This first ran on Splice Today.
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Comments sections can be sewers. Anybody who’s been on the web knows this, of course. But there’s an extra special rush of bile when it happens to the comments section on something you’ve written. I think the low point for me was this review I wrote recently about the documentary Hitler’s Children. The film focused on how the descendents of Nazis like Hermann and Goering have tried to cope with their ancestors’ atrocities. Many of the comments were thoughtful and positive. Some, though, were flat out anti-Semitic.
Again, that was unusually vile. But if you look at any mainstream site, you’ll see it isn’t off the scales. People in comments are regularly rude, insulting, inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, and just generally cruel and vicious. In many cases, it’s clear that they have little if any interest in commenting on the article in question. Rather, they want to get upon their hobbyhorse and spew their own particular brand of hate in a venue where they can be assured of readers and visibility. Set up an anti-Semitic blog in a corner of the interwebs, and no one will hear you Sieg Heil. Spew your hate in the comments of an Atlantic article or a Slate article, though, and you’re assured of a good number of eyeballs passing over your invective.
So why do mainstream sites have comments at all? There are a lot of reasons, probably. Comments can be useful in catching errors — a boon in an age when even the big media outlets can’t afford to hire proofreaders or fact checkers. In addition,, comments are vital for that much-hyped web-buzz word “community”. And, of course, comments are good for clicks. An active, controversial comments thread can be its own draw, resulting in more links, more pageviews, and more advertising dollars.
Sites aren’t merely plagued by their trolls, then — they are actively in collaboration with them, in many ways. Trolls can make an article more popular — or at least more viewed. And, in return, for goosing the stats, the trolls get a chance to talk to a larger audience than they could find on their own. Everybody wins!
Of course, there remain some open questions. While trolls may increase hits in some instances, they also drive some readers away, and reflect poorly on the site as a whole. In addition, it seems like sites should have some ethical duty to pay attention to the messages being promoted under their names. In the US, at least, websites cannot generally be sued or prosecuted for the statements of commenters. But still, editors at large sites carefully vet the topics and language of the people who write for them. They do this because they want to preserve their brand, and also because, presumably, they have some professional pride in what is published on their watch. And yet, often no such care is exercised when it comes to the comments sections — where any moron with a grudge can say whatever inflammatory thing he or she wants, and have it distributed far and wide by the most reputable names in journalism.
Some sites have seen this as a problem, and taken steps to try to address it. The New York Times has a team of comment moderators who have to approve every comment posted. Ta-Nehisi Coates carefully polices the comments on his blog at the Atlantic — and as a result his comments section is widely regarded as one of the most civil and productive on the web.
The NYT and TNC are exceptions, though. Most large sites try, instead, to get by with shortcuts. Some sites have tried to use software to filter out obscenity, or else have asked users to register using Facebook accounts to cut down on anonymity (though the truth is that anonymity in itself isn’t really the problem. Otherwise, editors or moderators simply moderate on a catch-as-catch-can basis, perhaps deleting some of the worst comments (as in my article on the Holocaust)…or not, as time and energy permit.
I can completely understand why sites don’t want to moderate comments. I’m a very hands on moderator at my own site here — and it requires a lot of time and effort, even though our traffic is a rounding error compared to someplace like the Washington Post. The media industry has enormous cash flow problems and business model difficulties as it is. The last thing they want to do is hire multiple full time staffers to read through their comments.
Still, there are other alternatives. The cheapest of these, and probably the best, is simply to get rid of comments altogether. If you can’t afford to deal with them, it seems like the best thing to do is shut them down. This is what Andrew Sullivan does at his site. It’s also been the path taken by Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter. Spurgeon will occasionally print selected correspondence from readers, and Sullivan often prints what amount to curated comments threads on individual topics of interest. They both, in other words, are interested in, and respond to, reader feedback. They just don’t use comments threads to do it.
I’m sure comments threads won’t ever disappear. People are always going to enjoy chatting about articles they’ve read, and as long as there’s a demand for that, someone will provide a venue. But surely we could start moving to a place where open comments was an option to be chosen, rather than the always-selected default. It seems to me that many sites would benefit from at least considering whether the comments are worth the trolls.
Coates did a pretty good interview about this with On the Media a couple weeks back. I’m sure the episode is still available as a podcast. The part that stuck in my memory was when he said that unmoderated comments basically amounts to the same thing as no comments at all.
I wish it amounted to the same thing as no comments. It seems significantly worse than no comments to me….
Noah, there’s a typo (two commas in a row) in the sentence immediately following the one about blogs’ lack of proofreading!
Heh. Well I can hardly correct that now, I don’t think….
I utterly fail to see what’s the big deal about some jackass blathering on about “the jewish owned media,” and other such vile claptrap.
Is it the shock of realizing that such attitudes exist? (If anything, this should be welcomed by the “Israel can do no wrong” types.)
That some noxious bigot bursts in on a preserve of fairly enlightened discussion? (It’s the Web, folks; how about limiting commentary in the “Atlantic” site to those who subscribe to the magazine, or other such culling out?)
Realizing that there are rude people in the world, or “having” to deal with them online? (I certainly prefer online rudeness, where I can tweak responses, dig up links to counter-arguments, with no in-your-face unpleasantness.)
As for “Why Allow Comments,” one major plus-factor is that — as opposed to just reading an article and moving on — people are thus encouraged to linger at the site, reading comments, writing comments, checking back to see what new comments have been posted…
…and thus, they get to see many more commercials from the site’s sponsors!
As I said, you don’t necessarily want to give someone a platform on your site. You don’t let anti-semites spew bile in your articles; why would you want to let them do it in comments?
And if you can’t see why allowing anti-semites to babble on in an article about the Holocaust might possibly be distasteful and discouraging to readers and writers alike, I guess I don’t really know what to tell you.
Also…I said in the piece that sites want comments, and for that matter trolls, because it encourages more clicks. Which means that those sites make money off of virulent anti-semitism, misogyny, and abuse. Which, again, is not ideal, in my view.
I actually looked up the Jews behind murders in Russia. At least one of Stalin’s right hands, Genrikh Yagoda, who helped him murder a bunch of people, was a Jew. And then there’s Lenin, Trotsky and others with a Jewish bloodline. Since some Christians died during that time due to the communists. That translates to “Jewish Bolsheviks slaughtered Christians” in the far right cuckooland. I can’t help but recall a similar generalization being made about atheists on this site.
Right; pointing out that Communism is an atheist philosophy, and that therefore attributing all evil throughout history to religion is stupid, is the exact same thing as blaming Jews for killing Christians because some Jew somewhere were involved in atrocities.
There is a lot of noxious stuff in the Old Testament, which probably has some relationship to the crappy ways in which a Jewish state treats some people under its control. Similarly, there are some unpleasant ramifications to many atheist philosophies, which perhaps has something to do with various genocides committed in the name of those philosophies. How hard is it to distinguish that from the argument that Jews as a group are evil, or atheists as a group are evil? It doesn’t seem that hard to me. But I guess any distinction is hard to make if the chip on your shoulder is big enough.
And this is a fine demonstration of why allowing hate-speech on your comments threads is disruptive and depressing. People react violently and unpredictably, and you end up spiraling off into unproductive discussions about which atrocities are the biggest and who is or is not a bigot. It’s exhausting and tends to drive away anyone who doesn’t really enjoy contentious discussions.
Well, the way I remember it was that the argument was over whether there was something in the structural makeup of atheism that leads to dangerous stuff like slaughtering millions of people. It wasn’t over whether some communists who killed a lot of people were atheists. The latter wouldn’t be a cuckoo generalization. The former was and still is. It’s similarity to the escaplating assumptions that all communists are Jewish, that all the people killed were Christians and that they were killed because they were Christians and not Jewish should be apparent to those without ideological blinders.
“escalating”
There are assumptions and structures in atheism that, yes, led to killing lots and lots of people. There are assumptions and structures in Christianity that led to similar carnage. There are also assumptions and structures in atheism that can be used to criticize murder, and assumptions and structures in Christianity that can as well.
Christians should own up to the aspects of their tradition that lead to bloodshed, not out of guilt, but in order to prevent such things occurring again. Atheists should do likewise for their traditions. (And Jews for theirs, and so forth.)
There’s a highly understandable ideological tendency to divorce the worldview that you allow into your head to be divorced from the institutions that promote that worldview. It would be great, as you suggest Noah, to somehow encourage worldviews to be confined to self-critique in all public statements. Hard to really find a way to enforce that, but having blood not only on our hands but inside our minds is a fact of moral existence.
Two divorces and a bris. Excuse my syntax.
Please specify the assumptions and structures in atheism that led to killing lots and lots of people.
It’s pretty simple. In Christianity, it’s God’s judgment. In Marxism it’s the revolution. In Nazism it’s race loyalty. In Islam it’s jihad. In American history it’s “property rights” and “two-thirds of a man.” Etc.
Enlightenment humanism/secularism/atheism has to answer for some things done in its name, if it wants to continue to propagate itself through institutions (governments, universities, corporations), even if individual faith-worldview, group dogma, and political institution never quite line up.
Right; there are various atheisms, just like there are various religions. But…Nazism’s racial views were absolutely influenced very strongly by Darwinism (as well as by residual Christian anti-Semitism.) Marxist materialism is wrapped up closely in the belief that economic exploitation makes the exploiters absolutely evil and worthless and worthy of death. Capitalism’s materialism, not divorced even yet from social darwinism, is very much involved in the belief that the poor should not be helped since they deserve what’s coming to them. For that matter, the French revolution and its terror were militantly and ideologically atheist. Hitchens/Dawkins etc. atheism is used still to justify violence against Muslims.
Again, that doesn’t mean all atheists are evil, or that atheism has to lead to violence. It does mean that atheists are well advised to think about the ways in which their beliefs have led to violence and can be used to justify violence. The argument, “that is a perversion of my beliefs” may well be the case, but really is not a get out of jail free card…not least because it’s the sort of reasoning that often ends up being used to justify violence.
And, of course, Christians (and Muslims and Jews) have their own bloody histories and presents to account for. But everybody tends to feel more comfortable pointing out the mote in somebody else’s eye.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
You don’t let anti-semites spew bile in your articles; why would you want to let them do it in comments?
