Bible/Darwin: Here Comes The Hair Dryers

According to Fox News, a group of atheists are performing de-baptizing rituals with hair dryers (thanks for the link Tad). This is one of these moments where as an anthropologist you feel a certain smug self-congratulation that human beings are in fact just as culturally creative as you keep on telling people they are. But it also speaks to deeper issues in the so-called atheism/religion debate that flares up periodically in America and England and is increasingly diffusing all over the place.

Just mentioning people likeRichard Dawkins is likely to draw tons of aggro to this blog, so I will keep it short: most commenters on the cage match between the rabid evolutionist-cum-atheists and the rabid evangelical christians-cum-creationists imagine this conflict to involve two separate groups. The genius of the hair-dryer ritual is that it demonstrates so clearly that what we actually have here is a case of what Simon Harrison calls ‘mimetic conflict’ — two groups competing to occupy a single identity. The opposition is not one of Christian versus non-Christian, but rather a conflict between two different permutations of protestant culture.

Consider: one side believes it possesses an infallible book written by an omnipotent author with a huge beard with completely explains the dynamics all living things on earth. The other side believes in the literal truth of the bible. One side believes it will go to heaven, the other advocates a space program to achieve “Mars in our time” as a mission to direct and shape human aspiration. Atheist parodic appropriation of Christian identity even comes with (according to the article) a ritual officiant who “doned a monk’s robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases” before the drying began — and of course there is nothing more protestant than damning your opponent for their popery.

This de-baptism makes clear in a single ritual what is at the heart of much of this debate: that within American culture, science and religion are two different things but two versions of the same thing, both of which rely in shared, rather intellectualist understandings of human nature and the role of the bible/Darwin: humans attempt to ‘find meaning in the universe’, explain natural phenomenon, and live regenerated lives free of the corrupting influence of earlier, false doctrine. These are notions that are, in general, not shared by members of other religions.

Partially is a way of saying that the anthropological notion of culture often cuts across what other people’s ‘ethnocultural’ notions — we see a single system made of oppositions where others see two discrete ‘cultures’ or groups. But mainly this is just a way to give props to atheists for such a well-designed ritual. I’m not particularly big on running other people’s beliefs down, but setting aside the mean-heartedness that comes across in the interview with the atheists, I have to say as a piece of cultural practice the ritual is superbly imagined.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

54 thoughts on “Bible/Darwin: Here Comes The Hair Dryers

  1. Sorry to jump in from nowhere, but I just needed to fuss a bit about your understanding of American Protestant culture. Instead of emphasizing the intellectual aspect of it, I would think more about the humanistic side of it, basically that the atheist side believes that regular folks can lead rich, fulfilling lives by ‘doing’ science, while the (mostly Evangelical) Creationists believe that regular folks can lead rich, fulfilling lives by ‘doing’ religious things. That ‘doing’ can indeed involve lots of intellectual study and internal debate, but it also can involve indulging in passionate testimonials preaching against or trying to convert the other.

    My particular point of contention is where you compare Darwin’s Origin of Species to the Bible. What you’re really comparing are either side’s parody of the other. Creationists ridicule atheists because they think atheists blindly believe whatever Darwin wrote, and atheists ridicule Creationists because they believe creationists are blindly following the dictates and dogmas passed down by their religious leaders. The truth is, the Evangelical churches from which Creationism sprang love to criticize other Protestant sects just as much as scientists love to criticize each other.

    In short, the Atheists say, don’t believe the priests, figure it out for yourself, while the Creationists say, don’t believe the professors, figure it out for yourself. If the root structure is American Protestantism, then it will remain a purely American phenomenon. If the root is actually humanism or post-modernism or something else, then we might start seeing it pop up in other parts of the world, in various guises.

  2. “The truth is, the Evangelical churches from which Creationism sprang love to criticize other Protestant sects just as much as scientists love to criticize each other.”

    That’s so true. In my conversations with Christian fundamentalists, they draw from a narrative that they are not in fact religious at all, or that they even have a religion. Their entire religious worldview is largely based on a cognitive map placing the term “religious” together with elements of ritual, procedure, dogma and bureaucracy. So Religion = a lack of spirituality. This is obviously a poke at Catholics, but also at the churches they may have grown up in. One street preacher thought I was a former Baptist for sure, since I didn’t believe in god. Basically, I think it’s a projection upon other Christians and churches of themselves at a time before they were “saved,” and, “developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” A narcissistic projection.
    You get a lot of sinners that needed help to stop drinking, or whatever, and so you have a rather narcissistic basis for a personal religious program. The idea of it even being a religion is beyond thought, because this is so personal, and the fact that the bible becomes literal is able to be incorporated without a feeling that such literalistic dogma is at all hypocritical. It is they who have found access to a secret knowledge. It is they who have god’s favor and who are highly blessed, which all is again narcissistic, and helps us understand what some have called “prosperity pimps,” which is the new way of understanding that part of the deal in being an insider is that god favors you financially, and through family happiness, etc… This can be explained using the concept of confirmation bias (I notice and remember getting lucky once, and don’t notice all the times I don’t). They’ll pick out bits of the Old Testament if they need to, but then say that the new covenant with Jesus closed the book on the old law when they don’t want to.
    Ultimately, they are in this position, because they get something that other Christians don’t, and I hear them talk a lot of shit about other Christians who are still “lost.” Since Christ is the answer for everything, all problems are the product of an ignorance that others have.
    Looking into fundamentalist Christianity really helped me understand the mindset of Islamists when I read them. Another interesting parallel is that these fundamentalists often reject their former lives and religious upbringing, while many atheist associate their disbelief to an almost ritualistic rejection of all faith, like the article. It probably has to do with how you come to that point. An atheist maybe in school, while a fundamentalist can often hit a rock bottom of some form, and fundamentalists can be found in the prisons, slums, military barracks, and shelters. Geography also matters.

    Another interesting fact, is that a majority of 9/11 conspirators were members of one of 3 radical mosques, and none of them were religious before going. They were immigrants in a new place and found social friendship in a place familiar to them, and it goes from there in an interesting process. The point is that there are a lot of correlations.

  3. …that within American culture, science and religion are two different things but two versions of the same thing, both of which rely in shared, rather intellectualist understandings of human nature and the role of the bible/Darwin: humans attempt to ‘find meaning in the universe’, explain natural phenomenon, and live regenerated lives free of the corrupting influence of earlier, false doctrine.

    While I’m fascinated by American atheism (because I’m a British atheist, and thus come with an entirely different set of cultural baggage when it comes to atheism), I don’t think the part about looking for meaning in the universe is really so true. The majority of American atheists that I’ve met/seen/read all seem very insistent on the fact that meaning is not in any way an inherent property of the universe. That is to say, they’re not looking for “meaning” – just for understanding, which is quite different. I think most American atheists will tell you that the question “Why?” cannot be meaningfully applied to the universe, and they are satisfied with that. If they bring up the issue of meaning at all, it is only because it is a problem brought up by religious opponents.

    The idea that they’re trying to free themselves of the earlier, evil, doctrine does, however, come up quite often. I’ve never heard British atheists (there is a lot more acceptance of it here, and there are more second generation atheists than in the states) talk about getting rid of their religious beliefs or undergoing “deconversion”, which is a surprisingly common topic on American atheist blogs and forums. I think that part of the argument is true; American atheists see religion as a corrupting influence that detracts from a pure life. But it may only be so because American atheists feel under threat and undervalued, and instead of coming directly from a protestant root, perhaps it is a result of the demonisation of atheism in America. Britain is a protestant nation, officially, but I’ve never seen myself as having deconverted or somesuch, and it may be because atheism is simply not a big deal here.

    The whole ritual sounds like a parody in any case, designed to provide a commentary on the idea of baptism, and not a sincere expectation that it will become a common replacement for baptism. I don’t think it’s evidence that atheists and the religious are vying for an area of cultural ground, just that some atheists like to mock institutions that they see as representative of the unthinking nature of religion (as they see it).

    I also emphasise the some there, because there will be atheists who think that the whole thing is ridiculous and puerile. There will be some atheists who would never do it, but think it’s quite funny. Some will perform a ritual like that to emphasise their membership of an atheist in-group, I suspect. But importantly, there will be a great diversity of opinion. That makes it hard to ascribe motives onto the people performing the ritual.

    Anyway, it’s all food for thought.

    Creationists ridicule atheists because they think atheists blindly believe whatever Darwin wrote, and atheists ridicule Creationists because they believe creationists are blindly following the dictates and dogmas passed down by their religious leaders. The truth is, the Evangelical churches from which Creationism sprang love to criticize other Protestant sects just as much as scientists love to criticize each other.

    I think it’s more that atheists see the creationists believing blindly (sometimes selectively) in the dictates of a single fallible book. Undoubtedly, religious sects criticise each other. Who would deny that? Minor theological differences have motivated wars for millennia. But creationists at the very least share a firm belief in the infallibility of the Bible and its capacity to override scientific evidence.

    Further, scientists don’t criticise each other by saying that they will go to hell for false beliefs, or that they’re leading people to Satan, or that they’re leading to moral corruption in society. The disagreements of scientists are of a completely different order to religious disagreements, and in general don’t filter down to the general public. Religious disagreements cause actual social effects. If you no longer believe in the dogma of a church, then you might leave it and go to a different church that suits your beliefs. Theological differences can create different in-groups and different communities. Scientific differences are arcane and generally affect only those directly involved in the work. They tend not to lead the creation of entirely new university faculties which the public attend in place of their previous faculty, which they now see as leading people to the devil.

  4. One side believes it will go to heaven, the other advocates a space program to achieve “Mars in our time” as a mission to direct and shape human aspiration

    Again, atheists are an extremely diverse group, and a direct one-to-one comparison between belief in going to heaven (a core Christian belief) and hope for a manned mission to Mars (a less-than-core “atheist” belief, notably espoused by none other than George W Bush) is not really a good idea because the ideas are not equivalent. I know plenty of atheists who do not believe in expensive space exploration of that sort – people who would much rather focus on mundane social problems, or who care much more strongly about environmental issues, and so on. As it happens, I support space exploration, because I’ve been an amateur astronomer since I got my first advanced telescope when I was 10, but I understand not stressing that aspect of life.

    I suspect the two things are equivalent in their stressing: heaven is certainly a core belief of Christianity, but not all Christians focus on converting others and helping them to get to heaven. Likewise, belief in science and social progress, sometimes represented by space exploration, could be seen as a unifying principle (rather than a core belief; again, atheists stress their internal diversity) for atheism, but not something about which all atheists agree.

