Be More Secular!

 

Browsing through the Salon the other day I was greeted with the following: “I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?" Thus says a philosopher, Phil Torres, who has, he informs us, given up on the ‘New Atheist’ movement. He finds its story to be one of promise unfulfilled unlike those, such as myself, who sniffed out its anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism from day one. I am not here to gloat however. He has figured out, finally, that New Atheism is in fact a racist con that uses secularism as a wedge issue to sell right wing policies and attitudes to liberals and progressives who might otherwise be suspicious of them. Good on him for he is correct. New Atheism is utterly illiberal in conception and we are now seeing that played out in the chauvinism and racism that inspired it from the very beginning. The fact that it has made literally everybody with a keyboard an expert on religion and what is wrong with it has also been a cultural disaster; inspiring verbal and physical abuse of ‘others’ and, in general, spreading a noxious cloud of stupidity over an important subject.                         

Part of this has to do particularly with North Americans (and to some extent, also, the culturally fading, embittered English). America, in particular, is an unhistorical nation and one often finds that otherwise quite sophisticated Americans simply cannot think historically. This is indicated in Mr. Torres’ opening salvo. He poses three questions with which he thinks a child can stump the wisest theologian. Presumably, for 1700 hundred years, Christians sat around drooling until Hume, or perhaps Tom Paine, invented thinking-for-yourself. Certainly Anselm of Canterbury did not (did he?) devote three masterful treatises to the very questions Mr. Torres think are instant slam dunks for team atheist. Well, alas, it seems he did. He touched on the free will of Satan in a short but dense work called De Casu Diaboli. This work is one of the most comprehensive and brilliant treatments of the problem of evil I know. The same may be said of his treatment of the atonement (Cur Deus Homo?) and his penetrating (if polemical) development of the Latin doctrine of the Trinity (Contra Errores Graecorum). For the a-historical American, though, this never happened as nothing significant happened (or could have happened) before 1776 (and by the way liberals exemplify this vice exactly as much as conservatives do- yes I’m looking at you Naomi Wolf). Thus, any atheist who stumbles on the notion that triplicity and unicity formally differ (on the dianoetic level of number) must be the first person in history to have had this sublimely simple realization. What is more, he must then rush to the internet to announce that he has ‘destroyed’ Christianity and shown up all the pretentious theologians and their meaningless jargon. 

 There are, however, worse vices than a-historicism and though I have had to be a bit hard on him I think Mr. Torres is absolutely on the right side: that of compassion and justice rather than hate. HE wants to remain secular and be a better person than secularists have hitherto been. What advice would I give him about how to do this? Well the first thing to do if one wants to be properly secular is to question existing assumptions about epistemic privilege. The reason people like Hitchens and Harris can issue ignorant and ill-informed comments on Islam is that they are Anglos: they are global aristocrats who, like all aristocrats everywhere, do not need to explain or defend their judgments to others, particularly brown or weirdly dressed others. New atheism is about the privilege of white Anglos to say exactly what they want of their social and cultural inferiors. This is why they are free speech advocates. They want to caricature and typify freely as an expression of their cultural hegemony and are enraged when women or brown people talk back or, worse, when people who have much better academic credentials than themselves talk back on their behalf. This aristocratic insouciance is the source of their anti-intellectualism and their contempt for ‘learned theologians’, philosophers of science, post-modernists, post-colonial theorists and other specialists in fields they have a God given right to be ignorant of. The New Atheists did not devolve into this mindset. It was their point of departure as with Dawkins’ idiotic attack on Popper in his essay “What is True”.

