If we go back to the seventeenth century, we see the debate about human nature and divine law goes a little deeper than just shock and revulsion at the devastation wrought by 30 years of theo-military conflict. Besides Hobbes we have figures like Pufendorf and Grotius trying to work out a unified theory of state power; indeed, it was here that the need to justify the nation-state as an historical entity and all the corresponding political "pattern-making," in the form of natural law theory, originated. More than war, it was the rise of scientific thinking, entailing the ability not merely to reflect (upon) nature's sublime unity-in-diversity, but to manipulate it, to make it an instrument of human agency, which provided the crucial shove in the direction of a new attitude toward social power. Scientific thinking created the idea that man could be the master of his own fate, without reference to divine guidance. Hence the Faust myth, indicative of the extent to which the laboratory was wrapped up in an aura of magical potency.

Human agency is the impossible idea here, either a salve or a cruel illusion to beings seeking to "liberate" themselves from any hierarchical, "slavish" chain of blind obedience. Scientists, and both Marx and Freud considered themselves to be such an exalted type of thinker, look to nature to discover patterns, rather than to the heavens to find them revealed. But that doesn't mean that a natural pattern, once located, is any more fungible, that one is any less constrained to follow the rules derived from such patterns.

What kind of liberalism, then, would English atheism have us observe, as to our political "practices"? Hitchens' own practice seems to consist merely in raising up an indignant hand and uttering a stately "no" to whatever seems most oppressive to his own instinctive intellectual habits -- fundamentalism, totalitarianism, "theotropism." Merely negating one principle, however, does not obviate the need, indeed, the inevitability of another arising to take its place. He's enough of a dialectician to have realized that.

Science has done far more to shape the modern world than religion. Foucault, among others, tried to describe myriad ways in which "reason" has come to exert a behavioral control as thorough as anything pettifogging clericalism ever did. If "liberation" is your goal, one could almost hope to be confronted with the heavy hand of totalitarian, or at least authoritarian oppression. Then at least one knows right off what one has to say no to, where the path of rebellion lies.

Hitchens' career, and especially his recent success as Scourge of Fundie Terror, indicates a felt need to keep re-discovering and then building up the meance of a return to a pre-modern, purely religious social hierarchy. What results, paradoxically, is a remarkably complacent world view. As long as the idea of religion is out there, to counterbalance and "frame" the reality of secular modern culture, we can take comfort in the notion that we are "resisting" it by "acting a negative," by simple declarations of unbelief. It's an attitude one might therefore call "pietistic."

But it has little to do with the underlying intellectual and economic drives of modern life. Modernity, founded on scientific thought, which is absolute (even, yes, "totalitarian") in its demand that analytical thought capture and process nature's embedded data for the purpose of creating ever more powerful human-directed social "patterns," this modernity is too active, activist, busy, aggressive to be bothered with any merely moral reflection on the blessed absence of the Divine. Perhaps this goes some way to explain how it's possible for Hitchens to feel like a rebel even asmenace he espouses a politics which reaches for cultural inspiration back to an attitude of the most intensely passive reaction.

To quote the 20th Century theologian, Gary Coleman:

What you talk'n bout Willis?

In the broadest sense, I'd say I'm talking about the fallacy of Libertarianism, the notion that freedom can be conceived as a void, a vacuum, a blank slate, a negative thing, just getting free of the government, etc. And I was prompted to go into intellectual history by Hitchens' citation of Lilla's citation of 17th Century philosophy. Speaking of the devil, here, the tabula rasa error recalls to mind none other than Mr. Locke himself. Seems to be a particularly English notion.

In your post you revisited Hitchens' disastrous Iraq fulminations. I think one could argue that the somewhat abstract philosophical issues I've dealt with here are intimately related to the political problems of empire today. The Libertarian Fallacy consists in imagining that all one need do is oppose the encroachments of state power on the individual, or of the axiological claims of religion on the individual's moral autonomy. In its own negative, negating, vacuuos way, the Libertarian Fallacy is itself a type of utopianism. We struck down the tyrant, ergo progress must be the result.

It's a naive and two-dimensional program. In Iraq -- and here I take the neocons at their word; I assume they are quite sincere -- we had Rumsfeld (with Hitchens explicitly backing him up) throwing up his hands at the spectacle of looting. "That's what people do with their freedom. Far be it from us to intervene." Naomi Klein has written some fascinating articles about how Bremer tried to create a free-market, libertarian utopia in the wake of evil Baathist statism, the flat tax and all that. For his part, in the face of all evidence to the contrary concerning the misery of Iraqis under occupation, Hitchens keeps returning to the moment of invasion to justify the original decision that consisted of nothing but 1) smash Saddam; 2) let the chips fall. This is the blinkered thinking of those who refuse to acknowledge that tyrrany, the state endowed with total power, bad as it is, might turn out to be no worse than anarchy, the complete absence of state power. For them, the reduction of state power becomes a kind of eschatological fantasy, ie, the Apocalypse, the Second Coming, Heaven on Earth.

