Give Fox News a great big hug
Ajita Kamal of Nirmukta is thinking about many of the same issues we’ve been thinking about around here.
A common misconception is that freethought implies treating all ideas equally. This could not be farther from the truth. Freethinkers are extremely discriminatory of bad ideas, and adopt a refined reasoning process in judging factual claims.
Exactly, and this is why the idea that the Center for Inquiry (for example) is and should be in the business of promoting “diversity” is so silly. Free inquiry isn’t some default state that flourishes is left alone; it has to be protected and encouraged, because there are always lots of people who want to shut it down the better to promote their own conclusions.
Organized promotion of freethought is a political ideology, even if freethought itself is not. The process of building a culture of freethought involves first creating communities of freethinkers- people who can find and communicate with each other, while living amongst the masses of people who are not freethinkers. Once these communities begin to come together online (and off), much good can be accomplished through activism.
Yes; then again there is always the risk of groupthink and other-hatred; then again if you let that thought trump all efforts to do anything, well then you can’t do anything.
Most freethinkers are wary of all ideologies. These are not usually the ones that are politically motivated towards promoting freethought, although they do benefit from the efforts of those who are.
Ah-ha. That’s a very helpful way of putting it – and accurate, too. I’m torn in that way myself. In general I am wary of all ideologies, all groups, all “communities,” all promotion…but somehow the backlash against gnu atheism has made me become more ideological (if you want to call it that) or more “loyal” (if you want to call it that) or more obstinate and refusenik about this one thing. My feminism has always been like that too, I suppose – opponents tended to firm up my allegiance.
That’s one thing backlashes do, as I think I’ve mentioned a few times – they stiffen the resistance. (So does that mean we should smile benignly on the Tea Partiers and Glen Beck and Sarah Palin? Dear oh dear, what a quandary.) Offer a prayer of thanks for The Enemy.
Yes, indeed, “when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger, stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard favour’d rage.”
And you are right, too, about CFI. If they are just encouraging diversity, instead of free inquiry, that is, freethought as traditionally understood, then they become part of the problem. After the recent discussion on Jerry’s page, it seems to me that we aren’t making distinctions carefully enough, and that is part of the problem with John Shook’s HuffPo argument.
It is wrong, for example, that Dawkins should have or needed to have taken theology into consideration. Eagleton’s snipe about Occam and Scotus is just dumb. But the more I think about it, the more willing we need to be to take philosophy seriously. Philosophy, though sometimes confessonal, and therefore tipping into theology, is at least supposed to be an impartial scoping of the territory.
Dawkins does take philosophy of religion semi-seriously, and, for the purposes of his book, seriously enough. It wasn’t a philosophy book. It was, in a sense, a spirited response to religious domination of the cultural scene, and it did its work well. Whatever anyone wants to say about Dawkins’ philosophy is, in a sense, irrelevant to the task the book undertook. Dennett just said that he didn’t think that any purpose is served by addressing the traditional arguments. Dennett thinks the real work is now done by cognitive theory of religion, and he may be right. That’s something that needs to be considered. But what does need to be clear is that, unbelief is a position in need of defence, and this is not going to happen by accident. It will happen because we don’t just dismiss arguments. It will happen because we engage arguments seriously. That doesn’t mean that we take on the whole province of philosophy of religion. It may mean that the days of philosophy of religion are numbered, but that’s an argument that still has to be made if so.
But again, it won’t happen by accident, and that’s why Ajita’s incredibly detailed essay about managing debate is tremendously important. I haven’t taken it all in, but the point she (I think) is making is that change will not happen unless we organise for it. And it won’t happen, either, if people keep talking about tone. I think there’s one tone that is important. Seriousness. This is serious business. We can joke about it, if we like, but if we don’t take it seriously — with the same kind of intense seriousness that religionists are applying to it — then, recognising that they are already occupying the cultural high ground, we’re going to take a licking every time.
