You know, Dawkins, it isn't like “I aspire to be an astronaut.”

So there’s a new video clip* of Richard Dawkins responding to a question from an audience member about our relations with other animals. (The sound quality is very bad, even if you turn up the volume all the way; straining to hear, though, I was able to make out most of what he was saying.)



In it, he makes plain – or so it would seem – his endorsement of vegetarianism:

“…I’m not a vegetarian. I would like to be a vegetarian. I would like everybody to be a vegetarian….”

“…In many ways I aspire to be a vegetarian….

I support his expression of these views,** of course, though discussing vegetarianism rather than veganism in 2013 puts him well behind the curve. I was also happy to hear the audience responding to these sentiments with loud applause.

There’s a problem here, though. He’s been saying much the same thing for quite some time now. After a while, stating that a course of action is the right one to take, despite which you personally aren’t taking it, stars to wear thin. It detracts from the ethical message if the person delivering it isn’t willing to follow it through in action. Especially in this case. Dawkins hasn’t put forward any justification that I know of for failing to live his professed ethics, and I can’t think of any. He’s a wealthy person in a wealthy society with great access not only to vegetarian but to vegan options. If he were to begin asking about and using these options on his speaking tours, it would go a long way toward changing attitudes.

My message to Dawkins regarding veg*ism: Keep talking the talk, but it’s time to start walking the walk.

* I admit I’m distracted by the hat worn by the guy in the back.

** Not all of them. There are several stupid statements here, some of which might even represent backpedaling. If we stopped eating other animals, there would be many fewer animals, and that makes it a complex moral question? Really? He seems to have read Peter Singer very uncritically, adopted some of the dumber of Singer’s arguments, and then made them even sillier.

You might be reactionary if…

Michael Shermer, in his recent “reply” (it wasn’t much of a substantive reply) to Ophelia Benson, made reference once or twice to moral progress. Since I’ve written about this more than once in the past, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit the concept.

Thinking about moral progress takes you down a tricky, potholed path. The idea lends itself all too easily to apologies for imperialism and colonialism, to the smug notion that “we” Civilized White People have brought the rest of the planet’s population out of its primitive, backward ways, along an ever-advancing path toward Civilization. It also tends to confuse theory with social reality, discounting the very real forms of oppression that characterize contemporary "civilization."

Even more nuanced views which recognize many of the sources of contemporary bigotry to be of modern, elite origin tend to place white, straight, male “Westerners” in the moral vanguard. This ignores the obvious point that the most privileged, the prime beneficiaries of any system of oppression and exploitation, are the least likely to be progressive in challenging the situation (not that it doesn’t happen – of course it does, and these people tend to receive far more historical interest than the members of oppressed groups).

But let’s accept the idea that, over the past few centuries, barriers to the consideration of rights and participation – whatever their origin - have been falling. The movements against racism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, ableism, imperialism, and religious privilege (specific and generic) have gained strength, marking progress at the level of moral theory and practice. This is true more broadly of the decline of authoritarian and hierarchical systems. (Again, this doesn’t mean the end of domination and exploitation in practice, but simply a decline in the explicit attempts to justify naked oppression. It’s an ongoing battle, always.)

What does this mean for us in the freethought movement? A lot! It means that we need to study the past, recognizing ourselves within the great sweep of the history of freethought and scientific progress, and to think about future generations. How will they regard our views?

Miranda Fricker writes about judging people in the past. We should think of ourselves as the past, because inevitably we will be. If we consider the arc of moral progress, and consider it a good thing, what do we think the most admirable of future generations will think of our views? How do our views fit historically?

I’ve had to revise my ideas about animal rights and psych rights considerably over the past couple of years, and have no doubt that not only my earlier views but some of my present ones will, to future generations, look quaint at best. The point, though, is the effort – to try to look back from the future and from the perspective of oppressed beings and to cultivate the habits of objectivity.

Now, Richard Dawkins likes to write about moral progress, but he’s not big on practicing what he preaches. Same with Michael Shermer. In my view, if we’re going to take moral progress seriously, here’s a relevant test:

Can your ideas be summarized or prefaced with “They want to take us back to a time when…” or “They want to continue a status quo in which…”?

“I want to continue a status quo in which women’s interests and talents are thought to be essentially different from men’s.”

“I want to continue a status quo in which women’s voices aren’t attended to with the same seriousness as men’s.”

“I want to move us back to a time when conference organizers didn’t think about the sex of invited speakers and so chose overwhelmingly men.”

“I want to move us back to a time when there were no harassment policies or cultural condemnation of sexism and each woman individually had to confront this on her own”.

“I want us to continue a status quo in which women who oppose sexism and misogyny are harassed, threatened, and subjected to a campaign of personal smears, sexist slurs, and denigration on the internet.”

If your ideas fit in this mold, you might be a reactionary.

Richard Dawkins gets a haircut

Dawkins storms in, his visage inevitably angry.

“Hello, Richard,” offers the receptionist.

“I have a 12:00 appointment,” he snips self-importantly.

The stylist approaches. Dawkins sneers.

“I want it short. Abrupt.”

“Blunt?”

