From Toothpaste for Dinner.
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That’s a Mighty High Dudgeon You’ve Got There
My wife asked me a question I at first dismissed when I told her about the previous post. I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. But I was telling her about the subject of the post, how I thought folks were wrong to perennially demand Sam Harris’s, or anyone else’s head on a platter when there has been a perceived violation of liberal principle. And she said,
But, aren’t they just people saying stuff…on the Internet?
Well, yes, but come on! Why do we do most of the things we do when we’re part of a political or social movement, or when we have a blog or other platform for opining? We’re trying to affect the broader conversation! To persuade! Influence! Two cents! Etcetera!
She seemed less than convinced, particularly since the price is so often my psychological well-being as I worry about responses and rejections, as I cringe as arguments both good and bad come streaming in from all the social media outlets. (I had disabled comments for the post in question for this very reason of personal well-being. Futile, I know.)
So I revisit her question. Aren’t they just people saying stuff on the Internet? Does it matter, really, if I think lots of people are wrong about how they overreact (in my opinion) to this one guy who is a big boy and can take care of himself?
What is the value of me adding my own high dudgeon?
Few read anything on the Web because they want to have their positions challenged. Likely the result of a post of this sort will be congratulations from those who already agree, and frustration, argument, and potentially abuse from those who don’t. And so it has been. (No abuse yet, but the night is young.) So why bother?
As of this moment, I’m honestly not sure. I mean, I still think I’m right, but I don’t know that I care enough about being right to endure the anger, or feel pressured to start debating with my friends. And this applies to any post or opining of mine that pesters a wasps’ nest of raw feelings.
I do know that a major factor is that in this case and others, I feel a responsibility to help keep this movement on an even keel, fighting the right battles, avoiding the pointless ones, and staying true to what we espouse. When I perceive that not to be happening, I want to flag it, but it’s almost always for naught, either because of the issue’s intractability or my own inability to make a given case in a given post, I or what have you.
So I’ll be thinking about this more, is all.
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Sam Harris as a Trophy for Righteous Indignation
Here is Sam Harris’s great sin: In the context of many hot-button issues, the data leads him to a conclusion or approach that conflicts with one or another liberal orthodoxy. Liberals and seculars, not immune from the same faults as other humans over whom we feel superior, then commence with knee-jerk tantrums over Harris’s perceived violation.
This is how it always goes. Harris holds a position on an issue that conflicts with our gut-level sense of fairness or compassion or what have you. Those are good senses to have! I’m glad that we all lean in the direction of tolerance and pacifism! But rather than see that Harris clearly is coming by his less-pleasant positions (like those on gun policy) honestly and with obvious reluctance (how many times does he have to say that he thinks the only real, but unattainable, solution to gun violence is to have no guns?), liberal-secular opponents of his scream something like “NRA apologist!” What?Or: He observes that at this point in history, radical Islamists are the folks who tend to want to blow up airplanes, so he says we should be looking at them more carefully instead using security bandwidth on grandmas in wheelchairs. The result? People scream “racist!”
This is absurd and it’s beneath what progressivism and the secular movement purports to be. It’s exactly the kind of one-dimensional thinking that you and I don’t like about the right and the religious. It’s the insatiable and never-ending hunt for apostates.
Maybe it’s because liberals are beleaguered, that our progress over the decades really is under constant threat, we have become hypersensitive to those within our own ranks who may be undermining all we’ve fought for. As a beleaguered liberal (no one out-beleaguers me, baby) I get it.
But for the love of sweet flappy jeebus, Sam Harris is not the enemy.
Harris ranks high in my book for thinking in depth, for challenging assumed philosophical tenets and ideals to which he might be inclined to adhere. He wrestles with the ethical and moral implications of the subjects about which he writes and speaks. He thinks in terms of what might result in the greatest degree of well-being for the most people, rather than simply clinging to principles for principles’ sake. I don’t have to like what he comes up with at the end, but I’m damn glad he’s working on whatever he’s working on.
But let me be clear. It’s perfectly fine, as far as I’m concerned, to disagree with Harris on whatever issue ruffles your feathers, be it guns, atheism, his taste in music, or that weird hairstyle he once sported.
