For a century or more, sentimentality has been the cardinal aesthetic sin. To say a work of art is sentimental is perforce to damn it. To be sentimental is to be kitsch, phony, exaggerated, manipulative, self-indulgent, hypocritical, cheap and clichéd. It is the art of religious dupes, conservative apologists and corporate stooges. As kitsch, it is likened to fascist or Stalinist propaganda by Milan Kundera, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and of course Theodor Adorno. The German novelist Hermann Broch wrote,”The producer of kitsch does not produce ‘bad’ art….It is not quite impossible to assess him according to aesthetic criteria; rather he should be judged as an ethically base being, a malefactor who profoundly desires evil.” The punk sneer pronounces the same verdict.
“Subversion” today is sentimentality’s inverse: It is nearly always a term of approval. To show the subversiveness of a song, TV show, or movie is tantamount to validating it, not just in pop criticism but in academic scholarship. What is subversive? Transgression, satire, idiosyncrasy, radicalism, asserting a minority identity, throwing noise into the signal, upending convention, generally mitigating for change. But as social critic Thomas Frank has long argued, today those are values promoted by advertising, corporate-management gurus and high-tech entrepreneurs. Canadian authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s entertaining polemic The Rebel Sells adds that anticonformist impulses are the octane of consumerism, seeking the cutting edge, the very soul of Bourdieuvian distinction, whether in designer couture, organic cuisine or “uncommodified” culture.
August 2012
Communication Breakdown
Rawls: I’m a reasonable guy. In fact, everywhere I go, people say to me: “Bill Rawls, you are a reasonable fucking guy.” Am I right, Jay?
Landsman: You are reasonable, sir.
Rawls: Yes. Yes, I am.
The point of this list, I hasten to say, is not that the opinions that I have expressed on these topics are necessarily correct, but rather that a good number of people in the CoR, including several leaders of the movement(s), either hold to clearly unreasonable opinions on said topics, or cannot even engage in a discussion about the opinions they do hold, dismissing any dissenting voice as crazy or irrelevant.
As you can see, the above is a heterogeneous list that includes scientific notions, philosophical concepts, and political positions. What do the elements of this list have in common, if anything? A few things, which is where I hope the discussion is going to focus (as opposed to attempting to debunk one’s pet entry, or deny that there is a problem to begin with).
B) The “I’m-smarter-than-thou” syndrome. Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.
C) Failure of leadership. It is hard to blame the rank and files of the CoR when they are constantly exposed to such blatant and widespread failure of leadership within their own community. Gone are, it seems, the days of the Carl Sagans, Martin Gardners, and Bertrand Russells, and welcome to the days of bloggers and twitterers spouting venom or nonsense just because they can.
…Do I have any practical suggestions on how to move the CoR forward, other than to pay more attention to what the people just mentioned say, and perhaps a little less attention to what is spouted by some others who shall go unmentioned? At the risk of sounding somewhat immodest, yes, I do. Here are a few to get us started (again, discussion on how to improve the list will be most welcome). Once again, the order is pretty much random:
i) Turn on moderation on all your blogs, this will raise the level of discourse immediately by several orders of magnitude, at the cost of a small inconvenience to you and your readers.
ii) Keep in mind the distinction between humor and sarcasm, leave the latter to comedians, who are supposed to be offending people. (In other words, we are not all Jon Stewarts or Tim Minchins.)
iii) Apply the principle of charity, giving the best possible interpretation of someone else’s argument before you mercilessly dismantle it. (After which, by all means, feel free to go ahead and mercilessly dismantle it.)
iv) Engage your readers and your opponents in as civil a tone as you can muster. Few people deserve to be put straight into insult mode (Hitler and Pat Robertson come to mind).
ix) Keep in mind that even the very best make mistakes and occasionally endorse notions that turn out to be wrong. How is it possible that you are the only exception to this rule?
This seems to be a recurring theme on several of the blogs I read. What’s with all these intelligent, deep-thinking people going for each others’ throats lately, needing to be restrained and sedated? I blame the heat. Fucking summer. It’s good for nothing, I’m telling you.<
I snickered a little at the pains he was taking to be coy about which bloggers he thinks are spouting venom and failing to provide examples of leadership. It reminded me of something I read a while back:
Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?
The Dude: No, you’re not wrong.
Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?
The Dude: You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.
Walter Sobchak: Okay then.
