I have no idea if it is random chance or something in the aether, but recently I have seen many post-mortems on the ‘New Atheist’ movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Some of these offer insights. More do not. But one thing I have noticed is that they are as likely to reduce the ideological diversity of atheism just as much as the New Atheists did, replicating many of that movement’s initial problems and ultimately creating a shallow critique.

The problem with New Atheism that has gone unaddressed by so many of the modern commentariat is precisely that it could not escape its Christian roots. Because of this, it was unable to create the intellectual freedom it claimed to be making.

Before getting into this I would first like to explore what the New Atheist movement was and my own interactions with it when it was new. 

New Atheism in Context

In hindsight, the 2000s seems to us today like the last gasp of organized religion’s outsized influence on public and political culture. It did not feel this way at the time. The Bush Administration was openly theocratic in its approach to both domestic and foreign policy. And in the brief window of the unipolar world there were no alternatives to moral panic neoliberalism, save global jihad. While Islamic radicals tried to expand their power in the Middle East with what was effectively a terror-for-media-coverage campaign, the United States played into their trap by doubling down into crusader rhetoric. While Bush waged what he claimed was a divinely sanctioned war abroad, he oversaw a homophobic moral panic at home which may have succeeded in securing his re-election. The government was staffed with Liberty ‘University’ graduates as political appointees and U.S. aid policy to Africa was subordinated to an ultimately doomed quest to tie programs to abstinence-only education. Most insulting of all, there was a concerted push by right wing culture warriors to push teaching creation science in public school science class. If anything, this last was the issue that really forced a strong backlash from an intelligentsia that had too eagerly jumped on the establishment bandwagon after the rally-around-the-flag effect of 9/11. 

Enter the Four Horsemen: Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Though by no means starting as a coordinated effort, the very obvious open void created the space for the publications of these four individuals (and many of their imitators) to make an outsized splash on the cultural milieu by not just opposing evangelism on the defensive, but by stridently attacking it. Religion was not just a tool used by the powerful to deceive the masses, it was the mark of a foolish person. A willing dupe. And someone who stood against good government and a rational conception of civil society. 

Another aspect of this ‘movement’ was that it was not just a rejection of theism, but also a rejection of postmodernism. The postmodern left, which in the pre-Occupy neoliberal era was the unquestioned  left mainstream (arguably it still is, albeit increasingly more identified with center-left professional managerial class types) rejected anything incompatible with a totalizing relativism. Postmodernism could not say that creationism was inferior to science or even wrong, it could only equivocate. Another aspect of this was the left’s (still existing) bizarre fetishization of Islam, a value system that could not be more hostile to the one they profess, but which they allow a leeway of tolerance they would never give to their domestic Christian enemies (likely out of the bizarre belief that it thwarts U.S. foreign policy objectives to be publicly sympathetic to a religion that was once committing the same kind of ideological expansionism and cultural gentrification as the present American empire).* It has always been a funny irony that the world view that upholds relativism as its ultimate ideal is so often championed by people so hostile to nuance and prone to moralistic binary thinking, but I digress as, we shall see, the postmodernists would hardly be alone in this error.

So we had a new movement that dumped on the pieties of the politically correct left while stridently attacking the evangelical political establishment of the era. Both of those things were necessary and welcome reliefs from the trends of the time.  They were a breath of fresh air in a stultifying political era where self-censorship was normal and the avenue for dissident expression was narrow. It was bracing and fun. I confess that I myself once (and thankfully only once) made the conscious choice to be seen reading The God Delusion on the train to test the waters. 

But even early on, and despite all the fun, I had my doubts. The same kind of doubts that let me shed my religious beliefs in middle school were reappearing in my later college years. I owe this early turn against New Atheism to my dedication to the study of premodern history. This was something that kept me grounded and aware that what might seem like an inevitable trend could just be a fad. It also made me deeply skeptical of the core concept of New Atheism: linear progress. I remember upon concluding The God Delusion that it was ultimately a form of cathartic entertainment, but hardly a work of philosophical rigor. It contained many bizarre assumptions about humanity’s proclivity for rationality that were easily dispelled from historical knowledge. I would go on to find many of the works of Harris and Hitchens in a similar vein. 

