Condell's Chauvinism.

The YouTube anti-theist Pat Condell has come out as a sympathiser, if not a supporter, of the English Defence League. You can watch the video above and decide that for yourself. I first encountered Condell's online videos in 2007 after I googled the word 'Islam' and I immediately found 'The Trouble with Islam' video which kicked up a fuss in Berkeley and has since racked up about a million hits. That was when Pat Condell really exploded onto the internet scene. He has faced challenge and accusations of racism. I remember when his video 'Welcome to Saudi Britain' was banned from YouTube and the ban was reversed after many people uploaded the video again and again in protest. That's not the only triumph Condell has enjoyed. He has brought out a DVD with a quote from Dawkins on the front, as well as a compilation of transcripts and racked up millions of hits.

After clicking on Condell's profile I found the video 'Hello America' in which Pat railed against the Christian Right, George Bush and Tony Blair, the unforgivable wars they had started and the subsequent abuses of civil liberties. He was even critical of Israel, or rather those on "both sides" stubbornly refusing to compromise for peace - but he insisted that Jerusalem should not belong to Israel. He described the Patriot act as a charter for fascism. These points differentiated Condell from the right-wing strain of anti-Muslim sentiment, which we find on the right-wing of American, British, French and Israeli politics. It appeared as though Condell stood outside the neoconservative narrative in his insistence that Bush and Blair were 'evil evil' cunningly disguised as 'good evil'. He described the 'War on Terror' as a war on freedom, and pointed out that Osama bin Laden's activities fed into this very same poisonous narrative.

For a while Condell stuck to his guns, consistently committed to individual liberty, humanism and secularism. All the while the former comedian lacked the cuttingly posh accent and mannerisms of fellow anti-theists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He was scathing about scientology, the Saudi regime, the GOP and televangelism; but it was always clear (as with the 'New Atheists' in general) that Pat had a special place for Islam on his hit list. He has issued calls for the burka and halal meat to be banned. When talk of 'Islamization' first emerged Condell was quick to join in with the Muslim-bashing. He came out in opposition to the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque', which was actually a religious centre funded by Sharif el-Gamal - himself a realty developer who probably votes Republican. It was in 2009 that Condell came out to distinguish himself from the liberal Left, which he dubbed the multicultural appeasement lobby.

At the time Condell struck back at accusations of racism by insisting that the human species constitutes one race, but it still holds a variety of religions and cultures within that scope. He then went on to claim that we are being 'invaded' by the cultural values of a religion which is inherently fascist. It's standard for rightists to use 'culture' as a convenient synonym for 'race' in its opposition to immigration, particularly Muslim immigration. The line between criticism of Islamism, Islam and Muslims is repeatedly and deliberately blurred to this end. All the while political correctness and multiculturalism provide easy targets for people like Pat Condell. One would think that this freedom-lover might welcome new citizens to join his free society and get away from the dictatorships of West Asia. But these people aren't fit for freedom in Pat's mind. The welcome reaction on the radical Right to Condell should surprise few outside of the bubble of post-political 'New Atheism'.

Just in time for the 2010 General Election the online face of 'New Atheism' came out in favour of UKIP. It was a surprise for many of his subscribers. He was soon thundering about the Guardianista Left, repeatedly accusing the liberal newspaper of anti-Semitism and of supporting Hamas; as well as slamming the BBC for being apart of the 'progressive consensus'. It's not clear whether Condell changed, or if this is how he always felt. It's plausible that he was always a reactionary hiding behind the tenets of bourgeois liberalism. By now Pat had developed a much less enlightened line on the Palestinians and had ranted about the London riots with ferocious reactionist bile. He pinned it on a culture of welfare dependency conducive to "mental disablement" and going on to compare the rioters to vermin and parasites. He fell in line with the gutter press in calling for stripping the rioters of their benefits and arming the police with guns.

There is an obvious nexus binding together a variety of forces with anti-Muslim prejudice. It's the hatred of Islam that forms the common ground between certain clumps of nationalists, conservatives and liberals. It's a cultural chauvinism with underlying orientalist assumptions about Arab and Muslim culture. It is no coincidence that there has been a resurgence of anti-Muslim bigotry since the attacks of September 11th 2001. For the neoconservatives and other assorted hawks the attacks on the World Trade Centre provided the pretext to declaring war on Iraq. The new obsession became Muslims and their way of life, almost succeeding the traditional place of the Jews in the far-right imagination - as a force that the Left is using to destroy Christendom. Then there are the liberal guardians of tolerance and freedom, who were so unsettled by the events of 9/11 that they found themselves unable to resist taking the side of civilisation.

New Atheism at Home and Abroad.

 

Here we find the confluence of scientism, rationalism and liberalism in its fetishism for progress, reason and freedom. Things can only get better and better, so long as we don’t let barbarous myths like religion get in the way. If we cast down the religions of the world, at the side of the road of history, we can look forward to greater freedom, pluralism and democracy. New Atheism is not exactly new. As Eagleton points out, it draws upon once vanquished grand narratives of Reason and Progress just as Western liberalism needs to rearm after the strike against it by anti-political Islamic purism.[1] By that time the world had supposedly been in a post-ideological, post-political and even post-historical age. All grand narratives could be sealed and forgotten, yet with the actions of nineteen murderers another narrative – of terror – had to be pulled open.[2] With the interventions in the Middle East came the old rhetoric of mission civilisatrice.

