Colgate is not enough
Last week a journalist had a very disgusting encounter with a group of Haredi men in Jerusalem. They were protesting the local council’s decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays, and she was there to report on their protest. She dressed conservatively, but then she accidentally walked up the wrong street.
I suddenly found myself in the thick of the protest – in the midst of hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their long coats and sable-fur hats. They might be supremely religious, but their behaviour – to me – was far from charitable or benevolent. As the protest became noisier and the crowd began yelling, I took my recorder and microphone out of my bag to record the sound. Suddenly the crowd turned on me, screaming in my face. Dozens of angry men began spitting on me. I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting – on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms. It was like rain, coming at me from all directions – hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses. Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face. Somewhere behind me – I didn’t see him – a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.
Why? Because ‘using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I’m not Jewish and don’t observe the Sabbath.’ That’s why.
In other words, a minor, formal, mechanical, petty rule is so important that it justifies dozens of men spitting all over a woman because she breaks it. In other words, something of no inherent importance whatsoever justifies revolting intimidation and bullying and humiliation of a human being.
Right. Just so, the action of a Florida college student in removing a cracker from a church justified death threats and a campaign to get him expelled from his university.
But the Toothpaste Twins don’t see it that way. They see it the other way. They think it’s the trivial infraction that is enormously important while the intimidation and attempted life-spoiling is trivial. They must, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t keep publicly raving about PZ Myers and his destruction of a cracker without mentioning the bullying and death threats directed at the student.
[W]e will end by elaborating upon why, in the wake of the communion wafer desecration, we decided we had to speak out about Myers in a way that would really be heard…[W]e were appalled. We could not see what this act could possibly have to do with promoting science and reason. It contributed nothing to the public understanding or appreciation of science, and everything to a nasty, ugly culture war that hurts and divides us all.
There’s a lot more in that vein, and very emetic it is. It’s also very misleading, because it never mentions the college student, just as the Newsweek article doesn’t.
I tell you what. I would dearly love to see a crowd of some five hundred women or so – a crowd big enough to win – surround that mob of Haredi men and turn on a whole truckload of recording equipment. You bet I would. No violence, no spitting, no pushing up against a wall, no kicking – just a spot of payback combined with demonstration. Demonstration of what? The unimportance of rules of this kind, that’s what. If people want to make them important to themselves, fine, but when it comes to punishing other people for failing to observe them – that’s bad and wrong and intolerable.
Would the Toothpaste Twins be appalled if a bunch of women did that? Apparently, they would. Their thinking is fucked badly up.
Why colgate twins? The cheezy smiles they’re wearing in the photo at the blog? Funny in any case.
Sheesh, those guys are amazing. Just when you think they’re almost scrapping the rust out of the barrel, they manage to go lower and plumb new depths. Where will it end?
@Brian: That’s a truly frightening question to contemplate. I’ve begun to suspect that the quarry of inanity in which they have become entrenched may indeed be bottomless. Knowing that they’re out there, busily crapping out interviews and opinion pieces from dawn ’til dusk makes my blood run cold. What new low might they reach tomorrow?
I grew up Catholic and, while I no longer drink the kool-aid, just as Richard Dawkins has referred to himself as a “cultural Anglican,” I’m still, at heart, a cultural Catholic. As a result, I was a bit uncomfortable with PZ’s cracker destruction, though I’ll be the first to admit that the burden was not on PZ, who doesn’t even know me, to make sure that I wasn’t made uncomfortable. I was far more repulsed by the response of the “professional Catholics” to it. I also thought that, while I probably wouldn’t have done what PZ did, he had a perfect right to do it in the way he did and he was a responsible enough person to live with the consequences. The Toothpaste Twins (I love that description) likewise have a right to criticize him within the bounds of libel law but they should be unsurprised by the blowback that they receive from doing so. I don’t recommend death threats such as PZ received but it seems entirely appropriate to question their motives, their logic and their basic assumptions as you and others have been doing. If they wish to be taken seriously, they have a responsibility to take these questions seriously and answer them appropriately. They haven’t done that as far as I have been able to tell. Not responding appropriately and responsibly diminishes them and their work product in my eyes.
