The Salvo, vol. 8: The Convert

Richard Dawkins, the fragile Crown, and the F-Word (again).

Gavin

Welcome to the eighth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: Richard Dawkins converts to “cultural Christianity”.

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In an interview on LBC Radio on 31 March, Richard Dawkins – biologist, author and captain of the New Atheists – described himself as a “cultural Christian”. “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos,” he went on, and while he said he is “happy” that Christian belief is declining in Britain, he claimed that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.” Unlike Islam, Dawkins concluded, Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion”.

Madoc Cairns draws on Edmund Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the world of the long 18th century, to make sense of what’s happened to the New Atheists and the conversion of the world’s most famous unbeliever:

“I have witnessed” the skeptic Edmund Gibbon wrote, at the conclusion of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the triumph of religion and barbarism”: his lament for the end of classical civilization instigated modern secularism, and burdened it with the terror of collapse.

The “New Atheists” of the early-21st century were, in this regard, not new at all. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali – above all, Richard Dawkins – evangelised for an atheism they saw as simultaneously irrefutable and in danger of imminent eclipse. Their struggle was not just for truth, but for survival. From the pages of Gibbon, an “age of darkness and confusion” beckoned. Science was a flame flickering in the shadows of history; they fought against the dying of the light. That said fighters should turn renegade – Hirsi’s apostasy from unbelief, Dawkin’s refashioning as a cultural Christian – seems, on the face of it, inexplicable.

[…]

That the New Atheists were entangled with the politics of their era is almost a commonplace: the movement’s rise and fall tracks almost exactly the lifespan of “The War on Terror”. The targets of the conflict were as ill-defined as the war itself: the “Axis of Evil” stretched from Ba’athist Iraq to Marxist-Leninist North Korea. The frontier was everywhere. So were the barbarians. Gibbon, across the 1200 pages of Decline and Fall, never arrives at a definition of barbarism. He knows only what the Romans did: barbarians – the “giants of the north” – are everywhere he’s not.

You can read the rest of Madoc’s essay here.

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The cover story of the magazine this week is on ‘The Fragile Crown’ and the political outlook for the House of Windsor. I’ve been thinking a lot about the life and work of Tom Nairn lately, whose studies on the Royal Family remain unsurpassed. First published in 1988, and reissued most recently in 2011, Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy opens with a quotation from Margaret Lane’s NS essay ‘The Queen is Crowned’ from the Coronation Issue of June 1953:

There are elements in this Coronation ceremony which are unexpected, emotional, and difficult to explain. I had a sudden feeling, craning at my glimpse of the bare-headed Queen at her anointing, sitting motionless with lowered eyes under her gold canopy, a sensation that was like something spoken aloud: “There is a secret here”….What that secret was, I could not say. No doubt it was the primitive and magical feeling which ancient and beautiful ceremonials still evoke, in no matter how rational a breast. That tony golden figurine was the point of light under a vast burning-glass; the vision of an uncounted multitude was narrowed down to this.

As Nairn explained, “the Queen and her family are never merely stars, or celebrities. They posses in addition a ‘secret’: an element of mystique whose glamour is in the end far greater than that of any media personality. It is precisely this mystique which concerns us here: the ‘glamour’ (in an originally Scottish sense) of persons and symbols ordinary in appearance but quite super-ordinary in significance. In a far more extensive, emotionally-powerful manner than any of the other surviving monarchies, Britain’s Windsors are like an interface between two worlds, the mundane one and some vast national-spiritual sphere associated with mass adulation, the past, the State and familial morality, as well as with Fleet Street larks and comforting daydreams”.

For Nairn, the British monarchy thrives on what he called “the glamour of backwardness”, which he explained in one of the book’s most brilliant passages:

‘Glamour’ is the old Scottish word for magical enchantment, the spell cast upon humans by fairies, or witches. It was brought into modern English by Sir Walter Scott, who also thought up and organised the first really modern Royal spectacle, George IV’s descent upon Scotland in 1822. “Here” notes J.H. Plumb, “George had struck the future note of the monarchy…be-kilted, be-sporraned, be-tartaned, riding up Princes Street to Holyrood House to the roaring cheers of the loyal Scots, he was showing the way the monarchy would have to go if it were to survive into an industrial and democratic society”. Glamour had won a new lease of life, in both language and the State. It has become part of modernity.

As for ‘backwardness’, this was until around the middle of the century the condition attributed by Her Majesty’s subjects to most of the rest of the world. It meant those incapable of industry and democracy, or still on the long uphill road of modernisation. A summit or advance-party view, it looked back with inevitable condescension to the treacherous lower slopes of picturesque superstition and back-sliding ignorance. The British Empire had done its best but many would, alas, simply never make it. Since then things have changed. Three decades of unconcealable retreat and contraction have fostered a general awareness that the United Kingdom is itself sliding helplessly backwards at an accelerating rate. Neither its industry nor its democracy are quite what they were taken for. Had they been true exemplars of modernity, they could not possibly have succumbed to such a fate. If the Industrial Revolution had really been what that title implies, how could Britain have foundered into today’s near-catastrophic ‘de-industrialisation’? Had the Westminster Constitution actually been the ‘Mother’ of democracy, how on earth could it have shrivelled into what we see today: an example of arrogantly centralist and secretive dominion buttressed by a crass and increasingly localised populism, a governmental Court reducing its Country to a nerveless subjection unknown since Charles I’s head rolled in the Civil War?

