In my last post, I claimed I wasn’t an atheist. That’s a complicated declaration. Atheism, despite being technically no more than contra-theism, is most of the time a philosophy with positive content. It’s usually strict materialism buttressed by other moral and political ideologies (though who could really separate the latter two categories). For the New Atheists (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris), atheism is materialism with the support of the myths of technological advancement and a hierarchy of civilizations. There are also exceptions to strict materialist atheism, such as the popular French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville’s rejuvenation of Aldous Huxley’s perennialism (though the former gives no credit to the latter) in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (L’esprit de l’athéisme). Comte-Sponville’s argument, as well as Huxley’s, is roughly that there is a kernel of truth underlying all religions, and this kernel is most clearly articulated in hardcore mysticism and other esoteric theology and philosophy (e.g., Sufism, Kabbalah, pantheism, strains of Buddhist philosophy, Gnosticism, critical theory in Western philosophy, etc.).
However, this kind of spiritual atheism still bears the stain of Christian imperialism, to use Gil Anidjar’s term. I don’t know of any form of atheism that doesn’t hold true to this, because to use the term is always to bear its past and employ that past intentionally or unintentionally. (I say the latter in answer to those who would argue for an atheist Buddhist tradition, which would necessarily bear the connotations of atheism in translation, and which is also a questionable claim given the pervasiveness of reincarnation doctrine and the alignment of atheism with strict materialism). As I’m sure many readers have noticed, a lot of people tend to shy away from the term atheism—even if they are strict materialists—largely because they think it has antireligious connotations with which they would prefer not to be associated. I sometimes fall in this camp, and in my last post I drew on some of the work of Anidjar to argue that I’m neither religious nor atheist (nor spiritual or a seeker, for that matter).
In his Immanent Frame post, “The poverty of atheism,” Anidjar is critical of the common desire to “name.” In this sense, I can’t name my position except in terms of critique, where that critique is an overture to a more complicated explanation that requires a conversation or an essay. Perhaps this is for the best. We might consider such a process the intellectual equivalent of the slow food movement—though to be clear, I’m implying an analogy, not a genealogy. In this way, slow thought means slowing things down despite the pressure to speed them up (where the latter idea is to increase efficiency—which as we all know is an intrinsic good, I kid). Basically, what I mean to say is, “Hey, I have no name for what I am.” I’m not sure if I can call such a statement a complaint as much as an observation, and practically it means something like, “Well, I guess you could call me an atheist, but I’m not really an atheist. I could explain more if you are interested.” And there we begin.
These are the quotidian politics and morals of my relationship to religion and atheism—terms I use despite myself, and terms I’m careful in using, as I straddle the line between honesty and tedious academic explanation. I feel my scholarship will really begin to do its heavy-lifting after we’ve gotten this initial conversation out of the way. That does not mean just using the term “atheism” anyway, but rather refusing to do away with it wholesale and refusing to elide important differences. I want to say, “I’m not quite an atheist, and now that you understand my meaning and now that you understand where I’m coming from, let’s have a conversation about this thing we call atheism—without dismissing it and without feeling the need to cling to it.” After secularization? It seems “after atheism” offers an equally compelling line of inquiry.
Could you please explain what essential attribute(s) of atheism is responsible for its carrying, as you say, the “stain of Christian Imperialism”? I ask because in your article you merely hint at your concern and never state the problem succinctly.
The answer is important as it speaks to your understanding of the atheist label and would more clearly communicate what it is exactly that you wish to disassociate yourself from.
Just saw this comment. For that statement, I’m relying on Gil Anidjar’s framing of atheism in this post:
http://tif.ssrc.org/2010/06/29/the-poverty-of-atheism/
He’s relying on his own work, the work of Edward Said, and the work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, among others. He might also be using Tomoko Masuzawa and Timothy Fitzgerald, though I’m not sure.
