Social class & the atheist movement (2)

My previous post was heavy on the abstract and conceptual. More needs to be said about David Hoelscher's essay Atheism and the Class Problem (Counterpunch, November 07, 2012). Hoelscher explodes the pretensions of 'social justice' atheists in a more thorough fashion than I have seen anywhere else.

Hoelscher prefaces his essay with a quote from Marx's Capital, which expresses the essence of the Marxian view:

The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. 

For more, see my web page Karl Marx on Religion: Sources & Quotations.

Hoelscher convincingly demonstrates that the Atheist Plus "movement" and Richard Carrier specifically have not the slightest understanding of class inequality and include the issue of poverty at most as an afterthought. On the other hand, atheists who do emphasize the class issue, like Michael Parenti, are ignored. Hoelscher makes light of Greg Epstein, who "holds the odd and unfortunate title of “Humanist Chaplain” at Harvard University"and whose book Good Without God curiously omits the issue of poverty and class oppression.Yet religion and economics are inseparable, and a staggering percentage of the world's population is condemned to poverty.

Hoelscher also refutes the notion that the “secularization thesis” has been decisively refuted by the likes of Rodney Stark and Alister McGrath .

Hoelscher wants to account for this flagrant blindness. He attributes it to classism. But he doesn't limit his criticism to atheists lacking in class consciousness. He also indicts leftists who dismiss religion as being a problem at all, for example Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, the Marxist literary theorist and apologist for religion Terry Eagleton, and left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn. The popular philosopher-mediocrity Alain de Botton also gets a comeuppance. Sam Harris gets the analytical thrashing he deserves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's reactionary politics are also noted.

Richard Carrier gets taken apart a second time, this time for his praise of Obama, whose anti-working class presidency is treated at length. 

Hoelscher reminds us via a speech by Barbara Ehrenreich, "that there is a vast and largely forgotten tradition of blue collar atheism in America, usually called freethought, in the nineteenth century . . . " There is no such talk about the working class today. Haven't I been saying this for years? Thank you.

Chris Hedges vs. Sam Harris

The Wrong Conclusion
By Eric MacDonald, Choice in Dying (blog), 30 July 2011

John Gray and Steven Pinker are full of crap. And in this case, Chris Hedges.

The Blog : Dear Angry Lunatic: A Response to Chris Hedges : Sam Harris

Hedges is good on the "liberal class" and the fascist threat, a real douchebag on atheism.  Harris is politically backward and historically illiterate. This is a reminder that one cannot wholeheartedly belong to any individual social movement at this time. Some are at odds with others; they are all riddled with contradictions.

One Marxist view of Dawkins & Harris

This is old stuff, but here's the info. I could quibble over some details, but there are important criticisms here of the political and social ignorance of Richard Dawkins and especially of Sam Harris. These pieces come from the World Socialist Web Site. Sectarian politics notwithstanding, there are some intelligent commentaries from a philosophical perspective.

Atheism in the service of political reaction: A comment on author Sam Harris

By Christie Schaefer, April 16, 2007

In the recent review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, Joe Kay mentions in passing the author Sam Harris, noting that the idealist standpoint of Harris and some of the other advocates of atheism is often bound up with reactionary political conceptions. (See “Science, religion and s

Science, religion and society: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion

By Joe Kay, March 15, 2007

In his new book, Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out.

Vygotsky & Cognitive Science

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) was one of the great pioneers of psychology, with a Marxist perspective that fell into disfavor with the Stalin regime. His Soviet school of psychology nonetheless survived, and he has been influential in the West as well.

I've had this book lying about for years, and stumbling onto to it recently, realized I should move it way up in my reading queue:

Frawley, William. Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

There are some reviews and related articles you will find interesting:

Rosemary Luckin, review, Computational Linguistics, Volume 24, Number 3, pp. 520-524.

William Frawley, Why I am (still) a sociocomputationalist and why you should be, too!

KaiLonnie Dunsmore, Individual Mental Functioning in a Sociocultural Context: Schematic Representations of Cultural Knowledge when Comprehending Text.

Jacques Vauclair and Patrick Perret, The cognitive revolution in Europe: taking the developmental perspective seriously.

My current motivation for taking an interest comes from my perception of how reactionary cognitive science is when applied in an ahistorical manner to social & political problems. Same goes for neuroscience: Sam Harris is a prime example of clueless ideology at work. I have no idea the degree to which the cognitive psychology crowd takes Vygotsky's Marxism seriously.

Politics of Neurobiology revisited

Biologism is the attempt to locate the cause of the existing structure of human society, and of the relationships of individuals within it, in the biological character of the human animal. For biologism, all the richness of human experience and the varying historical forms of human relationships merely represent the product of underlying biological structures; human societies are governed by the same laws as ape societies, the way that an individual responds to his or her environment is determined by the innate properties of the DNA molecules to be found in brain or germ cells. In a word, the human condition is reduced to mere biology, which in its turn is no more than a special case of the laws of chemistry and hence of physics.

SOURCE: Rose, Steven; Rose, Hilary. “The Politics of Neurobiology: Biologism in the Service of the State,” in Ideology of/in the Natural Sciences, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, with an introductory essay by Ruth Hubbard (Cambridge, MA: Shenkman Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 71-86.

