A Conversation With Chris Hedges
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Chris Hedges. HDS photo/Jonathan |
In his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists (Free Press), Chris Hedges, MDiv '83, critiques the "new atheists" and argues that their belief system is as polarizing as that of the religious right. Jonathan Beasley recently spoke with Hedges about his time at HDS and his new book.
Before I ask about the book, I wanted to talk briefly about your experience here at HDS. Do you ever get back to campus?
Well, I came back and did a Nieman Fellowship on Francis Avenue, so I was back on Francis for 1998-99, but I spent a year studying classics. I didn't take any HDS courses.
I had an antagonistic relationship with Harvard
Divinity School. I lived
in the ghetto; I commuted here from Roxbury. I ran a church, and I think
I mellowed over time. You know, I really came out of the social gospel and
Reinhold Niebuhr, and I think
it was at a time when a lot of the focus of
the School was inward, and I think disconnected in many ways. I guess you
mellow with age. I grew up in the church. My father was a minister; my
mother graduated from seminary, although she was a professor. I would say a
lot of the MDiv students had not grown up in the church, or they had a very
idealistic vision of what the church is. I mean, churches can be very cruel
institutions to ministers. I watched it for over 40 years with my dad.
I read that he was a strong advocate for civil rights . . .
Yeah. Well, anybody who took positions in the early 1960s, whether it was with a civil rights movement or the antiwar movement or especially his stance within the gay rights movement, made him a very lonely figure within the institution. I had some amazing professors here, first and foremost being Krister Stendahl. Krister was my adviser; I took every course he taught. Dieter Georgi . . .
Professor James Adams . . .
James Luther Adams. Although, James Luther Adams's opinion of Harvard pretty much paralleled my own. Adams was a real rebel.
Is that how you would characterize yourself when you were a student at HDS?
Well, I was an angry young man, I suppose.
Is there anything you might have done differently? Even perhaps taking a class you didn't take that you wish you would have?
Well, my classes were hurt because I was running a church. I was really busy. I was preaching every Sunday. I did seven funerals. I ran a youth group. I struggled to keep my grade point average up. As a matter of fact, I had gotten a full scholarship, and the Divinity School was not particularly pleased that I was investing so much energy into running a church. Although, I think in retrospect, it was the right thing to do. But it certainly made it difficult for me to sustain a very high grade point average.
How did you view your classmates?
Well, a lot of them had gone to divinity school to find themselves. That's not why I went to divinity school.
Why did you go?
Because I came out of an activist household. Issues of justice were paramount in terms of what it is we were called to do as Christians. This notion of a spirituality being "how is it with me," was sort of an anathema. And I think there was a heavy residue of that at Harvard, as there probably was at most divinity schools when I was in seminary.
Are you glad you went to HDS?
Oh yeah. Yeah I am.
Moving to your new book: when asked in a February 2007 interview with Amy Goodman why you wrote your previous book, American Fascists, you responded with one word: anger. Why did you write I don't Believe in Atheists?
Anger.
Was it?
Yeah. I was appalled. I didn't really focus on these so called "new atheists" until I had to debate them. And so I was stunned at their bigotry, their intolerance, their chauvinism. Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith calls for us to consider a nuclear first-strike on the Arab world. I almost fell out of my chair reading that. He's an advocate of torture. They believe in preemptive war. Their political agenda converges completely with the radical Christian right—the very people they set themselves up against. They have all the sins of Christian fundamentalists: a binary world view of "us" and "them"; placing people, i.e., themselves, on a higher moral plane above others; a belief that violence can be used as a kind of cleansing agent to push us forward toward a better world; this delusion that collective moral progress is possible; that human history is a linear march toward a better world. They're utopians, just like the radical Christian right. And of course I had to prepare for the debates, so I had to read not only their books, but the other books by the so-called "new atheists": Dawkins, Dennett, E. O. Wilson, and I was just stunned.
I mean, I don't have anything against atheists, I think most Christians would consider me an atheist, but this brand, this use of a secular religion to foster a kind of self-exultation within American society is just as pernicious, certainly not as powerful politically, but as pernicious as the self-exultation championed by the radical Christian right, and that's not a response. Of course what I fear is that, in a moment of fear, after another catastrophic terrorist attack, for instance, these two strands come together to call for horrific bloodletting against Muslims—if it's determined that some part of the Muslim world is responsible for this attack.
