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The Anti-Utopian

by Sean McManus
March/April 2008

We run offshore penal colonies where people are tortured. It’s out of Kafka. And our entertainment industry rivals anything the Romans did in the arena in the last days of the republic.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Chris Hedges is a former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times who has written extensively on religion and war. His new book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, is a critique of new atheism, which he considers as dangerous as the religious fundamentalism it seeks to combat. Hedges lives in Princeton, N.J., where he is an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.

You write about the “mystery.” Where does your faith lie?
For me the most authentically religious writer of the 20th century was Samuel Beckett. He gets the moral neutrality and the absurdity of existence. He understands the fictive narratives we tell about ourselves, personally and collectively. And he obliterates this idea of a linear or teleological advance. There’s a wonderful moment in Waiting for Godot when Estragon and Vladimir hear a threatening noise and they walk to the other side of the stage holding hands. I find this notion of human solidarity in the face of the absurd to be a deeply religious concept.

Is this an argument for some kind of church?
No. Institutions, as Paul Tillich correctly pointed out, are all inherently demonic. And those that claim to be moral are usually the most demonic. I grew up in the church and so every once in a while I go back. But the sermons drive me crazy and the creeds that everybody’s muttering, I don’t believe. And there’s a kind of sanctimoniousness among beliefs, even in the liberal church, that they’re sort of all “honorary sinners,” to steal a line from Krister Stendahl, one of my professors at Harvard Divinity School.

But I find the religious impulse real. Religious writers were our first ethicists. They sought to preserve and explain, in a flawed and often obtuse way, a reality—a reality of the infinite, and of these non-rational forces in our life: love, beauty, grief, death, that science will never explain. Artists do the same thing. Religion at its best seeks, like art, to preserve and to honor that. Religious institutions are corrupt, like all human institutions, and those in power have abused their authority, but that doesn’t invalidate them. Like art, they seek to give a completeness to human life. That’s something new atheists don’t get.

The number of people who identify as atheist seems to be going up. Do you see that as a bad sign?
It depends on what kind of atheists they are. Do they believe in a kind of moral chauvinism that thinks it has the right to silence or eradicate people they deem irrational? I have nothing against atheists in general. What terrifies me are these people who believe in collective moral progress, this idea that whether through religion or science, the human species is moving forward morally in the same way it’s moving forward technologically. That is a very dangerous belief. People who believe in some kind of a movement, religious or the belief in a rational human being, or those who believe in the cult of science that’s been peddled by new atheists, create different moral planes for different human beings. The consequence is that some are more worthy of life than others.

So anyone who thinks the human race is progressing morally is fooling him or herself?
Well I think human history bears it out. The worst genocides in human history were committed by idealists who wanted to purify and cleanse the world, to make it better. When you don’t understand your own capacity for evil, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, that it’s not just about fighting falsehood in others but in ourselves, that every act is undertaken with a heavy dose of self-delusion, then you’re in trouble. Both new atheists and Christian fundamentalists lack capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. When you wed that to the technical power of the U.S., it’s frightening.

So we’re doomed?
I didn’t say doomed, but the reality of human existence is that there is no salvation.

Isn’t that nihilism?
No. The greatest act of faith is to perceive the world for what it is and yet act in a way that honors the sacredness of life itself. I had a professor at Colgate who said that for every intellectual, faith is an embarrassment. He meant that you could fight for something all your life and care passionately about it, like environmentalists have done, and then realize that it’s still getting worse and will continue to get worse. But that doesn’t invalidate the struggle. True spirituality, as Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, is about resistance. When you stop resisting, you die.

Don’t you think Martin Luther King thought we had the capacity to improve morally?
King, who knew Reinhold Niebuhr very well, understood that when one evil is vanquished there’s always another to take its place. King had a deep sense of human imperfection and his own imperfections, which prevented him from exalting himself. You see it at the end of King’s life when he spoke against the Vietnam War. He said that evil and human sin never go away. Those of us who care about battling against destructive forces are never going to wake up and find that these endemic or intractable problems of human existence don’t exist. King understood that.

Do you offer any guidelines for what religion can be at its best?
Whatever it is should empower the disempowered. And it should seek justice. A faith that does not seek justice becomes deeply self-centered. The bottom line is it’s not about us. It’s about them.

Where do you see yourself in the political matrix?
I look at myself as a social conservative. I come out of Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt. I don’t believe in massive social engineering. I’m fiercely anti-utopian. The problem is that in our society, god is the market. We let human beings become commodities, along with the physical environment. When that happens, nothing is sacred. It’s all about profit. Everything is a salable object. And this is embraced all across the political spectrum. I know I’m perceived as left. But I’ve covered wars in Central America, and I’ve dealt with Marxism. I’m a fierce opponent of violent, utopian movements.

I’m curious about the political connection to the larger philosophical discussion.
People are thrust into the arms of the Religious Right when they feel disenfranchised. There’s been a Weimarization of the American worker. The reality-based world didn’t work, so they ran into the arms of charlatans and demagogues who promised them magic, miracles, and wealth. Until we create structures to reincorporate millions of Americans back into society, we will not blunt this movement. To label religion as evil is to ignore the underlying causes, which are really the product of globalization.

Do you view the secularism of Europe as a model for a political structure? Europe is a far healthier society than the U.S., which is pretty sick. The Europeans have not destroyed community the way we have; they have a managed capitalism that doesn’t throw its mentally ill out on heating grates and leave millions without health insurance. We have become a rapaciously cruel oligarchy. Europe is not immune from those forces of corporatization but, like Canada, it struggles to retain a state where there is an ethic of responsibility. We’ve lost that and we’re going to pay for it. The top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. You can’t retain democracy in an oligarchic state. That’s something Plutarch and Thuycides understood. It’s not a novel insight.

What do you perceive as the future of this movement? Your book is one of a growing pantheon of books on both sides of this issue. I’ve read all the books. There was a book by a Jesuit theologian who writes, “I believe in a personal god.” I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic being called God. And I find that sort of response plays into the hands of the new atheists, because it’s empirically ridiculous. I hear people talk about how their lives are blessed by God. I was in Sarajevo during the war when 2,000 children were killed in that city. Don’t tell me that my life, in the eyes of God, is somehow worth more. That’s the height of arrogance. And that kind of thinking is only sustainable for those who live in zones of privilege. For most of the world, life is a Hobbsian nightmare.

Your central premise seems to be more anti-utopian than anti-atheist. Did you consider the title, I Don’t Believe in Utopians? I didn’t think most people would be quick to associate new atheists with utopians.

What are your next projects? I’m going to write a book on the corporate state. We live in one. Our government’s been turned over to corporations. And however flawed government is, it’s the only institution citizens have to protect their interests. When it’s taken from them, you have what we have now, a coup d’etat in slow motion. We run offshore penal colonies where people are tortured. It’s out of Kafka. And our entertainment industry rivals anything the Romans did in the arena in the last days of the republic.

Who are you supporting for president? Ralph Nader We’re friends.