New Atheism to Theopolitical Problematics

Tentative steps towards a Real Atheism, or an Atheism of the Real

Yesterday I launched the sixth official Philosophy Portal course, and the first course of 2024, which will focus on a full exposition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as well as exegetical reading spaces hosted by

Dimitri Crooijmans

. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right centres the political question of the mediation of Absolute Freedom in the context of World Spiritual becoming. Find out more, or join us: Philosophy of Right.

The Portal will be hosting its first Book Club this coming Monday April 1st, focused on David McKerracher of

Theory Underground

’s book Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. You can find out more, or sign up here: The Portal.

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When I was growing into my intellectual consciousness (~2005, 19 years old), the public debates of the time centred around New Atheism and its rejection of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms. The best-selling popular intellectual book the year I started my undergraduate degree was New Atheist Richard Dawkins The God Delusion,¹ which forwards the argument that a supernatural creator God is unlikely to exist, and thus, personal belief in such an entity should be qualified as a delusion.

Dawkins and the New Atheists in general seemed (and still seem) to operate on the principle that “science and reason” could (can) replace “spirit and religion”. While notably, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the “New Atheist” movement, Sam Harris, did break the line in affirming a role for “spirituality without religion” — most notably in his book, podcast, and app, Waking Up² — the general negativity towards religion has consistently remained.³

In this specific context, I don’t think we should under-estimate the degree to which this intellectual movement was inspired and motivated by the events of 9/11, and the idea that fundamentalist religious belief in the context of modern technological society, posed a global threat to liberal secular plurality, which is in-and-of-itself, it still seems to me, a reasonable hypothesis.

However, last week in The Portal, we hosted philosopher Dr.

Matthew David Segall

of

Footnotes2Plato

, who started off our Real Talk session with the recognition that there has been a dramatic shift in our public debates around politics and religion. This shift has been so dramatic, that Dr. Segall notes that even the idea of the separation of Church and State is being called into question. In other words, and to state it positively: there is a growing desire for theocracy.

Why?

In what can only be understood as some sort of ironic joke, this growing desire for theocracy seems to have a lot to do with the ubiquitous nature of modern technology — and I would suggest the emergence of a “screen-being” mediated by the internet or Global Brain⁴ — which not only threatens the fabric of our 20th century institutional structures (and thus the hierarchies that allow us to meaningfully orient ourselves in the world across a lifetime and between generations), but also exposes us to the immediacy of our desire in a way that calls for a totally new level of self-discipline and self-reflection.

In combining both effects of ubiquitous modern technology and our new “screen-being”, we might say that what it has exposed to us is the real negativity at the core of sociality:

1. On the one hand, that our hierarchies were a formal response to and defence against this negativity, and

2. On the other hand, that the immediacy of our desire is intensely anti-social, the core of our inhumanity, even

If you needed any evidence that human historical movement follows some mysterious law of dialectical oscillation governed by negativity, look no further!

But back to the central issue: is theocracy, that is the merger between politics and theology, the only response to this situation? In other words, is theocracy the only way we can reinstitute meaningful social hierarchy and mediate the immediacy of anti-social desire?

The presupposition of theocracy seems to be that human social relations require a God-mediator. In other words, we cannot have human-human relations, we need to have human-God-human relations.

While I am certainly of the belief that human-human relations are governed by a fundamental negativity, I am against the idea that placing a transcendental illusion between us is the solution to this situation.

I would instead propose something radical: thinking the real!

While “New Atheism” attacks religion and theocratic beliefs as delusions, or in the language of German Idealism, transcendental illusions, I would suggest that “Real Atheism” would simply get rid of the New Atheist transcendental illusion in the big Other of the evolutionary process itself. This big Other supports the thinking of New Atheism, and is weaponised in discourse against its opponents in the same way that theocrats weaponise God. What both positions fail to do is actually think through the underlying social negativity at work in this dynamic.

• Theocrats: Human-God-Human

• Evolutionists: Human-Evolution-Human

While we can see the return of theocrats today arguing for a God-centred society that collapses the split between Church and State, I would also say that the New Atheist move still exists today as well, it has just transfigured itself into different positivist guises, with the deification of “creative evolution” and “emerging complexity”. In that sense, I would even predict that theocrats and evolutionists may find themselves fighting on the same side against the “meaning crisis” from different perspectives. Here the main difference being that theocrats will represent a more fascist political determination (forcing a politics of X God or X religious denomination), and the evolutionists will represent a more pluralist political determination (but obfuscate the underlying pluralist tensions in their abstract inclusivity and positivisation of “open-endedness” and “complexity” as “inherently good” or “valuable”).

We could boil down what I am trying to say to the following equation: any discourse that purports to “solve the meaning crisis” with “their old/new discourse” (theocratic or evolutionist), is false and an obfuscation of real philosophical thinking.