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Certainly one is entitled to bar whatever kind of argument or person one wishes from one’s site, or club, or home. At the risk (unless the person is some lout who wishes merely to stir up shit, or throw up idiotic arguments) of creating a “monoculture,” where everyone thinks and acts the same way.
The ideal would be a certain amount of “common ground,” shared assumptions (for instance, no one here feels that women should be second-class citizens, or gays should be persecuted), yet variety of attitudes to create liveliness, stimulate discussion. (Consider how Rush Limbaugh fans proudly announce themselves to be “Dittoes” — agreeing with everything he says — when they phone his radio show to make comments.)
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And if you can’t see why allowing anti-semites to babble on in an article about the Holocaust might possibly be distasteful and discouraging to readers and writers alike, I guess I don’t really know what to tell you.
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
Did I say I couldn’t possibly see that “allowing anti-semites to babble on in an article about the Holocaust might possibly be distasteful and discouraging to readers and writers alike”? It would actually be kind of difficult to avoid being aware of how easily people get all offended, outraged, and traumatized with all the P.C.-ness run amok; with, for instance, your once saying an argument was “lame” being outragedly attacked as “denying the humanity of handicapped people.”
Rather than being unaware of this phenomenon, I wondered why it should happen, listing three speculations as to why people would be thrown into such a tizzy: “Is it the shock of realizing that such attitudes exist?…[Is it] that some noxious bigot bursts in on a preserve of fairly enlightened discussion?…[Is it] realizing that there are rude people in the world, or ‘having’ to deal with them online?”
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Also…I said in the piece that sites want comments, and for that matter trolls, because it encourages more clicks. Which means that those sites make money off of virulent anti-semitism, misogyny, and abuse. Which, again, is not ideal, in my view.
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It’s “more clicks” that the sites want. If a happily excited batch of positive contents along the vein of “That last ‘Star Trek’ movie sure is awesome” would deliver, the site-masters would be just as pleased. For that matter, if the masses demanded lots of tofu burgers and wheatgrass shakes, Burger King and MacDonald’s would be delighted to accommodate this new craving for healthy food. If a miniseries on the psychological undercurrents and themes in Henry James would get huge ratings, the TV networks would be competing for which can produce the most “literary” programming.
Rather than “mak[ing] money off of virulent anti-semitism, misogyny, and abuse,” it’s controversy that generates the “more clicks.” If some jackass were to blather on about “the jewish owned media,” and other such vile claptrap, and be ignored (which is why we get the “Please don’t feed the troll” admonitions), then that would be a mere bump on the road of the discussion, to be glided past.
Instead, we get all manner of outrage…
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People react violently and unpredictably, and you end up spiraling off into unproductive discussions about which atrocities are the biggest and who is or is not a bigot. It’s exhausting and tends to drive away anyone who doesn’t really enjoy contentious discussions.
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…that “controversy” resulting from rampant troll-feeding.
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…those sites make money off of virulent anti-semitism, misogyny, and abuse.
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If simple “virulent anti-semitism, misogyny, and abuse” is all it takes to make money, then those White Power and Neo-Nazi sites should be rolling in the bucks, right? At the very least generating lots of “clicks”…
Saying people just shouldn’t feed the trolls is saying that everyone should moderate the comments threads themselves. It’s like saying, “well, we wouldn’t need any laws if everyone just behaved responsibly at all times.” It’s probably true, but building a society on the assumption that everyone is going to act like saints is kind of silly.
Moving on to fresh “argument-fodder”:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There are assumptions and structures in atheism that, yes, led to killing lots and lots of people. There a-re assumptions and structures in Christianity that led to similar carnage.
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Well, we certainly need no reminding about how the latter group’s “You are either a True Believer in the One and Only God, or you’re a servant of Satan, a mortal enemy of the human race” can lead to all manner of…unpleasantness.
But what is there inherent in the “we don’t believe there is a supernatural Big Daddy in the Sky” essence of atheism that “led to killing lots and lots of people”?
And no, “guilt by association” — where some group has a core ideology, with atheism as a sideline (usually because the Church was a stalwart defender of the Ruling Class) — is pretty dubious.
Speaking of which:
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…there are various atheisms, just like there are various religions. But…Nazism’s racial views were absolutely influenced very strongly by Darwinism (as well as by residual Christian anti-Semitism.) Marxist materialism is wrapped up closely in the belief that economic exploitation makes the exploiters absolutely evil and worthless and worthy of death. Capitalism’s materialism, not divorced even yet from social darwinism, is very much involved in the belief that the poor should not be helped since they deserve what’s coming to them. For that matter, the French revolution and its terror were militantly and ideologically atheist. Hitchens/Dawkins etc. atheism is used still to justify violence against Muslims.
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So the French Revolution, Marxism, Capitalism (???!!!), and Nazism are just “various atheisms, just like there are various religions”?
Oookay….
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Again, that doesn’t mean all atheists are evil, or that atheism has to lead to violence.
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(SARCASM ALERT) Well, thanks for that much…
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It does mean that atheists are well advised to think about the ways in which their beliefs have led to violence and can be used to justify violence.
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Pffft. As one of the Joneses asked, “Please specify the assumptions and structures in atheism that led to killing lots and lots of people.”
You make it sound as if atheism naturally (if not always) leads to violence. That the motivation for “killing lots and lots of people” is embedded in its very DNA.
Because the Nazis (only some of whom were atheist) or Stalin were mass-murderers makes atheism itself no more complicit in their atrocities than Judaism is guilty, as with that “Jews in Russia murdered millions of Christians” accusation.
Those Jews were Communists first and foremost, their actions part of Stalin’s ideological motivations and policies…
Mike, I specified several. You can engage with those arguments or you can ignore them. If you prefer the second, as seems the case, that’s fine, but I don’t see any reason to repeat myself.
I would point out, though, that your eagerness to link structural aspects of religion to bloodshed, coupled with your insistence that atheism can’t possibly be related to any bloodshed committed in its name, seems to fit fairly neatly into the dynamic I was discussing re motes in other people’s eyes.
I used to object to the idea of moderated comments… until I ran a blog big enough to draw trolls. And trolls alone aren’t even the worst problem. It’s easier to delete comments from obvious trolls than it is to figure out how to handle offensive comments from regular readers.
We have a pretty strict comment policy at Manga Bookshelf—one that I surely would have objected to years ago. But I decided at one point that it was more important to me to cultivate a safe, respectful commenting space than it was to uphold anti-censorship ideals. It’s been worth it, too. I’ve found that most of our regular readers are grateful for the policy. But it’s difficult and time-consuming, even for a small blog like ours.
I have sympathy for large companies who find the expense of moderating comments daunting, but I agree, unmoderated commenting is worse than no commenting at all, in many cases. And while it can certainly drive traffic, it’s not *necessary* to have comments enabled, at least not for readers. That’s what people have Facebook for.
If you’re going to blame Nazism’s way of using Darwinism on Darwinism, then you might as well blame Judaism, too. It’s a ping-pong ideological view of history: belief system BS was in the mind of T the tyrant, so BS is responsible. The crucial third variable being missed when blaming communist terror on atheism or Jewishness is hiding in plain sight: communism! When you privilege the collective to the exclusion of the individual, you make it real easy to terrorize a lot of individuals. My atheism is no more structurally responsible for what some atheistic communists did than Judaism is for the death of Jesus (cue Kinky Friedman), because I don’t share the anti-individualism. However, if you’ve ever expressed an anti-invidividualist view, then communist purges should give you pause about your BS, whether you’re an atheist or theist.
If there’s any value to leaving up anti-semitic or other expressions of bigoted ideologies, it’s that non-bigots often reason in the same poor manner. (Although, it should be pointed out that the atheist-shaming for communist terror comes out of the same fear-mongering sector of the religious right that the accusation of Jewish responsibility does — big surprise that the rationale is so similar.) Attempting to bury such views hides useful examples for those of us who don’t like bad arguments, even those made with a purported good intent.
However, I can appreciate Stephen Jay Gould’s view that having to constantly defend science against a bunch of religious jackals wastes a lot of valuable time that could be spent more productively. It’s easier to shut the religious idiots out of the conversation. The problem with such a view is when the arbitrator is just as ideologically inclined as the idiots, so can’t, or just doesn’t care to, distinguish a reasonable question from the idiotic.
And, of course, spam is a good thing to moderate out of existence.
“If you’re going to blame Nazism’s way of using Darwinism on Darwinism, then you might as well blame Judaism, too.”
I wasn’t aware that the Nazis were basing their terror on Jewish principles.
There seems like a fundamental difference between holding people responsible for the ideologies they espouse and blaming the victims of those ideologies for provoking them. Equating them seems like an ideologically motivated bad argument. To me.
Right wing folks who attack Communism for its atheism are often transparently motivated by malice and paranoia. They sound somewhat like Hitchens and Dawkins when they attack Islam, in fact. Nonetheless, Islamic ideology has something (though certainly not everything) to do with terror attacks and violence, just as atheism has something to do with Communist terror. As I’m sure you will objectively acknowledge, just because someone makes an argument with malice and bad faith, that doesn’t mean the argument is entirely wrong.
Also…Nazism’s use of Darwinism is pretty much in line with Social Darwinism, which is surely the most influential public policy offshoot of Darwin’s theories, and had massive impact not just in Germany, but throughout Europe and the US. It still retains a ton of currency, even if people are a little leery of admitting it. The idea that atheist Darwinists just don’t need to deal with that legacy at all because they’re right and the other people are wrong seems like precisely the kind of abdication of moral responsibility that makes it easy for these atheist philosophies to be used for hideous ends. (As opposed to religious philosophies, where it’s the sententious declaration of moral responsibility that makes it easy to use them for hideous ends.)
I’ll make it more explicit, then: Nazis hated Jews for their evil tradition. Nazis loved Darwinism for its support of white superiority. Who cares whether Jews really are evil or Darwinism promotes racial superiority? Well, I do.
Atheistic Darwinists have just as much responsibility for making reasonable arguments as anyone else, but are not responsible for someone else’s piss poor reasoning.
Again, you’re equating the ideology of those hated with the ideology of those doing the hating. Nazis were plugging into a history of anti-semitism, not into a history of Judaism.
