James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 2

[I just learned from this nice piece in Salon that yesterday was Baldwin’s birthday. One featured quotation seems apt: “[O]ur humanity is our burden, our life. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his [sic] beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”]

My previous post, drawing on a 2013 article by Molly Farneth, discussed existentialist themes in James Baldwin’s work, focusing on the influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s “maturational model” on his thought about bad faith (or, as he called it, innocence) and authenticity. To summarize, for Baldwin as for Sartre and Beauvoir, living authentically meant recognizing and accepting the contingency and ambiguity of identities – choosing existential freedom and its attendant responsibility rather than hiding behind essentialist claims. In that post, I challenged Beauvoir and Baldwin’s contention that a moment of choice between authenticity and bad faith occurs as we mature, particularly in adolescence, when a small portion of people bravely (but inexplicably) opt for authenticity while the rest retreat into what is no longer the natural innocence of childhood but has become a bad-faith innocence.

While I don’t think their coming-of-age model best captures how people grow into authenticity or bad faith, I’m impressed by the fact that they wrote about gender and sexuality in these terms in the middle of the last century. It’s difficult to overestimate the misogyny and homophobia that pervaded the political culture of the era, or how strongly these were linked. The work and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his perspicacious analysis of the bad faith of racial, nationalist, and other identities, were suffused by misogyny and homophobia.¹ In this, Sartre was simply representative of his time. The woman and the homosexual (or “invert”) were seen as fundamentally threatening to the survival of the “Free World,” linked in the political imagination to totalitarianism and decline. This was true not only among conservatives, but across the political spectrum.² Few were those who spoke out against the concrete treatment of these groups in political life, and even fewer who dared openly challenge the ideology at the core of their marginalization, exclusion, and policing.

In this context, Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Preservation of Innocence” was remarkable. He didn’t seek merely to defend the victims of homophobia and misogyny from false and harmful stereotypes, but turned the tables on their oppressors, going after the celebrated masculine identity and calling it out as a form of bad faith. Subverting cultural prejudices, he recognized that this identity made for a perfect case study of “innocence.”³

As Farneth describes, in “Preservation of Innocence,” Baldwin

turns his attention from racial categories to gender and sexual categories. In the first half…, Baldwin defends homosexuals against the claim that homosexuality is unnatural, by speculating on the concept of the ‘natural’. In the second half…, Baldwin turns to a discussion of hypermasculinity in contemporary American fiction. In connecting the two, he claims that homophobia results from people’s fear of the instability of gender categories; it is a violent effort to stabilize particular conceptions of manhood and womanhood.” (180; my emphasis)

…Baldwin discusses the nature of man and woman and their relationship to each other in the context of his discussion of homosexuality for two related reasons. First, Baldwin is trying to show that ‘natural’ gender categories are, in fact, human made. Like Beauvoir, who…argued that appeals to ‘nature’ attempt to oppress and silence those who threaten the status quo, Baldwin contends that such appeals attempt to eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity. …[I]n the second section of his essay, Baldwin argues that homophobia itself is the violent response of the ‘immature’ men and women who refuse to recognize the paradox of the sexes toward those who threaten gender categories. In this way, his argument about the contingency and complexity of gender identities is linked to an argument much like Beauvoir’s, about the tyranny of individuals who refuse to acknowledge the ethics of ambiguity and instead attempt to shore up the given world. (182; my emphasis)

Baldwin recognized that efforts to find essences of gender and sexuality are quixotic, Farneth writes:

Every attempt to establish the ‘natural’ qualities of men and of women fails. The evidence for the essence of gender or sexuality that one might try to amass from myth, legend, literature, and human experience is wholly contradictory and confounds the effort. (180)

…Baldwin notes the vast quantity of literature that has attempted to pinpoint the nature of the sexes and their relation to one another. Every such attempt, however, has simply added to the impossibility of the endeavor, for each assertion of what constitutes man or woman is confronted with an ever-growing number of counter-assertions, throwing these categories back into confusion. And yet it was this discomfiting ambiguity that produced the desire for clarification in the first place. (181)

As he wrote:

The nature of man and woman and their relationship to one another fills seas of conjecture and an immense proportion of the myth, legend, and literature of the world is devoted to this subject. It has caused, we gather, on the evidence presented by any library, no little discomfort. It is observable that the more we imagine we have discovered the less we know and that, moreover, the necessity to discover and the effort and self-consciousness involved in this necessity makes this relationship more and more complex. (quoted in Farneth, 181)

Given this, to live authentically (and thus ethically), “one must accept the ambiguity of these identities; thus, Baldwin notes, concluding the first section of the essay, ‘the recognition of this complexity is the signal of maturity; it marks the death of the child and the birth of the man [sic…and sigh]’ (598) (181; Farneth’s emphasis).

