New Atheism and the Alt-Right

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this one-off episode, I take a look at whether the Alt-right are the unintended offspring of the New Atheism movement that emerged online in the early days of Web 2.0. I argue that Web 2.0 created a unique environment where both atheists and the religious felt both emboldened and victimized leading to some very uncivil discourse. In the course of this battle, prominent New Atheists like Richard Dawkins celebrated a style of ‘naive empiricism’ where anything theoretical was seen as suspicious due to its status as theory and only facts were credible. Though Dawkins knew better than to call evolution a fact, he did so for political purposes and this led to a group of mainly young men overvaluing empirical factual content with a lack of understanding how theoretical understandings of phenomena balance, check and support that empirical content. Hence, ‘naive empiricism’.