Tom Morris

This is an absolute must-read: The Last Taboo: Why America Needs Atheism by Wendy Kaminer. The absolute thrashing Kaminer gives to the myth of the “secular liberal intellectual elite” is fantastic: the problem with the liberal intellectual elite is precisely how damn religious they are!

Skepticism - what now?

Last night, I attended Westminster Skeptics in the Pub. I tried to write a blog post on the train home about my impressions but they just came out sounding mushy and unreasonable. I blame lack of tables on the train and the bloody uncomfortable seats. Anyway, I’m not so interested in providing comprehensive coverage of what was said at Westminster Skeptics yesterday - there will be other blogs that do that and there is audio of the talk up at the Pod Delusion website.

Instead, I want to talk about my problems with certain attitudes in the skeptical movement and how we can make it better. But first, let me talk about swearing.

I have no problem with swearing. Ever since I was about eleven and the school drama teacher swore like a sailor in front of all her students, I figured it is perfectly possible to be intelligent, reasoned and to say rude words. I still believe that to be true. I certainly don’t believe in self-censorship: find me someone who claims to never swear, and I guarantee they say “frick” or “heck” or “bull puckey” (rather than “bullshit”). They end up sounding as ridiculous as Ned Flanders. Much better to say “fucking” rather than pussy around saying “fricking”. But rudeness is a tool that needs to be tempered. We shouldn’t just go out of our way to - as was reported yesterday - call people like Gillian McKeith a cunt. But not because ‘cunt’ or other swear words should just be totally forbidden. No, the problem with the “Gillian McKeith is a cunt” statement is that it is just poor communication. Poor communication can include swearing, and it can evade swearing. There are perfectly good times to use swear words and bitchiness and flat-out rudeness, but they need to be used artfully: go watch a good comedian or see a well-written play or TV show. Swearing and bad language is used for effect, to shock and so on. When skeptics use bad language excessively, the problem isn’t the swearing - it is the poor communication skills. I’m completely guilty here: when I wrote up the Gillian McKeith thing, I was exceptionally sweary and rude and it diluted rather than enhanced the message. Do what I say, not what I do. Use swearing - like any linguistic device - when it enhances the effect of what you are saying. When it doesn’t, don’t use it. I mean, really, it is no different from using alliteration or slang or metonymy. If you are trying to convince an educated audience, throwing in some ironic word play or clever metaphors will do more for you than swearing; if you are trying to stop a thug from stabbing someone, use whatever works. That’s the thing about rhetoric: you just use what works. What works is different for different people in different situations - a blanket ban on swearing in the skeptical movement ignores this important truth.

Indeed, there are people in the movement who are good communicators: PZ Myers for instance. They may not be accessible for people with a particularly weak stomach, but I’m not going to throw them under the bus because they call people fucking cretins every so often. Celebrate the diversity: some of us will be polite, calm and philosophical; others will be ranty, shouty and sweary. We’re just people and people are allowed their quirks and eccentricities. As we try and influence political change, natural selection will dictate what tactics we should use.

Okay, what’s next? There seemed to be a lot of hubbub at the meeting yesterday and on Twitter subsequently about whether skeptics are a movement. It is an unimportant question, but it seems to have raised a lot of grumbling. Consider this tweet from Red Maria:

Can ppl pls stop talking fancifully, no *delusionally* about a Pro Life “movement”, a skeptical “movement” cos it don’t exist #WestSkep.

Let me see. We’ve got people who blog about skepticism, publish journals (Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic), produce our own media (podcasts, YouTube), attend meetings, lobby governments, defend their fellow skeptics from legal incivilities (well, Jack of Kent does), appear in the media and generally attempt to push the skeptical point of view in the media - but they aren’t a movement. Why? I don’t know why people think skepticism isn’t a movement. I hate appealing to the damn dictionary, but here goes. dictionary.com: movement definition 12 says:

a diffusely organized or heterogeneous group of people or organizations tending toward or favoring a generalized common goal

How the fuck (oh, sorry, not allowed to say that) are skeptics not a movement? The main complaint from people seemed to be that we’re not a unified group with specific set beliefs like a church or a political party. Yeah, that makes us not meet the definition of ‘unified group with specific set beliefs’. But, of course skepticism is a movement. The feminist movement is heterogenous and only has a general common goal. So are many political and civil movements. And, you know what, so are religions and political parties. People join religions and political parties despite not agreeing with them completely. There are many, many pro-choice Catholics in this world.

