I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once?

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.

Tracey Rosen for­warded me her very smart response to an arti­cle in last week’s NYT that reports the U.S. Army’s use of anthro­pol­o­gists in Afghanistan. (It should be obvi­ous, but Tracey is not the Tracy of the arti­cle.) Her response was orig­i­nally addressed to her col­leagues (of whom the B. in the last para­graph is one), but she’s agreed to let me post an excerpt below.

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I’d like to bring up a couple of arti­cles that have stuck with me as I begin to encounter my own political/existential dilem­mas that get raised by field­work because I think that they are also rel­e­vant to this discussion.

The first is by one of our (con­tro­ver­sially) activist brethren, David Grae­ber, who wrote a piece in last January’s edi­tion of Harpers. The title: “Army of Altru­ists: on the alien­ated right to do good,” and the link.

His basic point can be gleaned from the title: viz., the “right” for Amer­i­cans to engage them­selves in the socially ori­ented “good” has been alien­ated from most of the pop­u­la­tion.

Most impor­tant of all, what will be said and done by those of us who take no side in filthy reli­gious wars? The ene­mies of intol­er­ance cannot be tol­er­ant, or neu­tral, with­out invit­ing their own suicide.

Which will it be, Mr. Hitchens? Will you “take no side in filthy reli­gious wars” or will you refuse to be “tolerant, or neutral” (such an easy slip down the slope) and there­fore stave off your own suicide?