    I seem to remember reading somewhere recently (probably a pop-sci publication like New Scientist) that edifying experiences and “the sublime” are coming to be seen as a basic human emotion in psychological circles. Perhaps these beliefs are cultural expressions of a human universal, and that no matter what we do, humans cannot get rid of the demand for sublime experiences, whether they come from a belief in religion or a belief in science. Perhaps in this way – but only in this way – science and religion are equivalent.

    Partially is a way of saying that the anthropological notion of culture often cuts across what other people’s ‘ethnocultural’ notions — we see a single system made of oppositions where others see two discrete ‘cultures’ or groups.

    I’d look at it and see multiple sub-cultures (Christian sects and individuals/atheist individuals united around certain cultural touchstones, like blogs, etc) surrounded by a super-cultural structure with its own history, much of it religious. American atheists want to mock religion; how better to do it than refer to touchstones common to both atheists and the religious, so that the ritual becomes meaningful in at least some respect to both the mockers and the mocked? If you wanted to mock religion and did it entirely with references to Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins, Terry Pratchett, Lawrence Krauss and the space programme, I don’t think you’d achieve your aim.

  5. de-baptism: “Reason and Truth.”
    McKellar: “basically that the atheist side believes that regular folks can lead rich, fulfilling lives by ‘doing’ science,”

    Fundamentalism is anti-humanist, the more extreme the more anti-humanist it becomes. Subatomic particles have no meaning absent our desire for them. Going to Mars is like mountain climbing: the process and achievement are what matters. A rock is just a rock, moving from the category of the undiscovered to the desired to the banal. Scientism is the doctrine of desire.

    It’s a fight between an ethos of desire and one of convention, with religion arguing for convention as Truth. Here’s where it gets tricky, because the rule of law argues for convention as necessity, and that’s where many contemporary academics miss the point. The rule of reason opposes the rule of law. Laws are just scraps of paper. The Pope had scraps of paper, and Galileo had science.

    Technocracy, the rule of experts, is not democracy. People who defend religion in public life defend a public understanding that can be shared by all. Scientists to the majority seem to say “trust us”. It’s not the science that scares people it’s the condescension, the research imperative and the cruel social Darwinism of academic power games. The definition of a monoculture. And now we have academic fields run as adjuncts to business schools. Research, entrepreneurialism, and progress: towards what?

    Its possible to say that many religious cultures are more humanist than cultures “based on” science and progress, precisely because religion debates values before facts, while under the research imperative values are assumed. The research imperative is anti-democratic. Democracy is founded in debate over the relation of values to facts. Democracy is the culture of language in use.

    Scientific Platonism may be a-theism but it’s not secularism, which is why there is a deep reactionary anti-democratic aspect to a-theism in both the US and the UK. The possibility of a secular humanism is forgotten.

  6. Creationists ridicule atheists because they think atheists blindly believe whatever Darwin wrote, and atheists ridicule Creationists because they believe creationists are blindly following the dictates and dogmas passed down by their religious leaders. The truth is, the Evangelical churches from which Creationism sprang love to criticize other Protestant sects just as much as scientists love to criticize each other.

    As pointed out in hilarious (to me, at least) fashion in a South Park two-parter.

  7. This is interesting, Rex, but do you really think that the “so-called atheism/religion debate,” as you put it, is mostly internal to the logic of Protestantism? Sure, this anti-Baptism ritual (and US/UK ‘new atheism’ itself) can be shown to share plenty of cultural elements with Anglophone Protestantism and it’s a good insight that there is a “mimetic conflict” going on. But to try to contain the “so-called atheism/religion debate” in this way is a mistake. Secular, anti-religious ways of thinking and behaving emerge from (and step outside of) all kinds of religious and cultural traditions. Atheists and secularists that emerge from, say, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim contexts undoubtedly frequently enact mimetic conflicts with their once coreligionists. But they also have a lot in common with each other that transcend those traditions–and not just because they are enacting some drama that is “diffusing all over the place,” as you say, from the US and UK. I say this as an atheist who identifies with an atheist tradition with roots in Marx, Freud, and Neitzsche (much more so than in Dawkins et al.) and also as a child of secular parents raised Catholic and Jewish. Some sort of crypto-Protestantist diffusionism? Nah.

  8. “Some sort of crypto-Protestantist diffusionism? Nah.”

    Precisely. Indian atheists espouse much the same thing as those in the west; doubtless they, as educated Indians, have a fair bit in common with European and American atheists, but they’re unlikely to share a protestant cultural background. And yet their enthusiasm for science, space exploration, human rights, and mockery of traditional religious practices is of very much the same nature.

    I also think that seeing religious divisions – especially radical, atheistic, or millenarian ones – as occuring within the religious tradition they are breaking from is to ignore the experience of those involved. The whole thing of a millenarian community, for instance, is renewal, breaking away, purity – seeing it from the outside as part of the same community as the religious tradition that it sprouts from is useful for some purposes, but it leads to a very dry hermeneutics on its own.

    Look at a few atheist websites – the Richard Dawkins Foundation site, or the Brights.net. White and blue, clean colours, brightness, a pure vision, modernity. An aesthetic impression derived almost exclusively from scientific sources (ie, a DNA-esque double helix in the RDF banner). Even the symbolism of modern US and British atheism is oriented towards a rejection of the traditional and of the past. That doesn’t mean that existing super-cultural traditions and viewpoints don’t influence the day-to-day life of American (or any) atheists, of course.

    In this instance, with this ritual, the point is not to take the place of the baptismal rituals of the protestants and Catholics, but to ridicule it, and so everything is inverted. A hair-dryer is a modern, mundane product, and functions as the comic antithesis of tradition and solemn ritual (as well as, obviously, representing dryness and hence the opposite of water). Gibberish masquerading as Latin – the epitome of meaninglessness – is the direct inversion of a real mass, whose content is supposed to be quite literally the word of god, and therefore the most meaningful of thing in the universe.

    So yes, atheism is in some respects a reaction to and therefore part of American protestant culture, but it’s also – in the minds of its participants – something fresh and a break from traditionalism. It’s like reading Victor Turner and choosing either to emphasise the ways in which specific instances of communitas and liminality are part of existing traditions or the ways in which they are different and novel. In the eyes of adherents, it is the truth, and not part of some arbitrary, local, traditional culture. That is to say, looking at the whole atheism thing as a “mimetic conflict” is only half-useful.

    tl;dr: If you ask American atheists whether they think their atheism is a cultural change taking place within American protestantism, they’ll look at you like you’re crazy.

    I say this as an atheist who identifies with an atheist tradition with roots in Marx, Freud, and Neitzsche (much more so than in Dawkins et al.)

    I do find this interesting – the idea of an atheist tradition sounds a lot like anathema to me. I’m curious, what does it mean to be part of an atheist tradition in this way, and what makes Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschian atheism different from other atheist positions? Is it not one and the same position – that there is no god?

  9. Well said, Conan. In response to your question,

    “the idea of an atheist tradition sounds a lot like anathema to me. I’m curious, what does it mean to be part of an atheist tradition in this way, and what makes Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschian atheism different from other atheist positions? Is it not one and the same position – that there is no god?”

    Sure, any particular atheism (like any particular religion) is part of a tradition, even as it transforms, makes ties with other traditions, etc. I emphasized ‘tradition’ in my post because I agree with a lot of what Rex says here: that there is a particular flavor to the new atheism that has a lot in common with Protestantism; that its renunciations and ridiculing of tradition have a cultural history and cultural logic (i.e., a tradition); and that, clearly, atheism (or secularism, more broadly) gets into lots of mimetic conflicts (which are two-way affairs, by the way; they transform religions too). But I also wanted to point out that this is not the only origin point for modern atheism. I mentioned Marx and Freud (I’ll leave out Nietzsche here) because their atheism was part of different critical projects that many people reading this blog likely identified with before they had ever heard of Dawkins (we can see the outlines of a tradition), projects critiquing what religion does in the world. I mentioned them also because they are familiar and influential atheist figures who are patently not crypto-Protestants.

  10. I would never claim that secularism and atheism could emerge ONLY from Protestantism — the position that you seem to be opposed to, Sean. There is, of course, such a thing as independent invention. I’d also never claim that the original cultural form couldn’t diffuse — I think its interesting, for instance, that this opposition couldn’t diffuse to other areas (I have a CD called “FOSSILS HAVE DISCREDITED EVOLUTION” that is very much in the creationist mode, but cites the Quran). This doesn’t mean that you can’t trace the transformations of the cultural structure.

    That said, I think there is something culturally distinct about Anglophone atheism/evolutionism that is clearly related to its Protestant background, including especially (pace Conan) its attempt to portray its opponent as Popish (you can’t critique Baptists for having a Latin mass led by priests!). But there is also more generally the sense — often remarked upon by Dawkins and others — that the solace of science is the sense of wonder or awe it invokes in the universe. This is straight out of Emerson. If the connection is not clear to you, I’d encourage you to check out Restless Souls by Leigh Eric Schmidt.

  11. I think Rex is right that there are differences between the way atheism develops in various cultural backgrounds. To even call one’s self an atheist is to set one’s self in automatic opposition to theists, or those that believe in some form of god. Theism simply isn’t pushed on Europeans the same way it is on Americans, which helps explain the blow-back and need to for rituals of difference.

    In Buddhism there’s no soul, no god, no creation myth, no end times myth, etc… Therefore, most Buddhists could easily call themselves atheists.
    In much of the more conservative areas of the Islamic world to even call one’s self an atheist is to mark a person as an apostate, which is something that can forfeit their lives in a worst case, or social sanctioning (best case). It’s just not the same.

    So, I think that the ritual of debaptism can’t be removed from the wider religious background. In this case it’s Christian.

  12. “In Buddhism there’s no soul, no god, no creation myth, no end times myth, etc… Therefore, most Buddhists could easily call themselves atheists.”

    While the forms of Buddhism that tend to be popular in the West are fairly psychologized, there are plenty of forms of Buddhism that have supernatural entities, be they gods, Bodhisattvas or whatever.

  13. This doesn’t mean that you can’t trace the transformations of the cultural structure.

    It is always heartening to encounter someone who has not only read but also actually understands Lévi-Strauss.

  14. Rex wrote: “I would never claim that secularism and atheism could emerge ONLY from Protestantism — the position that you seem to be opposed to, Sean.”

    Maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m saying that actually existing atheism and secularism in the world have lots of different origin points and cultural logics. I mean seriously , what is so compelling about all these mutually contradictory religions (each with their prescriptions for living and accounts of the ultimate nature of things) that, in age where most people are exposed to cultural and religious diversity (at least on TV), it wouldn’t occur to plenty of people around the world that maybe these religions are wrong? If there weren’t, to borrow a phrase, an available cultural logic of secularism, people would have to invent one. And they do.

