Guest post: The problem was dogma
Originally a comment by Sastra on A kind of Turing test.
In atheist forums I often promoted an unpopular opinion: the religious were no less ethical than we were. On the whole, they share the same values and moral goals. Even the Nazis didn’t really differ in their sense of right & wrong, or commitment to fairness, from the people they persecuted.
Because change what you thought were the facts, and you change what’s right and wrong. If God was a God of Love and homosexuals subvert the Loving Natural Order, thus harming not only themselves but leading whole nations into damnation, then gay marriage is wrong. And fighting against it is right. It does no good to see my opponents as wicked, immoral, demonic, or cruel if I would do the same thing if I believed what they believe. The problem was dogma, ideology. The problem with the religious was religion.
Sure, there’s a disturbing portion of psychopaths and people who really are cruel. But if there’s a position that’s popularly held it’s very unlikely indeed that it’s believed only by the sort of people who enjoy torturing others. Look at the facts they’re working from: what looks like a moral problem may be a problem in reasoning.
When I made this case I noticed that, over time, fewer and fewer people agreed with me. It used to be a standard position in skepticism and a respectable position in atheism. But the more emphasis placed on social justice, the more the religious were seen as reveling in hatred. Till it became… like it is now. Dark vs Light, Good vs Evil, the Saved vs the Damned. It’s come full circle. We’re not just like the religious — we’re like religion.
This is related to something I mention now and then, which is that we all agree on far more than we disagree on, but the disagree part takes up way more space and attention. It kind of has to be the case that we agree on more, or we wouldn’t be able to function.
Pulling in the other direction, I tend to think trans dogma attracts bullies more than other social justice/egalitarian movements.
I often say, what would you believe if you’d only every been lied to? I think this about the Nazis, for example (having met a certain old gent in Berlin one time, who had some… startling opinions on certain subjects).
But Ophelia’s suggestion that “trans dogma attracts bullies more than other social justice/egalitarian movements” sure sounds right to me. And I think that’s down to the cultish aspect of it. The loudest, most strident and intolerant individuals will only be encouraged and rewarded, because it’s too risky for anyone to stand up and ask for moderation or to seek common ground and a rational means of coexistence.
I regularly make a similar point. Often enough the notion is spread that the atheists are more rational than the theists. I always counter that that is an illusion caused by the topic that is discussed when atheists and theists are mentioned. It is not because we know of one common topic theists are irrational about that theists in general are more irrational than atheists.
I absolutely agree that trans dogma attracts more bullies. A mix of misogyny and the zeal of the doubtful.
But any social justice cause has the potential to make a bully out of someone, including the (for lack of a better term) gender critical movement.
People make the mistake of thinking that because it’s so clear that their opponents’ cause is based on incorrect beliefs or ideas, that that’s the root of (what they perceive to be) their opponents’ bad behaviour.
It’s irrelevant whether or not your cause is correct or just or valid, because everyone’s cause is the just and correct and valid one in their own eyes. If you’ve got righteousness behind you, it’s very easy to turn off empathy for people who don’t agree with you, even if you only differ on a point or two.
And social media exacerbates bad behaviour; we can comfortably hide behind our keyboards while we hurl personal insults and death threats and defamatory accusations at the people who disagree with us, egged on by other people who agree with us, who are comfortably hiding behind their keyboards, too.
(Funny enough, as I write this I see Stella O Malley is on YouTube talking about bullying online…)
Excellent points in the OP, and timely for me. I’ve been thinking about the concept of “hate” recently, and getting into trouble in conversations about it. Apparently “hate” is obvious and indisputable, and all people who exhibit “hate” are bad people we should cut out of our lives. I try to make the points that “hate” depends on context, and that people on opposite sides of an issue can be seen as “hateful” by the other side as a result. I also try to make the point people are complicated (“we all agree on far more than we disagree on”, as Ophelia noted), and that sometimes we really honestly need to ignore some views we find reprehensible in order to get on with the rest of our lives. Some people who are otherwise wonderful people, important to us, may have some views we cannot stand, so perhaps the best approach is to ignore those views and not talk about them outside of appropriate contexts. But no, we are not supposed to “agree to disagree”, we are supposed to jettison these people.
