I know there was some pretty intense debate on this post as to which was cuter, otters or pygmy marmosets. I think I have found a photo to end the debate:
That otter in the middle is so happy! Also, just so this is somehow relevant to the general subjects of this blog…um…something something polyamory is awesome, clearly…something something. Oh, who cares. Can you even stand the cute? It’s almost too much for me to handle!
I found this picture here. You should really look through all the pictures. I was in a low mood and now I’m definitely not!
I remember years ago when the book, The Rules, came out. For those of you who don’t remember, The Rules was a book about how to get a husband. It was based on the idea that men pursue women, so you have to present yourself as someone worthy of pursuance…by, apparently, playing hard to get and being manipulative. I never read it and just remember hearing some of the advice and a lot of it sounded quite dishonest and counterproductive to a fun, healthy relationship. Some examples include never, ever being sexual within the first three dates, not visiting the man in the long distance relationship until he has visited the woman three times, and breaking up if he hasn’t proposed before the two year mark. Basically, The Rules turn finding a long term relationship (and finding one that necessarily results in marriage because marriage is the only way to legitimize a relationship) into a stressful, dishonest, manipulative game that you win by being vague with communication and, as the woman, denying yourself what you actually want to do.
A lot of people have scoffed at The Rules because they generally sound pretty ridiculous to anyone who has been lucky enough to find satisfying relationships or to women who don’t want to play into the gatekeeper model of being female. At least amongst the people that I have generally spoken to about such things, it is generally accepted that hemming and hawing about whether or not to call someone or if you should wait to be called is dumb. If you want to talk to someone, call them. Then it’s on them if they want to refuse you. I’m not saying that it’s easy all the time to be an asker and not a guesser, to be the one to put yourself out there, but ultimately taking that step will either allow things to progress further or end before things get too difficult.
The thing is that people behave this way in non-romantic relationships, too. I spent a lot of time when I was younger trying to guess what people were thinking and wanting. I would wait for them to tell me…but most people won’t say what they’re really thinking or what they want either. So the result was that no one would be saying anything and no one would have any idea what was going on. Then one day, a big fight breaks out because you were too dense to read their minds or something. This is basically what highschool and college were like for me. I spent a lot of time not saying what I thought about anything and then by the time I left I was so angry and bitter that most of my relationships from then were beyond repair (not that this is necessarily a bad thing…my life seems fine without those relationships, but perhaps my teen years would have been more enjoyable if I said difficult things more often to people who reported to care about me). I also spent a lot of time observing how much people worried about every choice that they made when it came to social/romantic interaction. Looking back, and comparing things with the reactions I see now, all I can seem to gather is that it is generally considered desperate or rude to actually say how you feel and what you think. It is seemingly an accepted part of our society to sit there and worry constantly about everything and even when you are good at worrying and considering every possible ramification of your choice, you can still screw up and rudeness is close to unforgiveable.
Because the price of being “wrong” is so high, people just wait for everyone else to make a move, turning the entirety of social life into that same stupid, boring game. How often has a person been angry at another person for something they perceived as a slight and instead of confronting the “offender” about it, the slighted person waits for the “offender” to own up to what they did? If the “offender” has no idea they did anything “wrong”, why are they going to address it? Yet when it finally gets brought up after time has allowed the “wound” to fester, tensions and emotions run high and an argument breaks out. “You didn’t address this!!!” “I didn’t know it needed to be addressed…” “You should have! It was obviously RUDE!”
No. No, it’s not obvious. It is only obvious if you say something and say something clearly. Some people are not good at guessing. In other cases, it is very difficult to guess because a lot of people are really good at hiding how they feel about something. If you insist on waiting until someone notices that you’re having a problem, you will be often disappointed in people’s perception. This waiting combined with mounting disappointment can lead to awful insecurity or passive aggression on your part and both of those things are toxic. Saying how you feel or expressing worries can be very hard because the ultimate fear is that the worry is founded…but even if the result of the conversation is that your insecurity about a situation is based on reality, at least the conversation is happening. By not initiating conversation when you feel uneasy about something, your mind has a way of making things worse. For instance, I tend to project things onto people and I think many people do the same. You see what you want to see. You will find evidence to support your fears. The only cure for this is to find out the truth from the subject of your uneasiness. Finding out the truth may not necessarily make you feel better, but at least the bad feelings will be based on actual knowledge and not simply what you have assumed and cultivated.
