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?

1. Theodor W. Adorno, from “On the Ques­tion: ‘What is German?’”

Having said this, I will risk speak­ing about what facil­i­tated my deci­sion to return. A pub­lisher, inci­den­tally a Euro­pean immi­grant, who was famil­iar with the German man­u­script of Phi­los­o­phy of New Music, expressed the wish to pub­lish the main sec­tion of it in Eng­lish. He asked me for a rough trans­la­tion. When he read it, he found that the book, with which he was already famil­iar, was “badly organized” (schlecht organ­isiert). I said to myself that, at least in Ger­many, despite all that has hap­pened there, I would be spared this. A few years later the same thing hap­pened again, only this time grotesquely inten­si­fied. I had pre­sented a lec­ture in the Psy­cho­an­a­lytic Soci­ety in San Fran­cisco and given it to their affil­i­ated pro­fes­sional jour­nal for pub­li­ca­tion. In the gal­leys I dis­cov­ered that they had not been sat­is­fied with improv­ing the styl­is­tic defi­cien­cies of an emi­grant writer. The entire text had been dis­fig­ured beyond recog­ni­tion, the fun­da­men­tal inten­tions could not be recov­ered. To my polite protest I received the no less polite and regret­ful expla­na­tion, that the jour­nal owes its rep­u­ta­tion pre­cisely to its prac­tice of sub­mit­ting all con­tri­bu­tions to such edit­ing (Redak­tion). The edit­ing pro­vided the jour­nal with its uni­for­mity; I would only be stand­ing in my own way were I to forego its advan­tages. Nonethe­less I did forego them; today the arti­cle can be found in the volume Soci­o­log­ica II under the title “Die rev­i­dierte Psychoanalyse” (”Psychoanalysis Revised”) in a quite faith­ful German trans­la­tion. In it one can check whether the text needed to be fil­tered through a machine, obe­di­ent to that almost uni­ver­sal tech­nique of adap­ta­tion, rework­ing, and arrang­ing, to which pow­er­less authors have to submit in Amer­ica. I give these exam­ples not to com­plain about the coun­try where I found refuge but to explain clearly why I did not stay. In com­par­i­son with the hor­rors of National Social­ism my lit­er­ary expe­ri­ences were insignif­i­cant bagatelles. But once I had sur­vived, it was cer­tainly excus­able that I sought work­ing con­di­tions that would impair my work as little as pos­si­ble. I was per­fectly aware that the auton­omy I cham­pi­oned as the uncon­di­tional right of the author to deter­mine the inte­gral form of his pro­duc­tion had, at the same time, some­thing regres­sive about it in rela­tion to the highly ratio­nal­ized com­mer­cial exploita­tion even of spir­i­tual cre­ations. What was being demanded of me was noth­ing other than the log­i­cally con­sis­tent appli­ca­tion of the laws of highly advanced eco­nomic con­cen­tra­tion to schol­arly and lit­er­ary prod­ucts. How­ever, what rep­re­sents progress accord­ing to the stan­dards of adap­ta­tion inevitably meant regres­sion accord­ing to the stan­dards of the sub­ject matter itself…

2. John Gray, from a review of his new book in The Guardian:

What I learned in writ­ing for the opin­ion columns is that the reader has no oblig­a­tion to move from the first sen­tence to the second or to the third.