S14, E1B: The B-Side/"She Said She Said"
Series 14: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bridge Between Wildernesses
This is the counterpart of S14, E1: Flavours of Heresy where I began to explore the reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s epistle, Why I am now a Christian1. This ‘B-Side’ contains additional material related to that episode. See the B-Side Explainer to understand what I am trying to do with this.
Welcome to The B-Side
I said
"Who put all those things in your head?
Things that make me feel that I'm mad"
And you're making me feel like I've never been born
She said, "You don't understand what I said"
I said, "No, no, no, you're wrong"
“She Said She Said”, The Beatles, Paul McCartney, John Lennon
We live on a planet where the majority of people have some kind of religion, and although religion does not represent the atheist reality (which includes my own), it does shape the reality of the human environment that we all happen to live in. Or course it puts us in a good position to ridicule the foolishness of religions and belief without feeling any obligation to be constructive or to explain anything.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s realisation that atheism is incapable of effectively combating threats from ideological extremism has been met with incredulity. Famous atheists have called her naïve to think it ever could, but to say that ‘atheism is just a non-belief’, is both true and a highly convenient cop out. There was a time when atheists really did think they had religion on the back foot, and the hubris led them to their biggest mistake, the abandonment of secular-humanism.
I think many atheists would consider the possibility that there’s a scientific reason for the sense of spirituality that humans have and religions build on but that’s generally where the curiosity ends. They may say something like, ‘there are many things that are part of human nature that civilisation and education has helped us overcome’, but this still misses the point. To free people from mysticism in large numbers we have to offer an explanation for what they are experiencing.
It is not enough to suggest they only feel the way they do towards a certain deity because of their culture because they already know that. It doesn’t help them see where the religious impulse comes from or how it might be understood. I am convinced the key is to separate the cause of what is referred to as ‘spirituality’ from the experience of it.
By uncovering the cause we may find its purpose, and through it be better able to engage and empathise with those who hold it to be something real, life-affirming and essential without judgement or condescension. I feel capable of doing that without having to gaslight myself because I see religions as having a cause.
Stephen Jay Gould famously spoke about ‘Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)’ in respect of science and religion. The standard atheist objection to this is that there is no other domain that cannot be described by science. I think that’s true but the phenomena of spirituality, mysticism and religion do exist, mainly as repositories for things we do not yet understand. Shouldn’t science be trying to explain it?
Another way to look at this might be to look at the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’. There is no overlap but as we advance in knowledge, the ‘known’ increases and the borders of the ‘unknown’ retreats as ignorance contracts. You might be able to convince some people with logical arguments that their sense of spirituality is illusory, but for the majority (5.8 billion) you can’t do that by refusing to accept what they feel is valid to them - until that is, you can give them an alternative explanation for what they feel.
Remember lest we be too smug, everything we know is filtered through our senses to make our internal reality, so we are not different. That is not to say we can’t aid our search for truth with scientific tools, but we have to maintain empathy for those who for whatever reason, cannot access them.
If it’s not divine then we might suppose it amounts to neurological programming with an evolutionary purpose. This greatly clarifies things because in that scenario there is only one ultimate purpose of evolution - the survival of the meat vehicle for inter-generational genetic materials. In other words, ensuring that on average, the phenotype survives long enough to sexual maturity and put his or her unique contribution back into the gene pool.
To reject that, we have to assume that human survival was sidelined while resources were diverted to the evolution of a sense of spirituality, with no discernible survival benefit. That cannot be the case because it would be contrary to Darwinian selection to suppose we adapted without environmental pressure.
The Sense of Self
Of course we can say that of other animals that were occupying the same environment at the time we were emerging, so why do they appear to lack this spiritual aspect - is it merely down to linguistics? We know that most animals cannot recognise themselves in a mirror and that applies to most humans up to the age of 18 months too. It’s not clear what the animals that react to a reflection think they are seeing and there is an interesting paper on that here.
