Why the New Atheist movement could do with some Social Justice Lessons Part 1

Okay, here is a dark confession, I used to think that the New Atheism movement was cool and interesting! As a queer boy growing up in a Catholic home in the late 2000s, at the time of that Church being spearheaded by a conservative Pope, I turned to the online world and in libraries, where the new atheism movement was blowing up like Beyonce’s I AM... Sasha Fierce. Here were people who were talking sense, who could shake up our culture from its religious bondage and encourage people to look to modern sources of liberation, rather than (what I viewed as) ancient dogmas of oppression.

Of course, that was a very simplistic and one-sided view which neglected all of the positive aspects that spiritual practice and even the dreaded 'organised religion' can bring to individual and community life, from a hope and guidance to charity and social bonds. It also ignored the tendency of the new atheist movement to elevate white men to the forefront of their movement and to have them amplify stereotypes and defend systems of oppression within our society. These people were not wedded to religious texts, but to power structures and myths that come from secular sources and traditions (or at least have long since lost a religious meaning), but are no less cruel and at odds with our volition of human development than the religions they sought to de-throne. Sex and race were viewed as biological realities and social destinies, as was social class. Eventually, I came to conclude that New Atheism was functioning as a shadow education system, reinforcing the same rotten values of patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy within the our cultures, but this time for people who identified as ‘skeptical' and ‘rational'. This conflict within me was worked through over the course of several years and I eventually found a way to take a more critical and humanistic view of religion and its place in history and culture. For an essay assignment in a fourth year Mental Health module at Uni, my demons were well and truly exorcised on this issue, as I argued, against my teenage self, that religion could play an important role in emotional wellbeing- like the dramatic defeat of a Big Bad in a Buffy season finale, my bad romance with New Atheism was wrung from my soul as I wrote the words. Okay, cringey level of 2000s references and i will cool it for a while.

So with that in mind, I want to challenge the giants this movement and of contemporary culture, Sam Harris and Bill Maher. Now, I am not throwing them deep shade that will starve them of light to grow crops, no, they aren’t the worst people in the world, but at least a degree of annoyance with what they do and represent is appropriate. These people pose themselves as the grown ups in a room full of shrill ideologues. Now, okay, I know i can be shrill, but there is a deep void at the heart of the New Atheism movement and that is really worth pointing out and talking about... Just because I get upset and cry and shout and swear and these guys maintain a monotone and wry, ironic smile, doesn’t mean their talking points necessarily have validity. It makes very little sense to talk as much as they do about Islamic terrorism by groups like ISIS and the threat posed to ’the West', as any analysis of ’the facts’ reveals that these are much more marginal as causes of death and destruction in the countries that this movement comes from (mostly USA and western Europe aka ’The West') than a lack of healthcare, social programs, violence within the home and family, suicide or homelessness, which all impact far more of their citizens. Sam Harris has said that he believes in a social safety net, but the welfare state is not an issue that we ever see him mobilise to defend. This is more than a bit troubling as it is no secret to anyone paying attention that the social safety net in many first world countries is more than a little threadbare. To focus on ’trigger warnings’ and ’safe spaces’ and ‘Islamic extremism' to the extent they do only tries to make a mockery of the Left who are the greatest allies in the fight against austerity and for social protection. This lack of proportionality, priorities about goals and understanding of context is one of the recurring themes of the New Atheist movement.

They also argue that the far left and the far right are equally silly and extreme, when we know that the agenda of the far right is literally one of death and suffering for much of the population and the far left only threaten the ownership of the means of production. There is a reverse 'identity politics’ (side note: reverse identity politics is a thing, this isn’t like reverse racism) going on in the skeptic community, where they imply that experience with an issue and emotional investment actually makes people LESS QUALIFIED to talk about the most contentious political issues of our time (sigh). Now, funny enough, this tends to leave people least impacted by social and economic injustice, as the most trustworthy sources - this is hugely problematic! Forget trying to gender balance editorial teams or take on more diverse staff, the ideal is a dispassionate observer, who is almost certainly someone of privilege who can have a debate about politics as a clean, context and consequence-free joust. For a movement that is all about ‘western values' and 'free speech’, they certainly have a narrow perception of what these might constitute…

My greatest (soy-based fake) beef with the New Atheist movement comes in their criticisms of ‘identity politics’, which Sam Harris calls a ‘religion’ and a ‘tribe’. Harris, in his podcast on this topic, argues that issues like 'immigration, gun violence, trade, foreign intervention and abortion’ are best dealt with as single issues and that opinions on any one should not predict those on another. He also argues that ‘guns, climate change and immigration’ are totally unrelated if we are ‘reasoning honestly’ but that opinions on any one of these strongly predict opinions on the others within our culture because people do not reason properly and systematically. He also argues that when speaking about these issues, ‘when talking about reality’, individual experiences and identity are not relevant.

Now, these are two separate issues; the perceived irrelevance of identity and the need to take issues as individual silos of argument before coming to an understanding of them. I think that both of these are so troubling, but they should be treated as separate criticisms, at least at first. Although I think that Harris’ attitude to each of these just reveals a total lack of understanding the purpose of political debate- to the point that Harris even cautions against joining social movements.

Core Values and Worldview, not something to be dismissed.