To me the point of communication is not to reach consensus but to exchange information (factual, emotional, or both). This is not to say that often when communication occurs consensus does not occur…quite the contrary. When I bring up an issue, I generally hope that it can be worked out. But the goal is to let the information be known by concerned parties (or parties who I think should be concerned). If people commit to honesty once the conversation has begun, then the conversation will lead to a useful ending. Please note that “useful” does not necessarily mean “happy”. I simply mean that if people are saying what they really mean and how they really feel then decisions can be made based on reality. No guesses. This might mean the reconciliation is not possible. So be it. Sometimes things suck. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. Sometimes things go poorly. But why is it better to not talk about it at all?
Over the past few years my disbelief in a higher power or an afterlife has really affected the way that I view the world and my place in it. When I say that I only have one life to live, I’m not just throwing that comment away. This is important. This life that I have right now and for (hopefully) the next several decades is all that I get. What good is it to waste it not speaking the truth when I have issues with people that I care about? Because it might offend someone? So what? Then we can talk about the offense. I have worked too hard to open up and start speaking my mind to close up again. There is no use in it. If you care about me then you will be open, honest and unambiguous with me. If you do not wish me to be that way with you, then why are we communicating?
I am finally coming into my own. It is not easy. I think I’m experiencing some growing pains or something. For the first time in a very long time I feel like I am right about some things and am willing to fight for those things. And I might be proven wrong. But I do plenty of dancing on the dance floor. I don’t need to do it around subjects. I won’t be successful every time I try. But I’m going to try every time.
I have spent a lot of time over the last two or three decades thinking about things such as emotion. I am, I think, more aware of how emotion works on the mind, behavior, and beliefs than most. I have much that I could still learn, but I feel like I have some understanding (dare I say ‘wisdom’?) worth paying attention to on the subject.
In the times when I have been most offended, defensive, and have pulled (or ran) away from something I did not like or want to hear, I have found that all that resulted was an overall loss. The times when my inability, unwillingness, and fear of facing a challenge and trying to find out why I was offended was never a victory.
There are certainly times when an offending action leaves you with the wise course of simply walking away. There are times when offense has nothing to teach us. But there are other times when offense can be a great teacher, and we need to practice in order to tell the difference between the two. And it is quite easy to be wrong, so I tend to lean towards introspection in all cases of offense, disagreement, or even dislike of another idea or person.
If you are offended, even if you must walk away (if only temporarily), make sure to at least reflect on it. Be sure that the cause of the offense is not something rubbing against a fear, insecurity, or where you may simply be wrong.
In short, running or walking away from offense can be a way to hide from your potential to learn about yourself. Others, when they offend you, may have something to offer you. Be not deceived by offense; for it can often be a gateway to self-knowledge.
When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back. As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed. But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.
I know, it’s tempting. Finally, You’ll be saying to yourself, finally an intelligent person with an understanding of logic and reason is going to present an actual argument for god’s existence! Don’t bother. Purporting to be the story of how the author went from being an atheist to rejoining the Catholic church, it’s actually just a long-winded, obtuse, particularly serious case of verbal diarrhea, consisting of equal parts name-dropping of philosophers and smug dismissal of “new atheists.” Containing a staggering 6,918 words (that’s 11 pages in size 12 font), it contains not one single argument. It’s mostly just a list of philosophers and theologists, and the author’s naked judgment of the soundness of each. What a disappointing load of crap.
OK, so I don’t know why I have not been reading Dan Fincke’s blog, Camels with Hammers, for longer than that last month or so. I don’t always agree with him, but he and I share a number of things, including graduate degrees in philosophy, a love of Nietzsche, and being atheist bloggers. It’s too bad he’s not poly or I might have to have a man-crush or something.
This is what Patrick Stewart does after reading the beginning of this post
OK, not that last part. I’m totes hetero. Except for Patrick Stewart during the days of Star Trek: TNG.
Anyway, I’m getting off-topic (already), so I’ll just leave my Kinsey rating to the side for a moment and get to what I want to talk about today.
I had a long conversation with some friends last week about atheism, polyamory, privilege, etc that was rather frustrating all-around. In an email exchange, a friend wrote to me, and this was my response.
I think I address some issues which are interesting to readers here, so enjoy.
[I’ve changed names of people involved for the sake of anonymity or someshit]
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I find it interesting that you read that post and got this from it:
I’m not sure which viewpoint you meant to espouse here – doesn’t this stand for the proposition that any prominent view can be blindingly pervasive?