I think one of the things that the new atheists do which the radical Christian right also does is celebrate intellectual, cultural, and historical illiteracy. They know nothing about the outside world, and certainly nothing about the Middle East, and yet they make these grand pronouncements based on bigoted, racist stereotypes. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I spent seven years there, and I'm an Arabic speaker. It's not an abstraction to me. These are countries I know well and have spent much of my life in.
Do you take particular issue with the science of new atheists, or is the broader issue their belief system?
Well, the broader issue is their belief system, because it's a form of self-delusion. It's an act of faith. It believes that there is such a thing as a rational human being, which is an absurdity. You would think Freud, for one, would have obliterated that idea that we have a definable, constant self. New atheists externalize evil in the same way the Christian right does. Evil is something outside of us. Evil is essentially embodied in their warped portrait of what they call religion, and once we eradicate religion, we can remove this impediment toward collective moral progress. We can make a huge step forward as a human species. There's nothing in human nature, in human history that suggests that human beings are redeemable, finally, or that we are moving anywhere. We don't advance [morally] the way we advance scientifically or technologically. Science and technology has at once empowered forces to nurture, preserve, and protect life, but it has, in equal measure, empowered forces to destroy life—whether that's through industrial killing or the physical destruction of the ecosystem on which we all depend. So I found in both of these belief systems not only a self-exultation, which was frightening, not only a belief that violence should be used on the part of the American imperium to better the world, but a naïve, deeply ignorant embrace of what I would have to call the cult of science.
There's nothing in Darwin that suggests we are advancing morally as a species. In fact, Darwin writes correctly that we are all captive to our animal natures. And these people have perverted Darwin. They have tried to use evolutionary biology as an analogy. I suppose at times it may work, but the art of politics, of art, of human relations has to take into account these irrational forces. The brilliance of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, which virtually predicated the suicidal and fascist outbreak and violence in the Second World War, came because Freud understood the irrational. These people have, in essence, taken what is a bourgeois set of values for a tiny minority of the planet and posited these as universal values which must be rammed down the throats of everybody who doesn't accept them. I think that most ideological systems, like most theological or philosophical systems, are in the service of power, and this is no exception, and that of course characterizes both what the new atheists are doing and what the Christian right is doing. They are creating belief systems that are in the service of the worst aspects of American power.
Do new atheists and the Christian right differ in their desire for political power?
The new atheists are not an organized group. They don't have a marginal group. They don't have systems of indoctrination the way the Christian right does in terms of so-called Christian schools, radio, television. But, I don't want them to stake out the position of the secular left in this country. Because when you read what these people write and say about Muslims—it could come from the most rabid sermon by Pat Robertson or any of the other charlatans—that's not a response. In both cases, it's a plea for empathy, for understanding, for tolerance, for the recognition that there are other ways of being. For self-reflection and self-criticism. The notion that we posses the highest good, that our way of life is something that should be emulated. That is a very frightening belief system, no matter what form it comes in. Having spent 20 years of my life outside the United States and most of those years in the developing world, I'm acutely aware of the evil that is done in our name. Whether that is done in Angola, whether that's in Nicaragua, whether that's in Gaza, or Iraq, I've watched it.
I watched the KFPA debate between you and Christopher Hitchens. One of the things you said was,"the problem is not religion. The problem is the capacity we all have for evil."
Right. That is the issue. Both of these groups externalize evil. Evil is something outside of us, which must be eradicated. For the Christian right, these are the secular forces manipulated by Satan; for the new atheists, these are the irrational religious hoards. And when you think evil is outside of you, then you become blind to your own capacity for evil. There is no check on your own capacity for evil. What we are doing currently in Iraq is illegal. We live in a country that runs offshore penal colonies where we torture. And these are activities that new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris defend, and, in that sense, it's a childish view, not only of themselves, but of the world.
Look, the problem is not religion. I'm not blind to the sins of institutional religion. I grew up in the church. I know how dysfunctional and cruel the Christian church can be. But that doesn't invalidate for me the religious impulse. The problem is that neither of these belief systems grapple with our capacity for evil. I think one thing you learn as a war correspondent is that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin. Under the right conditions, very few of us are immune from the contagion of violence and war.
You've said that you're religious. Are you spiritual?
