Reason has a price.

Aggressive secularism has long seemed like the last gasp of an increasingly anaemic liberalism. All of the prominent so-called 'New Atheists' - Ditchkins, Harris, and co. - stand as exemplars of the virtues of liberal democratic capitalism. Faith is the enemy of progress because it has the terrible tendency to reach beyond the liberal framework of individual rights and liberties. As right as Nick Clegg may have been to call for the disestablishment of the Church of England the fact that it was Clegg calling for it proves it is not a radical demand. I find myself sympathising with the conservative tobacco salesman Roger Scruton as he took aim Dawkins with his musket and fired this noteworthy potshot:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.

Not long after that I was amused to find, in The Spectator of all places, a piece on the "cult" of Richard Dawkins. He's still busy since retiring years ago. For just £85 a month you can be apart of the 'Reason Circle' and get discounts on Dawkins merchandise. If you should want the chance to see Richard Dawkins speak at an event then you have to pay £210 a month. Only £100,000 to have a meal with him and gain entrance to the 'Evolution Circle'. That's not where it ends. You could make a donation of £500,000 to have dinner with the man - just the once - and become a member of 'The Magic of Reality Circle'.

The New School for the Humanities comes to mind. It was set up by another 'militant' atheist AC Grayling and it charges tuition fees of £18,000 a year. Is this more obscene than the Dawkins cult? It's a close call. And it was a long time ago that Marx wrote "Now atheism itself is a minor sin as compared with the criticism of existing property relations."

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.

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[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

The Gentleman Bitch.

Requiescat in Pace.

The soixante-huitard turned chickenhawk Christopher Hitchens once said that he had a kind of "penis envy" for Gore Vidal. Indeed the young contrarian had based himself on Gore Vidal and the two met in 1970 at the New Statesman. Eventually the slender Hitchens became the dauphin to Vidal's contrarianism and would later become one of many porky opponents to be outlived by Gore. Over the years the gadfly had stung William F Buckley as a "crypto-Nazi" only to apologise on the grounds that the term "crypto-Fascist" is much more accurate. Truman Capote felt the sting when Vidal described him as a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house". Later Capote's passing prompted the infamous remark "That was a good career move." Then there was Norman Mailer whose positions on women's rights prompted Gore to criticise his old friend. It was at a Manhattan dinner party in 1977 that Mailer threw a whiskey in Gore Vidal's face before heat-butting and punching him. To this violence Vidal quipped "And, once again, words fail Norman Mailer."

On that note Gore Vidal once described himself as a 'gentleman bitch' in his role as a provocateur of historians and the political class. He showed no mercy in his scathing attacks against deserving enemies and reached into areas as seemingly varied as politics, religion, history and literature. As a polymath he tried his hand at novels first then plays and scripts for film as the commentariat turned against him over The City and the Pillar. The mainstream media, with The New York Times in the lead, waged a campaign against Gore Vidal refusing to review his work. Out of this relatively dark time in Vidal worked on Ben-Hur (uncredited) as well as Visit to a Small Planet and a political drama set on a fictional campaign trail The Best Man. History is not without irony as Ronald Reagan auditioned to play the lead in the film adaptation of The Best Man. Reagan was turned down on the grounds that he did not appear presidential. Eventually Vidalian fiction was rehabilitated in the eye of the Establishment, but he remained a controversial figure.

The essay was his preferred form, placing him in the line of great litterateurs, for it was the form which he felt he had mastered and he hoped he would be remembered as an essayist above all else. There is a degree of self-awareness, detachment and cool about Vidal that led Italo Calvino to conclude that he has no unconscious. In his own words Gore stated "I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." He was as much a fixture of American life, its discourse, culture and narratives even in the capacity of opposition which he practiced. Even though Gore was a prominent commentator he remained out of the field for the most part. He could have been a politician with his family background and connections. Indeed he came close to becoming a player in the 1960s. After the disillusionment he experienced Vidal contented himself with the role of gadfly and cynic. In the words of Alexander Cockburn "Cynicism is the birth of opposition."

The contrarian tradition to which Gore Vidal belongs may properly be traced back to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. The taunting and mockery of all power by Diogenes, whether it be the waggling of a plucked rooster at Plato or telling Alexander the Great to get out of the light. It is the case that Gore was more than content to stand on the side-lines, for the most part, and attack both the Democrats and the Republicans. He deemed both parties to be just two right-wings of the Property Party. Vidal wasn't a perfect cynic, for he knew how to appeal to power at times and did so in support of George McGovern, then Jesse Jackson and later Barack Obama. But Gore Vidal remained much more of a cynic than his former dauphin Christopher Hitchens. He hadn't voted since 1964, when he did so to support Lyndon B Johnson, which severs him from the Democrats at the ballot box. Vidal explored the third party option in the form of the People's Party, a left-wing populist party looking to build on New Deal liberalism.

