You've probably heard of the so-called "New Atheists": Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Their books against religion are red-hot in a still religion-mad America. However, there's a shrillness about their tone that outrages even many atheists. That shrillness, especially in Harris, struck me immediately as very familiar. It's the same tone you find in a figure I discovered three years after her death (i.e., in 1985); one whose books have been remarkably consistent bestsellers ever since they were published in the mid-to-late 20th century; one whose heavy influence Harris openly acknowledges: Ayn Rand. Problem is, Rand is notorious as the guru of a cult.
Rand was one of the true founders of the New Atheism, one of its two twentieth-century godmothers. The other was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, who dedicated her life to relentless struggle against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren't fighting a new battle; they have simply picked up the swords left by the founding mothers of their movement.
I was once a closet believer in Rand's philosophy, unknown to anyone in the movement. (In my first decade on the Internet, roughly 1995-2005, I was strictly a lurker, keeping my presence hidden; I similarly didn't reveal myself to the online Objectivists.) I'm familiar with her writings, not just her three major novels but her many books of essays. I also studied the history of Rand, her philosophy which she named Objectivism, and the movement she founded on it. I'm as familiar with the philosophy as just about anybody in the movement. My entire realist worldview derives to a very large degree from Rand's. But there's something about how Rand led the movement, and in how she wrote, that is suspiciously religious. Many have gone so far as to call Objectivism a cult: Murray Rothbard (the free-market economist and a former Rand associate), Michael Shermer, Albert Ellis, and Jeff Walker, among others. Even no less a figure than Rand's one-time protégé, Nathaniel Branden, has made a detailed critique of Rand's philosophy, pointing out its weaknesses, which happen to be the most religious of her tenets.
Recently, while reading up on Lyndon LaRouche's conspiracy theories, I realized that Objectivism is a cult because it is in fact a sect of a religion. This religion has no supreme being of any kind, or even any gods. It doesn't even recognize the existence of the supernatural. It's called Rationalism, which is defined as the cult of reason. It's actually quite ancient, and Rand rightly credits Aristotle with the origin of her philosophy, for he and his mentor Plato founded the religion. But Rationalism took its modern form during the Enlightenment, the period between the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions that, along with them, created modern Western civilization, and with it the modern world as we know it. Modern secularism was born then. But the eighteenth-century West was just coming out of the Wars of Religion, and there was still a heavy religious tinge to the philosophies of the day. Descartes and the English and German philosophers were openly religious. It was the French who first broke with Christianity, as the Roman Catholic Church had vast political power within the Kingdom of France and used it to destroy its opponents, including Protestants and reformers. This is the reason for the French Enlightenment philosophers' antireligious fury (summed up in Voltaire's war cry, "Écrasez l'infâme!") and the bloodthirsty ferocity of the ensuing French Revolution. Rand had the same crusading fury because she came from Russia, a totalitarian Christian kingdom which got taken over by the new "Catholic Church" of Rationalism, which by the time she fled to America in 1926 had become known as Stalinism.
Rand found her following in America. She found it among Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals from oppressive religious backgrounds but who had come to reject religion. They took to their new creed, Objectivism, like a new faith, in the same ardent way Russians had converted to Hegel, Marx, and scientific rationalism the previous century. Similarly, many Catholic nuns would reject their faith and become militant feminists in the 1970s. Like those ex-nuns and Rand's Russian forerunners, the Objectivist converts brought a fiercely religious spirit to secular philosophy. They became what others called a cult, and Ayn Rand was their all-knowing guru, the avatar of the Goddess of Reason. The Objectivists were crusaders for Reason.
I stopped being even a closet follower of Rand when both the Ayn Rand Institute and its less dogmatic rival, the Atlas Society, became gung-ho supporters of George W. Bush's colonial adventurism in the Middle East. They became thoroughly infected with the neoconservative virus. By then I had been inoculated by the dialectical approach of Chris Matthew Sciabarra. The addition of dialectics had the effect on me of removing the religious Rationalism from Objectivism. Also acting as a vaccine was Richard Brodie's popular book on memetics and mind viruses, Virus of the Mind, which explains in detail, in memetic terms, exactly how religion works. (Dawkins himself is the father of memetics.) So even as the Objectivist movement followed its religious impulse into neoconservatism and the hero-worship of Great Leader Shrub, and in fact partly because of it, I became completely irreligious. I was now very much a secular humanist, with an emphasis on "secular".
