John Gray asks what scares the New Atheists — and I tried to think of what scares me before I read it. And the answer is…
Not much.
I’m in a comfortable position of privilege, so I can say that personally, there isn’t much I’m afraid of. It’s simply the wrong question to ask about the New Atheists, especially so of the relatively wealthy and popular ones, like Dawkins or Harris. I’m pretty sure none of them are trembling in fear of much of anything. Now if Gray had asked, “What are the New Atheists angry about,” then he might have something to write about. Greta Christina has a list.
So I then read the article. The long article. I anticipated some potential surprises, since it was an odd thesis, and surely he had some evidence and some reason to think that we atheists were driven by fear. I was disappointed.
First thing he does is recite a litany of scientist’s sins. It’s true that for the last few centuries, scientists have attempted to make scientific rationalizations for racism and sexism, and have literally committed crimes because they categorized some subsets of humanity as less than human. Eugenics was a moral catastrophe. We certainly recognize that now.
But somehow, in the minds of religious apologists, the racist convulsions of 20th century Europe are all the fault of those danged atheist scientists, so Gray starts his article with a list of bad, bad people, like Darwin and Haeckel and Huxley, who all endorsed a racial taxonomy for human beings. But he has a curious blind spot: he only names scientists. That Western culture as a whole was a sickening gemisch of colonialism, exploitation, racism, and sexism is a simple truth. The question ought to be whether the scientists of the time were worse than the general populace; did science and atheism contribute to moderating their views?
The answer to that is complex and messy, because while many of them might have been less virulent in their attitudes, they were also influential — there’s nothing racists love better than a scientist coming along and giving some supposedly objective justification for their bigotry. That these scientists had a relatively bloodless rationale for racism does not let them off the hook, but were they as awful as, for instance, the clerics of the time? And I think the answer is no. While there were also priests who actively campaigned against slavery and colonialism, the scientists Gray is chewing out also had more liberal views than the average man on the street. Darwin accepted the consensus of the day that there were coherent racial groupings of humans, but he was also an abolitionist with nothing but sympathetic personal opinions of people of other races. Haeckel was rather dogmatic in most of his racial views, but he was also a dedicated pacifist, and there was some nuance to his ideas. This article by Richards on Haeckel’s anti-semitism is enlightening (pdf).
Haeckel’s racial theories might lead one incautiously to presume that he was also an anti-Semite. That is certainly the belief of a number of scholars, most prominently of Gasman and Weikart. On its face, though, the indictment seems improbable, since
the most rabid anti-Semites during Haeckel’s time were conservative Christians, for example, the Berlin court-preacher Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909). Given Haeckel’s extreme anti-religious views, it is unlikely that he would be allied with such Christian apologists; and he loathed Stöcker in particular.
Now there’s an interesting point. While Gray is wagging his finger chidingly at Haeckel, what does he have to say about the court-preacher Stöcker? Nothing. Apparently Haeckel was operating in a cultural vacuum, and only his words mattered…at a time when theologians weren’t just arguing for the objective reality of races, but were actively advocating the extermination of races.
There is a perfectly good explanation for why Gray neglects to mention them, however. People like Darwin and Huxley and Haeckel left a positive legacy; we remember them for their productive contributions to knowledge, which makes their failings (and they were humans, we all have failings) stand out in contrast. The majority of the religious advocates of the era left us nothing particularly memorable, useful, or interesting, except in exceptional instances, the viciousness of their hatred. It’s a kind of selective memory. The tabloids and church sermons, which were enormously influential among the general public, are ignored, except by particularly diligent historians (that is, not John Gray), while the science abides, marred as it is, and gets referred to frequently by modern scientists. We don’t forget the past, errors and all, while religious thinking is eminently forgettable.
Yikes. I’ve only gotten through the first quarter of his essay, and it’s a mess of bad history and religious blindness. It’s not going to get better. Gray maunders on, rambling over tired stereotypes and antique objections to atheism that I’ve heard a thousand times before, always with more vigor than Gray can muster. Jebus, but he’s a boring writer.
But after that long introduction, he does admit to the premise in his title. There was the possibility that the question, “what scares the New Atheists?”, was entirely an invention of the editors, but nope. It’s Gray’s idea.
The predominant varieties of atheist thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to show that the secular west is the model for a universal civilisation. The missionary atheism of the present time is a replay of this theme; but the west is in retreat today, and beneath the fervour with which this atheism assaults religion there is an unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.
I…what? I’ve been wrestling for years with people who insist that atheism has nothing at all to do with liberal values. The American Atheists organization is courting madly reactionary conservatives at CPAC! Yet somehow John Gray thinks atheists are all unblinkingly liberal? To the extent that they’re panicking over an imaginary collapse of Western values?
For 21st century atheist missionaries, being liberal and scientific in outlook are one and the same.
Oh, I wish.
But that is his thesis, bolstered by nothing but blustering punditry. It’s shallow and wrong and presented at mind-numbing length. He presents conclusions that I might agree with — because they’re often obvious — as if atheists are completely unaware of them and ought to be surprised and dismayed. “Hey, look, scientific racists! I bet you never heard of them before, so checkmate, atheists!” His examples are often really terrible; not because science never make mistakes, but because his examples are cases of biases that have been falsified by science. Scientific racism is the refuge of cranks and pretentious panderers, not legitimate scientists in relevant fields. Racism is a poor example for denying the power of science because science actually does support egalitarian, liberal values on that subject.
That does not imply that science and atheism are infallible guides to good social values. Again, we’ve frequently seen science twisted into propaganda to support tyranny, as Gray points out.
In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.
This is discombobulating. Apparently I, as among the most vociferously liberal New Atheists around, have been the King of Atheism all this time. Yet Gray doesn’t cite me even once, preferring to quote more conservative New Atheists as evidence that atheism is intrinsically liberal. I know, that makes no sense, but as the essay demonstrates, Gray has no sense at all of any of the ongoing arguments within the atheist community and is just yelling at Imaginary Atheists.
And if I were King of the Atheists (I’m not, relax, and John Gray: don’t write another essay condemning my leadership, because I’m just a guy with a blog), I wouldn’t support the argument he’s making. I’ve been saying the opposite: movement atheism, as currently formulated, has serious problems precisely because it refuses to incorporate any position on human values at all. It’s in the awkward state of trying to be all things to all people, a blank slate on which Libertarian atheists can scribble selfish manifestos, or Humanist atheists can state their altruistic values. I’ve been arguing not that atheism leads inevitably to liberalism, but that if we don’t make any commitment at all to any progressive ideas, we’re only going to descend into chaos and purposelessness.
Or I suppose movement atheism could endorse Randian libertarianism wholesale, and avoid the curse of chaos and purposelessness, and instead march purposefully forward into a dystopian future. Atheism alone does allow for a lot of alternatives.
But one thing I bet all the conservative and liberal atheists could agree on: John Gray is full of shit.
But of course. It follows directly from the opposite case. Isn’t it obvious that the (opposite of liberal) = conservapoid, and we all know that conservapoids are vehemently ANTIscience. Reality has a liberal bias. Scientists only study reality, so scientists become indoctrinated with liberal bias. QED
——————————————————————————-
He implied Stöcker was a ‘rabid Anti-Semite’, and that Haeckel ‘loathed’ him. Not exactly “nothing”, maybe not enough, but at least something.
Am I reading this wrong, or does he literally say “illiberal (that is, NOT liberal) institutions that have tried to assert basis in science have been fraudulent and ephemeral, therefore liberal values can’t be scientifically validated”? He seems to reach the polar opposite conclusion of what his initial statement implies. If non-liberal attempts to co-opt science as a support of their values have been fraudulent, doesn’t it imply that science supports liberal values?
… there’s nothing racists love better than a scientist coming along and giving some supposedly objective justification for their bigotry.
