In Conversation with Dan Dennett

Kaustubh Adhikari

For those who are not familiar with Dan Dennett, Professor Daniel C Dennett is University Professor and Austin B Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Boston; an accomplished author, Prof. Dennett is famous for his treatises on evolution, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) and Freedom Evolves (2003). One of his most ‘controversial’ books is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), which is considered an important landmark in modern atheist thinking, and which earned him his place amongst the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’, along with British biologist Richard Dawkins, American journalist Christopher Hitchens, and American neuroscientist Sam Harris. Recently, Prof. Dennett has published a book on his research, Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind (2011).

Hailing from the Eastern part of India, Kaustubh Adhikari is a final year graduate (PhD) student in Biostatistics, in the School of Public Health, Harvard University. He was the recipient of the 2009 Robert Balentine Reed Prize for Excellence in Biostatistical Science. He is an editor of Palki, an online bi-lingual (English/Bangla) magazine, as well as a regular contributor to several web-based groups on the topics of rationality, skepticism and contemporary atheism.

[Read more…]

I titled my critique of Massimo Pigliucci’s complaint about the New Atheists with a Firefly quote — “We’re meddlesome” — so I might as well keep it up. There’s much in that series to illuminate my personal view of atheism, specifically, the elements that seem to antagonize people like Pigliucci and Stedman and Mooney and great swarms of other more accommodating people. First, I ought to point out the obvious: contrary to the defenders of tone, I don’t mind pissing people off.

Mal: Gotta say, Doctor, your talent for alienatin’ folks is near miraculous.
Simon: Yes, I’m very proud.

We often get this insistence from the accommodationists that the only way to win people over is to be nice to them — atheists should try to be good citizens who get along with everyone. A related point they will make is that atheists don’t have a real problem with discrimination, because they look just like everyone else and can blend in, and if we aren’t rocking the boat no one will have any grounds to oppose us.

I really, really despise that argument. I don’t want my community to accept my presence because they have me confused with an Episcopalian, or because I’m one of those good atheists who don’t raise no ruckus, no sir, and so they can tolerate me because I’m invisible. I intend to be loud; I will leave no doubt that I disbelieve and am disagreeable about it. I am not the one who needs to learn a lesson in tolerance, the smug, oblivious Christians are, and the only way I can give it is if I’m standing up and challenging them.

So when people, atheists and theists alike, complain that I’m obnoxious, I feel good about it. There’s the fact that most of the people doing the complaining are not the sort I have much respect for, so I take pleasure in pissing them off, but also that I’m fulfilling my responsibilities. I make people aware that where I stand, there stands an atheist, and not some simpering milquetoast making apologies for his temerity in disrespecting religion, but someone who is proud of his beliefs.

Badger: You think you’re better than other people!
Mal: Just the ones I’m better than.

Pigliucci complained about the arrogance of some atheists who think all believers are dumb, which is a common complaint, and one you hear from believers as well. But they’re wrong: I don’t think I’m smarter than everyone else.

I just think I’m right.

That’s important. Atheists should have a feeling of unrepentant confidence — we are on the right side of reason, the right side of history, and the right side of the evidence. It’s not because I think I have some intrinsically greater worth than others at all, but I have shed some delusions and freed myself of traditional dogma, and have also worked most of my life to alleviate my ignorance. Other people could benefit from similar enlightenment.

And anyone who’s bothered by my cockiness should have a little more self-awareness: we all think we’re right, or we wouldn’t be doing what we do.

Jayne: Shiny. Let’s be bad guys.

Yeah, the faitheists and believers think I’m a bad guy, for the reasons above (and I’m OK with that). My other sin, though, is that I encourage other atheists to join me, I reinforce my kind of rudeness in a large group of people, and I do that community building stuff. I foster my tribe. We grow stronger and louder and bolder, we are all bad guys together.

Of course, the kind of bad guys we are are the ones encouraged by Carl Sagan: the critics of mysticism and foolishness who do not sit silent when a god-botherer says something stupid. We misbehave because it’s about damn time someone did.

“…if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition ‐ even when it seems to be doing a little good ‐ we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.”

Carl Sagan

That’s us. No silence. We fight the idea that skepticism might be impolite by being impolite all the time, making the questioning of dogma commonplace and frequent. After all, why should it be considered so awful for a horde of atheists to point out that Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism are ridiculous? The are ridiculous and are going to get ridiculed.

Here’s something else I think atheists should be:

The Operative: Do you know what your sin is, Mal?
Mal: Aw, hell, I’m a fan of all seven. But right now, I’m gonna have to go with wrath.