But Baldwin argued that US society was particularly incapable of living with this complexity and ambiguity, leading to identities and attitudes in grotesque bad faith: “Baldwin claims…the American male attempts to ‘preserve his innocence’, to remain like a child in the world of clear-cut and ready-made categories” (182) “One may say,” he suggests,

with an exaggeration vastly more apparent than real, that it is one of the major American ambitions to shun this metamorphosis. In the truly awesome attempt of the American to at once preserve his innocence and arrive at a man’s estate, that mindless monster, the tough guy, has been created and perfected; whose masculinity is found in the most infantile and elementary externals and whose attitude toward women is the wedding of the most abysmal romanticism and the most implacable distrust (597). (quoted in Farneth, 182)

“Violence against homosexuals” in the fiction of popular writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, “that brutality which rages unchecked in our literature,” was, according to Baldwin, “part of the harvest of this unfulfillment, strident and dreadful testimony to our renowned and cherished innocence” (599) (quoted in Farneth, 182-3).

I believe that this existentialist framework - focusing on authenticity (the recognition of the complexity and ambiguity of identities, the acceptance of freedom and responsibility), bad faith (the retreat to the security of essential, “clear-cut and ready-made categories”; the denial not only of one’s own freedom and responsibility but of other people’s authentic projects; the policing - sometimes violent – of established categories and identities), and how “innocence” perpetuates oppression – is robust and extremely useful in talking about gender and sexuality. I’ve been wrestling with what this means in practice. What does it mean to live gender and sexuality authentically?

My ideas about this are still inchoate, but I’ve been working out a few principles:
first, approach gender using the existentialist definitions of “authenticity” and “is”; second, frame all questions about gender in a way that applies to everyone – we all share the same existential condition – rather than to one category or another (e.g., cis women or trans women), while remembering that people have different bodies and bodily experiences and therefore different problems and needs that we collectively need to address; and third, always keep in mind that our thinking about gender has developed in a patriarchal, male-supremacist society and that our actions will either perpetuate this system or challenge it.

The existentialist approach. In one sense it comes down to the difference between the existentialist meaning of authenticity and the traditional, essentialist meaning, which, I’m sorry to say, means that we need to be clear about what our meaning of “is” is. In the traditional framework, to say that someone is, for example, a man is to say that there exists a category “man” with an essence – biological, psychological, spiritual - which exists prior to and apart from any person’s self-identification or any group’s definition. A person is a man in the same sense that a table is a table. So authenticity is determined by congruence with this essence. Some who might self-identify as men are not authentically men because they lack the qualities deemed essential to this identification.

The existentialist approach is pretty much the complete opposite. People aren’t identities in anything like the sense that tables are tables. We’re free – and we’re all equally “condemned” to be free in this way – to create and recreate our own identities as long as we live. Authenticity, in stark contrast to the traditional view, means recognizing this freedom and the contingency and complexity of identity – that there are no “clear-cut and ready-made categories” existing apart from how we define and live our identities. Again, this is a moral question: refusing to accept the contingency of identity and retreating into pre-formed categories is dishonest, hinders our own development, and contributes to oppression.

The shared condition. This understanding of authenticity can move us in a fruitful direction. But only if we appreciate that we’re all authentic, or, conversely, in bad faith, in exactly the same way, and we’re all equally capable of being either. It’s not a question that only affects certain categories of people. As Christina Richards argues,

[G]iven that gender is not considered one of the existential givens, everyone is ‘condemned to be free’ with regards to their gender. We may further reasonably consider that anyone who is not trans (in that their gender is unconsidered) is in bad faith for refusing to recognise their choice (about what aspects of masculinity and femininity they take on), and for refusing to act upon it.⁴

I would put it slightly differently: Because living gender authentically means rejecting essentialism and recognizing that we’re necessarily free (in the existential sense) in our choices of how we identify and live gender, we can’t assume that trans people are living authentically from the fact of being trans, because we don’t know – until we ask people – that they’ve rejected essentialism and accepted their existential freedom. But we can’t make any such assumptions about non-trans people, either. If someone’s living as the gender they were assigned at birth or performing their gender in ways considered stereotypical, we don’t necessarily know whether or not they’re acting out essentialist beliefs or conforming to societal expectations or living their own free project. And this is all complicated by the fact that as social beings our understanding of gender comes shaped by society, so it can be difficult to tease out conformity from what’s freely chosen, even within ourselves. We can only resist essentialist thinking, abandoning the search for essences of any sort at the core of our identities and living with contingency and ambiguity.