So begins this essay from the 1970s, when the radical science movement was in full swing. There were various perspectives and agendas in this movement. Part of it was irrationalist in character, another part was overpoliticized, but there was a vigorous questioning of the social and political roles and ideological dimension of the scientific enterprise and various apologists in various fields of scientific endeavor. While the roots of contemporary obscurantism can be found in this period, there was also a vigorous Marxist inquest into the sociology, economics, politics, practices, and ideology of scientific disciplines, again, sometimes subject to bad politicizing and philosophizing, but nonetheless worthy of continued interest. Just as McCarthyism wiped out the history immediately preceding the 1950s in the public mind, so neoliberalism (in its liberal as well as conservative incarnations) has effectively erased the 1970s as an object of popular comprehension.

This historical amnesia is characteristic also of the secular humanist/atheist/skeptical movement in the USA, which now is highlighted as progressive in an age dominated by right-wing politics and manic irrationalism, whereas in the 1960s and '70s this movement was way behind the curve of social and political consciousness. The entire movement, in its desperate effort to bolster reason in a burgeoning new Dark Age, hunkers down behind a shallow scientism that erases society and history from its world view, remains unaware of its own history and of the ideological struggles within the sciences it reveres, and uncritically gobbles up the ideological droppings of its celebrated apologists.

A particularly noxious example of this is the uncritical slobbering over a politically and historically very ignorant man, Sam Harris, whose latest book is all the rage: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. That someone could advertise such banality and peddle it as novelty is a truly remarkable manifestation of a society at the end of its rope.

Religion, Violence, Entitlement (1)

From the website Against the Grain, a radio program broadcast on KPFA-FM, a Pacifica Network Station. It is unfortunate that such a program could never be broadcast on the Washington DC Pacifica station WPFW, where illiteracy, backwardness, and provincialism rule.

6.08.10| Religion, Violence, Entitlement

The first half of this program is described as follows:

Ron Hassner confronts the argument that religions are naturally conducive to peace. He emphasizes, among other things, the ambiguous and contradictory nature of religious texts and passages.[33 min. of 60]

Hassner begins by trashing Richard Dawkins' infantile lack of political or historical sagacity involving religion. But he also makes short shrift of the self-serving proclamations of the defenders of religion that all religions are inherently peaceful. Religion is not a private affair between man and God as the Protestant tradition would have it. Religions are not detached metaphysical positions; they inherently make claims about space, time, and behavior. There is, however, a perpetual problem of the interpretation of sacred texts, with and without their internal contradictions, with and without translations in foreign languages. Literalism is an impossibility. Justifying any course of action, warlike or peaceful, based on sacred textual authority is necessarily dodgy. When it comes to skewed interpretations, though, Hassner finds Sam Harris especially guilty of irresponsible cherry-picking from the Koran. Part two of this interview is forthcoming.

Paul Kurtz: "Naturalism and the Future"

In re: Paul Kurtz, "Naturalism and the Future", Free Inquiry.

Kurtz emphasizes the positive point of departure of philosophical naturalism in all its dimensions. He advocates the scientific method, but cautions against methodological reductionism (a.k.a. physics envy). Note Kurtz's exposition of ethical naturalism. All in all, Kurtz wants to emphasize the role of naturalism in constructing the good life.

OK so far . . . one point, though:

"Scientific methods grow out of the practical ways that people cope with the world and solve problems: as Dewey pointed out, they are continuous with common sense."

I think this is quite mistaken; scientific theorization (along with philosophical reflection and critical thinking) is quite the opposite of "common sense".

It's not clear whether the "New Atheists" are being used as a foil here. In the end, Kurtz criticizes Sam Harris for recommending that atheists (etc.) go under the radar, which is different from accusing them of negativity.

My overall discomfort with this piece is that Kurtz abstractly fights the battle for the Enlightenment, but has nothing of analytical value (i.e. scientific) to say about the society we live in beyond these general platitudes. His philosophical preaching is devoid of concrete political and social content. Also, his brand of naturalism can play a number of ideological and political roles; there is no guarantee at all that "naturalism" so vaguely formulated would be used to intelligently analyze society or intervene in its politics. It's sad that after all these decades, Kurtz has so little to say.

Liberal religion vs. the 'new atheists'

"Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination . . ."

-- Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

Should I Quit Being Christian? Some Questions for the New Atheists
Tikkun / By Be Scofield.
AlterNet, June 28, 2010

"The new atheists negate the contributions of religious people in the reforming of religion and the resisting of injustice."

A long whine about the "new atheists", with some interesting tidbits about Martin Luther King, Jr. Problem is, the historical information adduced here leads to ahistorical conclusions about the future . . . where to go now that we know what we know . . . and so the author ends up being as useless as the historically illiterate Sam Harris.

Scofield does not understand the problem with wishy-washy liberals, whether in religion or other matters. He fixates on certain statements by certain "new atheists", i.e. that moderate religionists pave the way for the extremists. He is so put out by such a blanket assertion, he seeks to disprove it with loads of historical information about the contributions of liberal religionists to progressive political action and social reform. This, I suppose, is consonant with Tikkun's soft and cuddly notion of progressive politics, a milder version of more radical liberation theology.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: the failure to distinguish between yesterday and today. Secular humanism emerged from the long and painful struggle to liberalize religion, passing through the stage of liberal religion and in the USA very much through the medium of Unitarianism. The first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, itself largely a product of social liberalism, already surpassed the level of today's whiny religious liberals. The question is not one of demanding that the past conform to the imperatives of the present and future, but of what our standards should be now.

