If Rory Stewart is remembered for one thing, it will be the effort he spent in disabusing people of the idea that a No Deal Brexit was a thing – an ‘Anglo-Saxon fact’. As an idea, he argued, it had gained a lot of traction as an ostensible solution to a keenly felt problem. But his critique of No Deal was not really at the practical level. Instead, Rory argued that the phrase was being used to conceal an irresponsible lack of detail – that, eventually, something positive had to be smuggled into the negative space that ‘No Deal’ implied.
Perhaps there is an analogy to be made with atheism. When you consider the vast range of meanings that could be attached to this term – no creating god, no higher plane of spiritual realities, no sacred/profane distinction, no meaning to the universe which each individual must seek, etc – the Anglo-Saxon fact embodied by ‘atheism’ dissolves into a heaving sea of possible meanings. This is one of the premises of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Allen Lane, 2018). Gray argues that many self-declared atheists throughout history, and especially in the contemporary world, have been averse to the prospect of genuine meaninglessness, so that they have clung to religious or quasi-religious beliefs not as an addition to their atheism but an essential part of it. 5 of his types he finds guilty of this smuggling, which he clearly finds contemptible. The final 2 buck this trend, and, although Gray is careful to avoid converting people to his mode of atheism, they are presented with much more approval than the previous 5.
All of the types are designed to find resonances in the present age, from the New Atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens to the God-hating of Sade, Empson, and Nietzsche. Perhaps the most insightful chapter is ‘Atheism, gnosticism, and modern political religion’. (By gnosticism, Gray means the ancient and pervasive belief that humanity enshrouded in darkness needs to free itself by finding the light of truth.)
“A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics.”
Beginning with Anabaptist theocracy in early modern Munster, Gray traces this thread through Jacobinism, Leninism, and Nazism, landing with triumphant finality even in modern liberalism. All of these political ideologies, from the French Revolution to contemporary interventionist foreign policy, are soaked in the idea that the purpose of politics is somehow to free people from an ignorant and miserable realm of darkness. One of the clear religious features to this political discourse, says Gray, is the way that substantial cost to human life is justified for the sake of bringing about the prescribed salvation:
“For Lenin the human cost of the Revolution was a passing incident on the way to a new world.”
“Since a new world could come into being only as a result of a catastrophe, destruction on a vast scale was an integral part of [the Nazis’] mission.”
The establishment of liberalism in the modern west has not required such bloodshed. But the gnostic element to this phenomenon is still clear in the way that, for example, British europhilic liberals explain their defeat in the Brexit referendum. If only, so goes the rhetoric, working class people hadn’t been duped by the eurosceptic forces of darkness (who want to impose the horrors of nativism on them), they might have voted in a more enlightened way. Gray concludes this chapter with a striking warning against the extension of the liberal world order:
“Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order by instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity.”
Frustratingly, Gray is silent on the religious elements of strongman right-wing populism. Orban, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte – all have either co-opted religious language or ostensible religious purpose for their administrations, or else captured a traditional bloc of religious voters with a secular vision. Analogies are constantly made between flag-waving political rallies and crowds which greeted 18th and 19th century revivalists – even the Telegraph’s unflappable Christopher Hope couldn’t resist the comparison [https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1130913970863464448]. As well as the near-religious treatment of these talismanic figures, the deeper motivations of nationalism are imbued with religious sentiments. Erstwhile hopes of establishing explicitly religious nations have morphed into baffling assertions of a ‘national spirit’, publications with ludicrous titles like ‘Britannia Unchained’, and confected wars between native traditions and immigrant cultures. Granted, this may not be a ‘type of atheism’ as such, but it is no less a political religion than centrist liberalism, and Gray’s focus on gnostic elements to modern politics seems to obscure some of the most obviously religious features of secular politics from his otherwise far-reaching vision.
But this is not primarily a book about politics – it is about ideas. From attacking foundational myths of secular humanism – in particular the conception of a coherent and collective agent called ‘humanity’ – to questioning the need for the world to be explained as a harmonious and meaningful system, Gray covers an enormous range of thinkers from different corners of the world and periods in history. As a Christian reader I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the chapter on God-haters, in which Gray argues that God-hatred hides a substitution of deities. Sade “was mistaken when he imagined that he had left monotheism behind. Instead, he changed one unforgivable deity for another [Nature]”. More subtle is the substitution performed by Empson, who wrote that ‘The Christian God…is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man.” The treatment of cruelty as a self-evident metaphysical evil is a culturally specific object. (I am reminded here of Jonathan Haidt’s brilliant The Righteous Mind, which argues that different cultures have different moral systems comprising different prominent moral ‘modules’, of which the care/harm axis is one of the more prominent in western liberalism.) So what is Empson’s deity? Gray is not specific, though he maintains that Empson “remained wedded to a Christian worldview” even as he “ended up embracing something like Gnosticism.” So Empson deifies some system of metaphysics which owes something to Christianity and something to Gnosticism. This is deified in the sense that its meaning and significance is taken as read – it contains premises which even Empson’s rationalism will not question or challenge. The substitution is not, like Sade’s, a straightforward one of Nature for God, but a nuanced replacement of the eternal characteristics of God with self-evident truths written, as it were, into the fabric of the universe.
If there is a thread that runs through this book, it is that apparently free-thinking atheism is usually no such thing, and that genuine free-thinking requires the abandonment of convenient and attractive myths. What is difficult to detect is Gray’s purpose in writing it. He pointedly avoids trying to persuade people into his own way of thinking , even though his feeling towards each type is clear from the tone of each chapter. He is pessimistic in any case that contemporary atheists will give up their nurtured myths and inheritances from monotheism. Gray’s two preferred types of atheism, ‘Atheism without progress’ and ‘Atheism of silence’, sound more like absence than anything else. Nonetheless, he offers fresh, deep, and convincing insight into the tensions that atheism addresses, and provides food for thought for religious and atheist readers alike.
Yikeiatry 