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? [Read more]
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. [Read more]
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. [Read more]