Ahh, no, it wasn’t that. Close, but no, it was something else…
So when people, atheists and theists alike, complain that I’m obnoxious, I feel good about it. There’s the fact that most of the people doing the complaining are not the sort I have much respect for, so I take pleasure in pissing them off, but also that I’m fulfilling my responsibilities. I make people aware that where I stand, there stands an atheist, and not some simpering milquetoast making apologies for his temerity in disrespecting religion, but someone who is proud of his beliefs.
Pigliucci complained about the arrogance of some atheists who think all believers are dumb, which is a common complaint, and one you hear from believers as well. But they’re wrong: I don’t think I’m smarter than everyone else.
I just think I’m right.
That’s important. Atheists should have a feeling of unrepentant confidence — we are on the right side of reason, the right side of history, and the right side of the evidence…And anyone who’s bothered by my cockiness should have a little more self-awareness: we all think we’re right, or we wouldn’t be doing what we do. Yeah, the faitheists and believers think I’m a bad guy, for the reasons above (and I’m OK with that). My other sin, though, is that I encourage other atheists to join me, I reinforce my kind of rudeness in a large group of people, and I do that community building stuff. I foster my tribe. We grow stronger and louder and bolder, we are all bad guys together.
…If you aren’t angry, there’s something wrong with you.
Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit. I will not support it in any way, and I resent the complacent schmoes who urge us to close our eyes to it. One the one hand, we’ve got the moderate academic types who like to tell us it’s mostly harmless and we’ll never be able to get rid of it, anyway; to them I’d say that, as people who are supposedly dedicated to learning the truth, you ought to be the first to deny religion because a) it’s wrong, and b) it’s a fallacious way of learning about the world. On the other hand, we’ve got the happy progressives who want us all to do interfaith work, and tell us that the fundies might be bad, but we share common cause with liberal Christians; to them I say that a mind addled by liberal opium is just as faulty as one fired up on conservative crack.
Deep sigh, rub hands over face, run fingers through hair. Okay. Being that we write as cultural Christians for the most part here, it’s fine to grapple mostly with monotheism. Most of the religion that affects our lives is “of the book”. But it’s also true that there are a few billion other people in the world who don’t experience religion as an inferior version of science, as propositions aiming to become workable theories, as statements of metaphysical facts that you must accept on faith. As some of those in the nascent field of evolutionary religious studies can tell you, for those people, religion is what you do rather than what you think. Telling them that their religion is “wrong” would be like telling someone that art and poetry aren’t “true” (of course, we don’t know anyone that ridiculously literal-minded, do we?) And even here in the cultural shadow of the cross, plenty of people “do” their religious practice in a way that no reasonable person should find fault with. Religion is just one particularly ancient and widespread way people have of solidifying tight bonds within groups. If religion as we know it disappeared completely, human beings wouldn’t suddenly become hyper-rational lone wolves; something else would serve as the anchor for people to band together and exclude outsiders.
I hate a group of people who have a common purpose, because pretty soon they have little hats and arm bands and fight songs and a list of people they’re going to visit at 3 AM. So I dislike and despise groups of people, but I love individuals.
Lately I’ve been interested in things like the differences in individual versus group psychology, as opposed to the less-interesting ideological distinctions. It’s especially interesting to see those differences in the context of a movement which generally prides itself on being above such atavistic irrationality by virtue of its heightened focus on reason. But honestly, if you read comment threads on posts like those above from the vantage point of a bystander with no particular sympathies, you can’t help but notice that the participants sound indistinguishable from any other bunch of assholes fighting on the Internet. Cheap shots, non-sequiturs, sarcasm, posturing, and various other rhetorical fleurs du mal sprout up even in what you’d think would be the inhospitable soil of rationality.
As we were just talking about the other day, the nature of our thinking and the tenacity with which we defend our conclusions changes simply by doing so as part of a cohesive group. The Internet, by facilitating instantaneous communication between people separated by the superficial differences of geography and personal idiosyncrasy, makes it easy to believe that one’s intake of news and information is more diverse than it really is. The old conversational topics we were taught to avoid in polite company, like religion and politics, are especially prone to gravitate toward balkanization and echo chambers when individuals in a more distant, impersonal medium can easily avoid having any substantial interaction with people who don’t fit their customized preferences. And even with the best of intentions, the imprecise nature of language itself, combined with the flawed rhetorical and written talents that most of us have at our disposal, turns any mass communication into the children’s game of telephone.
