Guest post: The roots of the “fragility as virtue” meme
Originally a comment by Sastra on Donors are disgusted.
VanitysFiend wrote:
The idea that the religious, be they liberal or conservative, deserved to be treated with kid gloves, and people like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris etc were being highly disrespectful when they called religious beliefs silly, wrong, or worst of all, bad. The idea that the mainstream progressive liberal left would move on from defending conservative Islam to something like Transgenderism isn’t that far fetched to me, what’s bizarre is that the sceptics and atheists followed them on this.
I used to call that the “Little People Argument “ — that being skeptical and honest was a position of power and that the religious were little people, not big people like us. They can’t handle the truth. They need comfort more. They can’t figure out how to be moral. That’s why we shouldn’t make rational arguments meant to persuade. The New Atheists jeered at this Accomodationism because we saw religion as power. But I noticed that enthusiasm for “Draw Mohammed Day” started waning when expecting Muslims to act like adults became increasingly associated with conservative views. Atheists who’ve primarily gotten into activism because they see it as a progressive social justice position are sometimes less wedded to epistemic integrity, I think. Prominent New Atheists started becoming charged with Islamophobia by other New Atheists who thus left the movement.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s rationalists started complaining about what was called Therapeutic Culture, a growing interest in getting therapy, giving therapy, recommending therapy, and applying therapeutic principles to everyday life. What in reasonable doses would be a good thing quickly started spiraling out of control, till resilience became identified with privilege. Wendy Kaminer’s 1992 I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: the Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions was a favorite with skeptics. If we’re looking for the roots of the “fragility as virtue” meme, Therapeutic Culture is probably one of them.
The intellectual has always, as far as I can tell, been a prestigious, even privileged figure. We can suppose that this derives from the economics of university tuition, or from the role of a college degree as gateway into the middle class, or from a time when only the upper class could afford books and the time to study them, or from when having even a small personal library required a noble’s wealth, or from the Dark Ages, or from Alexander the Great, or from the shamans in our prehistory. However you choose to frame it, book learnin’ and highfalutin language is something characters in fiction have to make excuses for. It’s only when the physicist says, “I grew up on a dairy farm,” and helps birth a calf that he becomes trustworthy. It shows that that he doesn’t think he’s better than the rest of us, which is the implicit assumption about the nerd.
Seeing believers as the underdogs against skeptics is the same inferiority complex.