I have emptied truckloads of scorn into the intersection where social media absorption, moral posturing and “the personal is political” narcissism all meet, and so I’m always cheered to discover that better minds than my own had already arrived independently at similar conclusions and voiced them more eloquently, as was the case while I finished reading Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion last night. But rather than try to excerpt all the good parts in this case, I will instead urge you to read what he has to say, starting with the section entitled “Poking Kierkegaard” on page 184 and finishing at the end of “Killing the Slacktivist In You” on page 191. Go on, now, it’s good stuff. There may be a test later.
tribalism
You Say You Want a Revolution, Well, You Know…
And as with most anti-religious ideologies Atheism+ espouses “critical thinking and skepticism.” This didn’t seem to work out too well for Objectivism, and I wish Atheism+ (or New Atheism, or whatever) would really just get off it, because there are some things that are obviously not going to be subject to critique or skepticism. If you do subject those things to critique, you’ll probably be called a “douchebag.” Atheism+, like many of the new atheist movements, seems to be attempting to generate a “thick” system of values to supplement spare anti-religious sentiment. Those values, norms, are outside of the process of critical rationalism. It’s pretty obvious if you are outside of those values, but not so obvious if you’re within those values.
Finally, going back to some of the Greek city-states, Mozi in China, and down to the early modern period with the French Revolution and the assorted Left and Right “political religions” (Marxist-Leninism and Fascism), there have been plenty of attempts to jettison what visionary great minds perceived to be “garbage.” The truth seems to be that one man’s garbage is another man’s fertilizer. Remove the fertilizer and sometimes the flowers don’t grow. Reduction and reconstitution is great in science. I’m not sure that it’s so great as a philosophy of life.
Yep. The part about Objectivism made me think of Jerome Tuccille’s classic book It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, his hilarious account of life among the libertarian movement from the mid-fifties to the early seventies. Of course, the FTB crowd would prima facie reject any underlying similarities between themselves and libertarians, but, you know, the perennial psychological themes and group dynamics Tuccille describes would look incredibly familiar to those of us who have been staring in amused amazement, or amazed amusement, at the glorious clusterfuck of atheism, New Left identity politics and intersectionality that calls itself Atheism+. I remember one part, later in the book, where he is rapidly approaching wit’s end while organizing a conference:
“Lop off the fringes and keep a good, purist libertarian center. We can’t accept any deviationists and we don’t need any crazies. Let everybody else keep the crazies. We’ll build a good, solid, quality movement.”
You can’t lop off the fringes, Murray. You can’t drive the crazies away because everybody is crazy. If we polarize all the deviationists, there won’t be anyone left in the goddamn center!
…Leave me alone, I don’t want to hear about it. Now I know why Lenin needed his Cheka. That’s what we need now more than anything else, a libertarian Cheka. A secret police to take care of all the goddamn deviationists.
I’m optimistic that we might see one of those yet! I mean, it took several years of the French Revolution before Robespierre got dragged to the guillotine, but Atheism+ has only existed for, what, two or three weeks?—and they’re already trying to disappear Richard Dawkins for going off-message! This digital age, man—everything happens so fast, there’s hardly any time to enjoy history in the making.
Titanomachy
Where do we go from here? I honestly don’t know. I don’t think Richard Dawkins should be blacklisted or any such thing. I do know that I’m probably less likely to buy his books or to watch his speeches than I was before, and I’m certainly less likely to recommend them to people who aren’t familiar with atheism. I’d like to see him enlightened, but I think it serves little purpose to attack him. Our time would be more constructively served by finding and promoting people who are better suited to be the public face of the atheist movement.
We’re not going to blacklist him, we’re just going to quarantine him behind a wall of silence and speak of him, if we absolutely must, only in the past tense, like parents who tell strangers that their rebellious black sheep of a son actually died fighting nobly on a far-off battlefield. Ahahaha. It’s almost like Dawkins’ strict adherence to science and atheism blinded him to the oblique truth to be found in, oh, the irony, mythology. Honestly, you can’t script this kind of entertainment.
