Jacob Hamburger on the old New Atheism

Jacob Hamburger has a good article here  titled 'What was the New Atheism'

An aspiring neuroscientist with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, Sam Harris had founded the New Atheist genre in 2004 with his anti-religious manifesto The End of Faith. Harris’s critique of religion was simple, hinging on the idea that “beliefs are principles of action.”

Clearly this is nonsense. Most of our actions are purely mimetic. We follow the crowd. If we are constrained to deliberate for ourselves on the matter, the result is that we do what the smart people are doing. This occurs even if we believe smart people are charlatans. All that matters is that those smart people have a verifiable track-record of doing well for themselves.

Our beliefs can and ought to be wholly irrational and incompossible with the world in which we find ourselves. This is because Love involves believing baby or Mummy or wifey or whoever is the bestest ever. On the other hand, the Mum who reckons her child is an angel, nevertheless keeps a sharp eye on the little fellow.

Harris, took a different view-

In other words, everything we hold to be true has the potential to inform what we do, and at bottom our behavior rests on a more or less coherent set of propositions. The major world religions are illegitimate not only because they make claims that science can show to be false—though for Harris this was obvious—but because a system of belief founded on “bad ideas” will tend to lead people to bad actions.

Ideas are things which can be expressed in a sentence. A set of sentences can be made subject to a protocol bound juristic process. A bad idea is one which doesn't fit with the others. It doesn't help the juristic process. It is something that we must eliminate from a particular discourse, by appealing to a specific protocol, so as to render the activity utile.

No doubt, if a specific discourse oversteps its juristic boundaries- for example if Commerce took over Religion, or if Politics sought to usurp Commerce- then, bad ideas might lead to bad actions but the fault would not be in the ideas themselves but rather the failure to adhere to proper protocols or rules of demarcation.

The same thing can happen in a purely nomothetic or analytic discipline like Mathematics. To give the subject 'univalent foundations'- for example to enable computerised proof checking- typological protocols must be strictly observed. Recently a computer disproved Godel's proof of God. Even that great genius was capable of a mistake in this regard though his 'ideas' were far from 'bad'.

Two years later, in The God Delusion, the Oxford biologist and “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” Richard Dawkins emphasized the other side of the equation. The most commercially successful of the New Atheist best sellers as well as the most evangelical, Dawkins’s book actively aimed to convert readers to scientific rationalism. Unbelief was not only a social good which prevented irrational acts of violence, Dawkins argued, it was also a good in itself for the individual.

Dawkins was being silly. Unbelief would not affect sadistic or sociopathic preferences. It might alter the perceived incentive matrix such that more, not less, irrational crime was committed.
As for the individual, the most important thing- ceteris paribus- is to give and receive love and esteem. Observing protocols has salience here. Unbelief is irrelevant.

After describing the role played by Christopher Hitchens, Hamburger notes-

The New Atheists were initially delighted by Barack Obama. Not only did Obama present himself as simultaneously pro- and antiwar, he was also the embodiment of liberal technocracy, the anti-Bush. A Harvard-trained legal scholar, Obama surrounded himself with experts. He credibly promised “solutions” in an election held only two months after the financial crash, which many blamed on Republican foolishness. Dawkins gushed at the future president’s erudition, while Maher speculated that a man that smart had to be an atheist, only pretending to be a “super-duper Christian” for the cameras. Despite Obama’s promises to withdraw American troops from Iraq, even Hitchens expressed his admiration, switching his vote back to the Democrats after having declared his support for Bush in 2004.

Bush was considered a frat-boy who had avoided an early death from cirrhosis by 'letting go and letting God'. This born-again narrative grated upon the New Atheists. What was the point of blowing the shit out of one Religion somewhere far away, if the home-grown product gained kudos thereby?

They wanted to believe that Obama would be the Philosopher King of a new Camelot. But                                                                                                                                   

the romance proved to be short-lived. By Obama’s second term, the president who had seemed a rebuke to Republican irrationalism began to be connected with a different kind of flight from reason. With Christian conservatism out of the White House, Harris and others gave increasing voice to what had previously been a secondary concern: liberal political correctness. Gradually, Obama was transformed from the professor come to restore sanity to American politics into the identity- and sensitivity-obsessed cultural liberal afraid to utter the phrase “radical Islamic terror.” As the Trump era dawned, many of the figures that had risen to prominence waging war against religion and fundamentalism took up the new challenge of reclaiming American liberalism from a left too consumed by “political correctness” to remember what it truly meant to be a liberal.

