On Offense

Despite reading a fair number of atheist blogs, I entirely failed to miss this controversy (and some responses to it) from a little over a week ago. Which is too bad, because it covers a couple of topics that have been a flies in my personal ointment for a while now.

If you don't want to read all of those links, here's the long and short of it. At an atheist conference in Alabama, a panel discussion was held on the problem of attracting more women to the movement. The panel consisted of five men and one woman, and one of the men repeatedly used the word "female" in a way that at least one audience member found troubling. When she commented, she was cut off by the panelist with a rude joke, and angrily left the room. Cue explosive bickering on several blogs.

Not to sound completely milquetoast, but I can identify with both sides here. During my brief time as the music director at my university's radio station, one of our DJs was an outspoken feminist who was so offended by the word "female" that she would spend her shifts going through our back-catalog and crossing out any use of the word (usually in a context like "this band has a female vocalist") and writing "woman" above it.

This struck me as a case of doing surgery with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. She had complained to management before about comments from some male co-workers making her uncomfortable, and her concerns had been taken seriously, so I was never sure why she didn't talk to anyone about the "female" issue. As at least one of her "corrections" was on an entry I wrote, I would have liked to have had the chance to explain my word choice, which had more to do with thinking "female" reads better than "woman" in some contexts than any desire (conscious or otherwise) to dehumanize women.

On the other hand, though, there are words that are similarly grating on me. For example, even though I know plenty of women who refer to other women as "chicks," I find that particular term cringe-inducing. I can't explain it; it has always bothered me, and likely always will. I personally think that my annoyance with the word "chick" is more justifiable than others' annoyance with the word "female," but really the whole issue is so subjective that finding common ground is likely to be no small task.

And that's the real problem here: determining whether particular offenses are worth speaking out against, or if they're minor annoyances that we just need to swallow. For example, I've decided that "chick" isn't worth fighting against, but "fag" is; but again, I know LGBT people who laugh off "fag" in cases that send me into a rage.

Am I irrational for being disgusted enough with the word "fag" to criticize those who use it? Was the woman at the conference who was offended by "female" irrational? That's a difficult question. I think that, to some extent, I am irrational. "Fag" offends me regardless of its context, but "retard" doesn't. That's at least inconsistent. But what are the options? Are we left with a dichotomy which says that either everyone should be offended by everything, or no one should be offended by anything? Neither option seems particularly appealing.

The closest thing that I can propose to an answer is that we all need more of that consciousness raising that Richard Dawkins likes to talk about, on a wide range of issues. That doesn't mean that we all become hypersensitive and humorless. But it does mean that we start paying more attention to how we use potentially loaded words. Words aren't inherently offensive; they become offensive because of the history of their usage. But just as understanding that history is essential to understanding whatever offense they may or may not cause, it's also essential in moving beyond mere offense.

I think there's a reason that very few people get up in arms about the prolific use of racial slurs in Quentin Tarantino's scripts, but an entire campaign was launched to try to stop kids from using "gay" as a pejorative. We assume that Tarantino knows the history of the words he uses, and uses them to the end of crafting a suitably sleazy world for his characters. To the extent that they elicit laughter, it's because audience and director are both aware of just how inappropriate they are. That is, we've had our consciousness raised.

Compare that to the kid on Xbox Live who uses "fag" like most people use commas. He doesn't know the history of that word, and isn't using it to any end other than being abrasive (or worse, he uses it simply because he hasn't thought about it). That kid is in desperate need of consciousness raising.

So what we need isn't more offense, more righteous anger, or more calls for those who disagree with us to have a sense of humor. It's more understanding, not just of those who have been offended, but those who do the offending. Nobody needs to be singled out and scorned--we all need a chance to explain ourselves.

They Want To Misunderstand

This article from the New York Times, about a group of biologists who set out to educate kids in the rural U.S. about evolution in honor of Darwin Day, has some good news and some bad news. It suggests that people in general aren't as aghast at the idea of their kids being taught about evolution as we might have suspected, but it also suggests that those who want the subject taught more widely are still making one small but important mistake.

First the good news:

The group’s small-town hosts took their own precautions. A high school principal in Ringgold, Va., sent out permission slips so parents could opt out of sending their children to the event (two did).

Only two sets of parents opting out of letting their kids learn basic science is, all things considered, pretty good. Yes, it could have been better (it could have been zero), but it still has to have been fewer than what the event's organizers, and maybe even the principal, were expecting. Maybe I'm too hopeful, but what this suggests to me is that the teaching of evolution is not actually as controversial as its shrillest opponents would have us believe.

Speaking of those opponents, though, some educators may still be making it too easy for them to go on willfully misrepresenting the theory of evolution. I think the most important step educators can take in making evolution clear to younger students is that there is no intentionality behind it. Of course phrasing it that way would open up a philosophical can of worms that teachers, understandably, would not want to deal with. Still, I think explanations like this don't go far enough in making the point:

Dr. [Craig] McClain, who wrapped up his Nebraska-Montana tour at a middle school on Monday, found himself explaining how giant squid evolved. 