And of course it matters that Darwinism doesn’t have to advocate white supremacy. It also matters that Darwinism has, repeatedly, multinationally, and horribly, actually been used over and over to support white supremacy. History and institutions matter, not just abstract logic. Refusing to acknowledge the way your ideologies actually exist in history is a cop out…and a way to claim purity when everyone else is stained. Which, you know, is not unrelated to how people justify killing each other. (And yes, Christians who claim that the Inquisition wasn’t really Christianity are doing the same thing.)
Or to put it another way; if you look at history, Darwinism actually has promoted racial superiority. You can look instead at the structure of the argument, and say, no it doesn’t. But that’s you choosing the context. And that in itself is an ideological choice to acknowledge some truths and deny others.
Hah! That’s so funny. That’s a radical individualist version of ethics…which is exactly how social darwinism justifies letting all the poor people die.
People exist in society and history, not just as abstract brains floating in jars. If the tradition you believe in goes off and murders 11 million people, it seems like maybe you might want to think about what that means. “I am smarter than the people who did that” may be true. But it’s also an excuse.
Let’s just say that, as a queer-positive anti-racist Christian, I decided to say that Christian anti-Semitism, homophobia, witch-burning, Crusades, Inquisition, etc., were somehow not my problem? I do feel like that history is more of a problem for me now that I’m Christian than when I was an atheist, but let’s just say I said “I don’t believe in those things so I’m pure.”
What do you suppose the reaction might be from this thread? I have some ideas.
Actually, Bert, I’d personally not have a problem with it, as long as we all agreed to extend the same thinking to atheism. Why can’t we all just not get along?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Saying people just shouldn’t feed the trolls is saying that everyone should moderate the comments threads themselves. It’s like saying, “well, we wouldn’t need any laws if everyone just behaved responsibly at all times.” It’s probably true, but building a society on the assumption that everyone is going to act like saints is kind of silly.
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So, suggesting that people not throw a shit fit if some troll makes an inflammatory remark, is…expecting them to act like saints??
“Holy lowered expectations, Batman!”
What’s next, suggesting that people not relieve themselves in public is the “silly assumption of expecting that everyone is going to act like GODS??
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I would point out, though, that your eagerness to link structural aspects of religion to bloodshed…
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An “eagerness” which was a response to:
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There are assumptions and structures in atheism that, yes, led to killing lots and lots of people. There are assumptions and structures in Christianity that led to similar carnage.
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That’s like saying, “The Nazis killed Jews because they felt threatened by them; Israeli Jews kill Arabs because they feel threatened by them.” The argument being pushed is thus, neither is morally any better than the other. (With the thumb on the atheism = mass murder” side of the scale.)
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…coupled with your insistence that atheism can’t possibly be related to any bloodshed committed in its name…
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“In its name.” Did those nastily non-religious groups — Nazis, Darwinists, Marxists, Capitalists, French Revolutionists (damn, if “politics makes strange bedfellows,” it’s got nothing on atheism!) — slaughter in the name of atheism?
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…seems to fit fairly neatly into the dynamic I was discussing re motes in other people’s eyes.
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Ah, the irony! Why, it’s like the KKK complaining about being victims of racism…
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Or to put it another way; if you look at history, Darwinism actually has promoted racial superiority. You can look instead at the structure of the argument, and say, no it doesn’t. But that’s you choosing the context. And that in itself is an ideological choice to acknowledge some truths and deny others.
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Which those so wise to have “mote-free eyes” are, of course, immune to.
Is it an “ideological choice” to acknowledge that ‘2+2=4’ and deny that ‘6×3=37’? There’s no room for facts; all is ideology, and so if someone dares to make some “crimethink” assertion — never mind what reality may be — it’s all ideology, no different than the most arrant nonsense. The exact same argument made by “creation science” types; science and religion, it’s all a matter of faith.
“The Mis-portrayal of Darwin as a Racist”:
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Darwin was an abolitionist whose scientific work refuted the commonly held racist beliefs of his time and opposed already existing eugenic concepts. It is, in fact, evolution that overturned the widely held belief in the divine superiority of the “white race”.
So-called “scientific racism” emerged around the same time that Darwin published his theory of evolution, but from a completely different group of people and for completely different reasons. In the mid-1800s both American slavery and European imperialism were coming under increasing criticism. During this time the idea of white supremacy became popular among those seeking to justify slavery and imperialism. Prior to Darwin, and after Darwin by opponents of evolution, biology was a theologically based field. The primary “scientific racists” were creationists who believed that science supported Biblical scripture, and that scripture supported slavery and the domination of one group over another…
…These are only a few examples from the Bible that demonstrate the genocide, racism, and infanticide that not only preceded Darwin by thousands of years, but that became deeply integrated into the so-called “Judeo-Christian” ethic. These ideas, the idea of a “chosen people”, the idea of “God sanctioned” conquest, and the rationalization of genocide, have played important roles in Western Civilization for centuries. Civilizations throughout the world have rationalized and engaged in similar behavior for as long as history has been recorded, but the specific sanctioning of these actions in the Bible has been cited repeatedly in Western Civilization from the time of the Christian Emperors of Rome to the conquest of the Americas, and indeed even by the Fascists and Nazis of World War II….
The very idea that the theory of evolution is responsible for the idea that certain races or groups of people are superior to others is so historically inaccurate that it is almost impossible to believe that anyone today could even make such a claim. As we shall see, however, “God” has been the primary justification for the concept of the superiority of one group over another throughout history, not “Darwinism”…
There was a growing movement in America shortly before the Civil War, as pressure against slavery was increasing, to justify slavery not just with scripture, but also with so-called “science”. At this time, however, most biologists, known then as naturalists, were theologically trained. Biology was still considered to be a Biblically based study of “the creation” before Darwin came along.
In 1853 the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he proposed that humans were composed of three races, the most advanced of which was the “Aryan Race”. In An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races Gobineau stated that civilizations collapsed due to race mixing. This work was highly influential in Europe and America and is widely acknowledged today as the foundation of so-called scientific racism.
In 1857, two years before Charles Darwin pushed The Origin of Species, Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, creationists who argued that science supported the Biblical account of creation, published Indigenous Races of the Earth. Dr. Nott, from South Carolina, had been writing and giving lectures on race for years and his works were highly influential. All of the copies of Indigenous Races of the Earth were pre-sold before they were even printed. The book went on to be published in many languages and was one of the best selling books of the time. An illustration in Indigenous Races of the Earth compared the skulls of “Greeks”, “Negroes”, and Chimpanzees…
In 1854 Archbishop Richard Whately, a renowned theological scholar, had published Origin of Civilization, in which he argued that God originally created mankind as perfect and in a state of civilization with technology and laws, but that since the “fall of man” different races of people have fallen away from God and have thus degenerated into “savages”. He, and others, argued that progress is unnatural and that it was impossible for inferior races to ever improve themselves and be capable of living among whites…
This argument continued to be made after Darwin had published The Origin of Species and was used as an attack on “Darwinism”…
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Much, much more at http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/darwin_nazism.htm
Thus, it was religion and pseudo-science seeking to reinforce “Biblical truths” that was the group pushing racist agendas, and Darwin’s theory that cut the ground from under them.
Not that Darwin as a person was perfect (unlike us ultra-enlightened moderns, veritable paragons of pureness that we are). See “Was Darwin Racist?” http://darwinaia.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/was-darwin-racist/ .
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Bert Stabler says:
Let’s just say that, as a queer-positive anti-racist Christian, I decided to say that Christian anti-Semitism, homophobia, witch-burning, Crusades, Inquisition, etc., were somehow not my problem?
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Well, having been a feminist since before many here were born (attitudes crystallized by Germaine Greer’s 1970 “The Female Eunuch”), and still firmly supporting women’s rights even while disgusted with how the movement fell into the hands of extremists, I had — and still tend to have — a pretty negative view of marriage.
Clearly for the most part it’s been an institution to oppress women; treat them as property; facilitate their exploitation; a poisonous goal that women are taught from girlhood is the very highest pinnacle (along with procreation) they can dream of achieving. The traditional ceremony could not express those qualities more blatantly.
And yet, after having been together for over fifteen years, when my Significant Other and I were wedded, it was not that version of the institution that we entered into. I don’t consider our husband-and-wife status remotely tainted by massive past and current abuse of women done under marriage; all that vileness is, likewise, “not our problem.”
I don’t believe in “collective guilt”; like all Jews are not automatically tainted by those who supposedly clamored for the death of Jesus, all Christians need not have their faith cast into shame by “anti-Semitism, homophobia, witch-burning, Crusades, Inquisition,” and what not.
Now, certainly some would have all males forever beating their breasts over their being parts of the evil misogynistic Patriarchy, all whites forever guilt-ridden over slavery. But, as the British put it, that’s all a load of bollocks.
You are not guilty for what others have done in the past, even if you’ve some relation to them. You are responsible for yourself and what you do; you are free to pick the finest parts of a tangled construction, nurture those and cast the rest aside.
Just as others will unfailingly pick the worst aspects and uphold those as the true embodiment of that construction; attack those who have other visions as blasphemers. (Aside from the obvious outrage-inducing quality, are not marriages between two men or two women ones where no one can be assumed to be the boss over the other, that other expected to give up their identity, their name?)
Talk about quixotic goals; check out the story of ManWoman, who after a series of spiritual visions, made it his life’s goal to “detoxify” the swastika, “An ancient design…first used during the Neolithic period around 4,000BC, and…prevalent in many religions around the world, including Buddhism, Hinduism and, amazingly, even Judaism. The word comes from the Sanskrit ‘svastika’, meaning ‘conducive to well-being’”: http://www.bizarremag.com/tattoos-and-bodyart/tattoos/8146/swastika_tattoo_man.html
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
…Why can’t we all just not get along?
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(Laughs) That’s brilliant!!!
Wow, well, every day is a brand new day. Clean slate. Blank and free of historical trauma and privilege. A confusing world it must seem, but joyfully free of responsibility.
Sort of interesting contrast between enlightenment rationalism and religion there; a dream of individualism vs. a dream of connection. I find the second more convincing, though both have their appeal. Not an accident perhaps that (if Jared Diamond is to be believed) Western modern societies are characterized by both autonomy and loneliness. Also, evil done in their name tends to be characterized by disavowal and distance.