It was then that Christopher Hitchens decided to abandon socialism and commit himself to an aggressive secularism and an even more aggressive foreign policy. He soon found allies in biologist Richard Dawkins and, later, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. It is to their credit that neither Dawkins nor Dennett supported the invasion of Iraq. Whereas, Sam Harris argues in the event of an imminent nuclear strike by Iran the best recourse would be to compound a Holocaust. And this man has the nerve to write a book claiming that science can solve our moral dilemmas! Terry Eagleton is not wrong to view the New Atheists as the ideologists of the ‘War on Terror’. Eagleton argues that the very act of trying to close history down in 1989 is what sprung it back open in 2001.[3] On the one hand the arrogance of Western imperialism and, on the other, the ‘new enemy’ of radical Islam. The paucity of advanced capitalism was exposed to violence with no such metaphysical anaemia. All of sudden ideology was needed and with that the Bush administration reached for neoconservatism.[4]

There was a debate on the invasion of Iraq held in 2005 where Michael Parenti was called in to challenge Christopher Hitchens on his loyally pro-war position. In his opening comments, Christopher Hitchens conceded that the fall of the Berlin Wall had opened up a period of peace and prosperity, which seemed to look forward only to widening the scope of pluralism and democracy.[5] He calculates that this illusion lasted for six and a half months from New Year’s 1990. For then came the annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević had declared war on Bosnia. These events signalled that the authoritarian state-ideology was not a distant memory of a barbarous past. Then came the slaughter in Rwanda a few years later, the continuation of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. All of these events made it clear, in the mind of one Hitchens, that there are still forms of totalitarianism which we must fight.

Later in God is Not Great Hitchens makes it clear that he views religious belief as inherently totalitarian in potentia to conjoin his anti-theism with his commitment to American foreign policy. The Ba’ath regime in Iraq was not a secular one precisely because it vested total authority and power in one man demanding faith from all its subjects. It then follows that the only alternative is liberal capitalism. This is why Hitchens took the view that neoliberal globalisation is a revolutionary force in the world. At one point Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.”[6] He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution, martyrs, saints, prophets, and mutually excluding papacies.

Yet the New Atheists maintain their own faith in history as Progress, that the capitalist system will inevitably bring to fruition a liberal democratic state. In Hitchens and Dawkins in particular you find this converges with a rigorous scientism. As Eagleton points out, Western liberalism is anaemic and requires more than itself to fend-off belief. This is where the need to resurrect grand narratives that had been discarded. And so Christopher Hitchens joined forces with Richard Dawkins in a bid to wage a war for reason against faith. The religions of the world are the last obstacle for Progress to circumvent. Of course, Hitchens accepted as a man who had read Freud that the religious sentiment may well be ineradicable. And what could be better than that? It’s an enemy that will always be there to justify the place of imperial America in the world. Just as the Soviet Union justified American imperialism in the Cold War.

This post was originally written for A Bigger Society.

---

[1] Eagleton, T; Culture and Barbarism (2008):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN6FcBXlIcA

[2] Eagleton, T; Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale University Press, 2008) pg.142-144

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hitchens, C; Parenti, M; Iraq and Future US Foreign Policy (2005): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MufGs0MQrPg

[6] Hitchens, C; God is Not Great (Atlantic Books Ltd, 2007) pg.151-152

Snipping away at Liberalism.

Since I first wrote about circumcision with regard to the liberal doctrine of free-choice and the communitarian emphasis of religious faith I have discussed the issue of male circumcision with friends and strangers. I was led to these discussions after being accused of being an apologist for religious absolutism and even theocracy. It's the first time that I've really looked into the issue and it seems as though there may not be an easy answer as to the legality of the procedure. It's clear why female circumcision should be illegal, it is unambiguously about the sexual repression and punishment of women. This is not the case with the circumcision of young boys, the evidence is ambiguous as to whether or not circumcision diminishes the sex life of men. It's also the case that the circumcision of women is not a religious phenomenon, rather it is a relic of a barbarous past. It precedes the Abrahamic religions in Africa and used to be prescribed to cure 'mania' in Europe.

It has become all too ordinary, especially in Europe, for cultural chauvinists to hide behind the shibboleths of bourgeois liberalism. In this view anything that constrains the capacities of the individual has to be shunted out of the way. It used to be the state, now it’s anyone with any beliefs which might prefer a stronger state. No wonder the cultural conservatives who slimed the Left have found common cause with liberal secularists. The self-proclaimed opponents of the state have come together to empower the state further in order to rid the world of fanaticism. It gets weirder as the guardians of free-choice come to defend the imposition against choice. The self-described libertarian Geert Wilders has called for the banning of the Islamic veil, the banning of the Quran and no doubt lots of other barbarian fetishes. Only the Western liberal lifestyle option can be chosen because it emphasises choice, freedom and pluralism.