A Neconservative Handmaiden 

It was actually Hitchens, the most charismatic and entertaining of the four, that would turn me against his ilk first. Hitchens was a die-hard Iraq War supporter, proving the hypothesis of ex-Trotskyists becoming neoconservatives correct in a very public way. His defense of that dismal operation on explicitly democratist grounds utilized many of the same rhetorical tricks and sloppy assumptions that the alliance of Evangelicals and Zionists he was supposedly opposed to made use of. A culturally righteous society had the duty to remake the world in its own image. To bring the others to heel for the crime of holding it back from its unified destiny. Not only was the world filled with cultures who were theorized to be destined to clash according to ideology, one of those cultures (the enlightened North Atlantic) was ultimately correct. And it seemed obvious to this freethinker that faith in the social engineering power of the United States military was a logical corollary to bring about what really was a missionary ideology. Needless to say, even 15 years ago I was always going to pick realism over atheism if forced to choose between them in an artificial binary. 

These were the elect. The City of God against the pagans. Special praise was given to nations that were seen to have ‘defected’ and joined the club of enlightenment-by-conversion. Dawkins loved Israel, seeing it as the Enlightenment’s version of a neo-Outremer, as well as his recent declaring himself to be a ‘Cultural Christian’. Harris dreamed of an apocalyptic Revelation-style war with the Muslim hordes. All of them viewed many East Asian countries as joining the club of ‘civilization’ when in fact they had always had their own civilizations filled with inventiveness and innovation. In fact, the justifications for many modernization projects in the non-western world were often explicitly nationalistic and even anti-western. And even in the Middle East, outside of a few spoiled rich kid failsons and radicalized losers who wanted to die for a cause, the Muslim world never ‘hated us for our freedoms’. They actually hated us because we were interventionists. 

There was also an inexplicable fear of China’s development and growing power on the world stage shared by the New Atheists. Here was an explicitly secular, even atheistic, state that had overseen the largest and most rapid  reduction in overall poverty in human history all while taking an assertive role against global designs promulgated by evangelicals and jihadists alike…yet it was disdained and even feared by the Enlightened Gentlesirs.

Why? Because the real point of New Atheism was to support weaponized liberalism. And to do this the history of atheism would have to be rewritten to be one solely of liberal-humanism.

The Christian-Liberal Teleology

The liberal world view puts undue emphasis on personal and individual reactions to moral stimuli. Ceremony and group-affirmation ranks quite low compared to the singular unit, whose journey is (ideally) constructed to be one of personal growth. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it is not how any society on Earth has ever worked in practice. Sure, societies can be liberal and this can bring certain benefits, but it is always in addition to something else- a pre-existing collective skeleton which the rest must be built upon. 

Societies, in turn, are regionally divergent adaptive mechanisms meant to increase survival. This is done through resource surplus and strategy. When done well, it has little to say about moral progress. Any group that lives long enough to cross multiple eras will inevitably become unrecognizable to its past self. This pragmatism is actually a sign of success, as pure stasis would almost certainly mean death. In a world where everything is changing and chaos reigns, there is no final moral arbiter, no ‘right side of history’. There is only survival, and, if lucky, a brief period of thriving before an inevitable decline. We are no more entitled to eternity than the dinosaurs were. And they are still far more successful than we are in terms of sheer longevity. 

If one does not believe in an ultimate moral arbiter, as it should be very clear that I do not, then why would one still believe that a secularized society should be guided by a universal mission? Especially a mission related to the spread of a singular type of civil society across the globe? Surely, the freedom to think outside of teleology means that one is liberated from the colonial quest of messianism. Once can cut back their efforts of conversion and focus instead on the real and material benefits of building and exploring. The diversity of the planet’s cultures (including political and ideological cultures) is actually a boon, not a curse. It means the blind spots of one society are not overlooked by the entire species. That the mistakes of one need not be the mistakes of all. If something goes right somewhere it can be reproduced elsewhere, but if something goes wrong it can be stopped before all of humanity is afflicted.