You know, though, if there were one principle that you would think atheists and rationalists might be uniquely suited to defend, it would be the imperative to discuss ideas on their own merits in specific contexts, to refuse to countenance the underhandedness of ad hominem dismissals of an argument. If Dawkins is indeed a sexist dickhead, that would present a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that, unlike the conventional, irrational attitude which treats heretical opinions as contagions which will infect anyone foolish enough to engage with them, we are calm and composed enough to separate the grain from the chaff in his writings, rather than cast it all aside in the vain search for ideological purity. “Here’s a good book about atheism by Richard Dawkins. Yeah, he’s got some stupid opinions about feminism, but that’s irrelevant in this context. Just read the arguments he makes here.” What’s so hard about that?
Nothing—unless you’re trying to build a brand. And as any marketers and advertisers are happy to tell you, perceptions and slick PR are what matter, not truth. No doubt, the A-plussers are telling themselves that unlike every other would-be revolutionary group that has sought power and influence, they’ll never compromise their principles in the process. It may be a moot point, of course—time will tell if they come out of their ideological purification rituals intact, or if they end up, like in Monty Python, as a bunch of competing Popular Fronts of atheism consisting of one or two members apiece. But if they’re that eager to jettison Dawkins for inconveniencing their rebranding efforts, you can expect many more such sacrificial measures, should they actually achieve their goal of becoming a viable force in American society.
Children Having Their Fun With the Blues
My girlfriend, who retains the fetchingly innocent idea that music is something fun to enjoy, rather than an ultra-serious badge of tribal identification, likes Nickelback’s music and isn’t afraid to say so. While out driving over the weekend, she was grooving in her seat to the Black Keys song “Gold on the Ceiling“. I smiled at the thought that possibly, at that very moment, Patrick Carney’s face screwed up in a grimace of pain as he felt a discordant jangling in his hipster soul, as if a goose with Top 40 taste had just walked over his grave:
“Rock & roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world,” he says, blowing cigarette smoke out the window of his rented East Village loft a few days before the band heads to L.A. “So they became OK with the idea that the biggest rock band in the world is always going to be shit – therefore you should never try to be the biggest rock band in the world. Fuck that! Rock & roll is the music I feel the most passionately about, and I don’t like to see it fucking ruined and spoon-fed down our throats in this watered-down, post-grunge crap, horrendous shit. When people start lumping us into that kind of shit, it’s like, ‘Fuck you,’ honestly.”
I too will declare my undying love for rock ‘n’ roll, but, dude, duude, come on. Relax that sphincter and let’s be honest—you’re not presenting any sort of artistic innovation or revolutionary vision of an alternative to modern consumer capitalism. The social consciousness of rock music, such as it is, tends to cling halfheartedly to trite hippie clichés, but you guys, having licensed over 300 songs to TV shows and commercials, movies, and video games, don’t even make that feeble gesture. Which is fine, of course, but I’m not sure how you justify opposing your music so violently to another band’s. They sound like a typical post-grunge band, which is bad, but you guys sound like, uh, a couple of pasty Midwestern college dropouts trying mightily to sound like grizzled old black bluesmen, which is… what, oozing sincerity and authenticity?
Rhythm and melody are not deep repositories of moral significance, my man; they’ll sluttishly tickle the eardrums of anyone without regard to class or taste and sidle up coquettishly to the status quo and the avant-garde alike. Take a deep breath and accept your status as just another couple of entertainers with a handful of good songs. Your Fostex 4-track will not get you into heaven.
Hitch 13:23
One of the joys of atheism’s outlets on the internet was that they were clever, deft, funny, tolerant and irreverent. It was certainly robust and not for the faint-hearted.
Those of us who do not wish to extend our atheism into someone else’s definition of progressive politics may take rather unkindly to being described as immoral scum, useful but unsavoury body parts, and outdated contraceptive devices. In the week when American atheism made its appearance in the Economist’s editorial pages, it seems to have been sowing the seeds of that most religious of events – a schism.
If only a great prophet had arisen among them…
I remember countless meetings where the idea was “one more plank.” And the problem is that this is what Freud called the narcissism of the small difference. People will always try to concentrate on themselves. Well, you can go to a meeting where someone says, “The meeting doesn’t stop till we discuss the question not just of Cherokee lesbians, but Cherokee lesbians who have to take an outsized garment label.” It’s barely an exaggeration. There will always be someone who wants it all to be about them. So what was for a moment something that was social, general, collective, educational, and a matter of solidarity can be very quickly dissolved into petty factionalism. Therefore, coalition-building is reassembling something out of fragments that needn’t have been fragmented in the first place.
