Reader Diane G. (and later a few others; thanks to all) called my attention to a piece by Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex called “How did new atheism fail so miserably?” It’s the usual stuff about Dawkins and the rest of us alienating the Left, and cites an even weirder article in The Baffler called “Village atheists, village idiots,” by Sam Kriss, a journalist who just got into trouble—and suspended from the Labour Party—for sexual harassment.

Kriss’s piece is simply unhinged, spewing out invective and then atheistsplaining that the New Atheists—among whom he wrongly includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, who doesn’t even like being called an atheist—have literally been driven insane by repeating their godless litany over and over again. Get a load of Kriss’s style and contentions:

SOMETHING HAS GONE BADLY WRONG with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates. Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.

His explanation, which is just plain dumb:

These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma. Under the correspondence model of truth—the one favored by scientific rationality—a true statement is a thought-image that mirrors actual events; truth is just a repetition of the world. But as anyone who’s spent time with the mad knows, there’s something dangerous to one’s sanity about doing the same thing over and over again.

It would be hard to maintain, I think, that Dawkins, Tyson (not a New Atheist) and Sam Harris are mad, much less people like Anthony Grayling, Dan Dennett, or even me (I’ll pass by Myers without comment). But let it be said that everyone mentioned is engaged in other activities, and hardly spends even 15% of their time promoting atheism. Richard is promoting his books and lecturing about evolution, as well as answering people’s questions (often about atheism) in public lectures, Tyson is popularizing astronomy and cosmology, Sam has largely given up talking about atheism in favor of his podcasts that cover a huge diversity of subject, Dan is writing popular philosophy books, and I’m back to writing books about science as well as a children’s book, and am more interested in free will than in atheism. Kriss’s piece can be ignored largely as simple raving by someone who, for unspecified reasons, doesn’t like New Atheism.

Alexander’s piece is at least sane, but he makes the same accusation as does Kriss: the Left doesn’t like New Atheism. I’m not sure that’s true in general, since those who like it aren’t going to write articles about it, but it’s clear that many Leftists not only criticize New Atheists (see Salon, for instance), but also assert that New Atheism is a failure. The former bit is true, but the latter is not. First the reasons for our failure:

According to Alexander, New Atheism has failed because

New Atheists were right, “but in a loud, boring and pointless way.”

Nope. The “Four Horsemen’s” books were all big best-sellers, and they continue to attract crowds wherever they go. When Dawkins (or even I) give a talk, even about evolution, most of the questions are about religion, whether it comports with evolution, or simply about atheism itself. When I go online to answer questions from college classes about Why Evolution is True, about 70% of the questions are about religion and atheism, even though I don’t bring it up! Maybe Alexander was bored, but a lot of other people weren’t—and aren’t.

Other progressive causes, like feminism, environmentalism, and anti-Trumpism were, says Alexander, are guilty of the same thing, but New Atheism is special in that it alone has been demonized by the Left. According to Alexander, that might be because it “failed to make the case that New Atheism was socially important”, or maybe because we “just didn’t know how to stay relevant”:

“Trump resistance always has new tweets to keep its attention. Social justice always has a new sexist celebrity to be angry about. Sure, a few New Atheists tried to keep up with the latest secretly-gay televangelist, but most of them kept going about intricacies of the kalam argument that had been done to death by 1400 AD. This is just an example – maybe there are other asymmetries that are more important?”

There may be some truth here, as the New Atheists have had their say and there isn’t much more to add. I myself have argued that, over the next 15 years or so, until the next generation needs educating, we don’t really need more atheist conferences. But, as I’ll argue below, New Atheists did achieve their goals, and, knowing this, and knowing that it will take time for society to change, have moved on to other things.

And Alexander adds this: “Maybe the New Atheists accidentally got on board just before a nascent Grey Tribe/Blue Tribe* split and tried to get Blue Tribe credibility by sending Grey Tribe signals. At some point there was a cultural fissure between Acela Corridor thinkfluencers with humanities degrees and Silicon Valley bloggers with STEM degrees, and the former got a head start on hating the latter while the latter still thought everybody was on the same anti-Republican side.” [See bottom for the definition of these “tribes”.]

That I don’t get, as New Atheist books and talks were attended by members of both tribes.

Finally, Alexander hits on one point that, I think, does account for some pushback against New Atheism: the fact that even liberal nonbelievers have a sneaking sympathy for religion, and don’t like people going after it. Or that there are more liberal feminists than liberal atheists, so success for New Atheism was bound to be smaller than for other liberal causes:

“And the cynic in me wonders whether New Atheism wasn’t pointless and obvious enough. There are more church-goers in educated liberal circles than Trump supporters, climate deniers, or self-identified racists. Maybe that made the “repeat platitudes to people who already believe them” game a little less fun, caused some friction – ‘You’re talking about my dear grandmother!’”

The thing is, I don’t much care about these articles that demonize New Atheists (except insofar as they slander my friends), for in the main we won. New Atheist books (especially The God Delusion) were huge best sellers, thousands of people wrote in to people like Harris and Dawkins thanking them for helping them give up their faith. And who can argue persuasively that New Atheism didn’t play any role in the increasing secularization of America? To paraphrase Dawkins on Darwin, the New Atheists made it intellectually respectable to be a nonbeliever.

There’s little more to say now: the arguments against God, never really “new”, have been made, and will need to be reprised for the next generation, and America continues to lose its religion. In most places save the South you are no longer ostracized for saying you’re an atheist. The only problem that remains is one that Diane G. raised: “Why is a movement that has been so successful also been so hated by the very people who should adhere to its claims?” Why do so many Leftists, including nonbelievers, rail and fulminate against not just the famous New Atheists, but against New Atheism itself?

Jealousy is one reason, I think, and so is a secret softness for religion—perhaps the view that society needs belief in God to remain cohesive (the “Little People’s Argument”). In the end, articles like Kriss’s and Alexander’s may raise questions about psychology, but what they haven’t demonstrated is their main premise: that New Atheism has failed. Hatred of a movement’s proponents is no sign that it has failed. Were that true, you could argue that the Civil Rights movement failed in the American South.

_________

*The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”. (There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)