I doubt this would be news to anyone. And yet, there we have PZ in full stride, taking criticism even from allies as confirmation of his righteousness and as encouragement to be even more recalcitrant and hostile; using phrases like “the right side of history” in complete, uh, unscientific earnest like any good Christian or Marxist; proudly bragging about “reinforcing” his rudeness among his “tribe”; and circumventing reasonable consideration by using selective, highly inflammatory examples of religion at its worst in order to make a naked appeal to raw emotion in the form of bumper sticker platitudes about how not being outraged means not paying attention. I guess he believes that he and his tribe have already done all the important thinking that needs doing, or else they can always hit the pause button on the amygdala and rationally sort through their conclusions every now and then to make sure they’re all still valid. Sounds likely. So, when the last reactionary has been strangled with the guts of the last priest, I take it that no one will ever need to act like an obnoxious jackass ever again? Why am I not optimistic?
But as I’ve said many times, being offended is not such a terrible thing, and can even prove useful. Sometimes my feeling offended is actually a case of being embarrassed over being jolted out of my complacency. And in some contexts, such as the slightly-removed environment of the online world, a person can feel offended or attacked without feeling overly defensive, as would be the case if they were being insulted in person in front of their friends, thus allowing them to change their mind rather than entrench themselves even more firmly in a desperate attempt to save face (it’s at least possible, if not likely). What I actually find most tiresome about his shtick is the way he’s turned his attention to sociopolitical issues with the same ham-fisted subtlety he uses in reminding us that creationism is wrong. Reasonable people can disagree in good faith over age-old arguments about where to draw the line between liberty and equality, over how important it is to have X-amount of racial/sexual diversity at conferences, over exactly what feminism entails now and what the best means of achieving its goals should be, or, indeed, over whether any of this naturally follows directly from atheism as a given, but he acts as if all that’s needed to solve such problems is “reason”, delivered with the brash certainty of loudmouthed adolescence.
Would You Give a Guy a Foot Massage?
I almost did a spit-take when I saw that above the byline of my old friend Mary Elizabeth Williams. Is she actually going to take a strong stance in opposition to the progressive outing mafia, I wondered?
My surge of optimism was short-lived, as the column turned out to fit the usual MEW template: on the one hand, on the other, possibly this, maybe that, views differ, gosh, who can say. Hell, the headlines are probably written by SEO copywriters rather than the columnists anyway, so maybe I can’t even give her credit for that.
But since she (or some staff monkey) asked, I’ll answer: no. No, the fact that you’ve paid money to see Travolta play various fictional characters in movies does not buy you access to the details of his private life. The same applies to any celebrity, for that matter. You don’t have the right to press-gang him or anyone else you suspect of being closeted, with or without good reason, into service in the It Gets Better navy. I mean, what, he’s not important enough as an individual to allow him control over how he presents his own public identity, but he’s nonetheless individually valuable to the gay liberation movement because his coming out would mean the world to, uh… some confused, small-town teenager who just happens to be a rabid Welcome Back, Kotter fan? How does that work? Is there a specific quota of out-and-proud celebrities that we’re aiming for, at which point the homophobes will realize they’re outnumbered and surrender?
It’s amusingly ironic, given as how bullying has been such a recent cause célèbre among the same social-media set, but at what point do shitbags like Louis Peltzman achieve self-awareness and realize that they aren’t any better, no matter how noble the ostensible cause?
For Here There Is No Place Which Does Not See You/The World Is Too Much With Us
A decade ago, the internet’s signature feature was obfuscation. You could invent a new identity; embellish your life to make it that much more interesting; buff out the imperfections; or just hide without feeling like an anti-social creep for it. Message boards, chat rooms, and nascent blogs, all depended on a technology-induced veil, a curtain that shielded online actions. What you saw was what people had selectively chosen as representations of themselves. Sometimes, though, information flowed in the opposite direction. Insider-y knowledge that had previously been the mark of real-life, earned inclusion in a community now could be readily acquired online. The internet was an unstable space; it allowed us the ability to endlessly manipulate who we were and what we knew.
…And that was just it: Instead of the internet working against our real lives in provocative ways, it became an extension of them. The looking glass was now a mirror; instead of reinventing us, the web simply provided more of us to the world, and more ways to take advantage of the world around us. We speak of Yelping and checking in on 4Square as if these were activities, when they are simply the day-to-day cataloguing of our lives—or, even worse, a grimly detached version of modern life in which we aspire to be ourselves. Mediation presents itself as a friendly tool when in fact it creates distance between us and the ordinary.
