Review: Evaluating the Rich Ambiguities of Western Atheism – The Wire

When, in the 11th century, the great Central Asian Islamic philosopher Ibn Sn or Avicenna (as he was known in his Latin reception) composed his commentary on the main works of Aristotle (384-322 BC), he also commented on the latters Meteorology. After summing up Aristotles view that humans inhabited both the northern and the southern hemispheres while the tropical zone in between was too hot for habitation, Avicenna rejected the idea that there were humans in parts of the Earth unknown to Islamic geographers. After him, Ibn Rushd or Averroes (d.1198), another canonical Aristotelian Muslim philosopher, and Ibn Tibbon (d.1232), a Jewish philosopher who wrote Aristotelian commentaries on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes and translated Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew, would repeat Avicennas rejection.

The scholar Franois de Blois proposes an explanation for why these Muslim and Jewish thinkers, like St. Augustine in the early fifth century AD, rejected what pre-Christian thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus found an acceptable possibility:

For the monotheist religions of the Abrahamic tradition, for Jews, Christians and Muslims, the idea that there might be people in inaccessible parts of the earth, or indeed of the universe, is a profoundly distressing one. God created Adam and Eve from whom all mankind is descended [] So are the people in inaccessible continents deprived of any hope of salvation? How does this fit in with Gods justice?

He concludes that all these objectors to Aristotle belong to the same tradition in that they share the same aversion of the Abrahamic religions to any notion of religious or cultural pluralism, adding that the circumnavigation of South America and Africa in early modern times not only debunked this Abrahamic attachment to universal Adamic descent, it also heralded the return to, may I say, the cultural relativism that is one of the more endearing traits of the world of ancient paganism. But such early modern cultural relativism did nothing to prevent the European genocide and colonisation on Christian grounds of such circumnavigated lands.

Seven Types of AtheismJohn GrayAllen Lane, 2018

At any rate, this dogma of universal human monogenesis forms one half of the object of John Grays critique in Seven Types of Atheism. The other half is the idea, also the invention of Christian monotheism according to him, of universal progress through history. In acknowledged imitation of William Empsons 1930 study of linguistic-poetic ambiguity,Seven Types of Ambiguity, John Grays book evaluates the rich ambiguities of the word atheism as it figures in modern Europe and America, discerning seven broad types in seven chapters respectively.

The first of these is scientific atheism or the position that sincereligion is bad science it can be debunked and replaced by good science, a position that originated in 19th-century European Positivism. Among its descendants, notes Gray, is the Soviet Union that declared hundreds of thousands of members of former clergies of all religions to be former persons and sent them with their families to their deaths in camps as part of a campaign for scientific atheism.

Also among its descendants are the racist evolutionary humanism of Julian Huxley (d.1975) and the American new atheist Sam Harris who calls for a science of good and evil, assuming without evidence that it would support liberal values of human equality and personal autonomy while defending the practice of torture as being not only permissible but necessary in what he describes as our war on terror.

To Grays genealogy, we must add Chinas ongoing genocidal campaign to remake Uighur Muslim identity on the model of state-mandated scientific atheism. Gray writes: Typically, exponents of scientific ethics have merely endorsed the conventional values of their time. His chapter on this type is brief because he finds it too easily refutable: religions arise as natural human responses to the need for values and science, no matter how good it gets, cannot close the gap between facts and values.

Grays second type concerns secular humanists which include Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell among others. What members of this group share beneath their overt differences is an understanding of historical time as progressive for humanity. Whether through a single apocalyptic upheaval or after the Protestant Reformation gradually over time, they held that humanity could only improve over time.

Whereas for Plotinus (270 CE), the non-Christian founder of Neoplatonism, the ultimate aim of human endeavour was returning to the cosmogonic principle of reason by exiting time, for St. Paul, St. Augustine and their consciously or unconsciously Christian legatees the ultimate aim was collective improvement in time. Marxs philosophy of history is Christian theodicy repackaged as humanist myth, Grays writes. Mill remained a Christian even in his explicit repudiation of Christianity, argues Gray, because he founded the orthodoxy of the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion. Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity even as he earned liberal opprobrium by reporting from Soviet Russia that methodical mass killing was central to the Bolshevik project.

Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity. Credit: Anefo/Wikimedia Commons, CC0

The method by which Gray traces intellectual genealogies is not, as George Scialabbas review of this book characterises it, guilt by somewhat far-fetched association. For what these thinkers share with Paul and Augustine namely the idea of collective human progress is not just a trope and does not form part of other pre-modern religious traditions. However one judges Grays positions on Marx, Mill and Russell or on Nietzsche and his vulgarisation in America by Ayn Rand which forms the focus of this chapters last part acquaintance with even just the broad features of pre-modern Islamic, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist models of historical time confirms the correctness of Grays main contention.

The Jain view of time as a beginningless, endless cycle, writes John E. Cort, scholar of Jainism, does assign privileged place to the human. But neither here nor in Mahayana Buddhist traditions (which reserve Buddhahood for humans), nor even in Hindu ones, do we see any conception of humanity as a whole or of that whole improving over time.

