I hear their hooves in the distance
There are a couple of other things that bother me about Julian’s ‘new atheism’ article.
One is that he says his opinions ‘are not so much about these books as the general tone and direction the new atheism they represent has adopted. This is not a function of what exactly these books say, but of how they are perceived, and the kind of comments the four horsemen make in newspaper articles and interviews’ but then he doesn’t provide a very clear account of how the ‘four horsemen’ are perceived and the kind of comments they make. He discusses ‘the new atheism’ without ever really pinning down for the reader what he takes that to be – so we’re left just vaguely assuming we know what he means because it’s probably more or less like what everyone else means…Well you can see that that’s not very satisfactory. Who is everyone else? What does everyone else mean? Is it really what Julian also means? That’s never clear, at least not to me. And since the subject of the article is why the supposed new atheists are wrong, there surely is some responsibility to specify and show what they have said, at least in outline. That’s especially true given the admission that the article is about them and their views but not about their books. I’m not absolutely sure that Julian would like being discussed in such terms himself.
There are a few brief quotations, rather late in the article, but we don’t know where they’re from, and they’re so brief it’s hard to be confident that they’re representative. And then there’s the bit about the title of the tv show…
Richard Dawkins, for example, presented a television programme on religion called The Root of all Evil and has as his website slogan “A clear thinking oasis”. Where is the balance and modesty in such rhetoric?
I agree about the website: that slogan has always made me cringe. (I need to change the subtitle of B&W, too. It has the same whiff of self-congratulation, of thinking nonsense is always the property of someone else.) But the title of the tv show had a question mark at the end, and besides that, Dawkins didn’t choose it and in fact tried to resist it. Julian knows very well that authors don’t always get to choose their titles, because he chooses the titles at TPM! Editor’s privilege. He also knows it because he doesn’t always get to choose his own titles. Why in fact…
Now really, people, there’s no need to be so vitriolic! (Not all of you, but a good many) A little internal dissent is no bad thing, is it? I should say that the headline was not mine and nor did I even see it before publication, and I think it does rather overstate the content.
What’s that, where’s it from? Why, it’s Julian, commenting at the Dawkins site on the reaction to his article. Cough.
The other thing has to do with this bit –
I also think the new atheism tends to get religion wrong. The focus is always on the out-dated metaphysics of religion, its belief in personal creator gods, miracles, souls and so forth. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the religious do indeed believe in such things. Indeed, I’m on the record as accusing liberal theologians of hiding behind their less literalist interpretations, and pretending that matters of creed don’t really matter at all. However, there is much more to religion to the metaphysics.
But the focus is not always on the out-dated metaphysics of religion, as he would know if he had read (or even skimmed) the books, and it’s really not very fair to refuse to read the books and then go right ahead and misrepresent ‘the new atheism’ just the same.
It’s not that I completely disagree. There are parts of Hitchens’s book that wearied even me, and Dawkins does occasionally tip over into rudeness (the time he talked about a woman having a stupid face, for instance), and Sam Harris is too fond of the word ‘spiritual’ for my taste. But there is no shortage of people criticizing ‘the new atheists’ (another fact which Julian rather overlooks), for good reasons and bad ones; I think any new work in that field should be at least careful to be accurate.
Splutter; choke; gasp! Pomo has a foot in the door at B+W! Next it will be respect for fashion, then for nonsense, the for both of them because ‘nonsense’ is a relative term anyway.
Sorry OB. If one criticises another’s position, one can only do so on the basis of conclusion that one’s own is better, but at the risk of the subsequent discussion showing that not be the case; which of course is precisely the risk I am running at this moment.
To criticise a whole bunch of likeminded thinkers (a ‘school’ of thought) involves precisely the same assumption.
Something like ‘B+W: sympathetic, respectful and modest understanding for those mired in allegedly fashionable nonsense’ would be OK at a pinch I suppose. But it lacks punch.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly self-congratulatory about “fighting fashionable nonsense.” Maybe if it was “standing up for unfashionable common sense” then it would be self-congratulatory.
But isn’t ‘fighting fashionable nonsense’ much the same thing as ‘standing up for unfashionable common sense’? Only from the other direction?