Nevertheless it is the liberal democratic system of human rights, civil liberties and equality of opportunity which the reactionary Right want to throw under the bus. Let alone multiculturalism and political correctness. All of this is worth defending from the cultural chauvinists and crypto-fascists. The aim isn’t just to get at the freshly settled Muslim community of many European countries. It’s about bashing Muslims to get to the real enemy, liberalism. The same is true of so-called counter-terrorist legislation, it infringes on our basic liberties and not to protect us. It’s the destruction of civilisation rather than the defence of civilisation. The traditional authoritarianism of the European Right rears its hideous casque once more in this way. That isn’t to say that the hatred of Muslims is purely extrinsic. It’s very real and shouldn’t be underestimated in its role in the populist projects of cultural rightists and chauvinists.

We can tell this much from the campaign against homeless Muslims in France where the far-right have set up soup kitchens that only serve pork-based soups. Likewise, the closet fascist Mel Gibson lashed out at Jews on the silver screen to get at the Vatican and its concession that not every Jew is guilty of deicide. Here we find anti-Semitism fits into an ultra-traditionalist Catholic agenda in rebellion against Rome. It’s not that the Australian ham-actor isn’t a Judeophobe; it’s that there is something more going on than a prejudice. This is relevant as we find increasingly the Muslims of Europe are pinned as alien to Western civilisation and subversive to the liberal precepts of capitalist society. There was a time when Jews were taken in the same light. And it is no coincidence that we find the attempts to restrict the freedoms of Muslims has slid into restrictions on Jews as well. This is most blatantly the case with the calls for bans on halal meat and circumcision.

I was eager to take the side of the religious groups that would be affected by a change in the legal status of circumcision for good reason. It would seem that there is more going on when people are calling for a ban on a practice of Muslims at a time of raging Islamophobia. This is where we should ask ourselves further questions about what it means to live in a liberal society. If we take seriously the bodily integrity of a child as well as freedom of conscience then we would be led to the legal regulation of circumcision rather than a ban. This could take the form of stipulations, that the operation has to be performed by a professional with anaesthetic. We might even go for an age of consent. Liberalism leads us to this compromise between secular individualism and religious communitarianism. The call to ban circumcision is suspect given that it is possible to find a compromise within the realms of liberalism. That's before we even consider the political context of Europe, with its authoritarian traditions of conservatism.

Power, Faith & Unbelief.

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." – Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal agreed with George Bernard Shaw that the subjects which interest civilised men can be narrowed down to politics and religion. Not just in Creation but in his 'inventions' Kalki and Messiah. The religious instinct in man fascinated Vidal, especially as he saw the late 20th Century as a period of the deterioration of the traditional religions. Meanwhile he had preempted the rise of the death cult in America in his 1954 novel Messiah. In the bourgeois fetish for the cultures of the past Vidal found great hopes for our civilisation in the Stoics of Rome and the Confucians of China. The great mistake of humanity, in his view, was monotheism in its claim to universal truth and he held Christianity in particular disdain. In his novel Julian the focus is the Roman Emperor Julian who sets out to undo the union of Christian dogma and state-power in order to revert back to the plurality of Paganism. This exemplifies the liberal side of Gore Vidal, his loyalty to secular humanism.

It is typical of Gore Vidal in his 'reflections' to blend history, religion and politics in fiction for the reason that the court historians are so awful that the novel is now the only medium that can redeem history. In Creation the protagonist is a member of the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the earliest monotheism, and witnesses the murder of Zoroaster. Cyrus is on the side of monotheism in the book, as well as the established powers in Persia and holds the masses in contempt. This is in contrast to Vidal's own political views, which could be taken as a hybrid leftism. In the book the political leaders of the time, particularly Thucydides and Pericles, are juxtaposed against one another as conservatives and democrats. The chaos of China is presented as a land which may conceive of the totalitarian impulse, while at the same time Confucian politics are received in a very positive light. Cyrus Spitama identifies himself with the conservatism of Thucydides as well as of Confucian hierarchical order and practical moral values.

In Creation Gore Vidal takes us on a tour of the ancient world, from Persia to Cathay and back, with Cyrus Spitama as our guide. Spitama is embedded in the ruling class of the Persian Empire, whilst also being descendent of Zoroaster and a follower of the Wise Lord consequently. Many of the major philosophical and religious ideas of the time are explored in the book, in Ancient Greece Cyrus encounters many philosophers and delivers his tale to his nephew Democritus. It was appropriate given the affinity Vidal had with the atomist principles espoused by Lucretius and Democritus. The vision was of a cosmos as a kind of soup of atoms bumping up against one another. The book culminates in the exposition of the atomist philosophy by Democritus. In another sense the relationship between Cyrus Spitama and Democritus mirrors the relationship between Gore Vidal and his grandfather Thomas Gore. Specifically the passing of the elder's wisdom to the young man.

The focus on the Persian Empire rails against the Western vanity, the tendency to see itself as a great fusion of Hellenism and Judeo-Christian values. Creation begins with Cyrus leaving the Odeon as Herodotus goes over his own version of history. The portrayal of Ancient Greece is just as one of many great powers rather than the centre of the world. The warring forces of China in the days of Confucius as well as the rival kingdoms of India feature prominently. The relativity of Greek glory to the lessons of the Buddha and Confucius, Mahavira and Lao Tzu. It's more than a novel, it is a work of comparative religion and philosophy crafted to persuade the reader not to be so arrogant in his modern assumptions. This is not to say that Vidal isn't writing from a position beyond commitment. Vidal was a lifelong atheist and opponent of monotheism. If anything he wants to enlighten us of the possibilities beyond the desert God of Abraham. The novel was timed well with the rise of Reaganism and the emergence of the Christian Right.