Not even all Islamic universal histories, despite sharing the schema of Adamic descent with Christian and Jewish salvific histories, always conceived of humans as a collective subject progressing through time. Rashiduddin Fazullah, the remarkable early 14th-centuryJewish-Muslim historian to the Mongol Emperors of Iran, composed A Compendium of Histories, a universal history in Persian unlike any of his Persian-Arabic models. Whereas his models had traced human diversity back up to Adam and Eve and triumphally down to the authors own patron dynasty, Rashiduddin followed such a monogenetic account with accounts of spatially dispersed Jewish, Christian and Buddhist communities that were irreducible to the Biblical schema. Evidently, the sheer demographical diversity of the Pax Mongolica and distinctively Mongol nomad heritages combined to undo the dogma of Adamic descent. Something of this seems to have passed into conceptions of historical time among thinkers in the great early modern states of the Islamic world the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires.

For these thinkers, time did indeed contain improvements on previous empires and in various practices. But it contained no sense of collective human improvement towards a goal. The Emperor Akbar (d.1605) thus took personal credit for improved matchlock rifles and getting elephants to mate in captivity among scores of other improvements. But his chief ideologue Abul Fazls Institutes of Akbar, which showcases such improvements, does not yield a cumulative terminus for all humans or even some. The Emperors human and non-human subjects reposed in his justice and justice was a changeless excellence.

Nor does it appear that even all Christian thinkers were in thrall to St. Augustines meliorism. Pseudo-Dionysus, the Christian Neoplatonist of the early 6th century, conceived of human improvement as ascent to divine unity rather than as earthly projects of collective improvement. In this sense, Grays true enemies are Paul, Augustine and their theist and atheist inheritors alone. For Plato and Plotinus, Gray writes, history was a nightmare from which the individual mind struggled to awake. Following Paul and Augustine, the Christian Erigena made history the emerging embodiment of Logos. With their unending chatter about progress, secular humanists project this mystical dream into the chaos of the human world.

Grays third chapter takes aim at the kind of atheism that makes a religion of science, a category that includes evolutionary humanism, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism and contemporary transhumanism. If the first type of atheism aimed to displace the bad science of religion with good science, this type sacralises science. Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution that had actually maintained that natural selection was a purposeless drift with no progress, the best-selling German biologist Ernst Haeckel (d.1919) proposed a scientific anthropology according to which the human species was composed of a hierarchy of racial groups, with white Europeans at the top.

Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution, German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a scientific anthropology. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Whether Julian Huxleys early 20th century defences of scientific racism or A.N. Whiteheads (d.1947) evolutionary theology, such theories depended on a misreading of Darwin that held to the idea of collective human evolution towards a higher purpose. Such misappropriations of science to justify racism, Gray argues, were following in the steps of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment (we read damning quotes here from Hume, Kant and Voltaire) whose racism was a necessary consequence of their vision of humanity:

Voltaires views of Jews expresses, in an extreme form, a theme that runs throughout the Enlightenment. Human beings become what they truly are only when they have renounced any particular identity to become specks of universal humanity [] Once this is understood the riddle of Enlightenment anti-Semitism is solved.

It was a scientific reformulation of morality in terms of Marxs class struggle that led Leon Trotsky to argue in 1938 that anything that promotes a proletarian revolution is justified including the taking and shooting of hostages, a practice Trotsky pioneered in the Russian Civil War.

Qualifying his admiration for the currently best-selling Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Gray notes that while Harari rightly recognises transhumanism as a contemporary version of a modern project of human self-deification, he mistakenly affirms the idea of humanity, a humanist myth inherited from monotheism. Humanity, Grays writes, does not exist. All that can actually be observed is the multifarious human animal, with its intractable enmities and divisions. This disaggregated view of the human animal echoes the aforementioned Rashiduddins vision of humanity as peoples dispersed without design as it does that of thinkers from the ancient world like Lucretius. What would it mean for any human today to adopt such a view as Gray commends?

Yuval Noah Harari. Photo: ynharari.com

Levelling his sights against the millenarian idea that humanity can be transformed in one cataclysmic upheaval, Grays third chapter on Atheism, Gnosticism and Modern Political Religion infers this millenarian pattern in a series of projects. Jan Bockelsons 1534-35 Anabaptist communist state in Munster which involved sexual communism that forced women on pain of execution to be everyones sexual property; Jacobinism of which Gray writes the human cost of the French Revolution runs into hundreds of thousands of lives; Bolshevism in connection with which Gray observes that Lenin aimed to purge Russia of the human remnants of the past and that according to official statistics collected at the time around 80% [of the inmates in the camps of the Soviet secret police] were illiterate or had little schooling; and Nazism which, though a Counter-Enlightenment movement in its rejection of the egalitarian morality professed (if rarely consistently applied) by Enlightenment thinkers, replicated the Enlightenment fantasy of a science of man based in physiology. While acknowledging some differences in motivation, Gray holds that all of these movements fuse a millenarian vision of a universal and sudden transformation of life on earth with the modernised Gnostic notion that dissatisfaction with and salvation from this malformed world could be achieved in history through specialised knowledge held by Gnostic adepts.

