Existential angst

Most atheists I know, myself included, just don't feel anything even remotely resembling "existential angst." In The Undergraduate Atheists, Unamuno, and Johnson, Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis describe the character of Miguel de Unamuno, the author whose story features prominently in Johnson's recent article (which I address in a earlier post). According to Golberg and Meis, for Unamuno, "true doubt is to put yourself at the heart of the contradiction between faith and reason, to be tormented by the questions marks. It is to spend life hovering over the abyss, terrified."

Some atheists, I suppose, feel this existential angst, but most of us atheists are simply not terrified by these contradictions, we are not afraid of the abyss; indeed, we don't really see any abyss. The authors quote Unamuno: "Since we only live in and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction." We see a lot of tragedy in the world, of course, but we do not see the idea of life as perpetual struggle itself as some grand tragedy. That's just what life is. Whatever it is that intellectuals like Unamuno are feeling, a lot of us just don't feel it. We're born, we live a little while, and then we die. It doesn't scare us at all.

There are two possibilities. First, we are somehow "missing out" on an important part of the human experience. But if so, it doesn't seem to otherwise affect us. Atheists span the range of humanity, from the relatively poor to the ultra-wealthy, from the criminal to the the mundane to the great. We build houses, books, movies, scientific theories, nations, and ideologies. We are workers, thinkers, scientists, writers, doctors, actors, engineers. We are friends, lovers, spouses, and sometimes opponents and enemies. We are happy, sad, angry, frustrated, bored, excited, jealous, envious, satisfied, and dissatisfied. Other than this existential angst, we don't seem to do or feel anything different from those who do feel existential angst.

The alternative to the idea that we are "missing out" is that existential angst is just people driving themselves crazy. They can't stand the idea that there isn't some "higher purpose" to human life. They can't just say, "No higher purpose? Ok. So what?" Sure, we do not look at this question with any kind of "nuance" or "sophistication." There is no there there. Any one human life, indeed all of humanity, has not the slightest bit of cosmic or transcendental importance. So what? I am here now, I am enjoying my life now, what more do I need? We see existential angst as a kind of tragi-comic vanity. Tragic, because it really does cause people to suffer; comic, because the idea that your minuscule bag of carbon, water, and a few trace elements matters to an unimaginably immense universe (which may be only one of many) seems ridiculous to us.

Indeed, we see existential angst as a craziness inculcated to no small extent by religious institutions. Some people (Nietzsche) will feel it "naturally," but I think most people would never give Unamuno's "abyss" a second thought had they not been indoctrinated as children into the idea that human beings do have cosmic importance, an importance that cannot be reconciled with a clear-eyed look at the actual universe. Our understanding that the loss of religion will not only remove a way to satisfy our desire for cosmic importance, but also take away the desire to look for a solution.

We atheists don't have contempt for the ordinary religious believer. We're a little sad; we wish that religious believers didn't have the problems that religion seems to solve (or at least palliate), but hey, everyone has to get through the day.

We do, however, have a degree of contempt for those who say that we're broken and wrong because we don't share their terror, for those who insist that we shut up and play along with a delusion just so their vanity isn't further wounded.

If you feel existential angst, if you are terrified by the meaninglessness of the universe, if you feel like religion has to play some part in dealing with that angst and terror, then do what you have to do. But don't look down on me for not sharing your terror, and don't demand that I pretend to support your delusions.

More "undergraduate atheism"

tl;dr: Fundamentalists are bad, therefore atheists are stupid.

I will first repeat my complaint that the term "undergraduate atheism" is essentially bigotry against undergraduates. I not only am an undergraduate myself, but I know many other undergraduates who are as smart, sophisticated and nuanced as any Ph.D. (And, frankly, I know some Ph.D.s who are as stupid and unsophisticated as the worst sort of undergrad, and who wouldn't recognize nuance if it nibbled gently on their ear.) The term is, frankly, as offensive and demeaning as "retard atheists" would be.

