid that I can't believe someone hasn't called him out for it before now - at least not in anything I've been able to find. I can't believe someone who has held a chair in the "Public Understanding of Science" has been able to peddle two such ideas as science, that someone who is considered a geneticist could claim that genes had an existence independent of living cells, not to mention the incredible assertion that genes "enjoyed freedom" that Dawkins and any other serious naturalist-materialist must deny to human beings.
Materialism-naturalism-"physicalism", etc are a symptom of intellectual decadence and, when those are expressed as science, as they are, constantly, today, a symptom of the intellectual decadence that scientists have brought science into. It's a terrible tragedy because their doing that has made perhaps the most difficult and important task science has ever legitimately taken on, keeping us from destroying our biosphere with carbon pollution of the atmosphere and other industrialized destruction harder and that effort at saving ourselves through our minds couldn't be more desperately necessary. Atheists have trashed the credibility of science, that has to end.
* I wish I'd kept the review of Kurtz's magnum philosophical opus "Exuberance" which compared his writing to Shirley Maclaine's.
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