I
don’t know if many of you saw the Atheist Bus a few years ago. It toured around
London for a while and on its side an advert read: ‘There’s probably no God.
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’
I
was reminded of this when I was reading a new book by Francis Spufford called Unapologetic: Why, Despite
Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. He
asked the interesting question: what is the most objectionable word in that
bus-side slogan? There was controversy in the humanist world about the
‘probably’; however, Spufford’s main objection was to the word ‘enjoy’ - ‘stop
worrying and enjoy your life’. The point that Spufford made was that the
underlying implication of this statement is that enjoyment is a natural state
of affairs that’s only being disturbed by people being worried by preachers and
believers - a point of view he briskly dismisses as complete bollocks. ‘Enjoy’
doesn’t really connect with a whole vast range of problems of human experience.
That statement seems to be pitched to an idealised consumer. What would it mean
to someone experiencing loss, bereavement, illness, death, indeed all the
vicissitudes of life? It leaves people with no sense of any hope or
consolation.
But
the Atheist Bus was a great success. Beginning with a Guardian blog by Ariane Sherine – a reaction to
evangelical Christian propaganda that claimed all non-believers were going to
hell – it raised £144,000 in a fortnight and soon went global. The Atheist Bus
is now, as you can see on the campaign website, in every country in the world,
complete with a whole host of celebrity endorsements.
But
here’s the question that interests me about this: the guy with the sandwich
board saying ‘repent, the end is nigh’, that sort of religious propaganda, has
been around all our lives. Why, suddenly, at this stage in history, has this
become the focus of a major campaign among the thoughtful sections of society?
Moreover, why does the campaign have such a shouty character?
Obviously,
it is part and parcel of the wave of so-called ‘New Atheism’, and the
proclaimed ‘four horsemen’ of the movement – Christopher Hitchens, Daniel
Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris – who all wrote books around the same
time as the Athiest Bus appeared, casting heaps of scorn and derision on
anybody who had any religious faith. But we also need to stand back and explore
what’s behind all this, and what’s driving it forward, by looking at the past
10 or 15 years.
In
a way, it’s encapsulated by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who recently died at
the age of 95. In his later, rather gloomy reflections on the experiences of
the twentieth century, in the 1994 book The
Age of Extremes, he commented on the ‘apparent failure of all programmes
old and new for managing or improving the affairs of the human race’. He looked
at the exhaustion of communism, of socialism, of social democracy and
liberalism, and the way in which the key values of humanism and the
Enlightenment had widely been called into question as a result of the
experiences of the end of the twentieth century. As such, it seemed that after
200 years in which human beings had thought that they could intervene to make
the world a better place, historical change was now seen to be taking place
without any subject guiding it. Change had become objectified and the humanist
notion of an autonomous agent is replaced by the notion of a fragile subject –
somebody to whom things happen rather than somebody who makes things happen.
This is a very significant reversal in the whole outlook of humanity compared
with previous years.
If
you looked at the website of the Atheist Bus, the interesting point that it
made by way of justifying the slogan was to say ‘religious advertising works
particularly well on those who are vulnerable, frightening them into believing’
with ‘threats of eternal damnation’. And so we see, this campaign begins from a
sense of loss of subjectivity and then focuses on the notion of human
vulnerability – the idea of the frightened, fragile, pathetic person.
‘Find
out more about atheism and a positive and liberating alternative to religion’,
it continues. But, of course, atheism can’t be a positive alternative to
religion because it’s simply a rejection of God; it’s a negative. It can’t be a
liberating alternative worldview and, indeed, it never was for the great
humanists of the nineteenth century. For Marx and for Darwin, it was always
something entirely secondary to their wider intellectual and political
projects. For Marx, free, conscious activity is man’s species character; human
experience is the foundation of knowledge and the whole concept of the human
self is one who engages in the world, develops an understanding of it and
develops a way of changing the world in order to transform humanity itself. It
is that dialectic, between subject and object, through which society is
humanised and humanity progresses. That’s what has been lost in recent decades,
and that’s what this moment is a reaction to.
The
irony of our anti-religious focus is that the origins of the contemporary
counter-Enlightenment are not to be found in religion, but in the ideas of
secular humanism itself. This is particularly the case with the popular ideas
of science, especially notions of evolutionary science, which are associated
with Richard Dawkins and others in that tradition. However, this is not science
but scientism, where science is extended beyond its legitimate area to make
claims of a wider scope in society.
That’s
the key problem behind all New Atheism. The downgrading of subjectivity, which
underlies our historical moment, is only reinforced by scientism that underlies
the world of New Atheism. This has led to a situation where subjectivity, which
is the key to resolving the crisis of humanity, has become downgraded, not only
by the movement of history, but also by the response to the problems of
religion.
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