Why we write
I’ve been going back and forth with Josh Rosenau, at his blog and also now via email, and I think we’ve pinned down (for the moment) our basic disagreement – which is about what one writes or talks for. Josh says, perfectly reasonably, that we surely write or talk in order to get some result, however broadly we construe ‘result.’ I say…yes, if we construe ‘result’ really broadly…but I think that may be where the difference is: how broadly we construe it.
At any rate, my goal, if any, when writing is not really to get people to do something. It’s certainly not to avoid disturbing people in any way. My goal is to say what I’m trying to say. It’s to get a thought out there without losing any of it on the trip between my head and the paper or the screen. It’s to be clear, and it’s also to be non-boring. It’s not…to persuade some imagined average person full of average prejudices who might be ‘offended’ by some irreligious observation. Of course, I don’t work for the NCSE! If I did, that kind of thought would probably play a much bigger role in my thinking. And working for the NCSE is an outstandingly useful thing to do – so maybe it just boils down to the fact that Josh and I have different jobs and different readerships and we have formed different habits. In that sense maybe our disagreements just go sliding past each other, gracefully and stupidly as swans, because we’re doing different things.
There is another angle though, which is that the imagined average person full of average prejudices may not exist as we imagine her. Imagining people and their prejudices is not an exact science, so I think it’s a mistake to assume too much prejudice and inability to listen to unfamiliar ideas. I think we can afford to give people a little benefit of the doubt. We can treat people like easily-wounded babies, or we can treat them as toughened adults. Either or both may be wrong – but the second has the virtue of treating people as…adults.
Spot ON, Ophelia! The whole conversation thread at Josh Rosenau’s, not just your N&C. For what it’s worth, I left this comment at his place:
I’m glad to have exploited you for my secret program of eliminating theism from the world. Muahahahahaha!!!!
What’s worse, I think one can needlessly pre-digest their writing, to the effect of injecting noise at the expense of signal, by positing some hypothetical average person and catering to their sensibilities.
Shouldn’t striving toward honesty be enough, and it shouldn’t it resonate with people in virtue of a common human condition shared by all of us?
Your writing inherits the form of the averageness it caters to, and thereby cheapens itself. That does far more to empower the very misconceptions you are trying to overcome than would a flat disregarding of them in favor of honesty. More is caught than taught after all.
I think one of the things we have got to remember is that we are in an era where the following has happened:
The rise of Fox News.
Fox News never attempted being non-controversial, in fact the nature of their trashiness often comes from the fact that they manufacture controversy.
The rise of GW Bush and the Religious Right both show the exact same elements of being controversial, frequently for the sake of being controversial.
In comedy, the non-PC commedian generally gets further than the PC one (Think George Carlin as an example here.)
Meanwhile, we have also seen traditionally “liberal” news organisations collapse as they have hired rightwing stooges for columnists and fought tooth and nail against even the vaguest suspicions of bias.
The further to the centre those news organisations have moved, the lower their sales have fallen – and it isn’t because they are “liberal.”
If you look at the biggest political blogs on the web they tend to be the leftwing – not the rightwing. The biggest comedy shows also tend left, what the left has to say is not unpopular.
The problem is that if you approach people and try to present things in a way you think they want to hear it, you come off as a used car-salesman type.
While the main aim should never be PR, which is why I don’t support the Fox News model, we should learn from the conservatives and not shy away from real conflict where it exists.
While we shouldn’t create false controversy, we shouldn’t particularly care if we inadvertantly offend people either.
The problem with the ‘framing’ approach to scientific communication has recently been highlighted on Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Intersection blog.
It’s been apparent for some time that their main interest in science communication is achieving one political goal, namely action to address the problem of global climate change. It doesn’t take much detective work to see that one of their disputes with the new atheists is that they find it problematic that outspoken atheism might become associated with science in the minds of the public, leading to religious individuals rejecting scientific consensus opinions on global warming.
To this end the framers have avoided treating science as a methodology but instead treated it as a collection of facts (thus avoiding the epistemological compatibility problem).
So you present the consensus data to the public and say “the best scientists did this – You can trust it and should act in the following way to solve the problem”.
All well and good until you get a situation like the email hacking incident which allows the denialists to present the whole thing as a conspiracy by a set of untrustworthy self interested researchers (and at the same time reinforcing the views of those who simply want to carry on as usual).
It’s a clear Achilles heel in the framing approach that they are going to eventually have to face.
Let’s not forget that many of the “New Atheists” do have some goals but those goals differ from the NCSE. There’s also the obvious question of whether promoting liberal theism and downplaying (or dissembling on) the effect that science has on religious belief actually leads to greater acceptance of evolution and science in general. I wish that Rosenau and the faitheists would present some evidence for this. In the meantime I think that speaking our beliefs and speaking them loudly will help us gain recognition and eventually gain the acceptance that homosexuals have gained. Sucking up to the powerful and defending the status quo hasn’t worked for any other movement that I can think of, I see no reason why it will work here.
To that extent I think that Rosenau isn’t being honest or effective.
