Enlightenment Optimism

Enlightenment

The strategy of the New Atheists has been to downplay the accusation that atheism has led to secular tyrannies (Marxism and Nazism), and stress the tradition of atheist secular humanism.[1] When Christopher Hitchens, for example, in his God is not Great: the Case against Religion (2007) calls in his final chapter for the 'need for a new enlightenment' he appeals to the tradition of Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot and d'Holbach in France, and Hume, Paine, Bradlaugh, and Russell in Britain and America. Indeed, the mainline atheistic wing of the French Enlightenment (and the British and secular humanism which championed its ideals in the next century) was committed to the idea - first anticipated by Pierre Bayle - that a secular society could be equally if not more virtuous and supportive of the social peace than a religious one.

The prominent atheist of the French Enlightenment Jacques-Andre Naigeon (1738-1810), for instance, commented that just as religions cannot agree with one another, a universal secular morality based on a common recognition of how we are determined by nature to seek our survival, well-being, and avoidance of suffering [2] provided no such grounds for unnecessary conflict. As Alan Kors has noted, Naigeon regarded Christianity as the cause of avoidable cruelty, superstition, and intolerance'[3] but believed that by removing this irrational support for such things, atheism 'put human beings in a relationship to natural phenomena and the quest for well- being that offered our only hope of amelioration'[4]. As Kors further notes, d'Holbach and Naigeon, the two foremost atheists of the Enlightenment, saw their materialistic atheism finally as more a moral than a philosophical choice - a strategy for achieving well-being.

The fundamental assumption underpinning their hope in the relatively violence free nature of a purely secular society was their belief that humans were inherently virtuous, and that religion represented a (corrigible) perversion of their inherent virtuousness. According to Naigeon, human beings' basic instincts are directed towards the achievement of well-being so that we were predisposed to love one another and enjoy a peaceful co-existence in this world; religion, however, as Kors observes, 'was regarded by Naigeon as 'a war against those natural tendencies, and its claim to authority was that it spoke on behalf of 'a fierce God whom it presents as the Tyrant of the human race'. Religion itself was born of fear, melancholy, ignorance, and a disordered imagination only a rethinking of the human relationship to nature and, consequently, to happiness could alter such a sad state of affairs. People would seek to understand and change the physical and social condition of mankind only after they understand that the 'force' governing phenomena was merely the 'necessary laws' of an amoral physical nature...atheism...alone could lead us to seek the satisfaction of our needs and the diminution of our pains among their actual causes'[5].

This optimism about pristine human nature unadulterated by religion may be said to be the fundamental conviction underpinning the hopes of enlightened atheists (both in eighteenth century France and in Britain and America in the following century) in a relatively violence free atheist future.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: The Case against Religion. London: Atlantic Books, 2007.
Kors, Alan Charles. "The Atheism of D'holbach and Naigeon." In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David Wootton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ See for example Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 272ff.; Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: The Case against Religion (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 229ff.
[2]↑ Alan Charles Kors, "The Atheism of D'holbach and Naigeon," in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 296.
[3]↑ Ibid., 274.
[4]↑ Ibid., 297.
[5]↑ Ibid., 277-8.

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