More toothy remarks:
I just bought the book and am a quarter way through. I don’t come away uniquely impressed by anything about it, except perhaps Sheril’s mischievous smile on the back inside cover, which I quite like.
I’ve found something new about them, though: namely, that the compartmentalization of knowledge was key to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures remarks. Acknowledging this is half a step away from admitting cognitive incompatibility, though it’s pulling teeth (har!) trying to get them to admit that.
You’re actually soft-selling the attack on the reporter, Anne Barker. As she mentions in the account you linked to, “Somewhere behind me – I didn’t see him – a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.” I would have been scared out of my socks.
Somewhat reminiscent of (indeed, worse than) Wesley Cook being grabbed by the woman who tried to wrench the wafer out of his hand.
I included that bit! It’s the last line of the quoted passage.
Yeah, scared for sure, but also – so grossed out. She could smell it. Eggh.
Ben – yeah – not even like pulling teeth, more like ruled out. They come right out and say it at times but flatly refuse to admit what it means. Twerps.
I’m always baffled when, faced with a majority whose sacred symbols are threatened vs. a minority whose actual personal well-being and safety are threatened, people mollycoddle the majority and tut-tut those who go a bit overboard in protecting the minority.
On Hemant Mehta’s blog a while back, a Catholic priest tried to defend the church’s discriminatory policy of prohibiting women from joining the clergy by tut-tutting us for not knowing theology. Christ is male, you see, so it is very symbolically important that the Eucharist be blessed by someone with a penis.
I explained to him that his excuses made the church’s practices even more appalling from my point of view. Not only are you discriminating against women, but you’re placing the preservation of a symbol above the well-being of actual, flesh and blood human beings.
I feel the same about people who tut-tut PZ without bothering to mention the fact that the Catholics were making death threats, and that the whole controversy really erupted not when PZ made his threat, but when Bill Donahue posted an incendiary attack on PZ at his website.
Screw the crackers. The threats against actual human beings are much more worrying for me.
Yeah. Don’t think we don’t go into that whole ‘No the priest has to be a man because the priest has always been a man because Jeezis chose his disciples from among the men’ crap in our book, because we do.
So convenient! Ho yus, we get to make all these rules that tell you what to do but you don’t get any say because the rule-makers have always always always been men.
I love the “Colgate Twins” as a name for them. lol
… or “Toothpaste Twins”, or whatever. Actually, I think I like “Colgate Twins” better – it’s more specific, and (for those of us who are old enough) it has a certain ring of confidence to it.
We could not see what this act could possibly have to do with promoting science…
That probably because the act, in and of itself, had nothing to do with promoting science. PZ aint no one trick pony. He can do more than just promote science.
…and reason.
Well, since they only mention the cracker itself, and not the other items included in the ‘desecration’ – including a book by a prominant atheist – then of course they don’t understand how it promotes reason.
It contributed nothing to the public understanding or appreciation of science…
See my comment above.
…and everything to a nasty, ugly culture war that hurts and divides us all.
If I didn’t know better I’d be tempted to think that was satire. Sadly though, it’s not. Oy, vey.
You know, at first, I was inclined to see Mooney and companies point about tone–but you’re right, this comes dangerously close to NOMA, or even worse, making us respect the claims of those who are easily offended for ritualistic reasons. You get to the heart of why we shouldn’t give an inch on this point.
As a person with a Jewish background who was raised in around Buddhists, I am amazed a how much some of this does not get mentioned anymore in the general public. Still, like the lapsed Catholic above, I still type “G-d” out of habit.