The glamour of his backwardness is its legitimation through icons of continuity and reassurance: the human presence of Royalty with its concrete, familial guarantee of all being well in the longer run.

As Rory Scothorne wrote in his profile of the late Scottish theorist in 2021, Nairn’s point in The Enchanted Glass is that “members of the royal family are not a quirky add-on to a normal regime; in their exceptional status and their phoney familiarity, they serve as a national totem, giving meaning and coherence to the system. They indicate to their subjects that Britain is not like other states, and thus need not be held to similar standards. By proving that we do things differently here, they help us to avoid the realisation that we actually do things worse. It is royalty, above all, that makes Britain’s conservative constitution popular, despite the lack of popular authorship or involvement”.

Nairn died in 2023 aged 90. You can read Rory’s moving tribute to him here.

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The publication of a new book has reignited the debate about whether the Trump presidency represented a fascist moment. Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America is a collection of previously published articles curated by the intellectual historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Three of those articles first appeared in the NS:

1. Richard J. Evans, ‘Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist’, January 2021

   “But time is against Trump. Hitler and his followers were young men in 1923. They could afford to wait. Trump is in his seventies and can’t. A successor may emerge, but it seems unlikely that he would match Trump’s crowd appeal. Questions are being asked about the failure of the police to prevent the storming of the Capitol, but there is little evidence that the forces of order – the administrative and legal arms of the state, as well as the military – will prevent a peaceful transfer of power on 20 January. The situation in the US today is more like Munich in 1923 than Berlin ten years later”.

2. Nikhil Pal Singh, ‘America’s crisis-industrial complex’, June 2022

   “What we see is less the play of two parties to a civil war, than two parties locked in an attritional struggle over an increasingly predatory state. If history is any guide, the likely outcome will be continued governmental incontinence and societal decay. What is apparent at the end of a long arc of right-wing ascendancy and progressive neoliberal policy-making is the shape of a long interregnum, defined by a series of fanciful and failed solutions to the denouement of US capitalism’s post-war golden age”.

3. Geoff Mann, ‘Are we approaching a new wave of fascism?’ November 2022

   “Yet what if such confident dismissals about the present-day threat of fascism lets us relax, precisely when we shouldn’t? What if an “incipient” fascism turns out to be more than a few hundred white boys with home-made swastikas glued to their boy scout uniforms? Maybe every past fascist “success” was preceded by a refusal to acknowledge the scale of the threat on the horizon: in No Name in the Street (1972), the American writer James Baldwin recounts that listening to liberals intellectualise over cocktails the perils of McCarthyism brought to mind, “German Jews sitting around debating whether Hitler was a threat to their lives until the debate was summarily resolved for them by a knocking at the door.” If the price of anticipating (and preventing) fascism is mislabelling not-quite fascism, there is good reason to set aside analytical quibbles”.

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Readings from the NS

1. “Authoritarianism or democracy? Majority rule with minority protections, or minority rule and majority marginalisation? These are the questions that have shaped US politics since the country’s inception. They are the questions that sent Americans to war with each other in the late 19th century. And they are the questions that still define American politics more sharply than ever in the age of Donald Trump – a man who routinely claims to hate losers, even as he takes up their lost cause”. NS columnist Jill Filipovic on how the fault lines of the American Civil War continue to divide the US.

2. “In the coming years, the biggest challenge for Istanbul’s – and İmamoğlu’s – future will be Canal Istanbul. If realised, this artificial sea-level waterway project will bisect Istanbul’s European side and form an island between Asia and Europe. Critics say it would devastate the city’s ecosystems, and imperil its water supply, destroying the equilibrium between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Erdoğan, the architect of this idea, has boastfully called it his ‘crazy project’. İmamoğlu is firmly against Erdoğan’s ecocidal plans. ‘We’ll get rid of people who look at the Earth and think of apartment buildings,’ he said”. The journalist Kaya Genç reports on the mayoral elections in Istanbul.

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Readings elsewhere

1. Melina Moe, ‘There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 March 2024. A lovely piece about the ways in which Toni Morrison used her rejection letters as an editor not only to tell writers how to develop their work but also to diagnose the transformations of the publishing industry itself.

2. Sam Adler-Bell, ‘Good Enough’, The Baffler, No. 73, April 2024. On Adam Phillips, British psychoanalysis, and why we should “give up”.

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Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

— Gavin.