Why the experience of anti-atheist prejudice is different, though similar, to prejudice regarding sexual orientation, race, gender, etc.

At a post over at Prop8TrialTracker.com on the purging of the most vile homophobic elements from the mainstream anti-marriage equality movement, I made a comment as to how this signals a movement into "dog whistle politics" regarding LGBTQ issues, where it is no longer okay to blame it all on those evil gays, but new codewords creep in like "traditional family" and "special rights". I felt the need to qualify my comment thusly:

(Disclaimer: As a straight white male, I've never felt the sting of having a mainstream politician call me less-than-human in cleverly veiled terms. I can't imagine...)

Except that I have felt that sting, sort of. One need not look far to find plenty of examples of mainstream politicians demonizing atheists in truly shocking ways. For an admittedly not-that-recent example, look at Bush Sr.'s infamous remarks about whether atheists should even be citizens.

But I can't shake the feeling that it's just not the same. It doesn't cut me as deeply as I think it would to have my race, my sexual orientation, my gender classed as sub-human. And I got to thinking: why is that?

I think it comes down to two major factors: Degree of choice, and "believing" vs. "being".

Now note I said "degree of choice", not "choice". At this point, atheism is not really a choice for me per se. I could no more decide at this moment to believe in god(s) than I suspect you, dear reader, could choose at this very moment to believe in the Keebler Elves. Oh sure, you might freely choose to proclaim an allegiance to Ernie and the gang any time you wish, but you wouldn't sincerely mean it.

But I suspect that if you really dearly wanted to believe in the Elves... If you told yourself every day that they were real, if you surrounded yourself with others who shared the same forthright belief, if you fervently tried to make yourself believe, one day I suspect you'd wake up and be quite certain of the magical origin of Keebler cookies. It might be a more tenuous faith, you might be more inclined to inwardly question it than those who had been Keeblerites since birth or had experienced a more organic conversion to Keeblerism. But I bet if you really wanted, you could pull it off.

To do the same thing in regards to one's race or one's gender is patently absurd. And as we now know from dearly-bought experience, attempting to do so in regard to one's sexual orientation is ineffective, dangerous, and often deadly.

My atheism is something less than a free choice, but it is somewhat more of a choice than are race, gender, sexual preference. I am an atheist because it is what seems to me to be the clear truth. I cannot change it as easily as I could change my shirt or my hair color or the restaurant I go to most often... but I probably could change it with sufficient time and effort, if sufficiently motivated.

The other difference is harder to get at, and I fear I am verging on a form of Cartesian dualism here... But I really think there is a subtle difference between what you are and what you believe.

To explain what I mean, consider a person who is a straight-up communist, and somewhat of an activist at that. If she is really sincere about her communist beliefs, it may be no more of a choice than is my atheism: She could insincerely declare her mind changed at any time, and she may at some time be sincerely argued out of it (and I naively hope she would; I find communism to be about as sensible a position as laissez faire capitalism, i.e. not very -- but this is an irrelevant digression and I will say no more about it), yet if she really believes in her cause at 8:32PM on Wednesday, she cannot simply "decide" not to believe in it at 8:33PM on Wednesday.

And there is no question that many Americans consider communists to be less-than-human. Yet somehow it feels like that stings a lot less than racial prejudice or anti-gay prejudice or misogyny. There's just something about what you think about things, especially when it is ostensibly for rational reasons, that makes criticism of it seem less hurtful than something which you are -- even when the distinction between identity and belief is fuzzy.

Perhaps it doesn't matter that this reeks of dualism; we are all de facto dualists in our day-to-day lives, after all, and since this post is all about perception, perhaps the fact that we usually perceive ourselves as dualists is enough to justify this perception.

In any case, I do think there are differences, and as such I think I still cannot claim to know what it feels like to be a member of a group whose very identity is (or recently has been) denigrated by the mainstream. There are a lot of ways in which anti-atheist prejudice is similar -- there's been much talk about how the "coming out" analogy works very well for atheism as well, for example -- but I think the experience of it is different in some crucial ways.

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BREAKING NEWS: Richard Dawkins holds a gene-centric view of evolution

At a recent debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Dawkins shockingly revealed that he holds a gene-centric view of how natural selection operates.

