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Sam Harris |
Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and long a critic of the Religious Right, argues in his new book, "I Don't Believe in Atheists," that the scientific utopianism of modern atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris should alarm us
John Whitehead: Let me quote from your book: "There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally." You paint a very dark view of human nature.
Chris Hedges: It's realistic. It captures the wisdom of original sin. And the wisdom of original sin is borne out by studies of cognitive behavior, psychoanalysis, and the fact that we are driven by forces often subterranean that we don't fully understand. We can all be taken over by the irrational.
This is a fact of human nature, and not to see it is dangerous because you fall into these very frightening secular or religious utopian belief systems. "Utopia"
All of us who spent a prolonged period of time in the Middle East and spoke the language never felt that the war in Iraq or the occupa- tion of Iraq was a good idea. I include those in the State Department, in the intelligence community, and in the Pentagon.
JW: But don't we Americans believe we can go about the globe sprinkling seeds of truth, honesty, decency, and democracy?
CH: Joseph Conrad got it right. Noble virtues, civilization, and high ideals are more often a mask for a sort of rapacious theft of natural resources in the blunt and brutal colonialization and extermination of those who will not be subjugated. That is a much more accurate picture of what Western society has done and has been doing for several centuries in the developing world.
JW: Why can't Americans see that there is a really dark side to this country? What's happened to us?
CH: We've learned to speak and think in the epistemology of television, which is one essentially filled with thought-terminating cliches. Television is really anti-thought and anti-self-reflection. This is what a consumer society is all about. It is about achieving this distorted notion of happiness and personal contentment, which,
There is a kind of war against self-reflection, self-criticism, and real introspection. We live in a society that regularly confuses our emotional response with knowledge. You can watch the election campaign to get a good example of that. Barack Obama talks about hope and change. This is just an updated Pepsi commercial.
SERIOUSNESS, MIA
JW: We're a society based on cliches.
CH: The other candidates are not any different. This is very dangerous because it is all about how we're made to feel, which means that we can be very easily manipulated. The media play a role in all this. With the loss of foreign bureaus and the loss of serious reporting, which has virtually vanished from the electronic airwaves, we have been reduced to celebrity gossip and trivia passed off as news.
One thinks of Cicero writing about the Roman arena and the way the spectacle in the arena had consumed the emotional life of ordinary Romans and corrupted the civil and political discourse. Look at our own entertainment industry. It is really about bread and circuses.
We exhibit many of the qualities of a dying empire. One of the most disturbing is this willful flight into fantasy about ourselves and the world we live in.
JW: I'm often asked, "What is the biggest danger sign you see about America?" My response is that Americans are no longer analytical thinkers because they no longer read. When Obama, Clinton, or McCain speaks, people don't analyze it. They think emotionally.
CH: That is characteristic of an image-based culture. That is what we have become.
JW: We are the children of the Enlightenment.
CH: Unfortunately, we are the children of the Enlightenment. But without the doctrine of original sin. That's the great failing. The Enlightenment thinkers dropped the notion of original sin and placed their faith in humankind, knowledge, education, reason, and science to create the new Heaven and the new Earth.
We saw that first in the French Revolution with the Jacobins. They believed that they had to raise certain segments of the human race that were unenlightened to their level, and where they won't be raised they have to be eradicated. That is what led to the Committee of Virtue and the Reign of Terror that left 80,000 French dead.
Utopian visions wedded to force or a lust for violence have created more mounds of corpses than any other ideology or belief system in human history.
The failing of many [modern] atheists is that they believe human beings can progress morally in the same way that science has. That is
JW: These are the new atheists.
CH: That is the term they use to describe themselves. It is important to distinguish them from people like Nietzsche, who are different.
The new atheists are intellectually bankrupt. They have nothing to offer in terms of serious moral, theological, or scientific debate. They are very much a product of the television age. The kinds of things they write about religion are religiously illiterate. I am very disturbed by the racist cant that they have unleashed toward the Muslim world. These people know nothing about the Islamic world. They don't speak the language. They have never lived there.
BOMBS AWAY
JW: There is this idea that America can go anywhere in the world and basically wipe people out. Isn't this the idea of people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?
CH: Harris in his book "The End of Faith" calls for the U.S. to con- sider carrying out a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. This is insane.
Harris says that it may be our only option, given what these people believe. That kind of garbage is what you get from utopians and fundamentalists--Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. This is a fundamentalist mind-set. One of the fascinating things about going after the new atheists is that it is exactly the same as going after radical Christian fundamentalists, as I did in my book "American Fascists."
The new atheists through secular language have created essentially a fundamentalist belief system that elevates them. In theological terms, it's a form of idolatry. In the same way, the Christian Right often engages in a gross form of idolatry. The parallels are fascinating. These include the frightening belief that apocalyptic or catastrophic violence can be used as a kind of cleansing agent to purge the world in order
JW: Books by the new atheists sell well in college towns.
CH: What worries me is that when we suffer another terrorist attack, these two essentially fundamentalist strains will come together. One is a secular fundamentalism, and one is a religious fundamentalism, both of which will call for horrific bloodletting. This is especially true if it is deemed that the terrorist attack came from the Muslim world. These attacks will not only be aimed at Muslims beyond our borders. I worry about the 6 million Muslims in our midst.