White, Male, Darwinian Scientists were aware that their historical baggage of Racist, Eugenic, pseudoscience made them an object of suspicion on Campus. Yet, if they surrendered to the countervailing 'Social Constructivsts', they risked destroying their own subject.

The fact is, though the monopoly of STEM subject achievement of White, Male, Christians and Jews had long ago been breached, they retained dominance. Furthermore, the Asian countries which were catching up  rapidly, had excluded their indigenous religious traditions from the political sphere and adopted, outwardly at least, Western mores. This is not to say that they had lost their identity or did not retain a certain mystique. However, it was not something in conflict with the West. Indeed, it appeared that the marriage partner of choice for the White Male nerd was East Asian. Unlike the Muslims, the rapidly expanding East Asian technocratic class was making no strong cultural or religious claim to alterity. The Hindus had immigrated from a country ruled by British style Upper Class Secularists and thus considered Atheism normative in public spaces whereas Religion was confined to the private space of the extended family. A similar point may be made about many upper class Muslims at elite U.S institutions. However, 'the war on terror' meant that it was not their brand of Islam which had salience. Instead, it was the redneck or flyover State born-again Christian, on the one hand, and the suicide bombers on the other, who posed a threat to the New Atheists. What sort of threat? Well, the one vulnerability of the New Atheists is when it comes to racially inherited differences in I.Q and culturally transmitted patterns of sub-optimal behavior. This affected their standing with respect to America's own indigenous 'minorities'.

 Religion can always say 'God can wipe such things away in an instant if we only believe'. Science can't say 'we have proof that everyone is born a tabula rasa' because it isn't true, so far as we know.
Furthermore, there is empirical evidence that strong Religious beliefs enable groups of people in America to gain collective upwardly mobility. Indeed, the 'costlier the signal' for the separating equilibrium- i.e. the more 'irrational' the content and intensity of the belief- the stronger the statistical effect.
There is also some evidence going the other way- 'cheap talk' pooling equilibria have no effect or a negative effect. Imposing a 'Zahavi handicap' on oneself, in terms of 'believing seven impossible things before breakfast', on the other hand, can radically change career and health outcomes because of the very different ethology associated with Human 'theory of mind'.

Such considerations raise the question- 'why shouldn't the Campus have a secular religion which is based on a 'politically correct' social constructivism'? The old fashioned answer is that it infringes on people's liberty to say- 'stop being so silly. Go away and leave me alone.' However, if you've got books to sell or a blog to promote, being left alone is the last thing you want. Thus the New Atheists had to firstly insulate themselves within a Cult and then act in the arbitrary manner of an elderly and very irascible autocephalic pontiff.

Part of the explanation for this shift has to do with internal divisions within the atheist community itself. In the early 2010s, New Atheism was less in the headlines than it had been during its heyday. But at the conferences where the surviving New Atheists spoke and on the online forums where their books were debated, shouting matches regularly broke out over accusations that they were Islamophobic apologists for American empire. In addition, the 2010s also saw an increasing number of polemics concerning sexism within the atheist community, starting with a 2011 episode known as “Elevatorgate,” in which the feminist vlogger Rebecca Watson complained of being propositioned in an elevator late at night during an atheist convention, only to be scolded online by Dawkins that women have it far worse under Sharia law.

Watson was a rising star. Dawkins- whose affair with Mr. Harrison was hushed up by the Gay Mafia wot controls the Niggah lovin' Jew Media- should have condoled with her on the plight of hotties being hit on by gum chewing nonentities. That is what protocol required. Celebs express sympathy and affirm mutual solidarity when one of their number is treated like a creature of mere flesh and blood by a member of the hoi polloi. Dawkins, inexcusably, compared Watson- who was like an 8 in nerdy circles- to some rando Muslima who, tho' constantly being cliterodectomized with a razor blade, wasn't even on Instagram!'

He did apologize, not with a dik pik like a normal person, but in the unctuous tones of a great big Limey pussy.

These kinds of incidents produced a schism among prominent atheists. On one side were proponents of an atheism explicitly tied to progressive values, such as the biologist PZ Myers, the “atheism plus” movement, and media figures like The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski.

Myers was once quite popular on the blogosphere. The trouble is an ugly old guy endorsing 'sex positive feminism' just comes across as creepy.

I do vaguely recall the 'Young Turks' but it is an ill-omened name in the East associated with the Armenian holocaust.