Scofield fails to attack Dawkins and especially Harris where they are weakest: their ignorance (in the case of Harris, shameless ignorance) of history and indifference to sociological analysis. Harris is the only "new atheist" who is actually new on the scene. The others and their colleagues have been at it for decades and still show no curiosity to learn anything new about history or society. The exception to the rule is of course Christopher Hitchens, who knows more about both than the rest of the organized humanist movement combined, but who has jumped the shark and utilizes his leftist past as petty gossip.

Instead, Scofield obsesses over this one isolated idea about moderate religionists, ignoring the purport of the comment for today's world, instead escaping into the past, including the all-embracing bosom of Dr. King, to justify the squalid middle class feelgood self-indulgence in nicey-nice prettification of ugly reality.

Unfortunately, neither Scofield nor the "new atheists" seem to be aware of what's wrong with upper middle class make-nice liberal religion. What is most noteworthy here is the middle class inclination towards respectable niceness and liberal guilt. (For the panderers to liberation theology, it's radical guilt, which is liberal guilt raised to the nth power.) And characteristically disgusting is the exploitation of Dr. King, the gold standard of the social gospel. Interestingly, Scofield tells us here that the Kings seriously considered joining the Unitarian Church, but realized they could not be socially effective with black Southerners by doing so. If this is so, it's not for us to judge King in hindsight, because he was not a free agent, but what about us? Why must we be shackled with the chains of the past?

It's one thing to be Mr. Nice Humanist walking the plush grounds of the Harvard Divinity School, it's quite another to fight one's way out of the culture of poverty and struggle to transcend the abuse heaped on one by social dysfunction, bad child-rearing practices, fear-based enforcement of social conformity, and degrading assaults on psyche and intellect. Such people don't live in a nicey-nice world and know what the struggle for the human mind is worth. It's war.

Ideological obfuscation does not help anyone, and progressives reveal something about their own weak politics in so indulging. Pompous gasbags like Cornel West and Michael Lerner are quite limited in what they positively have to offer compared to the harmful nonsense they spew and their contribution to the theocratic domination of public discourse.

Sam Harris, Islam, neurophysiology & historical illiteracy

So far on this blog I concentrated my criticism of Sam Harris on his op-ed piece "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals". While he is eloquent on the need to oppose "faith", he is a very ignorant man on most other things. Here is a sample, his most recent piece on the threat of Islam:

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks, The Huffington Post, posted May 5, 2008

Harris complains about the cowardice in the West of publicizing attacks on Islam, the Koran, Muhammed, etc., due to the fear of violent retaliation. He insists that the religion of Islam is intrinsically related to Islamic political violence and wonders where the Muslim moderates are in speaking up against it. He insists on the right of free speech, which he counterposes to the barbarism of Muslims ready to do away with anyone who dares to exercise it in the criticism of Islam. There are, however, some gaps in Harris' argument. He has no real notion of social causality. Doctrines produce behavior, but what produces and sustains doctrines, the interpretation of doctrines, and the translation of doctrines into action? What are the institutions that reinforce dispositions, convey information, and instigate actions? And what about the context in which information is conveyed? The problem begins in the very first sentence:

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam.

Wilders is under a death threat for a documentary film denouncing Islam. If Wilders has a right to free speech, and Islam is bad, then surely Wilders should be defended. But note at the outset Wilders is described as "conservative Dutch politician and provocateur". Wouldn't this set off some alarm bell to anyone not in a coma? One might want to know something about what Wilders' politics is all about, how it relates to the Netherlands's Muslim population, and to what extent this population refuses to conform to West European secular democratic norms, and to what extent they are under siege by European right-wing hate groups. What is Wilders' goal in defaming Islam; is it part of an illegitimate assault on the immigrant population? I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I think they are essential to an assessment of the situation.

Or perhaps Wilders' motive and political agenda are irrelevant to the content of his film: if the content is sound, then what does the political context in which it is generated matter? And regardless of the morality of the situation, doesn't Wilders have any absolute right to free speech in any case? Would anything be different were a person of Muslim origin to circulate anti-Islamic materials, as many, including most famously, Ayaan Hirsi Alihas done?

I have no problem with the denigration of Islam as a general principle, but there is no action that doesn't have a context, and we are deprived of the real social context in which Wilders' film is circulating. We don't know, for example, what percentage of the local Muslim population supported or approved of the assassination of Theo van Gogh, or how the information about the provocative cartoons or this film is communicated to the rest of the Muslim world to stimulate retaliation.

What about Harris' characterization of the global geopolitical situation? Can the very concept of "culture war" explain the world situation? Is it true that the the struggle over Islam is the world's most important culture war? And that the "zero-sum conflict" between Islam and civil society makes sense as an explanatory framework for understanding the world system?