    Rex wrote:
    “there is also more generally the sense — often remarked upon by Dawkins and others — that the solace of science is the sense of wonder or awe it invokes in the universe. This is straight out of Emerson.”

    Sure, or straight out Einstein, and not to far from plenty of mystical traditions.

  15. Very good point justaguy. There are differences in religions as they diffuse to different places and American Buddhism is different from other forms. Some differences are superficial though, and due to ethnocentric bias. We see something and utilize explanations that don’t fit, causing a lot of misunderstanding. Japanese religion for example, is really a mix of three traditions with a lot of local superstition and gods thrown in. This is fully understood among Japanese, most of which are not religious at all. It is incredibly common for Buddhist authorities to dismiss such things as myth, and moral stories. Also, if you read texts from the many different sects, you find that they all have the exact same core concepts, which explicitly deny things like souls, or anthropomorphic gods. Same with Islam. You have many different flavors, but at their core there are a set of universal beliefs. Over a thousand years ago, a patriarch in a Buddhist sect said:
    “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, and not what they see.” Huang Po

    There are also differences between classes. I’ve found that monks, speak about these things differently depending on who they’re talking to. The reason given to me by an Abbott of a Taiwanese monastery is that the answers that we accept are really the ones are are closest to what we assumed before looking. This is why we match up assumed authenticity when seeking out knowledge. Recent, psychological experiments have shown that we accept information when it comes from someone that looks like what we consider an expert to look like. An academic usually accepts info. from someone with a beard, and a businessman from someone shaved and in a suit.

    I think the same is true in Catholicism to a point. I’ve found that many priests have what many would consider to be an enlightened view of spirituality, whereas they often pass off a simpler and more moralistic type of religious philosophy to people in their congregation that aren’t in the mood for deeper understandings. I’ve even heard on priest say the bible was a “good guide, but nothing more.”

    I think all this creates a problem with the American (don’t know any other) type of atheism, because it often focuses on the more mundane, superficial, and dogmatic aspects of religious practice, and is largely unaware of the deeper aspects of wisdom traditions.

    This creates a problem, because a great deal of the world’s wisdom traditions become invalid, ipso facto, to many American atheists, which includes anything they have to say no concerning a deity. For example, the post-modernist critique becomes something based more on a misunderstanding and conflation between relative and ultimate truth, after reading Nagarjuna, a 2nd century Indian philosopher. We never hear about Nagarjuna though, because he’s labeled a Buddhist, therefore his writing becomes nothing more than superstition, and not valid philosophy. Read his book, “The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way,” and there’s not a single reference to any god, or dogma, or anything supernatural, or even metaphysical.

    At the same time, I think atheists are incredibly misunderstood in the US as well. There is often an assumption that they are inconsiderate, stubborn, dogmatic, intolerant, etc… and there’s just not much to back that up.

  16. Rick – thanks for the thoughtful response. I’ve also encountered a variety of ways of believing in Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity. I went to a Chinese New Year festival at a Daoist temple in NYC and found that in spite of the fact that people were spending the night chanting, bowing before various gods and generally behaving in ways we would consider religious – I didn’t speak to anyone who claimed to be Daoist. “The priest is from Wenzhou, so everyone from Wenzhou comes to this temple. If someone from Wenzhou were to open a Buddhist temple we’d all be there”.

    On the other hand a Catholic friend told me that he went through the rituals of Catholicism, not because he himself believed in them, but because the Priests did. So through participating in the same rituals as the Priests would, through their faith, make him good with the God he doesn’t believe in.

    Which is something that I find unfortunate about the New Atheists – for people who claim to speak for Science, they are bizarrely unaware of the fact that the social sciences exist and that we’ve been studying religion for quite some time. So, they seem to have a pretty simplistic understanding of what it means to be religious.

    They seem most comfortable with engaging with extreme political Islam or Intelligent Design advocates. Sam Harris, for example has the same view of what it means to be a good Muslim as Bin Laden – he just thinks that being a good Muslim is a bad thing. He seems to think that the variable involved is intensity of Faith – so that the difference between Bin Laden and Muslim that rejects political violence is quantitative – they believe less strongly in the same thing – rather than qualitative – they have different understandings in the tenants of Islam and practice different ways of being Muslims.

    “For example, the post-modernist critique becomes something based more on a misunderstanding and conflation between relative and ultimate truth, after reading Nagarjuna, a 2nd century Indian philosopher. We never hear about Nagarjuna though, because he’s labeled a Buddhist, therefore his writing becomes nothing more than superstition, and not valid philosophy. ”

    Yeah, you’re not the first anthropologist to mention Nagarjuna as someone who clarifies a lot of the intractable issues in contemporary theory. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to engage with him in my work at some point, translating him into social theory.

  17. “Which is something that I find unfortunate about the New Atheists – for people who claim to speak for Science, they are bizarrely unaware of the fact that the social sciences exist and that we’ve been studying religion for quite some time.”

    Yes, and I also find a lack of political and materialist understandings of why something is accepted in a religion at one time or place, and not another. There is too often a view that all religion is a super-structural phenomenon, and therefore they are somehow self-created or arbitrary to existential conditions. To be fair though, we are talking about an elite understanding of these things. I think the common atheist assumptions about religion and religious thought are accurate for a majority of “religious” people. There’s a philosopher, Ken Wilber, who is one of the more misunderstood people that’s an expert on this. (to be fair to that, most of his early work was shit, and something he’s worked hard to reinvent).

    I’ve never heard of Sam Harris, I’ll have to look him up. Again, to be fair to such a view there really isn’t an existing form of orthodox Islam that is without a bit of a supremacy, jihadi, or political part somewhere in it. This is a universal characteristic to the religion right now. The comparison of Bin Laden to any average Muslim though is beyond the pale, and for solid reasons not just, because it sounds bad.

    “you’re not the first anthropologist to mention Nagarjuna as someone who clarifies a lot of the intractable issues in contemporary theory”

    Really?! I’ve never come across anything else. Could you please direct me toward anything published so I can check it out. That would be soo cool. I’ve never even thought to look, which is what I’m going to do now.

  18. About Nagarjuna – I was talking about things people had mentioned to me in conversation. I haven’t read anything – or thought to search either – but a google scholar search for “Nagarjuna Anthropology” has a lot of hits. Something to dig into when I’m done with my QEs.

    Harris wrote a book called The End of Faith – which starts out by arguing that religious faith is a threat to Western liberal values, and winds up explicitly endorsing torture, colonialism and war. Muslims are, he argues, too irrational to govern themselves, so the West needs to violently contain them.

    Here’s a clip of him debating a Rabbi on Leviticus. Interestingly, the Atheist takes a Biblical literalist line, while the Rabbi argues social constructionism. So Harris doesn’t seem to want to engage what the Rabbi actually says his religious views are and instead argues against a literalist interpretation that the Rabbi explicitly rejects.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6yJ5OB_92Q&feature=youtube_gdata

  19. To second a commenter above: the Jewish tradition of secularism seems to have been forgotten. But that ties into my comment that’s still in moderation, on the fight not between faith and its lack but between an ethos of desire and of convention. The terms of desire track with Rex’s mention of protestantism, or the individual’s search for meaning. “The unending search for truth.” in the age of science becomes “the unending search for facts.” Dwight MacDonald in “The Triumph of the Fact” refers to Alfred Kazin’s “The President and Other Intellectuals.” Both are good at describing what’s by now become the normative fixation of academic intellectuals.
    I won’t repeat the comment already written. It might yet be let out of limbo. But A-theism is not the same as secularism.
    Democracy is secular conventionalism.

  20. I couldn’t find in a brief search anything that jumped out connecting something like Nagarjuna’s “Two Truths Doctrine,” or his tetralemma to theory. I think the issue for me is that too many anthropologist spend their time chasing their tales on metaphysical issues that have been settled in the past by people like Nagarjuna. One of the more concise renderings of what he did was done by a philosophy student for their thesis here: http://bahai-library.com/personal/jw/other.pubs/nagarjuna/nag05.html#RTFToC14

    That Sam Harris debate is wild. I think he’s used to debating fundamentalist Christians, and not Rabbis. As Seth points out, probably the best examples of secularism and an honest discourse about religious texts is found in the Jewish tradition.
    Wilber calls this the pre/trans fallacy found in the new atheism, which Harris seems to be arguing from.

    “What we call ‘spirituality’ applies to both the pre-rational stages of development and the trans-rational stages of development,” says Wilber.

    In pre-rational modes, like magic and mythic, we have beliefs in things like Moses parting the Red Sea and Lao Tzu being 900 years old, all the standard mythological stories and narratives we find in traditions all over the world.

    “The trans-rational stages,” Wilber continues, “have almost nothing in common with the pre-rational stages. The trans-rational stages of development have much more to do with awareness and the number of perspectives one can encompass. They have absolutely nothing to do with magic or mythic beliefs or dogmas. The trans-rational forms of spirituality are not really being addressed in this debate, which wastes time telling us that Moses didn’t part the Red Sea. Well, duh!

    “All religious activity is being lumped together, so that what a Zen master is doing and what Pat Robertson is doing are thought to be the same thing — it’s all just religious stuff. This is absolute nonsense, and it’s a disaster. It takes the contemplative aspects of the world’s great religions and mixes them in with all the magic and mythic accoutrements that also come with the world’s great religions. Nobody is really taking the time to separate these two out.”

  21. I think another difference between US and European atheists is found in who becomes their targets. Who are the theists that muck things up a bit. I think here that the Europeans are really on the vanguard in a cultural war between hyper-relativism on one end and Islamisn on the other. I would not want to be an atheist in Europe now. This remembers me of one of my favorate video blogging atheists in the UK named, Pat Condell. I love the immediacy of such rants. And this is one of my favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9dXGJ2rYdA&feature=related

    Man it looks like my European brothers are gonna need some help with that future war. I’ll stand with you.

  22. Which is something that I find unfortunate about the New Atheists – for people who claim to speak for Science, they are bizarrely unaware of the fact that the social sciences exist and that we’ve been studying religion for quite some time. So, they seem to have a pretty simplistic understanding of what it means to be religious.