What is driving me up the fucking wall is when liberals and seculars are so desperate to throw him out with the bathwater when he arrives at conclusions that differ from what We Hold to Be Self-Evident — or when he simply travels down a hypothetical path of reasoning and shows us where it leads. When he’s called a racist or a torture-lover or whatever, I have to presume it’s a result of the reader ignoring all the many, many words surrounding the words that one doesn’t like. You don’t have to like his conclusions on, say, torture, but to say that he’s all-for-it generally and has no qualms about it, that reveals more about the critic than about Harris.
Progressives and seculars, I find, are a little too goddamned eager to throw a label of “bad guy” on folks within our own trenches, and parade around with their Sam-Harris-shaped trophies to show how their righteous indignation is better than yours. Goddamn it, folks. There are real threats to progressivism and secularism and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all around us, and yes, there are a fair number of stone-cold, grade-A assholes right here who purport to be part of the skepto-atheist movement (even though they’re not part of any movement I’m involved in). Let’s save the demonization for the demons.
A note: Yeah, I’m turning off comments for this post because life is short and I’ve had a shitty day, and I’m not interested in the comments section becoming a trove of carefully mined quotes of the outrageous and unforgivable things Harris has said (“oh yeah, Paul, well what about when he said THIS!!!”). I’ve read just about everything he’s ever written, so you’re not going to surprise me with anything, and nothing of his has ever lead me to the histrionics that characterize so much of his detractors’ criticisms. If you want to piss all over me for this post, go open a Tumblr account. They’re free.
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This Tumblr is a BFD
Whatever’s bothering you, however crappy you’re feeling, this Tumblr will make you feel at least a little bit better. Unless you’re a bad person.
(Hat tip to Moglia.)
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Monty Python and the Scarcity of Irreverence
David Free in The Atlantic susses out what about Monty Python worked so well, and why we can’t have that today.
It’s a pity that the word irreverent has lost its weight, so that it’s come to seem a mere synonym for cheeky. The Pythons were irreverent in the deepest sense. They had automatic respect for nothing. Everything was fit matter for comedy: religion, national differences, cannibalism, Hitler, torture, death, crucifixion. They created a parallel world in which nothing was serious. They were like boys: they not only weren’t afraid; they didn’t know they should be afraid.
Today’s comedians can’t go back to that prelapsarian world. They can query or violate our current taboos, but they can’t unknow them. There has been plenty of excellent comedy since Python’s work, but most of it has been the comedy of social anxiety: comedy that walks the tightrope between what we can and cannot say.
Mostly true. When I think of the best television comedy (and there’s so little that’s even worth mentioning, let alone watching) like Louie or Arrested Development, the absurd is ever-present, but there’s always one straight man or woman at whom the world is being absurd. Louie and Michael Bluth are flawed and have quirks, but they are primarily suffering through a world gone mad around them. For Python, no one was exempt. Everyone was equally culpable for adding to the world’s psychic entropy. (Except perhaps Brian?)
It’s only been other form-shattering sketch shows that have at all come close to what Python began; I’m thinking of The State and Mr. Show in the 90s, and perhaps to a lesser degree the more-recent Portlandia. But these are all niche programs, not generational hallmarks of a particular kind of taste in the way that Python was and continues to be.
The anti-Python is, of course, the last couple decades or so of Saturday Night Live. That show is only irreverent in that is has no respect for its audience’s intelligence or time.
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Internet Comments vs. Knowledge
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.
“Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story,” wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.
And as though to echo the previous post’s title, “Comments. Boy, I Don’t Know”:
“I hope you’re not going to ask me, ‘What should we do?’” she said, laughing. “Because I don’t know.”
I think I do. Don’t have comments sections.
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Comments. Boy, I Don’t Know.
I don’t generally like comments sections. Though I appreciate the ethos behind them, the notion that a blog is a place where folks can continue an article’s discussion beyond the written post, it rarely serves this purpose. Most of the time, in my experience as a reader and writer, comments are usually a bulliten board for banal or thoughtless exclamations, and at worst, a cesspool of hostility and idiocy.
Freethought Blogs clearly is identified with a robust commenting culture, and its commenters have exemplified both the best and worst of this. Indeed, most of the time in this particular blog’s short history with FtB, the comments have been friendly and considered.But it doesn’t take much to draw the attention of the parade of fanatical ignoramuses.
So, look, I want to give the well-meaning folks a fair shot at participating in the discussions here (and I’ve actually really enjoyed some of the comments on posts about technology and gadgets) before I decide to shut the whole comments section down. Which I’m really close to doing.