For Gore Vidal the threat of the Christian Right is equivalent to the threat of Le Pen in France, in other words it is fascistic and anti-democratic in nature. The accumulation of obscene piles of wealth in a few private hands matches the concentration of power in American society. This creates a systemic need to block democracy at every turn. Vidal would remind us that the political system in the United States is not at all democratic. First of all, there is only one political party with two right-wings - the Democrats and the Republicans - which is the party of property. Chomsky has spoken in these terms too, except he called it the business party. There is a structural need within capitalism which can be differentiated in terms of a base and a superstructure. The economic base depends upon the ideological superstructure for its legitimacy. The relation of the base to the superstructure is not just dependency, there is a tension between the pluralism and relativism of the market against the sociality of institutions and tradition.


The management of this tension can found in the revival of political religion in the new world. The Christian Right was born out of the attempts made throughout the 70s by conservatives to regroup after the losses in the last decade. The Nixon administration left America disillusioned with politics, only for great hopes to arise with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The failures of the Carter administration to achieve significant change cleared the way for Reagan in 1980. Nowadays it is almost compulsory for American Presidents to be Christian: No unbelievers allowed! But it wasn't always this way. Crucially it was Carter who had made religion an issue in his openness about the faith to which he subscribed. This could be taken as a long-time result of the Christian revival of the 1950s. Really it was the 1960s which convinced many Christians that the shared fabric of society - its traditions, institutions and moral values - was about to be destroyed in its entirety. This is less a story of a Christian Right than the story of the New Right.

The debacles of the early 60s such as the Cuban crisis and the assassination of JFK the Establishment was shaken to its foundations. Everywhere there seemed to be collapse as the issues of civil rights, racism and imperialism became the moral battleground in the American body politic. The obvious opponent for Gore Vidal was William F Buckley, l'enfant terrible of American conservatism, and they would cross swords repeatedly in debates at party conventions in the late 60s. Around this time Paul Weyrich infiltrated the student Left and was astonished by the level of planning and tactics that he witnessed. He realised that the conservatives were wrong in their assumption that the people would support them because they were right about the issues. In actuality what was needed was a movement capable of rolling back the achievements of the Left. It would be a counter to the counter-culture. The key was the mobilisation of the religious, who were largely apolitical.

As Adam Curtis notes "The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics." The New Left had actually laid the groundwork for the entrance of right-wing Christians into the political realm. The issues of gay rights, abortion and sexual discrimination mobilised the Christian Right because the liberalisation on these social issues threatened the way that they led their private lives. Then Jimmy Carter abolished the charity status of the religious schools. For many it was the last straw, enough was enough. Paul Weyrich reached out to Jerry Falwell, the product of this backroom deal was the Moral Majority. Falwell pulled some strings in order to pull together numerous right-wing preachers in America. The aim was now not just to convert, but to register the converted as Republican voters in what would later be known as the culture wars.

The network of preachers were soon spreading anti-Carter propaganda and then an obvious alternative revealed himself to the newly political Christians. It was Ronald Reagan, the old hero of libertarians, who had been trashed by Gore Vidal in a debate with Buckley. Vidal had condemned Reagan in 1967 as an aging actor with little knowledge of the world outside the United States. This is on top of viciously draconian policies were hardly friendly to blacks and the poor. Before a crowd of Christians, at a mass rally, Reagan said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would only want the Bible to read. The election could've been won without the Christian vote. It was about a movement that could be used to influence and shape the political discourse. The right-wing hegemony turned the debate towards social and cultural issues on which the liberal Left had to be marginalised. Meanwhile the Right could implement an economic agenda as the leading political issues were moral.

Hitch is Dead, again.

Requiescat in Pace.

So Christopher Hitchens has given up the ghost, to borrow a Biblical turn of phrase, for the second and final time as it was around a decade ago that Hitch died intellectually. He was a gadfly so contrarian he eventually became conservative. The transition from revolutionary soixante-huitard to heartless war-mongerer was not a sudden one. When Hitchens first became a journo he was an international socialist, which might be understood as a heterodox Trotskyist, the shift began as Hitch turned democratic socialist in Orwellian vein, no doubt, a position as oppositional to the Communist Party as it was to the Conservative Party. He supported the Falklands war, as well as the intervention in the Balkans, before the notorious defences he gave in favour of the criminal invasion of Iraq. The worship of a particular kind of masculine hero is constant in Hitchens' thought. Even though he admired great radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Decca Mitford it was Leon Trotsky who he nominated as a subject for discussion on Radio 4.

It's hard to believe that he's actually pro-life as he rails against the Vatican on issues of family planning, contraception and birth control. But after that realisation it isn't a surprise that he has a problem with women in the workplace. Then we find Hitchens calling the Dixie Chicks "fat sluts" and claiming that it is only unattractive women who need to be funny. The way in which Hitch lambasted Diana Spencer carried the tone of sexism, she was a "gold-digger" comparable to a landmine in that she was "easy to lay" as well as "dangerous" and "expensive" to get rid of. It may even be said that Hitchens picks on what he considers to be "lesser" men, that his fixation with the sex life of Bill Clinton came down to the view that he was not a real man. No wonder feminists are suspicious of the Hitch for his shallow attacks, which repeated what we all knew already, on the likes of Mother Teresa with the title Missionary Position which he picked over Sacred Cow. Apparently the latter was in bad taste, which Hitchens would never sink to.