This is a really tiresome story, and following the thread of Josh Rosenau and Ophelia’s exchange is an amazing study of clarity on the one side and what looks like thought blindness on the other. What’s the matter with the guy? Can he not see that a public voice cannot, without absurdity, be directed at one particular demographic without prevarication (which is what ‘framing’ amounts to)?
I was particularly struck by this reading the Matthew Cobb’s review (in the London Times) of two new books on evolution. Here’s what he says of Eugenie Scott’s contribution:
You see that?! She drops the scare quotes around ‘creation “science”‘. That’s framing.
My take is that when one speaks or writes (effectively at any rate), one speaks or writes at the level of the intended audience.
If Rosenau disagrees with the tone of your writing, that it is not conciliatory enough, that only goes to show that his intended audience and yours are not the same. Your intended audience can rationally discuss counterintuitive and disagreeable notions without being enraged that the subject was even broached. Apparently, Rosenau’s audience is a bunch of mewling babies that can’t stand to have their beliefs or worldviews challenged, at least not without a good deal of sugar-coating, throat-clearing, and apologizing beforehand.
Suppose I believed free will is an illusion, and furthermore I believed that the notion is a logical implication of materialism. Presumably, many people find the notion that free will is an illusion to be unpleasant. But then how to frame this if I am trying to convince people to become materialists? Do I ignore the whole question of free will, hope it doesn’t come up, and mumble some compatibilist fluff I don’t actually believe in case it does (as Rosenau and others seem to think we should do regarding the compatibility of faith and science)? Or should I address the issue honestly and simply argue, to the best of my ability, why the illusion of free will is not actually so bad, why it makes more sense than the alternative, etc.?
If we’re positing an audience that MAY accept materialism, but can’t accept illusory free will, then my choices are to:
A) Hide the corollary of illusory free will from this audience, convince them of materialism on other grounds, then turn around and shout “Gotcha!”
B) Address a different audience.
Basically, if an audience is willing to reject a logical argument purely on the consequences of that argument (rather than any fault in the premises or argument itself), it’s simply not worth making the argument to the audience in the first place.
they find it problematic that outspoken atheism might become associated with science in the minds of the public
When you put it that way, it reminds me very much of the old “Lavender Menace” problem of feminism. Perhaps I should leave the explanation for somebody who was old enough to be there, but as I understand it, Friedan in particular made quite a show of worrying that out feminist lesbians were going to incapacitate the feminist movement because the public would associate feminism with scary, unfeminine, man-hating lesbians. “Shut up and go away, dykes,” was essentially the message.
Now, I’m no historian, and if someone who has studied this wants to come along and school me, I’d be delighted. But the conventional wisdom that I’ve picked up has been that this Lavender Menace thing was a bad idea both for mainstream feminism itself and for the people who promulgated it. First, it’s vicious and shameful in and of itself; we third-wavers sneer mightily. And second, it turns out that those excluded dykes had a whole lot of energy. Passionate + excluded + offended == organized and willing to be *loud*. (The Second Congress to Unite Women… well, it’s a good story, but I digress.) If Friedan wanted to downplay lesbianism and keep it from being associated with feminism, turns out she went about it exactly the wrong way.
I think that accommodationists, framers, whatever you want to call them, ought to think twice before wandering anywhere near “shut up” territory. There can be some unexpected side effects of policing your allies’ expression.
It keeps striking me as funny, by the way, that this particular argument gets me so riled up, given that I am by nature something of a framer on this issue. But the thing is, that’s my *choice*, not my *duty*.
Josh & his ilk compromise the truth for imagined polital short-term gains.
You do not.
I prefer your method by far, Ophelia!
I have been endlessly amused by the vitriol and outright anger displayed by those who insist on the importance of civility. Somehow, the “courteous atheist” is courteous to everyone but atheists.
True, true. There’s also the hilarity in the fact that the communicators mostly…don’t seem to be…[whispers] all that good at communication.
Doesn’t it depend a little bit on what you’re arguing about? If it’s the argument about the existence of God, I can’t see how accommodation/framing meaningfully works. You either argue about it or you don’t. (You can be gentle, pay attention to whichever scripture, blah blah, but the bottom line is that there ain’t no God.)
If you’re arguing about evolution, though, say, there’s obvious force to the claim that demanding of people that they abandon very passionately held beliefs in order to accept Darwinism is a rash strategy. And you don’t need to ‘assume’ an audience of that nature: there are plenty of opinion polls, for instance, to go on.
I just glanced at the thread. I’m a bit surprised that anyone let Josh get away with pimping his “debunking” of Coyne. As far as I can tell Coyne remains pretty bunked.
The situation is not symmetrical between “New atheists” and accommodationists. The former do not expect all atheists to be as outspoken as themselves, whereas the latter seem to think that every science-minded atheist has a moral duty to frame science-religion-issues the same way they themselves do. For the good of science, that is.
How many times in history has political correctness actually advanced science? There are plenty of opposite examples.
Very true. It’s odd, that – ‘new’ atheists don’t go huffing up and down saying why don’t accommodationists be more outspoken and direct – yet the more activist accommodationists – should be call them new accommodationists? – do the equivalent. Pack of busybodies, if you ask me.