    Except that a number of “new atheists” are social scientists themselves. I don’t know if I count as a new atheist – I was an atheist long before the wave of new atheist books, but so was Richard Dawkins. I’m openly critical of religion and I even occasionally read atheist touchstone blogs, like Pharyngula. I’m not a member of any atheist organisations, however. But the thing is not that “new atheists” reject, necessarily, the social aspect of religion – the quaint traditions and so on – it’s just that they see it as a dessicated and irrelevant set of beliefs when its core, belief in a deity, is false. There’s no point in bowing to any statues or priests, or attending rituals designed to glorify a non-existent entity. I believe the point the new atheists are making is that religious life is unnecessary, even while it may have a complicated social function – a complicated social function that may be filled by secular pursuits.

    I think all this creates a problem with the American (don’t know any other) type of atheism, because it often focuses on the more mundane, superficial, and dogmatic aspects of religious practice, and is largely unaware of the deeper aspects of wisdom traditions.

    Uh, what? Atheism doesn’t mean “criticism of religion”, or just a general distaste at religious practice. What it means is a rejection of a specific idea: the idea of a deity. In a culture that values the idea of a deity highly, that’s a big deal, and it creates an antagonism between atheists and theists. And when atheists criticise religion, they are doing it because they don’t believe in the very central premise, the real point of it. It’s not a naive or superficial thing. But obviously when mocking religion – hardly a necessary aspect of atheism, but clearly something a lot of people feel it necessary to do, especially in an antagonistic situation as in the states – you’re not going to focus on the deep theology. It’s not like there isn’t already a lot of critique of theological, “spiritual”, and mystical practices out there. No, mocking rituals are naturally going to focus on the ridiculous things in religion.

    Atheism isn’t like religion. When a religion spreads, it’s because someone is spreading it. You can’t be a Christian without having heard of Jesus. It’s extremely unlikely that you’d come to Christianity entirely on your own – you’re not going to just think it up one day. It requires that one absorb the lore and traditions of a group. Atheism, on the other hand, is a negative belief. Anyone could come to the conclusion that there is no god.

    Bear in mind too that lack of a belief in god is the only thing that binds any so-called atheist community together. The community is the most incidental thing, and it comes from individuals realising that they share a belief with others, not from a top-down spreading of a belief. Here in the UK, there is little pressure to believe in god, and our deputy prime minister (and certainly other ministers) is an atheist. I came to the conclusion that there was no god at age twelve, entirely without prodding from anyone – just from reading pop sci and attending compulsory religious classes in my Catholic primary and secondary schools, which clashed in just about every area. My dad was a physicist who never went to church, and science was always in the foreground. The “new atheist” books didn’t exist then, and I hadn’t read Freud or Marx or any other “tradition” of atheism. I simply came to the view that there was no god by looking at the world through science, and unlike a lot of people, atomic theory and moral scepticism were at the core of my rejection of the idea of a deity. It came about in a different way to others. It’s not some uniform conversion process when you “become an atheist”, and most of the time, the only belief truly common to atheists is the lack of a belief in a god. By comparisons, rituals, communities, and core beliefs in things other than simply the creator of the universe are central to religion.

    Atheism comes about in entirely different way to religious belief, and the views of Epicurus, Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Charles Bradlaugh, the Baron d’Holbach, Richard Dawkins, and others, are basically the same on the subject of god without necessarily having followed from each other.

    So, basically, atheism can come about anywhere and need have no traditions or lore. It’s not a movement within American protestantism. It’s just that, in America, it has to contend with the dominant protestant ideas, and so it writes its mocking rituals in protestant idiom.

    Atheism is certainly a cultural movement in America, but that’s not what it primarily is. Primarily, it is the understanding of some individuals that there is no deity as commonly accepted. And that’s it. It presents no unified front, has no dogma or leader, and requires no traditions, and most atheists proudly claim that organising atheists is like herding cats. I’m not a member of a single atheist organisation, and neither are most of my friends. In America, the beliefs of atheists are pretty much the same as mine on the subject of god, but they obviously react differently to the religious environment in which they live.

    So, to summarise my criticism of the subject of this article:

    1) The experience of atheists is of something entirely separate from religious tradition, and to look at atheism in America as sprouting from protestantism may be useful to some extent in looking at the cultural language used in mock rituals, but would ignore the actual human experience on the ground if taken too far.

    2) Atheism is not a religious tradition. It has no lore or rituals inherent in it, and only a small percentage of atheists (in the USA or worldwide) is going to popularise a ritual like this. To ignore the way in which atheism emerges – not as a tradition or something learned, but as a realisation of the falsehood of a particular belief – and see it as a cultural movement in the vein of religion is to ignore its peculiarity.

    I would not want to be an atheist in Europe now.

    First, Pat Condell is a racist. He’s a supporter of a right-wing anti-immigration party (UKIP), and his hatred of Islam seems to be fueled mostly by bigotry. His fans mostly seem to be Americans, who love the idea that Europe is about to be overrun by Muslims. But it’s not.

    But I can tell you that being an atheist in Europe is great. Pat Condell is an attention-seeking bigot, but for most atheists, there’s no need to even say anything on the subject. Islam is a tiny force in the UK – the UK is still 90.1% white European, for pete’s sake, and atheists are a much bigger group in the UK than Muslims. There isn’t going to be a future war, and the absence of crazy religious people (ie, creationists, etc) in government is a great blessing.

    Atheistic attention in Europe is not directed at Islam or hyper-relativism necessarily, mostly because 1) Islam is still a small cultural force in Europe, especially compared to Catholicism or the protestant state churches and 2) hyper-relativism is outside the atheist’s remit, unless atheism is conflated with a strong belief in science. They do correlate strongly, but they’re not the same thing.

  23. If there weren’t, to borrow a phrase, an available cultural logic of secularism, people would have to invent one. And they do.

    This ^

  24. “Except that a number of “new atheists” are social scientists themselves.”

    I was referring to the group of authors that are generally identified as New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett – and not necessarily to all of their readers. I’m sure there are plenty of Atheist social scientists with varying degrees of affinity for their work.
    I have not read their work exhaustively, but it seems to me that they (the above authors) come at religion from an evolutionary biology or cognitive science background and don’t see the value of social science approaches.

  25. Atheist Spirituality.

    I heard the phrase before the book came out. Colin McGinn approves of it, or has; other ‘Brights’ as well. But McGinn is still a Catholic, because his categories are still Catholic. As a secularist I think it’s silly. I’m not interested in replacing God with anything: emptiness isn’t grand it’s only empty. Platonism is silly. The stars bore me.

    And I’m not interested in capitalizing the first letter in “meaninglessness.” The stress is a claim to a form of grandeur. Philosophers choose atheism as a grand break with tradition; Nietzsche said “God it dead.” To the village atheist he never existed. Democracy is predicated on coexistence, not truth, talk to a jobbing lawyer about truth and he’ll shrug. But law can be an interesting way to spend a life. Its a topic full of intellectual complexity, like history or anthropology.

    “Belief in” science: the conflation of technical and moral progress is based in faith not fact, but you’re free to believe anything you want. The only thing I believe in is civility. I aspire to it and some day I may become consistent practitioner.
    And Rick is consistent in linking to racists.

    Islam in Europe. The slow secularization of Islam is feeding into a resurgence in humanism, the culture of books more than numbers. In the German tradition the humanities looked down on the sciences. Panofsky used to call his sons, both scientists and one with a Nobel Prize in physics: ‘My two plumbers.” Secular Islam will help push back against the mechanical barbaric Protestant imperative, as secular Judaism once did (and if you think Islam isn’t secularizing you’re ignoring history).

    And Rick is consistent in linking to and quoting racists.

  26. Seth, what is it about you that needs to always look for a fight? You’re like that kid on the play ground that won’t shut up in calling someone names until they spread rumors about them. Why are you so insecure? I have never linked to any racists, unless you expand the meaning of the word to the point that it looses all meaning. Please, look up the word, and then shut the hell up. You are getting very close to moderation territory. I’ve been very patient with you, but I’m done placating your need for drama.

  27. “Uh, what? Atheism doesn’t mean “criticism of religion”, or just a general distaste at religious practice. What it means is a rejection of a specific idea: the idea of a deity.”

    Absolutely, true. This is actually why I wrote that I think atheists in the US are misrepresented in popular culture. Just like justaguy, I was referring to the writings, interviews and debates of the big names in atheism as of late. There is a consistent focus on the mythic aspects of religion, which is a valid and necessary fight (in my opinion), but this leads to an ignoring of non-mythic aspects.

    One well written atheist parsed out two different general types of atheists. He called them either atheists with with a little a, which is what you refer to, and then atheists with a big A, which are the writers that I’m referring to.

    Part of the issue I think is that there needs to be a group of people that, as Voltaire pleaded, “remember to cruelties,” of big, organized religion. They have to stand guard to protect our ideals of secularism and separation of church and state.

  28. “First, Pat Condell is a racist. He’s a supporter of a right-wing anti-immigration party (UKIP)”

    I haven’t seen him say anything racist, or anything that didn’t have to do which a criticism of religion or religious practice which he feels has been encroaching on secularist ideals. I only know him through Youtube. I can see how others would want to brand him as such, but until there is some evidence I’m going to believe him on the matter.

    He’s no more of a racist than Hitchens, or Harris. To be a racist you must believe at least one, but usually both, of two things:

    1. There is a biological basis for a separation of humans a groups, i.e., sub-species.
    2. One or more of these groups is better in some way in relation to one or more other groups.

    I think that it is incredibly sad that trained anthropologists would not know this to the point of such common sense that it wouldn’t never have to be brought up explicitly. I think you could say that Condell is ethnocentric, in the sense that he feels that secularism is better than theocracy. I think many of us would probably fall under that rubric as well, however.

  29. 1. There is a biological basis for a separation of humans a groups, i.e., sub-species.
    2. One or more of these groups is better in some way in relation to one or more other groups.

    While, yes, of course these are formal definitions of racism, I don’t think your average bigot really cares if there’s a true biological basis for race. If it’s brown, keep it down – that’s the important thing. And Condell is certainly a bigot. It’s fine to criticise Islam, and many blogs and plenty of general atheists do it all the time. But to make it the centrepiece, to talk about how evil and vicious these sticky icky brown Muslims are with their foreign religion and burkhas and…

    He’s a bigot. He supports a bigoted, Euro-sceptic, anti-Islamic, authoritarian party, called UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). He is only good as evidence that atheists share only one thing: that they don’t believe in god.

    He’s no more of a racist than Hitchens, or Harris.

    Yeah. He is. Hitchens is a man with friends and contacts around the world, who is far from an enemy of social mixing between people of differences of opinion. The impression I got from God Is Not Great is that Hitchens was often angry on behalf of those being swindled by religion. The part where he discusses polio vaccination (I think) somewhere in Pakistan being boycotted and disapproved of by local Islamic religious leaders shows how exasperated and angry he is that Muslim children would not be free from polio in that area. There’s genuine compassion in his work, despite all his bluster and anger. Condell, on the other hand, is a so-called comedian who espouses banning the burkha and other offenses to civil liberty.