As wonderfully righteous Hitch was as he cast aspersions on Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, Hitchens was never that left-wing when Alexander Cockburn knew him and always foresaw he would jump ship to become an "insider". Even in the critique of Clinton and Kissinger he only ever repeated what was already known, but it had to be articulated in a clear and concise manner which would captivate, entertain and persuade. The list of the crimes Henry Kissinger committed had to be put together and by the late 1990s it was well overdue. As for the "horrible primate" William Jefferson Clinton, the point that the man may be a serial rapist had to be pulled into public view by someone as the mass-media was too compromised to do so. The defences he gave of George Bush and attacks on God were not so much contrarian as complicit and shallow. Noam Chomsky was right to characterise the media as a parade of "independent minds", as it was Christopher Hitchens posed as a "free-thinker" as  he endorsed the Republican Party platform and bought into American exceptionalism. Not to mention the shift from the Bolshevism of Russia to the classical liberalism of America.

It should be noted that the Hitchensian idiolect, as Richard Seymour calls it, was nothing original as Hitchens never broke the intellectual mould. The form of the argument was the main attraction and not the content. We get the feeling that it was the same for Hitchens himself, at least to some extent, when he said that he wouldn't rid the world of religion if he could because there wouldn't be anyone else left to argue with. But he had difficulty in handling complex ideas, as Seymour notes, which was matched by his ability to spew an emotionally potent tirade. We find this may be the case when it came to Hitch's eventual abandonment of socialism. Hitchens points out that there is no international working-class movement nor a socialist alternative (at hand) to the market economy, as for the anti-globalisation movement it is frightfully conservative insofar as it yearns for a pre-industrial world. He never engaged with the view that the Left needs to "begin again", as Slavoj Žižek would advise, nor did he attempt to solve these problems and instead retreated into a strange mission indeed.

To be more precise, the collapse of Communism had convinced this former Trot of nothing less than the mission to export the American Revolution. Everything else had become reactionary, no "excuse" could be made for Islamo-fascism nor could it be "accommodated" and it could only be annihilated. This is when Hitchens became a chickenhawk. And so it was, the radical Hitchens was long gone and now arse-licker Christopher Hitchens dedicated his energies to the values of the Enlightenment as best manifested in the establishment of the United States. Here we should turn to the prescient words of GK Chesterton: "Men who begin to fight the church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church… The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them." As Hitchens sought to secure the Enlightenment values of the West he supported the invasion of Iraq and, in doing so, helped make al-Qaeda the most successful terrorist organisation in history.




We might detect the fumbling Hitchensian egomania in the background of this most destructive endeavour. As Hitch himself notes in the aftermath of 9/11 "I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery." He went onto add "All my other foes, from the Christian Coalition to the Milosevic Left, were busy getting it wrong or giving it cover." Before finally spilling for all to see: "Other and better people were gloomy at the prospect of confrontation. But I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost." The fight was guaranteed to go on and on because the fight regenerated the opponent in the very act of confrontation and would do so endlessly. We can bomb Muslims to stop terrorism and in doing so create more terrorists which leads us to bomb more Muslims and in turn create more terrorists...

It was with the rise of New Atheism as the Iraq war descended into a bloodbath that the Hitchite cult emerged, it proclaimed itself beyond Left and Right as it voted Republican and ranted about Muslims. This was the low-point of Hitch's career in journalism and writing, it became evident that he would never rise to the heights of Gore Vidal whom he had set out to ape out of a self-described "penis envy". It is difficult to ascertain to what extent the lurch to the Right Hitchens took in public, and not just behind closed doors, may have been a careerist publicity stunt. We may never know. Noam Chomsky said 10 years ago "Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, there is no reason for anyone else to do so. The fair and sensible reaction is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past." Of course, we wouldn't have want him back after everything he had done to ingratiate himself with power and massage his ego.

Pat Condell on Norway.

So the face of New Atheism has commented on the recent massacre in Norway perpetrated by a right-winger who was wound up about multiculturalism, radical Islam and cultural Marxism. Pat Condell is probably sincere in his condemnation of the use of violence whilst he speaks of a war between violent barbarians and civilised people. The same can be said of his tirade against the suggestion that the right-wing critique of multiculturalism has contributed to the pool of hate from which Breivik emerged armed to the teeth. The problem being that the ideas expressed in Breivik's manifesto come from the mainstream and can be traced from the standard conservatism to the outer reaches of ultra-nationalism. We find he read columnists Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Phillips as well as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Unabomber. Breivik took the words of the Unabomber and replaced words such as "blacks" with "Muslims" and "leftists" with "cultural Marxists".