M&K go way beyond merely discussing tone here. Their 3rd part is just downright dishonest. First not mentioning the context of “Crackergate” and misrepresenting it. Second, they are poisoning the well, with the way they characterize all the people who criticize them in their comment section as PZ’s angry horde.
And finally, they end their piece with a call for “civility and tolerance” (emphasis theirs), but fail to note that we need not be tolerant to intolerance itself. This rule definitely applies to “Crackergate”. Ironically enough, M&K themselves seem to apply that rule as well, as they are not exactly tolerant of PZ, are they?
Same as you Paul G, I grew up Catholic: private school, sacraments, altar boy, etc. I certainly had mixed feelings when I watched PZ’s demonstration on YouTube. I had been godless for years, so after mulling over this odd emotional response, I eventually realized that my initial repulsion was simply due to an unquestioned and unjustified prejudice that I still carried around with me.
I’m sure this wasn’t PZ’s intent, but the incident seemed tailor-made to challenge a lapsed Catholic like myself into considering whether religious dogma still had some toehold on my worldview.
I have to say, I couldn’t truly call myself a cultural Catholic until I came to terms with PZ’s demonstration.
Chris Mooney was interviewed on This Week in Science this week: http://www.twis.org/
It made me feel for Chris a bit, and dispelled my growing feeling that this was some kind of cynical ploy on his part.
I’ve never completely thought it was a cynical ploy – just willful obtusity which has led, as it often does, to acting in bad faith (by which I refer specifically to the mischaracterizations of their opponents).
Here’s the essence of what Mooney is actually right about: For people who reject some specific findings of science or who have a general mistrust of the authority of science and scientists for religious reasons, scientists who are openly atheistic and who (correctly) point out that faith as a way of deciding what to believe is antithetical to science will be off-putting, frightening, and generally unpersuasive. But having realized this truth, Mooney (and apparently Kirschenbaum as well) seems to have become fixated on the goal of finding some way to reach out to them, to either persuade them or make them more amenable to accommodating science, or at least to persuade them not to directly oppose science (by pushing creationism in public schools and other nonsense).
That fixation – while informed by an admirable optimism and aimed towards an admirable goal – is ultimately foolish and counterproductive because the goal is unachievable as they conceive it. M&K keep repeating the mantra that “If you push people to choose between their religion and science, they will choose their religion every time.” While some people actually do become enlightened by learning about science and abandon faith, generally speaking that is an accurate claim. But for those people who have religious beliefs that clash with science, it is their religious beliefs – and the phony pseudo-epistemology of faith which underpins those beliefs – that are the problem: No way of “framing” science, no approach to communication however gentle and accommodating, can ever alter the factual findings of science – and it’s the facts themselves that believers have a problem with! Thus it isn’t science that’s “pushing” the choice between science and religion, it’s faith. And thus this is not simply a matter of communication or rhetoric or approach or persuasiveness: Believers of this sort simply do not and will not accept the actual content of science, so the style is quite irrelevant.
The Grand Canyon was not formed in a matter of days or months in a great flood. Humans really do share a common ancestor with all other organisms, and a quite recent (in geological terms) common ancestor with apes. There is no evidence of design or intelligently directed fine tuning or really anything whatsoever in science that leaves any plausibility intact for the overwhelming majority of people’s god beliefs (except those remote, abstract, vague god beliefs conceived specifically to get around the appalling absence of evidence and presence of counterevidence for other conceptions of god). If the content of a religious person’s faith beliefs directly contradict science and they see this conflict (not all do see it or choose to acknowledge it), science cannot change its content to accommodate them – and style/rhetoric is simply not what is at issue.
This is why the fundamental epistemological incompatibility of faith and science is actually crucial to the discussion insted of being the non-issue M&K (and other accommodationists) keep trying to make it out to be. Moreover, their mistaken understanding of the nature and cause of the problem commit M&K to all the other stupidities that we’ve been complaining about here: If reaching religious people opposed to science is a matter of finding the right rhetorical approach (and it isn’t), then any open admission and discussion of the incompatibility of science and religion is definitely a WRONG and HARMFUL rhetorical approach.