I listened carefully to a number of the speeches delivered at the London protest the pope. Everyone one of them was intensely serious. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, an historic moment, a kind of watershed. We need to organise around this kind of action, encouraging fearlessly anti-religious thinking, while at the same time recognising that this is an enemy of no mean stature. We may think him very weak in argument, but culturally he’s still very strong. We may have to close the wall up with the dead, Henry V style. (Where would we be without Shakespeare?) But, you’re right. If we’re taking on an ideology — and we are — we’ll have to be ideological about it, even as we resist the worst aspects of ideology. And that, it seems to me, is just what people like Mooney and Shook are about. They’re in the defining mode, and that’s when even friends become enemies, just as, for Christians, Jews, from whom Christianity itself arose, became the most hated and despised.
But no hugs for FOX!
I thought Dawkins treated theology with appropriate seriousness in TGD, where he addressed the various arguments theologians have made for a gods existence. Anyway, I don’t see how good arguments can be hidden in the depths of theology, unavailable for examination by the inexpert. Would that mean that theists are not using the really good arguments? Why not? Don’t they understand theology?
I think if you asked Dan Barker, who knows his theology, he would tell you that there’s nothing there that differs from the arguments that appear in the course of public debates on these issues, as well as the innumerable books by theists arguing for their position. Shook and Eagleton are adopting an esoteric idea of truth that assumes that all that theological expertise must be about something, and not knowing the details of that something makes you unqualified to speak on the larger issue of the existence of gods.
They are wrong, however. Whatever the something is that theologians concern themselves with, it has no special status. The claims can be scrutinized in the same manner as other claims, and require the same kind of demonstration other claims do if they are to be taken as possible, plausible or even true. Theology is not wrapped in secrecy, the books can be bought in bookstores, the arguments can be pursued in many ways. You can read them on the Web. All of the nuances and subtleties, if there are any, can be examined for relevance. We are not arguing with the wrong people, and we are not answering the wrong arguments. Our opponents are not holding anything in reserve. Their arguments are as good as they can make them, and if they are as inadequate as they have been so far, it’s not because theologians have better ones that are mysteriously unavailable to everyone else.
We are a fellowship of felines–strident ocelots rather than tabbies–independent atheists who have come together to stand up against injustice. Our tool for exposing injustice is moral scepticism; still no ideology necessary. no political leanings necessary either. We are sovereigns of ourselves and no need for approval of our defiance and aggressiveness. We are essentially free intellectuals. Once the sanity of justice, reason, freedom and equality are restored, we will scatter off again into obscurity. Uber atheism isn’t a movement but rather a solidarity. A defiance and resistance against the growing tide of unreason within politics and the media. I will not tolerate the intolerable in any form.
Funny, Eric, I was thinking of titling the post “stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood” but I’d done that before and not too long ago, so I didn’t. Funny that we both thought of it.
Ajita’s a he, actually; I looked him up. Confusing that names ending in ‘a’ are not (necessarily?) female in India, but there you go.
I saw your struggle to persuade that Bear person that it’s worth paying attention to philosophy. I saw your “Oh what’s the use.” :- )
Ernie, note that Eric said philosophy of religion and not theology.
Ocelot…now there’s a nice thought. We’re ocelots…
:- )
But not too seriously. Without a good mechanism of reality checking, philosophy tends to pay more attention to false or wrong ideas than it should.
You can argue that this is necessary – if you’re exploring the space of ideas, you’re obviously going to spend a lot of time dealing with stuff that isn’t valid – but this means that at any given point in time, a large proportion of philosophical work is ultimately worthless. The test of an idea is not whether you can convince other philosophers of it, but whether it can stand up to reality.
And as long as there is a significant body of philosophers who dismiss as ‘scientism’ any attempt to favour reality-based methods, this isn’t likely to improve much.
Thanks for the mention, Ophelia. I love the direction you’ve taken with what I was saying. Most of us freethinkers are anti-authoritarian, so ‘groupthink’ doesn’t come naturally. I did go through a long phase believing that atheism should be a private thing and that ideology is the enemy of progress. It was the forceful clarity of thought from those who led the surge of New Atheism that made me realize that there are social agendas involved that I cannot realize unless I adopt some sort of ideological stance.