(cf.)
The Joy of Violent Movement Pulls You Under (Slight Return)
I really think you lot need to be a bit clearer about what the emotional content of your atheism is. You are the ones who claim to be acting on a mere lack, on a non-belief, but as absences go, contemporary atheism doesn’t half seem to involve some strong feelings. It isn’t all reading Lucretius, or thinking about the many forms most beautiful. For many of you, the point of atheism appears to be not the non-relationship with God but a live and hostile relationship with believers. It isn’t enough that you yourselves don’t believe: atheism permits a delicious self-righteous anger at those who do. The very existence of religion seems to be an affront, a liberty being taken, a scab you can’t help picking. People who don’t like stamp-collecting don’t have a special magazine called The Anti-Philatelist. But you do. You do the equivalent of hanging about in front of Stanley Gibbons to orate about the detestability of phosphor bands and perforations. The Belief section of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site – where you’d think that it wouldn’t be that surprising to find discussion of, you know, belief – is inhabited almost entirely by commenters waiting for someone to have the temerity to express a religious sentiment, whereupon they can be sprayed with scorn at fire-extinguisher pressure. It’s as if there is some transgressive little ripple of satisfaction which can only be obtained by uttering the words “sky fairy” or “zombie rabbi” where a real live Christian might hear them.
Jerry Coyne asks if we think this is accurate. I do, yeah. I’ve said recently, and will repeat here, that you see all the exact same group dynamics at play in a comment thread full of atheists as you do anywhere else on the Internet. A bunch of assholes, full of self-righteousness, snarking at their enemies and patting each other on the back for being so clever. It only seems different when you’re emotionally invested in it. Having the crest of Reason & Rationality emblazoned on your flag doesn’t change the fact that you are, well, just another group of people rallying around a flag and behaving accordingly.
It will be pointed out, rightly, that religion is hardly a quiet, private hobby like stamp collecting, and as such, it’s to be expected that people will have strong, normative opinions about it. And no doubt, people who act like assholes during religious arguments will tell themselves and others that the importance of the cause compels them to forego politeness. But though it may be a common conceit to believe otherwise, most of what people do on the Internet is not valuable. You’re not changing the world by commenting on blogs; you’re just hanging out with your friends. Your sarcastic jokes and remarks aren’t cumulatively adding up to progressive social change; you’re just showing off to win praise from the rest of the group. Pointing and denouncing might feel satisfying, but they’re not the same thing as activism. You’re just one more insignificant individual who takes pleasure from feeling justified in being mean and causing pain to someone from the out-group, especially if it raises your own status.
The striving for distinction keeps a constant eye on the next man and wants to know what his feelings are, but the empathy which this drive requires for its gratification is far from being harmless or sympathetic or kind. We want, rather, to perceive or divine how the next man outwardly or inwardly suffers from us, how he loses control over himself and surrenders to the impressions our hand or merely the sight of us makes upon him; and even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated him or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.
— Nietzsche
In other words, it can make us feel powerful to be even a little mean. The need to feel powerful is so ingrained in us that even professions of humility can become subtle means of self-promotion (“I’m less interested in one-upsmanship than you are”, as Alan Watts said). And even those of us who genuinely want to spread joy and benevolence get an ego-charge out of exerting a powerful effect on another person, on winning their admiration, on inspiring awe (or even a little fear), on mattering in an undeniable way. Most of what we do on blogs is a way of convincing ourselves and others that we matter, of elevating ourselves, and a quick and easy way to get that assurance is to knock someone else down.