    Slight difference.

    The stars bore me.

    Then you don’t know enough about stars! I’ve been an amateur astronomer since I was a child, and my dad used to show me all kinds of things in the sky. I don’t necessarily think there’s more grandeur in it than in other sciences – I find geology and meteorology pretty fascinating – but there’s a special pleasure in seeing objects that far from you and being able to make a degree of sense from them.

    I don’t think replacing religious experiences with secular ones is a choice. Edification, or whatever a good, technical, unambiguous, uncontroversial term for “spiritual” experience is, appears to be a human universal, a basic emotion of humans. Whether it comes in the form of imagined deities or attempts to imagine the distances and scale of the bright shiny lights seen at night seems to be irrelevant to the brain. At least, that is how it appears. I personally hate the term “spiritual”, but I suppose that when people use it, they mean the same feeling I get from watching Star Trek. /snark

    And I can’t get enough Nietzschephobia. “God is dead” – oh, please. Don’t be so bloody melodramatic.

    “Belief in” science: the conflation of technical and moral progress is based in faith not fact, but you’re free to believe anything you want. The only thing I believe in is civility. I aspire to it and some day I may become consistent practitioner.

    Well, if you make a few basic assumption (and therein, of course, lies the problem) then it is possible to show an improvement in “morality” over the centuries, if by that we mean a reduction in deaths due to hostility. But yes, okay. I don’t think “belief” in science is necessarily predicated on its ability to improve the standards of ethical decisions. It’s more that it has a great capacity to improve material conditions. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive – if belief in science meant belief in its power to prescribe behaviour then I think we’d have a real paradox on our hands.

    I’m afraid I’m a moral sceptic. It’s quite lonely being a moral sceptic. It’s especially lonely given that most people see it as a paradox to be a moral sceptic aspiring to civility in their treatment of other humans…

    I have not read their work exhaustively, but it seems to me that they (the above authors) come at religion from an evolutionary biology or cognitive science background and don’t see the value of social science approaches.

    Yes, I suppose that’s sort of the impression I got, especially as it seems that those four see anthropology as leading to relativism. I don’t think they’re hostile to social science; it’s just irrelevant to their remit, as they see it. Definitely a gap in the market for an anthropological “new” atheist book! 😛

    Anyway, to me, the social aspect of religion and atheism has always been far, far subordinate to the question of truth. Whether religion is nasty or kind has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of its propositions, and for me, that’s all that matters. Or most of what matters.

  30. “Then you don’t know enough about stars!”
    See my first comment, 5th from the top, now out of moderation [thank you someone].

    “Well, if you make a few basic assumption (and therein, of course, lies the problem) then it is possible to show an improvement in “morality” over the centuries, if by that we mean a reduction in deaths due to hostility.”

    Are we talking about the 20th century?!

    “Science is descriptive, not prescriptive – if belief in science meant belief in its power to prescribe behaviour then I think we’d have a real paradox on our hands.”

    See my reference to the “research imperative”, again in my first comment, Technocracy is not democracy.

    “I’m afraid I’m a moral sceptic.”

    I defend curiosity as the highest moral value, and assume other human beings are my physical and therefore moral equivalent, so that the most interesting way to learn about them is to talk to them. I rank poking at them with sticks and other instruments as secondary in the same way I rank poking at rocks and dirt and stars as secondary. The Parthenon and the Sistine Ceiling manifest “ideas”: they were made as means of communication. Rocks are rocks. The only inanimate objects that interest me are those that were made by living things, and on this planet the most interesting living things, to me, are others like myself. But none of this has a foundation in anything less than my preference for conversation and consensual sex.

    Beyond that I’ll see your moral skepticism and raise you absolute physical determinism (and then go on pretending).

  31. Are we talking about the 20th century?!

    Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m terribly embarrassed to do this, but could I possibly maybe a tiny bit perhaps refer you to maybe Pinker’s The Blank Slate? Possibly? *battens down hatches* There’s a lovely graph showing percentage of male deaths in the 20th century as a result of violence in a number of different cultures.

    I just read your first comment – shame it was moderated, as it adds some provocative ideas, none of which I really agree with. So here we go.

    First, every scientist I’ve ever known has expressed a desire for everybody to learn about science, for everybody to be able to understand physical processes, for everybody to be the recipient of scientific understanding. Most scientists will gladly talk at length about their research topics, and they want people to be interested. I don’t think the problem with public understanding of science is a communication problem on behalf of researchers, but a lack of interest and desire to learn on the part of others. Why is the pop sci section of a modern bookshop a third the size of the section on religion? Why is the academic science section even smaller than that? It’s not because academics and scientists don’t want to write accessible books; it’s that people would rather not read what they’ve written, because they don’t care. The public is the problem in this technocracy, if it even is one. Science is also taught in all schools, and people are expected to have some level of scientific understanding. It just so happens that discovering the truth about this vast universe is a little complicated and requires a lot of nuance and a large number of sub-disciplines. It’s not “trust us because we are t3h ssyuhntysts!!!1!`!” It’s “hey, let me show why we think this” or “please BBC, give me a two-hour special on BBC4 so I can regale interested viewers with the story of planet earth/atomic theory/why clouds form/natural selection”.

    Research, entrepreneurialism, and progress: towards what?

    As for the problem above – progress and science, towards what? Well, that’s the thing. Progress and science are directed towards more science. Science will never end even if technology does. There’s always more to find out and more ways to look at existing scenarios. Science is also not simplistically focused on exciting issues like going to Mars. Science and technology is exciting and interesting both to researchers and some members of the general public in spheres that don’t seem at all adventurous – investigating, for instance, the tangled bank…

    If the aim is to produce a society where everyone is always happy and free then we will always fail. A society where people are allowed to be happy and free in as many ways as they like without affecting others, but which is directed instead towards understanding the universe in which we live – that is something I’d like to see, and of course it too is an impossible eutopian fantasy.

    And people say to me that that is some dry, boring philosophical position that neglects emotion, creativity, imagination… No, it isn’t. Emotions, creativity, and imagination are not removeable. You can’t get rid of emotions and creativity, and doing science certainly does nothing to rid your brain of creativity. It’s just that emotion is irrelevant to finding out the truth of something. I could rage all day about the gender of a rabbit and it will be whatever it is whether I like it or not.

    People who defend religion in public life defend a public set of misunderstandings that can be shared by all.

    Fixed that for you. Science is the search for an understanding of the universe as it actually is. It’s not about some dialectic between convention and innovation or somesuch; it’s a decision to pursue an understanding of reality/the universe/truth as it genuinely is versus a decision to wallow in comforting misunderstandings. Capitalising “truth” also seems like a strange move, as if you want to equate scientific enquiry with some desire for a quasi-religious thing. Science is just looking for what is true about things.

    Scientific Platonism may be a-theism but it’s not secularism, which is why there is a deep reactionary anti-democratic aspect to a-theism in both the US and the UK. The possibility of a secular humanism is forgotten.

    First of all, Platonism is hardly a useful term here. There are probably two Platonists alive in the cosmos (Roger Penrose, maybe? I’m not sure), but Platonism is not exactly modern science. Unless there’s some pomo meaning of Platonism that I’m not aware of, just as “liberal humanism” got turned inside out by the lit crit crowd.

    Second, where is this anti-democratic aspect of which you speak? And what makes you so capable of seeing this thread in “a-theism” when it seems utterly apparent to me that the only unifying thread to atheism is a lack of belief in god? I have yet to come across an atheist who would ban religion. Doubtless there are some people with that view, but it’s hardly a normal view in any modern group of atheists. Dawkins, PZ Myers, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Jerry Coyne – they’re all secularists as well as atheists. Most people are. And for a huge number of atheists, especially in Europe, the so-called social effects of atheism, and the political side that you seem to want to focus on, means nothing when compared with whether or not there is a god. The social aspect to that question is basically functionally irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. If you think that matters more than finding the truth, then I don’t understand your worldview at all.

    Important point: being angry about abuses in the name of a falsehood does not equate with wanting to ban the falsehood. If you detect an anti-democratic stance in anything written by Dawkins et al then it is due almost entirely to your own misunderstanding.

    The Parthenon and the Sistine Ceiling manifest “ideas”: they were made as means of communication. Rocks are rocks.

    If you are a geologist, rocks speak to you more than the Sistine Chapel does. You can work out a whole story from a faultline. Information isn’t some unquantifiable essence that only humans produce. It comes from anywhere we can analyse. Astronomers get easily as much information from a star chart for a certain year as Catholics and art historians do from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That may be hard to believe, but then, I haven’t phrased it in fashionably Hegelian terms.

    But none of this has a foundation in anything less than my preference for conversation and consensual sex.

    And of course, anyone interested in cosmology/geology/meteorology/physics/any non-human subject is an aspie rapist.

    In any case, I’ll direct you to Hume, and the is/ought problem. That should clear things up.

  32. I defend curiosity as the highest moral value, and assume other human beings are my physical and therefore moral equivalent

    1) Curiosity being the “highest moral value” – why do you assert this? On what basis?

    2) a) Other “human” beings are not your physical equivalent. Everyone differs from everyone else. Your genome is unique. You are a singular object. In a metaphysical sense, there is no “mankind”. We are all different whilst sharing many common features. Each organism is physically distinct from all others, as well as being distinct in its genome, ancestry, and experience. Terms like “human” are used for convenience and practicality, and because categorisation of that kind is the very basis of cognition. They are not metaphysically real, only as a matter of practicality, and basing behavioural principles and ethics on an assumption is… actually quite alright. We do it all the time. But still, it is why I’m a moral sceptic.

    If you base your moral code on the idea that humans are physically equivalent, then it is not built on a firm, rational basis. It is built on emotion – the emotion of compassion and empathy felt when seeing a similar organism. And that’s fine. All morality appears to be built on emotion.

    2) b) It also does not follow that your physical equal would be your moral equal. Again, may I direct you to David Hume and the is/ought problem? Simply because you are identical (and I would say that you are not identical to anything, but…) to something does not mean that you are obligated metaphysically to treat it in any way. The “is” cannot be immediately followed by the “ought”. They are ideas of totally different orders.

    So I’m a moral sceptic because morality does not appear to have firm, realistic foundation. It is not a problem because of what Hume observed: that what “is” is separate from what one “ought” to do. And only a sociopath would think otherwise.

    I apologise for the length of my response, by the way, but when my brain eats its food for thought it tends to plop out a lot of written excrement.

