Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris together for the final time in the NS.
In the special Christmas issue of the New Statesman, guest-edited by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and available for purchase here, the four leading members of the New Atheism movement have been brought together for the final time.
The name “Four Horsemen” refers to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris and was first used during a 2007 debate in which they discussed their criticisms of religion and advocated critical thinking.
Inside the pages of this New Statesman double issue, Richard Dawkins has contributed an essay, “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” and written the NS leader column, in which he launches a scathing attack on David Cameron and his government’s imposition of religious tradition on society in the form of faith schools. He writes:
Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I do not mean state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state.
For the issue, Dawkins also travelled to Texas to conduct an exclusive interview with the late author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. In what turned out to be Hitchens’s final interview before his death on 15 December, he and Dawkins discussed topics ranging from religious fundamentalism and US politics, to Tony Blair, abortion and Christmas. At the time, Hitchens said of his legacy:
It may strike some people as being broad but it’s possibly at the cost of being a bit shallow. I became a journalist because one didn’t have to specialise. I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag and the definition of the word “polymath” came up. Eco said it was his ambition to be a polymath; Sontag challenged him and said the definition of a polymath is someone who’s interested in everything and nothing else. I was encouraged in my training to read widely – to flit and sip, as Bertie [Wooster] puts it – and I think I’ve got good memory retention. I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth.
A lot of reviewers have said, to the point of embarrassing me, that I’m in the class of Edmund Wilson or even George Orwell. It really does remind me that I’m not. But it’s something to at least have had the comparison made – it’s better than I expected when I started.
The American author, neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris has offered an essay on the illusion of free will (further extracts from which can be found here):
Even though we can find no room for it in the causal order, the notion of free will is still accorded a remarkable deference in the scientific and philosophical literature, even by those who believe that the mind is entirely dependent on the workings of the brain. However, the truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us, for introspection soon grows as hostile to the idea as the equations of physics have. Apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you decide the next thought you think no more than you decide the next thought I write.
And finally, the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has written “The social cell”, an exclusive NS Christmas Essay which poses and attempts to answer the question: What do debutante balls, the Japanese tea ceremony, Ponzi schemes and doubting clergy all have in common?:
We need to look dispassionately at possibilities that can illuminate – and might eventually eliminate – some serious sources of suffering in the world. Once we appreciate the necessity of metabolism, reproduction and protective membranes for social cells as much as for protein-based cells, we can see more clearly the effects that novel environmental factors are likely to have on the prospects for these phenomena . . . Societies are complex in more ways than colonies of bacteria are. What does shine through is a principle of good design. Darwin showed us that the secret of life is the differential reproduction of effective designs for fending off dissolution. When we approach social phenomena with the same spirit of reverse engineering, we find a bounty of insights that can help us plan intelligently for the future.
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