Source: The Other Journal
The Other Journal (TOJ): It might seem appropriate to
begin our interview by addressing the growing voice of this supposed “new
atheism” as represented by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Onfray, et cetera,
yet there seems to be nothing new here but a great display of amnesia
concerning, among other things, their intellectual history. Moreover, what
often passes for a religion/atheism discussion these days seems to be little
more than a sensationalized intramural duel among real-life versions of
Nietzsche’s Last Man, as both atheists and religious interlocutors alike
desperately try to assert moribund bourgeois ideals against one another.
However, despite the poverty and pettiness of its discourse, this
particular cast of contemporary atheist and religious interlocutors has
benefited from the media machine and its penchant for spectacles. Indeed, the
popularization of New Atheism suggests that the late-capitalist culture industry
is at work here, raising this spectacle to a reality, dominating the collective
imagination and transforming our
understanding of what it means to be religious or scientific or atheist, and
perhaps this apparatus is what’s really “new” here. Could you begin, then, by
discussing the underlying logic of the culture industry, an industry to which
both sides of the debate seem tied and which finds it necessary to produce,
stage, and amplify this discussion/spectacle?
John Milbank (JM): I think that you have put this
question really well and at a level of sophistication that is usually missing. It’s
as if the crude and dualistic presentation of issues so common in the media has
now penetrated the book market and captured a part of what is supposedly serious
discourse. For a long time now, the media has presented religion in terms of
traditionalists—superstitious lunatic fundamentalists—versus ‘liberal modernisers’.
This new shift seeks to imply that religion is fundamentally insanity, that its
natural enemy is science, that liberal religious people are a bit confused, and
that the only valid way to be a religious liberal is to be vaguely spiritual. I
find it really hard to know what is going on here, so I can only offer some extremely
tentative reflections.
It’s important to note that the New Atheism movement began in the
1990s. Well before 9/11 Dawkins, Dennett, and Churchland had already got going.
Is this a purely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon? Not entirely. In French
thought there’s been a gradual drift from poststructuralism (which, in
retrospect, seems to be negative humanism after all) to new modes of speculative
materialism. However, it’s mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries that one gets the
crude anti-religion polemic. One might suggest that that’s because the entire
modernity-science-capitalism thing is at its most virulent here. Perhaps the
French just give a softer, far more sophisticated version of this
What needs to be focused on is the double impression given by the
media: (1) religion is reviving and (2) clever people know that it is over. I
find it fascinating that in Britain, which is of course far more modern than
the United States, left versus right is increasingly seen as secular versus
religious (though there are elements of this in the States). This is despite their
recent history of conspicuously religious “left” political leaders.
One sees this phenomenon in the 2008 Parliament debate over an embryology
bill. The press presented the debate as left versus right, science versus
religion, et cetera and wrote naively as if science answered moral questions. But
in reality, while the majority left members of Parliament supported
experimentation on embryos, the fact that by no means all of them did so was,
so to speak, hushed up. Increasingly, the media do not want complex stories,
and they therefore make us live by this dualistic approach.
Yes, the spectacle of “science” is now regarded an absolute destiny.
It is the human glory to undo itself through science. British police shows like
Waking the Dead now screen very long takes of the dissection of human
bodies by glamorous women. The message is that science is beautiful and glossy,
that finding scientific truth is the one moral impulse, and that human life is otherwise
a tragic mess.
Dawkins and his cohorts want the supposed incompatibility of science
with religious belief to be taught as
an official part of a state agenda. This is tantamount to a revival of
Soviet-style official atheism. It would mean that the obvious ‘debatability’ of
this view would be denied and free speech would therefore be denied to one side
of the debate. Religious people as declaredly ‘anti-science’ would inevitably
become second-class citizens. But I’m not arguing on ‘liberal’ grounds here
for the equality of all and every opinion. I’m rather suggesting that some
issues have to be publicly regarded as ‘debatable’ even though on stands on one
side or another. Hence I would argue that it is ‘radically irrational’ to
suppose that people who think religion and science are compatible are
‘obviously stupid’. But I would also argue the reverse. People who think they
are incompatible are in my view mistaken and not subtle thinkers but I can see
how they have made this mistake for apparently plausible sounding reasons. There
is no need to marginalise them as lunatics – though the case for doing so would
be far rationally stronger than the case for marginalising religious people.