Well, except for good ol’-fashioned raw power…
@1 twas brillig
The quote about Stöcker is not from the Gray article.
Yeah, it’s from Richards, who is a Haeckel scholar. What does Gray do, anyway?
re 4&5
oops, sorry for misreading…
Whenever I see the name John Gray I think of this guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MacLachlan_Gray
Depends: if he were specifically asking what scares the subset of “new” atheist right-wing douchebags, the answers is quite obvious:
The plebs.
The atheistic rightwing douches are, indeed, living in a comfortable position of privilege, and like many patricians and aristocrats before them, they are terrified at the prospect of the downtrodden eventually retaliating against them, hence their adherence to the “the religious rubes are inept morons who deserve to be forcefully kept in a subservient position” school of thought.
Another case of someone who thinks he understands atheists without ever actually, you know, talking to some. Or if he did talk to some–not read a book, however atheistic, but actually engage in conversation with a few atheists–he didn’t really listen because, I suspect, he already knew what atheists think. Because he read the God Delusion. Or at least scanned through it. Or maybe just the first chapter. And he read a bunch of people who aren’t atheists talking about atheists. He is, after all, a scholar.
As for me, I am afraid of something. I am afraid of the mindless religious, fallen into the trap oligarchy set for them. History tells us what can happen when the unhappy masses are pointed at a scapegoat. The potential they have to make the lives of my grandchildren hell is entirely too real.
When I saw the title I thought it was going to be about Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, those sorts of places.
@twas brillig:
Happens to the best. We know when it happens to the best, because the best can own up to error and integrate the new info before moving on.
@PZ:
To be the most generous possible to John Gray (not the comedian … or at least, not the intentional comedian), you write a blog. Your language isn’t always picked with the care that would make it easier to distinguish between “atheism on its own entails ethical consequences” and, “accepting certain ethical givens and certain observations about the nature of reality – including the nature of human society and the nature of cause and effect, to name two – accepting atheism must then lead one to different ethical conclusions than accepting any particular incarnation of theism.”
Nor is the language of others picked with the care that a presumably attentive-but-wrongheaded Gray would understand. Dawkins, for one, has shown that he’s quite able to speak carelessly.
None of this excuses Gray, really. He’s deep in his biases, making it difficult to parse what people who don’t accept his givens are actually thinking. Then he goes and does the truly idiotic: psychologizing unknown people, and that without even any fucking data. He should know better, really.
I’ll say more about Gray later, because this touches on a topic that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while now, but my basic points here are these:
1: human communication is messy, and outsiders don’t have to be dumb to get anthropology/sociology wrong.
2: human psychology is messier, and the links between anthro/soc and individual psychology are convoluted at best. Psychologizing individual motivations from social movements or large subcultures isn’t possible to do well. It doesn’t fucking work.
3: Nonetheless, we want to understand those around us. That supposed evolutionary tendency to see intention where it isn’t in order to predict danger, food sources, etc? That hypothesis, if it’s solid, would also tend to predict that those of us who fall hardest for religion on the basis of seeing a god’s intent in gravity pulling a willow’s branches into a parasol would also be far too quick to believe that they can divine the intentions of other persons. Note that this, also, does not require Gray be dumb.
4: Gray has training as a philosopher, which is supposed to make him aware of these biases. It doesn’t make us immune to thinking according to our biases, but it is supposed to give him the tools to stop himself from publishing shit he knows is likely to be ridiculous and poorly supported.
5: Either the training didn’t take due to arrogance or impulse control or bad teachers or whatever, OR Gray is publishing this crap despite being aware of it being crap.
6: Not stupid, but incompetent at a specific task basic to the philosopher’s methodology OR being a jerk (OR being outright evil, I guess).
John Gray: your column leads to firmer conclusions about you than it does about your topic. If there’s ever a sign of a worthless hypothesis, that’s it.
Ultimately, it comes down to this:
If I believe something that is incorrect or immoral because I am ignorant, I can educate myself.
If I believe something that is incorrect or immoral because I am prejudiced, I can seek out experiences that weaken that prejudice.
But if I believe something that is incorrect or immoral because I believe the creator of the Universe shares my belief, then I am pretty much fucked. And if enough people share those “divinely inspired” incorrect or immoral beliefs, then society is fucked.
As Voltaire said more succinctly, “If they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.
Gray is failing to distinguish between science — which is indeed intricately connected to the evolving liberal Enlightenment ideals of reason, human rights, and progress — and pseudoscience. When scientific views are adopted because they support the superiority of a nation, race, or tribe they are then held immune to criticism and no longer scientific. You can only self-correct when you care more about the content of the dissent than who the dissenters are.
As for atheism, if we approach the existence of God as a philosophical/ scientific hypothesis, it doesn’t stand against the alternate theory of Naturalism. I think John Gray is very afraid of that — thus the smoke and mirrors.
Okay, Mr. Gray, this atheist is overwhelmingly scared of ‘religionists’; not ‘theists’ per se, but those who construct authoritarian bureaucracies around a mythos, in order to dominate all the accomodative people of the general population.
And, naturally, totes scared that Gawd really does exist, and will take revenge on my denial of his existence. (that’s what all the religionists say about atheists, so gots to be correct, right?)
It is quite telling when people like Gray dis those “evil atheist scientists” but are likely to be mum when when it suits them. If Gray develops an infection he will wholeheartedly accept the germ theory of disease and receive antibiotics. He would casually ignore the fact that Koch and Pasteur had an influence on the Nazi racist ideology. If Gray suffered a seizure, he would have no qualms in undergoing an EEG even though it was developed by Nazi eugenics supporter, Hans Berger. There is little doubt that Gray would take an Aspirin daily if he suffered a stroke or myocardial infarction. And yes, he would mentally erase the fact that the Bayer corporation, as subsidiary of Farber used slave labor from Auschwitz.
Just to underscore the point that yes, many scientists held abhorrent views but not because they were scientists. They were part of a racist cultural milieu that also included priests, lawyers, politicians, artists, etc.. who held similar views. But Gray singles out the mean atheist scientists as though they were Davros in solely creating the evil genocidal dalek culture (a call out to you Who fans). But Gray would embrace them if it suits him. Therefore in the words of Tom Baker…..flapgobbledygook!!!
Here, Gray is correct, if he means atheism does not lead inevitably to science and to liberal values. That sequence has it almost completely backwards.
When I first encountered organized atheism (AA) and humanism (AHA) back in the 70’s, it used to puzzle me that so many atheists (and humanists!) were so illiberal. I eventually realized that a lot of atheists were “mad at god”, and that humanistic values did not necessarily have a grounding in scientific values (I argued with Paul Kurtz about his, to me baseless, laundry lists of humanistic values).
Coming to atheism by way of science, it has always been clear to me that the scientific value of truth-telling (acting in such a way that what is true might be verified as true) leads both to atheism (via naturalism), and to liberal values (via the need to form a cooperative community in order to even begin to do science).
When atheism is based in a flight from religious dogma and cruelty, it can end up almost anywhere, including the libertarian (but illiberal) rejection of concern for our neighbors, who are our potential colleagues. No wonder the lone mad scientist (with no colleagues, but somehow plenty of money) has become such a popular fictional characature of the scientist in our conservative society.
@PZ I am so grateful to you for actually finishing the article and confirming that the guy’s writing really is boring. As far as I can tell, @Crip Dyke’s points are well made, so you get four atheist-o’s with the benefit of the doubt since I couldn’t make it past the 3/4 mark of Gray’s article.
The dude wasted my time. Also, @Laurentweppe’s point is important. Some atheists do underestimate religious people because they are terrified by said people and try to dehumanize them as a result. The tendency to do this is strikingly similar to how some religious people think of atheists.