The patriarchal context. Recognizing that gender categories aren’t, in contemporary society, neutral is of great importance. The essentialization of these categories, their association with differently evaluated qualities, and the policing of their borders are all driven by a hierarchical system of oppression. All of these have to be resisted – individually and collectively - in order both to fight oppression and to enable people to pursue their free projects. Existential freedom isn’t the same thing as social-political-economic freedom, and in living our free projects regarding gender we face different problems and have different needs (involving law, policy, reproductive and other health care,…); reducing the problems and fulfilling the needs are social obligations. It’s also important to keep gender in perspective. It’s not the only identity, and often it isn’t especially salient; it’s also not the only axis of oppression.

So these are my thoughts as they’re developing. I’m still struggling with some questions which aren’t at all specific to trans people, but also continuing to read those perspectives (Anne Enke’s Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies is in my queue). And I remain impressed by Beauvoir and Baldwin.

¹ One could point particularly to “What Is a Collaborator?” and “Holes and Slime,” but misogyny and homophobia aren’t incidental to a few works – they run through his philosophy as a whole. Even works addressing the bad faith of racism, fascism, and nationalism are frequently framed in homophobic/misogynistic terms.

² See especially K. A. Cuordileone’s great Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War; The Lavender Scare; and chapter 6, “Literary Fascism and the Problem of Gender,” in David Carroll’s French Literary Fascism.

³ In fact, I often wonder whether Sartre would recognize the similarity between the rightwing anti-Semites whose bad faith he describes and, for example, contemporary Russian gangs who target gay and trans people for harassment and violence.

⁴ 2011. “Transsexualism and existentialism.” Existential Analysis 22:2 (July).

James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 1

[I’ve been scratching away at this two-part post for a few months. In light of recent events, I feel obliged to wrap it up and put it out there. In this first part, I describe and challenge Baldwin’s existentialist-influenced “maturational” model of authenticity. In the second part, I talk about (and admire) his existentialist analysis of gender categories, misogyny, and homophobia, especially in US culture.]

When I wrote at the beginning of the year about my 2014 favorites, I didn’t post about my favorite academic article. So I’m going to correct that. The best article I read last year – in the sense of intellectual fruitfulness – was Molly Farneth’s 2013 “James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and the ‘New Vocabulary’ of Existentialist Ethics”,¹ which “explores the striking similarities between the new ethical vocabulary in Baldwin’s early Paris essays and that of Simone de Beauvoir’s emerging existentialist ethics, particularly in their use of a coming-of-age metaphor to talk in moral terms about innocence, guilt, and responsibility” (170). I found the piece significant not as much for its primary argument about the “striking similarities between the language of the expatriate Baldwin and that of the emerging ethics of French existentialism, especially as developed by Simone de Beauvoir” (172)² as for its discussion of how Baldwin, remarkably and courageously, not only examined the concept of bad faith in terms of gender, misogyny, and homophobia but called out American culture as being saturated with bad-faith masculinism.

There are several parts of the discussion that need to be kept separate. First, there’s Farneth’s argument about the influence of existentialist ideas – specifically Beauvoir’s “maturational” model of authenticity – on Baldwin’s thought:

Just after Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which she stated that ‘adolescence is the moment of moral choice’, Baldwin arrived in Paris, became familiar with the existentialists and their philosophy, and began to write in moral terms about childhood, adulthood, innocence, and responsibility.” (172)

I’m convinced by this argument. While Baldwin didn’t acknowledge the influence and even wrote negatively of the existentialists, it seems unlikely that he arrived at such similar ideas by coincidence. Most likely, he absorbed ideas circulating in Paris and was either not fully aware of or forgot their source.

Then there’s the actual moral “coming-of-age” argument made by Beauvoir and Baldwin, by which I’m not convinced. In an earlier post, looking at Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, I sketched out existentialist ideas about bad faith and authenticity. Briefly, the existentialists argued that the human condition is one of freedom and responsibility. Living authentically means recognizing and accepting this freedom and responsibility – accepting that our identities and choices and those of our society are contingent rather than predetermined. But, they contended, people are often overwhelmed by this freedom and responsibility and take refuge in bad faith, claiming identities and choices as preformed or scripted. Sartre saw anti-Semitism in these terms: anti-Semites fearfully fled the contingency of their existence by choosing to believe that their identity and nature – and those of Jewish people - are essential and immutable. This was an “extreme” case, but Sartre recognized this dynamic operating in a variety of everyday and political contexts.

The existentialists considered the choice of living authentically or living in bad faith to be a central moral question. To hide in bad faith was itself an immoral choice, and led people to other immoral choices and acts. But they only tangentially addressed the key question about why or how some people come to choose authenticity and others bad faith (or, better, what circumstances lead people in one direction or another), or why at some times masses of people can come to opt for bad faith. What they didn’t develop, in other words, was a sociology of authenticity. Sartre’s notion that bad faith was a sort of “original choice” that colored every aspect of a person’s life was, first, never quite convincing and, second, just pushed off the central sociological question. His general impression that bad faith resulted from moral weakness and cowardice left unexamined why some were morally weak while others - particularly, in his view, Resistance activists - had the strength and courage to live authentically.