Fox and the rest have certainly helped make me more “radical” in promoting freethought, and it seems that groups like CFI have simply missed the point, perhaps due to their bureaucracy in organization. As you say here and in previous posts, there are plenty of venues where atheists and religionists can interact and find common ground, if that’s what they’re into. I completely agree that CFI could be doing much more good if they focused on promoting freethought instead of trying to be one of the aforementioned groups. But I’m not so concerned with what their agenda is as long as they don’t disparage the rest of us. The problem begins when in order to establish a seemingly benevolent identity for themselves such groups create false-balance and employ straw men when attacking groups promoting other aspects of the freethought movement that may or may not be more fundamental to realizing the goals that we care about. In this context, I find many of the arguments from CFI’s de Dora and others to be insulting to our intelligence as freethinkers.
@ Eric: As Ophelia said, I’m a ‘he’. Both my first and last names are gender neutral.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Jim Nugent, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Give Fox News a great big hug http://dlvr.it/65Ky1 […]
[This got a ‘looks like you’ve already said that’ after posting, but none the less disappeared. So here it is again.]
Egbert:
A bit like the Lone Ranger: ‘Time to hit the trail, Tonto. Our work’s done here.’ But a note of caution: the price of liberty is probably eternal vigilance.
Ajita Kamal: “Most freethinkers are wary of all ideologies. These are not usually the ones that are politically motivated towards promoting freethought, although they do benefit from the efforts of those who are.”
OB: “Ah-ha. That’s a very helpful way of putting it – and accurate, too. I’m torn in that way myself. In general I am wary of all ideologies, all groups, all ‘communities,’ all promotion… but somehow the backlash against gnu atheism has made me become more ideological (if you want to call it that) or more ‘loyal’ (if you want to call it that) or more obstinate and refusenik about this one thing.”
I like to think that with the spread of modern rationalism, science and global politics, the world is tending towards having a global population of freethinkers. If this is true, there is still of course a way to go. But if it is illusory, it will be because of a sufficiently powerful countervailing tendency to balkanise and fragment on whatever geographic basis into political and ideological ‘communities’ based on perceived or otherwise understood sectional interest. Each of these ‘communities’ will likely be maintained or at least underpinned by some sort of clerical caste. The one controlling modern Iran is merely an extreme example.
One of the great developments in the West that came out of the religious brawl of the Reformation and after was the sectarian live-and-let-live consensus that forms the basis of the modern liberalism so sadly missing in places like Iran. But one of its ironic twists was the rise of religious ‘non-conformism’ – a non-conformist being one who conforms sufficiently to be accepted into membership of a fringe church community.
The utilitarian principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ is one that is most commonly countered by those claiming privilege based on special insight, knowledge or revelation. This is a routine claim made by leaders of all religious sects who occupy positions of power beyond democratic control, such as those in Iran. But it is a latent feature of all sectional groups which try to exert political influence disproportionate to their own numbers.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/iranian-blogger-jailed-for-19-years-20100929-15w4m.html
Heehee – confusing – I was checking the spam file just after you posted, Ian, so I rescued it.
“The problem begins when in order to establish a seemingly benevolent identity for themselves…”
Exactly, Ajita, and I keep noticing that people who do that actually turn out to be in reality a lot less benevolent than people who don’t try to establish a seemingly benevolent identity for themselves. I don’t know why that is. But I’ve learned to trust people who don’t pretend to be Warmer and Kinder than everyone else a lot more than people who do.