In terms of movement atheism, PZ is right, although I don’t think that the word Atheism alone will ever rise above the churning waters of dissent within the community. This is debatable, however, and PZ’s advocacy for an already-in-use term to become shorthand for rational as well as godless is a position I respect.
I would say that, movement-wise, we often see active humanists (who do have way too much religious baggage for many atheists’ tastes), actively nihilistic libertariany atheists, who fuel the arguments of the religious against atheism, and the intelligencia which is gaining power, but is still figuring out it’s footing and doesn’t yet have an established stance. It has the misogyny that often comes with celebrity and intellectual respect, as well as such a prioritization of personal freedoms that all of the family values impulses (i.e. don’t cheat, lie, or steal) common to us as people get bottled up and explode in elevators. And this lack of a coherent moral code that acknowledges and works with moral impulses that come into conflict with freedom-driven impulses (Boobquake. I’m talking about boobquake, okay?) makes it difficult to gain larger committed atheist activists.
Thanks for the takedown, PZ. I started reading this article yesterday and realized early on that it was crap; I skimmed to half way (“oh dog, of course he’s quoting Harris”) and then closed the page. Has he not bothered to even read other recent articles in the same paper?
What is this
newprogressive atheist scared of? The answer to that is quite simple; authoritarian Right wing power mongers – who usually derive their authority and status at least in part from religion and its asscoiated anti-scientific reality-denial, and by extension from the unearned cache religious belief still enjoys in our society – have already taken great strides both toward destroying the biome we depend upon and creating an oppressive, dystopian future where the elite treat everyone else (and especially the already marginalised and routinely mistreated groups in society, like LGBT people, people of colour and women) as just another form of disposeable commodity.I am afraid that they will finish the job.
Actually, I’ve just completed a highly detailed study of what scares New Atheists.
It’s spiders.
@SqueakyVoice:
Thread won.
And your nom-de-net played the best supporting role.
I read the article yesterday, it was appalling, the author seemed to think that by being as wordy as possible he would be able to hide the fact he had few ideas and no evidence
What it seemed to boil down to was that in the past, there have been atheists who hold views we longer agree with, that just because someone is an atheist doesn’t mean they are going to be generally liberal and that religion is getting more popular in China and Russia.
That’s it, I really don’t think he made any other points
Spiders are our friends.
So, what scares atheists? I can’t talk for all atheists, but I’m quite sure most of us are scared of heights, some of mice, and some of wasps.
Well, for SOME of the prominent New Atheists, the answer to the question, “What scares the New Atheists?” is pretty clearly, “Muslims.”
Also, “Feminists.”
“Eugenics was a moral catastrophe. We certainly recognize that now.”
Now, hold on a minute! Please don’t interject half-truth into an article devoted to correcting the half-truths of others. While I agree that many implementations of eugenics have been problematic, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it in principle. Farmers use positive eugenics for improving crops and animal breeders for improving livestock and pets, just as both use negative eugenics to avoid passing on bad genes. As a principle, eugenics is neutral; just a tool with which one can make more informed decisions.
Calling eugenics “a moral catastrophe” is as groundless as calling euthanasia “a moral catastrophe”. Has euthanasia been implemented in unethical ways? Of course, but those examples diverge from the very definition of “having a good death”, just as the definition of “having good inherited characteristics” does not necessarily require the imposition of the State. If eugenics were taught as a positive set of guidelines, perhaps fewer people with genetically heritable problems would be likely to heedlessly reproduce. Heritable diseases like sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis could die out by people who carry those genes simply not reproducing. That absolutely is a form of eugenics, and one worth promoting. The State should neither mandate nor enforce these principles, but I would say the same for euthanasia.
For quite some while Fr Gray has been using his New Statesman pulpit to further the comfort and kindness meme about religion whilst denigrating all science as positivist. It goes down with a certain audience of conservatives. Basically he is in pre-conversion mode . Expect enlightenment and talking in tongues soon.
@weareallbornatheists, #27:
Okay, look: it’s a fucking blog. We are, obviously, from context talking about **human** eugenics.
Moreover, I don’t know where you get the idea that “eugenics” is broadly used as some scientific tool, or that any decision to insert a gene into a variety of wheat qualifies as eugenics.
try searching on google for
and you get things like:
or from dictionary.reference.com:
or merriam-webster:
“Well gollolleee!” Gomer Pyle would say. It seems that there’s a trend here regarding whether or not “eugenics” is explicitly about people. A trend that has left you behind, child.
So let’s take a closer look at:
Who fucking decides which are good characteristics and which of those characteristics that run in families are coded in the human genome? Who, precisely? If this is voluntary and some mom teaches a child that the child’s cystic fibrosis was a gift from god b/c it taught her humility, blah, blah, wouldn’t it then – according to eugenic principles – be incumbent on the child to seek out another person with double CF alleles and have as many children as possible?
Informed how? By whom? What “information” does eugenics add? Please refer to the writings of an actual proponent of eugenics (preferably important to the eugenic movement) when sourcing the incredibly valuable information that eugenics does or will provide to those considering reproduction.
And, finally, you assert that while
Name ONE implementation of eugenics that hasn’t been problematic. ONE.
But would that actually work? How would people know if they are asymptomatic carriers? Would you force testing? What if people couldn’t afford the test. Are you paying for it? How many people do you think fail to carry a single recessive allele for any traits whatsoever that would be profoundly limiting if doubled? Can you “promote” the idea that people with cystic fibrosis shouldn’t exist without doing harm to people with cystic fibrosis?
And yet you’re sure it’s “worth” promoting, presumably because you think the cost to people with CF is worth it. How worthy of you.
Moreover, you aren’t even discussing eugenics as actually understood. People making their own decisions about parenting and reproducing isn’t being criticized here. Eugenics is.
Two out of 3 of the above definitions use “controlled breeding” or “controlling which people become parents”. Eugenics has always been about upper class white folks justifying their wealth and privilege with false naturalism. Further, it has always carried with it the idea of enforcement for those not willing to go along with its oh-so-benign plans for human betterment.
Eugenics was questioned from without, not from within. It is, was, and will always be an ethical abomination.
Just like your fucking comment.
Apparently, no one has explained to you that it’s ill-advised to type drunk.
He rambles on. I perked up a bit when it talks about how we derive rights and things from Locke and such. Therefore it’s taking some ideas from monotheism or something. This isn’t a good point. I once posed the concept of rights to a utilitarian community, and one thing they mentioned is that you can consider rights generated from iterated prisoner’s dilemmas that would generate their high value. Essentially, we know how important rights are because of all the terrible things that happen when we violate them.
But I notice he doesn’t mention John Rawls, who is pretty significant for modern liberal values and his theories didn’t come from any God idea AFAIK.
weareallbornatheists @30
Looks like the loser just conceded.
*holds Crip Dyke’s gloved hand up to signify the triumph*
I’m going to let Crip Dyke’s smackdown of the pro-eugenics crap stand, with this addendum:
Sickle-cell disease is a shitty example to choose. Here’s why:
Sickle-cell disease is caused by a person being homozygous for the HgbS allele (rather than HgbA). This fact, I believe is generally known: sickle-cell disease is a classic example of an autosomal recessive condition (as is your other example, cystic fibrosis). Sickle-cell disease carries a high rate of pain, disability, and early death. It looks like an excellent example of something that humanity would be better without.
But!
Being heterozygous for HgbS and HgbA is beneficial! It confers (somewhat limited, to be sure, but real) immunity to Plasmodium merozoites. Until the relatively recent anti-mosquito campaigns, this immunity could literally be the difference between getting malaria (which, until relatively recently, had a high morbidity/mortality rate) and not getting malaria.
