The real problem is new atheism
Nick Cohen has a terrific, ferocious piece on Trevor Phillips’s failure, indeed refusal, to do anything about caste discrimination in the UK. Since Phillips is the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, this failure/refusal is striking as well as tragic.
Nick starts by clearing some stupid lumber out of the way.
You can tell that speakers are preparing to say something scandalous when they assert that “militant atheists” are the moral equivalents of the religious militants that so afflict humanity. Trevor Phillips, whose flighty management of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is becoming a scandal, was no exception when he announced last week that British believers were “under siege” from “fashionable” atheists.
…
Trevor Phillips’s attack on “fashionable” atheists for exercising their right to speak their minds shows he does not begin to understand modern sectarianism. From his ignorance flows a cowardly refusal to face down those who would bully and harass others, as a story that deserves more attention than it has received shows.
Phillips also, I would add, does not begin to understand people’s right to speak their minds. The endless flow of crap about #BadNewAtheists demonstrates that a lot of people don’t begin to understand that, because the whole “omigod #BadNewAtheists” thing depends on the assumption that there is something obviously Bad about atheists spelling out what they don’t believe.
Faced with the prospect of confronting the prejudices of core supporters, the Labour government preferred holding on to seats to living by liberal principles and backed away from extending anti-discrimination law to cover caste. With Labour gone, campaigners for just treatment for tens of thousands of British Asians have a glimmer of hope.
They are trying to persuade the coalition to take seriously a study of bullying and harassment conducted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It is a dispiriting read – little more than a list of pointless cruelties. The Indian supervisor of an NHS worker discovers that he is from a lower caste and makes his life such a misery he becomes ill under the pressure and is suspended; a social services care worker refuses to help an elderly woman wash herself because the old lady is from a lower caste and so it goes on through dozens of examples.
But Trevor Phillips doesn’t want to know.
A search of the Equality and Human Rights Commission records shows that it ignores caste discrimination in Britain.When I phone its press office to ask why, its public relations officers fail to return my calls.
Why tf not? Seriously: why? As it’s a press office, they must know Nick will report the failure, and where he will do so. Are they content with that? An article in the Observer noting that they can’t be bothered to pay attention to a report on caste discrimination? Too busy opposing “fashionable” atheists are they?
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times, “Militant theists carry guns, militant atheists carry books.”
So if all we carry is books, how do we manage to cause believers to be “under siege”?
:- )
Privilege.
“This is not a book to be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great vehemence.”
When I read about cases like the two you mention, I wonder whether what we need to do is “stop caste discrimination” or whether we just need to “make people (particularly in the public sector?) behave professionally”. There are lots of reasons people treat subordinates badly, or shirk — do we need a different mechanism when people justify that behavior on religious grounds?
Well, given a choice, yes, let’s have “end caste discrimination”! It’s a sucky bad horrible thing; India is officially opposed to it (unofficially is a different matter); there’s nothing good about it. Yes, let’s end it.
by making them feel so stupid that the only way they can end the argument is by shooting someone.
I wish we stopped exporting all the idiotic stuff we believe in.
If the press office consistently fails to return calls, there’s another place to cut government costs.
When Adam delved and Eve did spin, who was then the bra-ha-min?
It has always puzzled me how little attention the world in general pays to caste. Just think of the criticism India would get if the Dalits/Untouchables had a different skin colour to everyone else there.
Teapot: I don’t know whether you are being sarcastic or not, but the lower castes in India *do* tend to be darker, because they tend to have more jobs involving being outside. (I.e., they tend to tan more.) Also there was an article I remember reading, I believe in National Geographic years ago, about how in India there has been skin-colour based discrimination between groups in India for that reason – people inverting the low caste -> dark to dark -> low caste. Of course, even if either or both “causal arrows” were correct, they don’t entail anything about the merit (i.e. none) of such a situation.
The whole idea of atheism being the worst of the worst is one thing that unites fundamentalists with moderate religious people. Its so ingrained that they dont even realize that they are demonizing groups of people when they do this.
Just today I was reading a piece on the huffpo written by a country and western singer called Cheley Wright who, last year, decided to out herself as a lesbian.
She writes
“Religion has been used to malign and condemn people like me for generations, we all know that. There is a rumor floating around out there about LGBT people and it’s not good. A lot of folks think we’re Godless”
That poor woman – being associated with such a terrible rumor!
It’s like what we have come to expect from the interfaith crowd – the price of membership in the moderate club is that you have to contribute to the othering of those terrible atheists.
Or the press office fails to return calls because its costs were already cut, and there’s no longer any staff to return calls.
