Bunting pulls out the ‘new atheist’ file yet again
Another consignment of rebarbative truculent inaccurate wool from Madeleine Bunting. About…? The Vatican’s petulant cries of ‘petty gossip’ in response to revelations of its settled habit of concealing and protecting child rape? No. The ‘new’ atheists – that’s what’s got her worked up: the endless unappeasable horror of the ‘new’ atheists. Their wrongness. Their violence. Their ignorance. Their deafness to the overwhelming arguments of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton.
…in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists.
Indeed there has. There has been, in fact, a reaction; there has been a classic backlash. There has been a prolific, energetic, often very hostile and very inaccurate backlash. Bunting herself is a part of it – she has written piece after petulant piece complaining of the ‘new’ atheists. This is another. She is part of the very loud and populous chorus trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the shoddiness of the ‘new’ atheists. They could all be right, of course, but the mere fact that they exist doesn’t show that they are right. The wild inaccuracy that so many of them resort to tends to make me think they aren’t right, at least in their overarching assumption that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism. Bunting of course takes this assumption entirely for granted.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs.
Ohhhhhhh no they don’t. Bunting doesn’t, for one. Chris Hedges doesn’t for another. Eagleton doesn’t.
And then, what reason do they have for fury anyway? Why should two or three or four atheist books fill so many people with such fury? Bunting doesn’t say – she just assumes it, because as mentioned she assumes that there is something obviously illegitimate about explicit argumentative atheism.
From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides…What staggers the “philosophers” (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in Reason, Faith and Revolution…
Stop right there. Eagleton is in no sense as writer who uses philosophical arguments. Eagleton doesn’t argue at all, he simply announces. There is no argument in his book. I looked for it; it isn’t there. Bunting was fooled, as she was meant to be, by Eagleton’s unearned air of omniscience.
Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor’s 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong’s speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel. The problem with both genres is they don’t offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards.
What such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought? Bunting hasn’t shown us any, she has only asserted it. And as for strident certainty – what, exactly, does she think she is offering in this piece and the rest of her body of work? And then the snide remark about Dawkins’s book sales, as if they too were obviously illegitimate.
She gives us several more paragraphs of warmed-over Armstrong, and finishes by rejoicing that God is being discussed again. (Because there was a time, pre-Dawkins, when God wasn’t discussed? Has she visited the religion section of any bookstores lately? Some of the rows upon rows of books there pre-date 2006.) Then she gets savaged by CisF readers.
I gave up on CiF and The Guardian several years back precisely because of the toss being perpetrated by Mad Bunty and Eagleton. Doesn’t look like I’ll be returning any time soon.
I well remember Eagleton’s claim that Jesus was a Marxist.
It’s hilarious that Bunting considers Eagleton a philosopher. He’s no more a philosopher than he is an economist or a psychologist, two other fields he thinks ‘literary theory’ qualifies him in.
I’ve always been a bit baffled by the notion that secularists (in the atheistic humanist sense) are supposed to be stumped by the persistence/revival of religion.
As a member of organised secularism/humanism for over 20 years, I think it’s great that religion is being discussed seriously.
I remember running local humanist group bookstalls in the early 1990s, trying to persuade passing punters that the battles had NOT all been won, and that religion had NOT gone away. That the issues still mattered. It wasn’t the organised secularists and humanists who thought religion had disappeared. We knew it hadn’t. That’s why we were organised.
In Bunting’s latest article – and in many other places – the unstated assumption is that secularists are inevitably committed to some form of the secularization thesis (whatever you happen to think *that* is). Now, you can go back a hundred years and find atheists who thought atheism was simply the natural next historical step in a “lots of gods – one god – no god” process. And there has always been “religion is out of date” rhetoric.
But actually, organised freethought always does best when the religious are most vocal and visible.
Dan
Bunting’s piece was run also in the Sydney Morning Herald, with the comments from the online reading public being overwhelmingly against her.
It reminds me of the private motto of Eric Baume, an early radio shockjock (as revealed only to his personal friends, such as my father): ‘Speak well of my name, speak ill of my name, but speak my name.’
