Susan Jacoby on the incorrect assumption that all atheists are big-government loving liberals:
“In the United States, largely as a result of the relatively recent, post-1980 alliance between the political and religious right, atheism and secularism have come to be identified in the public mind with political liberalism. "Secular liberal" is an epithet to the anti-intellectual segment of the right, which--as a number of conservative intellectuals have pointed out recently--is in the driver's seat among angry conservatives today. Implicit in this epithet is the belief that liberalism, secularism, and a liking for big government are linked. Nothing could be more ahistorical or less accurate about present-day secular America.
As regular readers of this blog know, I am both an atheist and a political liberal. I actually prefer to describe myself as a freethinker, because my views about religion and politics have been most strongly influenced by 18th-century Enlightenment freethought, as exemplified by Thomas Paine. Paine was as opposed to slavery, the death penalty, and rule by inherited wealth as he was to orthodox religion. He was not opposed to government per se, as some conservatives have misleadingly suggested, but to government of the few, by the few, and for the few. In his 1794 essay Agrarian Justice, he became the first social thinker to propose a system of old age and disability pensions that relied not on charity but on government support provided by all citizens.
My atheism makes me a libertarian on government intrusion into essentially private matters--from sex between consenting adults to medical decisions about how to end one's own life--but I am not an anti-government economic libertarian at all. Which is to say that I think one of the entirely proper roles of government is to take away some of the money I make and use it to provide health care for people in need, to regulate financial institutions that cheat the public, to operate public schools, and to initiate numerous activities intended to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. My government has the right to do this because I owe my living to one of the liberties guaranteed by my American citizenship--the opportunity to speak my mind and be paid for it. (Sarah Palin owes her living, on a much grander scale, to the same guarantee--but the freedom she loves so much is apparently the freedom to to keep every penny that she could earn only in America.)
There is another longstanding form of American secularist philosophy, descended not from Enlightenment freethought but from the 19th-century distortion of Darwin's theory of evolution known as social Darwinism. The modern descendants of the social Darwinists are cultural libertarians but economic conservatives, influenced in some instances, as their predecessors were, by pseudo-scientific convictions about racial intellectual superiority--which they attribute not to God but to nature itself. This strain of American secularism and atheism runs from the social Darwinists of the Gilded Age through the eugenicists of the early 20th century and the followers of Ayn Rand's so-called objectivism, to those within secular organizations today who insist on calling themselves skeptics, are offended by the depiction of secularists as humanists, and tend to be as opposed to government social programs as members of the religious right.
The essence of social Darwinism was its assertion (never made by Darwin) that the struggle of organisms for existence in nature was replicated by the struggle of humans within civilization. The poor were poor not because God had decreed it, as religious conservatives had claimed about slavery, but because they simply did not have the wits or the strength to be anything else. The inventor of social Darwinism (though he did not call it that) was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose ideas received a much more favorable reception in Gilded Age America than in his native England. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and applied it to human beings. (The best elucidation of social Darwinism's place in American intellectual history is still Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944).
Those who preached social Darwinism in the United States always claimed that their views were "scientific"--an adjective, when appended to what are essentially social philosophies, that is always a dead giveaway of their pseudo-scientific nature. Genuine science does not have to label itself scientific; pseudo-scientific thought does, in a vain effort to prevent being unmasked as mutton dressed as lamb. Thus, the adjective "scientific" often prefaced the decidedly unscientific, non-evidence based form of communism practiced in the Soviet Union. Plaudits to "scientific Communism" were supposed to prevent Russians from noticing that there was no food in the stores. In the United States, social Darwinists (some of whom, as free market disciples, now have a permanent address at right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute) have always claimed that any government reforms or regulations are attempts to interfere with the natural, scientifically based order of things.
William Graham Sumner, professor of political science at Yale from 1872 to 1910, was the prototypical secular, right-wing public intellectual. He explicitly compared Gilded Age tycoons to superior biological species that had emerged from eons of evolution and declared emphatically that men like J.P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick were "a product of natural selection...just like the great statesmen, or scientific men, or military men." If all millionaires had emerged from fair competition, then they were best fitted to run society. (Sumner never addressed the question of whether the sons of tycoons were also superior by virtue of having been born to money.) Ayn Rand's turgid, didactic novels are nothing more than reheated Sumner.