Yes, yes, I know, of course they deserve it. You just might want to take note of the fact that almost everyone who acts hatefully or aggressively toward another claims that they’re only doing it for a higher cause, or in order to defend themselves or someone weaker. It seems to be a deeper truth about human psychology, no matter what the intellectual rationalizations—it doesn’t take much to get people to choose sides and start throwing rocks and making raids on the enemy’s territory. The hats and armbands and fight songs may change, but from a slightly removed vantage point, all of human history has been nothing but an increasingly sophisticated story of rock-throwing and territory-raiding. And no, I don’t believe that being an atheist means that we are somehow more aware of our subconscious, preverbal instincts and thus better able to keep them from taking us over—if anything, the smug satisfaction we take in our special status makes us complacent against them. Nor do I believe that those lizard brain urges, like the fabled dictatorship of the proletariat, will fade away once we’ve completely eliminated our enemies and achieved a mythical state of perfection.
A Crude Political Propriety-Meter
Robert Hughes’s death earlier this month prompted me to revisit his book Culture of Complaint, recommended to me by my friend Arthur as a criticism of political correctness/obsessiveness from a non-right-wing perspective. Among many good parts, this stood out to me:
These backward habits of judging writers in terms of their presumed ability to improve social consciousness may be tough luck for snobbish Proust and depressive Leopardi, for Henry James the closet case and Montaigne the son of bourgeois privilege. But they are even tougher for the students, who come away with the impression that the correct response to a text is to run a crude political propriety-meter over it and then let fly with a wad of stereotyped moralizing. “Boy, Professor Peach really did a job of unmasking the hierarchical assumptions in Dante last week, all those circles and stuff, you shoulda been there.”
Politics ought not be all-pervasive. Indeed, one of the first conditions of freedom is to discover the line beyond which politics may not go, and literature is one of the means by which the young (and the old) find this out. Some works of art have an overt political content; many carry subliminal political messages, embedded in their framework. But it is remarkably naive to suppose that these messages exhaust the content of the art as art, or ultimately determine its value. Why, then, the fashion for judging art in political terms? Probably, people teach it because it is easy to teach. It revives the illusion that works of art carry social meaning the way trucks carry coal. It divides the sprawling republic of literature neatly into goodies and baddies, and relives the student of the burden of imaginative empathy, the difficulties of aesthetic discrimination. It enables these scholars, with their tin ears, schematized minds and tapioca prose, to henpeck dead writers for their lack of conformity to the current fashions in “oppression studies”—and to fool themselves and their equally nostalgic colleagues into thinking that they are all on the barricades.
Luke 11:23
Ahahaha. For once, the comment thread is absolutely the best part.
Tally Whackers
I’m referring to the list’s gender breakdown. If I’m not mistaken, there are just 23 records by women artists in the top 200, and only two in the top 50. And that’s a generous count, making room for co-ed acts like The xx, Beach House, and Portishead. Again, we can look to the self-selecting voting base. According to Pitchfork’s own stats, 88% of the poll respondents were men. “The Dudes’ List” might have been a more accurate title.
Still—what the hell is wrong with these dudes? Did it escape their attention that for much of the past decade and a half, female artists have had a stranglehold on the popular music zeitgeist? Have they never heard of Missy Elliott? Can they really prefer The National to M.I.A.’s Kala, to Bjork’s Homogenic, to Joanna Newsom’s Ys? Where are politics in all of this? If you surveyed the roughly 24,600 men who submitted “People’s List” ballots, I wager you’d find nearly 100 percent espousing progressive views on gender issues. This would not be the case if you took a similar survey of pop, R&B, or country music fans—yet a “People’s List” of top recordings in those genres from 1996-2011 with a similar gender breakdown is unimaginable. The fact is, when it comes to the question of women and, um, art, the Top 40’s great unwashed—and even red state Tea Party partisans—are far more progressive and inclusive than the mountain-man-bearded, Fair Trade espresso-swilling, self-styled lefties of indiedom. Portlandia, we have a problem.
But let’s wait a moment before concluding that Pitchfork is just anti-women. After all, it’s one of the very few sites out there that gives women more bylines than men. The lack of female artists on this list seems more like a nasty symptom than the underlying illness. The survey format could be the culprit. Crowd-sourced rankings like these always average out the most interesting choices, allowing the most middle-of-the-road selections to rise to the top. (What’s up, Interpol.) So, in a way, statistics might be to blame for the blandness of the People’s List.