“Yes. Curt, if possible,” Dawkins spits. “I want flaps, indignant little flaps.”

“Militant, then?”

“No, not militant!” he barks. “I said indignant!”

“And I need to continue to be able to comb it back imperiously off my face.” Dawkins impatiently yanks a photo of Stalin from his pocket and shoves it at the stylist.

She looks at the picture. “So, would you like me to straighten the flaps?” she asks politely.

“No, you blithering idiot!” he growls, growing red in the face. “Leave them contemptuously tousled. They need to say, along with Cecil Rhodes, ‘Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life’.”

...

CFI to take legal action against Wyndgate; O'Reilly to respond to Dawkins cancellation

The Center for Inquiry reports that they plan to take legal action against the Wyndgate Country Club for cancelling Richard Dawkins' talk after the club's owner saw Dawkins interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor and learned of his atheism.

O'Reilly is expected to comment on the matter on his show on Monday night (8 PM EST).

Charles Darwin, godfather of terrorism

I had to stop in the middle of Green Is the New Red when I read about a certain report. ALEC has been in the news over the past several months, and its corporate agenda is of course well known. But I was still taken aback to read of their 2003 report about animal rights and environmental activism:

In 2003, ALEC issued a report titled “Animal & Ecological Terrorism in America.” The Private Enterprise Board Chairman at the time was Kurt L. Malmgren, a senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The editor of the report, Sandy Liddy Bourne, would later become vice president for policy and strategy at the Heartland Institute, which calls climate change “scare-mongering.” In a section titled “From Books to Bombs,” the report outlines the history of animal rights and environmental extremism, beginning with Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man. According to ALEC, the voyage of the Beagle charted a course that led to the Animal Welfare Act and then to the ALF. The next step, the report warns, is physical violence. The authors make this warning repeatedly and dishonestly… (p. 127).

Potter has a link to the report on his site, and it does in fact suggest this:

They are hell-bent on revolutionizing a system of perceived abuse into one that abides by deeply rooted philosophies of fundamental animal equity and environmental preservation. Change has been slow to take root, both politically and within the psyche of the American public. Yet the movement has brought the nation from an understanding of the ethics of animal/ecological welfare to a presumption of fundamentally protected rights. Outlined below is a timeline of this historic and sustained struggle for animal rights organizations:

1859 – Philosophical roots bud as a result of Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man where he claims, “There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”

...

From Darwin’s initial theories on the nature of animals and other scholarly works concerning environmental sustainability, these groups have progressed to the modern day firebombing of those institutions that have caused a breach in their vision of good society.

So the philosophical ancestor of today’s “radical” animal rights movement is Charles Darwin? On the surface, Darwin’s an odd choice. If his scientific ideas were so conducive to today’s radicalism, we’d expect him to have been a radical in his own time. But in fact the ideas quoted in the report were shared by many people over the centuries. His observations are accurate but not really original. The Animal Rights Library includes this selection from Darwin (and, incidentally, one from Richard Dawkins), but it also includes works from Tolstoy, Gandhi, Paley, and Schweitzer. Religious and secular arguments (and believers and atheists) have long been and still are found on both sides of animal rights questions around the world.* Anti-vivisectionist movements existed in Darwin’s time, but he was no anti-vivisectionist radical: see this excellent piece by Eric Michael Johnson.

But I think the theory of evolution, what it suggests about the inseparability of humans from other animals, and its rejection by the Religious Right are at the heart of why Darwin’s writing was selected in the report as the intellectual ancestor of the animal rights movement. It’s an interesting question to what extent evolutionary knowledge affects people’s thinking about our ethical-political relationships with other species. As I’ve said before, I think scientific knowledge can play a role in developing our ethical sensibilities concerning other animals. No ethical position, much less any set of tactics, automatically or inevitably follows from this knowledge, though. People with a deep appreciation of evolution can still be unmoved ethically to protect nonhuman animals.

The link made in the ALEC report, though, isn’t an intellectual or empirical one. It’s politically motivated – an attempt on behalf of corporations to appeal to the Religious Right, whose ideology we saw in action in the hilarious “Religiosity and Global Warming Advocacy” panel at the Big Footprint conference. By insinuating a nebulous link between the ToE and (a caricature of) the animal rights and environmental movement, they can smear both. By opposing to them a vision of religion that doesn’t recognize the mass exploitation and destruction of nonhuman animals by humans as a fundamental moral issue – or even celebrates it - and a minimalist animal “welfare” program in the interest of corporations, they can promote both.

*This is discussed in Paul Waldau’s Animal Rights:

On privilege and...

I’ve alluded to this in at least one comment and an earlier post, and someone else is still making an effort, so I’ll expand. (While it’s not my job to educate everyone on the internet, it is my compulsion to try. :)) It’s not a perfect analogy, but it might help some atheists who still read mentions of privilege as indictments or blanket accusations.

Religious people in the United States have privilege. This is different from privilege based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or sexual identity in that it’s largely rooted in beliefs.* Comparing and contrasting the axes of privilege is difficult: sexual orientation is like religion/atheism in some ways and like gender in others, religion is like class in some ways and ethnicity in others, and so on.