What’s this new scientistic fanatacism all about? Well, I suppose it
is fundamentally about the collapse of all secular ideologies in the late twentieth
century. One is left with the truth of science as the only reality of the
modern. If science is simply the freedom to know, it can become Faustian. And
apart from this freedom there is only the right to choose one’s own lifestyle.
The crucial thing here that the left has missed here is that sexual freedoms
have increased exponentially while all other freedoms have declined.
Today in Great Britain, you scarcely have the right to demonstrate,
and a higher proportion of Great Britain’s population is in prison than the
proportion of China’s population that is in prison. The boy at the shopcounter
with no customers is not allowed to read a book to improve himself, but who
cares what he gets up to with sex and drink after the shop closes? Of course,
there’s also a double-think about sex—it’s all OK and yet male sexuality is
nearly always exploitative, etcetera—but in general, it would seem that, as Adorno
and Horkheimer and Marcuse predicted, sexualization is intended to keep us all
quiet: neurotic, hysterical, frustrated, and unhappy but still “looking.”
Knowing that we they can watch a porn film when they get home from work,
workers may overlook the fact that they have lost the lunch-hour when they
could have caught up with public affairs over a sandwich in the local library.
Thus with sex divided from procreation, science and sexual freedom
come together in a tacit Malthusian programme of biopolitical manipulation. The
State aspires both scientifically to control reproduction and to keep its
citizens ‘drugged’ with dreams of sex and the need to compete in the sexual agon. Michel Houillebecq is completely
right about this and the left has to rethink its 60’s-derived libertarianism if
it wishes to continue to oppose capitalism.
Instead, by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation,
the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. “Women” are lined up with
science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human
subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in a “female” manner. The re-envisaged
autonomous female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific
objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here
of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an
endless “objective” improvement and the expression of a will to freedom/will to
power. Of course, this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female
body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the
male body (as also vice versa) and to another body that is itself and yet
becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also
to women, save as objects of their (“male”) choice, babies thereby become pure
consumer objects, and all human relationality and personhood is abandoned.
After the collapse of secular ideologies then, one is left with “just
science.” But also, of course, “the return of religion,” since these now
represent the only alternative ideologies—virulent in the case of Islam where
religion is still overwhelmingly practiced.
Post-9/11 has allowed the media to present the religion-versus-science
story in ever cruder terms. Of course, it’s highly significant that Christopher
Hitchens also supported the Bush foreign policy. This is because, at bottom,
neo-liberalism and scientism line up with each other. But Hitchens never really
explains how his imperialism of reason relates to the messianic aspect of
American imperialism. He and others don’t explore the point at which
fundamentalism and scientism can be in a hidden alliance in that the very
emptiness of a formalist approach to economics and politics can allow an
extreme religiosity to supply the concrete content. Racist and nationalist
fascism can no longer do this very readily because races are mixed up and
national identities are confused—so one is getting regionalism as much as
nationalism. Religions by contrast supply diffused globalized identities so
that religious extremism fits well with an era of globalization. Yet so also
does naturalism, the idea that all we have in common is one material planet and
our physical nature.
Hence, the age of religious and philosophical “agnosticism” is
over—as Quentin Meillassoux says. Now we have two rival dogmatisms about the
infinite, materialism and fundamentalism.
Instead of these dire alternatives, we need more apophatic (though
not agnostic) approaches to the infinite; we need to recognize that, as Charles
Taylor says, many people embrace a complex mix of belief and unbelief, and as …
Pope Benedict XVI advocates, we need more subtle mixes of faith and reason.
But the only way our media would recognize this complexity is if we
were not dominated by capitalism in the mode of the spectacle.
TOJ: In considering the historical development of modern atheism’s
cultural logic, what would you consider as its defining cultural form, if there
is such a thing? That is, what has been continuously present throughout its
modern history? Moreover, what key shifts in the way that power was
constructed, distributed, and organized, especially through changing
socioeconomic formations, might have provided the necessary material conditions
for its emergence and particular shape?