I don’t think the question of whether one is responsible for one’s historical baggage is entirely distinct from the question of whether one has any responsibility for the way one’s purchases are related to the actions of global capital. But that’s just one person’s opinion, of course….
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Bert Stabler says:
Wow, well, every day is a brand new day. Clean slate. Blank and free of historical trauma and privilege. A confusing world it must seem, but joyfully free of responsibility.
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What, I should personally feel all guilty, responsible, and burdened by slavery, the oppression of women?
No more than a Jew should wail and gnash his teeth over having killed Jesus.
And that one should not feel personal guilt, hardly translates into denying awareness of past and continuing injustices.
But from that guilt and its dispensers and champions comes the all-too-living stereotype of the “guilty liberal,” who never harmed a fly in his life, yet is crushed into paralysis by assuming the burden of guilt of countless unrepentant racists, gay-bashers, wife-beaters; of colonialist empires, warmongering politicos.
And does this make the overall situation and baggage of injustices better by one iota? It does not. But that is the desired goal of extremes on all sides, a paralysis of hatred and resentment. Thus, those in respective positions of power, great and small — whether a blathering televangelist or frothing feminist — will always remain in power; the situations and dynamics by which they manipulate their respective flocks fixed in place.
Moreover, who does not hold the “guilty liberal” in contempt? Did any black or woman ever respect his wearing of the hair-shirt, praise his sensitivity to injustice? At best he is seen as a schnook, an easy “mark” for donations, a weakling.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Not an accident perhaps that (if Jared Diamond is to be believed) Western modern societies are characterized by both autonomy and loneliness.
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Certainly; as Erich Fromm noted in the beginning of “Escape from Freedom,” earlier. “traditional” societies offered more circumscribed roles (India’s caste system comes to mind), yet security and togetherness within those roles.
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Also, evil done in their name tends to be characterized by disavowal and distance.
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What’s that line in “The Godfather” (the book, not the movie, as I recall), “A lawyer with his pen can steal more than a thousand men with guns”?
I read once an essay by B. Traven ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Traven ); best known as writer of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” but a radical political activist, member of the ill-fated International Worker’s Union, and journalist. He told of the horrors and brutalities suffered by the workers in one of the “maquiladoras,” sweatshops, in South America.
Then he visited the headquarters in New York of the American corporation which owned the sweatshop. Where there should have been horror and guilt of what they were perpetrating, how the company’s wealth was “generated,” here were spacious, cushy offices; secretaries typing away, bookkeepers annotating, executives reclining behind polished desks.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”:
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I don’t know why I keep hoping that Michael Jordan will one day grow a conscience and show he’s more than an opportunistic pitchman who overvalues the bottom line…
Last week, Jordan and Nike released his retro gym shoe, the Air Jordan XI Concords — which Jordan wore during the 1995-96 season…in time for the Christmas rush, but the special release incited a rash of violence nationwide…
But in light of the most recent chaos, it seems Jordan looked at how his shoes’ popularity lined his pockets with money and opted not to reevaluate anything.
Jordan has a legendary reputation for avoiding controversial issues, but the overly image-conscious Jordan should understand that all this negative publicity associated with the release of his classic shoe damages his brand.
Just as he did with Nike’s gradual response and changes to accusations that its products were manufactured in sweatshops with child labor, Jordan has deferred to Nike and continued cashing the checks…
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http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/id/7393317/michael-jordan-nike-do-more-stem-violence
See, also: http://www.monitor.net/monitor/sweatshop/ss-actions.html
I couldn’t find the article mentioned above; but in “Assembly Line,” B. Traven tells how condescending, culture-blind attempts to export American business practices can be…misguided: http://libcom.org/library/assembly-line-b-traven
If you hold the view that blacks are an inferior race of people because of their bloodline, then you ought to consider the potential effect of that belief as demonstrated in history. If, however, you’re a biologist who knows the Nazis were wrong about their approach to Darwinism and evolution, then you’re not responsible for their actions, because these actions were justified by opposing beliefs! To hold that you are responsible is perfectly compatible with the notion that Jews are responsible for Nazism because the Nazis acted on an incorrect belief about the Jewish tradition, even if the Jews disagree about how evil their tradition is. (It doesn’t matter to Noah’s sense of guilt if Hitler was wrong about Darwinism, only that he used “Darwinism” in some way to support his bigotry.) To what degree individualism leads to laissez faire capitalism, which then brings about the anomie of atoms is a fine discussion to have, but not necessary here. Unless it was your lie that encouraged a person to draw dumb conclusions from some mistaken understanding of some idea, then you’re not responsible for that person immorally acting on those dumb conclusions just because the term for the idea exists in both of your mental lexicons. Why? Because you don’t agree on the idea.
That’s different from the case where there is something contradictory about being, say, both a feminist and a Catholic, because the latter category is built on some very anti-feminist ideas. You have to actually want to change dogma or simply swallow a lot of shit in order to continue being both. The same applies to Bert’s being Christian and anti-anti-semitism, pro-gay or whatever. There are reasonable readings of the Bible that show it to be anti-gay and anti-semitic. However, even if Bert is wrong about the inclusiveness of Christianity as it’s traditionally been set up, he shouldn’t feel responsible for the actions of the “God hates fags” crowd, because the two parties disagree on the morality of gays. (Religion, as always, is irrelevant to morality, except as a post hoc justification.) If, however, Bert starts voting for a bunch of nitwits simply because they, too, are Christians (as with Noah, it begins to really matter to Bert that he and the nitwits both have an entry for ‘Christian’ in their lexicons that they both proclaim to be, regardless of opposing conceptual matrices that define the term in oppositional ways), then he should feel some responsibility for the hatred that these nitwits release on the world once in power.
Responsibility for “dogma” is more easily dismissed when it comes to atheism, since there’s nothing about it that states one should hate anyone else or be an asshole on TV or think any particular way about another person whatsoever, except that the theist is incorrect about God’s existence. John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx were both atheists: so fucking what? Never mind how responsible Marx was or wasn’t for Lenin and Stalin, it should be quite clear to any thinking person who knows a thing or two about Mill’s approach to religion that his atheism wasn’t responsible in the teeniest bit for any of the carnage done by the Soviets. You want to try and link evildoings in history to the belief that people should be treated as individuals, then you’d at least be making an argument relevant to Mill’s thought. But saying he had a theoretical hand in collectivist terror because of atheism is one of those topics (like the Jewish Bolsheviks) that can be moderated out of existence with a minimal loss to interlocutory value.
“Responsibility for “dogma” is more easily dismissed when it comes to atheism, since there’s nothing about it that states one should hate anyone else or be an asshole on TV or think any particular way about another person whatsoever”
I admit that I’m confused by the fact that atheism is being associated with any dogma at all. Aside from not believing in the existence of god(s), there’s really nothing else we essentially have in common with each other.
I will just repeat that traditions are not logical propositions, and pointing out that you are smarter than the folks who used your tradition wrongly may well be true, but can also look like increasingly vigorous hand-waving.
“Responsibility for “dogma” is more easily dismissed when it comes to atheism, since there’s nothing about it that states one should hate anyone else or be an asshole on TV or think any particular way about another person whatsoever”
I didn’t realize that there was a statement in the Christian Bible that required folks to be assholes on TV. Also, I wasn’t aware that “there is no God” was a statement that had no thought content.
I wouldn’t say Mill is responsible for Communism anymore than I’d say that Islam is responsible for Christianity. There are different traditions in atheism as in religion. There is, however, this particular militant atheist tradition of lumping all religions together and saying they are responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world. In response to that, I tend to point out that atheism has been responsible for a fair bit of evil as well, in various ways.
I think your use of Mill is disingenuous in that regard. You don’t think atheism has ever caused any harm to anyone ever in any way, right? It’s not that there are different traditions; it’s that atheism is essentially and by its nature pure, and cannot in fact be used to do harm to anyone ever, because it is a philosophy with no content except reason, which is objectively true and therefore harmless.
Is that an incorrect statement of your views? If so, I’d be curious to hear what harm you feel atheism has ever done, and whether you feel that you have a responsibility to think about that when promoting or arguing for atheism, or if it has no particular relevance to you.
I also like that the only way you seem to be able to parse responsibility to a tradition or a society or, indeed, it seems like, to some sort of individual ethics is through voting.
Melinda, I don’t think that’s exactly true. There are traditions in atheism, as in any system of thought. There’s Darwinism, there’s Communism, there’s Freud, there’s humanism, there’s Buddhism — for that matter, there’s a long tradition of Christian heresy that informed atheism in lots of important ways in the West.
Atheism in the west is particularly associated with enlightenment individualism (coming out of radical protestantism) — which has something to do with the fact that atheists tend to disavow any tradition. There’s a tradition of disavowing tradition, basically.I’d agree that the result is an amorphous and much less codified tradition than some, but I don’t think the result is an elimination of tradition, any more than strong religious communities eliminate (or should eliminate) individualism.
I’m glad that Mike brought up sweatshops and Charles brought up voting, since they both seem to be seen as ways to cleanse one’s conscience– sometimes one offsets the other, as when you buy cheap vegetables picked buy Mexicans and then vote for a bigot who hates Mexicans to make yourself feel better.
I’m also glad Mike brought up the embarrassment of being a guilty liberal. So much more aesthetic swagger in being an unapologetic post-racist than a liberal who is embarrassed about their values. Except they’re frequently the same person.
Buying and voting are the two ways to cleanse your conscience, I meant to say.
Also, someone should tell Darwin’s eugenicist grandson that his beliefs were not inherited– as it were. (He really was a eugenicist).
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Bert Stabler says:
…sometimes one offsets the other, as when you buy cheap vegetables picked buy Mexicans and then vote for a bigot who hates Mexicans to make yourself feel better.
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(????)
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I’m also glad Mike brought up the embarrassment of being a guilty liberal. So much more aesthetic swagger in being an unapologetic post-racist than a liberal who is embarrassed about their values. Except they’re frequently the same person.
