Atheism at the Agora (IIIb): visibility, the New Atheists, and the Iraq War

This is the fourth part of the series. In the first part, which you can read here, I reflected on some of the research that helped me reimagine the kinds of themes, sources, and ideas that might help me build up a coherent picture of atheism in the ancient world. In the second part, which you can read here, my focus was on aspects of the definition of atheism that I have applied, with a discussion of the history of early Christian contests in (re)defining atheism. In the third part, which you can read here, I introduced the idea that New Atheism owed its visibility and prominence as a movement to its usefulness as a pipeline for gaining progressive liberal support for US and UK imperialist and wealth interests in Iraq.

In this fourth part I am going to continue to examine New Atheism and visibility. I identify the aspects of New Atheist thought which contributed to support for US and UK imperialism, white supremacy, and the Iraq invasion, and the theoretical foundations on which they rested that made them particularly useful to US and UK administrations at the time.

The way that many of these ideas contributed to Western imperialism has been commented on before, usually from one of two perspectives: from a left wing, anti-imperialist perspective as in this article in the Jacobin; or from a Christian one, as in this opinion piece, which showcases many examples of these ideas, or this one, more broadly commenting on the ‘geopolitics of atheism’, exploring the ‘civilizational clash’ posited by the New Atheists.

This perceived ‘civilizational clash’ was viewed as a necessary consequence of a fundamental incompatibility between Western liberal democracies and totalitarianism and ‘Stalinism’ in the East. In particular, this involved the demonisation of Islam as irretrievably conservative, regressive, and violent.

“If you ask what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistake as [other] religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that it’s unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.”

Christopher Hitchens interview with Boris Kachka ‘Are You There, God? It’s Me, Hitchens.’ 26th Apr 2007.

As part of this, the New Atheists assume a divergence between West and East, with a focus on the loss of a scientific mentality in early Islam, contrasting the Eastern inheritance of slavish oriental origins against their own reaffirmation of Enlightenment philosophies and principles, traced from ancient Greece and Rome, which they perceived as the origins of Western greatness.

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

The New Atheists posited a decline in Western, ‘liberal’, culture, with the loss of these values and philosophies. Despite their characterisation of the Islamist Other as totalitarian, the New Atheists promoted (often pre-emptive) violent responses – atheists in foxholes, as it were – reluctantly assenting to the inevitable curtailment of Western civil liberties in service of defence against Eastern invasion.

“People will say it’s wartime and we have a deadly enemy, and I agree with that. I was in favour of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan very strongly, but it is even more important in such a time that we don’t give away power to the unaccountable agencies that helped get us into this in the first place. It is extremely important we know what the rules are and there has to be a line drawn. You mustn’t turn emergency or panic measures into custom or practice.”

Christopher Hitchens, statement on ACLU suit against NSA mass surveillance, Jan 2006.

The New Atheist worldview was built on other intellectual movements that provided crucial support for the ideologies of Western imperialism. This was the era of Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’. Attention has also previously been drawn to Huntington’s highly controversial theory of ‘civilizational clash’:

“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in the new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural… differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, Ianguage, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.”

Samuel Huntington ‘Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 1993, 22, 25.

This idea of ideology as an overcome and spent force is deeply embedded in neoliberalism. These polemic works were produced in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the perception of a final triumph of global Western, liberal democracies and the heyday of neoliberalist Capitalism. The authors pointed to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, painting a revisionist picture of liberal values drawn up in the ancient Greek and Roman world and forged, tested, and proven in the French Revolution, inherited as the rightful claim of modern Western, imperialist, neoliberals. These ideas were especially popular among the non-academic commentariat and media establishment. The New Atheists, ever the polymaths, owe much of their worldview to these movements in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The significance of New Atheist methodologies, epistemologies, and approaches in making it a desirable vehicle for Western imperialist, white supremacist, neoliberal ideology has received far less attention than the particulars of their ideas. The New Atheist rallying call was for the advancement of logic, reason, and facts, which goes hand in hand with a denial of the role, importance, or even existence of narrative, presentation, analysis, and subjectivity in influencing people’s understanding. Ideology and bias were for other people – the religious. This was a belief in their own ‘objectivity’: if they were wrong it was due to error, mistake, or lack of evidence.

scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense and its truths may even offend it. Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists too can make mistakes and publish erroneous conclusions. That’s all regrettable but not deeply sinister… A more insidious threat to truth comes from certain schools of academic philosophy. There is no objective truth, they say, no natural reality, only social constructs. Extreme exponents attack logic and reason themselves, as tools of manipulation or ‘patriarchal’ weapons of domination.