Enter the maturational model, which suffers from the same problems. For Beauvoir, and then Baldwin, the choice of authenticity or bad faith is one made as a person emerges from childhood. “This is the core of the existentialist ethics,” Farneth explains:

In Beauvoir’s formulation, the transition from childhood to adulthood is a crucial moral transition, in which the individual recognizes that the world is made and remade by human beings, and that he or she has a responsibility to contribute to this project. (177-8)

Sartre saw children’s play as wholly innocent in the sense that children know that their play is entirely imaginary and has no impact on the real world. Beauvoir views childhood in similar Edenic terms:³

[A]s a child, each individual believes that the world simply is. Beauvoir continues, ‘He [sic] knows that nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even himself’ (37). The child learns and explores, but he or she pursues and attains these goals within the limits of the given world. (175)

As people grow, however, they develop the capacity to recognize the contingency of human choices and human reality:

‘With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, ‘Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?’ He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time the adolescent discovers the human character of the reality about him’ (39).

…In the age of adolescence, in other words, the child begins to question and challenge the rules, values, and authorities that constitute the given world. (175-6)

Adolescents’ awakening to the world’s contingency and their own freedom and responsibility, and the choices it demands, is an intense experience, and “[a]lthough the collapse of the ‘facticity’ of the world is a kind of liberation, most individuals face it with fear and trepidation” (176):

Adolescents experience this freedom as a crisis, in which they must decide how to respond to the non-givenness of the world that they had taken for granted. Adolescents may recognize their freedom and responsibility for shaping themselves and the world around them, or they may reject this freedom and responsibility and cling to ready-made identities and values. ‘Adolescence’, Beauvoir writes, ‘appears as the moment of moral choice’ (40). The adolescent must ask the question, If my identity and my world are not fixed or immutable, how shall I live? (176)

The choice of an authentic life is frightening, demanding, courageous, and rare, according to Beauvoir:

The ethical individual is the one who acknowledges his or her own freedom and responsibility for creating him- or herself and the social world, and who engages in concrete projects to extend this freedom to those who are oppressed. (174)

…Very few of us navigate the age of adolescence and emerge as liberated human beings. To do so, individuals must first recognize themselves and their world as the products of human decisions and actions. Second, they must recognize that they are also capable of deciding and acting. Finally, they must recognize their responsibility for deciding and acting in ways that create the conditions under which others will also recognize their own freedom. (177)

The retreat into bad faith, the “desire for ‘external guarantees’ and ‘accepted models’,” in the Beauvoirian framework, “stems from the uncertainty the individual faces in adolescence” (175):

Beauvoir argues that many people simply turn away from the questions that arise in the age of adolescence, taking refuge in the rules and values of the given world. These individuals evade the responsibilities of freedom by remaining childlike, living under the unquestioned authority of others (Beauvoir calls this type of person ‘the sub-man’) or actively propping up those authorities in order to guard the given world against assault (‘the serious man’). The latter, the serious man, becomes a fanatic, who sets as his goal the preservation of the given as such. In so doing, he ignores the subjectivity of other human individuals and is willing to sacrifice those who threaten to upset the social order. This, Beauvoir writes, ‘is the fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings’ (50).” (176)

This maturational model of authenticity and bad faith influenced Baldwin, who also considered that “moral maturity entails the abandonment - or, at least, the critical interrogation - of fixed or given identities, values, and authorities. One must assume responsibility for one’s role in crafting an identity and contributing to the social world” (183). He “shares Beauvoir’s rejection of essentialism and of the ‘natural’, as well as her insistence that this rejection is a mark of moral maturity” (178). Baldwin’s term for bad faith is “innocence” – “the willful refusal to accept responsibility for oneself and one’s social world” (183):

To be innocent is to refuse to engage in the risky process of choosing, acting, and taking responsibility for one’s complicity in the identities, values, and authorities of the world.

…This type of preserved innocence is morally corrupt; it is the state of being of individuals and societies who refuse to take responsibility for their role in making and remaking the world. For Baldwin, as for Beauvoir, this state of being is connected to tyranny and violence. In order to protect the fixed or given world, the ‘innocent’ will sacrifice those who appear to threaten its static categories. (183)

Arguing that “freedom is hard to bear,” Baldwin, like Beauvoir, believed that those willing to forgo what Farneth describes as the “comfort and security” offered by essentialist claims and the belief that “the world is stable and steady” were few, especially in the US, which he saw as a culture of preserved innocence (184-5).