As a controversial figure, right up until the end, he outlived many old opponents and even the unseated dauphin only for Hitch to slander him a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite. This is over Gore's provocative comments on the "War on Terrorism" waged by the Bush administration, let alone his long-time criticisms of neoconservatives and Israel. He first courted controversy as a proponent of gay rights, though he was strictly anti-essentialist in his insistence that there are only homosexual acts and no homosexual persons. Similarly Vidal maintained that the issue of race was a real one, even if just politically. He never bought into the language of liberal multiculturalism and political correctness. The reasoning here is that the issue is not cultural, the US is a case of a monoculture with plenty of room for hatred along racial lines. This was the same man who once rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys, Tennessee Williams and Paul Newman (he didn't mind name-dropping either). The irony of all this is that the ideal Vidalian narrator is a person who sees as much as possible, but is seen the least himself.

See also:
Proposals to Improve the US Government
Vidal looks back on his remarkable life
The Profile of a Writer
Documentary on Vidal
Hot Talk with Gore Vidal 
The Education of Gore Vidal 

Islam, Europe & Democracy.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and an elected Parliamentarian, he is a member of the Party for Freedom and is probably best known for his merciless criticism of Islam. Wilders considers himself to be a libertarian and has named Margaret Thatcher as his greatest political role model. He is opposed to cultural relativism and has referred to Islamic culture as a retarded culture in the past. Wilders produced a short film, which depicts Islam as a fascist ideology, he called the film Fitna and he released the film in 2008. In his own words Fitna is "a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization and a push for Leitkultur".

Fitna is an Arabic word, which is difficult to translate, and is considered to be an all-encompassing word referring to schism, secession, upheaval and anarchy all at once. Leitkultur is a German concept and can be translated as "guiding culture" or "mainstream culture". The culture Wilders is referring to consists of the values and traditions of Judeo-Christianity, Humanism and Liberalism. In 2009, Geert Wilders was invited to Britain by the House of Lords for a viewing of his film Fitna and a debate on social inclusion.

Lord Nazir Ahmed is a member of the House of Lords and is the first Muslim life time peer of the United Kingdom. Most of his political activities relate to the British Muslim community, as well as the International Islamic community. In the past, he has openly criticised the British government for it's over aggressive Foreign Policy and the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Lord Ahmed was appalled by the decision to give Salman Rushdie a knighthood and stated that "It's hypocrisy by Tony Blair who two weeks ago was talking about building bridges to mainstream Muslims, and then he's honouring a man who has insulted the British public and been divisive in community relations." He went on to say in regards to Rushdie "This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world. Forgiving and forgetting is one thing, but honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of, because of what he did, I think is going a bit too far."

Lord Ahmed was sent with Baroness Warsi to Sudan in 2007, to meet with President Omar al-Bashir, to secure the relase of Gillian Gibbons. Their meeting was successful in securing a pardon for Gibbons, a school teacher who had been arrested for blasphemy after naming a teddy bear Muhammad. In 2009, when Geert Wilders was due to make his appearance in the House of Lords, Lord Ahmed threatened to lay siege to the House of Lords, with a force of 10,000 Muslims, if anti-Islamist Dutch MP Geert Wilders was allowed to speak at the House. Lord Ahmed later denied the allegation, whilst Wilders was denied entry to the United Kingdom and has been banned from entering in the future.

Silencing Wilders simply because he holds anti-Islamic views is counter-productive, in regards to furthering integration between the Muslims and non-Muslims of Great Britain, and will probably generate more Islamophobia in the long term future. Fascist Nick Griffin and his racist thugs will no doubt latch onto Lord Ahmed's behaviour for propaganda. Their argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy and therefore has no place in British society, will win over even more people. Well, Britain is technically not a democracy it is a polyarchy. A polyarchy is a system in which the ruling elite of a nation is divided into two or three factions - which have some differences but fundamentally adhere to the same ideology - whilst the rest of society is kept ignorant, fragmented and distracted. In elections the ignorant and distracted masses are given a choice between two or three people who basically have the same policies. So, even if Islam is incompatible with democracy, that is irrelevant because Britain is no democracy. Lord Ahmed may have intended to defend his religion from criticism, but the methods he used to accomplish his end ultimately tarnished Islam as much as the Sudanese teddy bear controversy and the controversy over Muhammad cartoons have done.

Do you really want these people running the United Kingdom?

Banning Wilders and his Fitna from Britain - in an attempt to pacify a man, who was not elected, who is meant to represent British Muslims, and he is threatening violence - implies that the film has a formidable argument; that British Muslims are incapable of peacefully defending Islam. This is utterly insulting to British Muslims and it annoys me that no one is angered by actions like this. Actions that perpetuate the myth that Muslims are intolerant and violent bigots. If we continue to feed this delusion, we in turn feed the propaganda machine of fascist groups like the BNP, we've already got a member of the BNP sitting on the London Assembly like a turd on grass. But how many turds will we let land on our grass before we take a stand and say "No more"?