But to the militant liberal, as was the case for their Abrahamic forebears, a society can only be legitimate if it meets a certain credo. The Augustinian dedication to dividing societies into legitimate and illegitimate based on ideological grounds is done to impart a sense of universal mission to civilizations. That this will inevitably lead to hostility and warfare with all who disagree is irrelevant because righteousness will sort out the End Times/ End of History. This religious impulse has been with liberalism since Kant and Rousseau and New Atheism was a (probably unintentional) attempt to bring it back for a younger and more secular crowd.** Its media elevation at least implies neoliberals and their friends in the media understood that the many failures of the Bush Administration were causing the winds to blow against their Reagan Era alliance with political Christianity.

The making of a better human through moral effort merely changed from a spiritual cause sometimes supported by the state to a state cause supported by a new spiritualism. The problem with these arguments is that they rest on the work of Stephen Pinker and others of a similar outlook who effectively rely on the logic of ‘line goes up makes world more gooder.’ 

The problem here is that Pinker’s data is itself highly selective and suspect. Much of the improvement in living standards come from non-liberal societies. Other dollar based metrics fail to account for subsequent rises in living costs in places where average wages grow. Meanwhile, the flagship liberal society, the United States, has been seeing a steady decline in its standard of living for years. If there be progress here it is unconnected to liberal promises or simple linear narratives. Every order so far gets a rise sure, but they all fall too. It is a bizarre act of presentist faith to believe the current one will be any different just because we are the ones experiencing it now.

I believe it is this fear that anything can be undone by irrational circumstances, often beyond anyone’s direct control, that motivates a strident faith in enlightenment. But history is replete with periods where knowledge was lost and living standards declined. Oftentimes, it was true believers seeking to make a better world that played a role in this loss. 

History is not progressive. Nor does it adhere to any unified set of human values. It was New Atheism’s fatal flaw to adopt Christianity’s worst and most Platonic assumptions about how the world works. You can invert the values on topical issues all you like, but the philosophical edifice is still the same rot of morally redemptive protagonist syndrome all the way down.

John Gray’s True Skepticism

Why should disbelief in God presume that humanity can be rational in the first place? After all, humanity felt the need to invent communing with the supernatural to compensate for something. Whether or not this is a vital social glue (and it is to many), it is not a rational behavior. If anything, humanity is the least rational species. A kind of ultra-performative ape which is the only one we know of that must invent elaborate rituals and justifications to get along existing. Something other species do just fine without such pretense. If I had to create a list of words to describe the human experience, ‘rational’ wouldn’t be anywhere on it. It is a nice idea, but an idea it remains. Perhaps open to rare individuals in some scientific and scholarly fields, but never to the whole of the species or a particular civilization.

The philosopher John Gray is himself an atheist, and began to rise in prominence in the 90s. Being one of the rare non-leftist scholars who took a decided anti-neoliberal and anti-end of history tone after the fall of the Soviet Union, he scorned claims of a rational destiny. He was lambasted for (correctly) predicting the eventual collapse of international democratic capitalism as the guiding policy lodestar of the future. He then turned against those who assumed Al Qaeda was a reactionary backlash by pointing out it was in fact one form of a hyper-aggressive modernity. His book, Straw Dogs, was the formative moment in my own journey away from whatever vestigial shreds of liberalism I retained. It was, interestingly enough, recommended to me by someone who challenged me to articulate my own world view. I confessed it was cobbled together from historical knowledge and not a preexisting philosophy. What I proceeded to describe was then responded to with ‘that sounds like John Gray’. Up until that moment I had never heard of him.

Straw Dogs is effectively an anti-enlightenment mood piece whose philosophical similarities draw more from Taoism than any western tradition. Just seeing such a thing in the early 21st Century Anglosphere was a bracing gateway to explore something new. Black Mass, arguably Gray’s best work, traces how religious apocalyptic thinking, especially that of the messianic religions, influences assumptions about the world from many secular ideologies and especially neoconservatism. The Silence of Animals drives home the centrality of irrationality in the human experience and the dangers of forgetting our true biological origins. These books questioned philosophical progressivism without being a knee jerk reactionary. Importantly, they were written to be accessible to a general audience. His most important book for this topic was Seven Types of Atheism. You can read my full review here, but the key thing to keep in mind is that he laments how New Atheism stripped away all of the varieties of preexisting atheism and tried to replace them with a single progressive-liberal vision in the popular imagination. Gray is mostly interested in reminding the world that atheism is a negation, not an affirmative ideology. As such it contains multitudes. Many of those alternatives fly contrary to the claims of New Atheism…and many of these, in turn, are the ones who actually broke more successfully with established religion’s dominant culture. A large proportion of the covered world views are indifferent or even hostile to liberalism. 

