Remember the nerds of South Dakota
Since I wrote a tut-tutting post about Caspar Melville’s tut-tutting post about gnu atheism last week, in fairness I should add that he promptly asked me to write a piece responding to his for the New Humanist, which I have now done; it will be in the next issue. That’s a generous way with critics, do admit.
The truth is, I really don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with being bored by gnu atheism. I’m very easily bored myself; I find a great many things irritating; I can certainly understand being fed up with something even if I agree with it. What makes a difference is the context. The context right now is an endless flood of commentary about how boring/irritating/wrong/evil gnu atheism is, coupled with the fact that atheists are perhaps the last minority (apart from criminals and such) that it is just fine to despise. Atheists are perhaps the last minority that it is fine to despise for no really justifiable reason.
I see a lot of bloggy woofing about gnu atheists “whining” about being “victims.” Aw diddums, is the implication. But that’s not it. I’m not “whining” about this because it makes me cry. I’m way too nerdy for that; I don’t care what the great majority thinks; I’d much rather put up fresh curtains in my bunker than try to join The Mainstream. But not everyone is like me. I’m just barely reflective enough to grasp that.
Not everyone is like me, and then, I’m not sure even I would be like me if my circumstances were totally different. It’s easy for me to be like me, in a big cosmopolitan coastal port city with a university and a huge population of nerds. It’s not so easy for people in (say) small towns in the Midwest with no visible nerds as far as the eye can see. I think the backlash against atheism matters for a lot of people, not just (if at all) for me. I’m not whining, I’m not playing martyr, I’m not demanding sympathy, I’m just straighforwardly saying that there is a huge amount of unreasonable and often downright vicious animosity toward atheism and atheists in the US and even in other more secular places, and that that animosity is a form of bigotry rather than a mere disagreement about truth claims, and thus it needs to be pointed out and disputed.
Many of these people who are involved in promoting the humanistic side of the freethought movement (loosely defined) feel that in order to gain credibility for themselves they have to portray Dawkins and the rest as irrelevant in today’s public debate. And as always, in their haste to create a greater role for themselves in the conversation worldwide they make the mistake of extrapolating about social causes from their personal experience, ignoring corners of the world where ‘Dawkinsonian’ New (gnu!) Atheism is yet to shake up primitive belief systems, let alone be influenced by secular philosophy or humanistic ideology.
As a non-nerd, totally normal and well adjusted male Gnu Atheist with an actual wife and a house in the suburbs of Detroit (perhaps the least-nerdy city in the developed world!), I am deeply offended at being lumped with those pasty-faced, Asbergeroid, socially inept, sci-fi addled, RPG addicted, developmentally arrested, comic book collecting losers.
Well, true, I listen almost exclusively to classical music. Which Stephen Fry admittedly called, um, “nerdile” in his memoir*. So what? And until I got contacts I needed glasses. Yeah, myopia – wanna make something of it? Never good at sports because besides the specs I was short & skinny. Now I’m short and slightly pear-shaped. Don’t care about football whether American, Australian, or that soccer nonsense. Or basketball…baseball…hockey…NASCAR…But a nerd? Never! Take it back now!
–*Moab Is My Washpot OK, so I used a footnote in a blog comment. Big. Fucking. Deal.
I hope your article in the New Humanist is aggressive and strident and very gnu. Now I’m off to read my astrology and alchemy books.
There there bcoppola. There there. Look, I told my contact at Fri Tanke (the Swedish publishers) before I went to Stockholm that I did or didn’t need something or other because I’m a nerd. She replied “we’re all nerds at Fri Tanke.” I felt so…………reassured. So at home.
There is something about your point. Like you, I don’t need to hide my atheism. My co workers don’t care. My neighbors (to the extent that it has come up) don’t care. Even my wife’s (she’s also an atheist) Southern Baptist family doesn’t bother us about it. So for me, there is no closet to come out of.
Some people may be calling for restraint because of fear of backlash. though I doubt that in the backwoods places, most people have no clue about who Dawkins is, so it’s probably a non issue.
I think it might be more of a personality/style issue. There are many people who really prefer low key approach, not just to theism but to any controversial subject. In most political movements there are the fringier types, who are vociferous, and the more subdued activists. And rightly or wrongly, the more subdued ones have a sense of embarrassment by the antics of their more radical brethren. A kind of friction develops with the moderates being viewed as lazy or weak and the extremists viewed as doing more damage than good. And there is a tendency for some open squabbling between the groups about these things.
Which is right? Did MLK or Malcom X, or the Panthers do the most for civil rights? I don’t know. We each need to do what we feel is more appropriate
Even if it is a mere disagreement about truth claims, one side advocates settling disputes by a reasoned examination of evidence, while the other side fights tooth and nail against using reason and evidence as criteria for settling disputes. (At least, that is, when they want to stop gays from doing icky stuff like getting married; not so much, perhaps, when they have been falsely accused of a crime.) This is something worth fighting for.
