In which Josh Rosenau does not read carefully
To say the least. To say it more politely than he deserves.
He did a post a couple of days ago on my post about Ben’s post. None of that now; I know you can follow along. It’s a pig’s life in the British army. Pull your socks up.
First he quotes Ben:
[Mooney’s] stance is self-consciously political. At least to some extent, there is a “difference in goals” between Mooney and the activist atheists — by which, I think, he means a difference in priorities. Mooney does not think that speaking out against religion is a priority, and that it is on the whole detrimental to science education; while others think it is a priority, and that it supports science education in some respect.
Then he quotes me:
I think that’s right, and it is the self-consciously political aspect that I have always found somewhat alien. I say “somewhat” because I can’t possibly reject all politics. I realize one has to weigh consequences (as we were just discussing with reference to the Vatican and a life-saving abortion) and consider priorities. But I think when serious discussion becomes too entangled with politics, then it simply stops being serious discussion and turns into some form of campaigning.
Then he responds:
But this is exactly what I find so strange – the ambivalence and even aversion to politics. I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t know why she, and many others in the gnu camp, seem to equate politics with “campaigning” with some sort of sleaze or dishonesty, and think that this is totally distinct from the bullshit that bloggers do on blogs (including gnu atheist bloggers on gnu atheist blogs).
And so on, for the rest of the post.
Do you see? Do you see where his reading skills deserted him? It’s in the part where he responds to me. He ignores what I said. He ignores what I said, and responds to what I didn’t say. I specifically said “I can’t possibly reject all politics” and then said why, yet he responds to me as rejecting all politics.
Bad blogger. No cookie.
Commenter tbell:
I think that pretty much captures it.
And Rosenau’s misreading is itself political. As I’ve just told him.
You have indeed been misread there. Few things are as annoying.
He’s not ignoring what you wrote, he’s misrepresenting it. You don’t identify campaigning with dishonesty or sleaze in the post, and that identification is not implied by the point you made.
I commented thusly on his blog, which I think addresses the source of his myopia:
I think Rosenau is playing games politics.
He redefines politics to mean virtually any social interaction.
Pretends to be shocked that gnu atheists, by misrepresenting one of them, are ambivalent and/or averse to politics.
Which leaves his readers with the implication that Gnus are either unable/unwilling to engage in dialogue or just plain out of touch with reality and how things work. Either way they can be sidelined.
I didn’t misread you, and the quotations you offer don’t support the charge. I didn’t say you reject all politics, I said you show “ambivalence and even aversion to politics.” And the passage you quoted from your own post does show that ambivalence and aversion.
You describe politics as if it’s an unfortunate thing that crops up here and there but is to be avoided, and you contrast it with “serious discussion.” My post is arguing that “serious discussion” is a kind of politics, not distinct from politics. I’m arguing that you’re seeing this in a (somewhat?) dichotomized way, while I see it as sides of the same coin.
Bollocks, Josh.
Honest to christ. Look, I said “it is the self-consciously political aspect that I have always found somewhat alien.” That means not all politics, not politics in every sense, not all aspects of politics, but self-consciously political politics. I said “I say ‘somewhat’ because I can’t possibly reject all politics.” That means I’m not rejecting all politics, politics as such, all aspects of politics, politics in general. It means I’m specifically not doing that. I said “I realize one has to weigh consequences and consider priorities.” That means one can’t reject all politics. I said “But I think when serious discussion becomes too entangled with politics, then it simply stops being serious discussion and turns into some form of campaigning.” That means not politics in general and all the rest of it, it means in particular situations.
Godalmighty. You could at least cop to being careless.
Is it me, or has “politics” become a little like the word “spirituality”? Just as I’m at a loss when Deepak Chopra drops the S-bomb, I have only a vague sense of what might be meant by the P-word in comment #7. Any “serious discussion” is, apparently, a kind of politics? Huh. One wonders what would not be “a kind of politics” under this expansive understanding of the term.
This sort of overly broad usage tends mainly to serve the demons of obfuscation, and rarely the angels of clarity and precision.
I second Andy’s comment. It’s getting to feel like when I first started dealing with Creationists and had to carry around a dictionary just to make sure we atleast had thaat much common ground. I understand that language changes and all that, but are we really doing anyone any good but making it up as we go along?
