Sam Kriss really doesn’t like me, or any atheists, for that matter. He name-checks me in a recent essay, Village Atheists, Village Idiots, in which he simultaneously makes the claim that the premises of atheism are obviously true, but that atheism induces dementia, which is slaughtering all prominent atheists in grisly ways.
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.
Well, actually…
Richard Dawkins seems to be doing quite well after his minor stroke, and is going to tour the US this Fall. “Wheeling lunatic” has never been a very good description of his behavior; he’s always calm, even as he says things I disagree with.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is also doing fine. As we’ll see, he still criticizes basic errors, which turns out to be Kriss’s real objection to him.
I rather agree with his description of Harris. He is a kind of paranoid racist Vulcan.
I don’t think I’m psychotic, but then, if I were, I probably wouldn’t think I was, would I? Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?
Christopher Hitchens is still dead. It wasn’t a fug that killed him, or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.
Speaking of rhetoric, though, isn’t it bad form to begin an essay that’s going to accuse people you don’t like of being hysterical and excessive with such excessive histrionics of your own? Not to mention howling about how they’re all diseased and dying.
It isn’t just the beginning, either. He’s just getting warmed up. The whole dang essay is Sam Kriss doing a war dance and screaming about those awful atheists.
Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.
But wait, Sam: you’ve just shrieked that all those atheists are insane and mad and deranged, but you haven’t actually made the case that we are. Applying extravagant adjectives and adverbs to people doesn’t make them more true. Fortunately, he’s going to give us his “complete theory” of what drives atheists mad, and it’s going to explain a lot. A lot about Sam Kriss, that is, but not really anything about those atheists.
His theory, which is his, is that atheists are saying things which are true and obvious too often. No, really, that’s the entirety of his complaint.
Whatever it is, it has something to do with a litany of grievances against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.
Weird, huh? And to make his case, he goes on and on about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his mockery of the rapper BoB, who claimed that the Earth was flat, and then Tyson pedantically explained multiple times that we can show that it is actually round, which Kriss found so annoying because isn’t it so obvious the Earth is round? And shut up Neil deGrasse Tyson, you think you’re so smart and that question is so easy and I know how to use a thesaurus so how come you’re so famous, and I’m not? And Bill Nye sucks, too.
There, you’ve got the gist of the whole thing, and unless you’re really into seeing people name-drop Kierkegaard 11 times, you can skip the rest.
It’s an odd performance. You know, I think creationism is obviously false, but that doesn’t mean everyone can or should shut up about it — it’s still an active political and theological force, even if all (and I mean all — even the latest bluster from the Discovery Institute is rehashing ancient arguments) of its arguments were demolished almost 200 years ago. We have to keep plugging away against ignorance, even if it is obviously wrong. To the person promoting it, it isn’t.
I’m currently teaching cell biology, as I have been since 1993. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I started yelling at a class of 19 year olds that “Jesus, the chemiosmotic hypothesis is so obvious! You never heard of proton gradients before? I’m not going to waste time teaching you about them, but they will be on the exam, because you should already know it!”
This seems to be how Kriss would run my class (he clearly knows everything there is to know about proton gradients and all the details of electron transport, because it’s all obvious, so I’m sure he could step right in to the job), because apparently calm repetitive didacticism that addresses the ignorance of different individuals is a sure sign that you’re dying of some fatal form of obsessive dementia.
It’s also strange that he would hate on Neil deGrasse Tyson for publicly refuting a flat-earther, when Kriss himself has written, I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement
. Is this just professional jealousy, that the criticisms of an astronomer against flat-earthers get more attention than the criticisms of…whatever the hell Sam Kriss is?
It’s curious, too, that Kriss would say that it’s obvious that “there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings”, but not notice that there’s a substantial majority of people in the United States, and elsewhere, who would vigorously dispute those claims. And if repetitively addressing ignorant claims is a hallmark of insanity, what are we to make of Sam Kriss? This isn’t the first time he’s raged at Neil deGrasse Tyson for explaining something obvious, which makes him guilty of exactly the same thing, only with more hyperbole.
It’s also not the case that he reserves his squawking for atheists; you should see what he has to say about Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton, a blinding-white astral demon made of chicken gristle and wax-paper, doesn’t even pretend that she’s running for any reason beside her own personal hunger for power. She wants to rule the world; it’d be hers by birth, only she wasn’t born, she emerged like a lizard out its egg from the cold undeath of money, fully formed.
Even his word salad is grossly unappetizing.
…his description of Harris. He is a kind of paranoid racist idiot.
Fixed it for you.
I decided Sam Harris was an idiot halfway through his book and shortly after I even heard his name. In the years since, everything has shown that to be the case.
