To give some context to what follows, it is excerpted from (rather silly-titled) I Don’t Believe In Atheists by Chris Hedges (better known as the author of the stinging exposé of the Christian right, American Fascists.) Hedges specifically addresses those whom he dubs the “new atheists”, exemplified by the atheist troika of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, whom he accuses of pushing a brand of secular fundamentalism with utopian ambitions, no less dangerous than the religious variety. This new, utopian atheist—whom Hedges believes is something new; he doesn’t disparage the beliefs of the private atheist, which are personal and possibly hard won—embodies the latest incarnation of some very old and dangerous fantasies: those of human perfectibility, historical determinism, and the denial of human nature. This time it comes wrapped in the language of science and reason, and steeped in the great modern myth of Progress.
Or so the argument goes. I haven’t read Dawkins closely or recently enough to intelligently comment on his critique, but Hedges echoes serious concerns I have harboured about Hitchens and Harris for some time. Hitchens made the conversion from Trotskyite to neo-conservative cheerleader of the Iraq invasion far too comfortably for my liking (raising troubling questions about the authoritarian tendencies of some on the left,) and Harris likewise gets too giddy at the mention of torturing and killing Muslims for my taste. Harris in particular has an annoying tendency of reducing the issue of third-world violence to a mere matter of religion, handily ignoring the exploitation and profound human despair at the root and the West’s role in cultivating it. This is black-and-white thinking. This is intellectual suicide.
Both men offer myopic world views. Both seem to be driven by fear.
While Hedges’ critique makes for interesting reading on its own, my main interest in this passage has to do with Hedge’s invocation of Frederick Nietzsche’s “Last Men”. Nietzsche, for the record, totally called it.
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We are sold items or experiences that, we are told, will make us unique and strong and confident and authentic individuals, even as we are stripped as citizens of real authenticity and individuality. Democracy, the corporate state tells us, is the product of economics. The free market means a free people. But democracy predated the industrial revolution. Democracy was, as [John Ralston Saul] points out, the political system that “made most of the economic events possible, not vice versa.” And so, in the name of freedom and progress, jobs are outsourced, benefits are cut, government assistance programs are slashed, and civil rights are curtailed. This, we are assured, is the cost of progress.
Those who hold power justify it by seeking to make it part of the natural order. Global capitalism becomes the engine that drives human progress. It leads to the highest form of civilization. Advocates for global capitalism effectively promote this faith even as they move factories from the United States to Mexico, China and the Philippines, where wages are low and workers are denied basic rights, health care and benefits. They talk of a new world order as they build a new serfdom. The atheists and Christian fundamentalists, because they serve mechanisms of power, because they refuse to deal in complexity, reduce the rage and violence of the world’s dispossessed to human imperfections that can be eradicated. If the disaffected can be converted to Christianity or become endowed with reason, we will all be safe and happy. If not, we must do away with them. They do not investigate the brutality and injustice of imperial aggression, the callousness of totalitarian capitalism and the role of poverty and repression as triggers for violence and terrorism. They blame the victims.
Mohandas Gandhi, standing on the other side of this divide, understood how Western industrialized powers created glorious histories and moral crusades to obscure or justify slavery, massacres, despotism and the destruction of traditional arts, crafts and languages. He understood the lies we tell ourselves. The attack on the weak was not part of the necessary price for progress and the advance of civilization; it was part of a program of raw exploitation by unfettered capitalism. The stories used to defend this exploitation created a cult of history much like the cult of religion or the cult of science. It permitted immorality in the name of the noble and virtuous ideals. These visions of an emergent world of light and universal civilization are always employed by those in power to hide their tracks. As Albert Camus wrote, “We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, these are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose—even for transforming murderers into judges.”