At the time it was kind of a tribute to Alan Sokal, but now…well I think it risks smugness.
Allegedly fighting allegedly fashionable alleged nonsense – how’s that? I think it’s quite snappy.
Ha!
One thing that really is cringe-worthy is when people call themselves “Brights.” How can anybody not find that embarrassing?
There’s an implication in “fighting fashionable nonsense” that you’re standing up for unfashionable common sense, but I think it is only smug if you actually say it.
There’s nothing smug about Ben Goldacre calling his blog Bad Science even though it implies he’s standing up for good science.
There’s no doubt when things are fashionable, so why say “allegedly fashionable”? If you say something is nonsense, it’s obviously your point of view, so why preface “nonsense” with “alleged”?
And why say “allegedly fighting”, when you are fighting or at least trying to fight? The original title is fine, unless of course you want to change it completely and eliminate the stuff about fighting, fashionable and nonsense.
Yeah – the ‘Brights’ thing was where all this ‘new atheism’ palaver really got started, I think. Such a mistake.
‘Bad Science’ has a different ring to it. For one thing it’s not ‘Fighting Bad Science.’ That sounds…well, Brightsish.
The “brights” thing is pretentious, as is “an oasis of clear thinking”. However, “fighting fashionable nonsense” isn’t pretentious. You don’t claim to anyone special (bright or an oasis of clear thinking), just someone who is against fashionable nonsense, more like the school-teacher who corrects all the homework with a strict eye than a light unto the world (a bright or an oasis of clear thinking). When I taught English composition, my students nicknamed me “Mr. Punctuation”, for my style of correcting assignments. I never claimed to be an oasis of clear thinking nor do you, as far as I can see.
Well, thank you, all.
The ‘alleged’ ‘allegedly’ thing was mostly a joke, amos. But it’s also true that people who don’t like B&W often do tell me off by starting ‘Asonewhoclaimstobefightingfashionablenonsense’ and then going on from there. ‘Allegedly’ would drop the claim down a level, also would amuse me.
B&W- hammer of popes, quacks and holy warriors.
and their sympathisers
Ooh, I’ve always wanted to be a hammer.
I’ve wondered from time to time who is fighting the rampant unfashionable nonsense.
Not me. I can’t stand anything that’s unhip.
How about “maybe fighting fashionable nonsense or maybe not, since 19XX”, that is, the year the website began? But there’s nothing more pretentious than “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Still, Ophelia, think of it, the darling nonsense that can’t manage to be fashionable. Haven’t you got just a few moments of strength left over to fight that nonsense too?
Or, better yet, maybe you could assign someone to monitor the nonsense that does not merit your attention, you could micro-manage it.
The slogan of The Sagan Society of UGA (when there was such an organization, alas), which I coined, was “Asking tough questions and not settling for easy answers since 1998.” There’s something to be said for a snappy slogan, and I’ve always adored the phrase “fighting fashionable nonsense.”
Would Julian call me an “obsessive atheist” for having helped run a student organization dedicated to freethought, skepticism, and science advocacy, I wonder? And if not, then why are atheists who read books about atheism by atheists obsessive? I guarantee I put a lot more time and energy into that group than sitting down and reading a handful of books! Mind you, I haven’t read most of the “new atheist” books for more or less the reasons he cites; it’s not a priority for me to read books on subjects I already know a lot about and have well-formed opinions on when there’s so much else to do. But I didn’t presume to write a published essay critical of four authors whose books I hadn’t read, so there’s a rather substantial difference in our attitudes.
As for OB always wanting to be hammer, well, I have always wanted to be a bell. As I would then be able to enjoy, morning, noon and night, all those ‘fashionable nonsense’ siblings from all over the land, clinging out of me and swinging on to me in my atheist tower and making a hell of an arpeggio loving clanger on my audible signal.
Very true, about the Times’s slogan. The Times’s self-admiration overall gets on my nerves in a big way.
Earlier this morning I was considering ‘where the gaps remain gaps’ and also ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’ – which I find pleasingly ambiguous, or rather double.
“it’s not a priority for me to read books on subjects I already know a lot about and have well-formed opinions on when there’s so much else to do.”
Quite. If only he’d put it that way, instead of the way he did.
