Here is the deep, philosophical question of the week: What is more
annoying, insufferable, and unintentionally hilarious than the
pontifications of atheist, "humanist", and "free thinker" A. C.
Grayling?
Yes, I know, it's a tough one. I won't keep you in suspense.
Answer: The fawning, embarrassing adoration of an eighteen-year-old English student who interviews Grayling and acts as if the impressively maned Englishman's empty pontifications are rhetorical gold nuggets. That the interview is published in The Humanist is cause for the stones to cry out: "Oh, the inhumanity! Stop! Cease!"
But, to be honest, we can at least admit how fun it is to read this
sort of nonsense and think, "And atheists think Christians are stupid?
Goodness. I weep for them." No need to waste time with the entire train
wreck of an interview, but a few pieces of broken thinking and confused
stereotypes are worth kicking about for a moment. First, from the
opening:
Philosophy
is a rather strange business in the modern world of consumerism and
commerce, I suppose. We’re so used to being force-fed ideas these days
that we rarely, if ever, stop and think for ourselves.
Uh, speak for yourself, young man, speak for yourself.
And that’s where Grayling bucks the trend.
I think a gallon of coffee just shot out my nose. That is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Mind you, I've crossed cyber swords with Dr. Grayling in the past,
over the matter of his ridiculous—nay, farcical—take on Christianity
and the "Dark Ages". How shall I put this? Grayling isn't about bucking
trends, but making bucks out of trends—in this case, the whole "new
atheists" vehicle, to which he has hitched his modest bag of
philosophical agitprop and public relations handles. A few years ago, an
acquaintance who earned his doctorate in London and is now an atheist
(we attended Bible college together 20 years ago as young Evangelicals),
smirked at the mention of Grayling, saying, "He's all about fame and
money." True enough.
But there is also the fact that Grayling
acts as if his thinking is fresh and his perspective is daring, when
both are actually decades out of dates. As I wrote six years ago: "He
is an heir to the Enlightenment and thrives on the sort of
anti-Christian
polemics and dubious historical assertions that became the rage among
many
intellectuals during the Enlightenment era, so much so that he seems to
be
nearly entombed in a dusty (dare I say 'old-fashioned') form of
simplistic skepticism
that was in style many decades ago." Carry on.
Author of over twenty books, including The Good Book: A Humanist Bible,
as well as countless newspaper and magazine columns, Grayling has been a
paradigm of humanism for many years: vice president of the British
Humanist Association, patron of the UK organization Dignity in Dying,
honorary associate of the National Secular Society… the list goes on.
Because we know that holding titles and being a patron of death are
the distinctive signs of truly humane people. Which is why, I suppose,
that we shan't say Mother Teresa was "humane", despite doing more in a
single day to help the poor, the ill, the outcast, and the dying than
Dr. Grayling (or myself, for that matter) do in a given year.
And yet,
anyone anticipating stuffy Socratic dialogue with a kooky academic or a
living, breathing replica of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (with added
mane), would be taken aback by Grayling’s down-to-earth, congenial
presence.
This is something that could only be penned by someone who is quite
clueless about both the history of philosophy and the current state of
philosophy today. Not to mention someone who has apparently never read
or studied a Socratic dialogue in his life. But, again, the reporter is
not even twenty, so he has something of an excuse. Not so Grayling.
What
makes Grayling tick, in his words, is “the fact that the world is so
rich in interest and in puzzles, and that the task of finding out as
much as we can about it is not an endless task, but certainly one which
is going to take us many, many millennia to complete.”
There’s a sort of childlike grin that beams out at me, as he affirms:
“That’s exciting—discovery is exciting.” Grayling takes pleasure in
doubt and possibility, in invention and innovation: the tasks of the
open mind and open inquiry. It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the
open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that
humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.”
Of course, the one thing that doesn't matter—or shouldn't matter—in
Grayling's openminded opinion, is religion. Sure, there are all sorts of
puzzles and mysteries and wonders out there, but religion either
misunderstands or misrepresents those things. Unlike the pure, unsullied
craft of science, which we know can never be misused or abused or
coerced for improper ends. No, religion relies on its unrelenting
disdain for reason, its hatred of freedom, and its failure to deal with
reality as it really is. That is why religion relies on Big, Simple Stories for Small, Simple People:
It’s also a way of thinking that marks a
line in the sand between religion and science. The temptation to fall
for the former—hook, line, and sinker—is plain to see: “People like
narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where
they are going.” Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of
human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow human beings “don’t
want to have to think these things out for themselves. They like the
nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody
authoritative with a big beard.” He looks down towards a small flower
arrangement on the table, and plays with it contemplatively before
continuing in an almost plaintive tone: “And that is a kind of betrayal,
in a way, of the fact that we have curiosity but, most of all, we have
intelligence and so we should be questioning, challenging, trying to
find out.”