The argument would go something like, there are assumptions undergirding the form of atheism that arose in France in the 1700s and assumptions undergirding what we think of as secularism and non-religion that are both tied to how we think of what religion is and tied to how we think about other cultures’ religiosity or lack thereof. By extension, our understanding of their religiosity or lack thereof is key to forming the rhetoric behind colonialism. As far as I’ve found, Baron D’Holbach is the first to take up the term atheist in a positive sense and identify himself with it, so it’s fair to begin there if we’re talking about modern atheism. He posits a philosophy that is deeply materialist and divides the world according to natural and supernatural. To do this, you need to have pre-existing ideas of what’s natural and supernatural, which might seem obvious to us, but which are concepts that develop slowly over time. D’Holbach, like many frenchmen of his time and many more afterward, is also deeply anti-clerical, not only because of his (a)theological beliefs, but also because there was a lot to complain about with the Catholic clergy (the priest Jean Meslier is a priest from the century before D’Holbach who writes a deeply anti-clerical atheist manifesto, though he doesn’t identify with the term “atheist” like D’Holbach does). Fast forward to the humanism that arises in France, and you see a worldview taking shape that goes under the name of atheism, separates the natural and the supernatural, and understands man as the center and origin of all religion and religious feeling (as opposed to God). Perhaps more importantly, it’s in direct reaction to the Catholicism and Protestantism of Europe, so it’s in direct relation to those beliefs, whether it chooses to acknowledge this or not. It shares with Christianity its assumptions of what religiosity is and what the absence of religiosity might look like. And when missionaries, merchants, statesmen, and soldiers explore, chronicle, and conquer the far reaches of the earth, they bring with them these European assumptions about natural and supernatural and religion and the secular. These categories don’t exist in many, or perhaps any of the more far-flung cultures they encounter, and yet there is quick talk of the religion and religious life of these places (and armchair anthropology proliferates). Tomoko Masuzawa and Timothy Fitzgerald have done good work on this idea, and Fitzgerald even does a pretty succinct job of making the argument connecting the religion/irreligion or the religion/secular dichotomy to the project of colonialism in this post here on the Immanent Frame:
http://tif.ssrc.org/2008/10/29/religion-is-not-a-standalone-category/
I don’t think I’d say atheism has any essential attributes since that’s not how I understand language, nor would I even be able to say what atheism is definitively because there are too many competing understandings already out there without enough overlap. I could suggest, as many do, what atheism ought to be considered, or what we ought to mean when we use the word atheism, but language has a funny way of squirming out of any box we put it in, so I don’t really make it my business to bother. I’m content to say the term is “overdetermined” and point to some of the many competing usages I’ve found thus far in my research. All of those uses have philosophical assumptions beneath them, and for me, that’s where the action is. I’d have to go case-by-case if we’re to identify a stain, and then the question is basically the one I’m asking in this post: what do we make of the stain if we find it? How serious is it? Should it be a big deal? What are the political consequences of these assumptions? Where do I stand?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, for most of its history, “atheist” has meant something much closer to “heretic” than “materialist.” Socrates was called an atheist, the Romans called the early Christians atheists and vice-versa, and throughout the 20th century, American evangelicals used the term to mean pretty much anyone who wasn’t born-again. The history of the heretic is pretty interesting when we’re talking about how Europe went about colonizing, and it’s still interesting to think about now. By extension, so is the history of the atheist.
So in sum, my understanding of the atheist label is that it can mean a lot of things, but that it usually means something pretty specific in reaction to Western Christianity when people call themselves atheists. It’s also a pretty crucial part of how we understand the secular state and colonialism because it’s the opposite of the category of religion, which has been a hugely important category for all kinds of ventures, colonial, neo-colonial, and otherwise. And finally, it’s pretty important as an insult for the non-religious, however that’s defined, so when Spaniards are slaughtering Native Americans pre-Valladolid and saying they don’t have souls, and when a nutball Norwegian shoots a bunch of kids at a youth camp, it really matters who’s a heathen. I’m skeptical of how easily Anidjar uses the transitive property to equate Religion, Colonialism, and Atheism, but is there more to atheism than how Dawkins presents it, and does it have an interesting history that should make us question how easily he or Daniel Dennett find it to say “let’s go re-educate these Muslims”? You bet.