After being asked whether he believes the organism is the basic unit of selection, Dawkins replied, "Well no, I rather think the gene is the basic unit of selection."

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself a geneticist?”

An incredulous Sir Anthony replied: “You are described as the world’s most famous zoologist.”

Later asked for comment, Dawkins replied, "I don't really understand what the surprise is. After all, this was basically the point of perhaps my most or second most famous book, The Selfish Gene. The next thing you know the headlines will be blaring about some point or other that I had already made explicit in The God Delusion."

Religious leaders later characterized Dawkins' reaction as "strident", "militant", and "exactly as bad as the 9/11 hijackers." "Faith traditions have a very long tradition of mischaracterizing Dawkins and leveling unfair criticisms at him," said Catholic League spokesman Bill Donohue. "By attempting to correct these misconceptions, he has sullied the beliefs of literally billions of believers."

"Why can't he just shut the fuck up and take it," added Baroness Warsi.

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Mardell's False Balance

Mark Mardell is the BBC's North America editor, who does a column called "Mardell's America" offering a look at American politics. I occasionally appreciate the column, but too often he just seems to be bending over backwards to try to makes his voice "unbiased" as the average American might perceive it -- which is quite a trick for a Brit since, as Mardell very well knows, the American "center" is way to the right of the European center. So many of his columns start to exude a vague "WTF is up with these Americans?!"-ness, which he promptly quashes by mumbling something about how the right-wingers maybe have a point.

His latest column has this annoying tendency on full display:

I haven't read [Pat Buchanan's] book, but judging from extracts it is easy to see how his pungently expressed anti-multiculturalism could be seen as racist.

But I do know the sort of views he is expressing are shared by many American conservatives who think their culture is under attack (just look at the comments on his blog, if you don't believe me)...Conservative views that seem very far to the right by British standards are all over the place - from blogs, to right-wing talk radio, and above all on Fox News.

So he seems to get it: The American right is full of scary racist shit. But then:

There is a grave danger for American democracy that the two parties not only can't agree, they can't even discuss.

Left and right live in their little ghettos of the mind, unwilling to listen to anything that doesn't reinforce their own views. If you only hear what your opponents are thinking through the warp of second-hand caricatures, then there is no chance of understanding their point of view.

"Ghettos of the mind", is it? "Second-hand caricatures"?

Or could it be that the American right wing is batshit crazy, and their "point of view" is not really understandable to begin with?

Just sayin'...

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Randomness

So you may have heard of that infamous horse head mask on Amazon. I wanted one as soon as I saw it, but figured it was a frivolous waste of money... until my wife and I had had a few too many on Valentine's Day, and suddenly it seemed like we couldn't afford not to own a horse head mask. Here's a couple pictures of me wearing it:




There's this "society thinks/parents think/really am" etc. meme going around, that you've probably seen. I decided to jump on the bandwagon and create a couple. The first is really meta (and probably too honest). And the second combines my new obsessions with the horse head mask!




And last but not least, a blurry picture of the X-ray of the screws and wire in my elbow. I am hoping to get a higher quality scan soon...

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Rejection Bacteria: Why it's difficult for lonely guys to understand when they are making women feel uncomfortable

There's been something I've wanted to say in the wake of Elevatorgate and all of the reverberations it continues to send through the skeptic blogosphere. I haven't said it for two reasons: One is because I'm not sure exactly how to get the idea across without making it sound like I am defending people whom I really don't wish to defend; and the other reason is because I'm not so sure the point I want to make matters all that much in practice (even though I think it is true and accurate). What people like Watson et al are asking for -- a little bit of thought about how our words and actions can make women feel welcome or unwelcome in the skeptic community, and just a tiny bit of effort trying to skew it towards the "welcoming" side -- is a bona fide good thing and I don't want to hinder that.

I've wanted to say something about the mindset of at least some of the people who are resisting this obviously good change, and why I think, even though their actions have obvious misogynistic consequences, they can be trying their best to be good people and still find it difficult to see this. And thanks to a recent SMBC comic, I think I just figured out how to say it.