Tellingly, many of Gray’s conservative fans, who glowingly reviewed so many of his prior works and who were probably primed for 7 Types seemed to have passed over this book in silence. I believe this is because the book critical of modern atheism was actually the most strident of all Gray’s works when it came to criticizing Christian ethics. Gray’s disdain for messianic teleology was the real fuel of his points on atheism- something the cultural right could not face.

This point should be so obvious as to be trite, but it goes to show how little ‘Freethinkers’ often move away from how they were raised. By definition atheism can never be a unifying project as it is merely the disavowal of a kind of belief. There never was going to be ‘an atheist community’ in the style of the pretentiously named ‘Brights’ or ‘Atheism+’. People who wish to be active in something communal should look at something else as the basis for organization (more on this later).

Besides, if your point is simply to register displeasure with the dominant theology of our times (spiritually or not) the devout are far more bothered by a rejection of their values than they are a rejection of their god. If you disdain Yahweh they assume you are simply mistaken, to be punished later or to come around in an act of redemption. But if you reject the very values associated with their tradition you are proof that their concept of light vs dark, good vs evil, is itself something that can be lived without. Villainous antagonists they can understand. Indifference or opposition to the very idea of moral melodrama? That wasn’t part of the prophecy.***

Where are they now?

New Atheism’s attempt to become explicitly political in a ‘positive’ sense broke whatever unity it might once have had. The current soy male and legbeard womanchild nerd vs (equally unmanly) mens-rights neckbeard-chud-nerd divide that has poisoned younger Millennial/older Zoomer culture actually began from the (religious) schism forced upon the community by clans like Atheism+. It turned out that without Rick Santorum and the Moral Majority breathing down their neck there was nothing but divides. In other words, New Atheism spawned Gamergate, and Gamergate spawned the first round of the still ongoing post-Boomer culture wars. 

So where are these people now? They have proven just how Christian their form of unbelief was considering the nature of their sectarian split by being divided between Catholics and Protestants. 

In the case of the Catholics this is quite literal. Becoming a reactionary Catholic is the next phase in hipsterdom. The ‘alternative lifestyle’ (which never was anything of the sort) of the now is no longer loafers-with-no-socks, electropop-meets-southern-hip-hop, it is the ‘universal church’. This makes sense when you consider angry nerds clearly need an impersonal structure and sense of mission and belonging that they are often unable to get through the more natural social interactions they struggle with. Considering the incel culture of much of Gen Z, this is probably going to continue for some time before moving on. Kind of like New Atheism and hipsterism. These kinds of people are often urban and very terminally online.

The Protestant branch are the wokes. Though I have made this point many times before, I am hardly the only one who has noticed. Rather than seeking institutional authority, this branch simply seeks personal power by the vector of social media canceling campaigns. In this way they live in a perpetual position of re-enacting the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the Salem Witch Trials, individualism fueled by sanctimony to build the Kingdom of God on a new Earth. Ironically, they are fond of the phrase ‘we are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn,’ while proving both by their demographics and their attitudes that they are in fact the descendants of the witch burners themselves. These types are more suburban/university campus but are also the most aggressively internet-brained of all demographics around today.

There is, of course, a New Atheism descended center too. These kinds are the Stancil-Yglessiai of the precocious up and coming professional managerial class. They all look the same, sound the same, and reference Pinker constantly. Their priorities are grand narratives of human development, though their cultural impact is nil. I personally suspect they may be a future febrile recruitment ground for strange cults and social movements once their vicarious causes end up going south. 

There are two things these very disparate groups still have in common. One is that they come across as Reddit users (and this is the most damning thing I can say about them), and the other is that they ended up on paths that mirror the Christian upbringing most of them had. As it is, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who advocates for a ‘Christian Atheism’, and, unsurprisingly, seems to be undergoing a clash of civilizations/neoconservative rebrand, serves as a living example of what little common threads remain in a once much stronger movement. 