That Mr. Torres has shown EXACTLY this insouciance in the opening sentence of his otherwise excellent piece is an indication of how much work needs to be done to de-center (which is NOT the same thing as cancelling) Anglo-centric discourse (a term I prefer to Eurocentric because continental thinking is such a bugbear for this crowd). The issue is starkly simple. As a philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition Mr. Torres is simply not responsible for knowing that Medieval thinkers worked out the complex metaphysics of the Trinity. In fact, I am sure he thinks I am a ridiculous pedant for even pointing it out. This is because his interests and his expertise are the assumed norm against which deviations are measured. This is epistemic privilege. I am not responsible for accounting for my approach to philosophy for it is the assumed backdrop of normalcy. It is him, that guy, who must account for and defend HIS interests and his approach if they happen to differ. Similarly, if I declared myself a Rastafarian I would have to explain and justify that choice though no wealthy denizen of ‘Babylon’ has to explain or account for his attitude to Jamaica or Trinidad (at any rate he always has Pinker to tell him that the enlightenment has been as great for people in the Caribbean as it has for people elsewhere). Thus, if I made comments about Evolutionary Psychology as ignorant as Mr. Torres’ comments about the Trinity I would rightly be called on the carpet as someone lacking intellectual integrity. I have to know what Mr. Torres knows but he does not have to know what I know. He does not have to know anything about Christian or Muslim or Hindu thinkers for their discourse is not privileged. This is why the insouciant aristocrat Dawkins can say openly that he doesn’t have to read any books by theists to know they are bunk yet assumes as a matter of course that his opinions should be heard with respect or even deference. When a female philosopher, Mary Midgely, criticized The Selfish Gene Dawkins (of all people) complained he had been insulted! 

This is why, as a Christian philosopher, I am assumed to be answerable not only to other philosophers but to comedians, magicians and sci-fi geeks who know literally no relevant texts on any subject pertinent to religion and could not interpret them intelligently if they DID know them. And, this is the kicker, I am otherwise as white and privileged as can be! Unlike visible minorities I do not have to answer for how I look before moving on to any other topic. Of course, one causes anger even by pointing this out. Normally, epistemic privilege (the right not to have to explain who you are and why you think as you think- the right not to have to know about the other though the other must know about you) is enforced by shrugs, eye rolls or simple silence. Plus, if the ‘other’ uses a philosophic vocabulary different from the usual one she can be accused of spouting pretentious nonsense or stringing together meaningless syllables. SHE will be asked to explain what the hell she means (on the assumption she cannot) while more familiar, though equally obscure, terminology gets an automatic pass. When this fails, though, when privilege is pointed out as privilege and its lack of inherent necessity is adverted to, the result is rage. This rage is followed, as night follows day, by the charge of relativism. Surely if MY epistemic standpoint is not the only correct one then NO epistemic standpoint can be correct and we devolve into anarchy! Surely we will open the door to witchcraft and voodoo if we shake the reigning consensus even one little bit! Well, here is where we fail to be critical enough. Here is where we fail to be SECULAR enough. Pointing out the dangers of relativism does not establish a single thing as true or false. It is a fear based reaction to any criticism that cannot be automatically dismissed. Centers of assumed privilege exist to be questioned and probed according to the ‘secular’ enlightenment itself! Skepticism, in the ancient and proper sense (not the ignorant, shrill James Randi sense), is the willingness to examine all foundations, in fact, the DARING to examine all foundations in spite of any fear for ‘social order’ or ‘the prestige of science’. If then, anyone wishes to be truly secular they should stop worrying about ‘western civilization’ and start practicing it in the best sense. They should put under scrutiny not only the 'foolish superstitions' of the other but their own most cherished convictions.

One final thing: nothing I said about privilege above is said by way of complaint. Privilege in the sense I mean above has always existed and will always exist. Privilege may even be earned. However J.S. Mill explains to us what this means in a 'secular' context. Earned privilege that ceases to be tested and prodded becomes dead custom. To keep its status as 'earned' any privileged discourse must pass the test of debate or we forget the grounds on which its privilege was earned in the first place. The danger of course is that upon re-examination we may find that the ground has shifted and what seemed obvious in the past has ceased to be so. That, however, is the risk we take in being 'secular' and, as Kant put it, in daring to know.