In the Agora: This Book is Not Good

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August 24, 2007

This Book is Not Good

[A]s Mark Twain once mused, give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep until noon. With God Is Not Great, a caustic polemic on the evils of religion, Hitchens has earned the dubious honor of confirming Twain's aphorism. Anyone expecting a masterful demolition of all things sacred will be disappointed. Bullying and shallow, God Is Not Great is a haute middlebrow tirade, a stale venting of outrage and ridicule. Beneath his Oxbridge talent at draping glibness in the raiment of erudition, Hitchens proves to be an amateur in philosophy, an illiterate in theology, and a dishonest student of history. Too belligerent to be nimble and too parochial to be generous, the once-captivating Hitchens demonstrates why he has forfeited any claim on our attention.
Yet there's more at stake here than one man's career in bloviation. As part of the recent surge in books by atheists, God Is Not Great marks the gentrification of unbelief, a tony nihilism embraced by bourgeois bohemians. Though "Islamo-Fascism" makes a convenient target for books such as this, it is in fact religion itself, in its capacity as an intractable impediment to the juggernaut of capitalist modernity, that must be quarantined or destroyed. God Is Not Great exemplifies the connections among the new atheism, the privatization of religion, the idolatry of the nation-state, and the sacrificial violence of imperialism.
[...]
The new militancy of secularism stems from some obvious sources: Islamic radicalism abroad and conservative evangelicalism at home, along with religious interventions in debates about abortion, gay marriage, "intelligent design," and global warming. But the boom in unbelief has other bases. Today's atheism pays extravagant homage to idols dear to the professional and managerial ranks. Science as truth; the technological mastery of nature; credentialed expertise as the only credible form of learning; efficiency and profit as the sole ends of economic and political life: these shibboleths comprise the mental universe of the Western middle classes. Colored by an incoherent blend of Darwinism and environmentalism, a bland infatuation with science and technology is the bourgeois halo around instrumental reason, and nothing in the new secularism of Dawkins, Harris et al. serves to exorcise that enchantment. While Hitchens likes to bask in the grand tradition of atheism (he throws out allusions to every great skeptic from Lucretius to Bertrand Russell), his ill-tempered tract rarely ventures outside the boundaries of the suburban moral imagination, even as it manages to flatter a corporate executive's every conceit.

From Eugene McCarraher's scathing review of Christopher Hitchens's God is not Great. Full text here.

I think there's a good bit of truth in the assertion that "the new militancy of secularism" arose in response to evangelical political militancy at home and Islamic militancy abroad. Fortunately, it appears the next generation of evangelical leaders (like Rick Warren) are a bit more cautious when it comes to blowback in spiritual matters, God's Warriors notwithstanding.

Posted by David Darlington at August 24, 2007 05:03 PM

Comments

It wouldn't surprise me if Hitchens' book is pretty lousy, but the deployment of the phrase "an incoherent blend of Darwinism and environmentalism" strongly suggests that the author has a rather limited insight into what he is talking about. (Actually, just that use of the word "Darwinism" would strongly suggests this on its own; I have yet to see anyone who actually understands the theory of evolution use that word that way.)

The rest of the review reveals further significant deficiencies, including: a rather simplistic invocation of Roger Bacon's relation to science(since it is a standard question about him as to what extent his religious views & those of his community _obstructed_, rather than aided, his empiricism). (I also found it very weird that he appealed to Bacon and Grossteste as religious men of science, and not Descartes and, above all, Newton!) And he makes a rather silly claim that it is a freshman-level philosophical result that Aquinas' versions of the cosmological argument is a success (when he is not generally held in philosophy to have be successful in this way, even by those who think that _some_ form of the cosmological argument may work); and included a confused appeal to Wittgenstein to back up this line on the cosmological argument, which manages to both run together the earlier and later phases of his philosophy (which are generally held to be inconsistent) and to ignore the ways in which the argument he's offering here is baldly inconsistent with Wittgenstein's own writings on religion.

I expect that there are some areas that the author of the review knows a great deal about, but neither the history of science nor philosophy are among them.

Posted by: philosopher at August 25, 2007 11:30 AM | permalink

August 24, 2007

This Book is Not Good

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