  33. “1. There is a biological basis for a separation of humans a groups, i.e., sub-species.
    2. One or more of these groups is better in some way in relation to one or more other groups.”

    While the biological model of race is the most prevalent model in the West, biology isn’t the only way of constructing boundaries of racialized difference. Look at the Hui ethnicity in China, for example, which consists of ethnic Han people who converted to Islam back in the day.

    There is a way of talking about Muslims as a race. Discussing them as a category of people with inherent properties – irrationality, violence – and mapping them onto physical characteristics – dark skin, body odor, etc – that seems pretty racialized to me.

    After 9/11 there was a rise in attacks on Sheiks in the US, where they were assaulted and in at least one case murdered, as they were presumed to be Muslim based on the way they look and dress. Its hard not to see an element in racism in that, or in the statement of a US Congressman that “If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked.” Similarly, a group of Lebanese Christians were mobbed during a protest against the building of a Muslim community center in downtown Manhattan. The fact that they hated Muslims too wasn’t enough to spare them the jeers of the crowd.

    In all of this you see that there are very definite ideas about what a Muslim looks like, and the inherent properties that a Muslim have – so that anyone with brown skin is a terrorist. True, its generally not expressed in a biological idiom – Muslims aren’t held to be genetically inferior, they’re just evil.

  34. “There’s a lovely graph showing percentage of male deaths in the 20th century”

    It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of ‘barbarity’ of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in character …to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible. it may be some time until another war occurs and meanwhile the public may become educated as to the meaning of air power.
    Rules as to Bombardment by Aircraft, 1921. Quoted In Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.

    To say Pinker’s arguments are simplistic is an understatement.
    Male deaths due to violence in England or Belgium in the age of empire don’t compare with the rate of deaths in the Raj, or the Congo, but do we call one the result of modernity and the other not?

    It’s perfectly fine to say that once we’ve universalized bureaucratic order and everything and everyone has its place there will be much less bloodshed, but then maybe you should see Chaplin’s Modern Times. Technocracy is not democracy. When human beings become cogs it’s violent. The research imperative may not be bloody but it’s violent. Calm authoritarianism is violent.

    “Firm rational basis.” etc. Nothing is based on a firm rational basis. Curiosity is pleasurable to most people and democracy is the form of government most supportive of individual curiosity. In a democracy you have the widest possibility for friendships (even with those who condemn democracy as weak). Demanding that we direct ourselves to one goal is not supportive of curiosity. Democracy is founded in arguments over the relation of values to facts: on arguments concerning the definition of happiness. It cannot be founded on one definition of happiness. And I overstate my lack of interest in science only because so many defend it out of reflex as representing some external Truth, rather than simply representing desire. Rocks are indifferent, they don’t speak. Man made objects are records of speech.

    I can imagine a society where everyone has the same definition of happiness and that everyone there would consider it just. I can imagine no logical argument against such a state but I would be bored there. The people would bore me because they would know be happy knowing only what they knew. Passivity is boring, and even though I think it’s destructive of democracy I can’t say it’s wrong in any absolute sense.

  35. To say Pinker’s arguments are simplistic is an understatement.
    Male deaths due to violence in England or Belgium in the age of empire don’t compare with the rate of deaths in the Raj, or the Congo, but do we call one the result of modernity and the other not?

    So, Pinker’s the one with the simplistic view, eh? The argument being made is that the state, and modernisation of bureaucracy and social structure, has a monopoly on violence which decreases violence overall by limiting interpersonal feuds, private wars, and violent crime. It’s not “we have advanced machines and therefore don’t kill”. It’s “we have advanced machines and that correlates with a relatively strong but not necessarily authoritarian state that prevents general violence by monopolizing it”. It’s also not Pinker’s argument, as I’m sure you know. It’s Weber’s. Pinker’s graph (I think he borrowed that, too) was simply to verify the hypothesis.

    Does this equate to moral progress? No. People are still the same as they are in any kind of society, tribal or communistic or otherwise. They are simply constrained. But the idea is that modernity correlates strongly with a lack of deaths due to hostility, and your wish to claim that a passive threat of “violence” (in the UK, not violence at all – no death penalty) is the equivalent of murdering someone is an attempt to redefine terms to fit a heavily politicised idea.

    Nothing is based on a firm rational basis.

    Nuclear power?

    I mean, that kind of relativism is ridiculous. Is there even a point in debating anything if there’s no rational basis for anything?

    And I overstate my lack of interest in science only because so many defend it out of reflex as representing some external Truth, rather than simply representing desire.

    It represents desire… in a strange, simplistic analysis of a single facet of not-even-commonly-accepted scientific adventurism, the decision to go to Mars. Most astronomers have opinions on the issue of Mars; I know of at least two who don’t give a damn about humans going there. They would rather send probes and robots to do the science for them without risking human life – precisely the opposite of the adventurous, desire-motivated explorative “science” image you have. It only appears to be about desire to you because you want it to be so (and also because it makes a nice, snappy soundbite). In reality, science is an extremely varied project, and desire may be part of it. But I don’t “desire” rocks; I’d just like to understand them. Once they’re understood to some degree (and, of course, they are) the process doesn’t stop. People don’t cut the enthusiasm and interest simply because the thing they’ve discovered is no longer cutting edge stuff. It’s only “desire” in the sense that I’d rather like to know. Your position is like suggesting that the only reason people learn languages is to have sex with the speakers. That may motivate some people some of the time, but…

    I can imagine a society where everyone has the same definition of happiness and that everyone there would consider it just.

    Strawman? I don’t recall arguing in favour of such a thing.

    Curiosity is pleasurable to most people and democracy is the form of government most supportive of individual curiosity. In a democracy you have the widest possibility for friendships (even with those who condemn democracy as weak). Demanding that we direct ourselves to one goal is not supportive of curiosity. Democracy is founded in arguments over the relation of values to facts: on arguments concerning the definition of happiness. It cannot be founded on one definition of happiness.

    This I agree with. Of course. I don’t think anyone but the most bizarre and antiquated authoritarian is arguing in favour of silencing all opinions on the subject of “what is happiness”. Science has the potential to explain roughly what happens in the brain and body generally when we are “happy”, as we would call it. It may even be able to predict roughly in what conditions and situations people produce this state. But, as I have mentioned, what ought to be does not follow from what is. Even if we could know how to make someone happy, interfering in their body is not done. It is not moral – and that is an assumption that we make based on the idea of a weighing up of the rights we have decided to give people based on our emotional reactions.

    When human beings become cogs it’s violent. The research imperative may not be bloody but it’s violent. Calm authoritarianism is violent.

    I remember reading a little Derrida once. Spectres of Marx – that the one? I seem to remember him saying, in 1992, that more people than ever before lived in oppressive, authoritarian nations, that famines, wars, death, crime, disease, pain, misery and Pizza Hut were far more common than at any other time in history…

    In 1992.

    I’m not entirely sure about this “humans become cogs” thing. I fail to see how it results from science at all, in any way. No one is suggesting that because people are biological machines and the products of evolution ergo they should be employed as cogs in a machine. First of all because, again, the is/ought problem makes that logically and rationally unsound. And second because the people who might propose such an idea are people themselves, and being people, they would be violently opposed to such an idea. As it stands, people are not cogs in machines, and no one thinks of them that way.

    Essentially, like Derrida, you are trying to scaremonger about science, technology, modernity, reality, and truth and thus require that the data be fitted to your conclusion when in fact it supports no such thing.

    Rocks are indifferent, they don’t speak. Man made objects are records of speech.

    But the people who made those objects are dead and no longer speak. In attempting to interpret their views based on the dust and products they left behind, you may be doing them a disservice, you may be misinterpreting their views. It’s not like you get to know them through their work; you may think you do, but I believe you’ll find that relationship a tad one-sided. Things are not special or more moral or more worthwhile or less degrading to human character simply because people made them. Studying geology does not turn a man into a machine with contempt for people. And rain is wet, and the Pope is a Catholic.

    It’s okay if you don’t want to study geology. It’s probably not for everybody. But don’t pretend that because you’d rather analyze the Sistine Chapel you are thus more moral and civilised, or less likely to think of people as machines.

  36. Demanding that we direct ourselves to one goal is not supportive of curiosity.

    And I agree. Wholeheartedly. But you are criticising (I believe) the part where I talked of an ideal society being basically based on science and ideally directed towards it. Of course, you then leapt to the conclusion that this was an authoritarian thing, that the scientific orientation would be enforced for all. But that’s not what I said, and not even implied. I would like to see (although naturally it is impossible) a society of individuals who have decided of their own volition to place science at the centre, to use taxation to fund science beyond the meagre level of funding it gets today. It is not required that everyone think the same way or become a cog in a machine to achieve such an idea or to imagine one.

    Passivity is boring, and even though I think it’s destructive of democracy I can’t say it’s wrong in any absolute sense.

    Passivity also doesn’t exist. People argue and disagree – it’s just something they do. You could enforce whatever you like on a population, but most of them will think what they think, not what you want them to. So passivity isn’t destructive to democracy; it’s the lack of passivity in humans that makes authoritarianism impossible and democracy necessary and worthwhile.

  37. “The argument being made is that the state, and modernisation of bureaucracy and social structure, has a monopoly on violence which decreases violence overall by limiting interpersonal feuds, private wars, and violent crime.”

    And your discussion concerns the deaths of males in violence not casualties as such.
    Pinker ignores a lot of data.

    “Nuclear power?”

    You’re making a switch not me. We’ve been talking morality (remember: while ignoring my acceptance of physicalist determinism).

    “Essentially, like Derrida, you are trying to scaremonger about science, technology, modernity, reality, and truth and thus require that the data be fitted to your conclusion when in fact it supports no such thing.”

    You’re sticking to your new tack: claiming to reply to by second comment on Pinker, in fact you’re responding not to what I wrote but to your own assumptions. You ignored the words, or at least the link. Derrida would be amused.
    You didn’t follow the discussion of the research imperative. I was responding to this:

    Second, on a cultural level, there is a gradual melding of surveillance programs with a) what Daniel Callahan calls the “research imperative” and b) the rhetoric of war. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg expressed the research imperative in its purest form when he said, “The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it.” Privacy advocates will need to find equally pithy and dramatic encapsulations of their values if the research imperative is not to run roughshod over extant privacy rights.

    I had a long discussion of this at the link posted above.

    “But the people who made those objects are dead and no longer speak.” You could say the same of Plato or Dickens or Quine. And to answer something you wrote further up, there are a lot of Platonists out there, and sad to say, many of them have opinions about politics.