Thus, if you live in an area full of Plasmodium-toting mosquitos, being homozygous for HgbA meant that you were at catastrophic risk of contracting malaria (which sucks). Being homozygous for HgbS gave you sickle-cell disease (which also sucks). But being heterozygous HgbS/HgbA is good! Your blood can carry oxygen efficiently and you don’t get malaria. Win/Win!
Weareallbornatheists, your diatribe about PZ being allegedly wrong about eugenics is entirely your lack of comprehension or your intentional dishonesty. “Eugenics was a moral catastrophe” doesn’t refer to eugenics in principle or in theory. It refers to eugenics as it actually happened. As it was actually applied and used in our history. And Crip Dyke more than adequately described what that was.
The salt in the wound of the atrocious things done in the Holy Name of Eugenics, by great intellectual scientific high society folk, is that even setting aside the moral issues, they usually didn’t even real understanding of genes. They didn’t really need to for their purposes. They found some flimsy patterns, and then just flat out assumed that things like “criminality” and “poverty” were heritable at a fucking genetic level. Or at least heritable enough to justify sterilizing them. And again, your attempts to gloss over that are either because you are ignorant of the relevant history, or because you are dishonest and just want to play a game of GOTCHA, on technicalities. Sorry, nice try, but this isn’t the right crowd to play that with. It isn’t that easy to obfuscate around here.
@Esteleth, #33:
Deep, authoritative, terrorizing voice:
Esteleth’s 33:
Deep, authoritative, terrorizing voice:
Feminist, anti-eugenics gamers FTW!
John Gray’s thesis regarding The Fear, specifically, is incredibly amusing: The westernized form of civilization (whatever that may be) is not as dominant any more, which causes a liberal moral panic in atheists? The concern about Western Civilization and culture is usually a right-wing thing. In fact, that is part of their complaints on a variety of things, from immigration to multiculturalism, from the Communist hysteria of the near past to the Muslim bashing of the present. And it’s why the more Islamophobic atheists who also might wail and moan about Western Values usually also have some additional illiberal ideas attached to them, whether it is in regard to women, or the poor, or gay people, or trans people, or non-Americans in general.
And, taking the “west” out of the equation, John Gray seems to be projecting (or pulling a straight-up Fox News style reversal of reality): Secularity doesn’t appear to be waning, nor is lack of religion in those countries that are already secular.
Well, I dunno — some of my sixth-grade sons’ classmates have found out he’s not a believer and have taken to telling him he’s going to hell and that he’s inherently evil. So yeah, that does give me some reason for concern.
Gee, I wonder what John Gray is scared of.
Dude. Weak.
“Dude. Weak.”
You’re right. What I should’ve said was
“How often do you have to replace your keyboard, what with all of the pounding and spittle?”
“I don’t know where you get the idea that “eugenics” is broadly used as some scientific tool, or that any decision to insert a gene into a variety of wheat qualifies as eugenics.”
Do you really not understand the difference between eugenics and genetic engineering? Hint: the former involves either negative eugenics, like not allowing a negative genetic strain to continue, or positive genetics, like promoting the perpetuation of inherent genetic traits. “Inserting a (non-wheat) gene into wheat” is utterly different from eugenics, and it’s nothing I suggested.
“(definitions): try searching on google for eugenics definition and you get things like: the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis…the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics)…a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents”
1. One can go dictionary-mining and Wiki-searching and come up with carefully edited definitions for anything. If I wasn’t already quite familiar with the definition of eugenics, or its history, I wouldn’t have posted anything about it here. It sounds to me like your notions are the result of preconceptions shaped by a Biology 101 class, taught by a politically-correct teacher, and later shaped by some personal issue (otherwise, why the histrionics?)
2. Have you noticed that none of the definitions you provided mention genetic engineering?
“Who fucking decides which are good characteristics and which of those characteristics that run in families are coded in the human genome? Who, precisely?”
The same people who have for years have advised women to not get pregnant if they have genetic traits that could predispose their child to a life-threatening condition: namely, scientists, through informed obstetricians and other physicians.
“If this is voluntary and some mom teaches a child that the child’s cystic fibrosis was a gift from god b/c it taught her humility, blah, blah, wouldn’t it then – according to eugenic principles – be incumbent on the child to seek out another person with double CF alleles and have as many children as possible?”
Nothing is stopping them from doing exactly that, right now, so your hypothetical scenario is useless.
“Informed how? By whom? What “information” does eugenics add? Please refer to the writings of an actual proponent of eugenics (preferably important to the eugenic movement) when sourcing the incredibly valuable information that eugenics does or will provide to those considering reproduction.”
By whom? Newsflash: Scientists! Those same folks who have for years been advising women who have such genetic predispositions to terminate pregnancies.
http://journals.lww.com/neurotodayonline/Fulltext/2003/06000/Pregnancy_Counseling_for_Genetic_Diseases__No_Easy.2.aspx
“Name ONE implementation of eugenics that hasn’t been problematic. ONE.
1. If any specific example of eugenics were nonproblematic, it’s less likely you would’ve heard about it, since it wouldn’t be sensationalistic news.
2. I can name many of examples of eugenics that haven’t been problematic. Here’s one off the top of my head:
marriage between first cousins is statistically far more likely to produce offspring with serious health issues caused by recessive genetic traits. In Britain, for example, members of the Pakistani community have a 13-times higher incidence rate of such genetic conditions than non-Pakistani Britons, the direct result of the inbreeding within that community. Because of problems like this, laws exist in most Western nations that prohibit marriage between first cousins.
“How dare the state tell me that I can’t marry my cousin! That’s an infringement of my civil rights! Who is our Surgeon General, anyway — Dr. Mengele?!”
/rolleyes
“But would that actually work? How would people know if they are asymptomatic carriers? Would you force testing? What if people couldn’t afford the test. Are you paying for it? How many people do you think fail to carry a single recessive allele for any traits whatsoever that would be profoundly limiting if doubled? Can you “promote” the idea that people with cystic fibrosis shouldn’t exist without doing harm to people with cystic fibrosis?”
Your question utterly pales in comparison to the one it begs: can you promote the production of children with a statistically much greater chance of being harmed by being born with CF just because you think that the “right to choose” of potential parents who already have CF trumps a potential child’s right to not have a short, miserable life? Do you really believe that the “right to choose” to have a child trumps everything else — including the well-being of the child?
The state would save money by providing screening to those who can’t afford it (they’re probably already providing healthcare to them anyway); it’s far more expensive for the state to have to care for a child with a debilitating disease for the rest of its life.
An aunt of mine was a pharmacist’s assistant in a state mental institution in the ’60s through ’80s. She told me interesting stories about some of the long-term patients there who had mental impairments such as Down Syndrome. One such young woman was constantly sneaking off with male patients with Down Syndrome, and getting pregnant. Through most of the ’60s (when abortion was illegal) when the patient would deliver, the baby would be sent off to yet another institution to be raised (they invariably had Down Syndrome as well). In the early-’70s, the mental institution was finally able to surreptitiously add birth control pills to the woman’s daily pill regimen, thus preventing more babies with Down Syndrome from being born. That was absolutely a form of eugenics and its positive results far outweighed any negatives.
And anyway — your pseudo-logistical quandaries and handwringing aren’t really quandaries at all; they’re the same kinds of questions that healthcare professionals face every day when they count the beans and say “sorry, but we need to pull the plug on this guy instead of simply keeping him on life-support indefinitely, at the expense of the state”. Eugenics are euthanasia are just mirror images of each other.
“Moreover, you aren’t even discussing eugenics as actually understood. People making their own decisions about parenting and reproducing isn’t being criticized here. Eugenics is.”