On the other were most of the prominent New Atheist celebrities—including Harris, Dawkins, Michael Shermer and Dave Rubin, a former employee of The Young Turks—who felt that the emphasis on feminism, diversity and anti-imperialism distracted from the fight against religious extremism.
During this same time, some fans of New Atheism began to flirt with aspects of the growing online far right, posting in forums such as r/atheism on Reddit. Though the alt-right includes a spectrum of views—from white nationalists and neo-Nazis to extreme anti-feminists and right-wing internet trolls—the rejection of liberal sensitivity and “political correctness” is a thread that runs through most of them. Many New Atheists would deny sympathy with the most extreme versions of those views, but there has nonetheless been voluminous commentary on the overlap between the fans of Harris and Dawkins and those of the “alt-light,” made up of self-proclaimed “provocateurs” who delight in riling up their liberal adversaries. In 2017, the repentant liberal atheist Phil Torres went so far as to conclude that New Atheism had undergone a “merger” with the alt-right.

What's wrong with that? Surely, that's where the thing started. It has merely found its natural home. After all, the 'Enlightenment' was about how White people were better than Brown or Black people. Prester John might be a Christian but he is the wrong color. Kant had no difficulty concluding that a Black man must be stupid even though there had been a perfectly competent African philosopher at a German University some decades previously.

The big problem with Christianity, or Islam, or whatever, was that it insisted people of all colors were equal coz Revelation and the Early History of the Church showed this must be the case. That was the great appeal of Atheism. It restricted the scope of reason so as to boldly stand up and utter, not alethic Truth to Power, but school boy sophistries ad captum vulgi.

Since Trump’s victory...the issue of political correctness has only become more pressing for many prominent New Atheists. Increasingly central to their arguments today is the idea that American liberalism has in fact become illiberal, obsessed with the primacy of group identities over the individual and intolerant of speech that contradicts the latest “woke” orthodoxy on race and gender. As many of those associated with New Atheism have taken up the fight against political correctness—including Harris, Maher, Shermer, Rubin, Peter Boghossian and Steven Pinker—they have gravitated towards a larger group that includes not only self-described liberals, but also conservatives like the former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro and the celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson. Many in this group, sometimes called the “intellectual dark web,” follow Pinker in his rhetorical association of liberalism with the Enlightenment, suggesting its connection to scientific thinking as well as to the achievements of Western civilization. Others prefer to call themselves “classical liberals,” a label that allows for overlap between a Hayekian embrace of the free market and support for more progressive libertarian causes like gay marriage or legalizing marijuana. What unites these apparently dissimilar figures is the belief that the contemporary left has abandoned both rational thinking and liberal values, and that this left must be defeated by appealing to a more authentic liberalism.

So, God is a lie, but the Enlightenment was 'liberal'- though it coincided with an uptick in the slave trade, reduced liberties and entitlements for European agricultural workers and mechanics, a roll back of female rights in property and so on and so forth.

As for 'classical liberalism'- its central claim was that a leisured class of ancient pedigree, receiving secure income from landed estates, indoctrinated in the Paideia of Greece and Rome but excused any very strenuous cursus honorum, was the best, indeed only possible, defense of the traditional liberties and privileges associated with a limited monarchy.

Clearly, though some of these 'New Atheists' started off in alethic disciplines, they are now peddling stupid lies about subjects they have not studied.

Hamburger asks-

 has science ever been liberalism’s solid ground? Ironically, the New Atheists’ insistence that an authentic liberalism be scientific can lead to illiberalisms no less glaring than those they allege on the progressive left. An obvious and egregious example is Harris’s call for profiling of Muslims in airports, on the grounds that since we have evidence of who is likely to be a terrorist, treating a man with brown skin and a thick beard the same as an elderly white woman represents a “tyranny of fairness.” No matter how many sociologists of terrorism or experts on airport security were to endorse his argument (and the only expert Harris could find, Bruce Schneier, rejected it outright), no one could call this a liberal proposal.

A proper Scientist interested in the problem of improved aircraft security wouldn't make such a silly proposal. This is not to say every efficiency increasing proposal they might make would be liberal. Still, so long as there was an efficiency gain of a Hicks/Kaldor type (i.e. everybody could be potentially better off) there may be a mechanism to make it liberal- i.e. in conformity with 'due process' and other Constitutional requirements.

Still more revealing is the recent attempt on the intellectual dark web to promote the work of Charles Murray on “racial” differences in human intelligence. Of course, Harris—once again leading the charge—claimed he did not endorse Murray’s suggestion in The Bell Curve that black people are on average less intelligent than white people. The recurring claim in his polemics was rather that the left had unfairly dismissed Murray because of an ideological aversion to “facts” about human biology, an assertion frequently mirrored in the intellectual dark web’s clashes with feminism. But even if these ideas of race and gender had a solid basis in empirical science, surely “true” liberals ought to reject the idea that their implications had any political relevance.