I see priests raping children. I see a publicity-seeking nun praising pain and suffering, poverty and sickness. I see politicians pandering for votes by demanding the persecution of gays in the name of Jesus. I see godly men declaring that the role of women is to be silent and subservient…and brood a quiverful of children. I see fanatics strapping explosives to their bodies and killing randomly in the name of their god. I see lobbyists hard at work, trying to dilute science education, and suggesting that we teach the Flintstones as fact in our biology classes. I see a pope in fancy silks and gold-bedecked palace urging people to shun materialism and savor the simple life. I see deluded people opposing work to alleviate climate change because they’re sure God wouldn’t let it happen. I see ordinary people certain that these are the End Times, rejoicing in our imagined imminent apocalypse, and actively working to bring it about.

If you aren’t angry, there’s something wrong with you.

Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit. I will not support it in any way, and I resent the complacent schmoes who urge us to close our eyes to it. One the one hand, we’ve got the moderate academic types who like to tell us it’s mostly harmless and we’ll never be able to get rid of it, anyway; to them I’d say that, as people who are supposedly dedicated to learning the truth, you ought to be the first to deny religion because a) it’s wrong, and b) it’s a fallacious way of learning about the world. On the other hand, we’ve got the happy progressives who want us all to do interfaith work, and tell us that the fundies might be bad, but we share common cause with liberal Christians; to them I say that a mind addled by liberal opium is just as faulty as one fired up on conservative crack.

I know that we can never get rid of religion, because there will always be people willing to lie for gain, and there will always be gullible people willing to believe them. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hate the lie of faith consistently and without apology. There are principles an atheist should stand for, and one should be that god-belief is bullshit.

No compromises on that. Wrath will be my response to those suggesting otherwise.

Zoe: Where are we going, sir?
Mal: The same as always. Forward.

No sitting still. Keep going, keep pushing, keep agitating. We may have to change course now and then, but the engines should always be running, we should always be plowing on ahead.

First it was Chris Stedman, now it’s Massimo Pigliucci. Everyone loves to sit back and carp about the New Atheists, because they’re the most prominent subset of the atheist movement, the ones getting the most press, and the ones getting the most criticism from theists…so of course the armchair philosophers have to take a whack, too. I’m not entirely sure why; Stedman should have his kinder, gentler, gooey-er faitheism to promote, and Pigliucci ought to have his philosophy-er, hoity-toity-er, rational-er atheism to peddle. I assume that some people just like to meddle — they just can’t bear the thought that someone else’s strategy, even if it is working towards a similar goal, is actually working and making progress, so they’ve got to announce their dissatisfaction and tinker. It’s only natural, I suppose, that a growing movement would find itself surrounded by not only opponents, but also obnoxious kibitzers.

Massimo Pigliucci was inspired by two recent posts, one from Greta Christina and another by Chris Stedman, to write an article on the goals of atheist activism, and unfortunately he seems to have understood neither. He seems to think they’re largely in agreement, which is a rather shocking misread; Greta wrote about two kinds of goals, but wasn’t trying to limit it at all to just those two, while Stedman was mainly oblivious to her message and was trying to argue about how bad the New Atheists are. Pigliucci similarly fails to comprehend the message, and instead, like Stedman, ignores the different goals of different subsets of the movement to, again, complain about the goddamned New Atheists.

You know, if I had assigned readings to students and they came back with such egregious failures of comprehension, I’d flunk them.

Let me make it simpler, with little words. Different groups have different goals, and that’s fine. The problems come when members of Group A with Goal A’ criticize Group B with Goal B’ for not achieving A’. A should work for A’, and B should work for B’, and A is not going to impress when they tell B to abandon their goals. Because B will tell A to go fuck off for being clueless meddling twits.

Greta was very clear about that. She even ended the article that way, with the importance of asking a simple question: “Which cause, exactly, are you talking about? Because we may not be talking about the same one.” Pigliucci did not bother to ask that question. He just assumes that his goals are everyone else’s goals, and therefore he’s justified in complaining about how we’re doing everything wrong.

Sorry, Massimo. You fail. Go back and re-read Greta’s post until you actually comprehend it.

Failing to understand that different atheists have different goals, Pigliucci then deploys a series of familiar complaints that we’ve heard many times before from the most mealy-mouthed accommodationists. He sounds just like Chris Mooney from three years ago or so.