Andy, well on his own post Rosenau said “any time you are trying to change someone’s mind, you are doing politics” and then said any time you write something – “I mean anything: poetry, fiction, fantasy, slash fic, polemics” you at least should be trying to change someone’s mind; therefore (apparently) slash fic is politics.
I’d agree with him that argumentative writing can be seen as political in a sense, but that’s beside the point. It’s not what Ben meant by “self-consciously political” nor is it what I meant when I commented on what Ben said. It’s just beside the point, as Rosenau’s commentary so very often is. It’s a red herring, it’s blowing smoke, it’s a detour, it’s a waste of time – as Rosenau’s commentary so often is.
Andy and Julian, that is. We cross-posted. :- )
Ophelia: Maybe you could clarify what “self-consciously political” means, then. Ben never defines it, you never define it, and clearly what you meant by it and what I took it to mean are not lining up. That may be my fault, in which case I’ll cop to it. But it’s also possible that you were unclear, and I can’t cop to that. But I don’t know what makes the “self-consciously political” different from any other kind of politics. What other kinds are there in your view?
Julian: “Any ‘serious discussion’ is, apparently, a kind of politics? Huh. One wonders what would not be ‘a kind of politics” under this expansive understanding of the term.’
Relatively little, as my post makes clear. I write: “any time you are trying to change someone’s mind, you are doing politics. And if you’re writing something …and don’t intend to change your reader’s mind in some way, you should just burn your keyboard. … I don’t think anyone in the gnu camp will disagree with that last sentence … they might disagree that that means any writing for a public audience is inherently political. But it is. I don’t see a way in which it isn’t.”
What we have here is not a failure to communicate, a lack of clear reading. It’s a difference of mindsets, and I laid it out as I did in that blog post hoping to explore that difference. Because we see the status of politics differently, I read her claim differently than she intended, apparently. I still don’t know how, or even if that’s really what happened. I’m still optimistic that this discussion can become an extension of Ophelia’s original post which tried to lay out some of those differences in mindset.
My point in advancing an expansive definition of politics is that the question of whether we’re “doing politics” is less relevant (to me) than whether we’re doing politics well. And that depends on our goals, which gets back to the valid point that what Helps depends on what we want to accomplish, and maybe our political goals are different. But being explicit about goals, and being politically self-aware (which is presumably different than self-consciously politics) can only help.
A further clarification: Saying that lots of things are political hardly means that they are only political. They’re other things, too, and it’s fair to say that sometimes the other stuff should be more important.
Josh, the passage as a whole was not unclear. It was certainly very clear that I was not announcing an “aversion to politics” and that in fact I was stipulating that I was not doing that. I don’t want to get into some profound dialogue with you if you can’t even see that when it’s right there on the screen.
Josh,
Although this is definitely far afield from the present discussion, you ask a decent question and so I’ll try my best to take a shot at an answer. Without getting into details, my principled objection to your definition of the political is as follows. You’ve omitted any reference to reliable relationships that are based on meaningful trust and power; but I think meaningful trust and power are necessary for any adequate description of political action.
This matters because some actions are meaningful without being meaningful as political actions. For example, if I ask you the time of day, then we’re both engaged in a meaningful interaction, and hence a funny kind of mutual persuasion. But so described, it sure ain’t political.
So by “self-consciously political”, we’re referring to acts that involve trust and power. Mooney is doing his best to organize a kind of trust amongst certain groups. That’s how he’s political. And he’s self-consciously doing so — that’s the way he talks about himself, and that’s what he thinks his project amounts to. (And not all political acts are self-conscious: e.g., if I am a worker, and I spontaneously burst into outrage at the Executive during a membership meeting of the local, then I might be aligning myself to become a catalyst for political action, but I might not identify myself as a charismatic authority.)
I can’t comment on how Ophelia read the sentence, but her worries about posturing seem consistent with my understanding of what a self-consciously political action means.
Does that help?
I also fail to see what is so unclear. The point, as I see it, is that Mooney’s focus is on the politics. How are people going to see that, how are people going to react? Being honest and forthright is good, but is only acceptable as long as it doesn’t interfere with the political aspect of the discussion.
The position Ophelia seems to be taking is that the most important thing is to be honest and forthright. Being political is good, but only acceptable as long as it doesn’t interfere with being honest and forthright.