The fact is, Harris is an ignoramus. He lacks the elementary tools to analyze society, and he knows nothing of history. He deduces society from fragmentary facts and abstract principles, as if belief systems are suspended in air and just generate social realities . . . or, are just rooted in the physiology of the brain.

Which brings to mind his only area of expertise. On his web site he presents four surveys, one or more of which he requests his readers to fill out, as part of a research project on the neurophysiology of religion:

Research Volunteers Needed

We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain.

I suggest you take a look at one or more of these questionnaires. I filled them all out. Perhaps they are not as idiotic as they seem. I don't remember much about survey design and psychological testing, but I'm guessing that the questions are designed to elicit telltale responses while concealing their purpose from the test-taker, so that the testees reveal more about themselves than they consciously intend. Still, it's hard not to think that these questionnaires are utterly ridiculous and can't possibly measure what they purport to measure. And can you even imagine the ideological biases of the survey designer? And for all we know, people who concoct questionnaires like these themselves belong in a straight jacket and a rubber room.

But more generally, the question must be asked: what can it mean to ascertain religious faith based upon the study of brain physiology? Of course we can gain knowledge about how dysfunctional thinking operates on the basis of the physiological and psychological mechanisms at work. But separated from real behavior in social context, they are just abstractions, descriptions of abstractly delineated processes. Everyone concedes that environmental stimuli trigger these brain processes, but then don't we have to understand just what the "environment" is, and how its structure and history--i.e. the structure and history of society--create a structure and history of responses and dispositions in the brain? How can we actually know about the genesis of and mechanisms of social reinforcement of belief systems by studying brain physiology in abstracto?

It's too bad people like Harris cannot learn the lessons of the Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, for starters. The same ideological naivete gets repeated over and over. We get a regression to metaphysical abstractions of social behavior--in-/out-groups, prejudice, etc.--in combination with natural-scientifically conceived biological constants, in order to explain behavior, and real society and history drop out of the picture. Instead of institutional analysis combined with the essential concept of ideology, we get pseudo-scientific garbage like "memes" and pseudo-Darwinian explanations of economic systems and social history. But instead of going after the likes of Dawkins, Shermer, and Wilson, let me focus on the problems of self-enclosed biological explanations.

Yesterday I happened upon perhaps the worst "scholarly" book on bigotry I have ever seen:

Dozier, Rush W., Jr. Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2002. Publisher description.

Perusing the book, and reviewing the bibliography, I am astounded how completely devoid it is of something you will find in all serious books on this subject--real information about society and history. There is no usable social knowledge or information in this crappy book: it's all about brain physiology combined with platitudinizing. I cannot conceive of anything with scientific pretensions more disgraceful.

This is the same clueless ignorant level on which Harris operates. And most other prominent public atheists on the American scene are no better. They are disgraceful representatives of atheism, not because they are too haughty and confrontational in their atheism, but because they are politically bankrupt. With what they contribute to popular enlightenment with one hand, they take back with the other. These people have contributed mightily to the provincialism and miseducation of their fans regarding the nature of their society. Their science-worship itself is a source of ideological mystification.

Sam Harris: “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals”

See also my original post plus responses on Freethought Forum.

Written 5 January 2007:

Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith was awful, but this article clinches the danger of his political ignorance. The full text is no longer available free to the general public. The original title I had is:

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
Sam Harris

Quote:

... But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

This is what I find now:

It’s real, it’s scary, it’s a cult of death
Liberals are soft on terrorism —and dangerously out of touch with the reality of global Muslim extremism.
Los Angeles Times [HOME EDITION], Sept. 18, 2006, p. B.11.

While you need to consult Harris’s article for reference, here is my criticism, written 18 September 2006.

---

(1) What is the social composition and ideological affiliation of the people polled who believe that the Bush administration itself blew up the Towers? Are more than a third of Americans on the liberal fringe?

(2) Where is the boundary between “liberals” and the “Left”?

(3) Since when do liberals hold this position?—:

Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

(4) What is the basis of this fantasy:

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

(5) The article abounds with vague generalizations of craven liberals and crazed Muslims, but the harsh reality which the mealy-mouthed weak-kneed liberals can’t face up to doesn’t get much treatment from Harris—instead only disconnected sound bites about the Muslim menace.

(6) The upshot is that the liberals make excuses for the Muslims, exculpating them as putative victims of the West. But even if this were uniformly true, where is the basis for analyzing what’s really going on in the Muslim world? None except that they are irrational fanatics possessed by a crazed religion out to destroy civilization.

Harris has succumbed to the hysterical, shallow, sound-bite culture in which appeals to fear and generalized ideological phenomena substitute for substantive social analysis.

And in this, Harris is only a typical liberal, nothing more.

---

Addendum: Sam Harris the liberal [written 19 September 2006]

. . . When I think of liberals, I think of them napalming Vietnamese peasants.

I asked what is the borderline between liberals and the left, because (1) this tendency to exculpate Islamic extremists is more likely to be found on the left, though there too there is a wide difference of opinion and analysis, (2) Harris’ hysterical propaganda piece reminded me how Christopher Hitchens lost his mind after 9–11 and turned on the left, making similar blanket accusations. Harris is much less sophisticated than Hitchens. Harris refers to his “fellow liberals”, and indeed, he is very much like them, always looking for an ass to kiss.