I find it interesting because this may be a related tangent to the post, but it is not what Dan Fincke was talking about (as I understand it). For me, the core of the post was this section (Quoted only to highlight it, not to have you read it again, necessarily):
And this is not because they are either brainwashed or intemperate, but rather because they know what you think already and are sick of it. They too were systematically enculturated to internalize the same values, beliefs, practices, and assumptions that you were. What you are about to say to them was drilled into their heads, quite often to their own detriment, with both words and consequences. And sometimes those words and consequences were extremely harsh in order that the point you want to make to them might sink deep into their little, obtuse heads. Whatever you are going to say, they have heard it already from their parents, their lovers, their religious leaders, their friends, their coaches, their colleagues, their teachers, and/or their employers. The assumptions you want to make explicitly clear to them, in order that they finally “get it”, have already determined the course of their lives in ways you can hardly imagine.
They have met you before. They have thought your way before, they have feltyour way before, and they have valued things your way before. They have lived in your world their whole lives. They walk around with you already in their head.
They have struggled through hard experiences, wrestled with challenging educators, and engaged in a whole lot of personal reflection in order to learn how to think differently, in order that they might successfully think and feel at cross-currents with not only explicit sociopolitical pressures but implicit ones embedded in language, social norms, religious practices, and, even, what are taken to be moral assumptions.
People who come from your own culture and yet think so wildly differently from what you think you know to be common sense do not just wind up that way because they are stupid or emotional or have mysteriously not been presented with basic information or arguments yet. They have, in all likelihood, had some bad experiences and been exposed to challenging ideas that you have not seriously had to contend with yet. They have, in all likelihood, thought through the issues at hand in intricately complex ways that you have not even begun to take seriously.
Of course this does not mean that they have necessarily come to correct conclusions in all, or even in most, matters. Their radical reeducation may be mistaken. They may have drawn the wrong conclusions from their experiences in any number of areas or in any number of ways. They may have something to learn from a dialogue or a debate with you.
But neither you nor they will learn anything if you just dismiss them as someone who needs you to explain to them the obvious that they might overcome their apparent obtuseness. Nothing is going to be learned if you condescend to them by telling them they haven’t heard out the “other side” and that they are just some sort of extremist who does not get basic facts about the world. Nothing is going to be learned if you strawman what is strange and unfamiliar in what they are saying so that you never give it the slightest chance to prove itself to you and to expand your horizons. You are not going to grow if you look for their most obvious mistakes, interpret their views to have the worst possible implications, or try to attack their personal failings as a convenient excuse to shut them down without listening to them.
This is not talking about how persuasive or prominent an idea is, at least not directly. As I understand it, Fincke is talking about how worldviews skew how we approach topics. It’s talking about how a person can get at a problem from a view that others, who have not dove into the intricacies, simply don’t see. The simplistic view that those people, who have not dove in, is often paired with an untested certainty about their view.
I say “untested” because they have not dealt with the subject deeply and seriously, so they are incapable of understanding it in the way that the expert (or even non-expert activist) does. It does not mean they are lacking in intelligence or anything like that, just that they currently lack the relevant experience to comprehend the various subtleties of the problems.
As an example, let me address your question about self-doubting ideologies, where you said
So it would cut against any ideology which isn’t self-doubting, including atheism?
I’m curious why you see atheism as not being self-doubting. Granted, there are atheists who may not doubt (as there are theists who do not doubt), but this is either a false claim to cover up insecurity or a semantic problem. Atheism per se is nothing more than the lack of belief in any “gods” (whatever those are supposed to be). Atheism is a tentative conclusion based upon rational thinking, logic, and empiricism; in short, it’s due to skepticism; the lack of supporting evidence leads to the lack of belief in supernatural entities.
Any intelligent and mature thinker knows that their opinions, conclusions, etc are always tentative. The strength of their certainty is dependent upon the strength of the evidence in support for a position, ideally. My certainty that there are no theistic gods is very high (for deistic gods, not as high), and if I am given sufficient reason or evidence to doubt this certainty, that lack of belief is subject to change. If there is good reason to think there are any gods, I want to know and am willing to change my mind.
But my experience with theology, science, philosophy, etc have led my certainty to grow quite strong, and the area for possible evidence for such beings is vanishingly small. That is, the gaps for “the god of the gaps” grows smaller the more we learn about the universe. But in the end I will always concede that I might be wrong, that there may be a god, gods, or something supernatural. I simply see no reason to suspect that I am wrong, currently.