What, then, is the skeptical movement? I follow G. E. Moore in defining things - if only because a Moorean putative definition rather conveniently ends pointless discussions quicker than any other mechanism I’ve found. I putatively define the skeptical movement by pointing towards the people who go to things like Skeptics in the Pub, post on the Bad Science forum, listen to The Pod Delusion or Skepticality or Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe - you lot are are the skeptical movement. Are you a movement? Yeah, sorta, in the minimal sense that I quoted above from the dictionary. I know, it’s terrible to be part of a movement. It might mean we actually get shit done. And that’d be awful, because we wouldn’t be able to sit back in our armchairs and complain about it! (I kid because I care, right?)

Okay, what else is on my list. The often jokey anti-“humanities graduate” stuff, and many people’s latent attitudes to non-scientific disciplines. This pisses me off, kind of out of self-interest. I’ve got a master’s degree in philosophy and am in the process of applying to do a Ph.D in philosophy. I’ve been told by numerous people online that philosophy is not a real subject, is just a load of bullshit peddlers “guessing about physics” and so on. Now, obviously, I don’t agree. I think that philosophy, like many subjects, can be bullshitty and waffly, but I don’t think it is at heart. Philosophers are, at their best, inquiring into the topics where science doesn’t penetrate well - the nature of our ideas. We use different tools and have different interests from natural scientists. But that’s fine.

And, you know what, philosophers, humanities types and non-scientists pull their fucking weight in this movement (again, I know, I’m being totally delusional calling the skeptical movement a movement). Whether it is Paul Kurtz bloody well starting CSICOP and CFI, or Michael Ruse testifying against creationism in McLean v. Arkansas, or the work of Barbara Forrest and Robert Pennock in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board. Or think of Robert Todd Carroll and the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Massimo Pigliucci, who has written books and produced podcasts advocating skepticism, and who has debated creationists and so on. What I find most amusing about the anti-philosophy stuff is how some of my fellow skeptics and atheists will rattle the “philosophers are useless tossers” stick, then engage in rampant special pleading when it comes to the philosophers they like. Daniel Dennett suddenly morphs and becomes a cognitive scientist or a computer scientist or some such thing. What kind of silliness leads people to say that someone who gave the damn John Locke lectures and won the Jean Nicod Prize and who holds the post of ‘Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy’ isn’t actually a philosopher?

What’s the benefit of all this silliness? Seems to provide no benefit to anyone except some mild, masturbatory feelings of intellectual superiority for random idiots on Internet forums. And in return, we push away reasonable, sensible allies who can help in fighting alongside the skeptical - err - non-movement. When a university decides to set up some nonsensical Homeopathy B.Sc course, we need people across the academy to rally in opposition. United we stand or divided we fall. We need to make sure that the next time the creationists rebrand, we’ve got some Ruse or Pennock type people who can come along and clearly tell the courts why creationism is bunkum. I mean, you get a philosopher to come along and say roughly where the borders of the scientific enterprise are and it sounds a lot less like scientists engaging in defensive special pleading, and it handily ensures that the creationists are kept out of Bible Belt biology classrooms. Just saying.

