Richard Dawkins, George Orwell and the Naivety of the New Atheism
George Orwell had a much clearer view of what a post-Christian politics would look like than the New Atheists
Last week there has been a small twitter storm over comments made by Richard Dawkins in which he restated his self-identification as a “cultural Christian”. As others have pointed out, this is nothing particularly new, Dawkins has often reiterated his affection for the pillars of English culture within which he grew up; the words of the King James Bible, Christmas Carols, small parish churches and grand city cathedrals. What these latest comments serve to underline is the extent to which his position towards this “cultural heritage” is both unserious and untenable. He did not miss an opportunity in his interview with Rachel Johnson to emphasize that he did not believe a word of the Bible, at the same time he probed at his host to see if she would admit belief in such ludicrous things as the Virgin Birth or the bodily resurrection of Christ. While affirming the value of the products of English Christianity he could not restrain himself from trying to undermine the faith of someone who takes the source of those fruits more seriously than he does. The ludicrousness of his position was best displayed when he said that he was glad that the numbers of Christian believers was declining but hopes that local parish churches and beautiful cathedrals could be preserved. One feels the urge to press Professor Dawkins and ask; who is going to do this preserving? Already countless church buildings are under threat across Britain, how much taxpayer funding is the good professor suggesting we dedicate to making up the shortfall from the lack of actual contributing Christians.
Beyond this bit of naivety about church buildings, there is a deeper problem with the post-Christian no-man’s-land in which Richard Dawkins and so many others find themselves. The very presuppositions upon which their secular humanism rests are Christian and without Christian belief they are vulnerable to attack from ideologies which have greater spiritual certainty. A keen observer of this reality in the twentieth century was George Orwell. This might come as something of a surprise considering his status as something of a secular saint. Nevertheless, it is my view that Orwell’s concern about totalitarianism for which he is so well known, has at its heart an anxiety about the loss of religion and, in particular, a specific notion of the soul which is present in English Protestant Christianity. Beyond this I also view the comparison as felicitous precisely because he has so much in common with Dawkins and his late ally Christopher Hitchens. Orwell, like the horsemen of New Atheism, was educated in an England still defined by the public morality of the Anglican Church, like them he rejected religion as psychologically and scientifically absurd. Hitchens, perhaps more than Dawkins, took up the mantle of Orwell’s left wing anti-totalitarianism, often using the image of Big Brother to lampoon the idea of an omniscient god. He was also often pointed to as a successor to Orwell, with his wit, his skill as a polemicist and his excoriating moralism. Yet, as obvious as the untenability of Christianity seemed to Orwell, he did not share the same faith in Reason unshackled that defined the New Atheists. George maintained a deep dread that the retreat of Christianity in Britain would only herald the destruction of his most fundamental concerns: freedom of conscience, individual autonomy and objective truth.
Orwell’s anxiety about the vulnerability of the liberal values he identified with was born out of a recognition that they are a product of “the Protestant centuries”.[1] Crucially they are dependent on belief in “personal immortality”, a belief which Orwell openly denies having. As this belief recedes the societies that have built their institutions upon liberal values will be dismantled by totalitarian ideologies that have a fundamentally different ethical and metaphysical frame:
"Western civilisation, unlike some oriental civilisations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality…The western conception of good and evil is very difficult to separate from it. There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man's feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated.”[2]
For Orwell it is the belief that the individual persists beyond death combined with the Protestant insistence on freedom of conscience that made the liberal tradition possible. He even credits it with facilitating a large part of modern European literature; “The novel is practically a Protestant art form; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual”. As per Shakespeare’s maxim, “To thine own self be true”. The link between Protestantism and this particular view of “the free mind” is illustrated perfectly in John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a foundational text of the English liberal tradition. In it, Milton articulates the necessity of knowledge to individual moral judgement. Above all Milton enshrines the centrality of choice: “For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said without exception, ‘Rise, Peter, kill and eat’; leaving the choice to each man's discretion."[3] Freedom of the press is essential because it is the right of each man to decide for himself both what to consume and what to make of it. Furthermore, it is not merely his right but his responsibility to seek the truth and speak his mind with a clear conscience.
Milton was concerned that if you deny a man knowledge and the ability to choose for himself, then his soul, his virtue, will atrophy.[4] Orwell is concerned about the reverse situation. The amputation of the soul dissolves the individual by denying his right and responsibility to know for himself and to choose and to speak. This is at the core of Orwell’s consistent anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, and his anti-Fascism. All deny, in his view, the centrality of the individual’s conscience by alienating it to authority: the Party, the Church, the State. The Protestant tradition, by placing the final moral authority in the hands of each person, did not just enshrine a personal freedom but a system of knowledge which allowed for the victory of the righteous dissenter: “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”[5]
As totalitarian ideologies like communism and fascism do away with belief in the autonomous individual without regret or remorse they dissolve the very notion of truth beyond power. Hence any epistemological ground upon which to oppose them quickly slips into the quicksand of ideology. This was most brutally displayed, of course, in Orwell’s own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in which any hope our protagonist has of resisting the Party turns out to be a mirage created by the Party to entrap him. In the final confrontation, Winston Smith is tortured until he confesses his guilt and admits that 2+2=5. It was the view of Richard Rees, one of Orwell’s closest friends, that the book reveals his “true and permanent preoccupation”, that is, “the fundamental problem of religion”.[6] In “Notes on the Way” he describes the problem like this:
Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period- twenty years, perhaps- during which he did not notice.[7]
Orwell’s dystopia is born out of his fear of what a soulless world would produce. One might say that Richard Dawkins still hasn’t noticed that the consequences he rails against are the product of an amputation which he encourages. The centrality of the individual’s responsibility to state the truth as he sees it has been replaced by his responsibility to be as harmless as possible towards his fellow citizens and, of course, the state. Our uncertainty about the possibility of truth beyond the jostling claims to power of balkanized minority groups is undermining the very rights which everyone claims to be grasping for. Increasingly what matters is not your individual conscience but your membership of a group or your utility to the state. This is true not just of the political extremes but of so-called “moderates” as well. Just last week the very sensible and grown-up Matthew Parris unapologetically proclaimed that the old should be encouraged to commit suicide in aid of economic growth.[8] In the face of this nihilistic abyss, it is no wonder that Islam is becoming an increasingly potent creed in western politics. It has none of the equivocation or contradiction inherent in so much of contemporary liberal morality and all of the confidence which comes with spiritual certainty. Meanwhile secular liberals like Dawkins have been sawing at the branch they are sitting on:
“And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire...so it appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to turn septic."[9]
[1] George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus, “Prevention of Literature”, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Secker & Warburg, 1968. vol. IV, p. 60.
[2] “As I Please”, CEJL, vol. III, p. 103
[3] John Milton, Areopagitica. Cambridge University Press, 1918. P. 17-8.
[4] Areopagitica, p. 19-20.
[5] “The Prevention of Literature”, CEJL, vol. IV, p. 62.
[6] Malcolm Muggeridge, 'A Knight of the Woeful Countenance', The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross, p. 167
[7] “Notes on the Way”, CEJL, vol. II, p. 15.
[8] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-cant-afford-a-taboo-on-assisted-dying-n6p8bfg9k
[9] “Notes on the Way”, CEJL, vol. II, p. 15-16.