Meanwhile, what can we do to help Molly Norris? Here is a (free-) thought provoking articel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff: http://www.legal-project.org/790/its-time-to-fight-back-against-death-threats-by
In a nutshell:
Ajita wrote:
and Ophelia replied:
This cannot be emphasized enough. It’s extremely important, and, I think, not commented on or discussed enough (I have discussed it many times with correspondents, including Ophelia, but it needs a broader public airing). When it comes to social justice movements (gay rights, feminism, unapologetic atheism), there’s an almost universal correlation between a tendency for a person to assert publicly* that they care about “respecting other peoples’ feelings” and asserting that they “want to take the high road” and a tendency for that same person to treat their more outspoken allies with substantive (not formal) contempt. To smile sweetly and repeat how reasonable they are, while at the same time egregiously misrepresenting the position of their alleged but more plain-spoken allies, and selling those allies out for social credit/money/book contracts bestowed by the uncontroversial majority.
To put it concisely, it’s the Uncle Tom phenomenon. Or, as we say in gay male circles, Uncle Mary.
The “concerned” and “nice” crowd—and they really do go out of their way to actively foster a persona that exudes “niceness” — is remarkably not nice, not fair, and not ecumenical when it comes to the treatment of their outspoken “allies,” who, they claim, actually share their values. They’re almost boot-lickingly deferential to the confident majority, giving succor to that same majority by scolding the boat-rockers for being “mean,” “unsophisticated,” “not helpful,” and generally “just not fittin’ for polite company!”
It’s perverse. Truly ethically perverse, and morally shocking. The “nice” crowd exhibits some of the most vicious, duplicitous, two-faced, back-stabbing, and genuinely not-nice behavior I’ve ever seen – toward their “friends.” They seem to believe that as long as they keep a camera-ready smile on their face and steer clear four letter words, that we’ll somehow not notice they just blinded us by spitting venom onto our eyes.
*It’s crucial to understand the performative aspect of this behavior. It’s deployed consciously in “public” setttings. The actor very much wants the audience (be it online, at a party, or before potential funding organizations) to see it. It’s just like “professing” one’s faith at a revival meeting. Genuine feeling doesn’t matter. What others around you think you’re saying is all that counts.
In for a penny, in for a pound (or, how Josh Just Can’t Shut Up on This Subject). Here’s an illustration of what I meant in my post #12, above.
I’ve been out of the closet as gay since I was 12 years old. I’m now 36. High school was an absolute misery – I was beat up, had my head thrown into lockers, the usual. When I went to the school vice principal for help, she told me “If you insist on being so open about being different. . .” You know the drill. So I dropped out.
But that wasn’t the experience that hurt the most. The most crushing thing I can remember was being sold out by “nice” people- “nice” gay people- who should have been on my side.
My tormentors from high school also worked at the grocery store where I was a clerk. During my employ, they stuffed photocopies of gay porn in my work locker, wrote my name and telephone number on the public (that is, the ones the customers used) bathroom walls letting shoppers know I was available for cheap oral service, blocked swinging doors so I’d hit my head when entering the break room. . and on, and on, and on. The store management would do nothing about it. (though, ironically, they now tout the company as extremely progressive and gay-friendly)
So I contacted a well-known local lesbian/gay rights lawyer. I became a minor local celebrity, you know, 16-year-old gay kid fights the system, sues employer. I was on local news broadcasts and talk shows. For complicated reasons, it went nowhere.
The most crushing thing was the lack of support from “my community.” And the worst example of that was a letter to the editor in the local progressive/counter-culture newspaper one week. The writer – a self-identified gay man and upstanding community member – savaged me. He claimed that he’d been through my check-out line at the grocery store many times, and no wonder I was targeted. I acted salaciously, he said, flirting shamelessly with my customers. If I didn’t want to be picked on for being a fag, I shouldn’t have bleached my hair, worn punk eyeliner, and basically, shouldn’t have acted like a sissy available for a pickup and a cheap shag.
He barely stopped short of calling me a whore who asked for it. “Young Mister Slocum should be more worried about homework and playing baseball,” he said (I’m paraphrasing, but very closely). “Why is he so concerned about being sexual?”
