A Book To Skip

I was in a book store the other day, and a title caught my eye: I Don’t Believe In Atheists, by Chris Hedges. It’s a fun title, and there’s been a spate of pro-atheist books of late, by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others, so I thought I might find in this little book (185 pages, excluding notes and index) a handy rebuttal. I noted with interest that the jacket blurb said the author had also written a book critical of the fundamentalists, and I thought someone who rejected both atheism and fundamentalism might be a fellow centrist. So I bought the book.

Unfortunately, Hedges disappoints. His modus operandi is to assert his opinions, with no attempt to prove them to a reader who doesn’t already share them. For example, he condemns the “liberal church” because it “accepts . . . the rosy vision . . . that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ ”. Maybe that’s true, but couldn't we have a quotation or two from liberal churchmen who say that? Personally, I’ve never heard Father Pangloss preach. The “Christian Right”, Hedges tells us, is a “threat to the democratic state” and has “built an alliance with the corporate state to dismantle American democracy”. Wow, I’d sure like to know more about this “alliance” and exactly how it plans to “dismantle” democracy: a military coup, perhaps, or Brown Shirts beating up non-Christian shopkeepers? Hedges doesn’t explain. He rejects Richard Dawkins’ optimism about the future and asserts that “We march toward a world where the rapacious and greedy appetites of human beings, who have overpopulated and failed to protect the planet, threaten widespread anarchy, famine, nuclear terrorism, and wars for diminishing resources”. You wouldn’t know from Hedges’ book that there are reasonable people who don’t buy into that prophecy, and you certainly won’t find in the book evidence and argument to support Hedges’ view.

Although this book is supposedly a critique of atheism, the enemy Hedges truly loves to hate is fundamentalism. Time and again he equates atheism with fundamentalism. For example, he contends that “Those who offer collective salvation, whether through science, Jesus Christ or Muhammad, promise an unattainable human paradise”. “These secular and religious fundamentalists are egocentrics unable to accept human difference”. The “secular utopians, like Christian fundamentalists, are stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class”. Both “atheists and Christian radicals have built squalid little belief systems that are in the service of themselves and their own power”.

Hedges traces the origin of the atheistic version of fundamentalism to the Enlightenment, and to a notion that he calls “utopianism”: the “dangerous myth” that “confuses moral progress with material progress” and “places faith in an empowered elite to guide us toward a new world”. This “Enlightenment vision” “sanctifies inhumane abuse of the weak to push the race forward” and is a “corruption” that was “built into the Enlightenment from its inception”. These “secular utopians” seek to give sufficient power to the most “rational” and “enlightened” among us, that is, to themselves, “to dictate to the rest of the planet a new way of being”. What Hedges calls “utopianism” is more commonly called “fascism”, the word Hedges used in his previous book to describe religious fundamentalists.

I found quite a bit in this book to agree with. Like Hedges, I oppose both atheism and fundamentalism. Like Hedges, I think that the Enlightenment has a lot to answer for. Like Hedges, I oppose fascism, under whatever banner it marches. And I admit that I get as much of a cheap thrill as the next guy from polemical attacks on beliefs I disapprove of. From time to time, as I read this book, I felt an urge to shout “Right on!” But you don’t learn anything that way. And it’s not really productive.

Ironically, Hedges himself advises us that we need to develop a “sober, dispassionate response” to the challenges that face us, we need “empathy, the ability to see the world from the perspective of those outside our culture and our nation”. Yet there is little that’s sober or dispassionate in Hedges’ book, and he shows no interest in seeing the world from any perspective but his own. It’s jolly fun to call your opponents “stunted products of a self-satisfied, materialistic middle class” who have built “squalid little belief systems” to serve “themselves and their own power” (I wish I’d written that!), but its more effective in the long run to address and refute their arguments. This book could serve as an object lesson in how not to have a sober, dispassionate discussion with those you disagree with.

By Eric Von Salzen