S14, E1: Flavours of Heresy
Series 14: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bridge Between Wildernesses
Net-Zero Hyperbole
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s epistle in late 2023, Why I am now a Christian, was surprising.
This understatement is my deliberate net-negative contribution to offsetting some of the hyperbole her letter inspired. Somewhere I read it had been compared it to shock of 9/11 so it’s uphill from here.
In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.
“Why I am now a Christian”, Unherd, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Christians tended to welcome the announcement but the responses from atheists were mixed. A minority sympathised with what they supposed was her inner turmoil, others suspected political motivations but perhaps the majority set about telling her why she was wrong.
A couple of months ago I had deconstructed around 30 articles on the Hirsi Ali conversion to Christianity. My search for original perspectives was mostly in vain and, remembering what wading through all those borrowed thoughts felt like, I am not going to inflict them on you. Yet it provided fodder for this series and hopefully I will respond to the main points made.
In common with many atheists, I am interested in the idea that humanism and tolerant secularism can help humanity, but consider for a moment what the reaction to her Christian conversion says about us as a group. Could it be that it provides an insight into what has gone wrong with the humanist project? And yes, I say it has gone wrong, because the focus has been on the wrong things.
You may be unconvinced by Hirsi Ali’s warning (paraphrasing) that civilisation is threatened by the opening of cultural and spiritual voids in people’s lives. Yet there is some truth to what Chesterton said:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
G.K. Chesterton
The move away from certain religions in their more benign forms have often been displaced by something far more dangerously radical. Similarly, the wavering of faith or vacuum of no belief has always been something the religious have tried to exploit for recruitment purposes, for example in Christian evangelism and Islamic Darwa.
Sure, atheists (and I consider myself to be at the anti-theist end of that particular spectrum) make cogent scientific arguments that remove the need for a god in our origin story, but for the religious it answers nothing. They are left with an unexplained feeling of spirituality.
Even isolated communities have some sort of mystical lore which suggests to me that the religious impulse is an evolved characteristic of humans. You may be sceptical of whether that’s a reasonable conjecture but indulge me for a moment; if it’s evolved we can try to find the survival benefit that it must have provided. It is only by understanding our formative impulses that we can have any mastery over them.
Let me give you an analogy.
Hypnosis has be proven to be effective in chronic pain management1 and also during surgical procedures2. We know of various shamanistic practices (for example those of the Dervishes in Turkey), where the state of consciousness is altered and pain is apparently, switched off. Would it makes sense to most of the world’s population to be told that pain is an illusion?
We know that pain provides a survival benefit in alerting us to harm, but it can also be counterproductive to healing and rehabilitation, so the most common way of managing that in modern societies is through medication. We don’t have to be dominated by the hard wiring that got us here.
Could it be that the religious impulse indirectly provided small primitive communities with the cohesion to help them survive? If so, it would not be difficult to understand why any growing consensus on the source of ‘spirituality’ might become dogma, and later perhaps a foundation to a culture.
I suggest that the corollary is that the religious impulse never evolved for large populations and it may be that they cannot be safely scaled. That might also mean that is cannot be safely displaced quickly. That being the case, our jeopardy is amplified, because the spread of dogma via the internet means there are few effective barriers to indoctrination.
Whereas a religion traditionally spread outwards from its centre gaining influence and encountering conflict on the way, what happens when intolerant conflicting ideologies overlap? What happens when an intolerant religion encounters those who have nothing to satisfy or explain their religious impulse?
Why are scientists bothering to ridicule people for believing in flying horses or miracles when they cannot offer an explanation for why 5.8 billion people in the world feel a religious impulse in the first place? That is the void that atheism and science has failed to fill. Why, because it betrayed secular humanism, and set a precedent for cancellation within its own movements.
Why are we Anything?
Just as “Why I am now a Christian” was a 180 degree pivot on the title of the Bertrand Russell lecture, put it through a further half-turn and ended up with Russell’s original title for his response. It strikes me as a metaphor for the sort of circularity that has gotten us nowhere.
Although Hirsi Ali’s announcement did not gush as you might expect of someone emerging from a religious conversion, in slightly more predictable form, Shermer resorted to atheism 101 to explain things she couldn’t possibly be confused about, including the subtitle she devised.
… starting with the subtitle of Ayaan’s essay: “Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war.” She’s right, but not in the way she thinks.
“Why I Am Not a Christian” Skeptic, Michael Shermer
I am bound to ask what other way was there for her to be right about this, or for that matter, in what respect does he think she is wrong? Whatever it is he presumes to know what she means better than she does.
Atheism per se can’t equip anyone for anything because it is not a belief system or worldview. Atheism just designates a lack of belief in God.
ibid.
Very good but wasn’t that her point? Imagine asking your doctor for help with pain and instead you get given a prescription for antibiotics.
You: ‘how is this going to help me with my pain?’
Doctor: ‘antibiotics are not meant to help you with pain.’
You: ‘that’s my point.’
In case you have not read her letter yet (or for emphasis if you have) Hirsi Ali’s concern was about the limitations of atheism and not it’s definition. You won’t learn that from reading replies like the one by Shermer, because they seemingly presuppose that in reaching this new perspective, Hirsi Ali must have somehow forgotten everything she knew about atheism.
If there is anything to be clarified here it’s how we define ‘rationality’.