If you re-read Harris’ piece, you’ll see it’s pure propaganda, he’s saying nothing specific at all, there’s no real social analysis, just an accusation that liberals are spineless and that only the right wing knows how to get tough with Muslim fanatics, whose entire basis of political existence is a death wish. Stupid and dangerous.

Let’s look at his social/political “analysis”:

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

The third paragraph is the only one with real information, albeit a generalization, but let’s accept it as true, and in any case, it reveals the ideological position of the 9–11 conspirators and others like them. But is this who you think you’re seeing every time you see an angry mob on the TV screen or read about a suicide bomber in the Middle East? This lack of differentiation is as true of Harris as it is of people on the left who ignore it. But even making this discrimination, we are ill-disposed to diagnose the source of this ideological motivation other than the superstitious belief in virgins and paradise. This hardly gives an adequate personality profile of Muslim fascists—I have no problem with calling them fascists. And it fails to give a social profile of the other retrograde manifestations of Islam throughout the world.

Let’s discuss the incident of the cartoon of Muhammed that aroused such a violent reaction. Is it true that this is just a free speech issue as portrayed throughout the western media, and that those who were incensed by the cartoon were just unreasonable fanatics? If this were a replay of the Salman Rushdie affair, I could see it. But the cartoon was a deliberate right-wing act of provocation, and whatever negative things can be said about Muhammed, portraying him as a contemporary bomb-throwing terrorist is a slander directed at the entire Muslim population. Suppose this newspaper had published a caricature of Moses with a huge hook nose and a bag of gold behind his back? What conclusion would you draw from that?

Now the violence of the reaction is another matter. Even so, we see little of the mechanisms by which these angry demonstrations and violent reactions are orchestrated, in other words, how the news is filtered to the various angry mobs who react to it.

The current flap over the pronouncement of the Nazi Pope is much more disturbing, actually. My reaction to Cardinal Ratsass would be: look who’s calling the kettle black. But what the news media is reporting is much more serious than the reaction to the cartoon: churches were burned and Christians were murdered—not officials of the Catholic Church, not priests or bishops, but, as far as we know, innocent scapegoats of a different religious persuasion. This is much much more ominous, and it shows that people are stupid everywhere; they’d rather turn on the nearest scapegoat than formulate a calculated response to what they perceive as an insult. But again, when I saw the reports on TV, I asked myself, how did the angry mobs who retaliated violently against the Pope’s statement get the news, in what context, framed and spinned in what fashion, and why were they primed to attack the targets they did? It’s not a question of making excuses for them, it’s a matter of understanding their social perspective and how they’ve been conditioned to interpret and react to current events. I don’t think attributing their behavior to their superstitious belief in virgins in paradise explains a damn thing, any more than I think our rednecks here are fundamentally motivated by faith in the Rapture.

As for his distinctions between Muslims vs. Israelis and Americans, Harris is living in a fantasy world. I doubt there are tens of millions of Muslims who are scarier than Dick Cheney, though I don’t doubt that there are a substantial number of such people, let’s say about the same proportion of them as we have here. Harris reveals himself in the end to be a typical liberal, as divorced from reality and spineless as the rest, primed to cave in to the first strongman who promises to protect him from the Muslim hordes.

Red state of mind?

Written 5 January 2007:

“Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.”

—Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

In re:
Press, Eyal. “In God’s Country,” The Nation, November 20, 2006.

The author reviews a spate of recent books on the political dominance of the religious Right and the atheist and secularist counterattack, including Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, seeking to dispel popular misconceptions. Evangelical Christianity is to be found among the lower classes everywhere, not just in the ‘red states’. Furthermore, the moral issues that concern these voters most are class issues (and even environmental issues), not predominantly the wedge issues that preoccupy its well-organized right wing. Also, there is a history of religious militancy in the service of radical causes from Abolitionism to the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s. Religion had never declined as some people thought in the 1960s, and so the current state of affairs is not a break with the past. Nor is there any inherent reason that fundamentalism need ally with right wing politics. Black Americans are as religiously conservative as their white counterparts, yet even with some conservative attitudes, their support for the Democratic Party is solid. Even white supporters of the Republican Party oppose many of its actions.

The conservative views of this religious constituency are not to be discounted, but one should take pause before dismissing this mass of religious believers outright, as does Sam Harris in his latest book. If believers are ‘deranged’, does this mean the civil rights activists of the ‘50s and ‘60s were deranged as well? How about religionists now engaged in social service? As you might expect, the reviewer trots out the misdeeds of secular tyrants to demonstrate the folly of one-sidedness. The conclusion:

It does mean the secular left should think twice before seeing religious people as their foes, not least since such an attitude risks alienating many potential allies and confining ourselves to a small sect of like-minded believers. This, after all, is what fundamentalism is about.

While all these adduced facts are helpful, and perhaps also the admonition against lumping the entire religious public together in an oversimplified manner, the conclusion is unsatisfactory and not a little annoying. The problem with liberals and the left is not their arrogance toward religion, which, after all, few of them will state openly. The problem is taking a strictly instrumentally political view towards the pros and cons of religion: good when it’s on our side, bad when it’s on the other side. While one cannot choose one’s allies according to one’s liking, there are some deeper issues at stake in understanding the role of religion in a modern, scientific age. The role of religion is a marker of the quality of life, and however the religious positively relate to progressive politics, religious superstition is a marker of ignorance, alienation, and authoritarianism.