Unfortunately, however, the sociopolitical problems at stake in the breakdown of hierarchy and the revelation of the immediacy of our desires, are very real, all too real, and no discourse of God or evolutionary process is going to save us from them. The real question is whether or not we are going to construct discursive structures that can think, talk and work through the social negativities in-and-of-themselves.

Since I am an intellectual outcast of sorts, I might as well just continue “sacrificing” all of the necessary bloody details that need to be thought through to the altar of our digital apocalypse. Take, for example, a situation I am currently dealing with on a nightly basis: my partner is currently entrapped in a situation with a psychopathic hysterical boss who is literally psychologically manipulating her everyday into the point of anxiety-provoking mental breakdowns. Moreover, the only thing that the medical-labour establishment seems to be able to do — at least at the moment, since actually proving psychological harassment in the workplace seems so difficult to do — is to throw addictive anxiety medications at her.

Here we see both of the aforementioned features of the negativity at work in the desire for theocracy:

1. A neoliberal hierarchy produces God-like boss-figures who can do whatever the fuck they want without consequences, and no meaningful larger-scale social structures to prevent it from happening

2. The immediacy of desire in the production of biochemical anxiety-medications designed to numb and obfuscate the problem of the truth raised by anxiety to the dignity of a conversation with real sociopolitical stakes

Hoo-ray!⁵

The essential point here: what is clearly a sociopolitical problem, far too complex to really comprehend or to unpack here, is being treated as a biochemical problem.

I have seen this same pattern repeat over and over again with people closest to me, from my brother: who clearly struggled with Oedipal familial wounds (an issue of familial hierarchy) being treated with anti-depressants — to my mother: who clearly struggled with the consequences of divorce and being overworked as a single mother, being treated with the same thing, anti-depressants.

Our sociopolitical reality is basically unliveable, and yet the only thing our society knows how to do, is throw biochemical medications at it.

Now it would be irresponsible of me not to note that, when we analyse Richard Dawkins approach to religious fundamentalism in this light, it reveals the same pattern: religious fundamentalism is clearly a sociopolitical problem, but his main critical and deconstructive arguments against it, are not drawn from sociopolitical analysis, but rather evolutionary biology, as well as a bit of chemistry and physics.

However, when we return back to the positivist discourse of a theocrat, they too would be obfuscating the social negativities, perhaps in the following way:

• If you just lived with and in the reality (qua transcendental illusion) of God then maybe you would:

  • Partner: live a simple home life and raise children, and stop trying to climb the career ladder where you will inevitable confront difficult situations with human bosses, i.e. your inability to submit to “the real boss” is causing you these issues working under a “secular boss”

  • Brother: your family would be going to Church every weekend, and be led by a strong patriarch who believed in this one true God, then all of your Oedipal crises would have been avoided; but now you find yourself a predictable result of secular society, spun out and addicted to drugs

  • Mother: never have divorced your abusive and psychologically unstable atheist partner who was struggling with economic crises, and then you would have been able to avoid submitting to working world where you are doomed to be overworked, and unable to attend to your duties as a mother

In all situations, real thinking about the negativities of hierarchy and the immediacy of desire, for example: men and women in the workplace, or raising a family in a modern city, or dealing with addiction, are just approached with an overly simplistic stop-gap. It is not tenable or even desirable to go back to a life where men and women are not, at scale, in the workplace (which does complicate hierarchy); it is not tenable or even desirable for us all to go back to raising a family in the countryside where we can escape the inhumanity of the city; and it is not tenable or even desirable for us to go back to a world of scarcity (which would have to be artificially enforced), where we do not have access to an infinite abundance of temptations which could open us to spiralling addictions. To think through these issues we would need Hegel’s central insight regarding the updating of Aristotelian logic:⁶

“To hold fast to the positive in its negative, to the content of the presupposition in the result, is the most important factor in rational cognition”

We need to think through new hierarchies, and we need to think through new relations to self-discipline. We need to think through new a socio-political contract to make urban life more liveable for humans (as opposed to just profit maximisation). We need to think through new constraints and responsibilities for grocery stores, pharmaceuticals, fast food services, and so forth and so on (so that people are not in an environment so conductive to addictive substances).

However, as unlikely as we are to find solutions in theocratic discourse, we are equally unlikely to find solutions by listening to the positivist evolutionists, whose narratives of open-ended complexity growth as inherently good and valuable tell us everything and nothing at the same time. They are often, or as a rule, elitist intellectuals always pompously disconnected from real social negativities, and never bother to think about it, let alone work it through in discourse. They rather try to stand on a pillar and sell an evolutionary or complexity worldview to “the average man on the street” who “just doesn’t get it yet”. When the “average man on the street” just “gets it” (some evolutionary, complexity, or open-ended worldview), then we will all be able to “overcome the problems of postmodernity” (same vague general “nihilism” which is apparently the issue).