Bunting is nothing if not a professional controversialist.
Yea Madelaine – Your education starts here – Bunting! And who does she recommend for corrective reading? Well, Armstrong, of course, and Taylor… another winner of the Templeton prize – better off than Gorgias and Pythagoras! And Eagleton, the philosopher, mind you! You’re right, Eagleton doesn’t argue: he pontificates. I don’t know how many of you heard the lectures on which Eagleton’s book was based, but the guy is a clown! Couldn’t sit through them all, but I got a good dose. Princeton, wasn’t it? Not sure what could have prompted them to invite Eagleton, but to speak of Dawkins’ philosophical illiteracy! Compared to Eagleton – who has read Scotus – or was it Duns? Yes, Madelaine has been truly and rightly savaged. Andrew Brown, Madelaine Bunting, Mark Vernon… need I say more? The Guardian needs to do some Spring cleaning!
We’ve got ’em on the ropes, folks!
It is obvious as they squeal from the corners into which they have been forced.
If you have a mind, you may wish to read my short post, continuing with the pugilistic theme:
http://www.antitheistdaily.com/2010/04/06/theyre-on-the-ropes-awaiting-the-final-knockout/
“What such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought?”
No idea. Has she read “The God Delusion”? That mentions philosophers, or at least theologians (hardly the same thing) by name, and has great fun with their assertions.
Yale rather than Princeton. Tut tut Yale – the Motoons, and Eagleton. Could do better.
What’s that you say? The world’s largest organized religion conducted a massive conspiracy to cover up child abuse? Look, over there, a mean bad New Atheist! Get him!
You mean get her!
I don’t know why I expect people who are given such a platform to speak from would have something worth saying. Maddening Bunting provides ample evidence that the opposite is quite possible.
The often-given explanation is that the Guardian likes to stir things up because that attracts readers. But then…couldn’t they at least get better contrarians to do the stirring? Bunting is just not good at what she does.
I have read several of Armstrong’s books, and after a while I realised it was impossible, having read them, to reconstruct the basic argument when someone asked me what it was. Sometimes, of course, one experiences this because of either deficient memory, or inadequate understanding. I’m pretty sure, now, in Armstrong’s case, it’s because there simply isn’t a coherent argument to reconstruct. (Take the Axial sages stuff: interesting that they – Jesus, Buddha, etc – were, very roughly speaking, of a certain moment in human history. But why?)
Eagleton is someone I used to have respect for. Again, when I felt I had no clue what the fuck he was on about I imagined it was my own inadequacies. (I understood about half of his book on tragedy; the stuff I understood I thought was quite good. The rest I thought I was just too dim to follow).
But I am now convinced that his book about ‘Ditchkins’ is simply, almost indescribably *awful*: a combination of a few reasonable but unoriginal ideas, some incoherent waffle and then some stuff which, if it does make sense, is just shit. The thing which *really* winds me up is the way he writes as if any reasonable, rational person will have had their basic education at the hands of priests, and if you don’t really follow the arcane ‘theology’ people like Eagleton are subsequently able to regurgitate, it’s your loss. Well, no it isn’t.
Yes. I too think Eagleton’s book is really conspicuously, shockingly bad – and bad in a vain preening self-admiring way that is just excruciating to read.
PJ Myers has a good account somewhere of one of Eagleton’s rhetorical devices, as when he says of The God Delusion that it’s as if someone had tried to critique the whole of science by reading the British Book of Birds, or it’s like dismissing feminism because of Clint Eastwood’s account of it, etc.
You stare at the simile (or whatever), and the more you look at it the less it makes sense.
That’s where the preening comes in – all those ‘aren’t I clever’ similes. Well no, you’re not all that clever, and your similes are just…tiresome.
What struck me about this was the virtually standard rhetorical move “the Fake Fermat”. Announce the existence of a sophisticated argument, but never describe it – there just wouldn’t be room. We wait years for it – seasons come and go. Pinkerton does not return.