Thinking about it carefully, it’s a big leap in abstraction, to consider that a two dimensional pattern of colour we can see, is in some way indicative of how we appear to others. Might spirituality have become necessary to primitive versions of ourselves as we evolved to think in abstractions? Could it have become necessary under the pressure of a growing sense of individual identity, to doubt personal extinction, just to survive a brutal existence?
Was the recognition of our own reflection a breakthrough? Did it show us that there is a viewpoint outside our own where we are in the frame? Might that cause us to speculate about a viewpoint where we are all in the frame? If so that suggest an external viewer, perhaps an entity that sees everything beyond us and that being the case, wouldn’t we want to befriend them?
How would humans possibly know how to appease the all-seeing? Might they look for signs of blessing and displeasure; might those who see signs in natural phenomenon and opportunities for atonement be given power as intermediaries? Could it simply be that the only way early humans could conceptualise these abstractions and disembodied feelings was to assume they must have an external source?
I am convinced that spirituality was a way to deal with our precociously heightened awareness at a time when we did not have even the most basic understanding of our world. Perhaps what we are left with is a neurological performance enhancer to compartmentalise our primitive nihilism.
Evolved Functionality?
When performance coaches teach elite athletes techniques for ‘getting in the zone’, they may set up cues that can be called upon by a pre-game ritual to trigger the optimum mindset. This is obviously a way to access some part of ourselves to produce consistent and reliable performance on demand. The techniques are not important for this discussion but could it be that what it is tapping into is the survival strategy of detaching from our sense of self to be part of something else?
When a mother performs a feat of super-human strength to protect her child she has to be in a particular zone which involves access to adrenaline. How would a primitive human have understood this? Could it explain why those in crisis often instinctively appeal to a higher authority because it feels like the strength needed can only come from somewhere else? It’s certainly why Alcoholics Anonymous insist that the appeal to a higher power is absolutely necessary for those struggling with sobriety - and it works.
I class myself as anti-theist because for me the universe makes far less sense if I suppose there is a capricious god in it. It was later in an interview on Unherd, that Hirsi Ali expressed regret for helping to popularise atheism, the inescapable inference being she now sees it as harmful. Many Christians might say the same, except I think her concern is the indirect threat to civilisation rather than the spiritual peril of non-believers - if so the difference is non-trivial.
Since becoming a public intellectual in around 2001, Hirsi Ali has been concerned about what happens to West if its civilisation, culture and knowledge are allowed to be overrun. As an apostate of Islam she found a home with secular humanists:
“When I met Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I think I jumped probably too soon on that atheist bandwagon and accepted too quickly the proposition that all religions are the same, and equally bad, and equally dark. Now I think it would be intellectually dishonest of me if I said I’m still radically atheist — I’m not — but also, more importantly, if I don’t take responsibility for my part in advancing the erosion of the building blocks of this Western civilisations that, as I say, I love so much.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Interview, Unherd
Without wishing to read too much into what might be a slip, I find it interesting for her to say (with my emphasis), she’s not ‘radically atheist’. Do think about that in your own time but let’s not get distracted.
At the time of joining the New Atheist coterie, Hirsi Ali continued to argue for reform within Islam, all the while warning anyone who would listen about the dangers of fundamentalism and Dawah.
This has largely been ignored in the diplomatic efforts of Western governments and the slur of ‘Islamophobia’ became politically toxic and a means of silencing critics, although, that did not work in Hirsi Ali’s case, it did close the minds of some people who otherwise might have been part of a receptive audience.
Whatever her cause for remorse (and we can speculate about that), some guilt would surely have been assuaged had atheism anything to offer those susceptible to religious radicalisation. Even if it’s unrealistic to expect atheism to do that, it is nevertheless still reasonable for Hirsi Ali to identify this as a limitation, not shared by Christianity.
There’s an inexhaustible well of poor and disenfranchised people, exploited and in need of hope to merely function. We can tell ourselves some stories about how the uneducated, weakened by their circumstances, become vulnerable to religious indoctrination.