This, from another gay man. Another gay man who undoubtedly enjoyed a secure place in the wider straight community. I’m sure all his straight church-going friends loved him, since he knew his place. Who the hell was I to disrupt his suburban demeanor with my gauche refusal to substitute gender pronouns so he could stay in his transparent closet?
So, yeah, that’s a rather more dramatic situation, but the dynamics strike me as disgustingly similar.
@ #13 Josh
Thanks for posting that. The dynamics are somewhat similar.
Ophelia, I suppose I’d rather be recognised for spamming than for nothing at all. ;-)
Conformity is the enemy to individuality and free thought. Individuals have to suffer alienation and lack of social support for their ‘crime’ of being different. We’re all different (even identical twins) but this message gets drowned out by the message of ‘we are all the same’. So whenever you hear the message ‘we are the same’, it should make you raise an eyebrow or two, followed by pinching your nose.
Conformists don’t stop at public space, they want you to conform in your private space, in your mind. But conformity is stagnant, resistant to change and leads to a split from reality. They are passive-aggressives, while individuals are active and aggressive, leading to change. If individuals can form together to create a new consistent narrative, it will eventually overcome the passive majority.
Yikes, Josh – that’s quite an illustration. How awful.
@Josh:
With your first comment you very accurately summed up my recent experience with a certain feminist website. Thank you. And thanks for posting your second comment, that experience sounds horrid and the behaviour certainly seems to match what we are seeing with the ‘nice’ Gnu Atheist-bashers.
Maybe what it is, is that the appeasers, the ‘look at me, I’m so nice and reasonable unlike you’ brigade, are simply cheesed off with the fact that you have not cracked under social pressure, as they have. You are less concerned with simply being popular. You continue to be yourself and state your views despite the horrific pressure of being systematically bullied and discriminated against, while they have modified themselves, watered down their views, fitted in. That ultimately makes you stronger than them and that must be maddening for them. So the only option is to hit out, and try to turn you into one of them or make you disappear. It’s a theory, anyway.
And when I say ‘you’ I don’t just mean teenage Josh, I also mean the Gnus and anyone else who has been on the receiving end of fake niceness.
OT, sorry: see the cartoon at the top of the page on this site dedicated to “visualizing women’s rights in the Arab world”:
http://visualrights.tacticaltech.org/
“Hey, I don’t know how arranged marriages work!”
Good grief.
Ed Miliband is openly atheist:
Oh dear. No surprise which kind of atheist he is. And now it looks like labour are going to jump on the faith bandwagon as Stephen Timms writes in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/29/labour-engage-religious-faith
Yes, religion gives us our values, our morals, blah blah blah. Shoot me now.
@Eric MacDonald:
In trying to discuss philosophy of religion and theology with theists, I find myself at a…I don’t want to say disadvantage, but it is one of sorts. Specifically, the so-called “sophisticated” arguments for God seem all to rely on rather certain knowledge of what words like “cause” and “exist” mean. As a skeptic, I don’t admit to knowing exactly what I mean by either word — I don’t think I could give necessary or sufficient reasons in either case, and I think the meanings of the words are inherently fuzzy until explicitly defined.
Unfortunately, this falls into a rhetorical trick whereby I can be accused of not taking the argument seriously, or of simply being difficult, or of not being well-versed enough in philosophy. I don’t think these criticisms are valid — I suspect that those making the arguments don’t know any better than I do what they mean by “exist” or “cause,” but that they use the inherent ambiguity to smuggle in implicit premises about…well…existence and causality.
The sense I get is that everyone is talking past each when it comes to philosophy, that rather than trying to understand, for example, what I might mean by saying something like “there is no such thing as a priori knowledge,” my opponent would likely accuse me of breaking the rules of philosophical discourse, or of being difficult, or whatever essentially on the grounds that “Well, of course there’s such a thing as a priori knowledge!”