Social Darwinism was always strongly linked with the eugencis movment, which had the same things to say about the intellectual inferiority of Jewish and Italian immigrants in the 1880s and 1890s that those who consider IQ tests scientifically unimpeachable have to say today about the intellectual inferiority of blacks. One would never know, from the comments of some atheists on this blog who seem convinced that IQ tests "prove" the intellectual superiority of whites, that many scientists argue that IQ tests measure only what people have learned within a given culture--not what their innate ability might be. Whatever supposedly scientific method has been used to measure intelligence--from 19th-century phrenology to today's psychological tests--the striking fact about generalizations regarding group intelligence is that they have always correlated with the group's economic status at a given historical moment. That is why many upper-class social Darwinists were convinced that East European Jewish immigrants were intellectually inferior at the turn of the century and would always remain so--and why we rarely hear such claims today.
The linkage between belief in the "scientifically proven" superiority of successful individuals and groups and opposition to government intervention in the economy is clear: If differences between the rich and the poor are really determined by natural evolution, and manifest themselves genetically, then government interference amounts to interference with nature. To me, this belief has a decidedly religious cast, and to find it, even in attenuated version, among atheists in the 21st century is befuddling. What could be more a matter of faith than the conviction that it is wrong for man to interfere with nature, whether through government or private effort? The average American life expectancy, around 40 at the turn of the century, has doubled--not primarily as a result of high-tech surgical procedures, drugs for the elderly, or even the common antibiotics introduced at mid-20th century but mainly as a result of improved sanitation and nutrition in the earliest decades of the century. Better sanitation--provided, let us not forget, by government--allowed many of those immigrants, then presumed to be genetically inferior, to live long into the century and send their children to high school and college. Had the children's genes magically improved?
It is impossible to determine the precise percentages in the split between political liberals and political conservatives among American atheists. We know that the religiously "unaffiliated," as the Pew Forum describes them, are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. That is no surprise, given the strong identification between the Republican Party and the religious right. I suspect, however, that the there are many more descendants of social Darwinists among atheists than is generally recognized. This political divide definitely reduces the influence of atheists in the culture at large, because it means that the only thing the two branches of atheism have in common is opposition to government intrusion in private life and to clear-cut violations of the separation of church and state. What's likely to happen (in fact it already is happening) is that secular liberals will make common cause with religious liberals on economic and social issues as well as some church-state separation issues. This alliance can be uneasy, however, because many of the religious liberals, like Jim Wallis, who now exert strong influence within the Democratic Party favor what I consider grave violations of church-state separation--such as the massive funneling of tax money for charitable endeavors through religious organizations.
For anti-government atheists, third-party libertarian tickets are the only realistic political option--unless they can swallow their distaste for the Republicans' anti-gay rights, pro-religion platforms. If history is any guide (and I think it is, despite the noise being made by the tea partiers right now), the success of any third party will prove ephemeral and will negate the possibility of secularist influence on the right.
Many religious critics of atheism have chastised atheists for considering themselves intellectually superior to believers. I do consider atheism, as a way of looking at the world, intellectually superior to faith in the supernatural (a characteristic of every religion). But I certainly do not consider all atheists intellectually superior to all religious believers. There is no such thing as "scientific atheism." There are atheists who respect the difference between real science and pseudo-science and those who do not. There are atheists who wish to use reason to promote social progress (yet another filthy Enlightenment notion) and those who use bogus reasoning as a club to assert their own superiority. It is depressing to see the great tool of reason used for the latter purpose by those atheists who have fallen for some of the most persistent pseudo-scientific beliefs in American intellectual history.”
Most of the atheists I know are left-wing thinkers. As for myself, I’m a Libertarian: in theory. Libertarianism requires a lot of faith in humanity. Faith I’m not quite willing to give to it yet. It is an ideal that we are all motivated by self-interest and by doing so we will help others through charitable work. Unfortunately, the evidence that this would work in the real world appears to be lacking. In the past I did lean quite far to the left but as I became an atheist and my opposition to the control religion can have over society grew, I found it difficult to reconcile that view with the opinion that government should have a strong hand in people’s lives. Therefore, aspirations for a libertarian ideal aside, I’d certainly support an approach that balances individual freedoms with moderate government control. Punish those who attain wealth through devious means that bring harm to people or the environment and leave those who do so honestly be.
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