There’s something to this developmental model (mischaracterized by Farneth as a metaphor), and the idea of a “moment of decision” we all face can be useful in helping people to appreciate what’s at stake in the choice between essentialist security and existential freedom. But in general I think the model is shaky and, like Sartre’s analysis, leaves the most important questions – concerning why some people choose to cling to a bad-faith innocence while others accept their freedom and responsibility - unanswered.

I don’t believe that childhood is innocent in the sense alleged by Sartre and Beauvoir. The argument that children’s play is grounded in a belief on their part that the world simply is and that their actions have no real effects isn’t especially convincing. I haven’t been a child for a long time or spent a great deal of time with children, but my memory and sense are that children see their play in a complicated way – both recognizing it as play on one register and believing in the reality of the play universe and their actions within it on another. Along with other animals, we have a need for effectance, and imaginative childhood play is one of the means by which we get a feel for our ability to affect the world around us and the limits of our effects. In a healthy childhood and culture, the process in which freedom and responsibility are increasingly accepted is a gradual growth process. This is very different from a model of childhood unfreedom and irresponsibility giving way to an age in which freedom and responsibility are thrust upon us and we have to make a stark choice whether to accept them despite having no previous experience of them or skills to manage them. The latter is the model for an unhealthy childhood.

This is important because I think that Sartre, Beauvoir, and Baldwin, perhaps because of the conditions of their own childhoods and the nature of their societies, internalized a sense of ontological insecurity and a lack of effectance and projected this onto childhood in general. This sense is pervasive, but it’s not universal. Sociologically, it may well stem from the conditions under which people develop as children, not just those of the family environment but the cultural and political context in which they’re raised. Generally speaking, it seems, certain conditions tend to foster a more natural growth into freedom and the responsibility it entails. To the extent that our environment is a healthy one which fosters ontological security, we’re less likely to experience freedom as frightening and to cling to the false security found in essentializing identities and naturalizing the social order.

¹ In Soundings 96(2): 170-88.

² Farneth notes that Baldwin didn’t claim any such influence, and in fact wrote negatively about the existentialists at times, but argues that, in light of the evidence, “[w]hile the nature of Baldwin’s conscious debt to the French existentialists is unclear, his own literary coming of age in Paris hinged on his adoption of several of the themes being developed and debated by them.” (172-3)

³ It’s unsurprising that this kind of Garden of Eden framework would be developed by people raised in Christian cultures.

The many ways to lose your voice

Ophelia posted earlier today about Deeyah Khan’s article, “Women’s Voices Must Not Be Silenced.” It struck me because it touched on what I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks, especially since learning about the heartrending plight of Tamil writer Perumal Marugan last month. Khan argues:

We need to be able to guarantee the safety of all artists and activists for human rights, so that it no longer takes extraordinary courage to call for a better world – so that every person with the ability to imagine peace, equality, progress and justice can express their dreams and hopes without fear.

We tend to focus on the most desperate cases, on the bravest people who already write and continue writing in the face of threats, violence, and repression. My culture even tends to romanticize so-called artistic suffering, to the point that personal pain and political repression are thought to be the basis for and even a requirement of great art. But even the most courageous artists defending free expression don’t want to be martyrs. They want to live in a world in which there are no martyrs to free expression and in which voices aren’t lost. And there are so many ways to lose them.

If you’re raised to believe you have nothing to say, or nothing anyone wants to hear, your voice can be lost. If you’re ignored, your voice can be lost. If you’re abused or taught to fear and hide from the world, your voice can be lost. If you’re not taught how to read or to express yourself, your voice can be lost. If you’re hungry or malnourished, your voice can be lost. If you’re led to believe that writing isn’t something people like you should do – because you’re a boy, because you’re a girl, because you’re black, because you’re poor – your voice can be lost. If you’re indoctrinated, punished for independent or “sinful” thought, and sheltered from new ideas, your voice can be lost. If you’re bullied and terrorized at school, your voice can be lost. If you’re traumatized as a child by war or mass violence, your voice can be lost. If you’re forced to spend your childhood working on a farm or in a factory or taking care of others, your voice can be lost. If no one in your world understands or believes in you, your voice can be lost. If you have nowhere to share your ideas, your voice can be lost.

If higher education isn’t affordable, your voice can be lost. If every day is a struggle just to survive or to care for your family, your voice can be lost. If you have to work long hours to support yourself or your family, your voice can be lost. If you’re homeless, your voice can be lost. If you’re unemployed and lose hope, your voice can be lost. If you’re terrorized and abused by your partner, your voice can be lost. If you don’t have access to books or research materials, your voice can be lost. If you have to migrate and never have secure legal status, your voice can be lost. If you’re a refugee, your voice can be lost. If you become sick and don’t have access to health care, your voice can be lost. If you have a disability your society can’t or won’t remedy or accommodate, your voice can be lost.