And you aren’t discussing eugenics as actually *is*; you’re discussing the straw-man version of it built by people with political agendas; the eugenics of Hollywood, Berkeley and of the Bible Belt. “Eugenics” is no more inherently wrong than “euthanasia” is. There are millions of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of physician-assisted suicide, call it “playing god”, “murder” or worse, and spout any one of a host of different reasons why it should not be allowed. Personally, I’ve never been convinced by emotional arguments.
“Eugenics has always been about upper class white folks justifying their wealth and privilege with false naturalism. Further, it has always carried with it the idea of enforcement for those not willing to go along with its oh-so-benign plans for human betterment.”
Ah, “upper-class white folks, and their wealth and privilege”. Clearly, they’re responsible for all that’s wrong in this world. Well, other than the internet, computers, electricity, electric light, television, the printing press, recorded sound, photography, telephony, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, refrigeration, the automobile, the airplane, satellites, patchouli-scented Kleenex and just about everything else your lucky ass enjoys. Yes, life on earth would be paradisaical if only it were run by say, poor Nigerians.
(And BTW — Alexander Graham Bell — that upper-class white guy who invented the telephone? Big supporter of eugenics. Ditto Edison, Tesla and most other upper-class white inventors whose products have benefited so many. Apparently they somehow missed the fact that fewer people would mean fewer customers. But just to be on the safe side and not get tainted by association, I recommend eschewing anything those awful eugenics supporters may have invented.”)
“Eugenics was questioned from without, not from within. It is, was, and will always be an ethical abomination. Just like your fucking comment.”
Bullshit. Eugenics has always been questioned by scientists, just as it was scientists from whence the idea came. And it’s curious that you choose to call something an “abomination” — the language of the religious; an all-purpose pronouncement intended to silence others. There are no “abominations” in the real world. If eugenics had no potential value, it would’ve died a natural death (HEY-o!). But in fact, it did not die out, and it exists today, albeit under a variety of other names. And even *you* support some of them, if, for example, you support a woman’s right to choose (as I do). Allowing a woman to terminate a pregnancy if a prenatal screening shows trisomy-21 in the fetus? Absolutely a form of eugenics.
Abortion has been treated with the same hysterical denouncements as euthanasia and eugenics have been, and by many of the same groups. Ironically, perhaps the greatest early champion of a woman’s right to choose abortion was Margaret Sanger, who was also . . . wait for it . . . one of the greatest champions of eugenics.
weareallbornatheists
So your point is, what? That the word has a strict meaning which differs from the everyday usage?
Wow! Welcome to the wonderful world of language.
*slow clap*
As if there wasn’t already a reason to dismiss the fuckwittery out-of-hand already.
@PZ
I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. You’re giving way too much credit to the asshat. Please see:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/aronra/2015/01/01/darwins-view-of-the-races-of-men/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/aronra/2015/02/10/darwin-was-no-racist-and-hitler-was-no-darwinist/
This is a minor nit. Whether or not Darwin actually supported racist views and/or eugenics is largely irrevalent to any actual point. Still, it’s probably a rhetorically useful tactic to rightly argue that Darwin was not a racist, and was not supportive of eugenics, and was rather extreme for the time for doubting and arguing against taxonomic classifications of human races.
…
@Crip Dyke
Depends on what you mean by the word, but for prospective parents who might otherwise pass on genetic diseases, aren’t there services available now that can select specific eggs and/or sperm which do not carrier the genes responsible for specific diseases, and then implant the fertilized egg in the woman? That seems like a good kind of eugenics. Surely this is an unequivocally good thing for at least some genetic diseases.
Or does eugenics necessarily include “non-voluntary”?
“Darwin was not a racist”
Ok. That probably cannot be supported by the available evidence, but a majority of my point stands.
Bingo.
Voluntary actions by intelligent people isn’t a problem. Forced sterilization, for example, is.
Eugenics isn’t about counselling* a woman to have an abortion if her child has birth defects of some kind, it’s about counselling adult people not to have babies at all because any baby they have will be some kind of negative burden on society – either a born criminal, or someone supposedly incapable of any net positive contribution.
I use the word ‘counselling’, but this type of “counselling” has included forced sterilization (en masse), forced abortion, and campaigns against even forming relationships with these people (or at least, strongly encouraging relationships with genetically appropriate people).
This isn’t about those few pregnant women being warned that their babies will be born with some kind of genetic disease, or about parents choosing to have healthy children via scientific methods that can guarantee them a child without a genetic disease. It’s about a sustained, implemented plan to keep specific people from having children at all, or, if not possible, of forcing (or, shall I say, strongly encouraging) the ‘better half’ to outbreed the unwanted part of society. For purely American examples, see here.
And something a little more modern.
Not really seeing anything good in any of that.
weareallbornatheists,
Eugenics is a controlled systematic program imposed on people.
What you’re describing is people themselves independently putting thought and care into the decision to have or not have children with the focus being on the welfare of the child.
The two are nothing alike. They’re opposites.
@weareallbornatheists:
From your #27:
I responded with information showing that eugenics is **necessarily** about humans. You can choose to agree or disagree, but when I criticize you for writing off-topic bullshit, saying:
it is blatantly dishonest to paint **me** as the confused party who believes there is no distinction between genetic engineering and eugenics, as you plainly did when you responded in your #41:
Obviously untrue. Farmers improve crops through, among other things, using genetically engineered wheat. If your own example is so broad that it encompasses both genetic engineering and whatever the hell else
would be, that’s not my problem.
That’s yours. YOU are the one who doesn’t know the differences here. Eugenics is about human beings. Not farmer’s crops. In fact, the only reasonable interpretation of your statement, given the actual definition of eugenics, is that farmers are encouraging the reproduction of human beings that are good agriculturalists. That’s how bad your writing is on this topic.
Back to your #41:
What? I took the first 3 definitions regardless of how well or poorly they served my argument. 2 described eugenics without reference to actual efforts to “improve” the human race, 1 using merely passive “study of” language, when I believe the word necessarily refers to actual social efforts, not mere observation of traits’ prevalence and/or supposed benefits.
Moreover, I didn’t edit the damn definitions at all. So even if I did “go dictionary mining” for only my favorite definitions, to then say that the definitions were “carefully edited” is redundant. Padding your argument by pretending a single point is actually two isn’t giving you more credibility here.
Refuted by your use of “improving crops” as an example of eugenics, combined with the evident fact that you have posted here.
permit me to rephrase:
Congratulations on mastering inductive reasoning. No, really. I’m sure your contributions to the philosophy and practice of pedagogy will benefit the world for generations to come.
I’m going to connect this one with a later bit:
Ah, thank you Mr. Spock.
However, it’s quite telling that your first response was to dismiss my critique of your #27 entirely as the ramblings of someone drunk. You apparently needed to come back to my #29 later to realize it had actual substance.
You clearly have difficulty determining the difference between an argument made by someone who actually possesses emotions and isn’t afraid to show them and a mere appeal to emotion.
I can be outraged by your arrogant self-entitlement when you assert that farmers improving crops is eugenics but that **I** don’t know what eugenics is, as evidenced by the fact that I paraphrased you instead of quoting you.
Pro-tip, when someone is criticizing your work in a debate, even if you feel you’ve been paraphrased incorrectly, that isn’t actually evidence of what the critic believes. It’s evidence of what you have managed to communicate to the critic that you believe. The problem in that communication might be on either side or mutual, but it is in no way evidence of the critics beliefs. Your failure to appreciate that shows you to be either 1) arguing incompetently in this case, or 2) dishonest. Compounding the error by being unable to distinguish a) language including emotion, from b) language which relies only on emotion to persuade only strengthens the likelihood that this is a recurring problem for you, and not merely a bad day at the keyboard.
====================
You have littered your #41 with so much wrong that I’m barely a third through it, but that will suffice for now. Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking will be able to judge for themselves who originated errors such as wheat being relevant to eugenics and who has the better arguments.