…Instead of remaking the world, the web is an excuse for more of it at its most mundane. The remarkably lo-fi act of using a smartphone to scan a take-out place’s tattered “Like Us!” print-out, hanging in the window, fading, and possibly torn around the corners, could not be more bound up in the material world—and everything that is utterly forgettable about it. For every artful employment of Twitter or Instagram, there are exponentially more folks using these applications, and of course Facebook, to amass digital waste in way the physical world simply does not allow for.
…But the extent to which this stream of endless disclosures of what we’re doing, where we’re eating, what we’re listening to exposes, even revels in, the ordinariness of our lives places us far, far from the days of obsessing over what specific music or movies to list in our social media profiles circa 2002. Instead of self-creation cooked up behind the veil, we’re absolutely laid bare without even realizing it. Even as Tumblr and Pinterest turn curation into a commodity, Facebook and Twitter continue to rule the day. We can’t change who we are. Maybe the best we can hope for now is to keep our exposure limited to what it might have been before all this social media junk got started. Not because we’re so interesting or petrifying, but because the endless drivel of the ordinary is never flattering.
The Leap of Reason Produces Monsters
In my post below in regards to Sam Harris’ recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I’ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets at my primary issue. When individuals are reasoning alone they often have a high degree of uncertainty as to their conclusions. But when individuals are reasoning together they seem to converge very rapidly and with great confidence upon a particular position. What’s going on here? In the second case it isn’t reason at all, but our natural human predisposition toward group conformity.
…This is not to say that reason and rationality are not without utility. These are humanity’s great cognitive jewels. But great tools can be used to various ends, and true reason and rationality are very difficult. Mathematics for example is undoubtedly true rationality, with crisp and precise inferences being derivable. But most other intellectual structures are not so clearly self-evident as mathematics. Verbal logic and reasoning are riddled with the pitfalls of cognitive bias. Because most people share the same systematic biases it is very difficult for groups of individuals engaging in self-reinforcing masturbatory ‘rationality’ discourses to perhaps step back and wonder about their motivated reasoning.
When people try to “reason” with those they disagree with it is rarely a matter of convincing them that 1 + 1 = 2, rather than 1 + 1 = -2. Rather, their arguments tend to be embedded in a complex chain of propositions, with unspoken assumptions. You, as the reasonable person have axioms which aren’t out on the table, and these axioms may not be shared by the person whom you are trying to convince. Additionally, the chain of propositions may not be quite so clear across the two individuals. The most extreme skepticism of reason comes from those who we might term as “post modernists,” but even though this extremism is folly we do need to keep in mind that skepticism of truth claims are often rooted in the genuine malleability of interpretation. If the heuristics & biases literature does not ring a bell with you, and you do not have Asperger, I strongly suspect you’ve been engaging in motivated reasoning without even reflecting upon it. The main issue I have with Sam Harris (and many self-described rationalists) is that I think they underestimate the herculean task which true rationalism really is. It may not even be possible to construct a mathematics of morality, and we certainly aren’t close. In everyday discourse, even the highest levels, it is passion which has reason on the leash. And I do not even see this as problematic necessarily, for reason is a tool toward particular ends, which passion may define.
Speaking of which, what’s the progressive atheist community banging on about today?
Tear it all down.
They’ve built cages for themselves and their children, and have beliefs that harm others. I can see that they’re quivering in fear at the modernists, the liberals, the gays, the atheists, all coming to expose their ‘worldview’ for the rickety tissue of lies and hate that it is, and I say…no mercy. No hesitation. No apologies. Break it apart, and set those people free.
Pointing and laughing is just one step in the process of liberating those Christians trapped in their prison of lies. I can feel pity for them, while I let reality crash into their delusions and send them scurrying. They fear change, but they must change.
Snort. I wonder if he stands around practicing his best hand-in-coat Napoleon pose in preparation for that glorious day.
The contentious issue for me isn’t over whether public school curricula should cater to evangelical sensibilities, obviously. It’s the blithe way that ordinary opposition to such efforts shades into this kind of pomposity and bombast. Whether I agree with the general impulses or not, I have no patience with the useless, self-congratulatory theatrics, or the malignant snarkomas that riddle the insular discourse among the commentariat. Reassuring yourself that the enemy “must” change in the face of your inexorable laws of social progress, when the whole history of humankind suggests that ignorance is far more resilient and deep-rooted than that, does nothing but inflate your own self-importance, especially when performing for the rest of the in-group. Are you actually trying to write something challenging and enlightening, or are you just playing to the groundlings?
Your Culture Will Adapt to Service Us. Resistance Is Futile.