On a more serious note, I did not know caste discrimination was an issue in the UK. On the one hand, there is no point in enumerating all possible types of discrimination explicitly in laws. On the other hand, common forms should be, just to make it clear. And if caste-based discrimination is common in the UK, there should be little problem with explicitly adding it to the anti-discrimination laws.
Just because it’s part of a religious belief system should not be an objection. After all, the same is true for gender discrimination and many other forms of discrimination. And it’s not like in those cases the state has banned people from discriminating in private, or within their religious organizations.
Being a member of an immigrant Indian community in Singapore, the claims of castebased discrimination in the UK sound appalling. Maybe it is because we are mostly south-indian, but such behaviour is truly unheard of in my neck of the woods. Just as we do not practice female foeticide or forced marriage nor have honour killings. The solution to caste based bullying and discrimination seems to be simple- zero tolerance. Fire those who refuses to do their jobs, prosecute those who bully.
Many Indians here do not observe any caste barriers, even in marriage. There are people here of the ‘lower’ castes but they do not proclaim a separate dalit identity and there is truly no ostracisation that I have ever heard of.
But my relatives in India (all irredeemable assholes, each and everyone of them) do observe untouchablility in the villages. I am just back from a trip to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and the relatives were upfront about not socialising with the dalits in the villages, though they acknowledged that behaviour in the cities was not so rigid. The moronic bastards do not allow the dalits into their homes and consider social or physical contact ‘contaminating’. The assholes are somewhat resentful about the rising political power of the dalits who benefit from positive discrimination and are now more circumspect about how they address and talk to the dalits.
True incident. While i was in my mother’s house in a regional town in Tamil Nadu, there was a huge loudspeaker outside belonging to a christian church – located two kilometres away- which blared religious music and sermons nonstop (the fuckers started at 6am and stopped only at midnight, though on one occasion they ended at 3 am). I was at my wits’ end with the noise pollution though the relatives were very nonchalant about the whole thing. Guess what? The xtians had a legal permit for their shenanigans and since they were a dalit group, none dared to complain as it was politically incendiary to do so. I never cursed so much in my life as when I was in India- I loathe the whole fucking country.
@Sigmund in #13: worse, even many atheists feel like they need to loudly establish that they’re not one of those atheists.
Sorry peple but I needed to get that out of the system. My mother is very upset with me as I was deliberately and abominably rude to the asshole relatives and i cant get that she values relationships with such people.
(Cackles at ‘fashionable’…)
Ah yes, you Phillips, you drooling, semisentient wank. All those folk bein’ so impertinent ‘n difficult as to call a hegemonic, towering pile o’ BS the BS it so clearly is actually audibly, they’re just being ‘fashionable’. Following the crowd, that’s the ticket…
Nice smear, pal. So subtle, really.
But I’ve news for you. No one’s gonna buy it. As it is, in fact, absolutely impossible for the gnus to be ‘fashionable’…
(/See, I’m one. And these two conditions–my being one and it being ‘fashionable’–are mutually exclusive. It’s a sorta universal constant.)
Jeez don’t apologize, mirax – it’s good to know these things.
@12 No of course I wasn’t being sarcastic. Lets restate the point as “Just imagine the criticism that India would get if the Dalits were ethnically black, or white or east asian”.
@mirax
well then Singapore seems to be a special case. In my experience NRI’s in UK and US generally marry within their same caste and with all the astrological nonsense (there are always exceptions of course) -atleast those who agree to go in for arranged marriages .
Sili’s quote in #4 was so good I had to look it up. Both the appropriate wording and the context were hard to find; got them eventually on a metafilter thread from someone trying to figure out the same exact thing.
Turns out, it was Dorothy Parker reviewing Mussolini’s novel The Cardinal’s Mistress. Actual quote is:
“This is not a novel which should be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Metafilter thread: http://ask.metafilter.com/56179/Which-novel-should-be-thrown-with-great-force
Google books result: http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1416926801&id=KgFOUGVkzMcC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=%22not+a+novel+to+be+tossed+aside+lightly%22&sig=2Y8Iug6lRWMQbOd-x7Hgrttg_EY#v=onepage&q=%22not%20a%20novel%20to%20be%20tossed%20aside%20lightly%22&f=false
#12,20
The original Sanskrit word for caste means ‘color’, the lower castes were the descendants of the earlier inhabitants of India who were subjugated by Aryan invaders in the Bronze Age.
I’m not sure what a modern genetic analysis would demonstrate,however that’s the origin of the caste system in India. Since this obscenity is sanctified and sanctioned by religion we just have to accept it.