If your country’s government censors or destroys your work, your voice can be lost. If they threaten you or your family, your voice can be lost. If they spy on you, your voice can be lost. If they criminalize writing about the subjects you care about, your voice can be lost. If they block your access to the internet and to communities you could join, your voice can be lost. If they bar you from studying, your voice can be lost. If they secretly destroy your career, your voice can be lost. If they alienate you from colleagues and friends, your voice can be lost. If they blackmail you, your voice can be lost. If they blacklist you, your voice can be lost. If they make you think you’re hated, harmful, or irrelevant, your voice can be lost. If you’re denied reproductive rights, your voice can be lost. If they conscript you into the military, your voice can be lost. If they convince you that it’s futile to continue writing since your work will never be published or have an audience, your voice can be lost. If they (or a corporation) launch an underground campaign to smear and discredit you, your voice can be lost. If they imprison you, your voice can be lost. If they call you insane, if they institutionalize and forcibly drug you, your voice can be lost. If they beat or torture you, your voice can be lost. If your country is invaded and thrown into chaos, your voice can be lost.

If your society ignores, dismisses, or mocks you or your work because you’re a woman, or black, or gay, or undocumented,…, your voice can be lost. If you’re harassed or threatened or stalked online, your voice can be lost. If you’re raped, your voice can be lost. If your family threatens you, your voice can be lost. If they claim you’ve dishonored them, your voice can be lost. If they force you into marriage, your voice can be lost. If your community denies you the right to go out alone, to socialize, to travel, to experience life, your voice can be lost. If fanatics threaten you or your family, your voice can be lost. If they intimidate media outlets so they won’t publish your words, your voice can be lost. If they create a climate of fear by attacking and killing writers and artists, your voice can be lost. If they create a climate of fear by attacking and killing black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims,…, your voice can be lost. If they menacingly protest the presentation of your work, your voice can be lost. If they put a bounty on your head, your voice can be lost. If they convince you that things are only going to get worse for writers, your voice can be lost. If they force you into exile, your voice can be lost.

We should admire the bravery of people like Raif Badawi and his colleagues, like Avijit Roy and Rafida Ahmed Banna, like the staff at Charlie Hebdo, like the women listed by Deeyah Khan. We should honor those martyred for their courage. But we should understand that the struggle to realize the right of free expression involves so much more than these desperate battles, and so much more than the strength and resilience of individual writers. It involves the long struggle for a world that not only does away with the many forces that silence people but actively cultivates free expression. I think this also means greater empathy; it means not demanding some narrow model of heroism from writers.

I’ll leave you with Crystal Valentine, reciting her poem on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show this morning:

I am (still) Charlie: anti-racist

In January and early this month, I wrote here and elsewhere about the murders at the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the public reactions to this violence:

• “Tragedy at Charlie Hebdo”

• “Before the massacre”

• “Theocrats of all stripes”

• “Interview with Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Luz”

• “I wasn’t consulted about that faith compromise, and won’t respect it.”

• “Global dog-whistle politics and words we should do without”

I particularly challenged a tendency among some on the Left to rush to accept claims about the racism of CH, to refuse the identification with the victims and survivors of the massacre implied in “Je suis Charlie,” and, when presented with evidence that their initial beliefs were mistaken, either to engage in mental gymnastics to try to uphold those claims in some form or to go silent and let the claims stand:

• “A bad epistemic approach is anti-humanist, unwise, and unkind”

• “Guest post: The problem with ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’”

• “Guest post: The community of the potentially mockable”

• “Preparing the ground for future crimes”

I noted at the time that while I thought this approach was unfair, disrespectful, and harmful, in most cases I believed the motives behind it were good. Some on the Left, sadly, just aren’t strong supporters of free expression and the right to blaspheme, and so had little compunction about suggesting that the people at CH were irresponsible or callous. But many others, cognizant of the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry and violence in Europe, (rightly) felt responsible to decry this racism and violence at the same time as they stood for free expression and the right to blaspheme, and (wrongly) saw calling out CH’s alleged racism in these terms.

So my posts at the time were directed at the people on the Left – arguing that for too many the fear of contributing to racism was leading to a failure to follow sound procedures for reaching and defending conclusions. I suspected at the time that some on the Right would take advantage of this episode, using it as an opportune moment to proclaim that (large segments of) the Left defend Islamism or that the vast majority of leftwing claims of racism are unfounded. And they have. (So be it – I’m not interested in their cynical and disingenuous games.) I expected that many would use the defense of CH to advance a racist agenda, dishonestly joining CH to their hateful movement. And they’ve done this as well.