I am a GNU athiest from South Dakota. Most people i discuss this with are curious and will try a soft conversion, but they are not to pushy.
“Atheists are perhaps the last minority that it is fine to despise for no really justifiable reason.”
Atheists and fat people, Ophelia. It hard to imagine until you’ve experienced it, the sheer amount of vitriol that is flung at those of us who are overweight just for existing.
I sometimes despair that there is a fixed amount of bigotry in the world and it just gets shifted around.
For me it is more a case of the criticism being so empty. I mean it would be one thing if the critics were actually tackling what we are actually doing – but we end up with a bunch of men of straw set up as gnu atheists.
And what ends up happening is that we get all of this criticism heaped on top of us – that we can’t really do anything about.
Even if we went silent that wouldn’t stop people shoving words in our mouths as Caspar did.
Say you are bored? Okay, then you don’t have to deal with the conversation. We aren’t going to go door to door on this, and the publishing industry can take the hit in book sales. Not a problem.
But do so honestly. Don’t assign positions to us we don’t actually hold in order to justify it to either yourself or others.
And if you are going to have a debate like “Where to next” then quite frankly it is just plain good manners to invite us to join in. We might just surprise you on where we think the discussion should go to next.
I drive around Laguna Beach with my Margaret Sanger tribute bumper sticker, “No Gods, No Masters”, and the only reactions I get are positive. A columnist for one of our local papers raised an objection a couple of Christmases ago to my brother’s “God is Just Pretend”, but that’s about it. It tends to be godlier the further inland you go, but it’s still California: do your own thing. Both of my state’s senators are Jewish women. What more can I say?
Why is it that almost all the nerd’s I have met (me included) are atheists?
No, I know – that’s why I said almost. I’ve occasionally been around people who unselfconsciously comment on any fat people they happen to see. I saw one incredibly sadistic vitriol-fling on a bus about ten years ago, which I’m sure I’ve narrated here at least once.
Yes, this is always worth pointing out. Where I live, it is not so bad to be an atheist. There is some casual disrespect, and of course you have to put up with people going on about their godliness when it would be considered uncouth to go on about my own godlessness… but I’m not going to lose my job or be heavily ridiculed or whatever.
In some large coastal cities, it can even be cool to be an atheist, and uncool to be religious (though even in those places, religion somehow manages to stick it’s dirty fingers deep into politics anyway).
It’s not at all like that in many places. That’s important to remember.
Ajita – excellent point.
I notice a shift in the baseline of the conversation here. Unlike the last few posts (including mine) the original premise was not about whether it was safe to come out of the closet (the ‘tut-tut’ folks were already out as atheists), but how aggressively in your face the position should be.
Let’s face it. People are disturbed by atheism, because (as a powerful part of our evolutionary heritage) community is built on shared belief structures and shared conventions (it makes little difference whether these beliefs reflect reality or not). So the atheist is emotionally unnerving. He or she is not bound by the commonly perceived rules of restraint (again, it’s immaterial whether these rules are actually valid or not) and so is seen as a threat. I think this is not just culture, this is deeply ingrained in our social instincts, to trust those who share some fundamental cultural beliefs with us. So they react, in the same way that our biological imperatives are programmed to react: hostility toward outsiders.
The chasm can be crossed, however, based on the many shared components we have with our fellow religious humans. Those are the areas that need to be accentuated.
James, quite so. This comes up whenever we argue with Harriet Baber, here or at CisF. She always insists that in her circles, it’s theism that is marginal and scorned. I think she generalizes way too much from that fact, and too often forgets to stipulate “her circles” and what a minority they are, but apart from that, of course she has a point.
But one doesn’t just live in one’s personal local circle, for one thing – one also lives in the “circle” that is the broader culture and discourse. Part of my “circle” is the Washington Post and the Guardian and NPR and the BBC. They don’t persecute me, obviously, but they do insistently marginalize a way of thinking that I think should not be marginalized.
Wonderful post, Ophelia! I’m looking forward to your article in response. I loved the way you made this point:
This is a new point, it seems to me: Calling shenanigans on the bigotry of rumour-mongering against atheists. Sam Harris’ initial point was about breaking the taboo against criticizing religion. But this new point brings home the harm and basic unethicalness (is that a word?) of using bigotry to try to enforce the taboo. It’s a bit more personal, and I think it lends a more credible call for justice than simply a call for conversation.
I like the word ‘unapologetic’ to describe the taboo-breaking attitude rather than the vague and increasingly pejorative ‘new’ atheism. I wonder if there’s a good word beginning with G to describe the bigotry-breaking attitude you express here. Cuz then we could have a neat new backronym for GNU. Perhaps ‘galvanized’ would do the trick?
GNU Atheism: Galvanized ‘N’ Unapologetic Atheism.