You see, the subtext of what many people have said in disbelief or anger might be summed up as, ‘religion is irrational therefore Ayaan Hirsi Ali must no longer be rational’. Yet western thought is becoming irrational because new post-modernist doctrines are obliterating our access to realities we once knew to be true.
I don’t fully accept Jordan Peterson’s critique that ‘post-humanism’ was created by atheists (I wrote about my total rejection of that here but have since mellowed on it). After all, the problem he was alluding to, the rise of post-modernism and ‘woke’ ideology, was permitted by the failure of the humanities to prevent themselves from being dismantled from the inside.
Secular humanists were marginalised by the New Atheists because they wanted to maintain constructive dialogue with the religious. Perhaps Peterson (who many people credit with influencing Hirsi Ali’s decision to convert) was referring to that, and if so, he would have a point. However, Peterson is so cryptically vague, it’s difficult to tell if that was accidental and to my knowledge he has never publicly spoken about the schism between the secularists and the New Atheists. The only thing he takes care to be clear about is communicating how smart he is.
Discourse, evidence and the objective search for scientific truths are all under threat while we are simultaneously prevented from defending ourselves from dangerous fundamentalist ideologies. The learning opportunity has been almost entirely overlooked and any chance of reframing the long forgotten discussion around secularist solutions (which is surely where the conversation should have logically moved) were obliterated by the chagrin at losing such a prominent atheist advocate to the ‘other side’.
Using the situation positively would involve some self-examination, because the biggest act of self-harm the New Atheists carried out, was burning its secular-humanist bridges. When Paul Kurtz was marginalised and drummed out of the organisations he founded, the New Atheists did not protest, and it was their complicity that set the precedent for what might eventually become their own exclusion. In the first paragraph of his public letter Kurtz wrote.
This letter officially announces my resignation from the boards of the Center for Inquiry, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and the Council for Secular Humanism, all organizations that I founded beginning in 1976. It is with profound regret that I also wish to announce my resignation as editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry magazine now in its 30th year of publication and from the editorial board of The Skeptical Inquirer. I have already been shorn of all effective authority in these organizations and magazines and "shoved on an ice flow" so to speak, so it is merely a formality to divest myself of any pretensions that I have anything any longer to say within the organizations or magazines that I founded.
I think it is worth being repetitive to hammer this point home: this was a cancellation that the New Atheists were party to.
Compared to the New Atheists, Kurtz stands as a candle in the dark. Indeed, it has been Kurtz’s three decade focus on an affirmative and inclusive message that has made his organization one of the central catalysts behind the modern day secularist movement.
So who were the dark element in Nisbit’s Shakespearian analogy if not the New Atheists? Five years later and three years after Kurtz died in October 2012, Dawkins would be the light element in the title of the second volume of his autobiography, A Brief Candle in the Dark. Of course we are all snuffed out in the end, but like Kurtz, some of us get to see what we care about extinguished first.
Incredulous and personally hurt by Hirsi Ali’s conversion Dawkins said:
. . . seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more a Christian than I am.
Some suggested that she was never a true atheist in the first place and others smuggled in the idea that she managed to misunderstand atheism or, was ultimately unable to overcome her formative programming:
One must remember that Ayaan comes from a deeply religious background. It was a very significant, and I am sure, intellectually demanding effort to give up those spiritual roots, and for someone like Ayaan, I expect the term “loss of faith” had profound meaning.
Possibly but to me it seems unlikely - not that it matters. I am sure she would want to be truthful about herself and has perhaps come to the conclusion that the change places her in a position to reach out to those with a sense of spirituality; a platform from with to argue against Islamic extremism, instead of alienating them entirely.
I dare say that Hirsi Ali has no ambition to convert atheists. Had secular-humanists like Paul Kurtz not been betrayed, the importance of building bridges to the religious, may not have been such an alien concept.
Elsewhere the line between empathetic and patronising is thinner and less original:
I am an atheist in the same sense that I am an a-supernaturalist or an a-paranormalist.
“Why I Am Not a Christian” Skeptic, Michael Shermer
Most well-known atheists seem to have trotted out some version of that at some time so perhaps they are a-originalists too, and whilst I accept that sometimes it needs to be said, that only applies to contexts where it is not blindingly obvious.
It is convenient to forget that Hirsi Ali didn’t just seek refuge for the harm that was inflicted on her on religious grounds, she campaigned for the reform of Islam and warned the world about the dangers, that made her conspicuous. Her stance on religious reform was seen as a bigger threat to fundamentalist Islam than her atheism.
Overwhelmingly, these respondents appear to condescend, but really they attempt make themselves taller by standing on her shoulders. She joined the New Atheists at a time when they were abandoning any pretence of bridge building or secularism. Perhaps she noticed that beyond its success across certain types of media, the humanist project has failed in the real world, buckling under the weight of its own self satisfaction.
The B-Side
From March 26 I will switch on paid subscriptions. After that, on selected series I will provide some paid companion ‘episodes’ (my work is typically episodic). These will generally complement the free episode without being essential to it. If this is unclear or you are curious about what this is about please see ‘The B-Side Explainer’.
“The Efficacy, Safety and Applications of Medical Hypnosis - A Systematic Review of Meta-analyses”, Winfried Häuser, PD Dr., Maria Hagl, Dr. phil. Dipl.-Psych., Albrecht Schmierer, Dr., and Ernil Hansen, Prof.