On semantics, and the poor use of movable goalposts

I have three daughters, and one of my least favourite things about this is a recurring argument which goes (at least in form) thusly:

Me: "[Daughter] - stop using that crayon to draw on the wallpaper!"
[Daughter]: "It's a felt pen, dad!"

or

Me: "[Daughter] - stop poking your sister with that fork!"
[Daughter]: "It's a knife!"

or

Me: "[Daughter], have you been sneaking non-uniform shorts to school?"
[Daughter]: "They're track pants! Ugh!"

It's pretty clear why those responses make no sense, and what conversational purpose they serve. My kids don't have good reasons for the stupid things they're doing, and want to deflect attention onto arguing about pointless minutiae. Fortunately, none of them is sufficiently good at this for it to be anything more than irritating - and after all, these are arguments from a trio whose ages range from 3 to 11.

It's a bit weird when you see people attempting this same (and similarly pointless) goalpost shift as grownups, though.

The first and most egregious example came from a group I'm a member of on G+. The group is called "Suppressed Transmissions" and specialises in weird news, art, and images that suggest hidden Dark Secrets behind ordinary reality. It's supposed to be a setting-mine for weirdness-in-real-life roleplaying games and fiction.

I shared a feature on an issue of Look magazine from 1972, because it had Anton LaVey on the cover and the concept of a reasonably mainstream magazine doing a feature on the Church of Satan amused me. The comment thread got hijacked by someone with strong antisemitic views, who viewed LaVey as part of some grand Jewish plot too complex and stupid to go into right now. The person got banned fairly promptly, but not before responding to being called on his antisemitism like this (sic):

"Semite means middle eastern people.  Just cause some kazhars converted to judisim doesnt mean they are all middle eastern, does it? Or is it a race Not sure which jewish lie you are gonna use to back the "anti semite" claim"

There's this weird kernel-idea embedded in there that somehow by redefining the terms on us, he can prove that by some anthropological-dictionary magic he's not an antisemite (he's anti-Jew, there's a difference, Dad. Ugh!) and that that will make his hatred of Jewish people somehow OK. Or possibly he's a not-especially-clever troll who maintains that particular profile just for Jew-hatin'.

The more subtle (and thus more troubling) example I've been seeing lately revolves around Ahmed Mohamed. Just quick, if you've been under a rock and missed the whole thing, here's the teal deer version: Ahmed is a 14 year old Muslim boy of Sudanese parents, who lives in Texas. He took a home-built* clock to school. There was an unarguably racist** and utterly disproportionate reaction which led to Ahmed being treated as a suspected terrorist, and led to the school authorities and the police in the state of Texas looking pretty bloody stupid.

The official response to this has all been pretty good (Ahmed got an invitation to the White House among other things) and my personal internet filter bubble means I haven't seen any overtly-racist nonsense. What I have seen, is a lot of people (Richard Dawkins' view is here, and links to more of the same) questioning a) whether Ahmed really built his clock or just de-shelled a commercial alarm clock, and b) what his motives were for doing so.

This is transparently the same debating tactic that my 3 year old uses. To answer the second part of the question first, there's nothing suspect about Ahmed's stated aim, which was to impress one of his teachers - and that motivation still makes sense if we assume he didn't build the clock himself from scratch. The first part is the kicker though - because the hidden assumption there is that somehow Ahmed's fear, suffering, and humiliation would be OK if we can just prove that he's not really gifted with electronics. Because the outpouring of support for him wasn't because he built a clock - that's very clear - it's because he was detained and harassed on the basis of his name and the colour of his skin.

I'm pretty clear on what my three year old wants when she tries to distinguish moral shades in drawing on walls with pens versus with crayons - she wants to avoid a discussion about drawing on walls. What is it that the "Clock Is A FRAUD!" people want, do you suppose?


*Or home-assembled, or maybe not - we'll get to that in a second.

** You can say "Islam is not a race" until the cows come home, but most people when they think "Muslim" don't think of someone who looks like this guy, or even (if they're honest) this guy.