Let’s take a detour and re-address the main New Atheist deviation, Sam Harris, who points out the need for spirituality without religion. What is at stake in Harris’s claim? What Harris will return to over and over again is the twin forces of the need for a meditative centring practice on the no-self and psychedelic experience as opening one to the ineffable force of love.

While both meditation and psychedelics, I would think, can be viewed as positive allies on the side of a new culture, both providing people with the practice of slowing down, questioning presuppositions, and developing a new relationship with the mind and thought as such, what is obviously missing here is any meaningful engagement with the underlying reasons why people are in increasing mental distress. It is almost as if the “spiritual but not religious” wing of New Atheism is trying to replace the problem of a culture addicted to anxiety and depression medications, but not address the underlying socio-political tensions that are causing anxiety and depression in the first place. Instead of throwing anxiety and depression medications at people, should we be throwing meditation workshops/retreats and psychedelics at people? As absurd as it sounds and as absurd as it is, this is actually happening.

Another aspect of this approach seems salient, and which points towards its symptomatic nature: both throwing anxiety and depression medications at people, and emphasising the need for meditation and psychedelics, seems unified in the obfuscation of speech as it relates to sociopolitical negativities specifically. Like, let’s not talk about the real issues, let us not build spaces where there are real sociopolitical stakes for speech, let’s all just “zen-or-trip-out”.

I appreciated that, in Dr.

Matthew David Segall

’s Real Talk, towards the end of the session, he emphasised that a culture built around “mystical experiences”, that is a culture built around having some divine communion with the Universe or God, is precisely what becomes the ground for sentimental narcissism. This is probably becoming increasingly obvious to our culture, as it exhausts the “spiritual but not religious” temptation. Here the spiritual desire to eradicate the ego for the ineffable experience, is itself, one could argue, the most extreme expression of narcissistic self-inflation. Moreover, getting caught up in our positive feelings, of connection or transcendence, is not something that really has any power to actually change our sociopolitical realities.

The context of Dr. Segall’s comments also happened to be situated in an interesting metaphysical reflection on the difference between Judaism, which he claims opens up the idea of God as the ineffably transcendent “nameless name”, and the Christian contribution to the dialectic of God, which seems to bring this ineffable transcendent nameless name into the embodied mundane experience of a human being, via the symbol or metaphor of Christ. For Dr. Segall, his brings him to a thinking, not necessarily of the importance of Christianity as an institution, but the importance of Christ as a real metaphor and fictional force that does open real new historical possibilities.

It is in this context, that I would frame a question that I by no means seek to resolve anytime soon or ever, and a question which I think New Atheism clearly failed to address: what does third millennium Christianity look like? Today we are seeing a revival of the religious notion, and a lot of this revival involves people re-identifying with institutions, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. Here the question is what is the dialectical truth of these institutions? The Orthodox and the Catholic have roots back to the 1st millennium, dividing up what is often referred to as “East” and “West”, or “Russian” and '“Roman”. The Protestant has roots in the 2nd millennium, which in a way, opens us to modern secular capitalism as God (as well as a multiplicity of Christian variants and offspring).

But the question of the 3rd millennium is only just beginning, and I would argue, by definition, will be in excess of anything that can be responded to adequately by constructions of the first two millennia. Dr. Segall’s suggestion was something like: we need a Christianity that gets over itself, which reminds me of

Jacob Kishere

’s idea and project of a “Christianity beyond itself”.⁷

While this gets closer to the mark for me, we still need to bring these speculations into practical contact with the aforementioned issue of theopolitics: that of finding the relation between theology and politics which seems to have been obfuscated in our culture, in large part due to New Atheism. In our Real Talk, Dr. Segall brought some interesting contradictions to the table, that I think we should take some time to unpack and think through. I would organise them in the following way:

1. The question of the separation of Church/State is back on the table

2. There is the possibility that politics without religion is impractical

3. We may need to rethink a civil religion to overcome blood bonds (issues of ethnicity/race)

However, and at the same time:

1. We should try to prevent God from being co-opted for political purposes

2. Politics of a theological or secular utopia cannot save us (as ends justify the means)

3. On the level of concrete universality we need pluralities to co-exist

How are we to make sense of these two series of points?

I suppose, from my perspective, that (1) if we want to prevent God from being co-opted for political purposes, (2) if we want to prevent either a theological or secular utopia from positing a saviour discourse, and (3) if we want pluralities to co-exist on the level of concrete universality (all points I agree with); we should both maintain the separation between Church and State (i.e. we should quickly take theocracy as a viable political option, off the table), and we should try to re-think/re-theorise a practical secular politics that simultaneously recognises ethnicity and race as real (and not just arbitrary social constructions), while overcoming them at the same time (as opposed to falling into the non/post-religious problems of right-wing secular fascism).