So the Right have fulfilled my low expectations. But I want here to reiterate that my own support of and identification with the staff at Charlie Hebdo was based on a shared commitment not only to defending free expression and blasphemy but to opposing racism. This doesn’t mean I think they’ve been immaculately correct in every possible way; neither has anyone. But they’ve seen these missions – to oppose systemic racism, to fight for social justice, to defend and demand free expression and blasphemy – as generally compatible, while recognizing that this can be complicated in practice and trying to be careful not to set back one of these goals while advancing another.

My support for CH was never just about free expression and blasphemy, but about their real and longstanding anti-racist actions. When I first put the “Je suis Charlie” logo up here in the hours after the attack, this was what I had in mind - a commitment to anti-authoritarianism, real skepticism, anti-racism, social justice, and free expression. All of it, at once.

In practice, of course, this means different things for different people in different contexts. For me, today, in this context, it means:

• bringing attention to rightwing (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, nationalist, imperialist, racist, patriarchal, corporate, neoliberal,…) ideas, practices, and policies in those areas about which I have some knowledge;

• refusing to focus almost entirely on one form of rightwing ideology;

• analyzing the cultural, political, and economic roots of rightwing movements;

• examining the shared bases and common core of all forms of rightwing thought (including, importantly, speciesism);

• promoting liberation and social justice struggles;

• challenging faith and deference toward faith in general and in liberation movements specifically, and encouraging good epistemic practices;

• supporting blasphemy that isn’t hateful, demeaning, or aligned with rightwing projects;

• trying as best I can to do all of this in a spirit of humility, compassion, and fairness

Atheist inclusion in official memorials: some issues

Ophelia Benson relays a request from Dave Muscato of American Atheists concerning the exclusion of atheists and humanists from public memorials. This is an extremely important issue to me, and I think it’s great that it’s being taken on. This will be a positive-critical post. I have some criticisms of Muscato’s procedure, and I have some praise for this broader effort which, unavoidably in this case, takes the form of criticism of the Harvard Humanist Chaplai, uh, Community Project.

Muscato’s request seems clearly to be meant for the leaders and representatives of established organizations. They’re asked to submit statements, including information about the group they represent, some of which might be given by Greg Epstein to “public officials” (we’re not told who) in a private meeting. They’re then encouraged, almost as an afterthought, to solicit remarks from others, some of which might also be passed along.

This seems a strangely and unnecessarily layered process, when much more direct means of seeking the contributions of the members of the community are readily at hand. (Even if some of these organizations didn’t have a sorry recent history of failing to engage, consult with, or respond to the criticisms of their supporters and people in the community generally, this would seem less than ideal.) A less hierarchical, more direct and open approach might also help to alert the community that there’s movement on the issue and get them active. Even if a private meeting with government officials is involved, that certainly doesn’t mean that grassroots public efforts and actions shouldn’t surround it. It can be about educating public officials while also being about educating everyone else, and there’s no reason the latter can’t supplement and accelerate the former.

That said, I’m pleased as punch that this is being raised as a key issue. As Muscato says:

Atheists are hurting from this news as much as anyone else, and part of the grieving process for atheists affected includes things such as representation at the official memorial service and in the community response. When memorial services include exclusively religious language, and especially when public officials use terms such as “godless” as a slur to describe these attacks, atheists who are affected are excluded and shut out from the community.

More than that, it casts grief and mourning as a religious, and not a fundamentally human, experience. For me, it’s not so much a matter of inclusion as it is of this aspect of monopolization. I think what we should have are secular community memorials in which religious groups can participate.

Which brings me to my criticism of the Harvard Humanists. Epstein’s response to the exclusion from the Boston memorial was consistent with the organization’s position in the past:

“The point of today was inclusion,” Epstein lamented. “All they had to do was say one word, or allow one official guest, and they didn’t. I can’t speak to their motivation. I hope it was a matter of ignorance.”

The HH have consistently attempted to identify and join with the “interfaith” community, and I’ve considered that approach unsound for a number of reasons. Epstein is plainly wrong here: the point of an interfaith event is by definition not inclusion. It’s inclusive only of faith (and, let’s be clear, not of all faiths by a long shot). The point is exclusion, both of people and organizations and more seriously of challenges to their monopolization of human experience and public rituals. That shouldn’t be brushed aside or minimized.

Epstein appears to be quietly asking for a seat at the faith table. I don’t think atheists should be included in official interfaith memorials. I don’t think there should be official, or officially endorsed, interfaith memorials. I don’t want us to have standing alongside faiths; I don’t want faiths to have that standing in the first place. There’s no more reason for us to accept religious public memorials than there is for us to accept religious public celebrations or religious public education.

(This is another problem with the procedure here: People might be unsure of whether to contribute statements or express support for this meeting since we don’t know how Epstein will be presenting the atheist position, and some of us have reason to suspect that it might not be in a manner we would support. I wouldn’t expect him to pass along my sentiments, but then this process doesn’t provide a meaningful space for me to air them.)

