John Grey Separates the Atheist Wheat from the Chaff

[ad_1]

 

The potent thesis of John Grey’s quick and eloquent new quantity is: “If you wish to perceive atheism and faith, you have to overlook the favored notion that they're opposites.”

Creator of some 20 books, Grey is a public mental unafraid to enter the fray and right here does so towards most of the most cherished beliefs of secularists, leftists, and bien pensant institution. This makes the ebook shocking as a result of Grey is himself an atheist, however he's extra vexed by unhealthy atheistic considering than by non secular perception and follow.  

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d decide the lucidity of the writing to be a 10. Seven Varieties of Atheism is packed stuffed with sentences like these about Arthur Schopenhauer: “Nor was his selfishness altogether unappealing. For anybody weary of self-admiring world-improvers, there's something refreshing in Schopenhauer’s nastiness.” In addition to a stray mental slip up right here and there—oddly, the large one is about Eric Voegelin, whom the writer admires—it is a constantly good learn, brisk and conceptual on the similar time.  

In addition to discussing the concepts of atheism, Grey additionally provides a great deal of historical past. Generally the personalities and biography of the atheists in query change into a part of the argument towards the concepts—an advert hominem gesture I think about Grey forbids in his classroom—however the historical past does have some extent. It's to indicate the intolerance of atheism and, in the course of the instances through which it has held energy, its murderous fury. Amongst many examples, Grey captures the peculiar frenzy of atheism: “In 1919, all of Moscow’s Boy Scouts have been shot and in 1920 all members of the regulation tennis membership put to demise.”

This ebook ought to put to relaxation the canard that atheism is free considering, and oh a lot extra broad-minded and delicate than what's on supply from the boring and cramped-spirited God-fearing varieties. Grey thinks theism ill-conceived, however he doesn't assume it has something just like the distasteful character of most atheism.

Grey reserves particular scorn for these he phrases“the Enlightenment Evangelists,” a camp that stands for the proposition that human nature free of non secular perception provides us benevolent liberalism. One in every of his seven kinds of atheism, Enlightenment Evangelism is represented by the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Typical of this place is the oft-repeated declare that however for the obscurantism of faith, cause would prevail and a kind of John Lennonesque humanistic utopia, realizing neither gods nor borders, would prevail. 

Like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Grey considers motiveless cruelty a formative human impulse. Therefore he sees the Enlightenment Evangelists as far too fast to whitewash their collective reminiscence and ignore how the scientific revolution was put into the service of the slave commerce. All through the ebook, Grey minces few phrases: “Trendy racist ideology is an Enlightenment mission.” Members of the academy and the literati will blanch studying: “It's Jewish and Christian monotheism—not the European Enlightenment—that's the chief supply of the follow of toleration.”      

A protracted-serving professor of political thought at Oxford, Grey is aware of whereof he speaks. (He has additionally taught at Harvard, Yale, and the London College of Economics.) He's an professional on the historical past of Western thought, and of the seven kinds of atheism he identifies—every has its personal chapter within the ebook—he appears roughly to subscribe to Schopenhauer’s model.

First he covers that darling of publishing homes in recent times, the New Atheism, contending that it's neither new nor attention-grabbing, and positively not a refined model of atheism. Relationship again effectively into the 19th century, the so-called New Atheism is crippled by the truth that it errors its goal. The New Atheists assume that the battle with faith is a quarrel over beliefs, however actually “the concept that faith is a matter of perception is parochial.”

Grey notes, for instance, that in Judaism worshipping overseas gods is a matter of disloyalty, not a matter of mistaken perception. Although an act of loyalty appears to ivolve perception of some type, Grey’s level is that the Previous Testomony command to avoid unusual gods doesn't compel a lot in the best way of optimistic perception. To this present day, Jews might be fiercely pleased with their id but run the gamut on the number of beliefs they maintain pricey. In a chopping line, he concludes that the New Atheists are “principally a media phenomenon and greatest appreciated as a kind of leisure.” 

Cheekily, he additionally observes that although the atheistic professoriate sniffs at pop thinker Ayn Rand, probably nobody has finished extra to disseminate the essential claims of atheism than she. Rand’s scientism, rationalism, and libertinism are stock-in-trade for many school lecturers.        

The rationale Grey recommends Schopenhauer’s atheism is that it denies that historical past has any course or internal which means. That is the one place that conforms to empiricism, he argues, and he's particularly important of the tendency of atheists down the years to embrace elaborate pseudo-scientific theories. Atheists have carried water for scientific ethics, scientific materialism, phrenology, and bastardizations of Charles Darwin, to call some. Grey chides atheists for making a fetish of science, and for failing to understand that science is not any problem to faith, because the latter meets the necessity for which means, very like artwork or poetry. As Darwinism is wont to remind us, we're programmed for survival, not fact; and faith does assist with the previous, thinks Grey.

In some good pages on transhumanism (Chapter four), Grey observes that Gnosticism is alive and effectively in our politics. Our tech overlords are dedicated to salvation by way of human information. On account of Gnosticism’s soteriological ambition, fashionable politics is misrecognized if considered as a conflict between secular and non secular actions. Therefore the ebook’s opening line: “Up to date atheism is a flight from a godless world.”

For all his evenly worn sophistication, Grey mangles Voegelin horribly. He’s puzzled that Voegelin thinks modernity’s unabated killing spree stems from Gnosticism, for Grey insists that “the assumption that the human world might be remade on a greater plan is discovered nowhere among the many historic Gnostics.” Voegelin’s well-known thesis is that the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore took Gnosticism’s valorization of cause, mixed it with the Christian concept of windfall and the Christian social type of the monk, and therewith bequeathed to the West the concept of a cadre of benevolent specialists managing the world for its betterment. Voegelin sees modernity as a continuation of the Center Ages, not the traditional world—and who can doubt the benevolent zeal of the fashionable academy and the huge missionary motion of idealist specialists of the American and European non-profit sector?   

Grey is a follower of Heraclitus, satisfied that empiricism reveals solely vitalism: “All that may really be noticed is the multifarious human animal, with its intractable enmities and divisions.” Heraclitus begins Western metaphysics, however so does Parmenides, who concluded that empiricism revealed fixity, stability, wholeness, love, and the operation of thoughts. The info level of Parmenides will not be taken severely by Grey: “The concept that the human species is a collective agent, setting itself ‘huge tasks’ and pursuing them all through historical past, is a humanist fable inherited from monotheism.” But proof abounds that world civilizations do have issues in frequent: mores, legal guidelines, video games, dance, poetry, adornment, household, reverence. Regardless of the range in these—although the human curiosity in chasing a ball round a subject or courtroom appears really common—all civilizations intention at a concord between vitalism and thoughts.

Specifically, the world’s religions attempt to assume by way of the advanced interplay of the 2, and so the metaphysics of Grey’s personal atheism seems missing. Not, thoughts you, simply as a matter of style, however as unhealthy philosophy. He’s proper to reject up to date Gnosticism, however not proper to disregard the perception of Parmenides.

What is sweet about this quirky ebook will not be its ending, however the very many good arguments all through towards the atheistic canon.

[ad_2]

Supply hyperlink