The problem of holding people from lower social classes at arm’s length is Janus-faced. By treating the “masses” as an anonymous collectivity, one condemns the non-conformists and dissidents among them to continued invisibility. So it never occurs to the guilt-ridden liberal or radical to think of the individuals suffering under the conformity and cruelty of the communities in which they are trapped. This is as bad as thinking oneself too good for the unwashed masses. Either way, it’s all about the capitulation to naked power.

The author fails to delve deeply enough into the dilemma we now face. He and others are on the right track in analyzing how the ‘red/blue’-state divide came to be. However, the destruction of liberalism, the isolation of its upper middle class adherents, and the descent of the nation into unbridled irrationalism, comprise an historical phenomenon that requires a deeper focus.

The USA in particular has always manifested an acute contradiction between its coexisting ultramodern and primitivist aspects, which stem from the conditions of the colonization of the American continent. We know what contradictions led up to the nation’s paramount crisis, the Civil War, which is still being fought. But, to adjust the focus for a moment, consider the contradictions that obtained at the moment Franklin Roosevelt took office: imagine the contrast between the skyscrapers of New York and the regions of the rural South that had never known electricity. Setting aside consideration of the unstable coalition that formed the backbone of the New Deal, consider the New Deal as an alliance of the New Class with the laboring masses. While the latter may have been dodgy in their commitment to a rational view of the world, and in some instances even to a secular society, it was a social order that made sense to them and worked to their advantage. In spite of the setbacks of McCarthyism, the liberal intellectual elite was in a position to maintain the fiction of the “American creed” and the consensus view of American politics. While some recognized the fragility of this alleged consensus, the illusion of stability of the Cold War liberal order maintained some credibility until it came apart in the late ‘60s.

One must understand how the Right exploited the weakening of the same liberal state the left opposed. The New Left rebelled against alienation, bureaucratic elitism, and the impersonal secular order and did not limit itself to traditional bread-and-butter issues or even equality under the law for disadvantaged groups. The political crisis of the late ‘60s, combined with the economic crisis commencing in the ‘70s and the cynicism that took over with Watergate and then stagflation, accompanied by a seismic shift in cultural norms which was the one victory the countercultures were able to sustain, weakened the entire fabric of social legitimation.

The Right absorbed the lessons of recent events and seized upon this key moment of weakness. They too re-discovered their “roots”; they too, learned that “the personal is political.” Cultural liberalism and aspiring minorities maintained a stronghold in the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party let its white working class base twist in the wind, this after having alienated the white South in the ‘60s. This is an abridged version of my rap—”It’s the ‘70s, stupid!”—but it basically sets the stage for everything that has happened since.

Others have analyzed these developments in one way or another, but I want to inject an additional element: the reversion to irrationalism. Aside from the long-standing irrationalism of the fundamentalists, there are two other social components to consider. The ideological components of the radical political movements and countercultures (which overlapped but did not completely coincide) were all over the place. There were occult and New Age beliefs and practices permeating the ‘counterculture’ (a term which should be pluralized, since all were not white people wearing peace signs and headbands), though these influences were not all-encompassing or all-pervasive. The political movements require additional considerations. Neither they nor their participants were monolithic, but there were irrationalist tendencies in black power, feminist, and New Left circles. These were the ancestors of the postmodernism that surfaced publicly in the ‘80s once the yuppification of the new social movements in the academy was complete.

However, before assessing blame, there is one crucial component to consider: the decline of mainstream liberalism in the ‘70s. This was the major component in the decline of rationalism within the liberal intelligentsia. Its positivism, technocratic optimism, and universalist pretensions were shaken by the new pluralism and the malaise of the late ‘70s. The mainstream of the humanistic and soft social science wing of the intelligentsia began to succumb to irrationalism, as the yuppified elements of the new social movements melded into the mainstream. Before that, the irrationalist tendencies of the countercultures and political movements, however deleterious some of their immediate manifestations and potential long-range effects were, seemed rather self-contained and thus a relatively minor menace. But with the collapse of liberalism, bourgeois rationalism within the ranks of the liberals collapsed, and from this the right, not the left, profited. The impersonal liberal state was seized upon by the New Right, as they too discovered the power of the cultural movement and the implications of the notion that “the personal is political.” Their hatred of the impersonal, unresponsive liberal state morphed into an opportunity to seize political power. The logical end of the breakdown of the rational bourgeois order is precisely the theocratic fascism that threatens us now.

New class liberals, isolated from the working class base of the New Deal/Great Society coalition, could do nothing but exploit the new cultural order. The “liberal media” became “liberal” only in the cultural sense, as the marketplace must maintain friendliness to the range of its consumer base, even while politically the media became more conservative. Hence the culture industry, while giving some sops to the hateful redneck Right, in the form of talk shows of the likes of Morton Downey Jr. and Rush Limbaugh, gradually institutionalized the culture of cynicism and decadence, which on mainstream television only ran full riot in the ‘90s.

