The Portable Atheist

Christopher Hitchens is on alert in his introduction to The Portable Atheist, an anthology of essays and excerpts, from the Classical poet Lucretius to magical realist author Salman Rushdie:

So the enlightenment of which I was writing is by no means developing in a straight line. The alternative to it, however, is being delineated for us with extraordinary vividness. It is in the hope of strengthening and alarming the resistance to the faith-based, and to faith itself, that this anthology of combat with humanity's oldest enemy is respectfully offered.

Only centuries ago, a figure like Hitchens — a litterateur with a spiel against religion long enough to weary Voltaire — would have had to disguise this resistance to avoid the theocratic lash. Flash forward through the advances of technology and democracy — the snowballing of media old and new — and not only has the word against God gotten out, but atheism's PR department is on a winning streak of late. The (lack of) belief is attracting a level of intrigue unmatched since Time Magazine's famous "Is God Dead?" cover in the mid '60s. Hitchens, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) — these are the authors associated with today's very public challenge to religion. Together they are credited with the rise of a literary cottage industry that John Powers, Vogue's film critic, ranked along with The Sopranos finale and the writers' strike as a top cultural trend of 2007: atheist chic.

As a nonbeliever, it's nauseating to listen to a pundit reduce my hard-won and often alienating skepticism to an entry on a year-end top ten. As if defending it was this easy. There is, to be sure, something catchy about the phrase "atheist chic." It may be down to the false impression atheism gives, convincing its opponents of being a throwaway view. Once-faithless individuals may think themselves reborn through faith, just like believers have on occasion stopped believing, but atheism itself is no more a fad than is language, which is to say, the human habit of parsing experience with thought, and thought with words. Over the last two millenia, while Christianity placated the West's growing taste for fun by conceding, one-by-one, the Bible's claims, atheists kept busy by cultivating a rich literature of our own. Selections from Omar Khayyam, Spinoza, James Boswell and others root atheists to a tradition our knee-jerk mistrust of conservatism often snubs. So The Portable Atheist is a good volume to hurl at anyone who thinks nonbelief budded sometime between the Second Continental Congress and Elvis Presley's first appearance on Ed Sullavan (to use two lingering cultural provocations as a frame). Hitchens's anthology also serves as an edifying reminder for atheists, too, who might be overrun by Dawkins' and Richard Harris's scientism to pay sufficient heed to the eloquence prefacing this last century and a half of mounting astonomical and biological evidence.

In a chronological collection of writings picked from the expanse of two dozen centuries, the tone of the first hundred pages typically lulls the reader with its genteel, old-timey charms, the substance sliding out of view like apparitions. The urgency of the subject at hand in The Portable Atheist seems to have cleared away the usual affectations (or this reader's distraction by them, at least). In my admittedly shallow experience with Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, the arch Romanticist's prose hadn't reached out with the same immediacy as his poetry. Though in the excerpt Hitchens's chooses from "A Refutation of Deism" (1814), Shelley's words grip tightly. It's a particularly good place to begin discussing this anthology because it includes the two discourses carried throughout the book — the faith-based's logical fallacy and moral prat fall.

"The laws of motion and the properties of matter," Shelley writes, "suffice to account for every phenomenon, or combination of phenomenon exhibited in the Universe." This is a gauzy generalization of the scientism which defines atheist chic's empirical claims, and one of the pleasures of The Portable Atheist is how every other essay seems to sharpen the details of this picture. It's surprising how, as succeeding, better informed generations refine this theme, little in the science-based discourse on God needs to be replaced or refuted. The line reaches a wholly satisfying apogee in Michael Shermer's "Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story", a flippant retelling of the Bible's first book, grounded in pure reason.

For a splash of cold water in the face, Hitchens offers H.L. Mencken. In "Memorial Service," Mencken eulogizes nearly 200 dead gods who exerted an influence from the classical world to his own time of bootlegged hootch and Model-Ts. The essay consists primarily of little more than the gods' names as Mencken ushers them to a resting place he has specially imagined — a hell for gods "as crowded as the Presbyterian hell for babies." Though, in a minor gripe, I wished the list of names would have been typeset with more ingenuity. The two-column list of gods sprawls across three pages in an arrangement which is neither as readable nor as impressive as a four-column single page spread would have been.