So the difference isn’t who is being political, it is whether politics is the goal itself or something nice to take into account when possible.
I would add the following to what Black Cat said: if you want people to trust you, then at minimum, you have to present yourself as if you were honest and forthright. And as a rule, actually being honest and forthright helps to foster the image that you’re honest and forthright. At least on the face of it, framing yourself as a framer is not an effective tactic.
Ophelia: It apparently wasn’t clear to me and perhaps to other readers. I think about politics differently than you, as you acknowledge thinking about politics differently from Mooney. Maybe that’s the source of the confusion, in which case resolving the confusion requires a profound discussion. Also, I might be remembering when you wrote, “[Mooney] thinks everything is political. I think that’s where I disagree with him most profoundly – over this confusion of the epistemic with the political.” Perhaps memory of that line (which is more clearly dichotomizing than the recent one I quoted in my post) informed my reading of your latest response to Mooney.
Ben: Thanks. I can certainly see why someone would adopt a narrower definition of “political” than I did, and I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had there. But even adopting the definition you’re offering, in which “self-consciously political” requires that someone be thinking of their goal as influencing the structure of trust and power in society, I’m still finding something odd about the position Ophelia espouses. (I could obsessively quibble that asking the time of someone is implicitly accepting a certain hegemonic role of time over our lives, and of government standardizers of time, and is granting that person and those standardizers a certain power over your life, but I haven’t got that kind of time or energy. Of course it’s not a political act, nor is chatting about the weather. But small talk can easily veer into discussion of politics, which was Seeger’s point, which I adopt by reference.)
In my post quoted above, I mentioned Dawkins’s “Out Campaign” as a gnu foray into politics and I don’t see how anyone can disagree. Ophelia often describes this blog’s goal in terms of reducing or replacing or ending the epistemic power religion holds in society. Isn’t that self-consciously aiming to change the structure of power and trust in society, and hence self-consciously political? If so, how can she say that being self-consciously political is “alien” to her?
Isn’t the pressure on NCSE to change the way that group and other science societies and science activists talk about religion and atheism also an attempt to change the power and trust of a) gnu atheists and b) religion in society, and hence self-consciously political? Wasn’t the effort to keep Francis Collins from running NIH, or to influence how he used that public office an unambiguously and self-consciously political act? Isn’t PZ’s poll-mobbing a form of self-consciously political action? Aren’t the debates Hitchens and other gnus organize with theists from D’Souza to Tony Blair (!) overtly and self-consciously political in that same way? Isn’t Jason Rosenhouse’s appeal to “the science of advertising” as a way to “raise consciousness” about atheism self-consciously political? What about the move to keep the Pope from visiting England, or to strip him of sovereign immunity?
If the civil rights and gay rights and abolition and suffrage movements were all self-consciously and scrupulously political – and anyone who says they weren’t is insane or profoundly ignorant – it seems improper for the gnus who explicitly compare their movement to those movements to then turn around and insist that their movement isn’t self-consciously political.
That is what bugs me. Gnu atheism is obviously political. It’s leaders (including the horsemen and Ophelia and even Jerry) are clearly trying – self-consciously! – to change society’s patterns of trust and authority. By your quite reasonable definition (I think mine is reasonable, too, and hope to return to that topic), it is a self-consciously political movement, led by people who are acting self-consciously politically. I don’t understand why it is so often couched as not political, or not self-consciously political, or perhaps even elevated above the pedestrian, self-consciously political, nature of accommodationism. Why not say that it’s a different politics, that the objections to accommodationism are themselves political (among other things)?
Why act as if being self-consciously political is a vice, rather than an opportunity?
I’m not really sure what this means. Does the political aspect simply mean marketing to a particular audience? I do think that Mooney is in the business of selling ideas, which is fine. However, I think that as not only a communicator but a science communicator his priorities are wrong. Science is unique in that accuracy must always come first. Communicating it is no different. If you accept this then it stands to reason that science should not be consciously political, despite whatever post-modern relativistic b.s. Rosenau buys into.
In my experience Mooney shows less interest in whether what he’s selling is accurate so long as it is effectively framed to the audience. Which is why he doesn’t get along with some (alot?) of scientists.
<blockquote>Does the political aspect simply mean marketing to a particular audience?</blockquote>
Basically, yes.