Gangs and heroes

When I was in primary school in Scotland, forming "gangs" was one of the games that seemed to be pretty much universal. Someone who wanted to start a gang would link arms with a friend, then walk around the playground chanting "Who wants to be in our gang?" and collecting prospects. These gangs tended not to last more than one lunch hour, but the allure of joining up (even for such a limited time) was potent. 

There seems to be something fundamental about humans that means we find being part of a group very seductive, and that seems to make us vulnerable to "hacks" that exploit this impulse to get us to do things, or be less critical of our stated beliefs*.

This is what sticks out for me from my friend Daniel's recent post about the kind of religion he objects to, and is sort of in the background of his most recent post about meme-responses to the situation in Ferguson. In both cases, it seems to me that people's membership of particular religious or ideological groups is blinding them to the unpleasant implications of things they believe. Of course, in relation to religion, this isn't a new idea. In fact, part of the core of the New Atheist suite of arguments against religion is the idea that religion makes people particularly vulnerable to this kind of hack.

Where New Atheism seems to me to fall down, is in the assumption that doing away with religion will do away with this quirk of human thought. You can see this in the way that New Atheism has itself become a gang of sorts** and begun to suffer from some of the problems that gang-ness tends to cause. In the case of the New Atheists, I'd characterise these as a tendency toward gatekeeping, the construction of various folk devils***, and falling in love with heroes. If you want more on gatekeeping or folk devils, Fred Clark at Slacktivist and the guys at Nonprophet Status do a pretty good job respectively****.

What I want to talk about right at the moment is heroes.

A hero is a person who, as a result of their achievements or statements, has been acclaimed as great and adopted as a representative of a certain group or ideology. This makes them slightly less human (in the sense of being a complete person with virtues, flaws, and frailties) in the eyes of their admirers, and tends to give their views more weight than those of the average person.

This can happen at a variety of scales, so you can be a globally-recognisably Hero of New Atheism or Feminism or Socialism, or a local hero like a parish priest or the leader of a chapter of the International Socialists. The most complete form of this, I would call something like "sainthood" - the point at which someone ceases to be human at all (usually after their death) and is pretty much pure symbol. I'd call Ghandi, John Lennon and Martin Luther King examples of this.

The problems inherent in having heroes are pretty clear, when you examine how this tends to work.

The first issue is that heroes tend to get more allowances for bad behaviour, because their status as group representatives makes them more valuable than the rank and file members. The most famous example of this is the sexual abuse problems within the Catholic church (and in that case it was exacerbated by Church policies designed explicitly to minimise scandal and thereby protect abusers) but anyone who's been a member of a group with an abusive but important member (anecdotal examples I've heard include socialist groups in Wellington, kink communities in the US, and a university pagan/shamanic society) knows that this is not a purely religious problem. There are also more public secular examples like the recent revelations about the BBC and British Conservative Party.

The second issue is that heroes tend to have their pronouncements heard and promulgated regardless of their merits. Having said something intelligent once is no guarantee of continuing to do this indefinitely. For example, I think Richard Dawkins is entirely correct about the logical extreme unlikeliness of God (at least in the majority of Church-doctrinal conceptions) existing. Meanwhile, his pronouncements on any issue relating to rape, sexual harassment (really women in general) or the relative danger posed by non-majority-white-people religions are woefully off-base, and yet are received as wisdom on the basis of his atheist thinking.

This is also true of other New Atheist heroes like Sam "torturing Muslims is super-cool" Harris and Christopher "the war in Iraq hasn't killed enough people, and by the way did I mention how women are biologically destined to be unfunny (whoops sorry that was a joke or maybe a secret plan to get more women being funny)" Hitchens. This is dangerous, because while there's no earthly reason for atheism to be associated with racism or sexism, an uncritical admiration of racist sexist people due to their status as atheist heroes is starting to build those links - at least in the minds of the wider public.