Theirs is a culturally and intellectually regressive way to think. If you're going to promote the agenda of regime change outside the West, you have to have a clear notion of what distinguishes a modern society from a pre-modern society. Indeed, the libertarian utopia has more in common with theocracy than with democratic secular modernity, in as much as the former ground themselves in a kind of fantasy of state-lessness. What inevitably results is just a transfer of power from the political nation-state to a kind of substitute, ersatz state: the church [mosque], the corporation. Iraq has been transformed by the neocon project into an amalgam of these two ersatz-states: the mullahs have gained enormously in prestige and social influence; the private security and energy corporations (that brilliant Scahill book on Blackwater again) are raking in huge profits doing our nation's military work, while our soldiers are reduced to martyr marionettes.

Underlying the Libertarian Fallacy is a simple problem of psychological immaturity. The Libertarian is convinced that he'd be able to create a perfect life for himself if the nasty, importunate, meddling, inefficient old daddy-nanny state would just "just get off my back." It's an idiotic refusal to acknowledge that we are to some extent dependent on each other, and masks a deeper, more sinister determination to eliminate the ethical responsibilities of community life in favor of those social institutions governed by unfettered greed.

Simply put, smirkily denouncing the idea of "supernatural authority" is mere evasion, an attempt to avoid the problem of authority in general. For anyone invested with any kind of authority whatsoever will come to possess "supernatural" power one way or another. But more than any moral failing of the Libertarian Fallacy, the intellectual weakness of Hitchens' "who-me?" attitude is found in his fall-back reliance on the notion of "gradual progress." When we think of the confrontation between Western Culture and all those primitives out there, we implicitly reference Ernest Gellner's conclusions about the anthropological celebration of "diversity": well, fine, diversity's all well and good, but let's not forget that our culture is and will remain infinitely more powerful than any pre-modern culture. So ask yourself: is the atomic bomb a gradual step toward technological progress; are calculus and artificial language and the computer which is based on them merely a modest advance on the past; when judged against the 10,000 year history of our species is electricity or medicine just a tepid little gain in our slow, steady march toward some faint semblance of progress?

No, of course not. Modernity, science and technical progress are absolute bursts forward, total and totalizing, indeed, totalitarian in the most immediate sense of the term, precisely because they offer more than just a "supernatural" fantasy of power -- they deliver the reality of power. What marks the strangely passive "libertarian" politics of Hitchens as truly neocon is his inability or unwillingness to see the connection between the desire to wield such power (a power which no god and no "belief system" based on the idea of god will ever possess) and the ethical demand to wield such power responsibly, so as to be accountable before history and the whole human race, all six plus billion of us. God may very well be dead, in other words, but Cheney the Almighty is still very much with us, and the real challenge is to make Him begin to behave like something resembling a human being.

C'mon Mark, The Fray is a place for people to say things like, "all liberals are idiots", or call each other facists, or communists, or anti-semites. It's nice that you think all this stuff through, but maybe you should write a book or something.

PS. I'm only teasing.

Well Hitchens certainly didn't think so; I seem to recall him nominating himself for top 10 intellectuals of the century or some such nonsense.

First off, Mark, I just want you to know that I stuck around after work to read all this, which is as sincere a compliment as I am wont to offer. Thanks for taking the time to answer my rather flip query.

Second, as you say, "Simply put, smirkily denouncing the idea of "supernatural authority" is mere evasion, an attempt to avoid the problem of authority in general."

Or, as the Grateful Dead say in a song called, The Wheel:

If the thunder don't get then the lighting will.

I'm not much of a Catholic. I figure they got me before I was old enough to really consent, so now they're going to have to kick me out even if I don't seem to fit in all that well. But when it comes to the distinction between earthly authority, say of the Trotskyite/Stalinist/BushCo kind, versus that of the Jesus/Yahweh/Allah types, I'll suffer under the latter far more serenely. At least with the Jesus types, the throne wasn't gold or marble. It was rough wood, soaked in blood. That's a king I can look up to without feeling like a slave.

You're awesome doodahman!

indeed he is.

Mark,

You are on to something in your critique of Hitchens, though suggesting science is the handmaiden of totalitarians (proxy religion that it is) ignores a larger philosophical problem -- and one I am taken by -- language. The emotioinal qualia of the mind has itself an escape hatch, call it freedom, in which the force of patternings (science / reason) do not hold us. The sense of the divine, (the truth of the divine?) will not come under the sway of prophets like HItchens because their linguistic bias excludes a more ancient awareness and understanding of the world. Religions' misuse of this understanding notwithstanding. The knowledge of history -- that frogs comes from toads -- does not enter into the present as we now 'think', where we are moved. "Take care of your own gardens," Voltaire concludes, in the end skeptical of his own skepticism.

Sadly, Mark commits a pretty common fallacy himself when he equates "Libertarianism" to anarchy. Minimal government to protect individual rights is a far, far cry from free-for-all looting, riots in the streets, and sectarian death squads. It might very well take a large government police presence to protect individual rights sufficiently, and clearly does in Iraq in particular. No real libertarian is arguing that Iraq would be better off with no government, as Mark implies.