So the way that Pat Condell just objects to the implied "complicity" of all critics of Islam in this crime is absurd. It is not the case that the common responsibility falls to neoconservatives, Zionists, right-wing liberals and fascists because of the commonality of ideas, it is the shared ideas which are the problem here. The tendency towards a form of anti-Semitism which hides behind a philo-Semitic love of Israel but draws a distinction between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews is symptomatic of right-wingers in the mainstream as well as on the lunatic fringe. Then there is the fervent opposition to political correctness and multiculturalism as an outgrowth of a left-wing conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation. You can find plenty of talk about the PC Brigade on the mainstream along with the line that there is a left-wing elite in the shadows of public policy. These lines only become more extreme in tone at the outer-reaches of ultra-nationalism. The same goes for the bile that the Right spews over anything remotely Islamic.

You must notice that the line Condell takes is that the use of violence is counter-productive and will never win over the people. The restoration of democracy in Europe can only come with the mass-support of the people according to him, by which he means the end of the European Union. Only the fanatics believe otherwise, a distinction which Condell uses to separate Breivik off from the discourse which he himself is embedded in on YouTube. It is about method more than anything then and yet he calls for a "defence" of freedom of speech no matter what. He may not have meant those words in any violent way, but it is the case that the radical Right have taken an interest in him and for good reason. The issue for Condell is still Islam in Europe, there is no mention of the media's immediate reaction to the massacre. Instead he rages over the suggestion that the right-wing opposition to multiculturalism might have something to do with this event. He goes onto reiterate the old lines that Islam is a "totalitarian ideology" and a threat to freedom, while political correctness is "cultural Marxism" and multiculturalism is a "lie".

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene.

 

You may have read of the New College of the Humanities which AC Grayling is eager to set up, which will charge £18,000 a year for a course and has £10 million in private capital to back up the scheme. The major selling point being the staff of money-grubbing dons which includes Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson among others. These are the intellectuals whom Grayling designates as "pink around the gills and a little bit left of centre", which might just be a sign of delirium on his part. Grayling argues that the decision came in response to the slashing of public subsidies to the humanities and the hike in tuition fees. It looks more like brash opportunism to me, but that would not contradict Grayling's claim. Appropriately, Richard Dawkins will be teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy at the New College as he is the prominent author of several books on the subject including The Selfish Gene.

For those who have been following the latest documentary by Adam Curtis you will know that Richard Dawkins was a student of Bill Hamilton and George Price, he had also been a computer programmer before he studied science. The work of these biologists had led to the conclusion that the human race are basically automata capable of self-reproduction, the actions of human beings are guided by the genetic codes which adhere to a rational strategy of which the aim is to pass on copies of themselves. The individual is only the temporary host to such genes, which calculate our behaviour even in a way which Price understood as the workings of a computer. Hamilton argued that the calculations went as far as to produce altruism as a survival strategy. The radical conclusions of Hamilton and Price brought down the Enlightenment view of humanity as distinct from animals and nature. It also undermined the role of religion in society and thus Dawkins has played a leading role in the rise of New Atheism in the 21st Century.

George Price and Bill Hamilton were each affected by the revelations in different ways. Price was an obsessive rationalist at first and yet he attributed the equations to God and had a religious awakening, which led him to devote his life to helping the homeless and then killed himself in 1975. Hamilton went on to become one of the most famous scientists in the world and was given the highest honours from the scientific establishment. He later traveled to the Congo where he looked for evidence that AIDS was the result of experiments by American scientists on chimpanzees. The chimpanzee version of HIV was then transmitted to humans through vaccinations for polio, Hamilton died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in 2000. Importantly, Hamilton always held that Price's religious awakening was superstitious and he would have been better off to continue his work in genetics than helping the homeless.

Years before his awakening George Price had worked for IBM and helped construct the first mainframes of computers, for him the equations of Hamilton could be understood in computing terms. Price was a free-lance science journalist dedicated to smash superstitious myths in order to promote rationality. For him computers and mathematics were the key to saving the world, we can measure happiness and contain Communism with mathematical equations and computer technology. When Price discovered the work of Bill Hamilton he concluded that the human being was simply a soft machine controlled by an on-board computer. The mathematical conclusions of Price explained murder, warfare and genocide as strategies undertaken by the genetic codes which control human behaviour. Some people may even be wired to be murderers, we might kill distant relatives in order to secure close relatives for the sake of our genes.

By the time of his death Bill Hamilton had written a series of books which took the logic of Darwinian ideas like natural selection to an extreme conclusion. He argued that Western scientific innovations should not be utilised to prolong the lives of the genetically inferior. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategies of the genes. We should take a stand against the slide into degeneration and against the scientific establishment, which he thought had covered up its own part in the creation of AIDS. He believed that the desperate struggle of everything to pass on its genes explained everything. For him there was no room for altruism and the weak should be left to die. Hamilton died after he contracted malaria, refused to take the proper medication and instead took aspirin which caused his gut to hemorrhage. As he died Hamilton knew he would live forever as a genetic code which he had transmitted in his life time.

With the particular brand of evolutionary biology, promulgated by these men, Richard Dawkins went on to dismiss the exaggerated notion of free-will and in much more vivid language which the scientific establishment could not marginalise as easily. As a result these ideas were able to seize the public imagination. Dawkins argued that the behaviour of human beings is guided by genetic codes, which are almost like an on-board computer. We are simply machines which are interconnected and constitutive of a higher order. Each of us play tiny roles in a vast strategic game in which different genetic codes compete with one another and have done for centuries. For Dawkins the individual is a machine for passing on genes, he would emphasise it is the selfish gene but not the selfish individual. For it is the selfish gene is the immortal replicator, not the selfish individual and so there is room for plans to do what is conducive to the happiness of the largest number of people.