You could of course argue that this is a step in the right direction - that inclusion will lead to education and understanding and eventually to more or fully secular events. But I won’t accept, even tactically, an inclusion that requires styling atheism or humanism as some form of faith or respecting the conflation of religion and human experience.

Rorschach's post about the ERV comments

It's great that so many people have donned their hazmat suits and waded into the ERV pit to protest the threatening, misogynistic language by saying "No." Rorschach has posted about the matter, including email addresses for ScienceBlogs and National Geographic. He notes:

[T]his and other comments in that and the previous threads on elevatorgate hosted by Abbie Smith on her blog in the last 3 months seem to be in breach of Scienceblogs’ Code of Conduct :...

An understatement. They appear to have reversed the Code and used it as an instruction manual.

If any of the other remaining ScienceBloggers are still unaware that this is happening on the site they share, they should probably be informed as well.

The skeptical-atheist community needs to say: NO THREATS

This has gone on more than long enough. We don't have immediate influence on those outside our community, but we need to stand together against veiled threats of the sort directed at Ophelia Benson.

Let's give them the Geraldo treatment.

Dear Paula Kirby, You're welcome.

I tried to post a comment on this thread at B&W,* but the thread was closed, so I’ll recreate and expand on it here:

What Kirby said was that, in her “years of being part of all this,” she has “seen nothing to suggest” that “women are being deliberately held back by the men in the movement” of atheism. That is not equivalent to saying there is “no sexism.” Far from it!

Whatever it is, it certainly isn't far from it, and making this sort of claim betrays an obvious agenda. In any case, from what I’ve read of Kirby, she’s shockingly ignorant of sociological realities in business and in general, to the extent that I don’t know why anyone would take her particularly seriously on the subjects of sexism or feminism. What I’ve read is, to be sure, a limited sample of her writing, but many of these comments are those people point to in defense of her case.

I can’t believe anyone who’s been involved in these discussions over the past few years could agree that there hasn’t been a serious problem with women being held back in the movement. Oh, here’s a relevant example: Some of us have been bringing up the lack of diversity amongst speakers at atheist events for years, dealing with endless comments calling us conspiracy theorists, talking about how women aren’t interested in or as well suited to taking those public roles, and all manner of nonsense.** Over and over.*** For years. Making lists (gosh, look who's on that one under K, H, and S!).

If I recall correctly, some people were touting this Dublin event in part because, finally, after all of these years of our pointing to the problem even when we knew what would ensue, this one would feature a more diverse set of panelists (at least in terms of gender). Then they have a panel of women who all agree that they don’t see sexism as a serious problem in the movement. Well, isn’t that just swell. I feel like a union activist who’s worked for years to get recognition and better pay and benefits - going on strike, being harassed, and with the risk of being blackballed - only to hear someone newly hired talk in one breath about their great health care plan and in the next deny the need for a union. I am angry.

*I have no idea what OB is talking about here, but I’m tired of feeling like I’m fighting an uphill battle and never know what’s coming next. I appreciate that she’s posted on it, but don’t understand this tendency to make an argument and then suddenly accept these strange claims.

**Fully conscious, deliberate sexism isn’t necessarily a part of this, though there’s much of that. Nor does it have to be a conspiracy. This is a stupid strawman.

***Note that on this thread Richard Dawkins said his organization was setting up a speakers’ bureau. In 2008.

What on earth are hospitals for?

Ophelia Benson has been posting tenaciously about this.

I don’t come at it wishing to debate (though I’m glad others do) abstruse and absurd Catholic dogma. I can’t for the life of me understand how they could seriously be putting this forward as a policy in the US in this century.

The purpose of hospitals is to reduce the suffering and save the lives of patients. It would be insane to license or insure a healthcare facility with an intentional danger or death policy. No facility, surely, could adopt this terrible policy, right? Catholic and other hospitals will of course come forward to say that they don’t have and have never had a policy to willfully refuse to save women's lives, right?

RIGHT?

Link Gnus

Just recently I thanked Ophelia Benson and Jerry Coyne for linking to my post, and now Richard Dawkins has, too. (I guess he still thinks I’m male, but I’ll live with it.) I appreciate and am enjoying the comments and suggestions – may have to write up a Part II of the Guide.

And now PZ has linked to my remarks about the possibility of evidence for a god (and also to this excellent essay). I think our position continues to be misunderstood and misrepresented. If I keep asking “Evidence for what?” perhaps it will help….

Ophelia Benson and the Atheist Alliance International*

She coulda been a contender. Instead, a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Don't count us out.

(By the way, I can't seem to find the video of the PBS film about Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and the blacklist online. A shame - it was one of their best.)

*Yes, I later corrected her name. No idea what happened, beyond too much time in the past 48 hours spent looking at a baby-name-mocking site. I blame Greg Laden.