Still worse from M&K’s perspective is putting responsibility for the problem on believers (even if it properly belongs there), because from a rhetorical standpoint the actual truth does not matter: If evidence and reason could convince them, these believers wouldn’t be opposed to science in the first place! Instead, we must use persuasion and rhetoric – and fiery denunciations of superstition from Myers, Dawkins, et al don’t help that cause.
Of course, the very problem with believers is that evidence and reason are less convincing to them than their own feelings. M&K’s approach is utterly worthless precisely because you can’t use manipulative rhetoric and emotional appeals to help people develop critical thinking skills. There are lots of approaches that can be effective in helping people develop critical thinking skills – and I think the approach of Myers and Dawkins (and others) can be effective for some audiences but counterproductive for other audiences. But soft-peddling or outright denying the conflict between the legitimate and proven-useful epistemology of science and the bogus pseudo-epistemology of faith is an approach that cannot possibly work because it exacerbates the problem rather than opposing it.
The accommodation position must be a one-way street in science’s direction. This is only feasible if you’re a deist or Buddhist or scientifically illiterate. M&K’s intended audience may be science illiterate but they certainly are not deists and Buddhists.
I’ve just started reading an article by Matthew C. Nisbet linked to from this comment: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/07/unscientific_america_on_jobs_i.php#comment-1778414
The article: http://www1.soc.american.edu/docs/NisbetScheufele_inpress_What%27sNextScienceCommunication.pdf
It looks like (as far as I understand M&K’s book, which I’ve not read and could be completely confused about) M&K could be using the “deficit” model which Nisbet criticises in the first part of the article.
Foolfodder,
At what point in that TWIS podcast is the Mooney interview. I tried downloading it, but there was so much obnoxious bullshit at the beginning that I couldn’t stand to listen to any more. I’d rather just skip to the interview, if possible.
Hi Wes, 35:30
Christ is male, you see, so it is very symbolically important that the Eucharist be blessed by someone with a penis.
Wes, when I encounter that argument I always point out that Jesus was a Jew and ergo circumcised, but you don’t see the seminarians lining up for that kind of imitatio Christi. Presumably, it is what Chico Marx called “one snoop-a-snoop to much.”
I followed OB’s link to the Toothpaste Twins. Pearly smiles I find refreshing in an age where so much published photography is of pouting models and unsmiling rock stars. I followed in turn their link to PZ Myers’ blog at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/the_great_desecration.php and thus to all the hooha over the ‘desecrated’ biscuit (OK, wafer).
The overwhelming majority of the comments I read there supported Myers, though I only got through 50/2000. #1 from ‘Maria’ said simply “May God have mercy on your soul.” The worst examples of abusive bigotry are probably those quoted by Myers himself in his threadstarter.
I don’t blame Catholic commenters being outraged over all this. After all, they have wasted so much of their precious time in this life at Mass, counting off rosary beads, and kneeling before plaster Virgins, that they need eternal life hereafter to make up for it.
Oh yes, and confessing their sins in a phone box to the operator, who in turn passes them on to God and passes back His blessing, wiping the slate clean for them till next time.
(By the way, the above is largely a critical litany I learned as a junior member of a congregation of the Church of England.)
Russell: My new packet of Colgate says that the active ingredients are sodium fluoride and triclosan, amid a list of inert fillers (silicon dioxide, glycerol, carageen etc). They apparently are the secret of the ‘ring of confidence’. Similarly, the desecrated wafer is a ‘disc of deliverance’. The fillers are the usual: flour, salt, maybe a bit of butter or oil. But they, according to Church doctrine, are not the active ingredient, which is immaterial.
I conclude that therefore that ingredient cannot be affected by material surroundings: altar cloths, crucifixes, banana peels, coffee grounds, garbage bin, rusty nail; whatever.
