I wrote the following response:

Mr. Eagleton seems not to understand people like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He tries to fit them into his notions of “liberalism” or “tolerance”, and criticizes them when the labels don’t fit very well. But these are Mr. Eagleton’s labels, not theirs. Dawkins or Hitchens are primarily rationalists, not liberals. To whatever degree their ideas fit in with a “liberal” or “tolerant” agenda is incidental, not the focus of their beliefs.

Most people do not understand or even care about a historical or ideological account of liberalism. When someone identifies himself as a liberal, the chances are that he means he agrees with specific ideas that are promoted by whatever group the media calls “liberal”. The idea that abortion should be legal. Or that a person’s sexual inclinations, whether towards the same or opposite sex, are not the business of his neighbors or government. The separation of Church and State. Or that it is unfair and inhumane that some people in a society should be fabulously rich, while others starve. Or even the milder version, that capitalism in the west is not an honest system that rewards people consistently for their ability, but is often instead a corrupt symbiosis between the very wealthy and their paid-for politicians.

In our times, these are hot button issues that receive wide coverage in the media. Hence people align themselves with others who vote the same way on such issues. This is usually the full extent of their “liberality”. In reality, such people are widely diverse if you consider the full context of their philosophy – from religious to atheist, from welfare-statists to libertarians. Not everyone who identifies with the “liberal” perspective on some issues agrees with everything else that is presented as “liberal”.

In short, “liberal” is a very wide and inclusive label that sweeps significant differences under the rug. It is still useful as a statistical aggregate – it does in fact describe real differences between how people stand on certain key issues. But it is completely inadequate when describing a particular individual. Castigating Dawkins for being “liberal” on one thing but not another is silly. Dawkins is not a liberal, he merely agrees with some liberal ideas.

Dawkins and Hitchens have made no secret of the fact that they consider religion irrational and dangerous. It’s no wonder that they consider the more extreme forms of Islam to be irrational and dangerous as well. That is consistency. But Mr. Eagleton sees a conflict because such an opinion about Islam isn’t tolerant enough to suit his view of how liberals ought to be. He thinks that their criticisms are not “nuanced” enough, because they do not mitigate their criticism of Islam’s barbarous cruelty sufficiently, in light of the historical context of “national injury” and humiliation of various Islamic people. But Dawkins and Hitchens don’t see tolerance as a primary virtue; they see reason as primary. To them, tolerance is a virtue only so far as it serves a reasonable purpose – to allow people full freedom of expression up to the point that they don’t interfere with other people’s freedom of expression. When it crosses that line, as in the case of fatwas and death penalties for apostasy or blasphemy, it is no longer a virtue.

This is perhaps the key difference between Mr. Eagleton and Mr. Dawkins. Mr. Eagleton says “For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.” Mr. Dawkins would never characterize his convictions as “few”. They might seem “few” in number, if you prefer to go by a list of “the ten commandments” or “the eight-fold path to self-realization” or “the fifty cardinal principles for right living”. But in scope, the devotion to reason encompasses a far wider and more complete philosophy than any such laundry list of rights and wrongs.

In underestimating how widely and thoroughly Dawkins or Hitchens apply reason to moral choices, Mr. Eagleton ends up with conflicts, as when Dawkins apparently supports items 4, 5 and 6 on the list, but not so much items 2 and 3. This is inconsistency only if you believe that such laundry lists are real, that people ought to be categorizable by how faithfully they cleave to the ten tenets of liberalism. The simpler answer, of course, is that Dawkins would judge liberalism by how reasonable it seemed to him. He wouldn’t judge reason by how liberal it appeared.