“The West does not like to admit this fact about itself,” wrote William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman, that it “has been capable of violence on an appalling scale, and has justified that violence as indispensable to a heroic reform of society or of mankind.” The atomic bomb, napalm, phosphorus raids, and indiscriminate area bombing were American and British techniques, used in “a mission of bringing liberty to the world.” The technological and scientific advances of industrialized nations made possible the conquests and the theft of natural resources in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. “To be a man of the modern West,” Pfaff wrote, “is to belong to a culture of incomparable originality and power; it is also to be implicated in incomparable crimes.”
The human race will not be redeemed by the domination of the globe by “civilized” and “rational” people. We cannot rise to moral and intellectual levels never achieved before in human history. Those who advocate this utopia seek to become Nietzsche’s new man, the Übermensch, the Superman. Übermensch, Nietzsche wrote, rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional Christian civilization. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. The will to power means, for Übermensch, that the modern man has gone “beyond good and evil.” The modern man spurns established, traditional religious values. He has the moral fortitude and wisdom to create his own values. This belief creates a human deity. Religion, which has failed humankind, will be banished. We will all become Übermenschen.
The absurdity of this human deity did not prevent Nietzsche from seeing where it could lead. Nietzsche warned that this new faith might, in fact, prefigure something else—a pathetic, middle-class farce. Nietzsche foresaw the deadening effects of the bourgeois lust for comfort and personal self-satisfaction. Science and technology might, instead, bring about a race of Dauermenschen, of Last Men. The Last Man would wallow in his arrogance, ignorance and personal contentment. He would be satisfied with everything he has done. He would seek to become nothing more. He would be stagnant, incapable of growth, part of an easily manipulated crowd. The Last Man would confuse cynicism with knowledge.
“The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars,” Nietzsche wrote about the Last Man in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself.”
“They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery.” The great causes of the human race lie defeated or reviled. The Last Man endows the empty banality of his private life with universal meaning. The Last Man withdraws from larger concerns, indulging “their little pleasure for the day, and their little pleasure for the night.”
Nietzsche attacked the pretensions and dishonesty of rational consciousness. He wrote: “Do not deceive yourselves: what constitutes the chief characteristic of modern souls and modern books is not the lying, but the innocence which is part and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty… Our cultured men of today, our ‘good’ men do not lie, that is true; but it does not redound to their honour. The real lie, the genuine, determined honest lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article of them by a long way; it would be asking them to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do, to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ in their own selves.”
The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has created tens of millions of Last Men. Atheists such as Harris and Hitchens exemplify these Last Men. They are tiresome epicures. They promote, as Chalmers Johnson says, a “consumerist Sparta.” It is the poor and desperate who fight our wars. The impoverished, often without legal rights, do the dirty work for a bloated, self-asorbed oligarchy and its compliant middle-class managers. Curtis White in The Middle Mind argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care. They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans who return home or the hundreds of thousands we have killed in Iraq. It is too upsetting. They do not want to read about the nation’s growing legions of underemployed and poor, or the child labourers in sweat shops who make our clothing and our shoes. Government and media censorship—increasingly common since the attacks of 2001—are appreciated. Most prefer to be entertained.
Those who promote the new atheists’ faith in reason and science offer an escape from moral responsibility and civic engagement. They express the dreams and desires of a morally stunted middle class. They promote, under a scientific veneer, the selfish lusts of the consumer society and the deadening provincialism of the petite bourgeoisie. Dawkins, in an example of this pedestrian vision, draws up his own list of commandments to replace the Biblical injunctions. He advises people to enjoy their sex lives as long as they don’t harm anyone else. He calls on parents not to indoctrinate their children but to evaluate evidence. His are hollow, liberal platitudes that casually deny the seductive lusts of violence, evil and abuse—lusts the biblical writers who wrote the commandments understood and feared. These atheists are suburban mutations. They are products of a moral and political landscape corrupted by too much television, rampant waste, unchecked self-indulgence, wealth, too little contemplation, the physical destruction of community and a loss of the sacred. They tell us we are good. They tell us we will get better. And they warn us not to get in the way of progress.