Hamburger is wrong. Firstly 'empirical science' just means Statistical methods which are idiographic. Actual Science, in this field, would find a structural causal model which can be manipulated to change outcomes. In other words, genuine Science would be able to not just predict that I'd be as stupid as shit but also show how I could become sufficiently smart to study a worthwhile subject.

If Science can help people of my race have a better life, then we don't mind if, in the process, it explains that we would otherwise be inferior to a more favored group.

This is not to say that a Scientific advance can't be illiberal but rather that, if we have a Liberal Constitution, then lawyers and economists can devise a mechanism such that the thing is a Pareto improvement- i.e. everybody benefits.

The New Atheists and their allies criticize campus “social justice warriors” for being like religious fanatics, proceeding from what they view to be empirically false beliefs (e.g. the idea we can all determine our own identities) to illiberal action (e.g. protesting a campus speaker who rejects transgender pronouns, in violation of the liberal principle of freedom of speech). But the impulse to ground political action in a “scientific” view of human nature is similarly at odds with notions of autonomy and self-determination that run throughout the history of liberalism.

This is not the case. A political action may be grounded in anything it likes.  However the effect of that action, in a Liberal Society- i.e. one with a tradition of effective Constitutional Jurisprudence- would be the mediation of that action by an appropriate mechanism such that the effect is verifiably Liberal, that too in a 'buck stopped' protocol bound manner.

In fact, as the philosopher John Gray has noted, many of today’s college activists are not so much illiberal as “hyper-liberal,” acting on an ideology “that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world” besides one “based on individual choice.”

Gray, like the people he speaks about, is talking shite. Shite-talkers aren't hyper anything. They're just talking stupid shite is all.

On this view, the conflict between the New Atheists and the campus left is really a debate, though in parody form, between two strands of liberal philosophy: one that boasts of its basis in scientific rationality, and the other that emphasizes its egalitarian idealism.

Debate? These stupid shitheads are talking ultracrepidarian shite. A parody is funny. This is just stupidity doing its thaang same as it has always done.

Campus activists hardly set the agenda for the broader left, but their increasing willingness today to engage in confrontational tactics is indicative of a larger trend

of talking shite.

Whereas liberals ten years ago may have shied away from open avowals of moral conviction—a close cousin of religious zealotry—many of today’s liberals, progressives and democratic socialists are becoming more comfortable admitting the role of passion and emotion in their politics.

Yes. There is a Nussbaum type availability cascade for that sort shite based on bogus philology and fake news.

As garden-variety Democrats have rediscovered mass protest—against climate change, migrant family separations or the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—activists to their left now feel emboldened to confront politicians at their homes and occupy public highways. Looking back with scorn on the record of liberal technocracy in America and Western Europe, theorists of democracy like Chantal Mouffe and Wendy Brown have argued for a liberal-left politics that emphasizes conflict over compromise. There are some good reasons to think that today’s liberals may follow their lead.

Sure! Once you've shat the bed, you may as well take to the streets. By contrast actually doing Science and finding a new Structural Causal Model and then getting the lawyers and the economists to do the Mechanism design so the outcome is liberal- fuck it! Why bother! It's the sort of thing which would make one rich and respected not for one's beliefs or one's emotions but one's achievements. However, if one actually wanted to achieve something, one would never have bothered with this sort of sophomore shrillness.

 New Atheists and their allies look around them and don’t recognize the rationalist liberalism they used to know. But many of today’s liberals can hardly avoid drawing grim conclusions, based on the best evidence available, about where the reliance on reason and science has led them.

'the best evidence available'? Are you kidding me? There are plenty of new Structual Causal Models which have been discovered over the last three decades which have completely transformed the life-chances of billions of people. Stupid shitheads have achieved nothing. What evidence could they assay?

With Donald Trump in the White House, a return to the strategies of Bush-era liberalism would seem to be irrational at best.

The Bush era was characterized by rising expectations among young people. It ended with the crash. The Obama era was about reversing socio-economic decline for the median voter. The Trump era is about making it hot for the elites by disrupting their cozy global cartel. Obviously, a billionaire isn't going to go the whole hog, so the rational strategy is to out-Trump Trump. Anyway, the non-STEM academy and commentariat has gotten much stupider and more ignorant over the last 20 years, so there is no other option on the table.

One promising way forward is to go after Charitable foundations- including Religious ones. After all, if we don't plunder the Monasteries, all that money will end up lining the pockets of the lawyers hired by the kids them guys rape.