Now, what is missing here is what could possibly be linking any cluster of concerns, and it is clear that they have come to be viewed as linked because of the actions of those on the Right of the political spectrum as much as the Left. When we talk about ‘guns and climate change’ from a contemporary New Right or neoliberal viewpoint, these issues are linked because regulating anything, from pollution to gun ownership and trying to redistribute resources by progressive taxes are highly symbolic issues, which could signify government ‘overreach' and interferene in a market which is perceived as inefficient. For the Left, who have a very different idea of what freedom means, the concentrated ownership of workplaces, housing and land create conditions were people are likely to be exploited, both ripped off by those who have control of these spheres but also vulnerable to sexual harassment, poor working and living conditions and having little time to pursue projects that they may feel are valued to their life. Immigration and climate change and military interventions are linked in at least a dozen ways, from climate change and austerity reforms making farming near impossible in some parts of the world and more competition for jobs in urban areas increasing the potential for conflict, to interventions displacing people, killing innocent civilians and emitting huge amounts of carbon while doing so. Where the left increasingly sees a complex, moving puzzle, New Atheists and ‘rationalists’ ask us to focus on one face of one bloc at a time. None of this is actually new information and it helps, especially those on the Left who do not have unlimited coin from billionaire backers and resources to be able to find common cause between these policy areas, so you can create a broad coalition of people who are impacted by these struggles. It also seems that the Left and Right seem to have completely different views of the world and especially the of the concept of ‘freedom’, which for the Right includes an abusive freedom, to be held by some, to exploit and to hoard resources and for the Left thinks about the essential needs that have to be sorted out for populations before all their members can meaningfully focus on self-development.

With an ear to the grassroots, you just might learn something

There is also an especially worrying reaction against ‘identity politics’, and the dismissal of people framing their argument by mentioning their closeness with an issue. Individual experiences are said to be irrelevant to social debate, but this is the view from nowhere and reveals the privilege at the heart of Harris’s position. The tragedy is that it is often up to people with direct experience with an issue can bring it to light as a political problem! There are so many contemporary examples of this, from the #MeToo movement against sexual violence, to the concerns raised by residents at the Grenfell tower block in Kensington (who were ignored to such a callous degree that many died in a fire-trap building that they had consistently warned was unsafe), even the residents of Flint, Michigan reporting that their water was contaminated with bacteria and heavy metals.

Now, the Grenfell tower disaster and Flint Water Crisis both have become symbols of everything wrong with neoliberal capitalism, the pulling back of the state, the strict enforcement of austerity measures (gotta slash those deficits, sorry poor folks) leading to a lack of oversight, as well as the valuing of human life according to ethnicity and income and decisions (about water sources and cladding materials) being made on the basis of cost and not human interests. The #MeToo movement has become an unstoppable force like an Atlantic storm and social attitudes to sexual abuse has made a few decades of progress within a few months. It is unclear if Sam Harris and his ‘reasoning honestly’ about single issues ever allows people to unpack the wider implications of such catastrophes and to prevent these monstrous events from happening again. Harris and his centrist, rationalist friends commit themselves to incrementalism and caution against revolutionary shifts within society. I have never seen anything from Harris to suggest that he even believes there might be a righteous anger in these situations, and how this outrage helps to bring issues into the public eye, or if this is just a foggy minded-over attachment to him. The perfect 'reasonable actor' is always going to be someone with no skin in the game and can’t be the standard we hold our political discourse to in a world of unequal power relations, abuse and trauma.

How to achieve change? a strategy that leads to political power, not only to being the winning Debate Team

There is a far more obvious problem with this though, which is that the dispassionate discussion of 'the facts’ is no sure route to political power. Problematic ideas about gender roles and social class in our society are not held because people have come to them after a dispassionate analysis of statistical data, but because of the process of socialisation and the stories that we have been told. Right-wing, individualistic arguments take hold of the public imagination in TV docudramas, newspapers and hulking, corporate-backed neoliberal and neocon think tanks. Giving up on anger and even empathy, seems like the left conceding some of the most powerful tools that we have, for what? Do Harris and pals not realise that people who are putting forward progressive ideas at a structural disadvantage in any discussion, because of where Overton’s window currently lies and because the Right has a near monopoly on every major distribution channel to promote their ideas.

The left can and should talk about the number of people killed by austerity policies and the scale of the homelessness problem, how social reproduction is totally devalued within society, back all that up with peer-reviewed research, but that doesn’t mean that people will believe us, even when we bring footnotes! What we need is to uproot the myths that the New Right have unleashed and/or benefited from within society, and we do that by telling new and better stories, about individual realities which illustrate the experience of millions. A million anecdotes can be a data set, can be a story about a social problem that is so powerful that it demands change, and demands it now - yep, gone full whiny, entitled millennial again ;-) ! That is one of the greatest strengths that the left has, as it has the potential to empower people in the process, and to help them see that they are not alone in their struggle and that their emotions provide an energy to organise, but they are also totally rooted in lived experience of oppression!

That is why I am no longer a New Atheist or a Rationalist- I am a radical, a humanist and I am vulnerable as a snowflake but ferocious in a winter storm.

References and Resources

Sam Harris podcast in which he gives a lot of the opinions about identity politics which I discussed here- https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/ask-me-anything-5

a Useful resource is this interview with author Christian Parenti, who speaks about the links between climate change, neoliberal politics and conflicts within Syria, Yemen and the response from Europe. -http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30666-christian-parenti-on-climate-change-militarism-neoliberalism-and-the-state

Sam Harris on Bill Maher show, talking Islamic terrorism and ‘a war of ideas’, notice how nearly all of the responsibility for tackling terrorism is put back on Muslim community and how terrorism is used interchangeably with Islamic terrorism, despite far right terrorism being more common within the US - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV7eVvph69Y

Shame Ewen, writing for the Fire Brigades Union about Grenfell and deregulation- https://www.fbu.org.uk/blog/grenfell-lessons