Pitchfork has always been an anal-retentive, numbers-driven machine. Their reviews suggest that there’s a significant gulf between an album given a 6.4 and an album given a 6.5. They draft lists compulsively, attaching stone-cold numerical rankings to albums that emerge from very different contexts. And their reviews often read like a baseball player’s stat sheet, full of record label catalogue numbers, precise recording dates, gear specs, and other obscure figures that make Pitchfork a closer cousin to Sabermetrics, than, say, Rolling Stone. Talking about music in numerical terms codes Pitchfork’s discourse as masculine. That’s not to say that women are scared off by numbers, but geeking out over numbers has long been culturally framed as a “male” activity. (Are there female stat geeks? Sure. But not a very large percentage, we’d guess.) And aside from the issue of gender, discussing music through math simply feels bloodless. In the Pitchforkian approach, music isn’t something to be enjoyed, it’s something to be catalogued. Records aren’t a source of pleasure, they’re widgets that need to be placed into vertically-descending cubbyholes.
Yes, in the Pitchforkian approach. Can you believe those philistines, reducing art and entertainment to numerical quantification, rather than understanding culture as a battle of White Penises vs. Multihued Vaginas, as all right-thinking people should? The Pitchforkian approach, as opposed to the demographically correct approach of small-minded bureaucratic bean-counters like ourselves, who would squeal with delight if iTunes would allow us to view our library as a color swatch, a pie chart, or a genitalia count so that, in the totally unlikely event that we should ever be tempted to leave some aspects of life unsullied by crude agit-prop, we could quickly be reminded of our priorities. Ooh! Maybe it could even produce a composite sketch based on the racial/sexual makeup of our libraries, so it could sit there in the sidebar and shame us with its gaze!
“Dude, your iTunes composite’s looking a little too White Broheim today! Whassup with that?”
“Aww, man, I know, but I just downloaded some John Denver and Kenny G this morning, so that threw it off. Don’t worry, I’ll add some Voices of Forgotten Worlds later to even it out!”
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.
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?
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.
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.
Birdbrains of a Feather
Should they swear off the legendary chicken sandwiches to support gay rights? Or could they eat one of the filets anyway, knowing their dollars would be but a drop in the bucket for a chain that has more than $4 billion in annual sales and donated a pittance to groups they may disagree with? I’d argue the latter — and this has nothing to do with my views on gay marriage. It’s because Chick-fil-A is a laudable organization on balance, and because I refuse to contribute to the ineffective boycott culture that’s springing up across America.
…I’m flummoxed that so many consumers are so quick these days to call for boycotts of any company that deviates from their personal or political views. For one thing, boycotts rarely cause actual pocketbook – rather than PR — damage. Most consumers don’t care enough to drive an extra mile to get the same product from someone else. And that’s especially the case for companies as large as Chick-fil-A, which has prime locations on many college campuses where there is little head-to-head competition.
But my bigger question is this: In a nation that’s as divided as ours is, do we really want our commercial lives and our political lives to be so wholly intermeshed? And is this really the kind of culture we want to create? Culture war boycotts cut both ways and are much more likely to meet with success when prosecuted by large groups of people, such as Christian activists, who are more numerous than gays and lesbians and their more activist supporters.
…From a business standpoint, some might say Cathy’s comments were imprudent if not downright dumb. But in a society that desperately needs healthy public dialogue, we must resist creating a culture where consumers sort through all their purchases (fast food and otherwise) for an underlying politics not even expressed in the nature of the product itself.
Someone somewhere on the Internet made the point already: most of the people threatening to boycott probably wouldn’t eat there in the first place; the people who do will largely shrug their shoulders and tuck in to another sandwich. More useless theater. But what exactly is it supposed to accomplish? As he says above, do you really think this is going to affect the company’s bottom line? Even if it did have a serious chance of doing that, what would be the goal? To put the chain out of business? To make it so that one less conservative Christian has political or economic clout? To convince him to see the error of his ways? To flex some muscle, make an example, send a message? Or is it just to flatter your self-righteousness and give credence to the delusion that much of what you do in your personal life matters at all in the big scheme of things?