This is exactly how a lot of lonely guys feel a lot of the time. (Take it from me; I was one for a loooong time) Unfortunately for everyone involved, young men are even more likely to feel this way if they find themselves in communities where women are significantly underrepresented, since this means they statistically will have fewer opportunities for successes that might help them overcome this crippling fear of Rejection Bacteria -- and of course these are exactly the same communities in which women are already going to tend to feel unwelcome due to being in a distinct minority.

What does all this have to do with Elevatorgate? Here's the thing: When that creepy guy asked you out, he very possibly overcame a crippling fear of Rejection Bacteria in order to do it. He seriously thought a flesh-eating microbe was going to eat his limbs right off his writhing body, but he faced down that fear and approached you anyway. In comparison to Rejection Bacteria, your passing discomfort or brief fear of being raped in an elevator seems incredibly trivial. "How dare you complain about being made to feel unwelcome when I just faced the risk of certain death to ask you on a date?"

Of course, sexual harassment and assault are real, while Rejection Bacteria are not. And so this is not a defense of Elevator Guy or anybody else who is being creepy.

But when you wonder why some of these guys, particularly the single ones, are just Not Getting It, this is at least part of your answer. I don't know if this has any value; perhaps the best way of winning this fight is to just keep speaking out against the behavior we don't want and eventually it will become socially unacceptable and/or people will start to "get it". Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to acknowledge that it can feel very difficult to be a lonely guy in a male-dominated community, to reassure people like this that we understand their challenges -- but that, whatever they might imagine, it's worse to be a woman in a male-dominated community.

I don't know, I don't know if that's helpful or not. The SMBC comic just struck me because, yeah, that's pretty much dead on what it feels like. For whatever that's worth...

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Then this happened...

That would be the olecranon process of my proximal ulna. Having surgery on Monday. D'oh.

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Free will and hot peppers

Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne are hanging around the former's apartment. Dennett goes to the kitchen, pulls a jalapeno from the coldest part of the refrigerator, and takes a bite out of it.

"Hoo boy, that's hot!!" Dennett exclaims.

Jerry impatiently corrects him: "No, Dan, it's not hot, it's spicy. Silly philosophers..."

Only the above little story is not really fair to Jerry. Really the encounter should take place in an alternate universe where, with the exception of food scientists and a handful of enlightened chefs, the vast majority of people believe with all their hearts that the chilled jalapeno really does have a high temperature despite being in the fridge all day, and find the suggestion that it might just be a heat-like sensation to be disturbing to say the least.

Capsacin really does exist, and the compound really does produce a sensation of burning in mammals when it comes in contact with their soft tissue, and it does this by stimulating sensory neurons that are involved in the perception of heat. In other words, even though there is no heat, the sensation of heat is, in a sense, real. Furthermore, the sensation is culinarily useful and it would be a shame if it were dismissed as just some silly illusion.

By way of analogy, I am increasingly of the mindset that what philosophers mean when they refer to compatibilism in the context of free will is very much a real thing; that as our understanding of neuroscience increases we will come to define its mechanisms in as much detail as we now understand the working of capsacin; that those same mechanisms are what is responsible for the sensation of libertarian free will that we all experience; and that the concept is extremely relevant and ought not to be discarded just because it creates an illusory sensation. In many ways, whether (and to what degree) an entity possesses free will in this compatibilist sense is a rather key litmus test as to what rights, etc., ought to be afforded that entity.

(This last point could be a post unto itself, so I'll simply terminate that line of reasoning right away rather than risk going into a several page digression.)

All that said, as a result of Jerry's posts as well comments from folks like Ben Goren, I am increasingly of the mindset that although all the above is true, it is confusing at best to give this phenomenon the label "free will", and at times the motive may even be deliberately obfuscatory.

In a world where people so desperately want to believe there is warmth in even the coldest jalapeno, referring to them as "hot peppers" -- even if us sophisticated foodies understand that we are simply referring to the presence of capsacin rather than some mystical ability to maintain a high temperature -- is going to be received by the vast majority of laypeople as a confirmation of what they already wish was true.

So after much deliberation, I think Jerry is right: We ought to call them spicy peppers, and we ought to start calling compatibilism by a name other than "free will".

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