  38. You’re making a switch not me. We’ve been talking morality (remember: while ignoring my acceptance of physicalist determinism).

    In that case, I was very specific in my view, and it seems that we agree. Of course, as I noted very clearly, morality is not rational and can have no rational basis. This is what constitutes moral scepticism. I thought you were joking about the physicalist determinism. On that subject, I withhold judgement. I think it is a more complex and interesting issue than the current labels.

    “Passivity also doesn’t exist.”

    you need to get out more.

    Unfortunately, I have a broken leg at the moment, so it’s kind of true that I need to get out more. In any case, my point is not that some people are not passive, but that passivity can never stably exist in a population, as people disagree. Some people are certainly passive, but whole societies? No. Internal disagreements, factionalism, differences of opinion on matters of taste – they ensure that passivity will never be the normal state of any society not permanently on valium.

    And your discussion concerns the deaths of males in violence not casualties as such.
    Pinker ignores a lot of data.

    And where can this data be found? It seems relatively obvious that the consolidation of a state and the monopolisation of violence reduces endemic and criminal violence. It has support in a lot of fields, and from a lot of avenues of investigation.

    I have myself never seen a murder, or any kind of killing. That’s actually a very modern situation, to have not seen anyone die violently several decades into one’s life.

    As for this “research imperative” stuff – how does it connect with a field like geology? Or physics? To be honest, I look at a statement like that (about being responsible for deaths if research isn’t carried out or funded) as a hyperbolic plea for funding, which is obviously an important subject to a scientist. Funding is what makes science possible. I can understand getting angry if funding saved lives and made research possible. If you think that there’s some ulterior motive beyond wanting to learn about the world and help people then I think you’re wrong.

    And to answer something you wrote further up, there are a lot of Platonists out there, and sad to say, many of them have opinions about politics.

    So who are they? Where are they? I’ve never met a Platonist in my life, let alone a Platonist taken seriously. Roger Penrose is probably the only real Platonist I can think of left, and I only think of him as a Platonist due to an offhand comment by John Searle. I don’t think Platonism is tenable, and neither do most people.

    “But the people who made those objects are dead and no longer speak.” You could say the same of Plato or Dickens or Quine.

    Undoubtedly. And the information you receive from those dead people is not going to be, necessarily, the information they wanted to put into their works. Whether the source is alive or dead, a rock of a pile of bones, the information itself is of a very similar nature regardless. Mathematically information may be treated in a variety of ways but there’s no real way to differentiate between human and non-human information. So the only difference, really, is the emotional content that you yourself put into the work and which may not already be there. When you look at the Sistine Chapel (would I be correct in assuming that you’re not a Renaissance-era Catholic?), you are certainly receiving all kinds of information, but the information that you receive is not the information that was intended by Michelangelo. As such, you may as well be looking at dead rock.

    In any case, your position seems to be a little crazy – that science dehumanises people. You also don’t seem able to defend your science=desire pseudo-hypothesis.

  39. “But the people who made those objects are dead and no longer speak.” You could say the same of Plato or Dickens or Quine.

    Should have been blockquoted above.

  40. My last comment is waiting for moderation. Until that get’s out:

    “Of course, as I noted very clearly, morality is not rational and can have no rational basis.”

    I’m not quite sure how this can be stated in anthropological terms, because we can pretty easily test whether various moral axioms are rational for a given set of circumstances, and how universal they are. I think it’s safe to say that our evolution as a highly social species has given us a certain set of moral instincts, which are highly variable to given situations, but still very much there.
    For example, there’s really not any culture where it’s ok to randomly kill anyone. Such a trait would be highly irrational for a social species, and as far as I know has never existed anywhere. Only sociopaths have this ability, and they are medically insane.

    If we look at the change of morality over time, we see an ever expanding inclusiveness of who is conferred fully human status, and therefore full rights of not being killed (outside certain conditions like them not being killers), raped, starved, eaten, etc…
    More recently this inclusiveness has developed the world’s first pan human moral systems in western secular traditions, and has begun to be inclusive of non-human species. For example, vegetarianism.

    This only makes sense in a particular ecological set of situations, but we know that when these conditions are met humans are much more automatically apt to care for each other than to kill each other. This isn’t arbitrary, and is fully rational.

  41. This isn’t arbitrary, and is fully rational.

    I agree with the line of thought you’re pursuing but not this assertion. Morality is not rational; it is logical, given a certain set of assumptions (logical atoms often being simply assumptions and assertions about things) but it is not rational in that it does not flow directly from what is the case. Of course, what we have here is a confusion of the meanings of the word “rational”, and not necessarily a disagreement. Rational certainly can mean logical, but for my purposes it means the idea that an idea might come entirely from reality without the imposition of any assumptions.

    For instance, your relationship to other people and your relationship to a bacterium are not different by type but by degree. It’s the same type of relationship – a genetic relationship with a shared ancestor – but it’s a much closer ancestor. That’s it, really. You have more in common with the organisms we call people than those we call bacteria, but the relationship is basically the same. You kill millions of bacteria every day, and to eat you must kill organisms that are demonstrably your relatives, whether animals or vegetables. Or fungi. The point is, the organisms you eat and the organisms you don’t are not absolutely different, but relatively different, and the divide between them is assumed and asserted but not able to be positively shown to be the case.

    Morals are therefore oft-logical developments on what seem to be shared ideas and shared assumptions. That does not make them “rational”, and the idea of rational morals has seemed strange really since Hume. And that’s fine. It’s okay for morals to be based on assumptions because most of the assumptions are logical based on stimuli and categorisation that all people do, and so are in their basics shared by everyone.

    Only sociopaths have this ability, and they are medically insane.

    Sociopaths may not be insane, per se, but they are not exactly standard people. They don’t seem to construct their worldviews in the way people “normally” do. Some psychologists believe that sociopaths and psychopaths are simply hyper-rational, and neglect emotions like compassion and empathy – possibly the basis of the assumptions made by humans on which they create moral codes – because they don’t really have them, or don’t feel them strongly. It may not be that psychopaths and sociopaths hate humans and want them to die; they just have desire and greed for various things and don’t see it as a problem to kill other creatures for which they don’t really feel very much in order to attain them. This is what I would expect, certainly, if morals were based on emotion and assumption rather than following directly from situations.

    So, again:

    tl;dr: is/ought problem. 😀

  42. I can agree with most of that. I would only say that it can be important to avoid dividing up aspects of what it is to be human into different spheres. Our intuitive empathy is as much a part of our humanity as our ability to speak a language, or reason abstractly. I’m not saying that you’re saying this, just that its something to keep in mind.
    It’s interesting that I learned this lesson from studying Buddhism, which goes back to my point about both pre and transrational aspects of religious thought. In Buddhism, human consciousness is divided into the 5 sense organs, plus mind. It is all of these that make us human. Even a deaf person is aware that they are deaf. As so, to feel empathy is a mark of humanity, as much as much as seeing. So, those with personality disorders like sociopathy, are aware that they are different from others. The only real difference is that their, I’ll say bubble for a lack of better term, is very restricted. They only truly value their own lives, with a small number of insiders who are fully human. (I’ve known and even lived with people with these disorders and it is weird. They also lie habitually).

    So, the problem with separating out rational behavior with rational thought is that it is rather arbitrary. We only know rational thought by observing behavior and determining it’s rationality. Rational thought can be followed by irrational behavior to observers, and somehow our irrational, emotional lives lead us towards an aggregated rationality.

    Just as the new physics teaches us that the differences between the quantum and macro world are really only differences between what we assume in our cognition and reality (imposed paradox), or the difference between bacteria and ourselves is a matter or relative and not absolute kind, so to is any conceived separation between the individual and the social. Knowing this, what is rational for an individual or rational for a population become no less difficult to parse out. In ancient Indian philosophy they called this “the two that are not two.” A common way this is taught is to think about a flower. Without a bee the flower can’t exist, and they affect each others biology to the point that it’s hard to know where one begins and one ends. Then when you smell a flower, do you smell the flower, your nose, or your brain. Without any one of these the term “smell the flower” cannot exist.

    Here we come full circle to the basic understanding that all human thought is both relative and dualistic in nature. That means that Levi-Strauss is famous for spending a lifetime figuring out what was well known by many thousands of years before he was born, and he still got it wrong because of the dualistic assumption that the dualistic mental world could be separated from the physical reality of being prior to thought.

    How did we get into this discussion?

  43. They also lie habitually

    That’s an extremely common sociopathic attribute. Have you read Columbine by Dave Cullen? The author himself said he was inspired by ethnographic writing in his work about the Columbine killings, and his depiction of the town and events is fantastic. But the parts about Eric Harris – the psycho/sociopathic leader of the killers – are particularly good, and Cullen uses conversational/ethnographic data from people who knew him with psychological analysis in a perfect blend. Describes sociopathy brilliantly, especially the capacity to lie in an extremely charming way.

    It’s interesting that I learned this lesson from studying Buddhism, which goes back to my point about both pre and transrational aspects of religious thought. In Buddhism, human consciousness is divided into the 5 sense organs, plus mind. It is all of these that make us human. Even a deaf person is aware that they are deaf.

    I seem to remember reading something along those lines in What the Buddha Taught, years and years ago. Very interesting conception of cognition. Better than Socrates’ chariot, I’ve always thought.

    Nonetheless, I’m afraid I don’t believe in the concept of “human”, not as a metaphysical category. We’re all different genetically and physically, and there’s no essence; I therefore don’t see anything that makes someone “human” per se. It’s a category imposed on the world, so I’m not sure it makes all that much sense to talk about the things that make someone human. It’s much more interesting to me to look at it backwards: we have this concept, “human”, and we know intuitively what it means, but whenever we start a formal list we exclude some of the people and beings that we call “human”. Rather than saying “all humans have these things or they must be something else”, it makes more sense to me to say “the beings we label as human share these attributes to some extent and differ within a certain range in these attributes”. The whole issue then becomes very complicated, but if we want to describe objective reality then there’s no point imposing arbitrary classifications on it. At least, that is my view. Certainly, a sociopath is not less human than a non-sociopathic person. Or rather, that’s not certain at all, but…

    irrational behavior

    It is the idea of this that I object to quite strongly. Behaviour is never rational or irrational, as I see it. It is a different order of thing from reason. It can certainly be logical, in that behaviour can follow directly in certain ways from certain situations given certain assumptions. But behaviour can’t follow directly from true statements without assuming something.

    so to is any conceived separation between the individual and the social.