But I can set aside my offense at the term, and look at the merits, or lack thereof, of particilar arguments against so-called "undergraduate atheists." Sadly, Michael Robbins' latest missive in the discussion, More on the "Undergraduate Atheists", (mentioned apparently favorably on the usually good 3quarksdaily) fails even to offer an argument.

Robbins begins his article (a review of Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason, which apparently traces the conflict between Christian fundamentalism and modernity) with what amounts to the oft-heard complaint that 99% of theists give the other 1% a bad name. One reason Robbins, like most apologists for "sophisticated" theology ignores the fundamental atheist critique of religion: yes, we know that "sophisticated" theology does not have the same objectionable features that a lot of fundamentalists have; the point is that the sophisticated critique of the fundies is secular, not theological. The fundies say God hates fags; the sophisticated crowd says God loves all people, including LGBTQ folk, but how does anyone know what God likes or hates? Why should what God likes or hates have anything to do with anything. Furthermore, if we look at the Bible (Old and New Testaments) and the Koran, it sure looks like the fundies have the simpler, more natural, less convoluted interpretation. On the other hand, if the sophisticated theologians argue that we have to interpret the Bible (or Koran) in light of modern, secular morality, why bother? Just endorse secular morality directly. In what sense is the Bible "sacred" if it has to change to accommodate us?

Robbins declares that "One of the worst aspects of conservative evangelicalism is that too often, especially on its fundamentalist fringes, its literalism encourages know-nothing atheism of the Dawkins variety." Above the article is a more explicit sentiment: "The worst thing about conservative evangelicals is that they encourage clowns like Richard Dawkins." I don't know, however, if this is the author's or the editor's statement.)

Really. Really!? Dawkins is worse than letting children die of treatable illnesses, worse than the oppression of women, worse than acid thrown in women's faces, worse than the erosion of abortion and contraception rights, worse the murder of abortion doctors, worse than the oppression of LGBTQ people, worst than the murder and assault of gay people, worse than the horrific bullying of gay children, worse than the erosion of science teaching in our schools, worse than those who, as Robbins quotes Marilynne Robinson, "have made religion seem foolish while rendering it mute in the face of a prolonged and highly effective assault on the poor." No, the real failure of fundamentalism is that it has created "know-nothing" atheists. Worse than sectarian violence. Gotcha, Mike.

Robbins does not actually argue that atheists actually have anything wrong. He indulges in some name-calling ("know-nothing," "undergraduate," "ignorant," "inept," and perhaps "clowns"), drops a few names, "The 'undergraduate atheists,' as the philosopher Mark Johnston dubbed them in Saving God, have been definitively refuted by [David Bentley] Hart, Terry Eagleton, Marilynne Robinson, Johnston himself, and others." Have we now? I guess we'll have to take Robbins' word for it, and ignore all the atheists who have challenged Hart, Eagleton, Robinson, and Johnston's works.

Although Robbins does not actually give us a clue as to why we're wrong, he does tell us (a little) what we're wrong about:

Such unbelievers seem to me to have missed something quite fundamental about the nature of being, as it appears to the human animal, something that the major theistic traditions attempt to address with rather more nuance and generosity than contemporary updates to logical positivism can muster. You don’t, obviously, have to believe in God to feel humbled and bewildered before what Heidegger called “the question of the meaning of Being.” (Indeed, I often think the notion of “belief” is more trouble than it’s worth.) But you do have to acknowledge that there is a question, “the major question that revolves around you,” as John Ashbery puts it: “your being here.” And you have to recognize that it concerns something outside the scope of the natural sciences.

Seriously? The question of the meaning of Being? Forget murder, rape, oppression, violence, terrorism, imperialism, because of course religion has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that (except, of course, for the majority of religious believers who do think religion has a lot to do with that: they are wrong wrong wrong! about what religion really is, and atheists are just as wrong wrong wrong about believing that just because the majority of religious believers think it does), we have the fundamental question of the meaning of Being!