Whether the nation is divided or not, I simply don’t want to live in a culture where everything from food to clothes to entertainment has to pass through a political filter before it can be appreciated. Politics is a regrettably-necessary evil. It’s one of the most disheartening, debasing, unrewarding activities that humans have ever invented, and it seems to be a magnet that attracts a disproportionate number of sociopaths. What kind of warped personality wants to increase its scope and presence in everyday life? Lest you think, though, that I’m simply incapable of idealism, let me assure you that I simply prefer to dream of a day when people stop treating every difference of opinion like a contagion that must be immediately quarantined and stop using economic sanctions as a loophole to reach the same results as literal censorship. I know, right? I’d like to envision a state of affairs where people realize that the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on winning whatever argument they’re having at that moment. I’m crazy like that.
Leaving aside my idiosyncratic definition of the good life, I agree that most consumer boycotts are ineffective knee-jerk reactions that rarely outlast the temper tantrum that spawned them, and I suspect that they’re quickly becoming just one more cynical means of signaling, that is, meaningless in and of themselves, only useful as a way of strengthening group identity. Sort of like any other vapid party where scenesters show up to see and be seen. No one but the most naïve still believes that this week’s boycott will actually accomplish anything, but it provides a chance to attract praise from someone important for a really dazzling outfit really stirring blog post or tweet. Dude, Arianna’s totally checking your Twitter feed out! You might be front-paging at the HuffPo next week if you play this right!
People can spend or withhold their money however they want, of course. But if you don’t want your money to end up being pocketed by conservative businessmen or invested in unpalatable companies and politicians at some point in the financial cycle, you might want to consider going off the grid, making your own clothes, and growing/hunting your own food.
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Horde
As he notes, we’ve got a problem with people who are furious that atheists dare to consider sexism and racism to be serious issues that we should deal with now. He takes the side that I knew he would, that these are problems we should address, because secular thinkers should be best equipped to deal with them.
As skeptics we should objectively examine the impacts of social discrimination, and identify the best ways to promote diversity and inclusiveness. By definition, prejudice depends on not having all relevant information, and as skeptics we are ideally suited to develop and promote arguments for inclusiveness and human rights, based on the evidence of the benefits to individuals and society. We could use this research to tackle the emotional and irrational thinking behind racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices and discriminations. It’s at least as interesting a topic as many we discuss, and a more useful topic than most.
I am fully in agreement. This is the necessary job of this generation of atheists and skeptics, to extend our principles to embrace topics of wider social import… So on one side we have smug jerks who hate the idea of being progressive, but on the other, on my side, we’re quite ready to cut the troglodytes loose, and we’re quite ready to move on without them… Michael has stepped into the no-man’s land between the raging forces, and it’s a gallant effort. But judging by the comments already on his article, he hasn’t convinced the smug anti-progressives that maybe they should embrace a wider scope for atheism, and he really hasn’t tried yet to convince the people on the other side that maybe the angry sexists and racists and sneering self-satisfied libertarians are worth bringing on board. I’m inclined to say they’re not, until they grow up and change.
All right, go ahead and pluck that low-hanging irony fruit. I know you want to. Yes, PZ is actually calling other people smug, sneering, self-satisfied jerks. I know, I know. Get it out of your system.
Now, then. Right away, in the first excerpted paragraph, we encounter his amazingly sloppy conflation of atheism and secularism. As we should all be aware, they are not synonyms, and it does not follow that being either atheist or secularist gives you an intellectual head start in the attempt to end sexism and racism. The Founding Fathers were mostly secular intellectuals; do we want to use their views on race and women’s rights as guidelines? Of course, he likely knows better. This is probably just an example of what happens when you form a clique where your ideas are always being reinforced (especially one that takes immense pride in its hostile stance toward outsiders); you tend to assume everyone already knows what you mean, you start using shorthand for convenience rather than carefully spelling out your ideas, which allows misunderstandings, mistaken assumptions and lazy thinking to spread, and whoa, whaddaya know, turns out that even comrades can end up having intense emotional disagreements over who’s more deserving of carrying the banner for the cause of rationalism.
Maybe there’s a lesson in there about how group dynamics can influence psychology and undermine intellectual rigor and communication. Eh, we can come back to that another time.