There is a religious element of Rationalism in the New Atheism because the great guru Ayn Rand put it there. I know it is religious because people have converted from Objectivism to other religions, from Evangelicalism to Scientology to New Age guruism, without changing their mindset. Their mindset may have been rational, but it was not secular. And so now I can explain the peculiar intolerance that the New Atheists have toward religion: they are themselves transitioning out of religion, with Rationalism as the transitional stage between theistic religion and complete secularism. That's why they treat those who hold to the old religions as their personal enemies. They explain their militant opposition to religion by pointing to the bloodthirsty Al-Qaeda cult (for it is a cult) and using it to point out that religious intolerance is a mortal threat to civilization, with 9/11 in America, 3/11 in Spain, and 7/7 in England as proof. But in doing so, they have adopted their enemies' intolerance. Ayn Rand, the great hater of mysticism, is the example they follow. And admittedly, Islam remains extremely dangerous; it has not yet been weakened by the secularizing trend that has undermined Christianity, itself once (and, in some places, still) a ferociously crusading cult. (I blame 500 years of Ottoman Empire for preventing the modernization of the Middle East. Christian Russia, the mystic-ridden kingdom Rand hated with all her heart, has the exact same problem, and cults still run rampant there, from the revived Black Hundreds to Aum Supreme Truth.)
The problem with the New Atheism is that it has allowed itself to be infected by the fundamentalist Rationalism of Ayn Rand and Madalyn Murray O'Hair (and, to a lesser degree, Lyndon LaRouche). They didn't just want to advance the dominion of reason; they wanted to destroy the old religions altogether. However, they didn't know that they were doing exactly what Rand's mortal enemy Stalin did: crusading for a different religion entirely, one they believed defines Western civilization now that God is dead. But in so doing, they adopted the religious intolerance of the infidel. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the New Atheists have likewise adopted the militant intolerance of their Muslim enemies. They have adopted as their own the war cry of French Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot: "Man will not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest!" If they had their way, some of them would massacre religious people like Stalin did. (He also massacred Communists, but that's a subject for a future entry.)
I focus on Rand because I'm so familiar with her. I have no such familiarity with O'Hair. But much of what I said about Rand also applies to the equally irascible and egomaniacal O'Hair, who was also accused of being the guru of a cult. The important thing is the hatred of religious people — not just religion, but religious people — that they passed on to their New Atheist successors and which they ironically share with their religious enemies.
It's not enough to say "no religion is my religion." To be truly secular, much less humanist, one must reject the religious mentality altogether, including its hatred of infidels. It's not enough to be an atheist — Buddhism, like Rationalism, rejects the concept of a supreme being — rather, one must, as the name of this blog states, take nothing on faith, not even reason itself. As I myself am a former Christian, a former New Ager, and a former Rationalist (of Rand's sect), I know religion when I see it. Even Nathaniel Branden himself came to see the religion in Rand, and ultimately (after being cast out of the cult by Rand personally) rejected it. And many people over the years have likewise rejected Objectivism because of the religious fanaticism of the movement. Rand was every bit as much a guru as any of the Hindu swamis she scorned so contemptuously.
What made me see the religious elements of Rationalism in the New Atheism was its harsh intolerance for the religious. That is, for people who stick to the old religions. But even before the Objectivist movement's embrace of imperial Bushism during the Iraq invasion of 2003 led me to reject Objectivism (as, among other things, being not objective enough), I could see that Objectivism was conspicuously lacking in humanism. Rand considered contempt a virtue. Butler Shaffer of LewRockwell.com even goes so far as to compare Atlas Shrugged to the infamous neo-Nazi screed The Turner Diaries, claiming that in her magnum opus Rand called for the extermination of the entire human race with the exception of the egoist/capitalist elite she celebrates. Rationalism and secular humanism are both atheistic, but one is religious in mentality and the other is not. Humanism does not crusade. Marxism and Objectivism do. Crusaders set up dictatorships. Look at the neo-tsarist state socialism of twentieth-century Russia — and the neoconservative corporate socialism of today's America.
An atheist is simply one who has no belief in a supreme being, or (in its stronger sense) any supernatural beings. But as the example of Buddhism shows, a religion can reject God and still be a religion. So Rationalism. I am, of course, an atheist myself. However, I have no faith. I don't need faith. And I certainly don't need to put faith in reason. Instead, I use it. That's why my arguments with defenders of religion never degenerate into screaming matches. All too often, many of the New Atheists are content to scream. Rand certainly did, spewing such creative invective as "rotters", "witch doctors", "Attila-ists", and "moral cannibals".
The cure for Rationalism, or religion in general, can be summed up in three short words. Strangely enough, they come from Ayn Rand. I live by these words, far better than Rand, trapped in the role of guru, ever could. They are:
Check your premises.
Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...
No comments:
Post a Comment