In spite of the strenuous rationalism of George Price, Bill Hamilton and Richard Dawkins, the three of them had recreated the idea of the soul as the genetic codes of human beings. These codes are immortal and will survive us into eternity with no distinction between good and evil. The existence of the individual is lesser than the genetic code which will surpass us and ultimately carries greater significance than us. At his most un-Christian moment Dawkins declared that we are descendent of a "tiny elite of successful ancestors", we carry the ancient "wisdom" of that elite with us in the form of DNA which is a lot like a computer code which has archived all that was good about the past. For Dawkins our ancestors were "winners" which might explain why he oozes complacency and smugness when he claims that the people alive in the 21st Century are more moral than the people who were alive in the 1920s. It would seem he is devoid of a sense of tragedy or even the most elementary form of moral realism.

It should also be noted that Richard Dawkins adheres to the Enlightenment conception of history as Progress, which Christopher Hitchens and numerous other New Atheists are also ensnared. The Progressive view (in the Herbert Spencer sense) of history was also shared by Bill Hamilton, which would be why he thought there is no need for radical change and we should just leave the "losers" to rot. The obvious moral outlook for Dawkins is utilitarian as he seems to have a bit more compassion than Bill Hamilton, but not enough to see that the New College of Humanities is a thoroughly disgusting proposal. Though it is the bourgeois self-interest proposed by Hamilton which is much more in line with the trajectory of their Darwinian outlook. It is clear that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins' work comes with the Thatcherite project interwoven into it, in a manner which is a lot like a genetic code funnily enough. It would seem that it is not coincidental that the liberals have become obsessed with matters of secularism whilst the radicals have started to look into theology more and more.

We should take note that the Fascist promise of an alternate modernity has changed a lot over the decades and the liberals have managed to shape it along the way. Though not in specific relation to Dawkins, but in relation to the post-political theories of genetics and technocratic liberal ideas favoured by the New Atheists. There is the permissive quality in postmodern nationalism today that claims it wants to restore free-speech by giving you the right to call coffee black which also allows us to call black men niggers. There is also a new affinity for technocracy and evolutionary economics among the radical Right. This would explain the alliance between the EDL and the Tea Party against Islam, let alone the support of the EDL for the spending cuts in Britain. It is clear that these crypto-fascists do not offer a 'social revolution' to buy-off socialism just before it could be killed off with the untermenschen.

In the last twenty-0dd years political struggles have been castrated as politics has been transformed into nothing more than management of society. The end of the Cold War supposedly marked the End of History as liberal capitalism went global. The old politics of grand narratives were then tossed aside, the world was beyond 'big ideas' now and the new politics would be managerial and pragmatic. But the evolutionary ideas of Hamilton and Price remain influential in our society to this day, above all the idea that human beings are automata controlled by genetic codes and we may have embraced that idea because we live in a world in which everything we do either good or bad seems to lead to terrible consequences. We have no idea what to do about the problems in the world in order to provide a comforting answer, a fatalistic philosophy, to excuse our failure to change the world no matter what we do. It also fits in neatly with the ideological constellation of our times.

Hitch is Dead.

By Hitch is dead, I mean that the Hitchens who was once wrote alonside Alexander Cockburn for The Nation and stood with Noam Chomsky at conferences is no more. In this sense Christopher Hitchens has been a zombie for quite some time. In death he is, what he dreads so much, a cliché. As the soixante-huitard turned chickenhawk known as Christopher Hitchens may not live to write the obituary of Henry Kissinger. Recently Hitch (his new nickname) was in a debate with Tony Blair on whether or not religion is a "force for good". Ironically Blair thinks that Mubarak was a "force for good", but still we're too overlook the criminal and immoral nature of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. A debate over whether or not Blair is a "force for good" would make the supposedly 'radical' Hitchens appear as he is, thoroughly and blindly conservative. That reminds me, before we get our trousers off, to point out that the above picture is inaccurate as Christopher Hitchens is actually pro-life and is only permissive of abortion out of pragmatic reasons.

I have meant to write an article on Mr Hitchens for a while, especially since he charged Gore Vidal as a conspiracy theorist in his usual modus operandi in February of last year. A great irony considering Hitch modelled himself on Gore Vidal, going as far as to compare his admiration for Vidal to "penis envy". But as a result of my busy schedule at the time I put off the article to summer about the time when Hitchens discovered he had cancer. This put me off, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out that Hitchens "waited til his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly". Then again I've never bought into the idea that we shouldn't speak ill of the dead and dying just out of courtesy. This is on top of the fact that Hitch has kindly pointed out that his "attack" on Edward Said was actually a critical review of Said's work and was released with the 25th year since the publication of Orientalism - not with Said's ill health.