The other thing is that I think skeptics are missing a trick in being so heavily invested in science. Don’t get me wrong: science is great. But there are plenty of times when you don’t actually need to use the full weight of scientific evidence to show that a belief is false or unreasonable. You just need a bit of Socratic questioning, a bit of logic, a few demands of intellectual consistency and a reasonably well-stocked armoury of analogies. Take postmodernism: you can’t actually provide empirical evidence to show that postmodernism is wrong because it isn’t really an empirical question. But non-postmodernist philosophers have provided some really quite good arguments against postmodernism, and it is hard to think of many analytic philosophers who are signed up to the postmodernist agenda. Yes, Sokal and Bricmont did their stuff, but if you really want to punch the postmodernists a new arsehole, you also need to read the first chapter of Alvin Goldman’s Knowledge in a Social World. Or read Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge. Or read Dennett’s Postmodernism and truth article. There really are some simple and effective arguments against the postmodernists and epistemic relativists, if you know where to look (I’m in the middle of developing one about social constructivism. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for weeks, but I haven’t quite got the logic as tight as I’d like).

Same for religion: if you are serious about atheism, forget biology and read philosophy of religion and philological critiques of the holy texts. We spend a lot of time arguing against creationism - because, you know, you can respond to creationism with reference to biology - but most Christians aren’t creationists. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good arguments against non-fundamentalist religion. But the arguments require one to read some philosophy – even, dare I say it, some theology. And that’s kinda scary for some because, you know, philosophers are all irrational evil non-scientists or something. And theologians are the lowest of the low.

I’m fully signed up on the “yay science!” programme - but admiring science doesn’t have to crossover into “boo anything that’s not science!” Also, I have to say, as much as I like science, I don’t need some of the saccharine bullshit around science promotion. Science is awesome, but we don’t need to bang on about how awesome it is at every opportunity. It is yet another example of one of the rules I try to live by: show, don’t tell. You don’t have to lecture people on how awesome science is - you just have to quietly prod them into realising that science and scientifically-derived technologies give them all sorts of cool and nifty shit - from iPods to robots exploring the surface of Mars.

Okay, enough special pleading for my own discipline.

What else then? I completely agreed with all the discussion of Twitter and Facebook: “a Facebook group is not a campaign” etc. I’m very sceptical of social media (and I’m especially sceptical of the consultants - sorry, “social media experts”, “social media assassins”, “social media scientists” - who flog social media as a panacea!) - Twitter and Facebook are fun, but I do kinda cringe when I see the mainstream media using Twitter hashtags as a measure of the importance of a topic to society at large rather than the importance of a small group of self-selecting Twitter users. People take Twitter way too seriously - it is a lot of fun, but it isn’t as world-changing and amazing as the social media types like to portray it. Plus, some thoughts are longer and more complex than 140 characters…

I’m completely in agreement about the accessibility of skeptical events and about how we are failing to reach outside our own white male middle-class and increasingly middle-aged bubble. I’d suggest that the pub location is part of the problem here. There is plenty of life outside the doors of sometimes rather dark and skanky London boozers. But, then, I’m pretty close to teetotal, and who am I to deny those who want a drink the right to do so? But why not have some diversity of events: skeptics in the restaurant, maybe. Skeptical picnics. How about if we had skeptical tours of museums - get some interesting expert to show a group of us around a museum exhibition or a science lab or something? And how about we actually have a London SkeptiCamp? Damnit, that’d be awesome. What about skeptical reading groups? I’d love to have a non-academic venue for reading books about science and philosophy and other interesting topics. If we are going to treat Billy Graham as our inspiration when it comes to communication, why not provide some of the community facilities that the megachurch movement that Graham and his fellows brought about but for those of us who are inclined towards religious and scientific doubt?

I’m not going to TAM this year. Why? Two reasons: firstly, it is largely preaching to the choir. And secondly, it is bloody expensive. I don’t make a great deal of money - I write software to fund my studies, and I have a large student loan to pay off. However nice it would be to listen to Dawkins and Randi and PZ and so on, I’m not going to pay over two hundred quid to basically attend a two-day choir preaching session. And, yes, the money is going to JREF, and it is a fund-raising event. But that doesn’t make it so I actually have funds to spend! Instead, I’m probably going to spend 150 quid going to a conference on the Scala programming language. Why? Because it is important to my work and while it won’t be entertaining like listening to skeptical choir-preaching and comedy and whatnot, it’ll be informative and exceptionally useful.