He stated the obvious, picked the low hanging fruit. The gods don’t exist. Religion can cause people to do terrible things. And then proceeds to go off into la-la land.
Because you produce so much very much hot air. Completely unlike Kriss, who only produces small amounts of tepid air, I’m sure.
I’m struggling to understand what this even means. Did Hitchens at some point literally fall in the Euphrates? I mean, he was a journalist in the right area. . .
Or could it be a convoluted reference to Hitchens’ fondness for whiskey? Per Urban Dictionary, one meaning of “fell in the river” is “Passing out after drinking way too much at a party”. But what does that have to do with rhetoric?
I’ve got a feeling that Mr. Kriss is comfortably insulated from the mendicants in what ever upper class, fashionably hip-and-trendy neighborhood where he doesn’t have to actually deal with reality. He’s safe to bellow and scrawl his contrarian bromides in a desperate (and futile) attempt to look intellectual.
Uh-oh. I didn’t for anyone to actually try to make sense of Kriss, which I think would be a futile endeavor.
I guess it’s a natural human response, though, to try to find order in chaos.
Maybe he’s referring to Hitchen’s late life obsession with Islam and his support for the war in Iraq.
Maybe it has less to do with us being able to shoot down ridiculous arguments with simple ones, and more to do with the ridiculous arguments never going away.
Creationism, Flat-earthism, etc. are a lot like boils: ignoring they doesn’t mean they go away, they just start to fester.
And they fester, and fester, and fester until they swell up to the point that they burst, spreading their infectious bile all over the place.
The best time to deal with their nonsense is when they make an appearance, not when they become a problem.
Urgh, that should be:
I had to google him.
He doesn’t have a wikipedia page.
There is some sort of bizarre prophecy of there being four(?) demons(? angels? bogeymonsters?) buried under the Euphrates River which are released when six trumpets blow (or something like that)… albeit I rather doubt that bit of magic mushroomery has anything to do with whatever it is Kriss was arguing by spittle.
I wonder if he is somehow referring to Euphrates the Stoic (not the river), albeit again just what his
pointgob of spittle is is opaque.From the about page of his blog:
Some of those quotes are jokes, so I’m not sure if that’s even your quote or if you said that about someone else.
Um … I think he’s talking about the Yahoo News comment section.
How does Kriss simultaneously complain that New Atheists just mouth banalities — and then complain that explanations are unnecessary and tedious, too? Apparently, he has a lot more faith in the general public than we do.
Or, as Akira MaKenzie suggests at #4, a lot less contact with them.
I am so using this the next time we disagree, PZ. I actually lol’d. Office is looking at me weird now.
The only ‘falling into a river’ reference that comes to mind is one of Disraeli’s quotes;
@Akira MacKenzie:
I know that that is true about Hitchens, but I am utterly failing to understand how falling in the Euphrates is meant to evoke that.
I mean, if I didn’t know that Hitchens was pro-Iraq-war, I might guess that “fell into the Euphrates” was a metaphor for a different kind of immersion, and would be meant to imply that he became so enraptured with Iraqi culture and/or Babylonian history and archaeology that he was actually extremely opposed to war in Iraq.
I have a friend who has a degree in psychology and she is always telling me: “Remember! It doesn’t have to make sense” when I try and make sense out of something someone said.
Sure helped me deal with my MIL.
@Saad:
The quote is from here, and was indeed by PZ in reference to Sam Kriss.
Search engines are your friends.
raven @ 1
Maybe the ‘paranoid racist Vulcan’ is referring to the fact certain folks* present their beliefs as inherently logical by assertion and their opponents as reasoning with emotions (and therefore dismissible) if they show any sign of having emotions towards a discussion about a problem.
* I don’t remember if Harris is one of these people. So if he’s not, I apologize for the comparison.
It sounds like he ingested the collected works of Hunter S. Thompson and vomited all over his keyboard, and this is the result.
Silly question perhaps, but is Kriss aware that not all atheists are old men, not even the more prominent ones?
does he really think Hillary was pretending at the DNC? He apparently heard the exact opposite of everything she said.
gee, projection is IMAX grade.
I don’t have the slightest idea of who Sam Kriss is, or why what he says should matter. The provided reading samples don’t inspire me to search, I’m not fond of thesaurus vomit passing for writing.
I note that his insults to you, PZ, are actually devoid of any substance. With Harris and Dawkins there’s some grain of truth to it. With you it’s just plain insults he thought were clever.
Looked him up, first result:
Pretty sure I can live happily without paying attention to one Sam Kriss.
@Giliell
In fairness, I thought Sam’s insult was hilarious. Realistic? Fuck no. But just so bizarrely specific and unexpected. I think it merits points for creativity if nothing else.