The "meaning of Being" is philosophical twaddle. It is "fundamental" only to over-educated middle-class white people. Perhaps "undergraduate" atheism is a correct title: you have to have years of graduate school indoctrination to get your head sufficiently far up your ass to take such twaddle seriously.

To a certain extent, Robbins is correct: we atheists, "seem not only to have never met an intelligent, educated believer, but to doubt that such a creature could exist." 'Tis true: intelligent, educated believers are few and far between, and many of those hide or minimize their faith. We know they exist: what we have trouble believing is that intelligent, educated people could take such vacuous twaddle as "the meaning of Being" to be an interesting question, much less the most important question there is, a question where getting it wrong is the worst possible thing. Yes, I've met intelligent, educated believers (many of whom are my friends); I don't discuss religion with them because the minute they say anything other than, "that's just what I believe because I want it to be true," they start sounding like idiots.

theObserver on Chris Arnade

Frequent commenter theObserver has an interesting and perspicacious take on Chris Arnade's recent article, Atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy. theObserver's comment has been edited slightly for punctuation and formatting.

I think [Arnade's] argument is slightly different [than Larry's interpretation] but silly.

The article is written in a confessional tone from a former Wall Street trader. He informs us that he received his Ph.D., worked Wall Street for 20 years and a lived a life "devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments." After becoming disillusioned, he began spending time with the poor "brutalized by a system driven by a predatory economic rationalism," a system he supported during his years at Wall Street. His eyes were opened: successful people have a "sense of entitlement and emotional distance [which] has numbed their understanding of our fallibility." He was "reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes".

Rationality then forms a large part of his criticism. Dawkins' scientific rationality marks him as a man "removed from humanity," incapable of understanding the importance of faith among the suffering and “preaching from a selfish vantage point”.

The argument then is this:

• All atheists are rationalists. Rationalism is false because life is not rational; only the wealthy can afford the pretense of rationality; therefore atheism is a luxury for the wealthy.
• Wealthy atheists cannot truly understand the faith of the suffering poor. Therefore atheism is a luxury for the wealthy, and wealthy atheists like Dawkins are selfish to criticize the faith of the poor.

Arnade projects his own failings onto the entire atheist community. He sneered at religious faith from his privileged, educated vantage point; therefore, all atheists must be privileged and sneering at religious faith from privilege. He was ignorant of the suffering and the importance of faith to the poor; therefore, all atheists must be equally ignorant.

Arnade ignores the wealth and power of religions organizations, enough wealth and power to change this situation next week. They choose not to. Instead they choose to toss scraps from their dinner tables to the poor sinners removed from God's grace. They choose to teach hope in an better afterlife, not hope in our "fallen world."

Atheism and poverty yet again

Sigh. It's really bugging me, especially since Mike the Mad Biologist, whom I usually admire, has linked, apparently uncritically, to Chris Arnade's essay, Atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy. So I want to look at the issue in a different way.

Arnade's argument seems to be that religious faith is a comfort to the poorest and most oppressed; atheists oppose religious belief, therefore atheists wish to deny comfort to the poorest. Because we wish to deny comfort to the poor, we are as morally and emotionally stunted as the ultra-wealthy. Arnade's argument is in the same vein as David V. Johnson's article, A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists. According to Johnson, atheists argue that the world would be better off if, holding everything else constant, religious belief was removed from society. However, because religious belief is (among other things) a comfort to the poorest, removing religious belief, ceteris paribus*, would entail great suffering. It is therefore wrong to oppose religious belief.

"Everything else being equal," or, "holding all else constant."

I want to make clear that by the "poorest," I don't mean people who don't have a lot of stuff. I mean the people who, for more-or-less economic reasons, simply cannot obtain basic human dignity and social value from secular society. These are people who must turn to illusion to gain the most basic emotional support necessary for human survival.