Why, aside from historical knowledge, did John Gray, the speculative realist philosophers, or myself end up so different from these people? It is because we were completely different from Zizek. Almost diametrically opposed, in fact.

Pagan Atheism

I was an atheist long before the rise of New Atheism. I am still one long after its decline. Its impact on my life was that I could be less cautious about my unbelief in public around unvetted company. But this came at the cost of being associated with philosophically shallow cringe in the popular imagination.

Atheism is, as implied before, a negation and not an affirmation. The only thing that can be rooted in it is skepticism. This is a most noble virtue. But it is only one. The point of being free from universal morality (itself an artifact of moralism and Platonic idealism) is to accept that a variety of societies are free to diverge over values without necessarily threatening each other, and that others who share your position on religion may also do the same in divergent directions at the individual level. Therefore, this is not a principle I believe in organizing around unless a shared threat such as theocracy or an attack on the secular state arises. However, if one was to suggest the necessity of non ‘New’ Atheists having a common culture I would recommend this: learn from polytheism. 

New Atheism was as monotheistic a world view as a non-religion could be. It saw freedom of will under a unified and moral universe as its lodestar. It saw a Pinkerite future for those who could only seize the power to become the new Enlightened Elect and usher in a world free from irrational superstitions. It saw humanity itself as a god.

Why not do something totally different? Why not seize on determinism, fate, and humanity as one aspect of nature among many? Why not recognize the very reality of a world of devouring food chains where mankind may be high but is not the highest? Values clash because there is no overarching moral truth outside of the objective material stage we all must share (and that stage itself is still of vital importance, being nature), and situational context and the ability to wield power will ultimately decide a variety of outcomes along divergent paths. This will be so in the future as it has ever been so in the past. No order lasts very long in the end. An explosion of cultural diversity awaits in the future as it did before. Deep time itself proves that the quest for teleology is a false one. But the quest for ritual, belonging, and to define both what one is and what one is not is eternal. The modern humanists may have lied about the possibility of changing human nature with ideals, but the reality of living in the real world exposes this deception constantly.

I am a proportional rather than absolute thinker. I believe atheism is most likely the correct philosophical position when it comes to the nature of reality. But it’s not exactly fun. By cutting itself off from a cultural context of mythic analogy, terrifying monsters, and powerful heroes it becomes easily infiltrated by halfwits and consumerists.**** It should not be so hostile to religions that don’t require faith or evangelism but rather inspire fortitude and courage. It can ally with religions that don’t seek to homogenize the world or care how many followers they have but rather seek to bring that irrational animal mind inside every human skull to revel in the uncanny of nature and fate.

I may not believe in the literal truth of Susanoo, Coyote, Dionysius, Apedemak, and Qetzacoatl, but in their clashing elemental forces and chaotic struggles I see a far truer reflection of the world as it truly is than in the sterile moralism of Levantine monotheism or the naive euphoria of liberal humanism. The world is ruthless and rudderless and it will sweep away us all, especially those too frail to face the bracing reality of its callous but freeing indifference to human concerns. But in the chaos lies endless creativity and a bracing fatalistic acceptance of the dynamic tension inherent in the natural world. 

I love it so.

*It never occurred to these people that one could oppose regime change wars and sanctions on Middle Eastern countries without having to look like a fool by being sympathetic to such a religion. The fact that I was someone who both protested the Iraq War and took part in Draw Mohammed Day seemed to break many brains when it really shouldn’t have.

**If you ever need a perfect example of both Christianity and liberalism openly merging around cultural supremacism, please explore the literature around Just War Theory. It is a tiresome subject where various types of idealists attempt to give moral justification for chickenhawkery based around ideals rather than interests. In my experience in academia I found that the vast majority of people who do this are people who are both Christian and liberal.

***This is also why Satanism is extremely stupid and cringe. It is the acceptance of Christian cosmology but just with the values inverted. The anti-liberal equivalent to this is probably getting really into Russian Orthodoxy and ‘esoteric’ politics.

****I am reminded of the time Richard Dawkins waged war on children’s fantasy literature, creating a divide with his friend the author Philip Pullman. I met Pullman once when I was a very young child (and his biggest fan), he signed my copy of The Golden Compass with the line ‘to Christopher who asks all the great questions.’