So in other words atheism is always tentative and thus, in a sense, self-doubting. An atheist should always doubt (everyone should). If I were to be precise, I would point out that because atheism proposes nothing about the world at all (it is a negative position; a- + theism=atheism), it is not even categorically meaningful for it to not be subject to doubt because it proposes nothing to doubt or not. Theism is the position, the claim, and atheism is the rejection of the claim and logically implies nothing else, directly. The only way to meaningfully doubt atheism is to be exposed to evidence or good reason to believe in a god. And an atheist should be open to the possibility of such (And there are atheists, like PZ Myers, who [seem to] disagree with that statement…for reasons too complicated to get into here).
The point of the post, as I understand it, is to show that ideas, whether popular, mainstream, etc (or not) are subject to a kind of bias, often called privilege, which creates a problem in communication. The Christian talking to me, for example, talks as if I have never heard the story of Christ. Or at least that if I know the words, I have failed to comprehend the meaning and significance of the story. But not only do I know the story, but I know the history, theology, etc better than they do (quite likely; studies have shown that atheists know more about religion than practitioners of those religions do, in most cases).
I know it more because I have spent years studying the subject. I have superior experience, so when I talk with people with other specialties (say, the law or robot-building), I run into ideas about the subject which fail to demonstrate sufficient understanding, let alone expertise. And the arguments that I hear are attempts to show a narrative which I not only understand (and better than the arguer), but which I have transcended, rejected, and have replaced with a superior narrative.
Like I said before; I would not try and argue a legal position with you (or anyone else who has studied such things) without understanding that my views on the subject are sophomoric (at best), and I would lend more weight on what you would say, even though I am aware that you may not actually be correct. But I hear people add their views about religion, atheism, philosophy, etc frequently who have little idea about what they’re talking about, because they are intelligent people and these are mere matters of critical thinking (or whatever their justification may be).
There seems to be a view in our culture that subjects such as religion and the complex issues surrounding “new atheism” are accessible to any educated person (and, I suppose it is if they do the work), and so many people feel (whether atheist or theist) like they can just confidently explain to me the popular narrative and I’ll simply get that I’m making it more complicated, extreme, etc than it has to be. When [name redacted] referred to me as “one-dimensional,” I wanted to say I saw him as sophomoric and simplistic, but I realized that wouldn’t help conversation. When I hear that, I feel like I’m talking to the freshman in philosophy class who thinks he knows everything because he read ahead and knows what the next reading offers as an answer. But that freshman doesn’t have a grasp on the problem at hand, and just looks stupid from the point of view of the expert.
There exists a (privileged) narrative about religion, faith, atheism, science etc in our culture which is largely nonsensical and flatly wrong. It sounds sensible at first hearing (that is, it’s compelling and persuasive and thus hard to respond to easily without explaining the underlying narrative), but it’s dubious and has been shown to be so by people such as myself for years. And yet this narrative drives the mainstream cultural opinion where the mass media, most of the middle class, and even educated people swim and pass around the memes which we, the experts in the field, know to be absurd. And so we get frustrated, labeled as angry, irrational, and “one-dimensional.”
The reason we seem one-dimensional is that whenever we talk to people like [name redacted], in the role he played during that conversation, we are viscerally reminded of the narrative we find so ridiculous, and have to confront it again. It seems like was are reactionary and combative, but we are defending ourselves against the dominant narrative. We are combating a privilege you have, can’t see, and everyone walks away frustrated. We have to explain the basics of the problem, for the thousandth time, to someone who thinks their opinion is intelligent when it isn’t.
So yes, we come across as angry, repetitive, and one dimensional. We have the choice of that, or shutting up.
Considering recent discussions about apologies, I think it is fair to ask what apologies are all about. The word itself comes from the Greek apologia, which means a justification, defense, or argument. Obviously, the term has transformed a fair bit, and an apology is now defined as “An acknowledgment expressing regret or asking pardon for a fault or offense.”
If you look at some ways to say “I’m sorry” in various languages it is clear that the concept of an apology is more basic than a mere regret or asking for pardon. For example, the Spanish ‘lo siento,’ while translated as “I’m sorry,” means something more like ‘I feel it.’ Thus, I would argue that the basic idea of an apology is sympathy, and can specifically lead to an attempt at atonement due to that sympathy.
Ok, so is it possible to have sympathy for some offense given, especially if it was not intended, and not feel culpability? In other words, can we sympathize with some offense without having the responsibility to make amends, atone, etc?
Glickman also suggests that if we hurt someone, regardless of our intent, we should be willing to “apologize and make amends,” and I think this is good advice as well.