Whether the critical thinkers in the crowd judge me more emotional or not, I could care less. It’s a human property to possess and communicate emotion. If you don’t want to be human, that’s your lookout.
@Englightenment Liberal:
Eugenics is necessarily an effort to eliminate traits considered problems/problematic. Poverty itself was and frequently is considered a heritable trait that should be the subject of eugenic effort to eliminate through ending the reproduction of the poor and increasing the reproduction of the rich.
Prospective parents freely making their own decisions about what traits they wish to pass on is precisely the opposite of eugenics.
There are, of course, “less problematic” and “more problematic” implementations.
Nuke the ghetto, I would argue, is more horrific than forced sterilization is more horrific than, “we’ve got to stop those welfare queens from having more babies,” political campaigns.
Nonetheless neutrally passing on uninterpreted information about traits and heritability – even if later used by individuals as one facet of a reproductive decision – is not eugenics.
Nor is it eugenics when individual people make individual reproductive decisions. Neither one individual nor one couple has the potential to make decisions that will ensure or eliminate the presence of a trait within a country or a race or within the human species. It’s just not eugenics.
rq wrote “(eugenics is) about counselling adult people not to have babies at all because any baby they have will be some kind of negative burden on society – either a born criminal, or someone supposedly incapable of any net positive contribution.”
That’s not entirely accurate. Eugenics would also take into consideration whether or not that hypothetical baby might be doomed to a life of suffering. A girl I went to college with had CF. Lovely girl, smart, fearless, and she’d been through hell in the previous 18 years, with spending long stretches in the hospital every 6 months, constant hacking cough, etc. I lost track of her after college but later found out that before she died (in her early 30s), she had had two children. Later still, I found out that one of them also has CF (what a surprise.) If a person *didn’t* have an hereditary disease that gave its sufferer an expected life expectancy of 20 years, but they somehow intentionally infected a baby with that disease, we’d call them a monster. But if a person does it through reproducing, we call them a mother, and we defend their “right to choose” as being more important than another person’s right to not be afflicted with a deadly disease. It’s perverse.
And being “capable of any net positive contribution” is not an inherent qualification of eugenics. What “net positive contribution” can be ascribed to most humans? Very little. So it’s not reasonable to require that from hypothetical offspring. But it *is* reasonable to not bring more people into the world who are likely to experience little but suffering, and produce little but expense.
rq wrote
@ weareallbornatheists;
While you are discussing the notional ‘beneficial’ applications of eugenics, I would remind you that there are people who frequent Pharyngula who are differently abled and/or who have the sort of heritable genetic condition that has lead proponents of eugenics to imply or outright state that people like them should not be allowed to live at all.
This may be an interesting academic discussion to you, but it represents real pain, mistreatment and discrimination for others. However you might wish to define it, in practice eugenics has routinely been, and continues to be, used as a premise to dehumanise entire segments of our species. Whatever you may believe, and however you may wish to frame the discussion, in practice eugenics as it is commonly expressed and understood is an eliminationist ideology that declares entire classes of people to be so subhuman that the ideal solution for society is to prevent their birth entirely by means of preventing those who already have those ‘undesireable’ attributes from having children. When you have been told that you are unworthy of life by various means on a regular basis ever since you were born, you might understandably have little patience for eugenics apologetics such as that which you are producing here.
You might want to bear that in mind. There are people here who have more at stake in this than you do. For them, this is about more than your personal hobby horse. A little empathy might be in order.
Saad wrote “Eugenics is a controlled systematic program imposed on people. What you’re describing is people themselves independently putting thought and care into the decision to have or not have children with the focus being on the welfare of the child. The two are nothing alike. They’re opposites.”
Perhaps you could show us where in the definition of the word or in every example of its implementation that is the case. I can save you the time: neither is true. You’re adding meaning to a word that isn’t there, and conflating some negative examples of its implementation, with reality.
Here’s an example of negative eugenics that violates your definition: the Spartans practiced a form of negative eugenics by leaving newborn children on an exposed area on Mt. Taygetus. Those that survived exposure for a day or two would be welcomed back into their homes; those that were too weak to survive, died. This practice *was* imposed upon the infants, but it *wasn’t* a “controlled systematic program”. It was people themselves independently putting thought and care into the decision of whether or not to raise a child.
Here’s an example of “positive eugenics” that violates your definition (although I’m risking Godwin by citing it): the Lebensborn program to encourage people to have more children in Nazi Germany was willingly engaged in by citizens who were largely motivated by patriotism and/or material incentives. While it certainly *was* a “controlled systematic program”, it *wasn’t* imposed upon anyone. So I’m afraid that your definition of the word is inaccurate.
@weareallbornatheists
Aren’t you arguing over semantics? I think the vast majority of individuals here would agree with your arguments regarding individual control over genetic destiny. The majority here would likely not bear children with his/her first cousin. I would also hazard a guess that many here would opt for terminating a pregnancy if there is a prenatal diagnosis of trisomy 21. And there are many more to examples to add. What you and everyone here is fully against is the state or any clique dictating to the masses their genetic destiny. You as an individual have the sole decision making in whether to have a child with someone with bipolar disorder in a society wherein individual freedom is cherished. Indeed, I would even agree that an individual should have the freedom to have a child with his/her first cousin. And I would agree that the state should assist in regards to the negative consequences (eg. birth of child with holoprosencephaly, epilepsy, etc,, as a result of consanguinity). No different than the state providing care for the smoker with the heart attack, the alcoholic with the bad liver, the stroke victim who ate burgers and fries, etc…Yes this is all the consequences of freedom and democracy with warts and all. But I’m sure you would agree that it’s far, far better than what any totalitarian bio-utopian geno-fanatics have to offer. As history dictates, those goose- stepping assholes caused so much cruelty.
weareallbornatheists, #54
I see. I was wrong about the controlled and systematic part.
Encouraging people to have more children is not what the term eugenics is taken to mean in reality.
@Nerd
Yep.
…
@Crip Dyke
Ok, what if the government got funds to ensure it was free to the population to engage in voluntary reproductive services which allow for parents to choose specific sperm and egg and avoid certain recessive genetic diseases. I think this government program meets your definition of “eugenics”, and I think this program would be laudable.
Crip Dyke wrote “Farmers improve crops through, among other things, using genetically engineered wheat. If your own example is so broad that it encompasses both genetic engineering and whatever the hell else…”
Ah, the “because I say so” declaration. The reality is that farmers don’t do a damned thing with GMOs other than plant and harvest them; they don’t do genetic engineering themselves; that takes place in the lab, by NON-farmers. NOR has eugenics historically included genetic modification of *humans*, so again — the mistaken conflation was yours, not mine.
“However, it’s quite telling that your first response was to dismiss my critique of your #27 entirely as the ramblings of someone drunk. You apparently needed to come back to my #29 later to realize it had actual substance. You clearly have difficulty determining the difference between an argument made by someone who actually possesses emotions and isn’t afraid to show them and a mere appeal to emotion. I can be outraged by your arrogant self-entitlement…”
I dismissed your “critique” as the ramblings of someone drunk because “critiques” don’t typically read like this:
“’Well gollolleee!’ Gomer Pyle would say. It seems that there’s a trend here regarding whether or not ‘eugenics’ is explicitly about people. A trend that has left you behind, child…(Eugenics), was, and will always be an ethical abomination. Just like your fucking comment… Your failure to appreciate that shows you to be either 1) arguing incompetently in this case, or 2) dishonest. Compounding the error by being unable to distinguish a) language including emotion, from b) language which relies only on emotion to persuade only strengthens the likelihood that this is a recurring problem for you, and not merely a bad day at the keyboard.”
