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Why your favourite atheists . . . aren't
Dec. 24th, 2007 07:46 pmhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
To be fair, the title of this post is technically wrong, but I think it communicates the right message. One of the main problems with the Brights/atheist activist movement is that its leaders are not really promoting reason instead of faith. They're Platonists. There are atheists who are not Platonists but they aren't really the ones in the driver's seat. This means that the attached value systems are really as faith-based as theistic value systems.
The value system behind Platonism is that there is a transcendent body of law and that it's our duty to understand it and center our cultural efforts around it. The trouble with this is that it doesn't necessarily follow that these systems be humane in our commonsense understanding of the term. In fact, when we look to the source, the model is basically totalitarian. Moving things along, its revival in the form of the Third Culture and later, the Brights began as a response to leftist, "liberal" influence in cultural academia. In other words, these people aren't going to save you from Bush and his successors. The dark side of this movement comes out in things like discussions of general intelligence. Sometimes the facade slips and you get James D. Watson.
And just to get you riled up about Godwin's Law, yeah, this sort of thing really was what some Nazis were into. It wasn't the *only* thing they were into, but this is another lesson: the New Atheism will not protect you from horrible injustices and can be coopted by evil quite easily. This is why Godwin's Law *exists*; the Nazis' memetic DNA was quite capable of infiltrating science as wholly as it did Christianity, phenomenology or Germanic mythology. Science was nothing special here. No Platonic Good preventing it from being used to serve an arbitrary ideology.
But leaving this aside I think it's important to understand why this mechanism exists. It's because we can turn all of these into instruments to understand ourselves, other people and the world around them, but in doing so it's very easy to get seduced by the idea of a Truth or an allegiance. Because claims of transcendental laws or God are so lofty it's pretty easy to structure any system in favour of them. We see this right now when we approach religious explanations for scientific phenomena, or scientific explanations for religious phenomena. Keep in mind though, that both of these are not the same as doing real science or religious service.
In this holiday season that's structured around ancient political considerations, religious services and astrological phenomena, what I would urge my friends to consider is the extent to which transcendental concepts inform your life, even in matters of casual cultural allegiance and the degree to which you can own the resulting fallout, when your culture leaders say offensive or dangerous things. I'm not saying you should ditch the transcendentals -- that's probably impossible, because people just don't seem to be set up to think without them. My belief system was founded by a man who flat-out said that anything outside the human psyche wasn't relevant to what he was out to do, but even he relied on a dialogue with bigger ideas.
The dismal conclusion is that these follies are probably inescapable, but we can still engage in them with a bit more clarity.
To be fair, the title of this post is technically wrong, but I think it communicates the right message. One of the main problems with the Brights/atheist activist movement is that its leaders are not really promoting reason instead of faith. They're Platonists. There are atheists who are not Platonists but they aren't really the ones in the driver's seat. This means that the attached value systems are really as faith-based as theistic value systems.
The value system behind Platonism is that there is a transcendent body of law and that it's our duty to understand it and center our cultural efforts around it. The trouble with this is that it doesn't necessarily follow that these systems be humane in our commonsense understanding of the term. In fact, when we look to the source, the model is basically totalitarian. Moving things along, its revival in the form of the Third Culture and later, the Brights began as a response to leftist, "liberal" influence in cultural academia. In other words, these people aren't going to save you from Bush and his successors. The dark side of this movement comes out in things like discussions of general intelligence. Sometimes the facade slips and you get James D. Watson.
And just to get you riled up about Godwin's Law, yeah, this sort of thing really was what some Nazis were into. It wasn't the *only* thing they were into, but this is another lesson: the New Atheism will not protect you from horrible injustices and can be coopted by evil quite easily. This is why Godwin's Law *exists*; the Nazis' memetic DNA was quite capable of infiltrating science as wholly as it did Christianity, phenomenology or Germanic mythology. Science was nothing special here. No Platonic Good preventing it from being used to serve an arbitrary ideology.
But leaving this aside I think it's important to understand why this mechanism exists. It's because we can turn all of these into instruments to understand ourselves, other people and the world around them, but in doing so it's very easy to get seduced by the idea of a Truth or an allegiance. Because claims of transcendental laws or God are so lofty it's pretty easy to structure any system in favour of them. We see this right now when we approach religious explanations for scientific phenomena, or scientific explanations for religious phenomena. Keep in mind though, that both of these are not the same as doing real science or religious service.
In this holiday season that's structured around ancient political considerations, religious services and astrological phenomena, what I would urge my friends to consider is the extent to which transcendental concepts inform your life, even in matters of casual cultural allegiance and the degree to which you can own the resulting fallout, when your culture leaders say offensive or dangerous things. I'm not saying you should ditch the transcendentals -- that's probably impossible, because people just don't seem to be set up to think without them. My belief system was founded by a man who flat-out said that anything outside the human psyche wasn't relevant to what he was out to do, but even he relied on a dialogue with bigger ideas.
The dismal conclusion is that these follies are probably inescapable, but we can still engage in them with a bit more clarity.