OK, so we should be willing to do so, perhaps, but I don’t think we have any moral or ethical responsibility to do so, necessarily. Not all offenses require amends. Sometimes offense is purely the responsibility of the offended. To explain why I think so, let’s get back to Alex’s post, especially to something else that Alex quoted of Charlie Glickman:
Some event happens, whether by a person’s actions or chance.
We filter it through our experience and decide what we think it means.
We have an emotional response based on our interpretation of that meaning.
Our feelings shape how we respond to the event.
When I read this, my pet-peeve alert went off and I had to control my urge to throw my phone (on which I was reading the post) across the room. Let’s track what’s wrong with this series above with my response to reading it as an example.
I read Alex’s post, getting as far as this feeling like he was making some fair points. Then I read the above sequence. That’s the event.
My ability to perceive and understand the information contained within said event led to parts of my mind, of which I am mostly unaware, to create an emotional response which flavored and colored any cognitive ideas and decisions I was capable of subsequently considering.
I considered the rational and logical implications of the ideas, flavored unconsciously by my background emotions for which I have no conscious control but which I am responsible for reacting to.
I decided I disagreed with Glickman’s sequence, making sure that my emotional considerations were not over-riding my rational capabilities (knowing that I may still be wrong).
I felt frustration, disagreement, and began to compose rational reasons why I disagreed, fueled by the emotional frustration and disagreement.
Here I am
The point of this is to illuminate that where the offense occurs here is at the pre-concious emotional level. I am responsible for how I react to this, not the source of the offense. Alex or Glickman should no more apologize for making me feel frustrated than should the phone on which I read the post. The result is that I’m not mad at Alex (or Glickman), my phone was not thrown, and I made the rational decision to respond to the post with a rational critique rather than dell in the frustration..
We are responsible for how we respond to our emotions, including offense. We are not consciously responsible for our emotions, since they pre-exist our conscious awareness, and offense is simply an emotion. If we are offended, we need to consider why we are offended and what we should do about it. Blaming the source, rather than take responsibility for our mind, is not always the best option.
There are many things to consider when it comes to offense.
Is the act or idea which we found offensive true or does it reveal a truth? Then why be offended by the truth?
Was it an act that harms me directly, physically? Was it done intentionally? Was it done via negligence?
There are many other questions which I will not try and enumerate here.
In the case of an unintentional harm, I wold hope that the person who acted and caused the offense should at least sympathize (I should not expect it, but I should hope for it), but I don’t think they have any responsibility for atonement or to make amends. So for them to say they are sorry, we have to wonder what they mean. If they simply mean that they sympathize with the offense (like the Spanish ‘lo siento’), then I’ll agree that it is a sign of a sensitive and caring person, but what of atonement? Sympathy can help solidify social bonds, but this is not the same as an attempt to make amends.
Should the offender try and make amends? Sure, if they want to, but in many cases this would be silly. If I were to make a statement such as “faith is irrational and harmful” (which I am wont to do) and another takes offense at this, I certainly sympathize with their feeling but I don’t think I owe any amends for this. I have done nothing wrong in stating an opinion, one which I hold for what I see as good reasons. Hell, even if I’m wrong I owe no amends, I just have to be shown that I’m wrong.
What could it mean to owe amends for an opinion which is seen as offensive? Does it mean I change my opinion? Does it mean that I don’t say my opinion? This is the basis for the charge that religious people crying ” that’s offensive” as being an attempt to shut up criticism. There is nothing to atone for in an opinion spoken, even if it does lead to offense. So if an apology means that we sympathize, then fine, but I think that’s a weak use of ‘apology’ and I think apologies (in the sense of making amends) should be reserved for when we do something wrong, not merely when offense occurs.
Offense is not the criteria for apologies; doing something wrong, harmful, etc is the criteria for an apology. Offense can happen for bad reasons, good reasons, or no reason at all. This is the case because offense happens before we are even conscious of the idea we find offensive, so it pre-exists reason. it is arational.
In short, there is no right to not be offended, and if we are offended then we are responsible for dealing with it. It is only when someone actually wrongs us, not merely offends us, that they have any moral culpability which might lead to an apology.
I wanted to piggyback a bit off of Shaun’s recent post about shame and shaming. In the comments section, Shaun wrote:
My point was that the emotional shame we feel is often caused by actions which do not seek to cause shaming. I didn’t see the OP making the distinction between the two, so wanted to make sure that this was not another call for people to stop criticizing other people because it might hurt their feelings.