What else did I want to say? Oh yeah. There’s another important thing I think skeptics (with the exception of the comedians in our midst) aren’t doing enough of: social criticism. It’s all well and good that we are out there telling people that homeopathy doesn’t work or psychics are a load of charlatans (and, yes, perhaps we could change our tone if that works), but what are we doing about the much greater threats to public reasonableness? The problem with politics isn’t just that politicians do stupid things like the recent response to the homeopathy evidence check: it is that the political system we have almost as a whole, and the media system that goes with it, is completely antithetical to the deliberative, reasoned process of good argument. Look at the “wash-up” process at the end of the last Parliament: here, important laws like the Digital Economy Act were rushed through in the dying breaths of the Parliament with virtually no scrutiny at all. We need to work on trying to build up systems to enable more scrutiny, more deliberation, more expert oversight, more bloody reasonableness and less bullshit in all areas of life.

This is the root of the problem. We need to engage in a veritistic social critique: look at all of our institutions in the round and see how we can reform them to ensure they are built around truth and reasonableness rather than bullshit. How do we get rid of spin doctors and PR bullshit and corporations that structure their corporate hierarchy on arse-kissing and bullshitting rather than honest doubt? How do we bring about an economy that isn’t built on elaborate bullshitting as the current one seems to be?

As Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, a whole lot of positive thinking and self-delusion went into the economic collapse - people bundling together debt that you can actually evaluate the risk of into complex financial instruments that one essentially cannot evaluate the risk on, then selling those on to investors using bullshit sales and marketing techniques (and, in some cases, the merchants who sold these instruments then betting against them). And the few people in the banking industry who expressed some doubt as to the long-term viability of the U.S. property market were quietly shuffled out of the backdoor and were replaced with yes-men more able to think positively rather than realistically. The regulators who are supposed to make sure that this doesn’t happen? Systematically destroyed by self-interest-driven deregulation. The whole enterprise is one of delusion - both self-delusion and intentional deception of others. Our faith-based economy then comes toppling down putting millions out of work and causing people to lose their homes and investments, and we are still more worried about homeopathy?!

On the same note, we need to challenge the cult of celebrity: so long as we have a media system that elevates people based on how they look (and who they go to bed with) rather than on their knowledge, expertise, skills and abilities, the rhetorical football match between the skeptics and the promoters of quackery and silliness will be played out on a field tilted firmly against public reasonableness. If we could make it so celebrities have much less of a pull in our society then Gillian McKeith wouldn’t be able to attract the same kind of appeal she has: part of what makes her so influential for the particular segment of the market she talks to is the fact that she’s on TV and in the newspapers as a sort of celebrity character. Celebrities line up to endorse all sorts of nonsense, and people follow. Think Madonna and the Kabbalah cult; Tom Cruise and Scientology. I can’t remember exactly who it was, but some actress got the media all excited about “cupping” a few years ago when she appeared in a backless dress with cupping marks clearly showing on her back. What are celebrities but gigantic appeals to emotion? You should buy X because this cool person says X is cool. Again, this kind of thing is at the root of many of our problems, and we need to be thinking of how we change society to cut away at the power of celebrities.

And as for politics, I think we are actually pretty misguided - or rather, not quite as sophisticated as we could be - in our appeal to evidence-based policy. Evidence-based policy rhetoric actually helps politicians avoid scrutiny, because the politician is able to simply say “well, the evidence says X”, when often it doesn’t. Evidence doesn’t necessarily speak for itself because of the yawning chasm between the descriptive and the normative. Yes, I’m in boring philosopher mode again. Just because the world is a particular way doesn’t automatically endorse a particular policy about how the world ought to be or how we ought to act. Take Iraq: even without weapons of mass destruction, we may have been justified in going to war. On the flipside, if Iraq did have WMDs, we may have been justified in not going to war. It all depends on your ethical presuppositions.