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“Aesthetic swagger”? Get yourself a dictionary, dude…
And what are the particular values that this theoretical liberal is embarrassed by? (In my case, it would be gigantic hypocrisy; massive double standards, as when Alan Moore is excoriated for supposedly misogynistic comics, while examples of venomously blatant misogyny by certain blacks, or fundamentalist Islam, are ignored, or brushed aside: “We must not criticize the Other!”)
I’m not an atheist, but stuff like this really rankles:
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Woman Being Denied Citizenship Because Her Morality Doesn’t Come From Religion
Margaret Doughty, a 64-year old woman from the UK who has spent the past 30+ years in the U.S., is in the process of applying for United States Citizenship and happens to be an atheist. She is currently a permanent resident running non-profit adult literacy organizations, doing her part to enrich the lives of American citizens. In the process of applying for citizenship, all candidates are asked if they’d be willing to take up arms in defense of the United States of America. Ms. Doughty responded,
“I am sure the law would never require a 64 year-old woman like myself to bear arms, but if I am required to answer this question, I cannot lie. I must be honest. The truth is that I would not be willing to bear arms. Since my youth I have had a firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or in the bearing of arms. I deeply and sincerely believe that it is not moral or ethical to take another person’s life, and my lifelong spiritual/religious beliefs impose on me a duty of conscience not to contribute to warfare by taking up arms…my beliefs are as strong and deeply held as those who possess traditional religious beliefs and who believe in God…I want to make clear, however, that I am willing to perform work of national importance under civilian direction or to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States if and when required by the law to do so.”
Despite being an atheist, Ms. Doughty was told that any conscientious objection must be based on religious grounds, not simply moral objections. So as someone who was not religious, and didn’t believe in a god, she had no basis for objecting. Her statement has been denied and she has been informed that to move forward in the process she must submit a letter from the elders of her church to prove her conscientious objections are religiously based…
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http://dividedundergod.com/2013/06/14/woman-being-denied-citizenship-because-her-morality-doesnt-come-from-religion/
A picture of her here: http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=442 . Obviously, another of the mass-murdering Nazi/Marxist/Capitalist/Darwinist/Freudian members of the Atheist cult…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There are traditions in atheism, as in any system of thought. There’s Darwinism, there’s Communism, there’s Freud, there’s humanism, there’s Buddhism…
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Not to mention the French Revolution and Capitalism!
Where some would see those as emphatically distinctive and varied systems in which atheism frequently but not always may figure…
(There are Christian Communists; ever hear of “Liberation theology”? And though the original Theravada school of Buddhism was nonreligious, the Mahayana school and Tibetan Buddhism are very much “into” deities and supernatural beings)
…it sure is, um, remarkable to just see all those as merely different varieties of atheism; with all their substantial underpinnings mere ancillary fripperies.
Well, to a Fundie preacher, there’s little difference between Jeffrey Dahmer, Oscar Wilde, Nero, Divine, Leonardo da Vinci, and Alexander the Great, either; they are vile homosexual abominations, and that’s what’s their most salient, defining quality.
I will give myself permission to not feel bad for Alan Moore. What a pleasant guilt vacation that is.
Also, I do realize “aesthetic” is a different word from “atheistic,” if that was the intended slight on my literacy. But switching “buy” for “by” was a purely Freudian whatchamacallit.
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Bert Stabler says:
Also, I do realize “aesthetic” is a different word from “atheistic,” if that was the intended slight on my literacy.
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Silly me, when you wrote “aesthetic,” I thought that’s what you meant!
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But switching “buy” for “by” was a purely Freudian whatchamacallit.
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So you meant to write, “as when you by cheap vegetables…”?
Oh, I see the sentence continues, “picked buy Mexicans.” My brain just automatically read that as “by”; it didn’t consciously register that there was anything wrong there.
That “aesthetic” was too much for its auto-correction system, though…
As it turned out, in my job yesterday I attended a presentation on Social Media. Where it was explained how, while it’s very nice to have “clicks,” what is particularly valuable is engagement — meaning permitting commentary.
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Matt H says:
Ta-Nehisi Coates …said that unmoderated comments basically amounts to the same thing as no comments at all.
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So, allowing anyone to speak up is basically the same thing as not allowing anyone to speak up at all?
That approach to free speech actually goes along quite well with the Obama version of “liberalism”…
On a more sensible note, indeed I’d agree that careful monitoring and swift deletion of trollish commentaries (as opposed to vigorously questioning ones) is often necessary to maintaining a civil tone in comments threads…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There is a lot of noxious stuff in the Old Testament, which probably has some relationship to the crappy ways in which a Jewish state treats some people under its control.
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No. If you want to see Old Testament attitudes in action, you’d have to go to the Taliban, or fundamentalist Islam. Why, even Orthodox Jews are ‘way too liberal to stone disobedient children, or women take in adultery, to death.
I’d think that suicide bombers who act like peaceful Arabs until the fatal moment, being surrounded by implacable enemies slavering for the extermination of Israel (and Arabs who may not be so bloodthirsty, but are OK with letting the former have their way; the same as the “good Germans” under the Nazis) has more of a “relationship to the crappy ways in which a Jewish state treats some people under its control” than brainless replication of Old Testament mores.
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Bert Stabler says:
…someone should tell Darwin’s eugenicist grandson that his beliefs were not inherited– as it were. (He really was a eugenicist).
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An earlier remark, that serves nicely (if unintendedly) as a riposte:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
People exist in society and history, not just as abstract brains floating in jars.
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Indeed, up until the Nazis utterly poisoned the association, eugenics was a perfectly normal, accepted idea in the liberal thought of the time.
To attack Darwin for not being racially “enlightened” by modern standards is like blasting Abolitionists and Lincoln for being “racist.”
I’d bet that if they’d grown up in those times, not one out of a thousand of these “more enlightened than thou” types would’ve been anywhere near as active or effective against the evil of slavery…
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Charles Reece says:
…that’s different from the case where there is something contradictory about being, say, both a feminist and a Catholic, because the latter category is built on some very anti-feminist ideas. You have to actually want to change dogma or simply swallow a lot of shit in order to continue being both. The same applies to Bert’s being Christian and anti-anti-semitism, pro-gay or whatever. There are reasonable readings of the Bible that show it to be anti-gay and anti-semitic.
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Along what I’d argued earlier, Billy Martin (formerly better known as Poppy Z. Brite), hardly a reactionary, was involved in trying to prevent the closing of a small Catholic church in New Orleans; prayed with other liberal Catholics in it.
And, I knew and was friends with gays in Miami who were firm Christians and went to a gay-friendly church.
So, one need not take the negative parts of the Bible, or a religious institution, or marriage, for that matter, as the entirety of it; one can pick the wheat, blow away the chaff…
Indeed, one has a responsibility to sort wheat from chaff. And then one also has a responsibility to not forget the chaff is never entirely separated from the wheat, especially when history is just one big bag of mixed-up flour. Or something.
And I don’t understand the problem with “aesthetic swagger” then– I was conceding that admitting privilege is frequently bad for one’s image, while questioning the moral import of self-scrubbing image maintenance. As in the evangelicals who are going around pissing and moaning about being persecuted by gays.
Noah: Perhaps my personal experience with atheism is unusual, but to me it seems that all those other “isms,” though they may include a lack of belief in god(s) as part of their philosophies, are distinct movements of their own.
Other atheists I personally know (or at least the ones I’ve ever talked to about atheism, which honestly is not that many–in my experience, the people most interested in talking about atheism are theists) have been like me in that nobody ever taught us to be atheists; it’s not part of some larger belief system or any kind of cultural tradition passed down to us by others. Whereas organized religion seems fairly inextricable from the idea of “community,” I’ve never attended a meeting of atheists or gone somewhere to hear someone speak about atheism. I didn’t read some great work that convinced me to be an atheist. I never felt any connection to the idea of god(s), even as a child, so rejecting that notion wasn’t a profound act, nor was it particularly influenced by any culture or tradition. So the idea of an atheist dogma feels very out of step with my own experience.
My actual point: While there are belief systems that include atheism as a component, I don’t see atheism itself as a belief system. It’s just a single belief, as much as “lack of belief” can even be considered a belief in the first place. As opposed to various religions being branches of theism–in which the belief in/worship of god(s) is the kind of the entire point–things like Darwinism and Communism are scientific/economic theories that may include atheism as a component, but do not exist solely or even primarily as a guide for practicing atheism.
I realize I’m probably out of my depth here, as I’m not a student of any of these things, but the difference seems obvious to me as a bystander.
I think we’re definitely at the point where for a lot of people atheism ends up being the default. I just don’t feel like the fact that it’s the default means that it’s outside of tradition or community.
There are definitely atheist meet ups, though (skepticism conventions, I think they’re called.)
I know that those things exist, but I don’t personally know anyone who has ever attended one. I admit I’m sort of baffled by them. As someone who is often irritated with the amount of public discourse that gets used up on the question of whether or not there is a god (and if so/not What Does That Mean?), the last thing I want to do is spend a whole day (or two or three) talking about it in a convention hall. Sounds like hell on earth (so to speak).
Don’t get me wrong–I actually love tradition and community, and I actively cultivate both in various aspects of my life. I even love a lot of traditions that come out of religion, many of which were part of my culture growing up. For instance, I adore Christmas. The music, the food, the lights, the family gatherings–I love them all. And that awesome candlelight service some Christian churches have going into Maundy Thursday – service of Tenebrae – I totally loved that as a teen when I sang in a Presbyterian church choir (my mom was the choir director, so my family all joined up to keep her company, though none of us was Presbyterian). But I don’t have anything like that associated with my lack of belief in deities. I can’t even imagine what that would mean. Granted, my views on science and politics are all probably informed by my atheism (and perhaps those views are shared by some others who are also atheists?), but really more so by the fact that they *aren’t* informed by religion, so What God Wants just isn’t a factor.
Again, I know this is just my personal experience, but I don’t think I’m unique. This seems to apply to most atheists I know.
“This seems to apply to most atheists I know.”
Right…it’s a tradition of individualism. Which is certainly individual, but doesn’t meant it’s not a tradition (if that makes sense?)