So, you see, one of the (many! countless!) flaws of
religion—because, hey, we know that all religions are essentially the
same, despite some superficial differences—is the reliance on
pre-packaged answers and narratives. Our intrepid young reporter is
lapping it all up, so much so that his irony radar completely misses how
Grayling then proceeds to hand him pre-packaged answers and narrative supposedly dismissing religion to the outer regions of enlightened thought:
But
the pessimism doesn’t persist for too long. Grayling’s biting wit is
never too far from the surface of his arguments, especially when he’s
waxing lyrical about theology. By tracing what he calls “a kind of
Nietzschean genealogy of religion,” he adopts a storyteller’s tone: “You
see a geography—and it’s an interesting one—in that the dryads and the
nymphs used to be in the trees and in the streams.” After that they
evaporated into the wind and the sun, he says, noting that the more
humankind has discovered about the world, the more remote our gods have
become. “They went from the surface of the earth to the mountaintops,
then into the sky, and finally beyond space and time altogether,”
Grayling observes. Not only have gods and goddesses retreated into their
extraterrestrial hiding places, but they’ve also dwindled in number
(generally) to only one or three, depending on your divine arithmetic:
“So they’re being chased away bit by bit,” Grayling chuckles.
I
suppose I'd chuckle as well if I had just explained how religion uses
simplistic narratives and unsophisticated thinking to fool the unwashed
masses, then I turned around and used a combination of simplistic
narrative and unsophisticated thinking to explain why religion is so
regrettable and skepticism (and scientism) is so wonderful. It's like
stealing candy from a baby or selling garbage to a teenager. And the
narrative continues, with the aid of Grayling's gift of prophecy:
Will
we ever really outgrow religion, though? Grayling leans against the
wall casually, stretching out his legs before responding with an assured
brand of optimism: “It seems to me that in five or ten thousand years’
time, when people look back (if there are any people) at this period of
history, the two or three thousand years when Judeo-Christian influence
in the world was considerable, they will collapse it down to a
sentence.” Just as we view the advent of Cro-Magnon humans in Europe in
40,000 BCE and the disappearance of Neanderthals around ten thousand
years later as historical events and nothing more, so future historians
will consider religion as a mere artifact. Indeed, according to
Grayling, they will astutely recognize religious history as “a bad time
for human beings, because they were getting cleverer with their
technologies, but they were no wiser.”
That's a strange remark, as Grayling argued the following a few years ago:
From that point [the "Dark Ages"] to this day every millimetre of progress
in liberty and learning has been bitterly opposed by the organised institutions
of Christianity, which at the outset burned to death anyone who disagreed with
its antique absurdities--none of its officers ever being arraigned for these
vast numbers of murders, or the literally millions of deaths caused by the wars
of religion that plagued Europe, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. But
bit by bit religion was forced back into its own shadows by the new learning
and the larger freedoms of mind and action that increasing secularisation
brought, liberating individuals and societies to the extent enjoyed today.
But now that toleration and
secularity has allowed the cancers of organised superstition to regrow, we see
the old story repeating itself: the church battling to stop progress, to return
us to the dark of prejudice and irrationality.
He once stated, in
other words, that Christianity fought technology tooth and nail, which
was evidence of the Church's stupidity and narrow-mindedness, but he is
now arguing that while religion (and I think he is focused primarily on
Christianity) was becoming more clever in terms of technological
advances, it was still stupid and narrow-minded when it came to real
wisdom and knowledge. Stupid if you do, stupid if you don't! Yep,
Christians were too dull and reactionary to allow the advent of modern
technology, but once those same Christians figured out how to develop
modern technology, they still remain morons. The logic dazzles, except
for being all smoke and no light.
Finally, one last bit of
nonsense, which sums up the sort of cognitive dissonance one finds in
the shallow skepticism of Grayling, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens,
and company (and, yes, I do think there does exist a deep and thoughtful
skepticism, and it is far more engaging and serious in nature):
Still,
it’s crucial to Grayling’s philosophical outlook that when we lose
faith, we don’t lose hope. “Almost any religion can be explained to
another person in about half an hour,” he claims, adjusting his
imperious-looking gold-rimmed spectacles. “But to know anything about
astrophysics or biology or anything that really gives us an insight into
the real beauty of the universe? That takes some years of study at
least.”
That surely ranks as one of the most arrogant, stupid—and,
yes, funny—remarks I've read or heard in all of 2012. Which brings us
to the final, philosophical question of this post: if a tree fell in a
forest and hit A. C. Grayling on the head, would it knock any sense into
him?
(Note: A big tip of the proverbial hat to Charles Flynn for alerting me to the interview above, as well as sending so many links and articles over the past year.)