JM: I think that we’ve scarcely begun to
pose, much less explore, this all-important question. How is it that atheism
arose so recently—at the end of eighteenth century—and yet so quickly
established itself? Clearly, it began as an elite phenomenon, so it is from the
start and up to now socially connected to the idea of a new, rival elite
opposed to the old aristocracy. This means that it has to be considered a
bourgeois phenomenon or else one of decadent aristocracy—which is another
modern socialising mode.
I think that Charles Taylor in A
Secular Age provides important clues by saying that the atheist self is the
“buffered self”—no external spiritual forces can get to it—and also that it is
a self that is entirely in charge of its own morality and self-disciplining.
Thus, as he argues, if Latin Christianity, because of its over-disciplinary
mode and its “festive” deficit, ushered in this sort of self, atheism finally
dispenses with the religious bit altogether. This atheist self is definitely
the self that is totally autonomous and so it likes to reduce everything to
predictable calculation. Spiritual security and worldly freedom and comfort are
preferred over the aristocratic heroism of a quest for meaning. In Great
Britain, even up to, say, Thatcher or even Blair, the establishment was still
somewhat religious. But Blair, ironically, ushered in a new political class
that saw politics like a business that is to be exploited, and this political
class is essentially an atheist class. Maybe the explicit personal religiosity
of the New Labour party in some way worked ideologically to mask this.
To my mind then, modernity is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism—“political
economy”—and capitalism is atheism and nihilism. Not to see this, or rather not
fully to see this, is the critical deficit of Marxism. Again, Taylor is right: All
critical resistance to modernity is “romantic’’ in character. It (1) allows
that more freedom and material happiness is a partial good, (2) yearns for
elements of lost organic values, and (3) realizes that the anti-body,
anti-festivity, anti-sex, hell-linked, disciplinary, over-organized character
of Latin Christendom is ironically responsible for the Enlightenment mentality.
I’m starting to think that this triple romanticism is more
fundamental than [any] left/right characterization, which after all, is a kind
of accidental result of the French Revolution. Both left and right, as André de
Muralt argues in L’unite de la
philosophie politique, are nominalist: Both favor a strong, single center
of money or power or both (right) or the rights of the many singly or when
totted up (left). Both positions are also in the end atheist.
It is also important now to re-read carefully Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, arguably the
most important work of political economy written in the last century. Although it is a socialist work, which
indeed goes rigorously beyond Marx’s ontology and history of capitalism from a
‘religious’, guild-socialist perspective, it is also suspicious of most
socialisms – state socialism certainly, but also many associative socialisms
which he notably tracks back to late 17thC Quaker thought, because he sees
these as all too akin to capitalist attempts to make indigency and
impoverishment a paradoxical source of wealth. Instead, he favours both wide
distribution of assets (like Chesterton and Belloc) and a guild-restriction of
market entry which by limiting market competition actually protects market competition from monopoly. This allows
‘reciprocity’ to rule – the primacy of mutual satisfaction of needs. This he
argues is the human norm against Adam Smith. And against Hayek he is saying
that ‘reciprocity’ is the norm of markets.
German ordo-liberalism or ‘social market’ theory has often said the same
thing. Maurice Glasmann in Afflicted
Powers has shown how the British left has misunderstood his current and how
close it is to both Polanyi and to Catholic Social teaching. One can also note
in passing that Polanyi praises Archbishop Laud and condemns the Cromwellian
commonwealth with respect to their treatment of the poor! It is a Catholic not
a Protestant socialism that he points us towards............................
We need, indeed a new kind of romantic politics that is specifically
religious, and often Christian, in thinking that one can only get distributive
equality on the basis of agreed upon values and an elite transmission and
guarding of those values. A more Carlylean and Ruskinian politics
then—basically left, yet with elements that are not really right so much as
pre-modern and traditionalist. Strictly speaking, the pre-modern predates right
versus left. In Great Britain, Phillip Blond is developing a crucially
important new mode of Red Toryism, which might in my view be seen as a kind of
traditionalist socialism. This is already having a profoundly transformative
effect upon British politics and, in effect, marks the political translation of
the paradox of Radical Orthodoxy and the beginning of its entry upon the
political stage. RT is also rapidly acquiring a global influence. Others have
been speaking of a ‘blue socialism’ (myself ) or of ‘blue labour’ (Maurice Glasmann, a Polanyist
Jewish Socialist and Jon Cruddas a prominent labour MP). However, I would argue
that the paradox amounts to the same thing whatever way round one puts it.