Or…think of it this way, maybe? If you were born in the middle ages, your beliefs would be different probably…including your atheism. Atheism doesn’t come from inside you (only) any more than any other idea does; it’s part of the way our culture and traditions work. And, importantly, part of that tradition is a separation between public and religious life, so that religion seems irrelevant to most public or community activity for a lot of people. But that in itself is a tradition/communal understanding of how religion should work.
I can see that, yes, the notion that I as a person (and a woman, probably, in particular) have the power to decide something for myself (for instance, that I don’t believe in a god) is a relatively modern one, and that it has come out of our changing culture. I wouldn’t realize that I could do that if I was born in the middle ages, and the existence of god would have been presented to me as an irrefutable fact that I likely would not have challenged, even if I didn’t feel a strong personal connection to it (which I may or may not have done–I should perhaps be clear that I *was* brought up with a religion, so I wasn’t raised to be an atheist either). But I do feel like you’re trying hard to talk about atheism as though it was the same thing as a religion, and I still think that a thing and the absence of a thing are not entirely comparable. I take your point, but I think I don’t see it as being as significant as you do.
I’d agree that atheism is different in some ways….so I don’t think we’re disagreeing all that much.
It is the case that atheism is a default position for educated Westernized folks. But that is an innovation, I think. I read (in the fabulous, non-theistic book Debt: The First 5000 Years) about a person from a tribe that had been proselytized by Christians who said that the Westerners had not taught him about the existence of spirit, but the existence of the body.
In a fairly theocratic society contemplating what to do with nonbelievers, who would be most likely to kill all atheists because they share a lack of faith in a god: the person who realizes that each atheist is not responsible for communist terror in the past, or the person who believes in collective responsibility? It’s a joke, right, having advocates of collective responsibility that ignores individual beliefs lecturing others on the moral dangers of an idea’s supposed tradition. Where would racism, genocide, terrorism, religious persecution, and totalitarianism be without treating a group of others as a homogeneous collective that’s responsible for being on the wrong side of an ideological dividing line. There’s the tradition of collective responsibility. Understandably, Noah and Bert feel guilty for its crimes, since they buy into the idea.
And since Bert and Noah seem unable to differentiate what they think from what others think (surely a good indicator of the collective mindset), I’ve said nothing about having no moral responsibility for your fellow man or the environment or anything OTHER THAN another’s evil deeds based on an idea that you yourself reject. For example, it seems to me that, regardless of religious affiliation, we humans have a responsibility to help those victimized by the sort of collective crimes rooted in the kind of reasoning Noah and Bert favor. However, responsibility for victims isn’t the same thing as responsibility for the crime against the victims. The difference is guilt — i.e., it isn’t the basis for every moral decision.
Noah: “You don’t think atheism has ever caused any harm to anyone ever in any way, right? It’s not that there are different traditions; it’s that atheism is essentially and by its nature pure, and cannot in fact be used to do harm to anyone ever, because it is a philosophy with no content except reason, which is objectively true and therefore harmless.”
Ideas don’t kill people, people kill people. But, as with weapons, some ideas make it easier to kill people than others. Thus, unless you want to make it easier to justify killing a lot of people at one time, individualism is than collectivism and atheism is better than theism. Of course, atheism, like anything else, can be used to harm people. But you have to control for variables when reasoning; it’s not just for scientists any more. If you’re trying to understand some evil event (anything from an action to an ideology) where X (a belief, biological trait, or whatever) appears, X’s possibility as a cause decreases when it appears regularly without that event. However, If I’m remembering my statistics correctly, the effects of X might be interactive, rather than additive, so that its causative properties are only brought out when other variables appear. Thus, the structural horror of atheism is only brought out when it appears in the context of collectivism or communism. To assess that, you either need to find an entire society that’s Christian communists, which we don’t have as far as I know. So you could instead subtract the atheism and go find other examples of the collectivist reduction though history. Was it any kinder to the outcrowd than the commies? Does anyone here really believe there was anything peculiarly awful about the way the commies acted that a belief in a god would’ve softened? Citing a bunch of different worldviews, ideologies and theories about humanity that happened to be atheist does not constitute a structural explanation, nor does it make a tradition.
But, this is crucial: If atheism truly leads to the worst horrors in the history of mankind when it appears in the context of communism, the noncommunist atheists like Mill are still in no way responsible for what they’re evil commie cousins would do in the future. He was busy writing about the problems of socialism at the end of his life, so why should he be held responsible for the interactive effects of atheism when he was opposed to the surrounding variables that are necessary for atheism to become so evil? If you want to shame atheists about communism, then what you really mean is that atheistic commies should worry about their “tradition” of atheistic communism. Yes, we should worry about the evil effects of a cause when we’re supporting that cause.
Noah: “I didn’t realize that there was a statement in the Christian Bible that required folks to be assholes on TV. Also, I wasn’t aware that “there is no God” was a statement that had no thought content.”
You believe there’s some tradition that makes us responsible for the bloviating style of 3 or 4 atheists who appear in popular media — that’s what the TV comment was about. The explicitly acknowledged thought content was the section you left off: “the theist is incorrect about God’s existence.”
I missed some of the later comments, but I think I’ve had my fill on this one. Until next time, nanu nanu.
“individualism is better than collectivism”
I think everything but this is pretty much handwaving.
“But, as with weapons, some ideas make it easier to kill people than others. Thus, unless you want to make it easier to justify killing a lot of people at one time, individualism is better than collectivism and atheism is better than theism.”
You’re saying that your ideas are better than everyone else’s because everyone else’s are more likely to lead to genocide. You don’t at all see any way that that might possibly be used to justify violence? You don’t see how that reproduces precisely the ideologies you claim to repudiate? The manner in which your defense of your position results in continually escalating charges of bad faith and more and more wild references to genocide — this doesn’t give you pause even for a second?
If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, I guess — but, as an atheist, if, in your tolerance, it’s okay with you, I’ll prefer to talk to and about theists as if they aren’t actually any more likely to kill people than I am. Which is to say, they’re somewhat likely, but less likely if they have some awareness of the history and tradition of violence of which they are a part.
And…you’re not disavowing collective responsibility, that I can see. You’re happy to blame theism for its crimes, and to claim that Bert and my thinking leads to evil places. It’s only your own individualist traditions that you insist on putting outside the realm of consequences and traditions. Thus, you can shake your finger and bemoan the evils done in the name of traditions and collective responsibility without even the slightest awareness, apparently, of the possibility that vaunting individualism might occasionally somewhere cause folks to shoot each other. Because global capitalism was just a random collection of individuals doing their thing, and to suggest that maybe that way of thinking has had some downsides for some folks makes you Hitler?
It’s a little frustrating — I’m supposed to be the raving ideologue because I believe that atheism and theism both have things to answer for and should be careful in how they conduct themselves, whereas you’re calm, clear-eyed and balanced because you’re willing to just denounce folks who believe something different than you do. Tolerance all depends on where you’re sitting, I guess.
What’s wrong with self-interested individualism? Nobody ever gets hurt in cowboy movies– or because of imagining they’re in a cowboy movie.
I don’t doubt that you might do lots of good things to help people, but a sense of ethical responsibility without any basis in history seems perhaps arbitrary. But whatever works I suppose.
“I’d agree that atheism is different in some ways….so I don’t think we’re disagreeing all that much.”
Perhaps you’re right, Noah.
Just to make sure I’m clear, too, in the context of this thread, even if I think atheism isn’t a thing the way religion is a thing, I don’t think religious people are more likely to commit atrocities than non-religious people. Which is to say, that we don’t generally set out to commit them, but if we eventually do, we’re likely to justify it by way of whatever ideology we happen to have at our disposal. I think it is unfortunately very human to use ideology (of any kind, religious or not) to justify indulging our ugliest, most destructive desires. Things that make us less likely to do so are both an understanding of ourselves and our history as a species, I think.
Anti-semitism is written into Christianity at the root and in the foundational texts in a way it is not and couldn’t be in atheism, so the regular calls around here for atheists to take responsibility for the crimes of Hitler and Stalin is either deeply historically naive or dishonest. Those crimes would not have been possible without the mythical figure of the “Jew” (materialist, literal, unspiritual, persisting in an unacceptable cultural identity) created by centuries of Christian thinkers trying to explain the awkward situation of the Jews having invented their tradition and yet rejecting their messiah. As for structures in a given tradition with a potential for evil, where’s the atheist equivalent of “his blood be on us, and our children”?
Christian anti-semitism is pretty thoroughly horrible, and is responsible for a lot. The particular horrific weaponized version of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, however, was made up both of Christian anti-Semitism and of Social Darwinism.
Atheism does work differently than religion, so the structures aren’t texts, usually. Authority and philosophy are more diffuse. Sometimes maybe that makes the action of power less violent. Sometimes arguably it makes it more violent, since no one ever has to take responsibility for anything.
Nobody is arguing that religion hasn’t been used as an excuse for any number of horrible things. All Bert and I are saying is that atheism has its problems as well. And yet, somehow that’s intolerant, while the rational, tolerant position is to denounce the folks that don’t think like you and deny any possible taint of evil on your part. It seems a little bizarre.
Well, anti-Semitism is not written into Christianity, as a religion. Christianity was a Jewish sect for a few hundred years (see the observant Jew Daniel Boyarin’s book The Jewish Gospels). I think you could argue that the Church is foundationally anti-Semitic, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of Christians from opposing anti-Semitism– if not too many Popes.
Atheists will kill for science or the revolution or “the greater good,” while theists will kill for some transcendent rationalization, and both will kill for money, power, and pride.
This is from Michael, on the Ralph Bakshi thread, and is so appropriate to describe what I was saying about the alleged swagger of not taking responsibility for your history perhaps being a cover for embarrassment:
“First of all, deciding for yourself that the parameters of someone else’s comfort zone must be violated for their (or society’s, whatev) own good strikes me as fascistic an impulse than the one that feels embarrassed about sex and compels others to feel the same. and besides, the square mainstream usually finds such outbursts titillating. I’m trying to understand why the tactic is important when very little socially constructive material actually came from it.”
This; “There is a lot of noxious stuff in the Old Testament, which probably has some relationship to the crappy ways in which a Jewish state treats some people under its control.” is insane. I mean, you’re setting it up as a counterbalance to the larger point that all religions and intellectual traditions need to be conscious of and atone for their past sins, which I also think is a faulty construction but anyway: pro and anti Israel people would most likely argue the Israeli mindset, the violent us-against them militance, is largely explained by the experience of the Jews in the holocaust and in historically anti-Semite Europe, especially in Israel’s right wing Eastern-European immigrant population.