Richard Dawkins ‘The insidious attacks on scientific truth‘, Spectator, 19th Dec 2020.

A worldview focused on ‘pure’ facts and denial of narrative and presentation was very useful to neoliberal governments, like the Tony Blair administration, that specialised in spin and narrative control, with selective assemblages of facts. In particular the case for the Iraq war relied on assemblages of ‘facts’ that created false and misleading impressions. The most notorious example of this was the ‘dodgy dossier’: a document issued in 2003 to justify the Iraq war, which emphasised its reliance ‘upon a number of sources, including intelligence material’, while selectively plagiarising, spinning, and manipulating ‘facts’.

In truth the ‘atheism’ part of the New Atheist movement was always the most disposable, but that has become clearer as time has gone on. Most recent discussions of New Atheism in the media and public domain have now dropped any real attention to discussion of atheism itself and focus on the use of the movement as an ideological tool for liberal democracies. Many of them are calls for a continuation of the New Atheist ‘ethos’ but sans the atheism.

In a society in which we are faced with postmodernism on the left and post-truth on the right, this skeptical, rational, evidence-based, unapologetically outspoken, liberal mentality can act as an effective antidote if applied broadly, consistently and strategically.

Helen Puckrose ‘Where Now for New Atheists?’ Areo, 15th May 2017.

Atheism is disposable both to the discussion and to the advocate for New Atheism. It is secondary to the use of the movement primarily in pulling people away from left wing views and towards a belief in ‘Western, Enlightenment values’; towards belief in Western, white supremacist, imperialist, neoliberal capitalism.

The “New Atheists” played a crucial role in my personal and political development. It was their insistence on reason, logic, and evidence that made me question my radical left-wing views and led me to adopt a more nuanced perspective.

Gerfried Ambrosch ‘How the “New Atheists” Deradicalized Me’, 15th May 2021.

Wrapping up

In fact, much of the New Atheist ‘ethos’ has endured, especially in the institutions and professional classes in British society. Despite defining itself by its ‘moderateness’, ‘objectivity’, and opposition to ‘extreme ideologies’, the dedicatedly ideological commentariat has served as the primary vanguard of democratic closure and increasingly decrepit, right wing, regressive, governments in the neoliberal tradition. The repeated failure of these governments is not recognised as a failure of ideology or their specific intellectual project, but a sign either of unrelated governmental incompetence or inappropriate ideological intrusion. Most of all, this fuels a belief that the liberal commentariat is under attack from the government; a deep-seated belief in the victimhood of the personhood and ideology of the wealthy, white, man: another defining feature of the New Atheist movement.

Social media likes to defend the perceived powerless from the perceived powerful, and atheists would be perceived to be wielding the power here. Not least because most well-known atheists are white men who come from a Christian background. This becomes clearer when you note that Richard Dawkins gets much more stick for saying things about Islam than he does about Christianity. There would certainly be an argument that since Dawkins writes from a position against all religion, his beef with Islam should just be filed under that, but it gets read, a lot, as a white man dissing Muslims…
I want to make it clear – perhaps to myself, because it confuses me at times too – just how Jewish, despite, or rather through, my atheism, I am.

David Baddiel, The God Desire, 2023.

It is no accident that the major intellectual giants of the liberal commentariat are the likes of Nick Cohen, veteran political commentator, neoliberal, advocate for the Iraq war, and Jewish atheist; and David Baddiel, laddish comedian propelled to significance for his commentary on antisemitism as a strong anti-left voice helping to exile the Corbyn movement from mainstream politics in the UK, and also a Jewish atheist. Baddiel’s book The God Desire (2023) on the history of atheism could easily have been published in 2008, based on its tone, coverage, and ethos.

The reader interested in the history of atheism might consider reading Atheism at the Agora: A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism (2023).