What I think necessarily needs to be added into this equation is: (1) the question of secular social hierarchy, and (2) the question of the mediation of desire (the two are interlinked). The question is: how to think the connection between the two in the context of the global digital age of our “screen being”?

Is this framing wrong?

While I do not think any one thinker or text can resolve these issues, I do think that we should start with thought that directly engages the question of the socio-political on the level of philosophy. That is precisely why the next Philosophy Portal course will centre the work of G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which seeks to provide us with the seed-form of a “science of right”. This science of right proceeds using the following logic:

1. The immediacy of desire (or what Hegel calls instinctual will/impulse)

2. The way of the world (or what Hegel suggests opens the problem of morality)

3. The unity of the two (or what Hegel calls “The Ethical System”)

Furthermore, the unity of the two (immediacy of desire x way of the world), breaks open into four categories with relevance to the mediation of rights towards freedom:

1. Family (mediation of sexual love and biosocial reproduction)

2. Civic Community (local social organisations beyond the family)

3. State (gigantic union between individual independence and universal substance)

4. World Spirit (actuality and domain of absolute freedom)

There are a few important things to note here in relation to previous points inspired by Dr. Segall’s Real Talk:

• Hegel avoids the problem of God serving political purposes by emphasising the importance of politics towards the mediation of freedom, not God;

• The mediation of freedom is not the mediation of a theological or secular utopia, but the mediation of the truth of the human being (as free); importantly, here, the truth of freedom does not guarantee us anything like a “utopia”

• The domain of World Spirit being above/beyond, and not reducible to the State, means that we must confront and work through the relation between pluralities on the level of concrete universality (as opposed to obfuscating the negativities of these relations)

A few more important points in general:

• Hegel, in placing rights oriented towards freedom, he is suggesting that rights are the more central and crucial categories for politics, in relation to responsibilities;

• However, this does not mean that rights do not come with responsibilities, and Hegel is clear that freedom has nothing to do with “irresponsible desire”

• Secular social hierarchy and its rights, for Hegel, is nested within a fractal of family, civic community, and state, and this fractal has been deconstructed by contemporary progressive politics to the detriment of universalist emancipatory politics in general; in other words: we must think a universalist emancipatory politics inclusive of family, civic community, and the state, as well as the interrelation between states on the level of World Spirit (where the Absolute Freedom of war is always a threat)

What must be at work in thinking through all of these complex dimensions, and more importantly, socio-political tensions, is something that Dr. Segall emphasised at the very end of his Real Talk: limitation is of the greatest value, and paradoxically, actually brings us closer to the infinite or the absolute.⁸

When we are lost in the infinite ineffable spiritual visions, we can easily obfuscate the real of limitation. It is only when we are courageous enough to actually confront the real of limitation, in the particularity of our language and relations, that we truly have access to something like “singular-universality”, something which is infinitely richer than a universality without the singular, as Hegel makes clear in the Science of Logic.⁹

Perhaps this brings us closer to the meaning of a “third millennium Christianity”, which understands the real metaphor and fictional force of Christ, while at the same time gets over its identification with denominational institutional structures.

Maybe this is the move from sacrifice to transmutation, which, following Eliot Rosenstock of

21stCenturySynthesis

, Dr. Segall also supported; or what I have referred to as the “sacrifice of the sacrifice” and the “Other Becoming”.¹⁰

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The sixth official Philosophy Portal course, and the first course of 2024, will focus on a full exposition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as well as exegetical reading spaces hosted by

Dimitri Crooijmans

. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right centres the political question of the mediation of Absolute Freedom in the context of World Spiritual becoming. Find out more, or join us: Philosophy of Right.

The Portal will be hosting its first Book Club this coming Monday April 1st, focused on David McKerracher of

Theory Underground

’s book Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. You can find out more, or sign up here: The Portal.

1. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Press.

2. Harris, S. 2014. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion. Simon & Schuster Export.

3. I have written about this here: Processing the Sacred.

4. The topic of my doctoral thesis, see: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. (link)

5. That is the negativity we wrestle with on a nightly basis.

6. Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 744.

7. See: “Wrestling with Christianity”

8. Limitation as of significant importance was also discussed recently by

Alex Ebert

and Daniel L. Garner of

O.G. Rose

, see: Alex Ebert on Limits Entailing Limitlessness; see also: Limits are Limitless.

9. See: Science of Logic.

10. Last, C. 2023. Philosophy After Nietzsche: The Challenge of Thinking both Becoming under a Cross and an Other Becoming towards Flight? In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 727-742.