Saying instead that their politics and actions can really be explained by a reading of the torah and that you should therefore should be wary of Jews in America, because Jews, say, ‘have a tradition of viewing gentiles as less than human, just look at Israel’ is pretty emphatically anti-semite thing to believe. (not that I’m implying you are an anti-semite, only that the equation in your quote gets close to saying ‘all Israelis are Jews, therefor all Jews support Israel.’)
And less offensive but wrongheaded in a similar way is the argument that a structural and important feature behind the holocaust in Germany and the Stalinist purges was atheism, therefore atheists need to feel somehow careful and guilty. Germans took inspiration from and was in historical continuity with Stalin’s massacres of Ukrainians, Muslim Turkish slaughter of Armenians, Christian America’s extermination of America’s native population, and was made possible by continent-wide nationalist resentments, Empires, etc etc etc. The causes and justifications of the great 20th century massacres is well documented and I would be very surprised if the theory that they were spread by the increasing popularity of atheism and humanism anything but a fringe right-wing, conservative belief.
Not that I’m atheist, I’m an agnostic Jew, but something about the ahistorical…I want to say contrarian arrogance…really bothers me.
First, fwiw, I’m an atheist Jew myself.
Germany was inspired by lots of things. Those included Stalinist purges and the American genocide of Indians (which was as much about capitalism as Christianity). Germany’s racial theories were in part indebted to Social Darwinism.
Marxist Communism was an atheist philosophy, and the militant materialism was a justification for the idea that economic class is the only thing that matters, and that therefore killing people on economic grounds is a good idea.
As for Israel; it’s absolutely the case that the recent history of the Jewish people has a lot to do with the Holocaust. But I think you’re kidding yourself if you pretend that Israel’s right to that land has no reference to Biblical claims.
For that matter, I’ve read about Jews saying that gay people shouldn’t be remembered in Holocaust memorials, since gays were killed for perversion while Jews were killed for being the chosen people.
As a Jew (even nominally) I think it’s pretty important to acknowledge that the Jewish religion has resources for xenophobia and even genocide (as do many traditions), and that those resources continue to be deployed on occasion. Judaism also has a lot of extremely honorable traditions, and there are lots of Jews who strongly reject the worst aspects of the Old Testament. Erich Fromm for example would repeatedly make a point of repudiating some of the genocidal passages of the Old Testament. I really don’t think Erich Fromm was an anti-Semite, nor that he was tending in that direction.
Are you seriously contending that there is no rhetorical deployment of the Old Testament against Palestianians in Israel today? Or that the Old Testament does not anywhere advocate genocide? Or that those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and/or that Jews don’t have some obligation to think about the ways they might have something to do with each other?
Or that you’re unable to distinguish between the proposition “There are parts of Jewish tradition that can be used in bad ways, and Jews have a responsibility to deal with those,” and the proposition, “All Jews are genocidal because the Old Testament is evil, and therefore America should be afraid of Jews?” Because to me it seems like those last two things seem pretty easy to tell apart.
Noah lent me Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (have I returned it ot him? hmmm.) which does a nice job of connecting Israel with reparation entitlement. Of course, evangelicals also like Israel, since it connects Muslim-hating and the Rapture pretty nicely.
And yet, I think Israel may have the highest percentage of atheists on the planet. One of the highest, anyway.
Yep. Very long, proud, and often extremely honorable tradition of Jewish atheism…not to mention Jewish socialism.
“individualism is better than collectivism”
Ah yes, because neo-liberalism has never hurt a soul.
By the way, the whole “individualism/collectivism is better than” debate is pretty outdated. CC: Will Kymlicka
Absolutely a Jewish state justifies itself in biblical Jewish language. And for sure there is a xenophobic sentiment in Judaism as it’s practiced today, especially with regard to intermarriage. (I would argue that Israel has a better track record with homosexuals than America, if you’re going to bring that up, but anyway…) And yes parts of the old testament advocate for genocide. Where I would differ is in saying that Israel’s crimes are particularly Jewish in nature. I mean, when Netenyahu was trying to drum up support for bombing Iran last year, if I recall correctly, the rhetoric was that Iran’s language regarding Israel was the same as the Nazi’s language regarding the Jews, therefore the US needs to bomb NOW! before a red line is crossed and Iran gets the bomb. I think I remember that he used a story from the bible to illustrate his point when giving a speech, but to draw a line between parts of the bible advocating genocide and Netanyahu advocating a pre-emptive strike seems specious.
My point about Stalin was that much of Soviet violence was directed at Ukrainians and the Polish, so rather than treat his atrocities as a consequence of a belief system to which modern atheists/materialists share some responsibility, they are better understood as a consequence of regional history. That the violence practiced by capitalist Christian Americans, Communist Soviets, the Turkish or farther away in Asia, the Japanese, was similar in scale suggests that linking extreme violence with Communism or Atheism the way you seem to be doing is a mistaken way to go about things. I think what people tend to do is lump all the people Stalin killed together, disregard the ethnic component and then claim that Marxism = that.
Stalin’s violence was absolutely about ethnic tensions and imperialism. There’s no question about that. And of course all sorts of people kill each other, whatever the ideology.
But the ideology matters. It’s not just a patina on the real violence, any more than you can say that Stalin wasn’t really a Marxist because he perverted Marx’s teaching…or for that matter that Hitler wasn’t a real Darwinist because he perverted Darwin’s. What people say matters; what they think matters; the ideology people use, whether it’s an excuse or an opportunity or a feint, matters, because people’s motives and actions include the excuses motivations and feints as part of the motives and actions themselves.
My point is not that Israel is uniquely homophobic because of Judaism, or that Stalin was uniquely awful because of Marx, or that atheism is uniquely awful because of neo-liberalism, or what have you. My point is that ideologies, religious and atheist, have histories and institutions in which they are embedded, and those matter; they’re not just accidents that you don’t need to think about. There isn’t a pure ideology you can pull out and say, well, this is mine, other people messed with it but they got it wrong so it doesn’t matter.
I’m a Jew by heritage; I’m pretty much a Marxist ideologically. But that’s all the more reason for me to take it seriously when a shithead like Netanyahu says, Judaism means killing, or when a shithead like Stalin says, Marxism means rafts of dead bodies.
I’m really not saying, “this ideology is the most dangerous,” which is what you seem to be hearing. I’m saying that people should own their shit, not to feel guilty about it, but in order to keep an eye on where their own feet are tending, and perhaps to be a little humble before they accuse other folks of whatever it is they want to accuse other folks of.
I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy or something, but I really do think that, for example, lining up Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot should encourage leftists like myself to do soul searching that’s modestly more involved than declaring, “well, ethnic tensions; nothing to do with me.” And yes, that goes for atheists as well.
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Bert Stabler says:
Indeed, one has a responsibility to sort wheat from chaff. And then one also has a responsibility to not forget the chaff is never entirely separated from the wheat, especially when history is just one big bag of mixed-up flour. Or something.
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Uh, flour is made of ground-up wheat (in this case). With the chaff (for all practical purposes) already removed.
So are you saying that the “chaff” I was referring to — “the negative parts of the Bible, or a religious institution, or marriage” — are not part of history; that only worthy, humane, sensible beliefs triumph and survive? That superstition, intolerance, injustice are irrelevant to history?
Isn’t it pretty to think so; to me, it looks like history is the enthronement of chaff; the replacement of one type of chaff with another.
“What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic.”
– H.L. Mencken
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… I was conceding that admitting privilege is frequently bad for one’s image…
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I can understand some Republican millionaire claiming they got where they were solely by the sweat of their brow; there’s self-inflating braggadocio in “I did it all by my lonesome”; ideological motivations in wanting to deny any governmental assistance whatsoever to “undesirables” wanting to improve their lot.
And they carefully leave out the inherited wealth, family connections, access to a high-class education, government giveaways for business and the rich.
Still, is everyone (well, white male heterosexuals, anyway) supposed to be convulsed with guilt, feel their self-image tarnished, if they happened to be born into a country that was not torn apart by civil war, into a healthy body with a well-functioning brain, into a family that was not horrendously abusive?
Those are just the lucky breaks that fall our way; with plenty of women, blacks, and gays similarly fortunate.
And, guess what? Plenty of people are so “privileged” and their lives still turn out disastrously. Believe it or not, there are millions of white male heterosexuals suffering in the lowest rungs of society…
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Charles Reece says:
…There’s the tradition of collective responsibility. Understandably, Noah and Bert feel guilty for its crimes, since they buy into the idea.
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At least when “collective responsibility” is applied to those embodiments of evil, oppression, and privilege: white male heterosexuals.
Is anyone telling American blacks they should feel guilty because Africans sold their fellows into slavery in the Americas?
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What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own subjects…
Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn’t yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn’t: they simply purchased people…
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http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/slavetra.html
Or, should blacks here feel guilty because some freed blacks in America then went on to purchase slaves of their own?
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…free black people have owned slaves “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.
And for a time, free black people could even “own” the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler “regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade,” Halliburton wrote.
Perhaps the most insidious or desperate attempt to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the statement made on the eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of color in New Orleans, offering their services to the Confederacy, in part because they were fearful for their own enslavement: “The free colored population [native] of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815.”
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http://www.theroot.com/views/did-black-people-own-slaves
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The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large.
…The country’s leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
…In 1860 [William] Ellison greatly underestimated his worth to tax assessors at $65,000. Even using this falsely stated figure, this man who had been a slave 44 years earlier had achieved great financial success. His wealth outdistanced 90 percent of his white neighbors in Sumter District. In the entire state, only five percent owned as much real estate as Ellison. His wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state’s average for whites. And Ellison owned more slaves than 99 percent of the South’s slaveholders.
Although a successful businessman and cotton farmer, Ellison’s major source of income derived from being a “slave breeder.” Slave breeding was looked upon with disgust throughout the South, and the laws of most southern states forbade the sale of slaves under the age of 12. In several states it was illegal to sell inherited slaves. Nevertheless, in 1840 Ellison secretly began slave breeding.