Hitchens's collection is also notable for the previously unpublished pieces it includes from novelists Rushdie, Ian McEwan and the courageous feminist critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Of these the most memorable is "End of The World Blues," taken from a lecture McEwan, the British author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach, gave at Stanford University last year. McEwen's contribution is a survey of Armageddon anxiety — its possible causes and undoubted effects. "Blues" is a tour de force chomping at the fear of death filling religion's gooey center. Refreshingly, McEwan isn't content with merely separating the credulous from the incredulous.

To the secular mind the polling figures have a pleasantly shocking, titillating quality — one might think of them as a form of atheist's pornography. But perhaps we should enter a caveat before proceeding. It might be worth retaining a degree of skepticism about these polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously — one poll's 90 percent is another's 53 percent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion, and forgiveness rather than of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.

So I'm brought back to this glittering confection, atheist chic — a qualitative reading of data which is as false as these polls' quantitative summary. At first blush, it's surprising to note the phrase was coined by a proclaimed atheist, LA Times columnist Dan Neil. In the year since Neil's article appeared, the phrase has been used mostly as a pejorative against the ubiquity of figures like Hitchens and Dawkins on television, bookshelves and at the tip of the reading public's tongue.

Hitchens joined the conversation in earnest last spring with his bestseller god is not Great and through the summer occupied the cozy space cable news channels reserve for the "other side" in the God debate. I watched with fascination as Hitchens's atheist profile, which had always been in plain view, rose to eventually eclipse his fellow bestselling authors. After tracking the messy debating tour Hitchens took through the South to promote god is not Great, I began to wonder what the point was to these degraded conversations with, as Hitchens might call them, the intellectual and spiritual charlatans he took up as interlocutors. It was no surprise that Hitchens had applied a closer (one can without blinking say: more respectful) reading to Biblical texts than your average pastor or Christian mogul. The initial thrill of watching in real time as Hitchens exposed more than a smattering of ignorance and hypocrisy began to give way to a feeling that perhaps this vigor was being misapplied. It began to look too easy. I know my own atheism was left malnourished and it was clear Hitchens hadn't succeeded in single-handedly bringing the Enlightenment to, say, Al Sharpton in their high-profile throwdown. A second read through god is not Great exposed less light, less heat even, than steam. Soon, the words in Neil's column that seemed absurd only months ago reverberated back with a new clarity:

I do appreciate the company and the ammunition in these books, and the occasional exchanged glance of solidarity in the bookstore. But I'm just slightly alarmed. The new atheism is pretty hard-core, militantly insisting we challenge religiosity wherever we meet it, or else enable its darker extremist tendencies. In other words, the new atheism is on a quest for conversion. Having insisted on tolerance of our non-faith, Dawkins and Harris' take-no-prisoners orthodoxy would have us be intolerant of others' faith.

So atheist chic has earned its wearying reputation by flaunting, perhaps even feigning, impatience with the other side. From Lucretius to Rushdie, there has always been a smugness earned by rejecting this particular status quo. But if there is anything remarkable about Neil's observation, it's the pugilistic impulse at work in the recent wave of atheist literature. The aim, as Hitchens's states baldly in his introduction to The Portable Atheist, is to strengthen and alarm the troops in this "combat." To what end? I wonder. I imagine the answer would have something to do with putting away, once and for all, Islamo-fascism and creationism. But is it untamed fervor which will ultimately do this job?

As far as opening the debate goes, discussing a subject honestly is always welcome. But the same tools of reason used to see through religion should remain easily at reach to temper the frustration in finding the other side unwilling to listen or speak with honesty. Despite Hitchens's intention, The Portable Atheist is the antidote to atheist chic (a phrase I'm certain he shudders at, but none the less defines); it strengthens my atheism more than alarms it. After reading it, I'm put in the mood for conversation, not desecration. The splendor of examples Hitchens offers reminds that from this tradition I've inherited a searching sympathy for members of my species — regardless of how any one individual chooses to console his or herself. This sympathy, not as easily afforded to the faith-based, is the foundation of Humanism, the convex to atheism's concave.