Given the prevalence of views that: sinners deserve eternal torture in hell, and that gays/adulterers/atheists are all sinners, I imagine that an awful lot of religious people I know hold views I consider reprehensible, but I don’t discuss it much; they are good people, adhering to dogma. Lots of people I know abide by TWAW and oppose sex-based rights for women, again adhering to dogma; they, too, are good, well-meaning people adhering to dogma. It would not be at all strange to me if the vast majority of the people I know had at least one major area of disagreement with me on some sort of “ethical” point, and so I’m apparently supposed to dump them all, according to the rules of social just warriordom as I perceive them.
The people I argue with can’t see what seems to me such an obvious, simple point. Why would you stay friends with a “hateful” person? How is it that so many of your friends are “hateful”? Maybe there’s something wrong with you?
This approach to “hate” is more dogma. “Hate” is a real thing, well-defined, and must be totally avoided, stay away from the impure people lest you be contaminated, something like that.
This resonates with me, because my father is a Trump voter. I still love him, I haven’t cut him out of my life, and we have through the years been able to talk politics and respect each other enough not to scream and yell. He’s almost 90; I’m not going to change his mind. He’s not going to change mine. We both understand that, and our conversations around politics are short. There are a lot of other things we do share.
I don’t think the trans movement attracts more bullies; I think it involves specific elements of moral panic which cause people to act in crisis mode, go into purity spirals, and divide the world into those who value freedom and self-determination, and those who want to return to the days when gay teenagers wanted to kill themselves. Trans activism is just like the early days of civil rights; trans people are the most marginalized and vulnerable; there’s an unprecedented epidemic of violence towards them; and they’re killing themselves because they’re dehumanized and denied the support they need. Won’t Someone Think of the Children and their need for Life-Saving Puberty Blocking Affirmative Care?
Moreover, the people skeptical of gender identity use the exact same arguments that were used to keep black people out of swimming pools and gay people out of decent jobs, housing, and service. They use the same tactics against trans rights as the Nazis did with the Jews. The so-called “Gender Critical” are all in cahoots with the worst elements of neo-fascist conservative religious fundamentalists. They spread conspiracy theories. They have a phobia.
It’s a perfect storm of panic, urgency, and requirements that we do something now! And thus the spectacle of a Women’s Feminist gathering hounding out a single woman carrying a sign saying “Biology Is Not Hate.” They were punching up. At long last — a mob mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.
That strikes me as far too broad and harsh. I certainly agree that there are a few terrible actors within the gender critical movement — people who identify as gender-critical subjected me to a monstrous and homophobic cancel campaign based on an unhinged conspiracy theory; they’ve tried to hound me out of my organization; they’ve wished me death and spewed utter hatred at me, all because I make a distinction between gender identity ideology (which I’m dedicated to combatting) and transgender people themselves, who I’ve been around all my adult life, many of whom I believe are very good people, and some of whom I believe have been misled and harmed by a terrible dogma.
But the grime on the gender critical side is almost entirely limited to social media purity-spiral behaviour (which is still terrible and has real-world consequences). It’s driven at its core by a very real fear that women’s and gays’ rights are disappearing, leading many to adopt a closed-off, “war-like” mindset, and a few of these people have kind of lost the plot a little. It’s very easy to get lost in this plot! It’s really complex and scary stuff! Despite being a victim of their ire and very much disagreeing with their actions, I can still at least see where they’re coming from and how they’ve ended up where they are.
Conversely, the stuff the trans activists are doing is harming women’s and gays’ and children’s lives in serious and far-reaching ways in the real world. (Really, everybody’s lives: straight men are censored and harassed, too. Look what they’ve done to Graham!) Looking at Twitter it may seem like “both sides” have their bad behaviours, but in Real Life there is absolutely no “both sides” about this: the highest echelons of power have been bamboozled by gender identity ideology; by now quite literally hundreds of thousands of girls and boys have had their bodies unnecessarily medicalized; and the very language that defines women is being memory-holed, from law to medicine to sport to sexuality. Everything.
There’s no question we’re all in a hot fucking mess right now, but I wouldn’t remotely characterize a movement of mostly women and gays fighting to defend their rights as phobic or hateful, even if a very small handful of people within it are.
