New Atheists Compared

From Scott Stephens:

What made the atheist tradition proper so potent was its devotion to the tasks of flushing out the myriad idols, often unperceived, that clutter human society, and dismantling all the malign political, economic and sexual uses which those gods were made to serve.

But there was another aspect of this tradition – frequently overlooked and now almost forgotten – that immunized it against the excesses and indiscretions which will almost certainly consign the “New Atheism” to the status of an early twenty-first century fad, like the recent spate of Hollywood remakes.

What do you think of the comparison Stephens makes? Is “new atheism” a weak version of the heavyweight atheists? How so?

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life – one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx’s great observation about the “theological” dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the “New Atheists” look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

But is there not is a kind of implicit acknowledgement of inferiority in the tone so many of the “New Atheists” have adopted? The air of contemptuous flippancy reduces atheism to a form of light entertainment and petit bourgeois chic.

In other words, this is not a “New Atheism” but rather an “Atheism Lite” (perhaps “Lites” would be a better designation for adherents to the “New Atheism,” rather than Daniel Dennett’s proposed “brights”).