Did you notice, by the way, that in these previous two paragraphs I've stuck with the view that atheism is in and of itself a rational and logical point of view? It's entirely possible for a person to be right about (or good at) one or more things (and receive appropriate acclaim for that) while still being wrong about other things, or even an actually terrible human being. This brings me to my final problem with heroes.

Communities who have heroes often feel the need to defend them, because of their status as community representatives. More than once when I've raised Dawkins' or Hitchens' problems with women, or Harris's racism in a discussion, I've been told that I'm attempting to smear them in order to discredit their advocacy for atheism (and presumably by extension atheism as a point of view). This is not an uncommon phenomenon in comment threads around the web.

I was really taken with the article "How To Be A Fan of Problematic Things"***** and I think that probably has the core of the principle you need for dealing with problematic thinkers. Unfortunately, heroising someone tends to short-circuit the capacity for that kind of critical analysis.

___
* I'm not going to go the route of suggesting that intelligent, well-educated people can't genuinely believe in, say, the Biblical account of Creation (as interpreted by Ken Ham) and must therefore be lying. I do think though, that there are probably different levels or classes of belief depending on how much conscious attention has been put into squaring them with the world we live in and their implications for your other beliefs. I think that humans are capable of holding sincere yet contradictory beliefs so long as they don't pay too much attention to the contradiction. There's something disingenuous about pouring mental effort into ignoring or handwaving those contradictions, but I think there are people who simply aren't fully aware of them. Of course, there are also people who deliberately espouse beliefs they don't really hold for reasons of Magic.

** In a recent internet argument I got told that I was wrong to think of atheism as a movement and that I was trying to pull the classic Christian apologist swifty of claiming that atheism is a religion and therefore atheists are religious and should go and vanish in a puff of logic or something. While it's true that atheism per se is actually just a single component of a wider worldview, I think there's such a thing as New Atheism which tends to include a specific set of views in addition to disbelief in god(s). I also think that once you have conferences dedicated to your interest or point of view, you can safely be called a movement or at least an informal organisation.

***At some point this will be a link to another post where I unpack this idea a bit. In the mean time, what I'm talking about here is a form of demonisation strawman where you construct a position so vile or ridiculous that opposition to it is a basic human response. You then justify your own extreme statements or actions by claiming that you oppose the folk devil that you've built (and covertly including a much wider group under the same umbrella term). Classic examples include "the humourless PC brigade", "delusional religious people", "lazy welfare queens" etc. It's important to understand that I'm not claiming that examples of these classes of people don't exist - just that they're rarer in their purest forms than the constructers of folk devils like to admit.

**** Fred Clark tends to talk about gatekeeping in an American white evangelist context, and the NS fellas talk more about islamophobia than other classes of folk devil, but they'll both give you some grounding in the ways these concepts work.

***** For bonus points check out this article about what happens when things that didn't start out racist become racist in a new context.

Talking about God (for fun and profit?)

...and we're back! So before I forget, Hairy Eczema and Flappy New Ears to all!

I was recently prompted to do some thinking about God as a result of a piece of debate I was included in on the mighty Book Of Faces. Specifically the thinking I needed to do was about Richard Dawkins' arguments about the non-existence of God, and my problems with Richard Dawkins (and, by extension the people who most commonly argue with him).

Strangely enough, my issue with Dawkins isn't his aggression and regular use of mockery (though I think these are unhelpful) - I object more to his conflation of spiritual and religious thinking with the power structures that tend to grow up around religions over time. Dawkins' opponents seem to me to suffer from a very similar problem. They seem to be stuck in a rut of attempting to defend willfully illogical ideas and corrupted institutions quite uncritically, when it seems to me that by sacrificing some of those more superficial trappings of their religion, they could still salvage the core more or less unscathed.

Now, Richard Dawkins does provide a pretty solid mathematical argument for the probable non-existence of God (or at least an argument that suggests most of the things commonly said about God are wrong)*. This is not necessarily fatal for theists/not-totally-materialists though - Alan Moore, for example, cheerfully admits that the god he worships was probably a sock puppet. More problematic (were it true) is the harm that Richard Dawkins claims is caused by the very act of belief.