First off, Christina makes an argument at the beginning of her post for in-your-face atheism coupled with a nicer and gentler approach, claiming that this good cop / bad cop strategy “works.” How does she know? To quote: “hey, there’s a reason cops use it!” Interestingly, no source is provided as to the extent to which said technique is in fact used by the police, whether it works (outside of movies), and why it would be appropriate to social discourse, as opposed to dealing with criminals.

How do we know it works? Because atheism is booming — new groups popping up all over the place, meetings with record attendance, lots of press, lots of new activists. The “good cop/bad cop” story is actually us being nice, and making room for other strategies — it was a chance for other views to save face, if they were smart enough to take it.

Also, while we know events are going in the right direction for us now, we make no pretense that we are following the optimal path. We’re quite serious when we say other activists — even Stedman — should be out there pushing their own way.

That would be that the dual nice/in-your-face approach worked in the past, for instance with the civil rights movement, or concerning gay rights. There are two things I think we should be clear about in this context. First, atheists really ought not to compare themselves to blacks or gays, as it is an insult to people who have experienced real discrimination. Yes, it may not be politically correct to tell your co-workers or family that you are an atheist, and I’m sure some people suffer psychological consequences as a result. But atheists are not being made to sit at the back of buses, hanged from trees, put in prison, or denied voting rights qua atheist. So let’s not make unseemly comparisons.

Smooth move, guy. First, complain that we have no evidence that what we’re doing works; second, tell us that we aren’t allowed to model our activism after known successful movements. That’s the kind of underhanded maneuver that might make a fellow doubt your sincerity.

No one argues that atheists suffer anywhere near the magnitude of the discrimination blacks and gays have confronted. But the tactic of decrying the struggle against smaller offenses because there are greater problems elsewhere is a standard suppressive effort to maintain the status quo. If the status of atheists is so much less extreme than that of blacks or gays, it ought to be easier to soften the lesser problem while making a simultaneous effort elsewhere. This is not a serial world, but a parallel one.

Pigliucci is making a particular contemptible argument: it’s the idea that no injustice should be opposed if there is a greater injustice elsewhere. Would you tell a black man that the prejudice he faces is unimportant, because if you want to see real oppression, you need to look at Native Americans? For that matter, as long as disabled Native American lesbian atheists exist, no one else should be fighting for equality for any other cause.

Moreover, the “bad cops” of the civil and gay rights movements rarely went around insulting the other side, they were simply vocal about their own rights. There is a huge difference between being in-your-face in the sense of taking to the streets and loudly complaining about rights you are unjustly denied and being in-your-face in the more basic sense of hurling insults at other people.

Right. So in the last 50 years or so of history, everyone’s approach has been to say nothing but kind words to, say, Lester Maddox, George Wallace, David Duke, the KKK, or George Lincoln Rockwell. No one objected to the overt racism of the policemen who turned fire hoses on black crowds; no one had rude names for the bigots who abused the students who led the way in desegregation; no one ever insulted the members of a lynch mob.

That’s total nonsense. An important part of making racism and sexism and homophobia socially unacceptable has always been labeling and mocking and denigrating the perpetrators of such evils. You don’t make progress by pretending that Fred Phelps is a nice guy, and not making him pay the price of public stigma for being a hateful scumbag, by calling him a hateful scumbag.

Which reminds me. Many of my fellow atheists are nice and smart people, but there is also a tendency within the community to think that one is automatically smart just for being an atheist, as opposed to all those deluded idiots who believe in things for which there is no evidence. I don’t know about your personal experience, but I can point to a lot of religious people who are a lot smarter — by any reasonable definition of “smart” — than several atheists I have encountered. And the same goes for being ethical (or not). So, let’s tone the self-righteousness down a few notches, it is unbecoming and smells too much of religious bigotry.

I think I smell…sanctimony.

You can find scattered idiots within atheism who say that, but not one of the big name leaders or organizations within atheism make any such claim. And further, many atheists were once religious, sometimes recently, and all of them have numerous friends and family who are religious (we’re a minority, remember?) Pigliucci is simply making a ludicrous claim to make himself look like the wise and sensitive guy.

Once he’s finished sniping at the New Atheists, Pigliucci then lists four reasonable goals for atheists: separation of church and state, acceptance of atheism, combating dogma, and elimination of irrationalism. They’re fine; I can support them, and encourage Pigliucci to continue his efforts to promote them further. They’re part of my goals, too, and I imagine other New Atheists will have no objection, either.

But it’s not enough for me. I have other goals as well, and what I do is work towards my objectives, not Massimo Pigliucci’s. If only he could understand that…

Later, I’ll aim to post something on my goals that I trust will be different from other people’s…and why I don’t complain if Pigliucci and other people don’t serve my will.