Oh, I’m so dumb, I now think you were being ironic there, but at first reading I didn’t get that! I should pay closer attention.
Ach you’re not dumb, I blinked for a second myself and I’m familiar with Sastra’s excellent voice. Yes she’s definitely speaking in a persona there, not as herself.
Everything from “Trans activism is just like the early days of civil rights” to “they have a phobia” is spoken in the voice of A Believer.
It seems to me that all strongly counter-factual ideologies must by their very nature attract bullies. When a social group — however tight-knit or loosely-affiliated — is organized around adopting and adhering to beliefs that directly contradict both everyday experience and well-established knowledge, the only way the social group can sustain itself and not rapidly lose believers to attrition by contact with reality is to impose social costs for apostasy (ostracism, public shaming, loss of standing, etc.) that are much higher than the social costs associated with adopting beliefs that most people outright reject (or at the very least find dubious). Policing believers to ensure they espouse correct doctrine and to punish thoughtcrimes is a necessary job for such groups, and that’s a task that is uniquely suited to and attractive to bullies. Convincing people to adopt such beliefs in the first place involves a wide array of methods and circumstances, but convincing waverers (and potential waverers) to retain such beliefs in the face of difficult-to-refute challenges seems to always come down to a narrow set of methods — those of the bully.
Well there’s your problem right there, Sastra. You’re too good at impersonating the voice of A Believer. (Technically I think that means you’ve passed Latsot’s Turing Test with flying colours, yes?)
The problem with this whole discussion as I see it is that beliefs are just taken as a given rather than the outcome of some cognitive process in their own right, even if it’s just accepting what you’ve always been told. My main problem with faith-based religion (and its secular equivalents) was always the part about leaving the most important questions in life – questions with real-world consequences and implications for the way we treat others – up to blind faith in the first place. I don’t think it’s any kind of excuse or mitigating circumstance to be doing the right thing as we see it if the way we see it is based on unjustified beliefs, we never made any honest effort to find out what’s objectively true (rationalizing a fixed, pre-determined conclusion doesn’t count as an “honest effort”), and were unwilling to even consider the possibility that our beliefs were wrong. “I am going to think and act as if this were true no matter what and let others pay the price for my unjustified beliefs. And if that means hating others, treating them as lesser beings, even subjecting them to violence, then so be it. That’s their problem! Not only am I willing to bet their rights, their dignity, even their lives on the correctness of propositions I have no real reason to believe, but I’m unwilling to refrain from doing so, and no amount of logic or evidence is ever going to prevent me!”
William K. Clifford’s classic article on “The Ethics of Belief” is, of course, essential reading in this regard.
In my militant atheist days I often made myself unpopular (among accomodationist types) for a somewhat different reason than Sastra. I was repeatedly told that the specific contents of specific beliefs don’t matter, because (A or B):
A. Nobody actually believes any of that stuff anyway (“That’s just an excuse for what people would be doing anyway. Without the religion they would invent some other excuse” etc.).
B. People aren’t motivated by what they sincerely belive to be true about God or the afterlife. (“Nobody actually cares if they face an eternity of bliss or an eternity of torture after death, because all that matters to people is getting the best deal out of secular society during the few decades they spend on earth”)
I strongly suspect A is wrong, but in the absence of telepathic powers, it’s hard to say for sure. I’m confident that B is bullshit though. And this is where I wholeheartedly agree with Sastra. While I too have issues with Sam Harris I think he hits the nail on the head on this point. The specific contents of specific beliefs do indeed matter. As Voltaire famously put it “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, because then they can also make you believe the kind of absurdities that would make the atrocities seem perfectly justified, even the only morally defensible thing to do. The problem with faith-based religion (or dogmatic belief systems in general) as I see it is that it allows people by the millions to think and act as if such absurdities were true whether they are in fact true or not. The fact that not all religious beliefs are equally harmful in practice is irrelevant with respect to the deeper problem, i.e. the part about leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. Almost every problem I have with religion-like movements ultimately comes back to the part about believing things for the wrong reasons* (as you pretty much have to do to believe in God, since no other reasons are available). The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism (a religion of total pacifism, or at least so we’re told) also gave us Jihadism.