Spirituality. That's a word that usually makes me nauseous. Am I spiritual? No. For me, the problem with the notion of spirituality, and this was true when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, is that it begins with the question "How is it with me?" Well, that's a form of narcissism. Buber had it right. It's not about me; it's about you; it's about the other. That spirituality of resistance, which Martin Luther King understood or Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood—that, for me, is authentic spirituality. So no, I don't like the word spiritual. I'm better at explaining what I'm not than what I am.
I think that, for me, Samuel Beckett was the most authentically religious writer of the twentieth century, because he understood the absurdity of human existence. He understood the fact that we weren't going anywhere. He understood the strangeness of it all. He understood the fragmentation of the self. That's why all of his characters were stripped down. Not only were they impoverished and on the margins of society, but often [they were] physically broken. And yet Beckett, unlike Joyce, got it, that in the end all we have is each other. So that when Vladimir and Estragon hear a noise in Waiting for Godot that frightens them, they would walk to the other side of the stage holding hands. I find that religious sense to be real and important.
Religion, like art, is an attempt to preserve or honor or explain those transcendent forces in human life, those nonrational forces—whether that's love, beauty, grief, mortality, alienation—and science can't do that. You don't reach wisdom until you have a deep understanding of the intuitive, and that means understanding the irrational. Artists have it; great religious thinkers have it. I pick up Ecclesiastes, and there's no question that's one of the greatest pieces of wisdom literature ever written.
You'd made the comment that Beckett would have written Ecclesiastes.
I think Beckett would have written Ecclesiastes. I think they were very much in sync. That's what makes Beckett such an important writer, and not just his plays, but his prose. His trilogy is brilliant.
A word you mention quite a bit in the book is utopia: utopian visions, utopian ideologies . . .
Well, what I'm really doing is fighting utopianism. Whether it comes in the form of new atheism or the Christian right. The notion that we're moving toward some kind of glorious sunlit future. First of all, the indicators around us point quite clearly to the fact that what we're moving toward is not going to be very pleasant. So that when you create a utopian belief system, you think that Jesus is going to save you, or science is going to save you. Then you create an ethical system that is irrelevant. An ethical system that's not grounded in reality is impotent and futile and really ends up degenerating into a kind of a criminality, as we see in Iraq. Because when the world doesn't advance, you, as the person who knows the absolute truth, have to employ more force to get us there. So this is really a battle against two utopian belief systems.
The book is a plea for realism. Having spent so many years of my life in societies where the structures were destroyed by war, one sees that dark side of human nature—which can be hidden from view in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts. I think it's better to have a grounding in what human beings are capable of—the good and the bad—and the bad can be pretty bad. [The book] is not meant to be pessimistic as much as it's meant to grapple with a kind of realism, both in terms of the world that we live in, and with human nature itself, and I think that in some ways you don't fully understand human nature until that infrastructure is stripped away.
So what do you consider your role to be between both sides? Are you a referee of sorts?
I'm not a referee; I am battling both. I'm not trying to reach out to these guys. I look at the radical Christian right in this country as the most dangerous mass movement in American history. And it is a mass movement. One that is seeking political power. One that has fused the iconography and language of American Christianity with American nationalism. I watched that during the war in the former Yugoslavia. And that stuff's very scary. I'm trying to ring the alarm bells. That in the event of an economic meltdown, or a period of fear triggered by terrorist attacks on American soil, there will be a backlash, but there will be a right-wing backlash. And one that will empower forces that really are bent on the destruction of our open society.
You said earlier that some Christians would consider you atheist . . .
Every time I go to church it drives me crazy. I came back from Kosovo to do a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in the fall of 1998. I grew up in the church, so unfortunately, it has a pull on me like a magnet. So I went to some church here in Cambridge, and I had to get up and leave in the middle of the sermon, it was right up there with puppies and balloons. It was just so disconnected. Unfortunately, church leaders, unlike Paul Tillich, don't take time seriously. The American state has been robbed from us. I mean, we live in a corporate state. We are undergoing a coup d'état in slow motion. I don't know where the religious figures are. Where is the next William Sloan Coffin? After he died, I don't see him out there.
Do you consider yourself a religious figure?
No. I don't consider myself a religious figure. Those kinds of definitions really sort of frighten me. Those kinds of labels. What am I? I don't think that what I am fits neatly with a label. Certainly not one I'm comfortable with.
