Heather: Thus spurred, I took another look at Brooks’ column. The dubious stuff is down towards the end.
The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality … challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
That is just really bad writing — though of the kind that anyone who writes much for a living commits once in a while. He seems to mean that the New Atheists are trying to put morality on a rational basis — a sort of “moral calculus” in the style of Leibnitz (? was it Leibnitz? I can never keep my philosophers straight). That’s not what they’re up to at all, though. Their objection to religion is not so much rational as empirical. And Brooks seems not to grasp that you can reason about emotions …
The New Atheists are “challenged” by current human-nature studies, but only because they are all lefties, yoked to the “blank slate” model of human personality and the Boasian “psychic unity of mankind” anthropological framework. They are not challenged in their atheism, only in their leftism. The political Left is all about social engineering; and the results coming out of the human sciences tell us that social engineering is mostly futile.
Brooks again:
Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.
Why would the evolutionary approach make it “hard to appreciate” that “most people struggle toward goodness”? If goodness — restraint, respect, self-cultivation, etc. — is what makes social life work, natural selection will take care of seeing that most of us strive towards goodness as an end. That’s our social nature, part of our human nature. It is perfectly consonant with the evolutionary approach. Likewise with the emotions he’s talking about there. It’s no more surprising that moral behavior brings forth happy feelings than it is that sexual intercourse does so. They both keep the species going.
Is it true that the New Atheists are all Blank Slate lefties? Are any of them?
Or did you just commit the kind of writing that everyone who writes for a living commits once in a while?
Dawkins & Hitchens certainly are, Dennett I think so, Harris I’ll admit I’m not sure.
I get the impression, and it’s only a vague impression, that Dennett merely pays lip service to the shibboleths of the left. His stance on so many issue seems so hard-nosed, unsentimental, and empirically-driven that I figure he can’t help but realize that, say, Pinker’s take-down of the Blank Slate is spot-on.
But, in today’s academic climate, if you come too close to blurting out what your “lying eyes” tell you about certain unpleasant social realities, you are cast out (Summers, Watson, etc.)
Maybe deep-down Dennett believes all that Lefty noise, but I’d like to think that he’s too intellectually honest to fall for it.
Kevin is right. Pinker’s anti-B.S. critique has become the mainstream view among evolutionists. Dawkins and Hitchens both say in different ways that religious belief is probably ineradicable, that we are wired for magical thinking, to fill in the gaps of our sensorium and understanding with causal phantoms and spectres. It requires a conscious, sustained effort to stave off the inborne, evolved impetus to project a human-like motivational structure onto the workings of the natural world, to assume the universe can be navigated with the same sort of storytelling-methods we use to map out human-centric dispositions and predicaments. Their argument is that Christian “humility” has it backwards. Atheist humility means giving up the idea that Nature operates like a Mind, one that places humans at the center of its cognition and concern. Also, Dennett’s evolution-manifesto *Darwin’s Dangerous Idea* is not exactly blank-slate boosterism.
>”The political Left is all about social engineering; and the results coming out of the human sciences tell us that social engineering is mostly futile.”
Social engineering doesn’t have to come from the state. Corporate engineers have become gods of shaping and channeling inborne preferences and prejudices to manufacture a frenetic consumer base of debt-ridden lifestyle junkies.
Hm. Here is Richard Dawkins on Pinker’s The Blank Slate:
He’s also defended eugenics.
Dawkins: “If we tried to do our Darwinian theorising without postulating genes affecting behaviour, we should get it wrong.”
BTW, what is the definition of “a new atheist”? People who’ve just written (or read) a book on the subject? Why do some people capitalize the phrase?
“He’s also defended eugenics.” That was a defense of discussing the idea, not a defense of any actual practice (though everyone practices some sort of eugenics when they reproduce).
Heather writes:
‘Why would the evolutionary approach make it “hard to appreciate” that “most people struggle toward goodness”? If goodness — restraint, respect, self-cultivation, etc. — is what makes social life work, natural selection will take care of seeing that most of us strive towards goodness as an end[…..]It’s no more surprising that moral behavior brings forth happy feelings than it is that sexual intercourse does so. They both keep the species going.’
I think Heather is incorrect, as goodness being “restraint, respect, self-cultivation, etc”–aka,’moral behavior’–are assumed in the above passage to be foregone conclusions. One merely need to watch the behavior of chimpanzees on the Discovery Channel to see that while the chimps do indeed have “a social life”, many of these behaviors are not currently tolerated in our current society (such as polygamy, rape, and murder). “Most people struggle towards goodness” is a vague statement, because ‘goodness’ here is a personal assumption, not a fundamental reality of the universe. Since human beings evolved from chimps (chimps that have their own ‘social life’), and chimps routinely brutalize and murder each other…then brutality and murder have indeed contributed to the evolution of the species, and are therefore ‘good’.
I suppose the phrase ‘new atheist’ is meant to belittle atheism – as if taking a skeptical view of theism were merely a fad or something.
Really the only thing ‘new’ about it is that for the first time in a long time one can actually say out loud what one thinks without being burned at the stake for one’s honesty.
Thank goodness for the Enlightenment!@Mr. F. Le Mur
The “New Atheists” are much different from the rare old fashioned types largely on the basis of their belligerance and certitude. Rigidity of view is surely preposterous in a mysterious universe but these are dogmatic folks. While I agree with elements of their critique, I believe that the secular humanism of the left is the moral route to oblivion.
While we may identify evolutionary bases for various tendencies, we also see different cultures manifesting different moral habits, such as Japanese pilots on WWII suicide missions, Islamic terrorists willing to blow themselves up, and African witch doctors creating potions out of the body parts of albino African PEOPLE killed for their skins,etc.It seems that Asian religions had fairly effective moral systems and Buddhism certainly does, but Christianity somehow supported the eventual appearance of democracies that allowed the growth of science and the fulfillment of human nature morally.
The Economist poses a moral dilemma in its latest issue. How is it that highly progressive, liberal Oakland, CA, has another explosion of violent crime in the midst of plenty? Liberals across the Bay area are overwhelmed by the pure inanity of brutal murders and the popular motto “Go Dumb.” Maybe evolution has not only left us with unequal IQ’s, but also unequal moral senses. That would make leftist humanism a very bad bet as a replacement for Christianity despite Hitchens’ bleatings.