“M&K could be using the “deficit” model which Nisbet criticises in the first part of the article.”
Actually there’s a place in the book where they repudiate the deficit model, with an air of shining virtue, but they don’t really explain what’s wrong with it. One gathers it’s just kind of unhip.
That’s mean but really the book is like that (as so many of the blog posts are…) – they really do just gesture at stuff and expect the reader to know what they mean.
I suspect PZ was relieved to be dealing with Catholics because it kept the science issue out of the equation, as Catholics aren’t supposed to have a problem with evolution. Instead, PZ’s action was political: he was protesting the threatened implementation of a blasphemy law.
Donohue and the outraged Catholics wanted secular institutions to punish a young man for committing an act of desecration, and violating the sacred. There was a strong undercurrent of what was later termed “fatwah envy” — they had seen the fawning respect given to the Muslims who were outraged over the cartoons, and they wanted some of the same. PZ was drawing a line, in the same way that others drew Mohammed. You don’t get to define the sacred for other people. And leave the boy alone, and pick on someone bigger.
Unless Crackergate is put in its context, people will just see it as a live version of the old ‘Atheist Professor and the Chalk’ story. It’s not. Technically, a pious Catholic could have mounted the same protest, for the same reason — separate church rules from state rules. Yet it looks like M/K are encouraging the culturally divisive view. Ironic.
Sastra: Good point.
“Actually there’s a place in the book where they repudiate the deficit model, with an air of shining virtue, but they don’t really explain what’s wrong with it.”
Ah, ok, thanks OB. The reason it struck me was that on page four of Nisbet’s article, he sort of mentions that the “deficit” model includes things like holding Sagan up as a paragon and talking about a golden age of science literacy. It seemed to me that something like that had been discussed in the past few days.
I’m curious why Nisbet and Mooney split up, and I thought that might have been the reason I guess. Still, Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science” does come in for a bit of criticism in the article for having helped turn global warming into a partisan issue.
“I’m curious why Nisbet and Mooney split up, and I thought that might have been the reason I guess. Still, Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science” does come in for a bit of criticism in the article for having helped turn global warming into a partisan issue.”
This is only supposition, but the split came not long after the Expelled affair(*). Given the hostility in reaction to Nisbet’s claims that the affair was a victory for the makers of Expelled I wonder if Mooney decided enough was enough.
(*) For those who are unware of the Expelled affair, PZ Myers was refused entry to a showing of Expelled on the instructions of the film’s producers. That alone was telling, but the real sting comes when you know that with PZ in the queue was Richard Dawkins who was allowed in. Not only are the producers hypocrits, but they are stupid hypocrits.
I agree with everything said in the “Colgate” article except for calling them the “Toothpaste Twins”.
No, that couldn’t be it. Mooney came down on the side of Expelled very strongly, too.
And it’s certainly not as if he’s separating himself from Nisbet in the ‘piss everyone off/attack people for no obvious reason’ department either.
Well I agree with calling them the toothpaste twins, so there. See explanation in other thread. (Nobody made them pose like that, it was their choice, and they want everyone to see them as a coupla nice fresh-faced kids. I’m not making fun of their looks, I’m making fun of their presentation.)
Hear, hear. It’s a conscious and painfully obvious attempt at a “likeable, wholesome” presentation. Sure, all celebrities do it. That’s the point. Celebrities do it. And that’s why it’s fair game for mockery. It’s all of a piece with their focus-grouped, market-researched personas.
There’s a reason why people refer to Nisbet as Le Marquis de Coiffure, and it’s not because he has good hair (and he does). It’s because it takes work to have hair like that, and it’s just damned implausible there’s no PR motive behind it. Presentable and well-scrubbed is one thing. Twee and precious is another.
Oh, dear. I’ve devolved into peevish comments about appearance. And, oh dear, I don’t feel bad about it either. . .