Because of the place it had in my specific journey through the youth internet culture of the 2010s, I am tempted to call this movement “baby materialism”. There was definitely common theoretical ground with historical and dialectical materialism, and when grilled on sociological questions New Atheists often ended up agreeing to Marxist talking points, but New Atheism ultimately suffers from its shallow and noncommittal philosophical nature. Looking back there are quite a few punctures where the surrounding medium of Marxism-Leninism can be seen seeping into the bubble, the most obvious of which is why there are currents of religion like liberation theology that run completely against the political will of the ruling class: Because New Atheism tries to pinpoint the origin of religion only as a tool of suppression (which to be fair is a valid and blindingly accurate approximation of much of its historical role), and due to its bias against religion, it fails to recognise that religion can also be wielded by the suppressed classes as a tool of liberation - a dialectical relationship that is nonetheless contained entirely within materialism.

From a social standpoint, New Atheism is a double-edged sword as well: On the one hand, it can push its followers towards scientific discovery, hence empowering them to adopt the scientific method, do proper research, question silent assumptions and the status quo, and look to a variety of sources to find alternatives; on the other hand, their obsession with formulating morality on a merely “scientific” basis is prone to both theoretical failure and practical views that are in equal measure dubious and horrifying. This is because of a problem common among New Atheists, namely that they are fatally attracted to plugging in numbers. If scientific findings are established in one setting, then they are all too susceptible to the fallacy that when the setting changes it suffices to change the parameters even though reality demands a wholesale reexamination of the entire model. They then go and try to reinvent some universal moral system such as Kantianism or Utilitarianism, and impose it on populations with vastly different, evolving material conditions with vastly different, evolving moral demands that follow from them, instead of just asking the actual population - who is after all the subject of the study - what they deem right and wrong. This is what sets them up for failure.