That’s not a “critique”; that’s more like a “true believer” engaged in a shouting match at a demonstration. And everything else you’ve wrote has reinforced that image. Emotions don’t belong in a debate about eugenics any more than they belong in a debate about abortion of euthanasia. And trying to shout someone down, resorting to ad homimen, or condescendingly dismissing their views on a forum ostensibly devoted to freethought strikes me as more than a little odd.
Your pseudo Vulcanism, where no emotion should come into a debate, says a lot about your lack of empathy for those distressed by your inane arguments.
Take your pseudo Vulcanism and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
If you can’t stand emotions and emotional arguments, go to a philosophical web site where everybody talks past each other, but does so politely.
Also, it’s pretty rich to see “Ah, the “because I say so” declaration ” coming from someone whose entire definition consists of “I don’t care what the dictionary says, here’s what the word REALLY means because I say so.”
Gregory Greenwood wrote “While you are discussing the notional ‘beneficial’ applications of eugenics, I would remind you that there are people who frequent Pharyngula who are differently abled and/or who have the sort of heritable genetic condition that has lead proponents of eugenics to imply or outright state that people like them should not be allowed to live at all…You might want to bear that in mind. There are people here who have more at stake in this than you do. For them, this is about more than your personal hobby horse. A little empathy might be in order.”
I don’t doubt that’s true and if I’ve hurt anyone, I sincerely apologize.
Having said that, what topic might that *not* apply to? Is discussing abortion off-limits because a poster here may have had a bad experience with abortion? -or euthanasia, because someone may have recently lost a loved one? Those aren’t rhetorical questions; it’s a function of “free thought” that one expects to be able speak their minds without self-censorship or the fear of unintentionally offending others. One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that, no matter how controversial the subject, or how I may relate to it personally, having a thick skin is a necessary trait for engaging public debate.
And I might point out the implicit double-standard in the expectation that we all must tiptoe around anything that might offend people who belong to certain groups, but that it’s perfectly fine to bash say — oh, I dunno — ” upper class white folks (with) wealth and privilege”?
Numenaster wrote “…someone whose entire definition consists of ‘I don’t care what the dictionary says, here’s what the word REALLY means because I say so.’
I didn’t posit my own definition, and Crip Dyke didn’t post “what the dictionary says”, she posted *an excerpt* of what the dictionary says. I can do the same thing:
Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “Atheist – a person who believes that God does not exist” (source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheist )
Do *you* accept that definition as accurate? I sure as hell don’t! And yet, there it is — the main definition from a respected dictionary. My point in criticizing the copy-pasty of portions of definitions is because it gives the appearance of authority and accuracy while not necessarily containing either. So under the heading of “eugenics”, some dictionaries add references to of negative examples connected to it. Does that make the word inherently negative? I wouldn’t say so, any more than “atheist” is negative because, according to a dictionary, it supposedly requires a belief in a deity whose existence is a given.
Nerd of Redhead wrote “If you can’t stand emotions and emotional arguments, go to a philosophical web site where everybody talks past each other, but does so politely.”
So much for “free thought”, much less free expression.
And I’ve never yet seen a debate where emotions added anything of value (despite being a tactic frequently employed by religious apologists); more often than not, it’s disruptive, divisive and makes people defensive.
Weareallbornatheists said:
“she posted *an excerpt* of what the dictionary says. I can do the same thing:”
I notice you didn’t post any portion of what the dictionary says about the term eugenics. You know, the actual subject of this discussion. Now why might that be?
Oh, and Gregory Greenwood — I wanted to point out that when you mentioned that some people here might have conditions that may have led others in the past to say that “people like them should not be allowed to live at all” — the first thing that popped into my head was that there was a time not so long ago when any of us who are atheists would’ve faced the very same risk. Still, I don’t take it as a threat to my survival when someone brings up atheism and the way we’ve been persecuted in the past. Indeed, it has no emotional content at all for me. YMMV.
Weareallbornatheists also said
“So much for “free thought”, much less free expression.”
in response to Nerd saying that the tone here will not be altered to suit hir preferences. Who is it trying to limit expression again?
weareallbornatheists @ 61;
This is not about ‘giving offence’ to people. This is not about the imagined ‘thin skin’ of the differently abled. This is about recognising the toxic character of an ideology that openly posits that certain classes of people are unworthy of life simply because they are different. We have encountered that kind of ideology before. We have seen the kind of oppression and pogroms it can all too easily lead to. Nobody of good conscience should be willing to sleep walk into such a scenario again simply in the name of an intellectually vapid concept of an abolutist free speech that doesn’t even brook the notion that it is acceptable to criticise speech that is actively and dangerously dehumanising.
I never said you couldn’t speak your mind. I never suggested you should be subject to any form of censorship, self imposed or otherwise. I simply suggested that you ought to consider the impact of your words on people for whom discussions about whether the differently abled should even be allowed to live at all are not merely dry, academic exercises but the stuff of their day to day lives.
These are false equivalencies. Access to abortion rights is not the same thing as being compelled to have an abortion, and likewise, access to the right to a dignified end to ones life is not the same thing as being forced to die to someone elses’ schedule – both access to abortion servcies and access to end of life services amount to empowering the individual to express their own self determination and bodily autonomy. While such servcies could conceiveably be abused in certain circumstances, access to the rights themselves oppresses no one.
Eugenics, on the other hand, is in most cases an ideology that promotes a hypothetical society where particular groups of individuals are denied the right to reproduce in order to confer some notional benefit upon the rest of society. It is a situation where individual rights are denied to specific groups in society in the name of a fuzzy and poorly defined (not to mention all too often biologically incompetent) ‘greater good’. It is about taking bodily autonomy and self determination away from people declared to effectively be inferior classes of human.
You are ignoring the existing power gradients within our society. Wealthy, able bodied, cis/het, middle/upper class White people are the privileged group in our society. As a group, they hold the vast majority of the wealth and political power available in the Western world. They can afford to be endlessly ‘thick skinned’, because they never have to genuinely fear that their voices will not be heard. Entire media and governmental networks exist to promote the notion that the privileged White voice is the whole of the discourse, or at least the only discourse worth listening to.
Conversely, the marginalised within our society, the differently abled among them, are routinely ignored and have their perspectives silenced. They lie outside the visible social and political discourse as experienced by most people, and they are reminded of that every day. If a group expressed prejudiced or even eliminationist rhetoric against the privilged elite of our society, that elite can simply laugh it off because they know that society is structured in such a way that such attitudes are meaningless fringe ranting at the most, with no chance of ever threatening their group as a whole. The marginalised do not have that luxery, since history has shown us time and time again that those without a voice can all too easily find themselves in the cross hairs when society finds it expedient to have a scape goat on hand, and even without such widespread and socially endorsed violence, the marginalised can easily be preyed upon by bigots motivated by irrational hatreds, and civil society and government will typically be slow to act if it even notices at all.
There is also the point that ‘bashing’ privileged and wealthy White people by pointing out their privilege, and the manifold ways in which it is used and abused, is hardly comparable to an ideology like eugenics that argues that entire social groups should not be allowed to exist at all. It is like comparing a stubbed toe to a bullet wound.
Freethought
While evidence based, nothing is said about having to remove emotions from any argument.
I get very tired of pseudo Vulcans, who hide behind “don’t get emotional”, and then claim this blog isn’t about freethought. It is. But it doesn’t mean free flowing thought (or rather lack of thought) from dogmatic folks trying to impose their values upon us. We can ask for evidence, and decry lack of evidence and misinterpretations of facts to try to make a bad idea look better.
You aren’t censored, just being told you don’t control the argument. PZ and the horde does.