But in order to have folks behave in a manner that I think suits this blog, I probably need to lay out what the comments policy actually is. Fine then.
So here’s how this is going to go.
First and foremost, this is my blog. I am the supreme evil dictator of this stake of Internet property. It’s not a democracy, it’s not a town meeting with the city council. I’m not disinterested in other people’s perspectives, but in the end, this is my space and it’s going to reflect that fact.
I have no obligation to host a comments section at all, and many of the best blogs have none (Andrew Sullivan, John Gruber, etc.). And no, that’s not an example of “censorship,” and it’s not silencing anyone. The Internet is a big place, and if you really want to respond or react to something I’ve written, you can do it on your own blog. Your links back will only increase my Google ranking.
While I do have comments, here are the rules, and they’re simple. You can’t comment here just to abuse or be an asshole to me, other commenters, or anyone else. I will be the one who decides what counts as abuse or “being an asshole.” Debate and disagreement with me is fine, but if you get shitty about it, I’ll mark you as spam. I may just decide you’ve got a crummy, nasty attitude, and that’ll mean you’re out. Again, I will be the one who decides what counts as shitty, crummy, nasty, or what have you. Again, if this doesn’t please you, start your own blog and complain about it there.
Needless to say (or is it?), racist, sexist, bigoted comments, or anything containing threats, won’t be tolerated.
If a comment thread goes off-topic, straying into subjects irrelevant to the post in question, I’ll probably turn comments off for that post.
Life is short, and I have no incentive to waste my time by subjecting myself (or my tens of readers) to a bunch of abuse and garbage.
Hopefully, things will be cool, and there’ll be little reason to act on any of this.
But if it becomes a waste of time or even an additional source of stress, well, I’ll just shut the section down.
(Note: The title of this post is inspired by this immortal exchange. I hope Jed Bartlet does not want to kick my ass.)
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Call Her an Asshole
Friend of the blog, and our whole little family, really, Meg Rhem, has advice for fathers of daughters (and I have a baby daughter).
Dads, here’s a big one: do not ever, under any circumstance, refer to a woman as a whore or a slut. These words are violent, they are hateful, and their only function is to undermine female agency, to diminish women as a whole. Think of them the same way you think of the “n” word. They are not good words. . . .
Respect your daughters, respect your sons. And don’t call that lady who cut you off in traffic a dumb whore. Give her the respect she’s due: call her an asshole.
I’m so down with this. And if there’s anyone who needs diminishing, it’s my three-year-old son. That kid’s a freaking tsunami of toddler. I never refer to women as whores or anything like that anyway, though my wife says I swear too much around the kids. But even little ones need to know who is and isn’t an asshole. What else is parenting for?
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The History of Not-Reading
As one whose shelves were once littered with not-reading, I liked this. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The history of reading,” [Leah] Price says, “really has to encompass the history of not reading.”
Anyone who has ever displayed a trophy volume on the coffee table knows that people do many things with books besides read them. A book can be deployed as a sign of intellectual standing or aspiration. It can be used to erect a social barrier between spouses at a breakfast table or strangers on a train. It can be taken apart and recycled or turned into art. Price’s recent work recreates Victorians’ many extratextual uses of books.I’m fascinated by how the scare of an e-book takeover and the rise of tablets have swung the pendulum of attention to the book-as-artifact. These bricks of paper are obviously more than the ink on their pages.
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Not All Deep Rifts Are Worth Diving Into
Kate Donovan, who is a real blessing to the interwebs, makes a great point about the Deep Rifts in the skepto-atheosphere, which I will then pour a teaspoon of cold water on.
Kate writes:. . . if we’re going to be intellectually honest, we DO need to be arguing, critiquing, and otherwise speaking up about intolerable behavior. We need to–to cherrypick from the Bible myself–cast the beams from our own eyes. Stepping out and saying that you don’t want to be involved in all that drama is equivalent to what we object to of the religious. I’m sorry it’s stressful, exhausting, and disheartening. But we’re worth it.
I completely agree, and as I wrote in my vaguely infamous post at Skepchick a while back, this movement owes it to itself to determine what it’s going to really be about, and act on it. It has to work out the “now-what?” after we all agree that God and Bigfoot are hoaxes. Go Kate, Go us.
Now the teaspoon of cold water.