He puts the Crusades, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the various horrors of ultra-orthodox Shariya law*** (amongst many many other things) at the foot of "belief" on the grounds that only by believing in some god could we justify doing such awful things to each other. Unfortunately for Dawkins' argument, humans are quite good at justifying doing awful things to each other on irreligious grounds as well.

I think that most of the stuff that Dawkins (and those who agree closely with him) wish to blame on religion can be more accurately blamed on religious leaders and organisations who are more interested in maintaining their own position of power than in the teachings of their various faiths. The reason this rings true for me is that  you can see the same kind of behaviour by power-elites who exist outside of religious groups - it seems counter-intuitive to me that there's really something magical about religious belief that totally switches people's brains off. Power-worship seems like a far more likely culprit.

Which brings us to Dawkins' detractors. My problem with churches is that they seem to me to be primarily organisations of social control. The spiritual core of most religions is self-improvement along various lines, but this has little to do with the daily machinations of, say, the Catholic Church.

I spent 4 years doing a job which required me to listen intently to a minimum of one church service a week. I was recording them to be broadcast, which meant I had to pay much closer attention than many church-attendees (I suspect) in order to catch any verbal slip-ups so they could be corrected. The thing that struck me was the disconnect between the words of Jesus quoted from the Bible, and the interpretation applied by the church people. The words of Jesus seemed to me to place the power of his message directly in the hands of his Disciples, and by extension his followers. The standard church interpretation, however, claimed that he'd empowered the organisation, rather than the people.

My point is, that the best defense a Theist can take to Dawkins' mathematical info-theory argument, is to abandon some of their dogmatic points about God and the organisations that humans have built up around him. This would result in an infinitely less rules-lawyer-y approach to spirituality****, and make them essentially immune to arguments from the likes of Dawkins. For example, the Dune books provide a good example of what an omniscient being would need to look like for their existence not to violate human free will. Not that all spirituality needs to come from 70s science fiction, but it does provide a blueprint for thinking outside the box about this stuff.

The only problem with my suggestion, as far as I can see, is that by sacrificing dogma and their big Clubs O' The Saved, theists lose the ability to claim that they have a particular right to tell people what to do. And there, I suspect, lies the rub...

* I'm not going to go into it in the main text of the post, because understanding it properly requires being a maths-nerd of the kind which I am not, and because explaining it properly would cause me to ramble even more than is usually my wont. If you're interested, Richard Dawkins explains the relevant bit of information theory in more depth than I can be bothered to here.


A rough summation of his information-theory argument for the non-existence of God goes something like this:

1. A thing's "informational content" is the amount of bits of information we'd need to make a correct guess about its existence and attributes in the absence of any other context that would explain it for us**.
1. Therefore, the higher a thing's informational content, the less chance we have of making a correct statement about it without the addition of some provable information.
2. There's a mathematical formula for precisely how much each bit of information reduces our uncertainty if you want to follow the link, but it's not actually necessary to understand the point of the argument.
2. Some Theist philosophers have argued that God has an infinite informational content. This is also a potential consequence of interactions between some of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God by Theist philosophers.
3. You have an infinitely-small (functionally zero) chance to make a correct statement as to the existence or attributes of a thing with infinite informational capacity unless you have an infinite number of bits of information about it.
4. The possibility of God's existence (or at the very least anybody's ability to make a correct statement about God's existence or attributes) is infinitely-small - functionally zero.

** A neanderthal might find a computer pretty mystifying, but modern people have enough other contextual information for even reasonably un-computer-literate people to know that they're reasonably common in the First World at least, and have some idea of the things they can do.

*** I'm pretty sure that we only ever hear about insane applications of Shariya law in the West - honour-killings and all that madness. I don't know of any sane applications of it (and can't be bothered trawling right now) but I'm pretty sure that if they exist we won't see 'em on the News.


**** And precisely how could a more adaptive spiritual approach possibly be a bad thing? Sure, people will come up with crazy new prejudices to replace the old ones they've abandoned, but they do that with economics and politics already, so why the hell not?