A mix of such Gnostic and Pauline-Augustinian progressivism also forms the intellectual core of liberalism, argues Gray. Whether explicitly grounded in the belief in God as in John Locke (d.1704) or implicitly Christian in its overtly non-theistic progressivism, modern liberalisms share an evangelical zeal to impose their values all over the world. In a rare admission of the kind of modern political order he himself validates, Gray closes the chapter by saying that liberalism remains among the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal like other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed. What, then, would a non-imperialist liberalism that is content to remain local rather than impose itself internationally mean for universal human rights? Wouldnt the very idea of such rights have to be abandoned in abandoning the idea of humanity? Might that necessarily be a bad thing if it was accompanied by new worldwide conceptions of justice that included non-human animals among the agents with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights? Grays book leads us to raise such questions while only gesturing towards answers.

John Gray. Credit: University of Oxford

Those gestures do not appear in the next chapter that he gives to God-haters like the Marquis de Sade who hated God only to resurrect Him in the Nature he embraced; or like Dostoevskys Ivan Karamazov who refuses without positive alternatives the Christian project of theodicy the attempt to reconcile belief in Gods omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness with the fact of evil in the world.

Rather, it is in the last two chapters Atheism Without Progress and The Atheism of Silence that Gray upholds kinds of atheism that he approves of. Apart from selectively upbraiding Gray for his anti-Communism, Terry Eagletons review of this book accuses him of lapsing in these final chapters into a kind of transcendence without content, of which there is no finer example than what one might call Hollywood spirituality.

But it is not clear that this is the case. The materialism of at least one Grays exemplary atheists the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (d.1952) conceived of nature as a creative energy that produces everything in the world, including the human species and all its works. Like Spinozas (d.1677) monism that Gray admires, Santayanas philosophy was a kind of anti-Platonic materialism that, in contrast to modern materialisms, validated religion as one of many natural or material phenomena that conveyed truths that could not be conveyed otherwise. It also has the virtue of refusing any belief in universal progress. In this sense, Santayana consciously echoed the ancient Hindu philosophical tradition of Samkhya that Eagleton would find hard to characterise as Hollywood spirituality. The problem, rather, is that Gray does not tell us by what criteria Santayana asserted these positions. Were they based on science or just individual observation? Insofar as Gray does not tell us, his evaluation of Santayana remains nothing more than the un-tested assertion of a philosophical anthropology.

This is also the problem with Grays validation of the novelist Joseph Conrads (d.1924) atheism that maintained like Bertrand Russell that the human was a machine burdened with consciousness in a godless and progress-less universe symbolised in his fiction by the sea. But Conrads vision reverts to an ancient tragic model without testing it against many models of historical explanation not all of them necessarily meliorist that were unavailable to ancient thinkers but available to him. In this sense, his misanthropic atheism remains falsifiable even with the negative virtue of not subscribing to universal progress.

Grays qualified admiration for Schopenhauers (d.1860) atheism is admiration for his appropriations of the Hindu Vedanta philosophical tradition to assert, against Christian hopes for salvation in history, that redemption lay in exiting time after purposeless striving. The reappearance in this book of Hindu-Buddhist philosophical motifs is telling. They appeal to Grays atheists and to Gray himself because they were indifferent to historical time and non-universalist. This is also possibly why Islamic thinkers make no appearance in Grays worldwide range of references. Pre-modern Islamic historians typically worked in and assumed governments by means of which they or their kings intervened in history.

Gray is not the first thinker to argue that modern understandings of progress are mistakenly secularised versions of Christian salvific history. Of the cluster of German philosophers of history responding to the Second World War and the Holocaust it was Karl Lwith who first argued this at length in his 1949 Meaning in History, writing:

While the lords of the history of the world are Alexanders and Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers, Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Kingdom of God and therefore of secular history only insofar as the history of the world hides a redemptive meaning.

But the history of the world gives no evidence of such meaning and purpose, Lwith argued, and the world is today as it was when the Visigoths sacked Rome, only our means of oppression and destruction (as well as reconstruction) are considerably improved and are adorned with hypocrisy.

Without saying so, Grays book takes Lwiths misanthropic thesis as a stable assumption on which to mount seven examinations of seven self-professed modern Western atheisms, finding five to be crypto-Christian and two more successfully non-Christian in their non-progressivist indifference towards humanity as a whole. But Grays interventions rest, like Lwiths, on his untested assumption that human nature has been the same mostly just nasty from its beginnings. Does a history that decries most atheisms for being universalisations of Christianity not undermine itself by this unargued universalisation of human nature?

Prashant Keshavmurthy is associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

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Review: Evaluating the Rich Ambiguities of Western Atheism - The Wire