We all know them: the conscientious objectors of the digital age. Social media refusers and rejecters—the folks who take a principled stance against joining particular social media sites and the folks who, with a triumphant air, announce that they have abandoned social media and deactivated their accounts. Given the increasing ubiquity social media and mobile communications technologies, voluntary social media non-users are made increasingly apparent (though, of course, not all non-users are voluntarily disconnected—surely some non-use comes from a lack of skill or resources).
The question of why certain people (let’s call them “Turkle-ites”) are so adverse to new forms of technologically-mediated communication—what Zeynep Tufekci termed “cyberasociality”—still hasn’t been sufficiently addressed by researchers. This is important because abstaining from social media has significant social costs, including not being invited to or being to access to events, loss of cultural capital gained by performing in high-visibility environments, and a sense of feeling disconnected from peers because one is not experiencing the world in the same way. Here, however, what I want to address here isn’t so much what motivates certain people to avoid smartphones, social media, and other new forms of communication; rather, I want to consider the more fundamental question of whether it is actually possible to live separate from these technologies any longer. Is it really possible to opt out of social media? I conclude that social media is a non-optional system that shapes and is shaped by non-users.
Technically, Social media is optional. No laws or formal rules require that we participate. As seen in the example above, however, there is a strong social cost to abstention. As an integral aspect of everyday life, social media is increasingly difficult to opt out of. P.J. Rey points this out in his recent discussion of Facebook exploitation. Here, I want to explore why and how this is the case.
Contemporary social interaction takes place in both physical and digital spaces. The social media abstainer therefore necessarily “misses out” on some of this interaction. From the example above, we see that abstainers miss more than just the latest gossip. Indeed, they seem to “miss out” on full social integration. This latter kind of missing out threatens a deeply ingrained human need for sociality, making the costs of social media abstention quite steep. To abstain from social media is to largely and (sometimes) voluntarily dis-integrate the self from the social collective.
You know, there are still substantial numbers of people who manage to find life worth living without a strong social media presence; it’s just that tech-savvy media junkies tend to only recognize the existence of other tech-savvy media junkies. The rest of us are essentially flyover country on two legs as far as they’re concerned. Still, I’ve been dreading the day when they look up from their toy phones long enough to wonder about us. It won’t be long before amazed curiosity turns into something more sinis—oh, yeah? That was fast.
It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?
The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).
But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.
I’m so old, I remember when the Internet was the escapist alternative to the herd mentality of small-town busybodies. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I Am a Berliner
Well, this is interesting. I just finished reading Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin the other day. I just quoted from it yesterday. And here he is being interviewed about it:
IL: Yes, they are. But back to Berlin. You say that he was highly sceptical about the Aristotelian idea that people are “political animals”. Is it possible nowadays not to be a political animal? How possible is it to stay out of it all?
MI: One of the freedoms that Isaiah valued, which is not very popular, was the freedom not to be a political animal. The luxury of a truly free society is that political involvement is a choice, not an obligation.
IL: That may be true regarding active political involvement, but there is also the argument that you may not be interested in politics…
MI: …but that politics may take an interest in you. Oh, sure, sure. And he understood that. He understood that the freedom to be disengaged was possible only in societies like the British one in which he lived in for most of his life. Whereas there are other societies where politics taps you on the shoulder or knocks on your door and can carry you away. In that case, involvement becomes compulsory, in the sense that it’s a matter of your survival and your dignity. He understood that. But a good society, I think, is a society where politics leaves you alone and where you choose to get involved or not. I think he was right to say that there are a lot of things that shouldn’t be politicized. Healthy societies are societies that don’t politicize everything. You choose the best judge, not the politically well-placed judge; you choose the best director of the orchestra, not the one with the best political friends; you choose the best editor for a magazine, not the one who has political connections. If everything is politicized, then everything becomes a zero sum game between those who are in and those who are out. Smart societies just don’t do that because it means you don’t get the best people.
That reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the book:
A second conflict of values—between privacy and participation—ensued. Against the weight of the whole republican tradition, which had always made political participation and citizenship the redeeming arena of human life, Berlin tacitly defended political quietism, or at least the liberty of those who wanted to keep out of politics. He was highly sceptical, therefore, about the idea held since Aristotle that men were ‘political animals’. The desire to participate was simply the desire to be recognised by one’s own group, and the desire to belong. There was no reason to suppose that participation, the exercise of citizenship, improved human character. Politics was an inescapable element of human affairs, he argued, simply because human goals were in conflict. Politics was not an emancipatory activity, merely a necessary one.