This brings us to the author’s final recommendation. If the liberal-left is going to show more respect for the working class, what is it to do? It is entrapped in a closed-feedback media loop that cannot be broken. Simply consider the nature of hip media satire. The fact is that Al Franken, Jon Stewart, Colbert and the rest constitute a segment of the culture industry produced by and for the hip, cynical upper middle class, and in the final analysis, they are all useless for a radical social critique. These are the same sort of people who gobble up the cynical and sadistic albeit sometimes hilarious degeneracy of South Park and Family Guy.

If bread-and-butter New Dealism is not on the table, or is insufficient as a basis of appeal, what could a cultural politics that would respect the working class possibly look like and could it gain either financial backers, media greenlights, or a consumer base? Must the backwardness and ignorance of working class populations be piously pandered to? On the other hand, is there an alternative to Blue Collar TV? The Nation, after all, is an organ of the upper middle class liberal-left. If these people are feeling guilty about their class privilege and political impotence, should they then genuflect to Dumbfuckistan? Granted that the “liberal”cultural industry cannot bridge the red state/blue state divide—and I’ll add that no matter how assiduously they hype the flavor of the month, Barack Obama spouting his platitudinous bullshit can’t do it either—is there an escape from this vicious circle? I don’t see a way out, but I’ll be damned if pandering to ignorance is the answer.

Scientism of the Gaps & the ‘Two Cultures’

See also my original post on the Freethought Forum with a series of responses.

Written 1 January 2007:

It is essential to note that both pseudoscience under the aegis of legit science and pseudo-science or anti-science under the aegis of supernaturalism both rely on scientism and illicit projections based on gaps. Scientism is a disputed term, but here I am using it to mean a quasi-ritualistic aping of the methods of science in misapplication to an object of inquiry. Because there are always gaps in knowledge, these gaps are exploited to provide pseudo-explanations or denials of the scientific explicability of phenomena. The mirror-image of “Intelligent Design” is the pseudoscience of Dawkins’s memes. All of modern society is trapped in irreconcilable dualisms. A culture capable of generating the one in a scientific age invariably must generate its complement. Over a century and a half of philosophy and broader intellectual currents can be mapped as a competition and vacillation between the currents variously nameable as positivism (scientism) vs. irrationalism (Romanticism).

The religious Right represents one wing of reversion to irrationalism, its power in the USA derived from the decline of liberalism in the 1970s. The liberal wing of irrationalism (misconstrued by its opponents and many of its proponents as radicalism) is vaguely characterizable under the umbrella term of postmodernism, whose intellectual roots are derived from the political Right but have undergone political mutations in the course of their development. The ascendany of this tendency is concommitant with and derives from the same social conditions as the New Right. The attack of the postmodernist wing on rationality and science should be considered as much an assault on secularism and atheism as the attack of the religious Right, and in spite of the mutual cultural and political hostility of these two camps, the postmodernist assault on science serves the cause of the new fascism.

Meera Nanda has documented the problem in relation to India:

Meera Nanda Online

For those who can brave the waters of philosophy and intellectual history, my study guide provides a number of sources for exploring this dichotomy:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

A more easily digestible approach to the problem can be found in C.P. Snow’s 1959 initiation of a debate on the “two cultures”:

The Two Cultures: C.P. Snow, Literature and Science

The ‘two cultures’ problem plagues us today: specialization and fragmentation allow educated people to remain ignorant of huge swaths of information needed to make sense of our world. Dennett, who is a professional philosopher, ought to know better, but philosophy is as divided as everything else, and Anglo-American philosophy is particularly narrow and provincial. Dawkins is an ignoramus outside of evolutionary theory, and he has impermissibly extended his knowledge by instigating the pseudoscience of memes, an illegitimate metaphorical extension of notions from genetics and natural selection to the cultural/social/ideological sphere. This is a repetition of the nonsense to which the new evolutionism was put in the second half of the 19th century.

Just as there is a god of the gaps, there is a pseudoscience of the gaps, which can be tailored to naturalistic and well as supernaturalistic world views. A naive conception of how science can be applied as a universal method, especially to social and cultural phenomena, constitutes scientism, or the fetishistic application of scientific methods and notions to an object of investigation without comprehension of how the two match up.

Sam Harris presents us with a somewhat different version of the problem. First, he presents a new twist, making ridiculous claims for Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, and similar New Age nonsense. Secondly, freaked out by 9–11, he purports to explain social behavior merely as an effect of belief, rendering an understanding of the springs of behavior in both the Islamic world and in our society impossible. Thirdly, he is so politically and sociologically naive that pernicious consequences flow from his public interventions. Harris himself amalgamates aspects of the two cultures, with the New Age gloss, but as he has no basis for explaining social, cultural, and ideological phenomena, he ends up doing as much harm as good.

Missing in all of this is a huge range of possible contributions from social theory, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, history, and the full range of philosophical traditions, along with the crucial concept of ideology. Where are the representatives of these domains of expertise in the secular humanist, atheist, freethought, and skeptical communities? How is that the two cultures are somehow segmented such that activist atheists and secular humanists seem to be conversant only with one of these two cultures, both on the production and consumption ends of the culture industry?

Upgrading the intellectual culture of atheism

My original entry on my Freethought Forum blog includes a number of responses.