Your pseudo Vulcanism is a method of tone trolling. So stop. We can respond how we like.
weareallbornatheists @ 65;
What makes you think that either atheist or differently abled people faced persecution or the threat of death only in the past? There are many places in the world where atheists face imprisonment, torture, or even risk execution for their lack of religious belief, but this is not the case in the West, and few people are suggesting that such should be the case in the West. The situation is different for the differently abled, since while they also face violence and mistreatment the world over, there are also those in the West who still argue that they are a burden on society that should be removed by one means or another, and sometimes cite the notion of eugenics in support of that argument.
There is also the point that it is relatively easy to hide being an atheist if you so choose or if you think the situation necessitates it – you have the option to avoid the topic of religion, or even lie about what you really believe. The same can’t be said for most of the differently abled. People tend to notice things like, for example, wheel chairs. They can’t choose to hide when things start to get bad, or even dangerous.
@Enlightenment liberal:
Hrm, you’re getting awfully close to something that would be eugenic and less problematic.
I’ll happily concede that there exists a hypothetical in which a eugenics program is implemented through means that are not unethical.
I don’t think it’s happened in real life, however.
=======
Separately, I was thinking about the example of the cousin-marriage.
It is undoubtedly true that as poor a method of birth control as denying a marriage license may be, marriage control has been used by eugenics advocates as a (supposed) tool to control reproduction. It certain communities with high stigma for out-of-wedlock birth and strong monogamy traditions, it might even be effective (to some degree or other).
But I don’t know that first-cousin marriage-bans (ugh, for clarity, this is not to say “marriage banns”) were implemented for the eugenic purpose of **eliminating people who carry a trait from the population**. I’d have to look at the history here, but I’d expect to find that it was implemented to eliminate a trait from the aristocracy by ensuring that those most likely to be born with a disfavored heritable trait are preemptively removed from the line of succession.
To make things more complicated, the first-cousin marriage-ban is closely related to the incest taboo, which research in applied ethics suggests isn’t purely a social construct. (Read Goodall on primate ethics and others.) That it might exist across multiple (at least 2, possibly as many as 5) extant closely related species…and thus strongly implying it also existed in various (and likely the majority) species of homininae (or at least hominini) … would undercut the idea that the motivation for the ban is something as specific as eugenics.
OTOH, the theorized basis for an intrinsic, society-independent incest-taboo is that such an intrinsic (perhaps also “instinctive”) taboo would reduce the appearance in a population of certain low-fitness recessive traits. In other words, instinctive eugenics. But still, eugenics **is** a particular social movement (or group of same). It would be confusing and make little sense to say that this taboo is instinctive eugenics. And yet, if the taboo motivates passage of a law, is that different than a scientifically rationalized law whose aim is the same – the removal of a trait from a population through control over reproduction?
Moreover, there are serious definitional problems here. Can we only define “population” as all people living in a certain area? I think it would be eugenics if the whites in a Black-majority city like DC acted to eliminate all CF carriers from only the white population. So how would that be different than the aristocracy eliminating whomever from only the aristocracy? As a legal status that can be changed, nobility isn’t equivalent to race, precisely. But race isn’t a strictly biological entity. Race has been defined in different ways at different times, and a person could “change race” by traveling between areas that had a “one drop rule”, areas that had a “one eighth rule”, and areas that had rules that provided for multi-racial identities/categories.
Ugh.
That’s a thorny one. Arguably, the first-cousin marriage-ban is eugenic. I would disagree since eugenics is applied to a particular movement that starts with Galton (however foreshadowed by others in history) and the bans existed long before Galton. But I concede it is **arguably** eugenic.
Since the original statement by weareallbornatheists was that there existed **non-problematic** implementations of eugenics (which is a pretty high bar), I would argue that even if the ban on noble inheritance to certain children through the mechanism of bans on certain nobles’ marriage constitutes eugenics, that it would remain a problematic implementation of eugenics and thus weareallatheists would still be floundering around for a non-problematic example.
Why is it problematic? Well, for one, it required a noble/peasant distinction with undesirable traits defined differently for each.
Modern-day cousin-marriage laws are nobility neutral and some come after Galton. Would they satisfy the non-problematic implementation requirement? Hard to say. I’d have to research it, but it would be an interesting question. In any case, it gave me something productive to think about on the bus.
@weareallatheists:
You really have reading comprehension problems don’t you?
You say about me:
numbering added by me.
As for [1], cite one instance of me telling you not to post. I believe I actually asked you for examples, which would require **more posting** to make. Clearly, unless you find a counter-example, you’re forgetful, lying, or failing to comprehend others’ writing.
As for [2] cite one instance of my use of ad hominem in this thread. Just one. I’ll wait.
As for [3], I freely admit that my tone may come across as condescending. However, dismissing your views without thought didn’t happen. I specifically put in a bunch of time and verbiage to show where you made unsupported or refuted arguments.
Freethought doesn’t mean “free thought”. Look it up. Freethought requires interrogation of one’s own position, a skill which you consistently fail to demonstrate.
This is repeatedly demonstrated, but I am amused to cite your response to Gregory Greenwood (whose original message to you is comment #53) in your comment #61:
What kind of reading miscomprehension has to be exercised here to go from
to
Well, gee, the only way that makes sense at all is if you are incapable of empathy, and thus feel precluded from participating in any discussion that might require it.
But nobody said shut up. No one said that discussing eugenics is off-limits. The wise Gregory Greenwood merely advised – not even insisted upon, much less required – empathy.
Please learn to tell the difference between people having an opinion on what constitutes respectful behavior and people telling you that a topic is banned. It would be a useful skill for you to have going forward.
@just anyone at all that got this far…
weareallbornatheists says in #63:
Well, I’ll just leave that bracketed here. It says quite enough about weareallbornatheists on its own.
@Gregory Greenwood, #67
citing weareallbornatheists, #61:
True, but I think that weareallbornatheists more fundamental failing here is in understanding the original statement (which, not incidentally, was mine) which is bolded here with its preserved original context from #29:
That’s a factual statement.
This is also a factual statement. Note that it doesn’t **also** say, or even imply, that people with mobility impairments have always been about using wheelchairs. Nothing in this statement indicates how many people in the group are users of the identified tool.
Compare to the statement about eugenics. A tool is said to have been crafted and used for a primary purpose. The tool is also said to have been made for the use of a particular group.
It doesn’t say how many wealthy white people used eugenics. It doesn’t say that no poor indigenous person ever employed eugenics.
If you didn’t use the tool of eugenics, bully for you. If you did, better choices next time, okay? But in either case, the tool of eugenics is what it is, and stating that isn’t “bashing” anyone.
weareallatheists @61
A classic notpology. No apology starts off “if I’ve hurt anyone”. That moves the onus of being insulted from the insulter to the insultee. “I suppose, if you’re so thin-skinned as to be insulted by my insult, then I have to apologize to you, so I apologize if I must, but if you’re not insulted then no apology is needed or given.”
A genuine apology begins with the insulter realizing that they have given insult, not claiming that it’s the fault of the offended person to feel insulted.
weareallbornatheists,
So what is your actual disagreement with PZ and us here? That we (and the rest of the world) don’t call things like genetic counseling and livestock breeding eugenics?
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 73;
Thanks for the clarification, and you are absolutely right; weareallatheists was at best seriously misinterpreting, and at worst grossly misrepresenting, your position.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 71;
The who now? That is someone else, right? Another commenter with a similer handle? I could see ‘the not always unbearably annoying’ Gregory Greenwood describing your humble servant, or even ‘the commenter who sometimes almost makes sense formerly known as’ Gregory Greenwood, but wise? I don’t know, sounds like a stretch to me… ;-p
LOL.
Now I’m totally going to be using
in the future. In fact, I’m going to have to invent reasons to quote you just so I have more opportunities to use it. :-)
Crip Dyke
For days when you’re feeling positive, you can say ‘the sometimes bearable occasionally almost pleasant Gregory Greenwood’.