This Little Prig Went to Market, This Little Prig Stayed Home
As a gay guy, I couldn’t care less what a bigoted poultry mogul thinks about me and my romantic life, and I don’t believe that the stakes of the “to eat or not to eat” question are all that high. Moreover, in an era in which gay visibility is no longer lacking, the political point of a “kiss-in” is lost on me—what do you want, a cheer of approval from the teenager working the drive-through window who very likely supports you anyway? And now it’s Starbucks Appreciation Day (excuse me, rebranded to: “National Marriage Equality Day”), and I’m supposed to drink burnt coffee and otherwise patronize businesses who do approve of me. When did fighting for civil rights get delegated to my debit card?
A few things up front: I think it’s fine to boycott Chick-fil-A or any other company if doing so makes you feel good. But given that the only probable result is a savvy PR calibration and miniscule impact on the bottom-line, let’s remember that boycotts rarely carry more than symbolic weight.
…As Alexandra Chasin explores in her book Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, one of the more troubling trends of the 20th century was the recasting of political rights as economic freedom of choice—call it shopping as activism. Chasin points out that not only is this vision of social struggle lazy (not to mention exclusionary to poor people), but that it also “accepts the premise that the market can and should both shape and enact social policy, as well as the assumption that the market will lead toward increasingly moral social policy.”
It sure is refreshing to see an example of well-reasoned sanity for a change. Maybe this will convince some people to take a deep breath an—ERMAHGERD PAPA JOHN’S YR DEAD TO ME NOW.
Streets on Fire, the Mob Goes Wild, Wild, Wild
I want to issue an apology and a goodbye to many frequent commenters, who I consider my intellectual mentors. Comments are now turned off on the blog. Many will see this as a cowardly move, as censorship, and so on. It is precisely these kinds of irrational reactions that I am no longer tolerating. (I predict Facebook commenters will have a field day as they usually do) As someone with too much to read and write, on already very difficult topics, I cannot keep having to clarify views that I’m usually putting in the clearest way I can.
It is difficult to overlook the role that blog comments play in all this. Having a blog and building a large community of readers can destroy a person’s intellectual integrity—as appears to have happened in the case of PZ Myers. Many people who read his blog come away convinced that I am a racist who advocates the widespread use of torture and a nuclear first strike against the entire Muslim world. The most despicable claims about me appear in the comment thread, of course, but Myers is responsible for publishing them. And so I hold him responsible for circulating and amplifying some of the worst distortions of my views found on the Internet.
Incidentally, readers often ask why I haven’t enabled comments on my own blog, since they build a sense of community and generate traffic. Needless to say, I know that I have many smart and knowledgeable readers who have valuable insights to share on any topic I’m likely to touch. My reasons for not enabling comments are essentially the same as those given by Seth Godin on his blog. You can read his justification here. I also can’t spare the time to read hundreds of comments in an effort to determine whether they would contribute, however subtly, to the problem of noise and defamation that has now sucked me into its vortex. This is not to say that I don’t care what my readers think. As you can see, I do. And I do my best to read your emails. But generally speaking, I’m at the limits of my bandwidth and have to draw the line somewhere.
PZ:
I’ve been getting a little exasperated lately — Pharyngula is a relatively lawless place, which is good for getting combative, aggressive discussions going, but not so good when discussions spin off into frustratingly ingrown fussing and howling and pointless boundary-pushing. This is my party, I’ll have you know, and there have been way too many times when I have not been enjoying it. So I’m changing a few things. There will be new rules. There will be new means of enforcement.
Have I mentioned lately how much I appreciate you thoughtful, considerate bastards for never causing me these sorts of headaches?
Ethical Concrete
Is it just religious believers who look for ethical concrete?
Not at all, secularists often do too. There is, for example, an increasingly fashionable claim that science will decide which values are good and which are bad. I’m as critical of the false certainties of a morality rooted in science as I am of the false certainties of a divinely sanctified moral code. The desire to set moral values in ethical concrete is a yearning for moral certainty – a fear that without external authority, humans will fall into the morass of moral relativism. But there can be no getting away from the fact that as humans we have to stand on our own feet, think for ourselves, create our values and practices, and bear responsibility for them.
