Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris ... were the apostles of atheism as fearless as they thought?
Whatever happened to “New Atheism”? It was born in the febrile aftermath of 9/11, when belief in a deity – or, let’s be honest, specifically in Allah – seemed to some people a newly urgent danger to western civilisation. Sam Harris began writing The End of Faith (2004) immediately after the World Trade Center attacks, and it became a bestseller. There followed the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. The men toured vigorously, but they all met together only once, and this book is the transcript of what ensued, with new brief introductions by the surviving members, Hitchens having died in 2011. Contrary to the book’s subtitle, the “atheist revolution” was not sparked by this cocktail-fuelled pre-dinner round of chat and backslapping, which took place in 2007. By then the participants could already salute one another for the impressive sales of their books, boast about how willing they were to cause “offence”, and reminisce about how brilliant they were when they befuddled this or that bishop with some debating point.
In many ways the conversation already seems dated in its political preoccupations, particularly in the idea proffered by Hitchens that “holy war” was the greatest existential threat to civilisation. (There had been nothing holy about the cold war, which brought us closest to the brink of planetary Armageddon, and North Korea now is not a theocracy, but never mind.) “I think it’s us, plus the 82nd Airborne and the 101st, who are the real fighters for secularism at the moment, the ones who are really fighting the main enemy,” Hitchens announces with armchair-general relish. (The 82nd and 101st operated in Iraq and Afghanistan.) The other Horsemen agree eagerly that they are all very brave. In his introduction, Dawkins insists that “the atheistic worldview has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage”, which might indeed be unsung had not its adherents themselves been singing it for so long.
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