@Caine lmfao, this guy is just endless laughs for me. x)
I think he makes a good point. If Christopher Hitchens is so smart, then how come he’s dead?
I like Kriss’ style.
Definitely going to read more.
I’m not a fan of HRC, and I’m down with the notion that the Democrats aren’t anywhere Left-wing enough and they need to push for far, far more than just whatever scant “progress” is currently fashionable to their upper-class donors. That said, they’re currently the only politically viable game in in shit hole country that isn’t entirely insane.
Check your privilege Kriss. Not all of us have the luxury of living in a largely secular society with a parliamentary government that offers voters actual representation. Some of us were, sadly, born in the USA where Christainity and capitalism are our unofficially official religions that all have to bow and scrape before.
Sam Kriss just really wishes he’d been born around 1860. Isn’t it so much more romantic and mysterious to write about madmen and insane asylums (a fucked up social order that he is apparently in favor of), rather than dreary modern knowledge like thought-process disorders, evidence-based therapy, and anti-psychotic medication?
Knowledge is so boring. Much more fun to try and fix a fucked up social order using wild speculation and 19th century metaphors for mental illness.
What a sheltered, shallow twit. I’m not going to critique the style, since it’s fun to partake in a frivolous, underpants-on-head rant once in awhile. Still, there should at least be something like an informed, reasoned, meaningful point in there… somewhere. Atheists are not a new or emerging movement. We make up 16% of the World population, which puts us somewhere between Muslims and Hindus in abundance. His armchair diagnosis of a handful of midddle-aged native English-speaking white men as a global sampling of one billion-plus people is extra funny, since one of them is already dead.
Akira McKenzie is right. Kriss has Hitchens metaphorically drowning in the Euphrates because in real life he immersed himself in support for the Iraq War and Neoconservative politics after previously being a lifelong Democratic Socialist. If “falling in the river” means “passing out drunk”, then you could also say he drank Neoconservatism so deeply that he passed out – i.e., he lost his philosophical bearings in war fever.
Perhaps Kriss portrays PZ as floating in a hot air balloon in order to suggest that “New Atheism” is un-grounded. I don’t really get his beef with PZ, but agree that some of his other caricatures are on the mark.
Kriss seems to be a philosophical joker. He tends to make his points through bizarre metaphors. I really enjoyed his essay about Flat-Earther “Hylothanatism”.
a really smart person takes a hot-air-balloon to float above the landlubbers and promptly gets lost.
Floating by a person on the ground he asks, “where am I? ?? ” to which the grounded person replies, “In a balloon! (ijit)”
–
gee I don’t know exactly why Kriss’ insulting description of PZ brought forth this pseudo joke.
something about a “…listing balloon” sounded silly; balloons don’t list like ships, but some cartoon balloons may include lists, so umm. *shrug*
In reply to a piece whose main argument is couched in rhetorical and metaphorical terms, PZ has chosen to ignore the metaphors and (a) object that ‘Hitchens actually died from cancer, thank you’, and (b) Kriss’s main argument is that atheists keep repeating themselves. Which is not only beside the point, but fitting, because one of Kriss’s complaints about New Atheists is that they are blind to metaphor!
But the point of Kriss’s essay is not that ‘atheists keep repeating themselves’, but that if we don’t imagine a better world we are condemned to repeat it, that a naked acceptance of facts without seeing the possibilities for change is an attitude that will not take us very far. That the New Atheist attitude seems to be that *facts* are *good*, which has the unfortunate corollary that *dreams* are *bad*.
In the final gripe about Hillary Clinton, you make Sam’s point for him.
I was unaware of the Disraeli quote. As a filthy, uncultured Colonial, my knowledge of quotations from 19th Century British politicians is extremely limited.
My guess was based on 1) Hitch support the Iraq War as a means to combat militant Islam, 2) the Euphrates runs through Iraq.
It’s a shot in the dark, but it seems to fit.
I’m glad to learn that death, disease, dementia and insanity only happens to atheists. I can’t think of a single prominent Christian who has ever had a stroke or cancer, held objectionable and bigoted beliefs, or suffered from mental illness. Perhaps a pope or prominent evangelist has fallen from a hot air balloon. I’ll have to go check Wikipedia on that one.
@Anonick:
False dichotomy; non sequitur.
I am not blind to metaphor.
I’m just exasperated with shitty writing.
Some people like purple prose.
John @39: More bluish, I’d say. I like blue. And this is just bloody good writing. My idea of bloody good, anyway. As is a lot of the stuff on his blog.
Rob, thanks. I see what you mean.
I too confess a weakness for masterful writing, whether or not I’m sympathetic to its gist.
