Sep 26 2007
Hitchens Says, “Holy Books Steal Their Morals From [Secularists]“
Via The Anchoress I got to follow the web of the web and find the transcript of “An Evening with Christopher Hitchens,” from Union League Club, New York, May 1, 2007 (Part 1, and Part 2). While some claim Hitchens was drunk and obnoxious during this event I can’t help but admire someone who even though possibly under the spell of Bacchus can solidly argue that our secular tradition is nothing to be ashamed of. Here are some excerpts from the event:
We don’t expect people to give up their need for something numinous or transcendent. That’s what poetry is for; that’s what literature is for. That’s the need I think it supplies. I don’t actually like devotional painting, but I could not possibly do without gothic architecture and devotional music. It would be — life would be quite empty without it. Like not having the poems of Auden or Philip Larkin or, indeed, the Cranmer Prayer Book — or the Book of Job, where it says — why does this move me? Why should it? It says, Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Okay, if I live long enough, I’ll write something that people would remember like that. But I’m not there yet.
But you don’t have to pay the supernatural and worshiping and prostrating price for this culture. I would say that was my main point. And those of us who believe that an ethical life can be lived without this are not without resources, you know. We have Epicurus. We have Spinoza. We have Benjamin Franklin. We have Thomas Payne; Thomas Jefferson. So you know, you can — morals do not derive from holy books. The holy books steal their morals from us and make them into an object of worship, and demand sacrifice, which we don’t need.
Our secular tradition is nothing to be ashamed of. Whereas religion is never done apologizing for its crimes; never, never, never and never can be. Just last week, His Holiness the Pope announces, You know what? All those dead babies, un-baptized, that you bore in pain and died on childbirth — they didn’t go to limbo after all. Can you think of anything crueler than that? I can — telling them they were in limbo in the first place — St. Augustin’s beautiful idea. Centuries of torturing ignorant and uneducated people — giving them vouchers, so they could go to schools where they would be told that their miscarried babes had gone to something very like hell, and were howling and crying without consolation.
And again I have to admire Hitchens for explaining (and all atheists I’m sure have struggled with this) what I call the ‘Hitler was an atheist fallacy.’ However, Hitchens explains it on a larger scale, in the context of a question from the audience:
Unidentified Audience Member: I just wanted to suggest that, even though there are secular thinkers who haven’t apologized. The religious people have apologized. But it doesn’t mean that the secular people have nothing to apologize for; they just don’t bother doing it.
Christopher Hitchens: Well, I’m not sure quite which secularists you mean, though I think I can guess. I mean –
Unidentified Audience Member: Engels]?
Christopher Hitchens: Oh, so it’s wonderful Engels. When Joseph Stalin went to meet his mother down in
Georgia after all those years — hadn’t seen her for awhile — and she said, “Naughty boy, where have you been? Why do you never write? What are you doing now?” And he said, “Well, actually, Mama, I’m Chairman of the Central Committee of the Presidium of the Communist Party of theSoviet Union now.” And she looked at him and said, “You stupid boy. If you’d stayed in that seminary, you could have been a bishop by now.”
It would be idiotic of the Bolshevik Party not to take advantage of the fact that until 1917, the Czar, the head of the state, had been considered the head of the Church, and also semi-divine. If you couldn’t replicate a credulity like that and take advantage of it, you would not be doing your job as a totalitarian — save if you happened to inherit a Confucian China, or an Angkor Wat type
Cambodia . Take — by all means, you have already the local superstitions. That’s how Christianity converted the pagans — by putting a cross around the head of the local deities.
It’s not a question of whether it’s secular or not, if you see what I mean. It’s a matter of attacking our own beliefs — not how bullying is the leader, but how willing are we to prostrate ourselves at his feet, or hers. How willing are we to be citizens?
Now no society that we know of — and I’ll challenge you directly on it — has ever been accused of falling into totalitarian habits by following the examples of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Payne, Epicurus, Spinoza — the tradition of doubt and separation of church and state — that I can think of. And I’ve tried. I don’t think you can find one, either.
So be sure you’re comparing like with like when you do this.
And fascism, of course, was essentially a Catholic racket, everywhere from
Croatia toPortugal . InSlovakia , the head of the Nazi puppet state was actually a priest in holy orders. The Concordat between theVatican and Hitler and Mussolini was agreed by all to be essentially the guarantee of their taking and holding power.
In the other side of the axis, the head of Japanese National Socialism — the Emperor was actually not just a religious figure, but himself a god. Do not confuse the idea that totalitarianism and secularism are in that way confusable.
7 responses so far
The holy books steal their morals from us
False. False. False. Anyone who knows the history of moral thought in Europe realizes that contemporary secular rights were derived from a Christian theology. Locke, Rousseau, and Kant all secularized the Christian doctrines like the soul. Instead of being valued as god’s creation people are now believed to posses autonomy and human rights, the secularized version of the soul. Even Neitzsche, the vitriolic atheist that he was, realized this.
Now no society that we know of — and I’ll challenge you directly on it — has ever been accused of falling into totalitarian habits by following the examples of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Payne, Epicurus, Spinoza — the tradition of doubt and separation of church and state — that I can think of. And I’ve tried. I don’t think you can find one, either.