I always refer people at this point to a post by Janet Radcliffe-Richards called Expert advice. She is basically right: values drive policy. Take abortion. All the facts that the various factions in the debate about abortion bring forward seem to be masks for the values - science doesn’t tell us at which point we should consider the foetus to have become a separate moral being deserving of rights or protections. These values debates persistently hide behind arguments about facts. But we can critically evaluate values too! We have a whole field dedicated to doing this: secular moral philosophy. We can evaluate them for consistency, and we can apply theoretical dilemmas to them and see if they match our more basic intuitions about ethics and politics. We should be demanding of politicians that they openly declare their values and ideals up front in a detailed way. But we don’t. Plenty of Anglo-American political discourse seems to take it for granted that having values is a good thing, but it is something that we should hide away in private - perhaps because those values are religiously inspired and people feel they shouldn’t broadcast their religious commitments in a secular society. This is an utterly terrible policy. It also leads to the misuse of evidence in the first place! If the climate change denialists were able to openly express that they don’t think we should do anything about climate change, would they need to deny it? I mean, it is all rather a big coincidence that the climate change denial crowd all seem to be politically aligned on the right-wing. They aren’t drawn to climate change denialism because it is a fun intellectual position but because it threatens the political ideals they hold so dear. Again, it is an argument about values cloaked in an argument about facts.

The same is true with alternative medicine: it is an argument about whether or not non-traditional medicines should be funded and permitted by the government which is otherwise committed to evidence-based medical policy. I think the great problem with the alternative medicine crowd isn’t just that they often distort the evidence to support their claims - they don’t meet the same evidential standards that are required for other medical interventions. But they also have the moral value that consumer choice is a primary good. Choice has become a buzzword around health matters, but I think that it is actually a giant distraction. I don’t really care much about choice - I care about whether the choices I am offered by the government or the market or whatever are actually good. If I had to go in for a surgical operation, and I was given the choice between either having the best surgeon or having a choice between three lousy surgeons, I’d quite willingly choose to have less choice. The fact that I am willing (and, I believe, any rational person would be willing) to choose to forgo choice in favour of some other primary good seems to undermine arguments for choice. Similarly, the choice between hundreds of different apartments is great - but if they are all out of my price range, why do I care? With alternative medicine, yes, I have choice. I can choose whether I use the homeopathic placebo or the crystal healing placebo or the meditation placebo or the acupuncture placebo. But if I’ve got goddamn cancer, my primary object is to get rid of the cancer, not to have ‘choice’.

We still need to have the argument about facts, but we need to go further and have the argument about values too.

And this takes us to the nub of it. Skepticism isn’t about science. Science is an important part of skepticism, but that is because science is an important part of being an epistemically responsible person. It is a wonderful tool we have to work out the truth about a vary large set of things. But skepticism for me basically boils down to being reasonable about everything. Be reasonable about facts, but also be reasonable about one’s guesses, about one’s values, one’s hopes, one’s metaphysical presuppositions - basically, be as reasonable as possible as much of the time as possible, and help to build a society around the shared basis of being this very modest reasonableness. Following Susan Haack, I see science as being just part of the everyday common methods we use to inquire into the world. The good scientist is using the same kind of methods at heart as good inquirers in any other field - historians, engineers, detectives, even the dreaded philosophers! Inquiry is universal: we don’t have to all be scientists, but we should all try and inculcate this critical, inquiring attitude universally. If there is a challenge for the skeptical movement, it is this: take the critical methods of the reasonable person and apply them to every facet of society.

James Streetly has a post up about last night’s Westminster Skeptics.

You know how we laugh at Engrish - Japanese speakers misusing the English language in bizarre ways? Well, Japanese and Chinese tattoo artists have been getting their revenge for years, and Hanzi Smatter shows how. Ha ha. Stupid Westerner is proud of his giant “idiot” tattoo. (via l. m. orchard)

The W3C are working on EmotionML, a markup language for emotions. There is an incubator group report which lists some of the use cases for such a language. I’m currently ambivalently biting my tongue at the prospect of a machine-readable emotion markup language.

noodlemaz has a post about last night’s Westminster Skeptics too.