Written 27 December 2006:

While I’ve been put off by the intellectual limitations of the atheist/freethought/humanist movement for years, nay decades, my irritation has now achieved critical mass. Ironically, the tipping point is a development that should have induced approval—what has been dubbed the ‘new atheism’.

“The Crusade Against Religion” by Gary Wolf, Wired News, Oct. 23, 2006


The New Atheism is spearheaded by the triumvirs Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. While their groupies ooh and aah over their every public appearance, I find them all severely deficient in one or more ways, and I find Harris positively reprehensible.

In subsequent entries I will outline my dissatisfactions with these characters, and others who are supposed to be our heroes, like Michael Shermer. For now, I’ll limit myself to general observations.

I cannot assess the situation in non-English-speaking countries, but it is possible that different historical configurations of intellectual life and political forces have bequeathed intellectual cultures of their freethought traditions different from ours. My remarks are addressed to the intellectual culture of the USA and what I have seen of recent offerings originating in other English-speaking (anglophone) countries.

Let me begin by listing key factors of the problem:

(1) political constrictions (more severe in the USA than in West European democracies)

(2) historical amnesia (the permanent effects of McCarthyism)

(3) the dominant philosophical trends of Anglo-American thought

(4) intellectual specialization

(5) the intellectual monopolization of atheist/humanist agitation by natural scientists and their groupies.

Now I’ll elaborate just a little on each factor.

(1) To function at all in the public sphere, close adherence to its restricted political options and its sacred cows must be maintained: the existing liberal institutions of society and its legal instruments must remain sanctified (especially now when they are in severe peril)—the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers, etc. Any political or sociological analysis going beyond liberal (in the sense of liberal democracy, not social liberalism or social democracy) nostrums is taboo. Capitalism as a system can under no circumstances be criticized, and even criticisms of social inequality must be muted. This is not only a limitation due to fear of reprisals on the part of the general population or the government, but due also to the composition of the atheist/secular movement itself and especially the orientation of its leaders.

(2) There is a historical link between atheism/freethought/secularism and the working class movement and working class autodidacticism—a tradition largely wiped out by McCarthyism. Some of the left-leaning freethought agitators are still remembered—Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, for example—but the tradition as a whole has been swept under the rug, with the collusion of certain gatekeepers of the secular humanist movement. (Oh yeah, I’ll elaborate.)

(3) Anglo-American philosophy was for the greater part of the twentieth century dominated by what is called ‘analytical philosophy’, correlated to a dominant interest in technocracy and the hard sciences, to the exclusion of the most sophisticated of social and cultural theory, which emanates from Germany and the germanophone sphere. While an opening has been forced in recent decades (mostly outside of philosophy departments), American philosophers remain rather narrow, as evidenced by Dennett, a Dawkins groupie who is ill-equipped to grapple with the explanation of social phenomena.

(4) Narrow specialization combined with narrow intellectual culture virtually guarantees that scientists (for example) almost invariably make fools of themselves beyond their specific area of expertise.

(5) Rational inquiry is equated to the ‘scientific method’, or more generally, the values associated with the scientific method. But what methods are appropriate and adequate to the grasping of social, cultural, and ideological phenomena? Not a one of the most prominent atheist scientists has the tools or demonstrates a whit of intellectual sophistication in explaining social phenomena. Dawkins has learned nothing new in 30 years. Harris is an imbecile and a menace. Schermer is worthless. (Details to follow.)

Scientists with a conscience at best make good liberals, but few advance a jot further. These people simply do not have what it takes to grapple with the social crisis we face now at the depth required. If they did and spoke openly, their access to the media would likely be cut off, but their minds are even more limited than their scope of action.

Unlike many of my fellow atheists, I don’t salivate every time Dawkins or Dennett or Harris or Schermer makes an appearance or publishes a book. I find the atheist and secular humanist intellectual culture quite tedious, even if it is necessary.

If the centerpiece of one’s intellectual life is Darwin vs. the Bible, one is going to be diverted from exploring other areas of inquiry just as important. Those of us who dismissed the Bible as a piece of tawdry pulp literature from early childhood just don’t feel the burn to devote much energy to arguments over it, and don’t even want to waste our time debating ignorant Bible-humpers, eager though we be to remove the obstacle to human progress they represent.

In any case, the current censorship of the class question, coupled with a defensive bolstering of the crumbling institutions of secular democracy, squeezes ideology-critique for the masses into a very small corner, and hence the culture industry makes room only for the likes of Dawkins and Harris.

Lacking the necessary intellectual sophistication to grapple with the full range of social and ideological phenomena, the atheist and secular humanist community is as hamstrung as the Democratic Party. It has to scale back its ambitions just to keep liberal democracy from being swallowed up by irrational, theocratic fascism, but its scope of discourse and action is so limited it can’t approach the root causes of our social problems, though of necessity it’s driven to be more political the closer this nation is driven to fascism.

I have no recommendations for improving the efficacy of our activism based on my perspective. Perhaps there is no remedy. But I do want to pose a question or two: is it necessary for our minds to be as limited as our scope of action? Are we prevented from upgrading our own intellectual culture just because we have to keep it simple when talking to the rest of society?

But if our minds are limited because our society is limited and because our practical possibilities are limited, then what does that say about our much-touted capacity for rational thought?