Isaiah Berlin felt similarly about his political principles:
Indeed, the only defence he offered of liberty’s priority in politics was in terms of pluralism. If values were in conflict, then liberty’s priority was procedural. A regime of negative freedom was the best guarantee of the public discussion of choices that a free social life required. But this left the justification of liberty trapped in a circle: freedom was required to make freedom possible. He never professed to be bothered by his own failure to ground the defence of liberty on ultimate principles. He tartly suggested that secular rationalists who sought unassailable guarantees for political principles were succumbing, without realising it, to nostalgia for the kinds of consolations once offered by religious faith. Berlin dismissed the very idea of seeking ultimate guarantees at all. “Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed.”
How Bruised Their Buddhism Has Become
Some see an irony in Buddhist monks aligning themselves so closely with a government that resists accountability for humanitarian abuses. But the greater irony is that, in protecting and preserving their particular form of Buddhism, the Sinhalese seem to have injured it gravely. The sangha’s preoccupation with politics has come at the cost of spiritual focus. Most monks in Sri Lanka no longer meditate, which is supposed to be Buddhism’s core. Some Western Buddhists have gone on missionary trips to Sri Lanka to revive meditational practice. But success has been fleeting.
There has also been a breakdown in monastic discipline. Last February, a monk was sentenced to death for murder — the first monk so sentenced since Talduwe Somarama killed Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1959 after he reneged on the full implementation of a Buddhist nationalist agenda. Over the last decade, there have been nearly 100 cases in which Buddhist monks have been charged with sexual abuse of minors, and many instances of monks, particularly young ones, being cited for public intoxication and hooliganism. The fundamentalist idea that Buddhism is a unique national possession has encouraged a sense of moral superiority, which makes it hard for many Sinhalese to accept how bruised their Buddhism has become. As one prominent lay Buddhist painfully (and discreetly) explained to me more than twenty years ago, “Buddhism is hollow now in Sri Lanka. We are only going through the motions.” Today, those motions are growing ever more disturbing.
Sri Lanka’s toxic identity politics are not altogether unique, especially in other Theravada Buddhist nations. Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, for example, provided a similar rallying point against British colonialism. But the conflation of “the land, the race, and the faith” among the majority there, along with a view that this majority is the steward of its own uniquely pure form of Buddhism, has been a great source of political and cultural disharmony with the country’s many non-Buddhist minority groups, most recently the Rohingya Muslims. Although Buddhism might eschew violence on a doctrinal level, it is not immune from nationalist myths that see a place for it.
This reminded me of a book I read about a couple years ago that touched on similar themes:
Since my initial realization in 2004, I began to look critically at my earlier perspective on Buddhism—one that shielded an extensive and historical dimension to Buddhist traditions: violence. Armed Buddhist monks in Thailand are not an exception to the rule; they are contemporary examples of a long historical precedence. For centuries monks have been at the helm, or armed in the ranks, of wars. How could this be the case? But more importantly, why did I (and many others) hold the belief that Buddhism=Peace (and that other religions, such as Islam, are more prone to violence)?
It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.
…Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence… In a way, I wish I could return to that dream of Buddhist traditions as a purely peaceful, benevolent religion that lacks mortal failures and shortcomings. But I cannot. It is, ultimately, a selfish dream and it hurts other people in the process.
I showed that article to a sorta-Buddhist friend of mine, who responded:
I wonder if they actually make the intellectual leap that it is both. That although they strive to escape from humanity, an inherent form of enlightenment — the bodhisattva who chooses to remain on earth and protect those still seeking release — in fact, possibly the most important tenet of all, true compassion that results in a selflessness in service to the universal self of humanity is the heart of Buddhism and the heart of their protection of their temples, their forests, this world of illusion that is, nonetheless, the world.
The monks are not on a violent rampage, but using guns as a modern tool — not just trying kung fu or tae kwon do — for the goals they have always had: strength, peace, and being left alone. I do think he does a disservice if he relegates the monks to the level of the “rest of us” and doesn’t examine their use of the violence — is he suggesting they are no different than the drug thug or gang killer?
Context certainly does matter. But I would still suggest that being invested in “Buddhism” as a transcendant ideal, as an identity, to the point of feeling defensive and attempting to rationalize discrepancies away, is itself a form of maya. If a Buddhist writer provides a useful insight to you, that insight isn’t diminished by the actions of someone else in the world who also identifies as a Buddhist. The point is to outgrow such conceptual boundaries, not to purify or reinforce them.