Mooney doesn’t want to talk about out atheism. He avoids it as much as possible. His gig is better science literacy, where accuracy should be paramount. The gnu movement has a goal in mind as well: better atheist awareness, which will diminish religious authority, which will lead to better science literacy, which in turn will prove beneficial to society. All the while holding to a scientific worldview. That’s what makes this movement unique and, I dare say, have the ability to rise above most political discourse, as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens demonstrate in their public debates.
In maintaining a reality-based scientific worldview, where honesty and truth come first, I believe gnus are consistent on insisting that NCSE not water down science by siding with sectarian politics in the unevidenced belief that it will increase science literacy. Either say nothing at all or give equal weight that many scientists do see a conflict
I’m not aware of any organized campaign to have Francis Collins’ nomination blocked. I think you’re stretching the definition of “effort.” In turn, by saying the decision to make Francis Collins head of NIH was a politically-driven decision and therefore unwise does not make the criticism itself politics as usual.
I don’t think we’re denying there is a political consequence in our aims. As I explained on your blog, our first priority is self-consciously rational or moral criticism, only then and consequently are our aims entering the political sphere.
The problem is, when your opponents are playing politics by using rhetoric and deceit, and you try to correct that language with reason, then you can’t help but become involved politically.
It rather like a religious person discussing religion with an atheist, and then accusing the atheist of being religious, because they’re discussing religion. We’re not religious and we’re not political, we’re using reason to criticise our opponents, and we can’t help but be sucked into the game.
Perhaps I am not explaining myself well, Ophelia is the queen of clarity and so maybe she can explain her own priorities and aims with you. But I think what we’re doing is a kind of anti-politics much like what we’re doing with anti-religion.
By using the word anti-politics, I think I may have just caused more confusion and chaos, but that is my attempt to try and explain what we’re doing. In using the term anti-politics, it means that there is a coherent and specific interpretation of what politics is, otherwise, if everything were political, then anti-politics is as incoherent as politics. I think perhaps we’re doing reason, then morality and only then, in a reactionary way are we being political.
Which is why we need common ground on what we all mean by politics, not just what Josh Rosenau thinks politics is.
What we need most here, if we are to have a rational discussion is coherency. And that is what Ophelia is best at doing.
Josh,
I can’t speak for Ophelia, and wouldn’t try. She might have a different set of desiderata that are involved in the concept of “politics” than I. But I think the way I put it is (probably) consistent with the way she puts it, with her concerns with manipulation. And to be clear, in my view there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being self-consciously political — in fact, Ophelia says as much when she pre-empts your worries in the above post, since she uses language that is deliberately not categorical.
But two points:
1) You can’t be a manipulator without being self-consciously political — it comes with the territory. Other things that come along with that territory: vanity, stubbornness, inability to admit mistakes, etc.
2) Sometimes when folks make a habit of being self-consciously political, it’s only because they’ve forgotten how to be ordinary decent social human beings. So if I ask them the time of day, they’ll accuse me of perpetuating the hegemony of Anglo time and the tyranny of the Greenwich line.
Well, those people are unreasonable assholes, and it’s important to preserve the ability to sort them from perfectly friendly happy social dolphin types. So for instance, in your parenthetical remark, you say some things about how you think that the case of checking the time might be a political act. But I think it’s important to distinguish between a political act and an act that is set against a political background. If you don’t, it sounds funny — regardless of a person’s meaning, to say that politics is everywhere and in everything makes it sound like they’re paranoid. In short, we need to make sure that our definition of a political act is so wide that it conflates the political with the social.
I agree that all of the cases you cite are self-consciously political. I also agree more generally that we have to be careful in making sure that we aren’t too narrow in our definition of the political. So, for instance, we can’t restrict political action to collective action, since we need to preserve the sensible feminist insight that in some sense the personal is political. Relatedly, we have to recognize that sometimes people will engage in political acts without knowing it. (For instance, occasionally a bumbling male dolphin will wander in and unintentionally make use of sexist epithets, and then squee in shock and dismay when the political background is rightly pointed out.) But I think that’s consistent with Ophelia’s concern.
Benjamin: “to say that politics is everywhere and in everything makes it sound like they’re paranoid. In short, we need to make sure that our definition of a political act is [not?] so wide that it conflates the political with the social.”