Well, I read your post above with interest as well as your reply to mine. I think you're right to be skeptical of Hitchens' attempt to equate religion with totalitarianism; conversely I think we can dismiss any too casual assumption that increasing atheism will lead to more democracy. Simply doing away with an antiquated metaphysics in no way removes the appeal of a more modern, more efficient metaphysics, precisely because scientific concepts are based on a superior ability to explain and manipulate natural forces. The real reason we fear anarchy is because, as Hobbes rightly maintained, we are not all equal in strength or resources at our command. With the increasing complexity and difficulty of scientific concepts (how many of us can follow a mathematical argument past a basic calculus level?), scientific, rational truth becomes as inherently hieratic and "priestly," as much a possession of a chosen few, as any theology. Those who possess the power of scientific knowledge (and look what's happened to our economy, dominated by Yale math whizzes running hedge funds) will control the fates of millions. In these circumstances, no wonder people look to an affect-based "spiritual" institution to give them back some sense of control or at least participation, community support, some basic psychological comfort. God, I think we can argue, is much more democratic than NO-God, precisely because of the dominance of scientific thinking and its power over nature in the modern world.

As for the notion that Libertarianism is just "minimal govt" to "protect our rights", I just think that's a misnomer. What, for instance, do we mean by rights? Property, basic services (education, health, etc), freedom from any threat, when every crackpot in the Muslim world is defined as a threat? You're not going to get that from minimal government. What libertarians categorically refuse to acknowledge is how everything that goes on in the world economy is ultimately reliant on government to guarantee its survival; the fact that the "free" financial markets all came running to the Fed to save them from their own heedless self-indulgence last week has been pointed out by many, and that's just the first in an infinitely long list of such occurrences. There simply is no blank slate in modern society, no vacuum, no pristine social void where entrepreneurs create wealth all by themselves and their marketing pros and a few dispassionate investors, without any govt help - not there, not now, not anywhere at anytime. The market and the state are one, and each relies equally on the other at every step of the process.

So the real problem, as numerous people have pointed out in response to Hitchens' column, is authority in general -- not how to banish all mystical authority, but to recognize that all authority is deemed endowed with somewhat mystical powers, to acknowledge that as a necessary evil and to bring it under some ethical control, to make such forces accountable. As for Hitchens, one can only remark that it is surpassing strange of him to come to reside in and slavishly laud Great Holy America, the one true Sword of the West; as if he's not savvy enough to notice that it's precisely a certain millenialist, even prophetic strain in American Culture that prompts us to undertake the "Anti-IslamoFascist" crusades which he would so gladly brand with his own ideologico-publishing ventures. As if here were himself a kind of high priest of historical irony.

Mark, it's ok to believe in whatever one does as long as one remains peaceful and unintrusive in the lives of others. Unfortunatelly it's not the case with every single one of the main modern religions (that's those which managed to suppress competing religions and thus survived the "test of time"). Every religion starts out proclaming it's right to exist and trying to survive. Once in the position of power however, every (yes, every) mainstream religion violently suppressed other religions competing for the same congregation. The totalitarian non-belivers (e.g. Communists) do exactly the same: eliminate any competing ideology and religion. In this respect it's right to say that religious and totalitarian societies do have a lot in common. And that's what Mr. HItchens does seem to assert and he has history to support his assertion. What do you have to support yours?

Mark and Others,

Hitchens, and in part this discussion, is acadmeic in nature, historical in approach. Is it possible that this type of language does not adequately address the sitaution we are in? In other words, if the politics and culture of the west compromise / damage / human sociality, our lucidity will not help us to reconstruct the emotional storylines which once connected us as tribe / religious group / society, etc. If you consider a movie like The Queen, this seems to me its point: that human social needs have become so great because they are eroded by the statism of late capitalism. Something like the death of Diana sparks what becomes a tide of emotive connection. Debating whether this happens better or worse under atheism or religiosity seems to skirt the point: the need is there and is not something that we can explain or adjust or tinker with through academic journalism or theory.

I admrie -- in some respects -- the work of Patricia Churchill on consciousness: if we see human consciousness as part of an illumined energy in nature -- consciousness as intrinsic -- this might give us the peg / idea to hang a brighter hat on, one that can sustain not only the need for social connection, but also encompass the awe and sacredness we feel in the light of the natural world . . .

Does the increasing difficulty of scientific concepts really matter? OK, there are a couple of issues, like global warming, where the science matters. But most issues simply aren't about science, which historically has done a lousy job of delivering a workable metaphysics (you can get one, sure, but only by screwing up the science part).

And as we've seen, those Yalie math whizzes running the hedge funds aren't in control of much of anything. Not even their own fates.

I do not think, even at a second reading, I have your point. What, for example does this sentence mean?

"But that doesn't mean that a natural pattern, once located, is any more fungible, that one is any less constrained to follow the rules derived from such patterns."

At any rate, the confusion could be caused by reading Foucault and believing he was anything more than the dunderhead he was. Not only his writings (a generous term for the words he used) but his personal life demonstrated with great clarity that he lacked connection with reality. His numerous ramblings on "power relations", for example, told us, in an endless cascade of words, what everyone else has known from age four.

But l digress. I was actually interested in understanding what you meant by the penultimate sentence in your post as my limited abilities do not grasp it.

Cheers