The potential disparity between the intent of a statement or act and its effect on the statement/act’s recipient is, I think, a key factor in most breakdowns in communication. I also think that several of the conversations on this blog and others in the past couple of months have not fully acknowledged the elephant in the room. Charlie Glickman recently wrote his response to the skeptical con sexual “harassment” kerfuffle, and (as I pretty much think of all of Glickman’s writing) he’s spot on.
What this situation brings up for me is the fact that there’s a big difference between doing something to deliberately and maliciously harass someone and offering an unwanted invitation or attention.
Of course, one of the big problems here is that we can’t always know what someone’s intention is in a given social interaction. They might not even fully understand their intention themselves. In addition, when someone says he/she felt “harassed,” we have to take their word for it. I’m not sure we can devise a set of rules that would objectively determine what constitutes harassment in all circumstances, and possibly not even in most. And even if we had such a set of rules, and saw people acting according to them, that still wouldn’t solve the problems because, as we’re all fond of saying around here, context matters. A lot.
While these folks’ actions weren’t appropriate in this setting, I can think of quite a few situations in which it would have been perfectly acceptable to do what they did. Swingers conventions and kink conferences both come to mind. Non-conference events like sex parties or clubs are also places where one might offer a card like theirs and walk away. For that matter, so is Folsom St. Fair. And those are also places where it very well might be “appropriate to hand someone an invitation to group sex if you haven’t already had or discussed having sex.”
I do worry about the possible sex-negativity of Elysa Anders’ characterization of her encounter at Skepticamp Ohio. Anders clearly finds the sexual nature of the invitation upsetting, not necessarily its social nature. She has subsequently said that she became friends with the “sex card” couple of Facebook prior to the encounter, which does not mean she wanted any more than a casual social relationship with them but does mean that she was not opposed to interacting with them in non-sexual ways, despite their status as relative strangers. The fact that adding the possibility of sex into a social situation is always seen as problematic (or its not being problematic is the very rare exception to the rule) suggests a cultural discomfort with the notion of sex as a relatively harmless social activity. I find that assumption to be sex negative.
I want to be clear about what I’m saying here. It seems fairly clear that the couple’s behavior violated the conference’s harassment policy, and I think it was an inappropriate thing for them to do in that context. However, I also think it’s possible that they’re simply the kind of people who see no harm in propositioning relative strangers for sex (i.e. their intent was not to harass). I’m not saying that their intention trumps (or invalidates) Anders’ reaction, but I think it’s also problematic for the reverse to be true. A person’s perception of being harassed is, of course, real to that person, regardless of the “harassing” person’s intent. But I also think that Glickman is right to say that it’s important to work “with people to distinguish between ‘this person did this thing’ and ‘I feel this way about it.'” Sometimes the gap between what a person did and how we felt about it is minute; sometimes it’s wider. Assuming it’s always one or the other gets us into unnecessary trouble. And though we should probably err on the side of caution, that doesn’t mean we’re inerrant.
Finally, Glickman suggests a four-part sequence of events between what happens and how we react:
Some event happens, whether by a person’s actions or chance.
We filter it through our experience and decide what we think it means.
We have an emotional response based on our interpretation of that meaning.
Our feelings shape how we respond to the event.
When a social encounter results in one party feeling uncomfortable, harassed, etc., I think it’s important for both parties to consider this chain of events. What in each person’s experience made them believe the interaction had a certain emotional tenor? Is it possible that they’ve both “read” the situation incorrectly? Have they both read it correctly and one person really is being an asshole? Under what circumstances would the same behavior in a different context be (or not be) offensive/harassing? In all cases, I’d argue that assuming both parties are operating in good faith is a better default position than being preemptively distrustful/cynical/defensive.
Glickman also suggests that if we hurt someone, regardless of our intent, we should be willing to “apologize and make amends,” and I think this is good advice as well. One of the reasons I think this discussion has taken some ugly turns in the blogosphere is that several writers (mostly men) have essentially said that the “offending” parties in these examples ought not to apologize for their actions. I don’t really understand this position. If you’ve hurt someone, it doesn’t really matter if you meant to hurt them. They’ve been hurt. That hurt exists, even if you believe they’re being irrational. You can, of course, choose not to apologize. You can say, “it’s your fault for misinterpreting my intent; I didn’t do anything wrong, so I won’t apologize for your reaction,” but that’s childish and staggeringly arrogant (it implies that you couldn’t possibly be wrong, for starters). I don’t think childishness and arrogance are good methods of having productive social encounters/relationships.
