Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray. Allen Lane (London). 2018. Hbk. 176 pages. £10.93.
Seven Types of Disappointment
John Gray is that rare beast, a British public intellectual. Perhaps this tells us something about the prevailing national mood, because his stock in trade is a sort of downbeat iconoclasm, a morose demolition of familiar ideas and assumptions. Nevertheless, I looked forward to reading his latest book on atheism. It seemed like a perfect subject for him, because we all think we know what atheism means. I was intrigued to find out just how he would show us, yet again, that we are all wrong. As I say, I was looking forward to the book. But in the end, I was disappointed.
In his first chapter Gray seeks to clear the decks by dismissing the ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Harris and others. He skewers it contemptuously as ‘a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion’, based on a mistaken understanding of religion as ‘an out-dated scientific theory’. The new atheists’ big mistake, he argues, is to assume that religious faith is primarily about beliefs and explanations, whereas in fact religion is primarily about human practice and shared experience.
So far so good. Gray is spot-on in his demolition of the new atheists, and in his emphasis on religion as a matter of practice rather than belief. If he had gone on to develop his argument from this insight, he might have written a very valuable book. But he doesn’t. Instead, despite deploring the new atheists’ emphasis on belief, he repeats their error by defining an atheist as: ‘… anyone with no use for the idea of a divine mind that has fashioned the world’.
So, for Gray, anyone who does not sign up to this narrowly framed theological belief — a belief which would be meaningless in many religious systems — is an atheist. By this definition Buddhists are atheists, and Hindus are probably atheists, and adherents of folk religions which aren’t much interested in the creation of the world in the first place are atheists too. In the Western world meanwhile, which is Gray’s primary concern, just about every thinker and social movement since the Enlightenment is also atheist. Much of the book is taken up with a whistle-stop tour of these thinkers and movements: Hume and Harari, Mill and Marx, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, Jacobins and Nazis.
Defining atheism so loosely and so widely is really not very helpful. But having done so, and having completed his quick canter through post-Enlightenment political and philosophical thought, Gray has a surprise in store. It turns out that all these liberals, communists, nationalists and secularists are not proper atheists at all, because all they have done is take on board Christianity’s conception of history as redemption, and redefined it. They are all closet monotheists who have simply substituted ‘humanity’, or ‘the nation’, for ‘God’: ‘Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means’.
Gray’s final message, as we should have expected, is that we misunderstand ourselves. We think that our culture is openly secular, but really it is secretly religious. We think that atheism is the opposite of religious faith, but really it is veiled monotheism. We think that categories such as ‘humanity’ or ‘nation’ have practical meaning, but really they are mystical abstractions: there is no such thing as ‘humanity’, Gray says, just the ‘multitudinous human animal’ in all its squabbling variety.
In the end, Gray has not really addressed atheism at all. Instead, what he has done is to demonstrate that various Western philosophies and movements have roots in Western Christianity. But this is hardly a revelation. Where else could their roots lie? The fact of historical continuity does not negate the fact of historical change: both are true. So I was disappointed, but really my disappointment was my own fault. I should have guessed that John Gray, being John Gray, would end up somewhere like this. Because even when he starts out with a genuinely interesting question, such as the question of atheism, the chances are that he will end up with a gloomy, fatalistic, and strangely irrelevant, answer.
Martin Spence used to be a full time trade union negotiator. He is now a freelance writer and a SOF trustee.