Assuming my square-bracket insertion is correct, I’ll just say that I take your point, but I think it’s more complicated than that. My earlier parenthetical was, I hope obviously, meant as tongue in cheek, and I’d agree that social niceties like birthday gifts and thank you notes and giving someone driving directions are social but not self-consciously political. In the Venn diagram, I think we could say that the social is a superset of the political, one circle fully surrounds the other, and the two are not coextensive. But I draw the political circle much larger than I think you or Ophelia would. And that has consequences. It means, among other things, that I probably have a more favorable impression of politics than you. Which makes it a less paranoid perspective.
It’d be interesting to explore some other consequences that follow from those differing definitions, but I want to circle back to the original post, and reiterate my question: If those acts – including this blog’s stated reasons for existence – are self-consciously political, then in what sense is the self-consciously political even “somewhat alien” to OB and other gnus? That is part of the point of my post to which this post is responding. I still don’t see how that’s a misreading.
Ophelia’s previous post a distinction between “serious discussion” and “campaigning,” which is not a totally bogus distinction to draw. Yet the About page says B&W “was established … to oppose a number of related phenomena.” Which looks like both campaigning and “serious discussion,” unless we adopt a narrow (too narrow, IMHO) understanding of “campaigning.” Plus, the things being opposed include “Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated,” which gets us back to the self-consciously political.
For these reasons and more, I think it is unfair to categorize my post as a misreading of OB’s previous post. There is some sort of genuine tension here, and my post was trying to tease it out, partly by exploring my own view of politics and hoping others would explore their own as well.
Here is the problem: you are defining politics differently then Ophelia, then arguing that her point is wrong because it doesn’t work with your definition of “politics”. That is called the equivocation fallacy.
To give an example, saying you are debating a creationist. You argue that science has a really clear picture of how evolution works in general. The creationist argues that this is wrong, because science cannot explain what caused the big bang. You reply that evolution as you are talking about biological evolution, which does not include cosmology. The creationist points out that astronomers often refer to evolution of the cosmos, and that is the definition he or she is using, therefore you are wrong.
Has the creationist proven you wrong? Of course not, the creationist just shifted the topic to an entirely different subject than the one you are talking. That is what you are doing here.
I explained what I think Ophelia means back in post 17, including how I think “self-consciously political” is being defined, but you have not addressed this. I don’t think your objections hold any water when you define it in the manner I did (which is how I interpret what Ophelia said, she will have to say whether it is accurate).
Well there are gradations. So let’s distinguish between social acts, political acts, and self-consciously political acts, and contrast that with having a Machiavellian character or a Happy Social Dolphin character. A person has a Machiavellian character just in case they’ve forgotten how to stop being self-consciously political. A person is a Happy Social Dolphin just in case they’ve forgotten that sometimes the social is political.
That’s the sense in which being self-consciously political might seem somewhat alien, despite being necessary or inevitable. This is just to say that there’s a kind of revulsion for the Machiavellian character. There’s a kind of guilt by association: the Machiavellians are weirdoes, and you have to be self-consciously political to be a Machiavellian, so it’s worthwhile to be on your guard to some extent when people are self-consciously political. And that applies even when you are yourself self-consciously political.
BlackCat’s reading of my view is pretty much right, but I would modify it just a little.
Political people have to be political. I wouldn’t say that for political people being political is acceptable only if it doesn’t interfere with being honest. In a perfect world that would be true, of course, but in this one, alas…
So I wouldn’t, for instance, say that a liberal campaigning in a conservative district has to tell all the truth on all occasions. Political people need to win.
I also wouldn’t say that Eugenie Scott has to tell all the truth to every audience. On the contrary; I understand why she can’t.
But not everyone is political, and that’s a good thing. Division of labor. Some people, fortunately, get to just ignore The Majority View or What People of Faith Would Think About That, and tell the truth as they see it.
And I think we should have a lot more of the second category than the first. Being political in the sense of carefully knowingly – self-consciously, as Ben said – avoiding certain truths for certain audiences ought to be a minority thing for people who do particular jobs. It’s a faute de mieux kind of thing. It’s less than ideal. It’s not something to treat as desirable or even as more moral than the alternative.