*This is were I disagree with those atheists who say things like “I have nothing against faith, I’m only against organized religion”. If I could chose between a world without unjustified beliefs and a world without churches, I would chose the former any time. If we could get people to stop believing things for bad reasons the harmful ideas of religion would die a natural death, and whatever good ideas are in the mix don’t need the bad reasons to stay alive. If people still wanted to go to church for community and support, I wouldn’t really mind. If we could have a “religion” without unjustified beliefs, it would probably rank very low on my list of concerns. And with unjustified beliefs even secular ideologies have the potential to become the stuff of nightmares.
axxyaan #3
There was a time when I would have said that skeptics (if not necessarily atheists) were, on average, more rational than others, but I no longer think so. It’s not that my view of religious people, let alone their beliefs, have changed for the better, but my view of skeptics (as well as humans in general) has changed for the worse (and it wasn’t ecstatic to being with). I now see the world as populated by dangerous ticking time-bombs who might explode at any second. If some of us (no, I’m not making an exception for myself) haven’t done so yet, it’s only because the right “trigger” (a new fad or craze going viral etc.) simply hasn’t crossed our paths yet.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the “banality of evil”. People like Eichmann and even Himmler were remarkable only in how unremarkable they were. The atrocities of the 3rd Reich were not a result of some sudden outbreak of brain abnormalities. This is what normal people do under the wrong circumstances. That evil is normal and even banal doesn’t make it less evil though. What It does mean is that there’s nothing particularly good about being normal.
And I used to be such a nice person :(
In Denmark we have a populist anti immigration party, that aligns itself with the right on these issues, but being populist has some big government, welfare state postitions. (Dansk Folkeparti)
They had a big defeat in local elections last year, the then leader of the party took the blame and on the night of the election was interviewed as the big loser – responsible for the zinging defeat of the party. The interviews showed him alone in the party headquartes – no one else in sight.
A political opponent commented on this – saying that she felt sorry for him. I was a tough experience to suddenly be all alone in front of the cameras – no support – everyone scrambling to let you take the blame for everything.
And she experienced a hell of a backlash! There could be no empathy with a racist!
Deying the huminty of our opponents is never a good look.
@Artymorty
Yes, the second paragraph should have been in quotation marks. As should most of the first.
I originally had it all in one giant paragraph but decided before posting to put a space in there to make it easier to read. Which it didn’t. Sorry.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The problem was […]
G @ 12 – Bingo. Combine your counter-factual and your ideology and you might as well call it a recipe for bullying.
There’s a kind of freedom in embracing the fact that neither you nor your interlocutor can change the other’s mind. Without the drive to persuade, the dominance/hierarchy paradigm is of little use, and the familiar metaphors of attack and defense likewise lose applicability. Psychologists, I believe, refer to this alternative axis of interaction as affiliative, where one intentionally bares one’s throat, which would only invite bitey teeth under a paradigm of dominance, and thereby increase affiliation (or “closeness”, or “warmth”) with another person. My father knows he’ll never convince me to take up Christianity, and I know I’ll never convince him to leave it. Our mutual acceptance has let us have deeper conversations on the subject of religion than I’ve had with anyone else, certainly any theist, because there’s no need to maintain constant en guarde.
Nullius @ 20 and iknklast @ 6
I certainly know and appreciate the feeling of mutual inability to change minds. In some cases, it has made for a rich, respectful conversation about different viewpoints. as Nullius mentions. I wish this were more commonly the case. More commonly these days, and especially on the topic of trans ideology, there is only frustration and a tacit agreement that we will never raise these issues with each other, no matter how often we talk about them independently, because the result is expected to be anger and frustration and accusations. Some other issues are similar. I have a close relative who is believes that the World Trade Center was a demolition job, and he literally laughs at me for disagreeing. Even “I do not agree, I’ve seen plenty of information that disproves that idea to my satisfaction, and I don’t wish to sit here and attempt to dredge up those points from memory, I’d rather talk about movies and weather and what people we know are doing” does not stop the barrage. Sometimes you have to insist on changing the subject; sometimes respectful disagreement is not possible.