A new paper by Heriot-Maitland, Knight and Peters in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology (BJCP) estimates that 10-15 percent of the population encounter ‘out-of-the-ordinary experiences’ (OOEs) such as hearing voices. By automatically pathologising and hospitalising such people, we are sacrificing them to our own secular belief system, not unlike the Church burning witches.
First off, equating the diagnosis and treatment of people with mental illnesses to burning witches is just stupid. I’m not going to bother pointing out why.
Second, this is just the latest example of someone slapping the label “religion” onto something to legitimize it. As Evans himself says:
A western psychiatrist would nod and tick off the classic symptoms of psychosis: hearing voices, feeling guided by spirits, feeling singled out by the universe, believing you have magical abilities to save the world. Our psychiatric wards are full of people locked up for expressing such beliefs.
Those are the classic symptoms of psychosis for a reason! The reason is that they are evidence of psychosis! Evans goes on to argue that:
Perhaps we need to find a more pragmatic attitude to revelatory experiences, an attitude closer to that of William James, the pioneering American psychologist and pragmatic philosopher. James studied many different religious experiences, asking not “Are they true?” but rather “What do they lead to? Do they help you or cause you distress? Do they inspire you to valuable work or make you curl up into a ball?”
Really? We need to take an experience that, in any other context, is clearly a delusion and shows a dangerous disconnect from reality, and (because it’s “religious”) we need to evaluate them individually on a pragmatic level? I’m all for caution before locking people up, but it’s important to recognize such experiences for what they are: delusions.
Really, this is the same tired old “religion can be a force for good” argument. Of course it can! The problem is that it can also be a force for evil, and there is no way of knowing ahead of time which it will be. The same voice that tells you to donate to charity today could tell you to murder your children tomorrow. If we take a pragmatic approach to such things, as Evans urges, we will end up encouraging people (at least, the people whose visions we deem acceptable) to place greater and greater faith into their own delusions, with wildly unpredictable consequences. Instead of helping these people understand their mental illness and find treatment, we encourage them to adopt an arational worldview and entrench themselves into a belief in things that aren’t real.
Come to think of it, it’s unsurprising that such things are called “religious.”
Yesterday, my friend Angie Tupelo posted a link that caused me to revisit a term that my partner Jessie and I came up with some time ago.
Dick Stump: verb. The act or behavior of responding to sexual rejection with aggression or hostility, especially by a man directed at a woman.
It can also be used as a noun (see title). The idea is that a woman has metaphorically castrated a man via sexual rejection, and the man responds by attempting to piss on her with the stump. I like the term because it (a) rightly makes the man in the circumstance an object of ridicule, (b) sort of sympathizes with him, in that it acknowledges that a bad rejection can feel like castration, but (c) illustrates how stupid and counterproductive the reaction is. It also brings up the image of pee getting shot everywhere in an uncontrolled splatter, hitting everyone in a 10ft radius, which is often how those sorts of reactions can be.
If you’ve rejected me, I hate you. If we’re just friends, our friendship is over. If we don’t know each other, I will never offer you mere friendship. The friendship I’ve offered to your sex has been abused too much and for too long. I now spit at the concept. So I offer you two options and two options only: take this dick, or fuck off and die. Spread your legs, or go fall on a knife. Wet my prick, or eat a fucking bullet. In other words, if you don’t want to fuck me, then stay out of my life forever. If you don’t want to fuck me, I honestly couldn’t care less if you died. Those are the only options you get. Those are the only options you deserve.
Guys, don’t do that. Dick stumping is the main reason why honesty is hard for women in potentially sexual interactions. For every clear rejection a woman gives, she risks provoking a round of dick stumping, which is at best unpleasant, and at worst dangerous. I encourage everyone subject to a clear sexual rejection to take a deep breath and say “thank you for being honest.”
And remember: friends don’t let friends dick stump. Make it know that dick stumping will not be tolerated in your social circle, and things will get better for everyone.
Last week, mostly in the comments section of my post on the difficulties of defining words clearly and universally, to everyone’s satisfaction, Wes and I discussed (among other topics) the importance of rhetorical framing. CERN’s recent announcement of the near-certain discovery of the Higgs-Boson (a.k.a. the “god particle”) has elicited surprising reactions from theists, and I think framing explains their response.