I crossed with Ben. I don’t even think Machiavellians are weirdoes! But I don’t think they’re the best model of anything except calculation, either. What James Carville does can be useful, but I sure as fuck don’t want to do it myself.
Right, but you would say that this person is being “self-consciously political”, right?
I was not saying one approach is good and one is bad, I was simply trying to define “self-consciously political” and contrast it from “political but not self-consciously so”.
Indeed; that’s exactly what I would say. That’s what I took Ben to mean by “self-consciously political” – having reasons (not necessarily bad reasons) to decide how much of the truth to tell based on political considerations.
The connotations of the word politics that come to my mind in these discussions are all negative. Sophistry over substance. Machiavellian manipulation. The classic bullshit artist, someone who will shout the truth when it serves their ends but is just as quick to deny the truth, construct false or misleading equivalencies (or tell outright whoppers) for the same ends.
I don’t think it’s an exclusively American phenomenon that observing actual politicians brings these characteristics so quickly to mind, but we do seem to be among the current world leaders in this respect. Anyone who can’t understand an aversion to politics must be using the word in the rarified, abstract way Josh is, or just not paying attention.
TheBlackCat: “Here is the problem: you are defining politics differently then Ophelia, then arguing that her point is wrong because it doesn’t work with your definition of “politics”. That is called the equivocation fallacy.”
No. I’m using the definition that Benjamin Nelson offered, which Ophelia seemed in the previous post to have endorsed (in broad strokes, at least), and building off of examples Benjamin agreed were “self-consciously political.”
Yes, I define political differently, but not with regard to those actions. We all agree there, so there’s no equivocation.
Benjamin, Ophelia: Perhaps because I take a more expansive (and more favorable?) view of politics, I’m not comfortable with treating politics and Machiavellianism as at all equivalent. I think anyone trying to change the world is doing politics, that doing politics well requires a certain population of brass-knuckle bruisers (you call them Machiavellians, I’d call them “hacks” – contrasting with “wonks”), but even hacks are most effective when wielding the truth. Policy and politics types tend to distinguish hacks from wonks by saying hacks want to win, often at any cost, while wonks want to be right, though reality is more nuanced. Good governance – good politics – requires both. The Bush administration was all hacks, and look where that got us.
Hacks and wonks are like zebras and gnus in a migrating species herd, each foraging differently, each keeping watch for predators, and defending the herd in its own ways. Would that we could all get along as well.
I think that it’s wrong to claim that zebras like me and Genie and Chris do what we do because we are not honest, or not able/willing to “speak the truth as [we] see it.” I’ve written before why I think no one can speak the whole truth, which means that we all tell less than the whole truth, and it’s not a question of whether to be honest or not, but of which parts of the truth to tell, and which to emphasize. And that’s dictated by goals, not by moral character or honesty or whatever. I emphasize that many scientists and religious groups see no conflict because it’s a true account of their beliefs and it serves my goal to talk about that. I’m speaking the truth as I see it. Your emphasize is different so you don’t tend to talk about that, preferring other truth claims. I don’t think that omission reduces your honesty or commitment to truth.
There’s also a legitimate difference of opinion between you and me about the epistemic status of claims about the supernatural, so what we would say if we could speak the whole truth (as we see it) would inevitably differ.
Ophelia: I disagree with the argument that “not everyone is political.” Everyone is political at some times, and not at others. I also think that “being political” encompasses more than you do, which is momentarily beside the point. To get back to the OP, given that I tend to think that politics is inevitable, and since so much that you do seems political to me (and Benjamin Nelson agrees, so that’s not just my quirky definition), I don’t see why it would be worse to be self-consciously political than to be political in some other way. I’d think it’s better to be self-consciously political, and therefore to be effective at the politics while also maintaining fidelity to your ideals, than to be inadvertently political, and thereby be right but not effective.
Grendel’s Dad: “Anyone who can’t understand an aversion to politics must be using the word in the rarified, abstract way Josh is, or just not paying attention.”
I understand why people are averse to politics, but I don’t think that they ought to be. I think they ought to take politics back from the bullshitters.
Josh, I don’t treat people who are self-consciously political as equivalent to people who are Machiavellian. The hack is part of the subset of people that are self-consciously political. That might make your average person legitimately wary of those that are self-consciously political, because from an ignoramous/outsider’s POV the hack is indistinguishable from the wonk. But that doesn’t mean the hack and the self-consciously political person are equivalent. (Incidentally, your misreading here is almost certainly my fault. I should not have used the phrase “guilt by association” — I meant it a bit ironically.) Does that clear things up?