While there was subsequent investment return in raising and keeping young males, females were not productive workers in his factory or his cotton fields. As a result, except for a few females he raised to become “breeders,” Ellison sold the female and many of the male children born to his female slaves at an average price of $400. Ellison had a reputation as a harsh master. His slaves were said to be the district’s worst fed and clothed. On his property was located a small, windowless building where he would chain his problem slaves.
…Interestingly, considering today’s accounts of life under slavery, authors Johnson and Roak report instances where free Negroes petitioned to be allowed to become slaves; this because they were unable to support themselves.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia-1995) was written by Ervin L. Jordan Jr., an African-American and assistant professor and associate curator of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia library. He wrote: “One of the more curious aspects of the free black existence in Virginia was their ownership of slaves. Black slave masters owned members of their family and freed them in their wills. Free blacks were encouraged to sell themselves into slavery and had the right to choose their owner through a lengthy court procedure.”
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Emphasis added; much more at http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
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Bert Stabler says:
Atheists will kill for science or the revolution or “the greater good,” while theists will kill for some transcendent rationalization, and both will kill for money, power, and pride.
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Scientists and the Holy Inquisition; there’s no difference! (Oh, that needs a SARCASM ALERT…)
From Tim Kreider: “Scientists Riot!”: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly060215.htm
Science, vivisection and eugenics and chemical/biological/nuclear weapons included, has done a fair amount of damage. And this stuff about blacks selling blacks has quite a bit of Holocaust-denying about it. Slavery was a part of many African cultures, as a blood-debt system, but the legacy of the Atlantic s;ave trade, and the invention of racism to sustain it, doesn’t go away when you start throwing numbers around.
“The enthronement of chaff,” to be sure.
I don’t want to ignore Sarah:
That’s a faulty inference (something being better than something else doesn’t entail that there’s no downsides to that which is better), but as I said above: “You want to try and link evildoings in history to the belief that people should be treated as individuals, then you’d at least be making an argument relevant to Mill’s thought.”
Maybe read the rest of the comments (e.g., collectivism to “the the exclusion of the individual”), but ok:
“A crucial task facing liberal defenders of minority rights, therefore, is to distinguish between the ‘bad’ minority rights that involve restricting individual rights, from the ‘good’ minority rights that can be seen as supplementing individual rights.” — from his Politics in the Vernacular
I notice that Kwame Appiah criticizes his method for going about that, but regarding his relevance here, he’s a philosopher of individualism, isn’t he? Anyway, he makes for a good followup to an anti-multiculturalism book I recently read, so thanks.
I’ll try to go back into reader mode, now.
I can agree that there’s a tendency in some atheists to see themselves as better people than the religious simply because they believe in something different and this is annoying. My point is that it’s more important to see the differences between the racial pseudo-science of some of Darwin’s followers and the contributions to science Darwin made. Or the difference between Stalinism and Marxism, Zionism and Judaism, whatever.
To move away from Godwin’s law territory, there was a controversy a few weeks ago that an anti-immigration study was written by someone who subscribes to the theory that there is an IQ-differential between races. That sort of theory is indebted to Darwin but I don’t think you can say that naturalists have to answer for the Heritage Foundation. There are groups and institutions that do need to reconcile their past; labor with nativism, white people with privilege and segregation, (to take two groups that I sympathize with and am a member of, respectively) but extending that logic to say that atheists need to reconcile their institution with the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is casting that sort of net so wide it’s almost useless.
But “I’m saying that people should own their shit, not to feel guilty about it, but in order to keep an eye on where their own feet are tending, and perhaps to be a little humble before they accuse other folks of whatever it is they want to accuse other folks of.” I agree with, in general. First time commentator, fan of the site.
The claim maybe makes more sense in the context of the discussion. That discussion taking the form of:
“Religion is responsible for everything bad.”
“No, atheism actually has a history of blood to answer for as well.”
I’d agree that categories like religion and atheism tend to be very wide, and not all that useful. Except insofar as they remind you that the folks who don’t agree with you aren’t the only ones sitting on piles of bodies.
And thanks for the kind words about the site!
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Bert Stabler says:
Science, vivisection and eugenics and chemical/biological/nuclear weapons included, has done a fair amount of damage.
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Bad ol’ science! I like that oh-so-subtle guilt-by-association. Let’s try an exercise along the same vein, with evil building-making as the target:
“Architecture, concentration camp buildings and torture chambers included, has done a fair amount of damage.”
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And this stuff about blacks selling blacks has quite a bit of Holocaust-denying about it.
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Well, unlike the poisonous “the Holocaust didn’t happen, and not that many Jews were killed, anyway” hogwash, “blacks selling blacks” is a well-documented phenomenon.
You must think this chap’s words “about blacks selling blacks ha[ve] quite a bit of Holocaust-denying about it”:
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West Africans to African-Americans: “We Apologize for Slavery”
The president of the West African nation of Benin has a message for African-Americans: His compatriots are sorry for their ancestors’ complicity in the slave trade…
An often-overlooked facet of slavery’s ugly historical stain is that black Africans sold other black Africans into slavery. When rival tribes made war, the victors took prisoners and made them indentured servants, often selling them to white slave merchants. Tribal animosity seethed.
Benin president Matthieu Kerekou says intertribal hostility over the slave trade still exists…
Kerekou attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last February and sought African-American church leaders to whom he could apologize. The pastors offered forgiveness. As a result, 125 Western leaders will gather with tribal chiefs from across Benin for the reconciliation event. U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R, Oklahoma) and Congressman Tony Hall (D, Ohio) will participate along with pastors, athletes, celebrities and representatives of European (former) slave-trading nations.
Brian Johnson, an African-American living in Virginia, heads a U.S. sponsoring group COMINAD (Cooperative Missions Network of the African Dispersion) and works with many black churches. Johnson says the infamous “Gate of No Return” that stands on the Benin beach where slaves embarked will be renamed the “Gate of Return” and/or destroyed. African-Americans will be granted Benin citizenship.
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http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4223655/
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Bert Stabler says:
Slavery was a part of many African cultures, as a blood-debt system…
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Ooh, it was a part of their culture! A tradition! Not like the putrid capitalist greed of white people…
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Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn’t yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs…
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http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/slavetra.html
That’s a heckuva lot of “blood debt”!
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…but the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, and the invention of racism to sustain it…
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So it was those vile Europeans who invented racism; it didn’t exist before the “Atlantic slave trade.”
Oookay…
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…doesn’t go away when you start throwing numbers around.
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
Are ideologically-pure True Believers remotely capable of engaging with the words someone actually said?
No more than a Fox News pundit would deal with someone’s arguing against invading Iraq on their actual charges; rather, we’d get “this stuff about the invasion of Iraq being built on lies has quite a bit of Holocaust-denying about it.”
Did I even remotely hint that “the legacy of the slave trade” should vanish “when [I] start throwing numbers around” about black complicity in the enslavement of other blacks?
And I like how quoting lengthy historic data (with links to much more) is dismissively described as “throwing numbers around.”
Why, (SARCASM ALERT) someone talking about the horror of the millions murdered by the Nazis is just “throwing numbers around” too, right?
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Isaac M says:
I can agree that there’s a tendency in some atheists to see themselves as better people than the religious simply because they believe in something different and this is annoying.
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(Sorry, but…)
Not believing that Santa Claus exists is on the same vein as thinking that old St. Nick will come down our chimneys on Christmas Eve? It’s just “believ[ing] in something different”?
If a drunk says there are pink elephants flying around, and someone says “No, there aren’t,” is it a “belief” that there are no levitating pink elephants there, or a bald statement of fact, an accurate perception of reality?
The same way that Fundies and some folks here argue that scientists are no different than priests; they’re all “faith-based” thinkers.
On a more sensible line:
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My point is that it’s more important to see the differences between the racial pseudo-science of some of Darwin’s followers and the contributions to science Darwin made. Or the difference between Stalinism and Marxism, Zionism and Judaism, whatever.
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Indeed so! However, it makes it more difficult for some smug modern who didn’t do bupkis to fight intolerance and injustice beyond blogging away, to sneer at Lincoln for being a racist (thus seeing himself as better than Lincoln), and other such bits of ahistoric nonsense.
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There are groups and institutions that do need to reconcile their past; labor with nativism, white people with privilege and segregation…but extending that logic to say that atheists need to reconcile their institution with the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is casting that sort of net so wide it’s almost useless.
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Yes. But we get that “ultrawide net” thing here a lot; makes it easier to righteously condemn! This is a “Rape society”; white males are all guilty of oppressing blacks…
Oh, are feminists going to reconcile with how they in the past argued that women needed to be given the vote, so they could cancel the voting power of newly-freed black males?
As one example of attitudes:
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[Elizabeth Cady Stanton] descended to some rather ugly racist rhetoric along the lines of, ‘We educated, virtuous white women are more worthy of the vote.’ … She talked about how much worse black men would be as voters than the white women about whom she was concerned, and she was really quite dismissive of black women’s claims. … There were some comments about, ‘What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?’ She has one, I think, inexplicable comment about black women [finding] an even worse slavery under black men than they did under their former white slave owners…
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http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/for-stanton-all-women-were-not-created-equal
Hi,
I know this is the wrong thread, but regarding your current article “Misogyny Against Men is Deadly Serious” on Splice today – you wrote: “Similarly, Serano point out, male-to-female transsexuals are embraced by the women’s movement, while male-to-female transsexuals are stigmatized and often deliberately excluded.”
The word “male-to-female” is used twice.
I wanted to contact you via Twitter but the link on the bottom of the article is broken.
Otherwise – great article! Many thanks!
Sigh; thank you. I wrote the editors….
Since the feeling of Glenn-Beck-esque hyperbole is apparently mutual, I by no means think that (currently and formerly) oppressed groups are not guilty of oppressing people (now and/or in the past), and they need to think about that snd have that conversation too.
So there you go, Mike, you win. Now you don’t have to worry about the negative consequences of history on people who are unlike you (or me at least, a uniquely privileged person) because you’ve managed to show that all victims are the victims of other victims. To me, though, this level of defensiveness is the petard of “ressentiment” on which Nietzsche hoisted himself.