Awhile back, Dawkins had the charming idea of calling the various books put out to respond to him and his fellow bestselling atheists as “fleas,” referencing a bit of poetry from Jonathan Swift. I’ve decided, as a new bloggy project, to post one review of one of these books every week. That commits me to reading a lot of books I’m unlikely to like, but I do it all for you, dear readers.

This week’s target is Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists, an especially nasty piece of work for its internal inconsistencies and Hedges’ poor reading comprehension when it comes to the books he targets. As I noted when I commented on his Point of Inquiry appearance back this summer, Hedges gives rather bold endorsements of relativism, both moral and about reality. The book is much the same. The new atheists “turn their particular notion of the good into an inflexible standard of universal good” (p. 2). “They see only one truth: their truth. Human beings must become like them, think like them and adopt their values, which they insist are universal, or be banished from civil society” (p. 7). In general, Hedges says, “Any form of knowledge that claims to be absolute ceases to be knowledge. It becomes a form of faith” (p. 20).

He never works to make something intelligible out of these declarations. However, he does pretty clearly abandon them, as when he isn’t hammering these themes, he’s demanding that the new atheists think like he, Chris Hedges, does: “Those who teach that religion is evil and that science and reason will save us are as deluded as those who believe in angels and demons” (p. 28). He constantly complains that they are utopians ignoring harsh realities. Especially ironic is when, in the space of a single page (p. 87), he attacks atheists for treating evil as an external force and and for not realizing how evil corporations are. Hedges simultaneously denies objective facts and values, and demands that everyone recognize that this is a world dominated by evil new atheists, Christian fundamentalists (“the most frightening mass movement in American history”), utopians, and corporations.

Let’s straighten one thing out: there is such a thing as reality. Whether or not there’s such a thing as a perfect representation of reality, some representations are still better than others. We don’t want to close off debate too soon, but in terms of ultimate goals we want everyone’s view of reality to be as accurate as possible. And to carry on debate, we have to be willing to consider reasons to accept one view over another.

The other abominable weakness in the book is the wildly inaccurate portrayal of his targets’ views. They are described as racist and utopian without a shred of evidence in favor of these accusations. In other passages, it isn’t clear what Hedges is accusing them of, partly because he’s so vague about his own views. He constantly rails against violence, to a degree that makes him sound like a pacifist. But is he a pacifist? One hints strongly suggests “no”: he suggests that after Sept. 11th, when we had the world’s sympathy, “To have built on this sympathy, to have turned the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his band of followers over to intelligence agencies instead of militarizing the problem, would have made the nation more secure.” Surely Hedges is aware that intelligence agencies too would ultimately use violence, though, and that the main reason for winning others sympathy is so that they will do violence on our behalf?

The other noteworthy current in the book is Hedges’ dim view of human nature, thought it is supported with inconsistent appeals to science. On the one hand, Hedges comes off as a strident materialist, constrasting himself with Dawkins et al. mainly in terms of pessimism: “Darwinism sees our animal natures as intractable. It never attempts to argue that human beings can overcome biological limitations and create a human paradise” (p. 46) He also has a slightly more nuanced, though materialistic strain: “The human brain is a complex machine. It is able to veto the promptings of impulse and habit. It is wired, although perhaps not all the time or even most of the time, to make possible the exercise of free choice, or at least an extraordinarly large range of possible choices. It can lead us to carry out acts that are contrary to our own self-interest and self-preservation” (p. 55). That passage, combined with remarks about how we are “not equally flawed” (p. 14) suggests very little disagreement from the view Hedges is supposed to be arguing against: there is only disagreement about the mostly contingent question of whether we have managed collective moral progress. There are good arguments that we have: the spread of democracy and egalitarianism, for example.

Hedges’ counter-arguments to the idea of collective moral progress end up depending on bogus accusations of racism and raving about the evils of corporations, ravings which ignore the general increase in prosperity that came with the modern age. He also focuses on the big instances of mass-death in the modern world, though this focus is gravely misleading: a tribal war that kills one person may not seem like much, but if the tribe only has 50 people, you’re looking at a tragedy equivalent to 6-7 million deaths in the modern U.S.

I said Hedges’ relationship with science is contradictory, though, because while he wants to appeal to science to support his dim view of human nature, he also seems to say that science cannot be applied here: “Scientific ideas, because they can be demonstrated or disproved, are embranced or rejected on the basis of quantifiable evidence. But human relationships and social organizations interact and function effectively when they are not rigid, when they accept moral ambiguity, and when they take into account the irrational” (p. 54). Hedges fails to understand why this is all beside the point: scientists are perfectly comfortable studying the irrational. Indeed, there’s a wonderful new book out called /Predictably Irrational/, all about that stuff for anyone who’s interested. Hedges also mocks Sam Harris’ appeal to a study showing widespread support for suicide bombing in the Muslim world (pp. 71-74). There is no actual rebuttal to this, it is simply held up as self-evidently absurd, an instance of how “Harris mistakes a tiny subset of criminals and terrorists for one billion Muslims” (p. 20) (while obviously, Harris has shown that these criminals have disturbingly wide support).

There is a final irony to Hedges book–that if you dig down enough, it seems that he agrees with the main points of the new atheist critique of religion: there are “morally indefensible passages in the Bible” (pp. 3-4). “Atheists ridicule magic, miracles and an anthropomorphic God. They remind us that the world is not 6,000 years old, that prayer does not cure cancer, and that there is no heaven or hell. But these are not thoughts. These are self-evident tautologies” (p. 70). So the new atheists are right, but darn it, they shouldn’t be so uppity!