The problem with Arnade's and Johnson's arguments is that unlike things like food stamps or welfare, religious belief cannot simply be eliminated without changing anything else. There are some problems that can be examined in isolation, such as church-state separation, but the overall issue of religion cannot. There is perhaps some value in performing a ceteris paribus cost-benefit speculation (and arguing that the benefits would outweigh the costs is not to be indifferent to the costs), but such speculation is entirely hypothetical. It is completely impossible to simply excise religion from human culture without changing anything else.

I accept the argument that those who cannot find dignity and value from secular society must by necessity turn to religion. But so what? How does that change my project?

For Arnade's and Johnson's arguments to be relevant, they must show one of two things. First, they could show that atheists really are directly targeting the poorest and trying to undermine their faith without compensation. I don't think anyone can actually do so; I read a lot of atheists, and that direct targeting is just not there. Alternatively, they could show that the actual atheist project indirectly undermines the value of religion for the poorest. But how?

The atheist project rests on four interlocking planks: the intellectual, philosophical, and scientific bankruptcy of religion, state secularism a.k.a. church-state separation, atheists as first-class citizens and moral human beings, and the social delegitmization of religion.

The first three planks of the atheist project are irrelevant; the only relevant plank is the fourth, the social delegitimization of religion. Certainly if religion were immediately and completely socially delegitimized, the poor might suffer. (They might get mad enough to revolt, and gain in secular society what they are denied today and must turn to religious illusion to supply. But that's an argument for another day.) But religion cannot be immediately and completely delegitimized. So instead of noting that the immediate and complete (and impossible) delegitimization might have undesireable consequences, we have to ask, what are the consequences of a gradual and partial (and possible) delegitimization?

There are three kinds of atheist. First, there are "individual" atheists, atheists who really don't care at all about other people's religious beliefs. Second, there are libertarian atheists. These atheists really do not care about (or endorse) the suffering of the poorest. However, these beliefs are not at all connected; they don't care about the poorest just because they don't care about the poorest, not because they are atheists (and vice versa, they are atheists just because they do not believe in any god, not because they don't care about the poorest). Finally, there are liberal, progressive, and radical atheists, atheists who want to eradicate religious belief among the poorest by eliminating poverty. We don't want a world where the poorest are denied the comfort of religion; there are many disagreements about ways and means, but we all want a world where there are no poorest, where everyone can obtain dignity and human value just by being good people. We believe, among other things, that a world that supports the social legitimacy of religion allows for the existence of the poorest; we want a world that does not allow anyone to live in such poverty. We don't want to take away the comfort; we want to take away the need for that comfort. For this we deserve praise, not censure.

Psychological comfort

Oh yay, another article about the psychological benefits of religion: A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists by David V. Johnson. Let's ignore the fact that Johnson insults both atheists and undergraduates; there are a lot of undergraduates who are smart, capable, and on their way to graduate school. And never mind that Johnson does not cite, much less quote, a single atheist argument; we are to rely entirely on his (insulting) paraphrase. And, finally, we can ignore the circularity of his central argument:

[S]uppose that in the alternative universe, human beings would not have this tendency towards religion. They would not be quite like us. Let us call them "Dawkinsians." They would be like human beings in every respect, including their stupidity, impulsiveness and tribalism, but they would lack any tendency toward forming religious beliefs. They would certainly lack the psychological boon from religion, but they would also somehow not have the need for it. They couldn't all be like David Hume, meeting death without blinking — that would be unfair. (Of course humanity would be better off if everyone were like David Hume!) What would it be like, from the inside, to be a Dawkinsian in a world of fellow Dawkinsians? To be a human-like creature, but to be satisfied with the rational belief that there is no God, no ultimate meaning or goodness to the universe, no life after death, and so on. Would Dawkinsians dread their own deaths? Would they have any capacity for mystical feeling? Would they suffer existential angst? Would they worry about the ultimate grounds of good and evil? If they did, then they would likely be worse off, I submit, than a world of human beings with religion.

In short, a world without religion would lack religion, and religion is good, therefore religion is good. It's amazing that people get paid to write and publish this bullshit.