You wouldn’t know it from the professor’s insistence that he’s already punched Social Justice into his Progressivist History GPS, so let’s go, let’s go, we’re gonna be late, come on, you irrational reactionary troglodytes, honk honk hooonnnnnkkk, but there’s a, uh, rational case to be made that atheism and/or skepticism already have an enormous task in front of them just trying to reduce religiosity and magical thinking, and therefore activist efforts will be more effective with a tighter focus. Too much mission creep, and you end up becoming a vague protest against “everything bad” while accomplishing nothing in particular. There is no clearly right or wrong strategy here. The quickest way to achieve anything like your social justice goals might involve putting atheist agitation on hold and partnering with progressive religious groups to combat sexism, racism, homophobia, militarism, etc. Value pluralism, you know.
Getting back to that startlingly blithe assumption that atheists would make great philosopher-kings, it is obviously a complete non-sequitur that a particular constellation of left-wing political beliefs necessarily follows from one’s conviction of the nonexistence of something called God. Having accomplished the relatively unremarkable task of reasoning your way to disbelief in a monotheistic deity, you’re not necessarily qualified thereby to design an ideal society, explain how it would operate in practice, or organize all the necessary maneuvers leading to it, even leaving aside the immense problem of accounting for all the variables that could possibly produce a different result than the one intended. Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists all started from rational Enlightenment principles. The fact that they ended where they did should, if nothing else, make one suspect that people too, uh, smugly enamored of how “ideally suited” they are to resolving social problems with their superior reasoning may eventually end up simply rationalizing their behavior in any event.
No, I’m not saying that the FTB crowd is going to eventually seize power and start executing whomever they don’t imprison in labor camps. I’m just saying that my 19 year-old asshole know-it-all self could be just as supercilious about all those morons who can’t see how obvious it is blah blah blah, and hindsight has shown me what a fucking idiot that guy was.
You Can’t Figure Out the Bag I’m In
Wilson asks the question: Why does everyone hate Céline Dion? Except, of course, it’s not everyone, is it? She’s sold more albums than just about anyone alive. Everyone loves Céline Dion, if you think about it. So actually, he asks the question: why do I and my friends and all rock critics and everyone likely to be reading this book and magazines like the Believer hate Céline Dion? And the answers he finds are profound, provocative, and leave you wondering who the hell you actually are—especially if, like many of us around these parts, you set great store by cultural consumption as an indicator of both character and, let’s face it, intelligence. We are cool people! We read Jonathan Franzen and we listen to Pavement, but we also love Mozart and Seinfeld! Hurrah for us! In a few short, devastating chapters, Wilson chops himself and all of us off at the knees. “It’s always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness,” Wilson observes.
…We forgive people who can’t sing or construct a song or play their instruments, as long as they are cool, or subversive, or deviant; we do not dismiss Dion because she’s incompetent. Indeed, her competence may well be a problem, because it means she excludes nobody, apart from us, and those who invest heavily in cultural capital don’t like art that can’t exclude: it’s confusing, and it doesn’t help us to meet attractive people of the opposite sex who think the same way we do.
Do you think I’m smart? Or a good writer? A stand-up fellow, even? Better than average, at least? Well, I’ll assume so, if for no other reason than the fact that you willingly return here to read. Anyway, the reason I ask is because I’ve dutifully taken in critically acclaimed albums and books that made no difference in my life at all. They didn’t open up new ways of experiencing the world. They didn’t inspire me with new artistic possibilities. The qualities that others praised as innovative and mesmerizing struck me as trivial or overblown. Conversely, I’ve been lifted into a buoyant mood by simple ear candy, making my mind feel alert and engaged, facilitating the energy and awareness that sometimes leads to keen observation and penetrating insight. I’ve been inspired by brilliant metaphors and turns of phrase found in otherwise forgettable fantasy fiction. The Muses seem to delight in popping out of the strangest hiding places.
If you like what you see here, you should know that an awful lot of unimpressive pieces helped construct the mosaic, is what I’m saying.
Aesthetic taste just isn’t a reliable indicator of overall character, the best efforts of so many pop culture cliques to try to reassure themselves otherwise notwithstanding. I find that most of the people I would call truly interesting are the ones whose taste is scattershot and contradictory without betraying any shame over “guilty pleasures”. And I’m bored silly by all those poor little insecure magpies, collecting various pop culture objets d’art, hoping for some vicarious transmission of superiority thereby.