Hitchens pulls a fast one here also. The question was whether or not there was an example of a secular totalitarian state, and the Soviet Union is such an example. And Marx and Engels, on orthodox readings, reject liberal autonomy as a result of capitalism and want to replace it with a totalizing and secular state.
Hitchens is trying to appeal to Jefferson, Franklin etc. in order to show that secularism has some sort of built in anti-totalitarian function. This is just not true. The concept of secularization does not entail demoracy. It is completely conceiveable to have a totalitarian secular state. It is the emphasis on liberal conceptions of justice that entail the rejection of a totalitarian state, not securalism itself.
So you’re saying it’s false to not be ashamed of secular tradition? That was the point of the first paragraph.
The second point I interpreted differently. What Hitchens said about dictators is that most dictators made themselves head of state in the Christian tradition of king over people, king over all aspects of society, rulers of church, state and military. Most dictator’s approach to religion has been of complete dominance where the head of the state is the head of the church. To Stalin religion was something he manipulated according to his whims, at one point he closed the churches and then later on in life he reinstated them. So no the Soviet Union was not a secular state. It might have gone through stages were religion was seen as an enemy but the heads of state were the ultimate leaders of the church. So Hitchen’s point is that in dictatorships there is no separation of church and state.
So you’re saying it’s false to not be ashamed of secular tradition? That was the point of the first paragraph.
No, I am saying that the statement, “holy books steal their morals from us” is false. It is just a historical fact that Western secular morality arose from the Christian tradition. If anyone is going to be accused of “stealing” it is secularists.
So Hitchen’s point is that in dictatorships there is no separation of church and state.
And what does this have to do with religion? The reason that there is no seperation of church and state is because that is based on liberal rights, but totalitiarian regimes reject liberal rights, so there is no such seperation. In totalitarian states there is no seperation of state and anything.
I wasn’t talking about religion, I was addressing your statement: The question was whether or not there was an example of a secular totalitarian state, and the Soviet Union is such an example.
You said Hitchens pulled a fast one when approached with this question. My take was that he answered the question and my previous post explains how.
Can you pls give examples of secular morals that seculars stole from Christians? And you know, Christians weren’t the first to have morals. And today’s atheists aren’t the first to be atheists.
Can you pls give examples of secular morals that seculars stole from Christians? And you know, Christians weren’t the first to have morals.
Lockean natural rights were an extension of the natural law tradition of Thomas Acquinas and the invioability that rights were supposed to guarantee people were were a secularized version of having a soul. Further, Kant’s categorical imperative is a secular form of the golden rule, which was had in other cultures, but had its most egalitarian expression in Christianity. The moral philosophy of the enlightenment codified people’s intuitions in secular terms. Since the Europe of the enlightenment was primarily Christian they codified the Christian virtues in secular garb. Neitzsche makes this point many times, most forcefully in the Geneology of Morals, where he contrasts the Greek ethos with European ethics derived historically from Christianity.
I am just stating what I take to be a historical fact, that enlightenment liberalism had its historical roots in Judeo-Christian morality.
Johnny, good examples, though I beg to differ. My questions referred specifically to Christianity. The first historical record of a code of human rights was the Sumerian Ur-Nammu from 2050 BC that contained rules and punishments related to human rights of children and women. In 539 BC the Cyrus Cylinder declared free religious worship for citizens of the Persian empire, and abolished slavery. The biblical books of Chronicles and Ezra reflect the writings of the Cylinders. Thus the Bible borrowed those concepts.
About Kant’s categorical imperative, according to theWikipediaentry Kant argued in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that what he is saying his is not the same as the Golden Rule. However I’m not educated enough on Kant’s ideas to debate this, but I’ll work on reading some more for a later time.
As for the Nietzsche example, not sure it proves or disproves a link between secularism and morals (and I spent today reading The Genealogy of Morals, which is why it took me so long to reply–you can’t say I’m not trying). But this stuck to me: “The symbol of this struggle [good versus evil], inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”: —there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction. Rome felt the Jew to be something like anti-nature itself, its antipodal monstrosity as it were: in Rome the Jew stood “convicted of hatred for the whole human race”; and rightly, provided one has a right to link the salvation and future of the human race with the unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values.” What I see here is Nietzsche rooting for Roman morals (not Greek), for the strong and noble, and supporting the idea that Jews are to blame for hatred for human race. Being a child of Rome (as a Romania I can claim the title) I should be flattered by his writing. But it wasn’t the Jews who raped the women of my people into Romanization.
Nietzsche must pardon me, but humanism started much earlier than biblical times. Oh I forget, he also blames Buddhism for European nihilism. “I saw the beginning of the end, the dead stop, a retrospective weariness, the will turning against life, the tender and sorrowful signs of the ultimate illness: I understood the ever spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its by-pass to a new Buddhism? to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism?” But my question referred to Christian writings, so this is irrelevant.
Well, well, well. Not surprised that we must agree to disagree on this one, although I am impressed with the work you did to flesh out your position. Reading the Geneology at work, sheesh, that’s some blogging determination. We’ll have to continue this debate another time.