When I’ve challenged some Indians on this point they claim that the ‘preference for lighter skins’ is merely ‘cultural’ while ‘Europeans’ who discriminate on the same basis are ‘racists’. In my opinion Westerners who accommodate these double standards are patronizingly racist themselves.
#10,
:-) In comparison, the class system in 14th England is a model of social mobility.
The weird thing about the caste system is that it’s not even really a Hindu thing, just a South Asian cultural thing in general. When I was a Muslim I met Desi Muslims who were still caste conscious even though they had no trouble condemning such barbaric Hindu practices as yoga. The Sikhs originally all took the same surname to avoid caste distinctions, but modern day Sikhs often append a surname after Singh/Kuar in order to let others know “Hey, my family background is okay.”
@RJW
All caste’s seem to prefer fair skinned women (with the nauseating fair and lovely ad’s showing various dark skinned women being rejected in arranged marriages till they use the beauty cream to transform themselves into fair skinned women who immediately get the husband – whereas America seems to like the tanned look.
I’d think skin color is usually not associated with castes because as of today every caste has every shade of skin color. And usually the caste was taken to indicate your occupation rather than a comment on your race though of course that doesnt make the practice any less disgusting.
@DA
Reminds me of the Christians and Muslims who wanted to be considered for the backward classes quota for education.
@#24,
Your comments on the persistence of caste consciousness are very interesting. I remember a quote by the Indian historian Romila Thapar,”what’s immutable in India, is not race or religion but caste.” It’s certainly not going to disappear quickly.
@25,
I’ll accept your opinion that there’s no longer any correlation between skin color and caste. The question remains as to why ‘all castes’ prefer fair skinned women, the obvious(but not necessarily correct) answer is that these preferences are the result of Western cultural imperialism.
HIPSTERRRRRS!
@ deepak
Well, I dont know the caste of 90% of my tamil friends, schoolmates and neighbours and people here just dont make the caste connections that Indians from india do. Maybe it is because we are all most likely shudras, ;-). We are also Tamils, with a political tradition of rejecting brahminical hinduism and casteism. I think that our status as a mainly working class minority community helped to erase some of the traditional divisions.
There is a fair bit of marriage out of the race and ‘caste community’. Yes certain groups tend to marry in and have more arranged marriages as a result – Syrian orthodox malayalees, Gurajati jains, punjabi sikhs,Sindhi trading communities , very small groups like the tamil chettiars, the malayalee Nairs and Menons. However the vast majority of the south indian singaporeans date freely, fall in love, marry and (nowadays) divorce in very similar ways to other Singaporeans.
I have only ever been asked what my caste affiliation was by Indians from india (numerous times in India and once at an international conference in Italy!)and never ever in Singapore. However that may change yet as we recently have had an influx of new immigrants from India – and there are reports of them being more caste-conscious and snobbish towards local Indians.
@23 Yes, agreed, your para 3 was my main point. In the west we seem to think that somehow discrimination isn’t as bad when it isn’t based on blatant racial lines.
Its not just Asia where this happens. I remember when visiting Peru a few years ago that everyone you saw on Peruvian TV had much lighter skin than everyone you actually met. (This might have been a function of the makeup and cameras of course).
Similarly I remember seeing a TV programme about East Africa, and the locals interviewed all seemed to regard lighter skin as higher status, apparently due to the association of lighter skin with the Arab slavers and darker skin with the Africans they enslaved. I don’t know if anyone here has any local knowledge of whether this was at all accurate.
@mirax
That’s good (well except for the divorce part!).
Deepak, #25, is that a British or Canadian thing? I’m a yank, so I missed the reference.
Svlad #27, so true. I just stopped believing in God because one night I showed up to a party in my American apparel shirt and skinny jeans, and started chatting this girl up about how much I love Animal Collective, and she’s like “Yeah, but are you into atheism?” I was like “Uh, I like their old stuff better.” and she saw right through me. But now I’ve read the God Delusion, and am basically the king of Williamsburg.
This article is so sad, especially the examples given about people being discriminate against in a country where a person might go specifically to make a better life for themselvs and their families.
Although there probably are Christians who might use this as an advantage to proselytize, how does that excuse the actions of the Hindus who support the caste system? (Also, I find it amusing how people use “they’re trying to convince members of our faith to leave the faith” as an argument. I think this is probably used as a way to discourage members of the faith from pointing out any problems they might see within it, because even parents who might realize there’s a problem might not want to risk their kids leaving the faith.)