(e.g. Theodore Dalrymple)
—
* In passing, I’m also often subject to the accusation that I rely upon a thesaurus. It amuses me.
十人十色
John Morales
I have never accused you of relying on a thesaurus.
It may be that I have accused you of being a thesaurus.
;)
Some people have a large vocabulary;
some people are a large vocabulary (⇐ category mistake!)
Owlmirror
My #43 was a joke. Jocularity. Whimsy. Silly word-play.
jeez
@chigau:
I was being facetious in the same (jugular) vein!
(does a little jig followed by pratfall)
Point being that PZ ostensibly objects to the poor quality of the writing as much as to its content, and that the former unlike the latter is not hitherto the commenters’ consensus.
The quality of the polemic is independent of the quality of the message (and here, the message is addressed to particular atheists and their perceived species of atheism) and, as PZ summed it in a similar vein, “[…] he [Kriss] simultaneously makes the claim that the premises of atheism are obviously true, but [and] that atheism induces dementia, which is slaughtering all prominent atheists in grisly ways” — something nobody has specifically disputed.
(Or, as has been said, “nice video, shame about the music”)
PZ Myers wrote:
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh.
Isn’t the story from Kierkegaard that Kriss cites intended specifically to illustrate that there is no contradiction between ‘the premises being obviously true’ and ‘induces dementia’. If PZ disagrees with it, he ought to argue with it, rather than blandly state he rejects it.
PZ thinks its bad writing, sure. But where has he actually wrestled with Kriss’s substance? Nothing has been said about whether atheism is still a genuinely transformative movement, whether it is harmful or not to praise the beauty of the world, about Kriss’s point that atheism’s adherence to facts leaves no space for dreaming of a better world.
Sure, it’s a non-sequiter when I said that the corollary of ‘facts are good’ is ‘dreams are bad’. But I was paraphrasing Kriss, and you ought to have read him, no? Here it is in the original: “A bad world can be redeemed. The dogma that it’s good is rarely anything but evil.”
The story from Kierkegaard is obviously a false analogy. Arguing against a flat-earther — as Neil deGrasse Tyson did — is not even vaguely equivalent to Kierkegaard’s wandering obsessively repetitive proclaimer. If arguing against someone whom you believe to be incorrect is itself somehow profoundly and offensively wrong, then obviously Kriss’ spittle-flecked screed, as PZ even notes: “makes him guilty of exactly the same thing, only with more hyperbole.”
Kriss’ argument cuts its own throat.
Oh, and “induces dementia” — Kriss is also committing some nasty ableism along with his wildly fallacious reasoning.
Indeed, that dogma sounds very similar to the Just World Hypothesis.
Citing from the linked page:
(emphasis added)
But Kriss is profoundly confused if he thinks that saying that the universe has beauty in it is the same as saying that the world is good (or just) as it is. Indeed, if the opposite is proclaimed; that stars and nebulae and mountains and rainbows and green fields and trees and good food and all living beings are all ugly and horrible and worthless, then Kriss’ statement that “a bad world can be redeemed” must be false. Kriss’ world offers nothing good to no-one; it is irredeemable in its horror and despair.
ali:
PZ:
Owlmirror, posting edifying links:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090221063348/http://rec.horus.at/trek/lists/darmok.html
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/12/darmok.html
Owlmirror @51:
Any analogy can be rendered ‘obviously false’ by pointing at the differences between the things you’re comparing. But that misses the point of analogies. Kriss understands what you’re saying;
Did Tyson convince anyone that the Earth is, in fact, round rather than flat? Some response to BoB was certainly called for, and Tyson’s twitter responses were appropriate, apart from the “five centuries regressed” bullshit. By the time Tyson did his mic drop, it was just performance theatre, preaching to the converted for their applause/approval. That’s Tyson’s schtick, which seems to be mainly for his own aggrandizement/acceptance*. Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are/were no better, IMO (and I’d add Krauss).
Where I think Kriss mainly missed the mark in this essay was in including PZ in the Carnival of Clowns. Anyone who reads this blog knows that, and I don’t think it necessary to point out why. So on that particular point Kriss was lazy. And even with that, PZ’s
is, I think, a vast overstatement. The single sentence about PZ is a love letter compared to what Kriss has to say about folk like Nigel Farage, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, etc.
*By the way, I find it hugely ironic that the BoB episode gets such positive response for Tyson, when Tyson’s bullshit about “red light penetrates through fog better than blue light” gets nothing more (from what I’ve seen) than unquestioning acceptance, when it’s just as wrong as “the Earth is flat”. If you know the Earth is round, “yay Tyson!”. If you don’t understand scattering of light, “whatevs. Who cares?”.