Instead, let's look at the notion of psychological comfort. What, precisely is religion comforting us against? Is it, as Johnson suggests, "existential angst"? I don't think so. Existential angst and the dread of death are, like atheism, luxuries of the rich. What religion comforts people from, as Chris Arnade notes (from my previous post), is oppression, exploitation, and degradation by other human beings.

Why do we have to lie to people to comfort them? That's condescending, paternalistic, and insulting. Religion is the means that the oppressors use to keep the oppressed from rising up against their oppressor. The "psychological comfort" of religion is actually more important to the oppressors: it allows them to escape the guilt of their crimes against humanity. "Sure we exploit and immiserate the mass of humanity," they might think, "but they're comforted by their delusions of god."

The notion of psychological comfort is nothing but a privileged cop out. We don't need to do anything about the actual exploitation of humanity, so long as we give them the illusion of comfort. That's not just a mistake, that's a crime.

Atheism, a luxury of the wealthy

In The people who challenged my atheism most were drug addicts and prostitutes, Chris Arnade observes that the poorest and most oppresed in society are some of the strongest religious believers. Religious belief, he notes, offers such people the hope and dignity they cannot get from society. From these observations, Arnade concludes that atheists are indifferent to the plight of the poorest. "Who am I," Arnade asks himself rhetorically as an atheist, "to tell them the one thing that gives them hope and allows them to find some beauty in an awful world is inconsistent?" Atheism, while superficially clever, partakes of the selfishness and emotional distance of the wealthy.

Arnade explicitly compares atheism to the privilege of the rich, linking to an earlier story, The wealthy 'make mistakes', the poor go to jail, contrasting the privilege of the rich with the oppression of the poor. Arnade seems to reason that only the wealthy can afford atheism, the wealthy are at best emotionally distant from and indifferent to the plight of the poor, therefore atheists are equally distant and indifferent. Our project, or an inevitable consequence of our project, is to take away the only thing that can give the poorest any hope, without offering anything in return. And we don't care, because we are just as emotionally distant and indifferent as the very wealthy.

While the poorest and most oppressed can rarely afford atheism, atheism is not a characteristic of only the ultra-wealthy, and atheism is distinct from the rationalizations and justifications the capitalist rulers of society. Arnade's comparison is not only odious and offensive, but also untrue. While the most oppressed can rarely afford atheism, atheists include people from all but the very poorest socioeconomic classes, and the religious include people from even the very top classes. Arnade offers no evidence, only guilt by association, showing any connection between non-belief in gods and indifference to the plight of the poor.

The only atheist Arnade references is an unflattering caricature of Richard Dawkins. But neither Dawkins nor any other even moderately prominent atheist makes a project of stripping religious belief from the poorest of the poor. Atheists have long recognized the role of religion for the poorest of society. As Marx famously notes in the introduction to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Those people oppressed by an unjust society, who seek in a delusion some comfort and dignity denied by society, do not directly offend the vast majority of atheists. Atheists struggly against the pervasive religiosity of society, not its presence in one social class. By criticizing atheists, Arnade seems to imply that this pervasive religiosity is necessary to comfort the poorest, that we all must pretend so that those we deny real dignity can maintain its illusion. Atheists have a different perspective: a society that requires a pervasive delusion is a bad society; we should have a society where everyone can find hope and dignity in the real world, not an illusion. No individual can do everything; atheists are just those who attack the delusion directly, while others struggle against the material injustice of society.

Arnade is also actively infected by religious delusion, to the detriment of those he supposedly champions. He sees the addicts and prostitutes as failed people; his central criticism of the wealthy (and therefore atheists) is that wealth has "numbed their understanding of our fallibility." But the poorest are not those who have failed in any meaningful sense. They are oppressed. They are victims of a society that has institutionalized oppression and degradation. Arnade does nothing here but assert his own smug paternalistic superiority masquerading as compassion.

Arnade needs to understand that atheists do nothing but point out that we have constructed a lie to justify and rationalize the oppression and degradation of millions of people. When that lie is exposed, maybe we will be less hesitant to permit the degradation that the lie conceals.