There is a difference between engaging in a grand debate about what this movement should be, and drama for drama’s sake. My fear is that for a while now there’s been little in the way of arguing and critiquing, and a lot more of what looks like a drama addiction fed by self-created crises. That is what I want to opt out of.
You know where I stand on the issues at hand. The fact that there is a contingent of folks who are fighting for the right to joke about rape and perceive oppression of the white male is an abysmal state of affairs, and yeah, we need to root that shit out. But we are also, being humans, prone to indulge in a lot of back and forth that is merely gratuitous, with folks from all corners seeking out things to offend them, and then shouting from the rooftops about how righteous is their indignation. That st00pid vide0 by that guy is an example of this, a goddamn serenade by moonlight from a freaking gondola to an imagined oppression of white males. Christ. What are we even talking about??
I don’t want to have arguments with that, but just call it out for the nonsense it is. I don’t want to comb my Twitter stream for poorly-chosen words from well-meaning folks so I can express how hurt I am. I don’t want to languish in victimhood as though just being victimized were somehow a form of activism. I don’t want to waste time arguing with someone who thinks being blocked from interacting with a Twitter account is somehow equivalent to being taken to a CIA rendition site. That’s not the grand debate I signed up for.
So, to be clear, Kate is right. Let’s argue and critique and get our house in order. Let’s not for a moment shy away from stamping out the worst in us, exhausting as it all can feel. But let’s also be clear that there’s little substance in much of the noise right now, and a lot of the bickering is more preening than pious. Opting out of that crap is not avoiding the fight, it’s a sign of knowing what battles are worth fighting.
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No, I Was Not Bullied into Not Being an Asshole
Oh, barf.
Okay, so apparently that Thunderf00t guy (who I didn’t know anything about before the tumult he brought to FtB) has a video in which my name appears among a list of folks who contributed to the Skepchick series on rejecting anti-woman vitriol in the skepto-atheosphere, and asserts that the aforementioned folks were all “bullied” or “cajoled” into taking part.
I mean come the fuck on. Do I really have to do this?
For the record: I was honored to be asked to participate, I am proud of what I wrote, and stand by it entirely. I know bullying. I am still recovering from a lifetime of it, and yeah, being asked to state the obvious on a great website is not bullying.
Also for the record: I still don’t understand why anybody cares what this guy with the zeros-for-o’s in his name thinks.
Gah. I can’t believe I even had to dignify this nonsense. My eyes are rolling so far back in my head I can read my own thoughts. I need a blog shower.
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Making Tools to Fix Their Own Problems
Catherine Bracy on the tech sector’s obliviousness to genuine social causes and crises:
The well-documented lack of diversity in the Valley would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. It feels like, and often is, a bunch of Stanford guys making tools to fix their own problems. . . Barely any of them start from an entrenched social problem and work backwards from there. Very few of them are really fundamentally improving society. . . They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.
This isolation has also deluded them into thinking that they are in fact making the world a better place, simply by building their products and platforms. The Silicon Valley rich are famously stingy philanthropists and a defense I’ve heard more than once is that the tools they spend their time building are inherently good. “Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?”
This feels to me like it stems from the same phenomenon that is responsible for the tech press’s bizarre unwillingness to face up to the human tragedy that was unfolding at Foxconn and its ilk until forced to. And when one of the prime messengers of this bad news turned out to have fudged his credentials a bit, they disgorged a torrent of bile at him, obviously under the mistaken impression that we were all off the hook to enjoy their devices guiltlessly once again — just because Mike Daisey unfortunately tried to have his story pass as pure-as-snow journalism.
The tech media that I follow so closely is indeed woefully sheltered. I think most of it is quite well-intentioned socially, but Bracy is dead on that its sense of priorities is distorted. It needn’t be, considering its ability and propensity to, well, search.
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The Constitution, On its Merits
When I read this piece by Louis Michael Seidman in the New York Times today, I wanted to throw a parade.
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
Oh snap!
This is the kind of thing Good Americans are not supposed to say, kind of like a fundamentalist Christian saying that, well, maybe God didn’t make human beings exactly in their present form. Ears perk up and small gasps can be heard around the table as such a sentiment is uttered in a kind of faux casualness.
But more to the point, I’m always relieved to hear this brand of sentiment about the alleged intractability of the Constitution when it’s not coming from, say, theocrats who, not content to deify the Founders, would rather just upend the whole shebang and make Jesus king of America.