“We don’t know what we don’t know” is good.
“We don’t know what we don’t know” is good, but it needs a “yet” in there somewhere. Gives it a touch of optimism (sunny spring days do that to me).
‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ is quite Rumsfeldian. ‘Unknown unknowns’-‘things we do not know we do not know’.
Perhaps O.B. is Rumsfeld!
I thought of Rumsfeld, of course – and he was right about that, however wrong he was about most things. But the root of the idea was thinking about the way people often don’t notice what they don’t know – that is, think they know something that they can’t know. Surprisingly, Julian appeared to be one such person in that article – although I suppose at a stretch it could be that he just worded the thought badly.
I don’t think I need a ‘yet’ for the kind of not knowing I chiefly mean by that phrase – which is a sort of anti-god of the gaps claim; if we don’t know something, then we don’t know it; we don’t get to slot ‘god’ in just because we don’t know. (The other meaning of course is that we don’t realize we don’t know X Y or Z.)
Now this is the tone of disagreement I can live with! Really, the stuff at richarddawkins.net was poor.
But on the titles issue. Headlines in papers and magazines are really out of authors’ control. When it comes to TV series and books, it depends. In the case of The Root of All Evil?, I cannot believe that someone on Dawkins’s clout would not have had the power to veto a title he didn’t like.
In fact, I was contacted by a TV production about potentially making a programme that may well have been, given the timing and channel, what turned out to be The Root of All Evil? From the first conversation it was clear they wanted somehting that was quite aggressive against religion and my insistence that I would only do the programme if it wasn’t so black and white is a= probably one reason why conversations didn’t go further, although the main one was that they got Richard Dawkins! (When they told me that was who they had got, i told them that of course, in such circumstances, they should not have creferred me!)
So on that score, I don’t think I’m, guilty of a double standard.
I agree aboput the undesireability of ‘fighting fashionable nonsense’, but mainly because ‘fashionable nonsense’ sounds a bit Daily Mail-ish and pursed lipped to me.
Dawkins is on record claiming that ‘Root of all Evil’ was foisted on him by the way. I agree it is a silly title. ‘Brights’ still takes the biscuit though.
Straplines R Us says:-
“Kicking the crap out of crap.”
Yeah, the comments at the Dawkins site were bad. (Julian, you know I always want to replace ‘poor’ with ‘bad’ – I’m so opposed to all this mealy-mouthed tiptoeing around; if it’s bad it’s bad! Ha!) The early ones anyway – I think the tone did improve after Russell’s comment and then yours, but you may not have read the later ones. It did go on and on – I only skimmed the later pages.
I don’t know…maybe Dawkins could have made them change the title if he’d really dug in, but he did say early on that he didn’t like it and had tried to get it changed. Maybe he didn’t want to dig in too much.
It’s always a problem, people agreeing to compromises foisted on them by others, then complaining about it after the show has been aired/article published/etc, and the financial recompense for services rendered has been safely banked…
:-)
“Making your dollar count in a world of fashionable nonsnense” ?
“Making your dollar count in a world of fashionable nonsnense” ?
No that was quite 90’s right-wing wasn’t it ?
How about
Butterflies and Wheels
“It’s the Arrogance of every Generation to Presume they live in the most Turbulent Times.
Well this time kids, you were right.”
I’m leaning toward ‘Evincing a certain skepticism toward what could be considered nonsense.’
Or
“Embracing the Hard-Nosed Bastard of the Religious Death Cult So Hard It’s Brain Crawls Under A Truck and Turns Yellow. The rest of you: Queue Over There”
Heh, sorry.
Heh, sorry.
“Explorations into the cultural-historical crapheap” – but much prefer “Fighting fashionable nonsense”.
_____
The ‘bright’ thing, I have to admit, made me want to force philosophy professors to take a Turing test before being allowed to talk to the public.
“Embracing the Hard-Nosed Bastard of the Religious Death Cult So Hard It’s Brain Crawls Under A Truck and Turns Yellow. The rest of you: Queue Over There”
“Kicking the crap out of crap.”
“B&W- hammer of popes, quacks and holy warriors. “
Based on the above hyperbole, may I suggest:
B&W, shouting loud but carrying an extremely small stick.