If we want to talk seriously about Hitchens we must take note: it is no coincidence that the liberals are increasingly fixated with secularism, while the radical Left becomes interested in theology. Nor is it coincidence that Christopher Hitchens has drifted to the Right over the last 20 years. Both of these have come after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War which heralded the end of history as Fukuyama put it. The old ideological struggles were over, the power of the market and liberal democracy had triumphed over all other systems. By 1989 CHitchens, who was in Romania at the time, had been involved in Third Camp politics of the Left for over 20 years. Originally aligned with the International Socialists which stood in opposition to Really Existing Socialism as well as capitalism. Later Hitch turned towards democratic socialism. Note the prominence of leftist men of action, as well as of the pen, namely Trotsky and Orwell.

In spite of giving a pep-talk to the Bushites in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and actively defending Bush as a viable alternative to the Democrats, on issues like Palestine, he still insists that he is a radical leftist. Hitchens reserves the label of "cliché" to pin on those who accuse him of becoming a conservative. It would seem as though Hitch can't stand the idea of being looked back on as a socialist who became a reactionary in later life, a cliche if there ever was one. So out of desperation Hitchens tries to hold together a "leftism" of sorts. To clarify this version of "leftism" that Hitchens buys into, it is so vacuous and hollow that it is possible to be conservative and adhere to it. For Hitchens there is no chance of a working-class movement developing, that could replace the international movement of the 20th Century. At the void where there should be a conspicuous socialist alternative to the market economy Hitch points and shouts that Karl Marx underestimated the "revolutionary" nature of the capitalist system.

All the while he labels the anti-globalisation movement conservative for it's nostalgic for a pre-industrial world. There is a ring of truth to such claims, but the conclusion drawn by Hitchens is not entailed by them. Revolutionary America has replaced the October Revolution for him, the jump has been made from Leon Trotsky to Thomas Jefferson. The admiration for George Orwell still lingers on, one of the more conservative figures in socialism. As Richard Seymour has pointed out Hitch still buys into a scholastic type of Marxism which singles out the US as the major force of historical progress, as the USSR is gone, against the forces of reaction. In this struggle against reaction, e.g. al-Qaeda, Hitchens has adopted the language of 19th Century imperialism. Recall the words of Mill "Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be their improvement." The same thought-process is in Hitchens' support of atrocities in Iraq.

Rather than taking these problems as reason for the Left to "begin again", as Slavoj Žižek argues, Hitchens offered no solution and opts for identity politics. Specifically New Atheism, which is an endless intellectual war against religion in the name of Progress. Note Progress, in the Herbert Spencer sense, with a capital 'P' that holds all those Victorian connotations of liberal interventionism and free enterprise. The faith in historical Progress is a major part of the identity politics which Hitch now prescribes. In his endorsement of the "War on Terrorism" he went as far as actually delivering a pep-talk to the Bushites. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton, he's gone from dining with repulsive fat cats and giving them a piece of his mind to just dining with repulsive fat cats. Hitch has criticised the Bush administration in retrospect, as "impeachable" and "incompetent", whilst expressing modest regrets over Iraq (that the conflict strengthened Iran). But these are meaningless gestures, that have been brought on only by the misadventure itself, ignorant of the conditions under which the invasion was pursued.

It was GK Chesterton who said "Men who begin to fight the church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church… The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them." The same is true in vice versa, that the fanatical defenders of religion have ruined religious things. The terrorists are prepared to destroy this world for love of another world, the warriors on terror are prepared to do away with democracy out of a rejection of the Judeo-Islamic civilisation. The ultimate paradox being that some of them love human dignity so much that they are even ready to legalise torture to defend it. In other words, to defend Western values we must infringe upon those values relentlessly. This could not be demonstrated more clearly than when Fallujah was virtually torn apart, killing 6,000 and forcing 150,000 to flee, Christopher Hitchens remarked "the death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [Jihadists] have escaped."

Out of his enthusiasm to invade Iraq to fight dictatorship and fundamentalism in the name of democracy and freedom, Hitchens has flung away such values and ideas. Free and democratic elections were only held after a great deal of resistance to the occupation from the Iraqi people, the aim of regime change was not to hold elections but to install a softer Saddam. Freedom and human rights are hardly flourishing in the "fledgling democracy", which is why Muntadhar al-Zaidi was tortured. Before free elections could be held the economy was overhauled, mass-privatisation and deregulation handed over the country's public services to the forces of the market without a mandate from the people for such policies. 80% of the oil was divided up, not by the "invisible hand", between American and British companies. Corporation tax was slashed and loopholes prepped to allow multinationals to transfer all profits out of Iraq untaxed. All the while companies like Halliburton and Bechtel lined up for multi-billion dollar contracts handed out by executive order.

This is the intellectual death of Christopher Hitchens, it converged several years ago with the beginning of an unjustifiable slaughter in the Middle East, the bloated corpse has been floating around face-down for quite some time now. The corpse has drifted so far to the Right it can no longer be turned from this trajectory and can only decompose along the way. It is ironic that a former Trotskyist cannot see how one can oppose both American imperialism and Islamist terror, you simply have to take a side and it better be the right one. The events of 9/11 tore apart the fantasy of American immortality and invulnerability, someone else must die and for the sake of public relations the Other slaughtered is always the bad guy. The Other being the hundreds of thousands of innocents dispossessed and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hitch has secured his special place in the commentariat as a cheerleader for war and oppression. A contrarian so contrarian he hardly realises he is a right-winger even after voting for George the Anointed.