My motivations, I suspect, are different from Seidman’s. He concentrates primarily in the piece on the structure of government, on who among the branches has the power to do what. My more recent wishes about not wanting to adhere to every outmoded decree in the Constitution stem, not surprisingly, from the grossly distorted Second Amendment (because it’s crucial that white landowning males have muskets to stop, like, tyranny).
But this kind of thinking about government’s foundations is crucial, really, if we take government seriously. Otherwise, we really are no better than religious literalists, doomed to wonder what the prophets meant for us to do concerning Internet policy and subsidies for the solar power industry.
It’s also crucial in terms of one issue close to my heart, electoral reform. There’s not even a right to vote enshrined in the Constitution, only protections against those who want to limit it where it already exists.
Seidman cushions the blow for those who fear chaos if we loosen our adherence:
In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.
Yes, so let’s definitely enshrine our highest principles and ideals, as well as our best idea of how our government should be structured, but let’s make sure that we can redecorate the shrine when it looks like we need to.
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An Unnecessary Hell
The Economist has a very worthwhile exploration of the enduring concept of Hell, but concludes in such a way as to baffle me.
[Hell] should have been sunk long ago by the weight of its contradictions. But the key to its survival lies in the writings of St Augustine, who, of all people, ought to have been tolerant of sinners: to paraphrase, “Knowledge of the torments of the damned is part of heavenly bliss.” St Bernardino of Siena took it even further: there could be no perfect sweetness of song in Heaven, he wrote, “if there were no infernal descant from God’s justice.” Just as there can be no light without dark, and no sound without silence, so everlasting celestial joys depend on a contrast of everlasting horror. Without Hell, you can’t have Heaven.
What nonsense. What this line of thinking (not necessarily this writer's) says is that, in effect, in order to fully appreciate or enjoy something, one must be threatened with (not actually experience, but be threatened with) its most excruciating and horrifying opposite. One can't be fulfilled and inspired by great music unless one is taunted with the possibility of having to experience sonic garbage. I can't really know a deep and true love for my children unless I have the possibility of their deaths dangled in front of me day after day.
Why must it be so? It takes religion to think this way. I prefer a little Shakespeare to temper this notion:
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.We are reminded of the wonderful, the beautiful, and the numinous by their scarcity, though that is not their prime requisite. Beautiful music is considered so in part because it is so rare that it is produced. My children are utterly precious to me in part because they are literally precious, they are uniquely, exclusively mine and my wife's.
Maybe Christianity falls apart without the ever-present threat of eternal torture. But Hell's non-existence has nothing to do one way or the other as to the presence of “God's justice,” or God itself.
Side note, also to be filed under “It takes religion to think this way”:
Sinhalese Buddhism has 136 and Burmese Buddhism 40,040, one for each particular sin—including nosiness, chicken-selling and eating sweets with rice.
I'm guilty of at least two of those.
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Social Lasers of Cruelty
Jaron Lanier, a kind of web reverse-guru, perhaps the Anti-Shirky, talks to Smithsonian magazine about what he sees as the existential threat of Internet anonymity.
“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.
“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam….Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”
[ . . . ]
We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming…digital Maoism.
He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”
It’s a haunting image of speechlessness. A pogrom is carried out by a “crowd,” the true horrific embodiment of the purported “wisdom of the crowd.” You could say it made Lanier even more determined not to remain mute. To speak out against the digital barbarism he regrets he helped create.
I think Lanier is maybe a bit too in love with his own novelty, the web pioneer who now hates the web, and takes some of this to an unnecessary extreme, but I take his point. If there's anything about the web, and blogs particularly, that I find loathsome, it's comment sections and bulletin board sites that traffic in anonymous anger and hate-spewing. Frankly, I was a little afraid to come to Freethought Blogs because I know how tumultuous a lot of the commentaries can get (so far, most of you have been lovely).
I'd never be one to say that folks should not be allowed to be anonymous online. Far from it. But I do think there's a lot of merit in the individual sites and blogs deciding that for their own plot of Internet real estate, folks have to go by their real names in order to play. That probably doesn't work for, say, YouTube, but for a given publication or service, I can definitely see why that would be preferable — a declaration that at such-and-such a site, you stand by your words with your real identity. And if you don't want to play by that rule, you can simply not participate in that site, or respond on your own blog or platform outside of that site, as anonymously as you want.
That doesn't solve what Lanier fears, of course, but at this point, what could?
pav dot quest 