Incidentally, FWIW, I don’t assign you or Scott (or Phil Plait) in the same zoological category that I put Chris and Sheril. You seem to be willing to entertain the wisdom of tactical diversity, but that’s not the impression I get from M&K. And I think that’s a core difference. And for that reason, I think that a lot of your worries about the necessity of choosing your message, etc., are besides the point.
So: let’s agree that we can all choose our own tactics, and let’s also agree that to some extent they all have a role to play in protecting the herd. By agreeing to these terms, you will have by all appearances distinguished yourself from Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirshenbaum.
Josh, that’s all very well, but it still relies on taking your particular view of what politics means as opposed to the more familiar one. There just is a commonplace meaning of “political” that has to do with being strategic rather than honest. You want politics to be better than that; so do I; but that’s really sort of beside the point. If that’s what you meant to say in your post, it didn’t work.
I keep crossing with Ben, just after he’s said things better than I have!
OPHELIA!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDjE_rwIUmI
Hmm that should’ve been on separate lines. Ah well.
Godalmighty.
I’ve just seen that Rosenau has slagged me off on his post for the “attempted outing” of TB as Tim Broderick – whose identity is common knowledge, because he used to link to his website with his name on it when he posted at the Intersection. That Tim Broderick repeatedly called me a liar at the Intersection – when I was not, needless to say, lying; I was asking a set of serious questions about Unscientific America.
Rosenau gets on his ethical high horse because I referred to the non-secret real name of a guy who publicly libeled me. He thinks I should respect the “anonymity” of someone who used the “anonymity” to libel me!!
Gee, thanks, Ben, that’s really deep! :- )
Benjamin: I agree that there’s value to tactical diversity, and I’m glad to reach some agreement there. But when I or NCSE get criticism from Jerry Coyne or Larry Moran or other gnus for doing what we do, that seems to reflect a failure of reciprocity. Coyne (especially) seems to think that his approach is better not just for gnus, but for zebras and giraffes. And sometimes the goals of gnus and zebras overlap, and it’s possible for them (to stretch the metaphor) to step on one another’s toes. Coyne’s more likely to appreciate that point coming from you or Ophelia than he is from me, FWIW.
Ophelia: “There just is a commonplace meaning of ‘political’ that has to do with being strategic rather than honest. You want politics to be better than that; so do I; but that’s really sort of beside the point. If that’s what you meant to say in your post, it didn’t work.”
That was part of what I was saying with my post, though mostly I was trying to express my own view on politics. Speaking the truth as I see it and all that. But also trying to challenge the idea that being honest is distinct from being strategic, or that being strategic is distinct from being honest. It isn’t (IMHO).
Also: I’ve emailed you about TB, etc., and am happy to resolve it offline.
Josh, maybe. But I think there are at least two things worth keeping in mind.
First, institutions have more responsibilities than individuals. Coyne is an individual who (until recently) represented nobody but himself; by contrast the NCSE is an organization that represents all scientists, including Coyne. So if Coyne genuinely thinks that the tactics (and strategy, i.e., philosophical outlook) of the NCSE are ineffective or unwise, then he owes it to himself to criticize those tactics. One can hardly blame him for that!
Second, there’s the problem of idiosyncratic personal conflicts. For instance, you and Coyne seem to have some kind of personal/professional history, so I couldn’t dare to comment on your exchanges with him. Also, Mooney’s criticism of Coyne’s TNR piece resulted in bad air, either because Mooney has no interest in a diversity of tactics (which seems unwise), or because he is keeping his strategy very close to his chest (which seems elitist). So the human drama clouds a lot of the interactions.
The human drama doesn’t have to play that much of a role, though. Take Phil Plait, for instance. Plait shares the same tactical outlook as Mooney, and much like Mooney is he not terribly responsive to criticism. Yet there’s a world of difference between Plait’s reputation and Mooney’s reputation. Indeed, the debate that is utterly impossible with Mooney actually seems tractable with Plait, just because Plait was relatively clear-spoken when he recognized the validity of passionate confrontation as a tactic.