A Truth That’s Told With Bad Intent Beats All the Lies You Can Invent
Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Practical Reason, famously said that if a man fleeing for his life came to our house for refuge, and his would-be murderer appeared shortly afterward to ask if we knew where he was, it would be a crime for us to lie to him. You can subject yourself to Kant’s notoriously leaden prose if you want to understand his reasoning in all its detail, but the gist of it is that lying to another person violates their autonomy as a uniquely rational agent. It treats them instrumentally, robbing them of their intrinsic dignity as a moral actor by using them as means to an end that they did not rationally choose.
It just goes to remind you that making a fetish out of abstract principles, even one as seemingly unobjectionable as rationality, can lead you to absurdly stupid conclusions. I would argue that autonomy and dignity actually entail never being able to offload the burden of moral choice. Seeking to submit to some preordained “universal” truth is seeking an excuse to avoid making difficult decisions anymore. God/Absolute Reason said it, I believe it, that settles it. But like an ethical version of rock, paper, scissors, no single virtue trumps all the others at all times. Consider the context and use your judgment.
Anyway, Kant said that over 200 years ago; surely, we know better now?
I present to you: Sam Harris.
But what could be wrong with truly ‘white’ lies? First, they are still lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding — these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
And while we imagine that we tell certain lies out of compassion for others, it is rarely difficult to spot the damage we do in the process. By lying, we deny our friends access to reality — and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information. Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.
…To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us. The temptation to do this is often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior. Often, there are good reasons why they would.
…Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make — and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
Sam Harris, for instance, looks forward in his book The Moral Landscape to the day that governments and corporations will be able to use brain scanning technology to detect whether people are lying, thereby creating ‘zones of obligatory candour’ and enabling an entirely truthful public life. ‘Thereafter, civilized men and women might share a common presumption’, he writes, ‘that whenever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored.’ This, Harris suggests, would no more be a deprivation of freedom than currently it is to be denied ‘the right to remove our pants in the supermarket.’ Perhaps we should equally say that the attempt by governments to snoop on our emails or to introduce random stop and search procedures on the streets is no more a deprivation of freedom the right to remove our pants in the supermarket.
Harris dismisses the criticism that using compulsory brain scans in the courtroom would be an infringement of the Fifth Amendment which protects an individual against self-incrimination. ‘Prohibition against compelled testimony’, he writes, ‘appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age’ in which it was ‘believed that lying under oath would damn a person’s soul for eternity’. This is an odd view of moral and political history. Protection against compelled testimony is, in fact, an Enlightenment concept, a product of the liberal defence of individual autonomy against the power of the state. Harris’ insistence on enforced truthfulness is, on the other hand, far closer to the premodern and religious belief that authority should take precedence over individual freedom.
All this reveals the fundamental problems of a ‘top down’ view of morality, whether religious or scientific. Top-down moralists look upon morality as a means of imposing rules and regulations so as to produce correct behaviours as defined by some external standard. I, on the other hand, regard morality more in terms of a social conversation through which we collectively define the conditions for human flourishing.
Association Fallacy
I didn’t find much objectionable in Ian Murphy’s article, at least once I got past the subheading:
Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff, thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists.
To be fair, maybe an editor inserted that line. Okay, now that I’ve been fair; regardless of who wrote it, what kind of a twit starts off an article bemoaning faulty thinking with such a logical howler? Vanquishing a tribal desert god doesn’t entail inheriting that fabled omniscience.
The only thing that reasonably follows from a profession of atheism is the assumption that here, we have a person who either successfully coped with the loss of a psychological center of gravity that often accompanies breaking the emotional and cultural bonds of faith, or one who was never raised to consider religious belief an essential piece of personal identity to begin with. Atheism doesn’t actually require Herculean feats of logic, and as such, says nothing meaningful about one’s imperviousness to “lesser” irrationalities like pride, fear, anger, or groupthink.
The Man Who Wasn’t There
“We engage in all sorts of behavior to avoid others, pretending to be busy, checking phones, rummaging through bags, looking past people or falling asleep. Sometimes we even don a ‘don’t bother me face’ or what’s known as the ‘hate stare’.”
- Avoid eye contact with other people
- Sit on the aisle seat and turn on your iPod so you can pretend you can’t hear people asking for the window seat
- Look out the window with a blank stare to look crazy
- Pretend to be asleep
“Ultimately this nonsocial behavior is due to the many frustrations of sharing a small public space together for a lengthy amount of time,” concluded Kim. “Yet this deliberate disengagement is a calculated social action, which is part of a wider culture of social isolation in public spaces.”
Apparently this is common behavior on a bus. Oh, but I’m the weirdo for doing those things everywhere I go?
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