My sense is that this is what’s behind a lot of NAs being so hostile towards philosophical discourse. There’s this sense that those making philosophical defenses of religion (and philosophical attacks on atheism, materialism, epistemology of science, etc.) are making up the rules as they go along, or at least not sharing the rule book with us. I also get the sense that when Dennett or another atheist philosopher essentially refuses to engage the traditional arguments it’s for similar reasons — that the traditional arguments are predicated on metaphysical and ontological assumptions that actually aren’t necessarily obvious. There’s a question of whether it’s even worth trying to figure out what’s wrong or vague or imprecise or ambiguous about these traditional philosophical notions of existence and causality. Is it better at this point in history to start over from scratch?
The problem is amplified by a similar disdain on the theists’ side for trying to understand the philosophical implications of results from mathematics and science. Relativity and quantum mechanics pose real problems for traditional notions of existence, causality, time, space, and the nature of the universe, at least as far as I can see. The fact of computation, which is too recent for academic philosophy to have really struggled with yet, could conceivably open up new attacks on problems of mind, problems of epistemology, etc, but I get this suspicion that those accusing NAs of a lack of philosophical sophistication would simply take such arguments as NAs confusing computer science for philosophy and embarrassing themselves.
I guess I’m curious about whether you see a similar problem — that atheists and believers have different rules for how philosophy is done and ultimately end up talking past each other — and if so, whether you have any ideas for getting around it.
On my #13 above:
1. Thanks to O and the others for your forbearance. Looking back, my post is kinda self-indulgent.
2. I should clarify that, in that situation, there were supportive people. They weren’t all “nice” people or Uncle Marys. It’s just that the phenomenon of “nice” people in any sphere you can think of who are in fact substantively vicious so exercises me I can’t help commenting on it.
Amy Clare – why, that certain feminist web site wouldn’t be feministing, would it?
Josh – actually it was The F Word, Ophelia wrote about what happened in a blog post a few weeks ago, I think it was titled ‘Beware of people who want to ‘make room’ for things’. Although Feministing has incurred my wrath in the past, just for being very openly gushing about religion and the religious at times (while accusing atheists of ‘silencing’ of course)… I haven’t read it for ages, partly for that reason!
“I thought Dawkins treated theology with appropriate seriousness in TGD, where he addressed the various arguments theologians have made for a gods existence. ”
I agree, but I do think some of the situation is his own fault despite this, because when people accuse him of this his responses tend to take entirely the wrong focus. He’s said on numerous occasions that he doesn’t think theology is a subject to be an expert in. Now, those of us who have taken care to understand his position would probably realize that what he means by this is that since god almost certainly doesn’t exist, there isn’t a factual basis for an academic subject on it. But when he says that, the way it comes off to religionists and accomodationists is this something more like:
“There is nothing at all in your religion worth learning about, and I don’t need to understand your position to tell you that it’s stupid.”
He ought to be saying what you’re saying. “If you read The God Delusion, you’ll see that I seriously addressed the bulk of the best arguments for the existence of god therein; despite the volumes of apologetics material that is out there, it’s very rare that an argument comes up which differs substantively from those I dealt with in my book, as well as in debates with theists.”
Ophelia: “I’ve learned to trust people who don’t pretend to be Warmer and Kinder than everyone else a lot more than people who do.”
I think Josh is absolutely right in that it’s related to this whole Uncle Tom stuff, the idea that if we all just shut up and acclimate we’ll be fine. It’s taken on some pretty grisly forms in history, such as Poles who’d sell their Jewish neighbors down the river in hopes of better treatment by German occupiers; though I suspect in a lot of those cases some latent anti-Semitism may also have been involved.
I think it may also be related to the whole “Nice Guy” phenomenon, that disgusting old cliché where, because a man has this view of himself as “Nice,” he has this expectation that women somehow owe him something. It may be more than accomodationists not believing that the more ‘strident’ critics of religion are sometimes successful. I think it may be the case that they *can’t* believe it, that they have a fundamental commitment to Niceness, as it were, and the possibility that it isn’t always the best weapon in the vampire slaying backpack is objectionable to them. “If my way of trying to convince theists doesn’t always work, why should theirs? Don’t theists know that those nasty New Atheists are abusive and mean?”