Blond draws upon genuine traditions of ‘Tory radicalism’ (Richard Oastler etc)
but in fact RT goes well beyond that. It stakes out a new radical communitarian
ground against the liberalism of both right and left.
The hard thing now for critical thinkers to do is to think outside
leftism. They have to see that if neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have
totally triumphed, this is because the left in its traditional mode is
incapable of carrying out an adequate critique of capitalism. In the end, this
is because it’s atheistic—one needs to be religious to recognize objective
values and meanings as not just epiphenomenal. Again Polanyi clearly saw that
capitalist ‘primary accumulation’ is always also an act of descralisation. Today in Great Britain, the left is more or
less now defining itself as scientistic which actually permits an underwriting
of a new mode of fascism and racism as I mentioned earlier.
Left Christians now must stress the Christian bit much more if they
are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.
Atheism is bourgeois oppression; atheism is the opium of the
people—it claims to discover an ontology that precludes all hope. In the face of this we need now to celebrate
the faithful legacy of peasants; learned, honorable and genuinely paternalist
aristocrats, Christian warrior kings like Alfred the Great and Charles Martel;
yeomen farmers and self-sacrificial scholars. Charles Péguy, William Cobbett
and Hilaire Belloc are the men for the hour.
TOJ: How might we understand the key intellectual shifts that both made
possible and legitimated the changes in the organization of power that
contributed to the rise of modern atheism? Moreover, in light of the common
readings of atheism as essentially negative—as a sober desacralizing,
disenchanting, and demythologizing movement—how should we understand the
intellectual shifts of modern atheism in relation to Christian theology? Did
atheism’s intellectual development come by way of a thorough rejection of
theology, as common readings claim, or more primarily as the construction of an
alternative theology?
JM: Again, this is to ask absolutely the
right question. Many authors, like Michael Buckley, have now shown that atheism
was not “subtractive.” In the face of a decadent late-Baroque theology, it had
positively to invent a self-sufficient naturalism, or else new modes of theism
were invented. Often, indeed, atheism has operated as a religion—of nature, of
man, of race, of class destiny—and now it’s becoming the religion of
science—democracy is supposed to produce an obedient seconding of the verdicts
of science, which are seen as answering all problems, even ethical ones.
Charles Taylor has now extended the anti-subtraction theory into the
social realm. The very idea of social and political order without religion is
bizarre by all traditional lights. The invention of secular order is an
extraordinary achievement, if not highly questionable, because instead of
faith, it requires rational foundations that one really can’t have. Thus,
practical atheism is more dogmatic than religion.
I’d add to Taylor a bigger stress on the dubiousness of liberalism,
which is mainly political economy. As Pierre Manent argues in his Intellectual History of Liberalism it
“empties the soul”—it delivers negative freedom at the price of a loss of
character.
We’re now at a crossroads. Politics has become a shadow play. In
reality, economic and cultural liberalism go together and increase together.
The left has won the cultural war, and the right has won the economic war. But
of course, they are really both on the same side.
The point is to resist this. And that means, of course, to re-think
Christendom, but in more festive, pro-body terms, yet more interpersonal, less
fearing terms, and terms that celebrate much more excellence and virtue in every realm,
including those of craft, farming, and trade, and to re-think Christendom with
greater will to the democratization of excellence.
The “other religions” thing in the end won’t matter. The world as a
whole is rapidly Christianizing, and even in Islamic countries like Bangladesh
Muslims are finding their own specific and valuably Islamic way to Christ in
notably increasing numbers. As Paul Claudel realised in Le Soulier de Satin, the meaning of globalisation is a shift to the
primacy of the sea, la mer tout entière,
and so figurally of baptism and personal relationship, however terrestrially
sundered. The evil disasters of colonialism can only be redeemed when they are
seen as perverse and yet providential ways to the further proclamation of
Christian universalism.
But the challenge now is to have a good and true and not a perverted
capitalist version of a global Christendom.
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