Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

atheism

Embracing Intersubjectivity

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Prologue

A young woman is featured at a freethought conference and speaks on communicating atheism through blogging, then later on sexism within the atheist community. She has her say, makes some points (namely, that just because other female skeptics don’t recognize sexism within the skeptic community in their own lives and work, that said sexism might still exist), and afterwards basically goes on with her life. Later, she spends time at the bar in the hotel chatting and generally having a good time, and when at four in the morning she decides she needs some sleep, she finds herself alone in an elevator with a man who takes the opportunity to ask her to his hotel room for coffee.

(A word to the wise: an offer for coffee at four in the morning is rarely about a desire for caffeine.)

Later, the young woman records a vlog about her experiences at the conference, and as an aside relays this experience, ending with, “Guys, don’t do that.”

Hence Elevatorgate.

This is the story of how I became a feminist.

First, let’s clear the air

“Feminist” is the kind of terms that comes loaded with huge amounts of baggage, and it’s not my place here to define it or to throw up walls about who does or doesn’t get to claim the mantle of the term, or to apply that term to others. Virtually everyone in polite discourse agrees broadly with the idea that “women should be treated equally to men,” or “women should collect equal pay for equal work,” or “women should have strong role models in media,” so hopefully we can address issues slightly more sophisticated than those Gloria Steinem was fighting for in 1972 or so. (Hell, even the complementarians among right-wing American Christian evangelicals would broadly agree with the idea of legal equality between men and women; they’d just cover themselves with the fig leaf of “different roles” based largely on terrible ideas of biological essentialism and determinism.) We can start with the hoary old cliche of “the radical notion that women are people,” and move on from there, can’t we?

Also, I recognize and respect the opinion of those who claim that a man, particularly a white, cisgender, Western-educated man, can by definition not be a feminist, although I disagree. If your politics means that you consider me a feminist ally, rather than a true feminist, I’ll accept that label instead. While this is the space in which I’m telling a story about myself, I fully believe that stories such as mine should be decentered, and offer it here for what I presume to be a largely male, cisgender, white audience.

Second, let’s clarify some terminology.

I’m fully aware that there’s quite a bit of separation among the various subgroups I’ll be discussing here, and that to some degree I’m going to pretend that the atheist, skeptic, freethought, and rationalist movements are one and the same. This is to some degree an artifact of the way the different groups are incredibly porous to one another, and the lines between them are fuzzy at best.…

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Voluminous Description

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Finally finished Kershaw’s biography of Hitler.  I’ve been working on it – both volumes, unabridged – for years, picking it up for a bit, putting it down for a bit, etc.  (This is how I usually tackle mammoth reading projects.)

Can’t help feeling underwhelmed.  I mean, I’m in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project… but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers – Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc – that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.

Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history.  The narrative history of one protagonist.  This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority.  Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind.  He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity.  His reactions are utterly predictable once you’ve spent any time (so to speak) in his company.  This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like “Hitler’s reaction was predictable”, followed by a re-run of something you’ve already read a hundred times.  Kerhsaw isn’t to be blamed for Hitler’s personality, but he is – perhaps – to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project.  Kershaw doesn’t really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people.  He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc – all the usual explanations – and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.

Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history.  He’d been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography – a more ‘popular’ type of book – and often brings insights from social history to bear… especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)… but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist.  The asides can be genuinely fascinating.  Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example.  The repeated motif of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical ‘solution’ to any problem.  In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable – often unwilling – to do anything about it. …

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The Wank Delusion

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Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: “*vomits*”

Okay, let’s examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally ‘attractive’ woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right…

1.  It is assumed that this picture – i.e. the person in it – represents ‘sexiness’.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective – far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He’s probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is ‘reason’?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn’t make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses… in short: ideas… are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there’s not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don’t know what that means.*

4.  People’s level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don’t think paunches and big beards are sexy – which would mean you’re not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea ‘sexy’ anyway?  Even the idea ‘let’s have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you’d like to have sex with. 

6.  It’s difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn’t make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn’t make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll… but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the ‘New Atheists’ were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham. …

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“What if there’s no one out there?” asks the Doctor.  He’s inside the Brannigans’ floating car, stuck in gridlock.

What if the world ended when you weren’t looking?

“Someone’s got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it’s there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?”

“There’s a whole city above us,” says Brannigan, “The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn’t just leave us.”

“In that case, where are they?” counters the Doctor.  “What if there’s no help coming, not ever? What if there’s nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever.”

What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke?  What if the crisis is permanent.  What if normality is the crisis?  What if everyday life is the end of the world?

Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord.  The people of New New York left it too late to pull the cord.  Capitalism crashed around them, shattering as one of their products ran out of control (a bit like, say, a stock market or a credit system).  In the story, the product was a patch that managed mood.  It was a palliative against the horror, which only intensified the horror.  The Heaven of the state was depopulated, leaving lofty council chambers full of skeletons.  The Hell of the lower levels filled up with fumes, and monsters of the repressed started to breed within them.  And Limbo filled up with the survivors.

“Shut up! Just shut up!” cries Valerie, Brannigan’s wife.

Sally Calypso appears on the screen.  “This is Sally Calypso, and it’s that time again. The sun is blazing high in the sky over the New Atlantic, the perfect setting for the daily contemplation.”

“You think you know us so well, Doctor,” says Brannigan, “But we’re not abandoned. Not while we have each other.”

Contrary to what most pop-culture will tell you, ordinary people are generally pretty damned good to each other in the aftermaths of disasters.

There’s a sense in which the amazing co-operation to be found, for the most part, in Tahrir Square and Occupy, was something akin to mutual aid in the aftermath of a disaster.  Under capitalism as it stands (or tries to stand) every single day is the aftermath of a disaster.  Prescient in so many ways, this episode.

The people of the gridlock are all locked away from each other in their seperate boxes, the way capitalism locks us away… but in the aftermath of the ongoing disaster of modernity, they’re also making lives and friendships and networks of support.

“This is for all of you out there on the roads,” says Sally, “We’re so sorry. Drive safe.”

And everyone in gridlock starts to sing in unison.  This may be another patch, another mood stabiliser… but it is also a real and material act, an act of solidarity. …

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