Some of you may have seen this Twitter feed making the rounds. When I first saw it, I was puzzled. How can theists claim that a discovery that demystifies a major, previously unanswered, question about the physical world is bad for atheism? I considered the possibility that the Twitter feed was a joke (and it may still be, though I think it’s serious), but then I came across other christian apologists making the same case. Many theists do, indeed, see this discovery as proof of their god’s existence. But why?
The answer, at least in part, is that apologists have reframed the term “god particle.” Fifty years ago, when physicist Peter Higgs hypothesized his eponymous boson, it was simply called the Higgs boson. The metaphor of a “god” particle comes from nobel laureate Leon Lederman’s 1993 book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is theQuestion? In most press accounts, the phrase is bracketed by quotation marks, a rhetorical move meant either to indicate words/phrases that are being used in ways that might differ from their denotative meanings or to show potential biases of the word/phrase’s originator. When Rush Limbaugh called Sarah Fluke a “slut,” people reported that Rush had used that word to describe her, not that they were using it themselves.
By placing it in quotation marks, the mainstream media, then, frames “god particle” as a term that could at least be open to debate. I think they do this with varying degrees of success, and using the term at all gives it credibility that scientists wish it would not have. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around here. Scientists generally do a poor job of framing issues in the public discourse. Perhaps this is because they see language in general, and the language of the media especially, as needlessly slippery, and they do not want to engage in discussions involving terms/concepts that are not clearly, objectively provable. In a way, that’s what I’d expect of scientists: it’s what makes them good at science. However, it also reflects a type of black-and-white thinking that doesn’t always help factions make their rhetorical points.
But the media is also to blame for assuming its audience needs figurative language to understand complex ideas (though figurative language is certainly useful for this purpose, one must choose one’s metaphors carefully), for so readily and uncritically using normative (in this case theistic) figurative language, and for not doing the minimal amount of research needed to know that Leon Lederman himself thinks the term “god particle” is problematic. On this last point, I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to let Dr. Lederman off the hook. He has joked that his idea to call it the “goddamn” particle was shot down by editors, but he has also said that he used the term “god particle” because the Higgs boson was “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” It seems Dr. Lederman could think of no better way to communicate uncertainty than appeal to a deity, so he may have been foist by his own petard (along with the entire physics community, which is no stranger to using theistic metaphors to make its points).
Christian apologists, however, have used framing to remove the quotation marks completely. For them, “god particle” is not a metaphor but a descriptor. They refer to biblical passages like Colossians 1:15-18:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.
For apologists, then, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle is the discovery of the “invisible God.” This line of apologetics lauds scientific discoveries like the one at CERN as proof of the validity of the teleological argument. The problem, of course, is that they’re begging the question. The mere fact that we’re able to see a logical order to the material world does not prove that an unseen “logical” creator of that world exists. Whether or not that creator exists, our observations will be the same.
The thing about framing, though, is that it’s not always the same as misunderstanding–or, more insidiously, misusing–language. In the case of “god particle,” the problem is that the phrase’s two constituent words are abstract enough to allow myriad interpretations. The word “god” has almost a dozen definitions and “particle” has five. The definition of “particle” is particularly flexible, so it’s not altogether surprising that apologists would see “all things…that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers” as being made up of “one of the extremely small constituents of matter.” Somewhat ironically, the definition of “particle” with respect to English grammar is “a small word of functional or relational use.” In other words, a particle itself doesn’t belong to a clear category: it is not easily quantifiable. To the extent that it fits into a linguistic structure, its role in the logic of that structure is unknown/invisible, or at least not categorizable.
I’m not saying that I think apologists are right to see the discovery of the so-called “god particle” (see, was the “so-called” so hard to use?) as proof of a deity’s actual existence, of the universe’s “intelligent design,” etc. But I think that Leon Lederman’s choice of words was problematic, that the media’s dissemination of his phrase (utterly divorced from its original context, mind you–Lederman was worried his phrase might offend theists) was irresponsible, and the scientific community’s inability (or lack of desire) to frame the debate in a way most advantageous to its own case contributed to apologists’ declaration of victory.
Atheists (or materialists, secularists, etc.) see the world in a way that we believe is fundamentally right, but we don’t have the power of cultural normativity–and its concomitant ease of rhetorical framing–on our side. As a result, we must be especially vehement in pointing out the ways in which dominant groups use framing to buttress their hegemony. We must understand, however, that framing is a technique we also use. Demystifying framing is necessary in order to understand how it functions, but demystification alone does not necessarily change the rules of the rhetorical game.
Skepticism, Properly Applied 