But there’s no doubt that the religious in the US have privilege. “People of faith” are granted more respect and seen as morally superior. Religion is seen as necessary to a good and full life. Government is overwhelmingly comprised of (so-claimed) religious people. Religious people have access to powerful social networks. They’re seen – and largely see themselves - as better parents and leaders. Religious views shape culture and public policy. Religious people might with reason fear that their particular denomination won't be acceptable to other religious people in power, but generally have no reason to fear that being religious itself will be a problem for them. For nonbelievers, a pretense of belief carries benefits. Histories and narratives highlighting (or falsely claiming) religious virtue and heroism, including those stressing the role of religious people and religion in social justice movements, predominate. Rarely the subject of discussion, this state of affairs is regarded as natural and inevitable.

Challenges to belief, in turn, are greeted with hostility, and face an uphill battle. Critics of theism are caricatured - viewed as strident, hostile, and a variety of negative stereotypes. Atheists are excluded, actively or passively, from political events dealing with morality and public policy, and often hated and threatened. Incursions into religious privilege are frequently viewed as rooted in an intent to destroy and dominate or an implicit belief that all religious people are evil. This is all found as much in day-to-day interactions as it is in public debates and institutions. People in many places reasonably fear being open about their atheism with their family, friends, and colleagues, and are even more apprehensive about becoming activists.

There are some atheists who, from ambition or fear or whatever complex mix of motives, choose in various ways to concede to and reinforce religious privilege. Accommodationists often cater to stereotypes of atheists; refuse to challenge negative comments about them; misrepresent other atheists, especially gnus; rush to give the religious and their sympathizers the benefit of the doubt while denying it to atheists; make excuses for the religious; argue that atheists' approaches are counterproductive or alienating; seek to distinguish themselves from other atheists, especially gnus; and at times openly disparage other atheists (especially gnus) for refusing to be sufficiently deferential…though of course they don’t put it in these terms.

None of this means that we think all religious people are fundamentalists or crazed, malicious, intolerant, and out to get atheists. We (with few exceptions) know that’s not true. But we want – as a corollary to other goals - to do away with religious privilege, at all levels of life. And we rightly criticize other atheists who act in ways that perpetuate religious privilege, making it harder for atheists – especially the most vulnerable among us – to make progress.

For religious substitute men. For fundamentalists or crazed, malicious, intolerant, and out to get atheists substitute MRAs, rapists, and raging misogynists. For atheists substitute women. For gnus substitute feminists.

For accommodationists substitute, oh, tools of the patriarchy. :P

*Related to this, our problems with religion are of course not limited to religious privilege.

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.

Feminism, Richard Dawkins, and moral progress

It’s funny that some people of late have assumed that I read books and simply buy their arguments uncritically. My books – including those I agree with in a general way and cite – are riddled with critical (admittedly, often snotty) comments, “X”s, and “!”s.

This includes The God Delusion, which, as it happens, I was just flipping through the other morning. Coincidentally, as it happens, I was reading the section about the changing “moral Zeitgeist” and how it isn’t driven by religion. As I was reading, several recent stupid comments about women and feminism by Dawkins came to mind, and I was planning to post about this section as a sort of general consciousness-raising effort. Dawkins’ latest remarks have made this particularly relevant, so I’m moving the post up in the queue.

In the chapter on “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” Dawkins argues:

Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the twenty-first century are bunched together and way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) [!:)] would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. but over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue. (307)

Some of this section is odd. He calls Huxley, “by the standards of his times,…an enlightened and liberal progressive” (302). But regardless of what “the average Victorian” (303) may have thought, Huxley was hardly progressive on social issues when seen against, oh, say, Elisée Reclus or Peter Kropotkin (who were arguably in many ways not only ahead of their time but of ours), not to mention many rebels who were women, nonwhite, and non-European. Dawkins suggests that moral progress “moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world” (306), driven by leaders and role models (he lists only men). It’s kind of a “great men” model of social change. When he refers to his limited “amateur psychology and sociology” (308), I can’t help but concur.

The notion of moral progress is complex, but in broad terms I agree. When he speculates about Peter Singer’s call (which didn’t really begin with Singer) to move to a “post-speciesist condition” (308) being a likely direction for the moral consensus, I also agree. However, as his recent comments have shown, Dawkins fails to consider himself in light of his own thesis when it comes to women. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that, like Huxley, he’s not as progressive as he thinks – that despite (or not) his being part of “the educated world,” his views and remarks about women and feminists resemble little so much as those of “the average Victorian.” Those who recognize that in any given era many who consider themselves forward and enlightened thinkers hold ideas that the Zeitgeist of a later time will regard as morally repugnant should appreciate that they may not be – and to the extent that they’re members of privileged classes (white, male, straight, well off, not disabled, religious, Northern), are less likely to be – among the moral vanguard, and act appropriately and conscientiously.

*Oh, shoot. I was going to write more about this series on Kropotkin and Huxley, but forgot. Oops. Even if I don’t, though, I’m happy to recommend it again. I have few criticisms, though the title is strange - Kropotkin was a scientist, too!

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….