    I think that’s a rather different thing from the difference between one’s relationship to a bacterium and one’s relationship to another person. Society is always a grouping of individuals, not a discrete element in itself. Individuals are informed by society and acculturate to certain general principles, but that doesn’t make the individuals in the society uniform. There is therefore a difference between the individual and society. A better question to pose might be, what is the difference between an individual’s relationship with someone seen as inside the society and one seen as outside of it? That makes the whole set up much fuzzier, and precludes the possibility of a syllogism based on the idea you proposed, that what is rational (I would say “logical”, but nevertheless…) for the individual is what is rational for the society, or something similar.

    And again we come back to Hume’s guillotine. “Is” and “ought” are entirely different, not just in spelling but in logical formulation. There is simply no way to get to an ought from an is without a background assumption. That these assumptions come from acculturation is almost certainly the case, but the idea that the acculturation itself means that both society’s conception of “good” and right action and the individual’s conception are always in accordance is clearly not the case. So society and the individual are separable, both for practical purposes and for the purposes of making any ethical statements.

    A comparison with smelling a flower is not so useful. The process of smelling a flower appears to have several parts in human language when it is in reality an undifferentiated whole. The reality, at the atomic level, is that the whole process is undifferentiated. Individuals, however, are distinct from other individuals. Their points of view and internal thoughts, while influenced by other humans, are always individual. Individuals may be influenced by several strands of culture and not at all by others which influence other individuals within the same social and economic sphere.

    The reality is that culture and society are like the idea of smelling the flower. They don’t really exist except as conceptions imposed on reality, and the reality is not of an undifferentiated social world but a very-much-differentiated world of individuals with differing opinions, assumptions, and worldviews. Ergo, to say anything close to the idea that what is good for society (ie, the imposition) is what is good for the individual cannot be the case.

    How did we get into this discussion?

    A discussion of atheism inevitably leads to a discussion of morals and where they come from, or if they are real at all, and that generally leads to either human evolution or cognitive issues. It was inevitable, almost!

  44. “Nonetheless, I’m afraid I don’t believe in the concept of “human”, not as a metaphysical category.”

    As an aggregate there are only patterns and tenancies which can be measured, and which we can categorize as human. I didn’t say that there was any essential quality to the category of human, rather there was definitely a pattern of humanness, just as a table has a particular quality. Such things co-arise with the conditions upon which they are dependent. This relationship goes all the way up and all the way down with no essential quality of any “thing” to be found anywhere. Nagarjuna goes past Hume, and again he did it in the 2nd century. You can’t confuse ultimate with relative truth. Ultimately nothing exists in any permanent or essential way, but relatively here we are. Too many anths. who played philosopher got lost in this, hence post-modernism. You can measure human behavior and you can say that certain aspects of human behavior have stable tenancies. Anyone who would deny this is in the wrong field.

    “Behaviour is never rational or irrational, as I see it.”

    Yes it is what it is. You’re the one that brought up rational and irrational. I’m just saying that these two terms cannot be removed from observable behavior. It’s like love. You can literally see love on a PET scan in the brain, you can feel love, you can express love in a poem, and you can socially institutionalize love in marriage. All of these things are no less love than any other.

    “Individuals, however, are distinct from other individuals. Their points of view and internal thoughts, while influenced by other humans, are always individual.”

    That’s not completely true, for the same reason a picture of you when you were 3 isn’t you, but it’s also not not you. You’re positing an individual to be separated when there’s nothing to posit or separate. You are basically building a building starting on the second floor, with a priori and unfounded assumptions. But, for reasons that would take too long to get in to. Long post are illegal here. Basically, I would ask you to look up the concept of “Emptiness” in Buddhist philosophy. This is the hardest to understand concept in it, but it’s actually very simple. It’s only hard, because it empirically looks at your above point and it tests it for validity. Usually a metaphor of a “mirror” is used. If you would like to get beyond Hume or Wittgenstein, I would recommend Garfield’s translation of Nagarjuna’s, “The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.” Or, a more modern scientific approach to the same thing would be Steve Hagen’s, “How the World Can be the Way it is.” Please don’t read this as me acting superior or anything. It’s just that it’s really hard to explain and I literally can’t do it here without pissing the moderators off.

  45. Actually, I think you deserve better than me dropping the matter like that.
    Anthropologically, this a similar way of understanding the individual in relation to others was taken up in a study of animism among a hunter/gatherer group in India. It’s not in my Endnotes, which means it’s in a box in my closet. In the paper the anthro reopens the concept of animism, and concludes that after Tylor defined it, it was simply accepted and never critically examined. In studying this group he was able to not that they had no concept of an individual sans any context. That is there was only this person with this other person. Or, this person with a tree and whatever. They correctly understood that our notion of saying, “I’m like…,” is without any truth. We are like (a trait) when we are with this person, and we are like (trait) when we are with so and so. A good example of this is when you think you are finally all grown up and above certain behavior you just need to go home to visit the family on Thanksgiving to realize just how quickly you can regress.
    So, this groups concept of the self was much more accurate in actual experience, while ours is accurate only as a mental construct without any actual experience.
    Even now I am only me with a computer. My mental state, my behavior is only now existing because of a computer. So, I only exist now because of you. But the same things is true of you. Then if I look at what the computer is, I can’t separate it, nor myself, with the people generating power for it. Nor, from all the people historically that made the technology possible. Nor, for the physical reality which made it all possible.
    Thich Nat Han has a famous talk about a coffee cup. He shows the way one cannot conceive of or, invoke a cup without simultaneously invoking the entire universe.
    This is only actually the first step of understanding the concept of “Dependence Origination,” but, when it comes to consciousness it goes further, yet is based on the exact same understanding.

  46. That’s not completely true, for the same reason a picture of you when you were 3 isn’t you, but it’s also not not you.

    I’m not positing an individual essence, here. I’m simply saying that the views of a person and the views considered to be those held by society will always be at variance. That isn’t to say that the individual is totally autonomous, or that society isn’t important in the creation of the views of the individual, or that there isn’t a commonality to a lot of views within a society, it’s simply that people frequently disagree with the general consensus and even when they agree in general, there are often minor differences. People’s views are not simply those of the society in which they live, but result from a convergence of experiences. When discussing moral issues, as one’s moral assumptions are not going to be exactly those of society, what is good for society is not inherently what is good for the individual as their basic assumptions, and therefore the basis of their moral and ethical views, will not be the same.

    A good example of this is when you think you are finally all grown up and above certain behavior you just need to go home to visit the family on Thanksgiving to realize just how quickly you can regress.

    While this is certainly the case, an individual’s views are not entirely shaped by the then-present situation, but by a variety of experiences and life-history. People’s views don’t automatically undergo total change by transplanting them into a different situation. An Indian immigrant to the United Kingdom will not automatically and suddenly adopt the views and background of UK life, and despite being part of – indubitably – the society of the United Kingdom by living and working there, his views will not be those of the dominant societal patterns.

    Individuals’ views, then, are separable from those considered to be of the society in which one lives, and therefore equating the morals of a society with those of an individual in it would be incorrect. And that is the point I wished to make. I don’t dispute the metaphysical points you make. Few thoughtful people would.

    My mental state, my behavior is only now existing because of a computer. So, I only exist now because of you.

    Only if your present mental state is the totality of what you are, which is not the case. Your mental state right now is informed by me, yes, but also by previous experiences. Your ability to write doesn’t come from me, nor your ability to analyze things, nor the knowledge which you write down, nor your attitude, nor the reason for the discussion…

    Metaphysically, you are not the person labelled with your name ten years ago. In a practical sense, however, you are, in that what happened ten years still informs your thoughts now and, while eradicable through illness of various kinds (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, amnesia of several kinds), and while not an absolutely perfect recreation of your life ten years ago, you still retain your ten-year-old experiences. Many of them, anyway.

    Your views are thus unique, and you are an individual, for practical (ie, ethical, legal, etc) purposes at the least.

    Apologies to the mods for the length of my posts.

  47. Yes it is what it is. You’re the one that brought up rational and irrational. I’m just saying that these two terms cannot be removed from observable behavior. It’s like love. You can literally see love on a PET scan in the brain, you can feel love, you can express love in a poem, and you can socially institutionalize love in marriage. All of these things are no less love than any other.

    I brought up “rational” and “irrational” in the context of behaviour to point out that the terms are absolutely inapplicable, and can certainly be removed from observable behaviour. Behaviour can be logical, or reasoned out, but that doesn’t make it rational, in the sense that I employ it. Logic doesn’t have to be based on reality; it can be based entirely on fictions, assumptions, and assertions, and it will function. Rationality, by contrast, is a direct flow from facts and from reality. Behaviour – like morality – doesn’t flow from facts, but from assumptions and assertions, in that in order to make an action comprehensible, you need an assertion.

    For instance, it would be logical to move out of the way of an axe swung at your head. It would be logical because you wish not to die, and it would also be instinctual, because you would automatically do it, and because on an emotional level, you do not wish to die. But it is not rational, because not wanting to die is not rational. There are no grounds on which anyone bases the idea of not wanting to die, because there are none necessary. It always comes back to an assumed good, or an assumed principle, but not to the basic reality of the universe.

    Not wanting to die is an emotion and a logical atom on which the logic of some human action is based. It is not a fact resulting directly from any chain of rational enquiry.

    And therefore, rationality is not applicable to behaviour, and this is why the is/ought problem shows up as it does. No “is” can produce any “ought” without the intervention of emotion or assumption.

  48. I have so say that we don’t fifer much in our talk on this. It’s hard to have this conversation face to face, and it’s hopeless via this media until we get to learn more about each other. I want to spend some time looking over what you’ve written and think about it. There’s nothing written in the Madhyamika school of Buddhist philosophy that really contradicts the world of Hume or his student. Both have gotten a bad rap for being nihilist with is a charge brought by people that can’t understand what the men were saying. Scholars like Garfield consistently cite Hume in their foot notes and analysis of the versus. I love Hume and Wittgenstein both. But these things can go on and on, and always end up in going in circles where we say the same thing, just different enough to keep it going.
    I don’t even like to get into these kinds of things to much in real life for a few reasons. 1. in order to really train the mind to observe the “suchness” of now, and to incorporate so many perspectives, it requires a meditative practice. A specific kind of way to train your brain to be aware without thought, and see phenomena before form and color. It’s really what Nagarjuna brings to the table. This is why he’s able to say things that take things further to a way that applies these truths to everyday and political life. The endeavor is to cease suffering of the person, not just to get him to understand something profound. So you know I’ve read and get what you’re talking about, now check out this other guy, and let me know what you think.
    I have more of a contention with the way you dismissed Condell as a racist, which I’m reputing in detail tomorrow. Good night, and thank you for the civility.

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