Yet being safe and well-fed doesn’t require the same strength, as being in squalor, in a continuous state of being threatened and hungry. Perhaps having no need to believe in anything is a luxury, and religion offers the needed promise of something later, to those who have nothing now. What do we have to offer as atheists? Freedom from fear perhaps? But for many the thought of leaving their god behind is a source of fear so denying their feelings are valid just pushes them away.
It’s interesting that whereas we atheists have criticised the religious quest for forgiveness and absolution from supernatural entities, some of the non-religious are turning to a different kind of determinism, whereby nothing is their fault to begin with. See -
Perhaps our evolved natures have not finished finding news ways to delude us. Meanwhile it’s not possible to prevent theocracy by ignoring religion. If secularism is about how people might live alongside each other regardless of religious belief, then what does New Atheism offer, apart from a feeling of unearned superiority?
Atheism enjoys far more success in attracting people from the moderate range of the religious spectrum simply because it is a shorter step to take. I sympathise with those who say that religion is always harmful but the choice is not between ‘harm’ and ‘no harm’. If the beliefs of those who cause the least harm to others are disproportionately displaced by non-belief, the net benefit will be at best, sub-optimal.
The moderate voices of atheism were drummed out by the New Atheists, including the founder of three highly influential organisations, Paul Kurtz. His massive contribution is not popularly known. How long will it be before the erstwhile ‘New’ are being ousted by post-modernism, hoisted on their own petard, because when their chance came, they did not stand up for tolerance.
To sum up, Kurtz repeatedly emphasizes that it is wrong to draw a line in the sand between the godless and the religious. Instead secularists desperately need to reach out to moderately religious allies on pressing issues such as poverty and the environment. […] he strongly rejects the arguments advanced by Hitchens and Harris that the moderately religious are just as deserving of attacks as extremists.
The Four Horseman Lost a Rider
This made me think about one particular part of the famous Four Horsemen discussion, because it’s where Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s inability to attend on the day, is to be most lamented.
DAWKINS: Sam’s asking about whether we should be even-handed in criticising the different religions, and you’re talking about even-handedness regarding good versus bad.
HITCHENS: Whether all religions are equally bad? […]
DAWKINS: Yes, whether Islam is worse than Christianity.
The Four Horsemen: Hour 2 of 2 - Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Ep 1
Harris clarifies.
HARRIS: […] it’s almost an ontological commitment of atheism, to say that all faith claims are in some sense equivalent. The media says the Muslims have their extremists and we have our extremists. There are jihadists in the Middle East and we have people killing abortion doctors. And that’s just not an honest equation. The mayhem that’s going on under the aegis of Islam just cannot be compared to the fact that we have two people a decade who kill abortionists. And this is one of the problems I have with the practice of atheism: it hobbles us when we have to seem to spread the light of criticism equally in all directions at all moments, whereas we could, on some questions, have a majority of religious people agree with us. …
So he was arguing there was scope to be discerning in the criticism and find consensus with some of the moderate religious. This point was completely ignored.
DAWKINS: Well, I’m sure that’s right. On the other hand, my concern is actually not so much with the evils of religion as with whether it’s true. […]And so, although I also care about the evils of religion, I am prepared to be even-handed, because they all make this claim [of a supernatural creator], it seems to me, equally.
Clearly falsehoods harm people and that must be the root of our concern for the truth. Yet in this case, what is the greater harm to people, the uneven access to the truth, or being unable to differentiate degrees of danger?
HITCHENS: I would never give up the claim that all religions are equally false. And for that reason: because they’re false in preferring faith to reason. And latently at least, they’re equally dangerous. ….
In the discussion that followed concessions around this point were made, but it was academic, and astonishing in its lack of pragmatism. Yet this is where Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s presence could have made all the difference by anchoring the conversation to what it was like to be a human being, existing under the oppression of religion in one of its most extreme forms. How do we liberate them without offering an explanation for how they feel? It’s possible for us to accept that the religious do feel something because we are human too. What better place is there to start? What other place can there be?
If you don’t have access to UnHerd you can read it via this web archive.