“Smaller squids get eaten by everything,” he said. “It’s not a very good lifestyle to have.”

Hopefully McClain went on to make it clear that the change in squid size was driven by the fact that smaller squids died off, while their larger neighbors survived to pass on their genes to future generations, resulting in a larger population overall, and that this process played out over millions of years. Given that evolution's theistic critics love to claim that evolution happens by "random chance," and that change in species would require a driving intentional force, the above response doesn't go far enough. It leaves it open for some shifty apologist to say "What makes more sense--that the squids got bigger because they wanted to, or because God wanted them to?"

I don't know what McClain's full answer was, or what came before, so I don't want to suggest that he wasn't doing his job properly. But I have heard evolution's staunchest defenders talk about this subject in ways that are too ambiguous. When a large portion of your audience is primed to misunderstand you, you have to work harder.

Observe!

In a new post at his blog Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne takes apart the work of yet another scientist with New Age leanings writing for the Huffington Post. Since I've spent the last two days going after the religious tendency to use subjective experience in dubious ways, it's only fair that I point to a more secular ideology based on the same thing.

The post Coyne is critiquing is nothing new if you've read even a paragraph of someone like Deepak Chopra. It's a mangling of quantum mechanics which takes the technical notion of "observers" to mean "humans looking at things" (see Sokal and Bricomont's Fashionable Nonsense for a more thorough discussion of this common mistake), then assumes that anything true of subatomic particles must be true of all sorts of macroscopic objects. It then concludes that since reality is a construct of (human) observers, there's no reason it can't go on indefinitely.

I once applied for a job at a "natural foods" grocery store, and while waiting on an interview there, I overheard a hilarious conversation. Two young hippies were sitting at a table drinking Naked fruit juice and loudly talking about how all disease is imaginary, and if you can stop believing doctors and "the government" when they tell you you're sick, you'll become immortal. The passion with which they were discussing this nonsense was funny, but I also have to admit that I was a bit envious. What must it be like to really and truly believe that we're in complete control of reality? Surely it's more than a little intoxicating.

I feel the same way when I read peddlers of quantum nonsense. I think that some of them are cynical, and just pushing this stuff on readers who don't know any better (and don't want to), but still, for those who do believe, what a different life it must be. Of course it will end the same way as mine--the inevitabilities of disease or old age will put a permanent stop to our continued observations, and no amount of positive thinking will be able to stop it.

But I confess that I sometimes wonder, in the meantime, which of us is having a better time.

An Important Difference

Last night, Sam Harris tweeted a link to a debate he had participated in a few years ago on the subject of religion's role in the end of the world. The debate itself is mostly awful, as these things tend to be, with the moderator helping Harris's opponent pile on him to the point that a frustrated audience member finally cries out "You're the moderator!" I'll link to the first clip, though, for the sake of a reference:



Something interesting did emerge in the course of the debate, though, namely the extent to which Harris's religious opponent seems to rely on his own personal experience as his most important source of evidence, and the extent to which his compatriot the moderator is instantly willing to accept that experience as better evidence than any of the statistics Harris offers in return.

Of course we already knew that this was true of religious people to some extent. Powerful personal experience of the numinous does, in my mind, serve as some evidence in favor of religious belief, even if it is vastly outweighed by counter evidence from philosophy and science. But if one accepts what one takes to be one's most important convictions entirely on the basis of such evidence, we shouldn't be surprised to find him privileging that same sort of evidence in all cases.

Of course no human enterprise can ever get off the ground without input garnered from personal experience. But the value of science is that it gives us a set of tools for refining that kind of experience. This is why repeatability is vital to the scientific enterprise. If only one person is ever able to perform an experiment, we shouldn't put as much stock in it as if every competent individual who performed it had the same results.

This is why when Harris says that a single well-designed opinion poll of people in Gaza would be of more value than the personal experiences that his opponent continually cites, he's absolutely correct. It can be hard to accept that one's experiences might not be a perfect mirror of reality, but that's exactly why we shouldn't stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that they are, oh yes they are! At least if what we really care about is getting at the truth and not just maintaining our sense of smug self-satisfaction.

The New Retro

Working in a game store gives you a different perspective than you're likely to get just reading about games online (or even getting involved in the discussions with the other people who talk about games online). For example, it's amazing how many people don't realize that the PSP Go can't play UMDs, or who have never connected a console to the internet. The majority of gamers are nothing like those of us who frequent trendy gaming websites and listen to their podcasts.

One trend that has become almost ubiquitous in the store at which I work is frat boys buying N64s and trying to recreate their childhood game collections. To some extent, this was inevitable; back when I first started searching for games on the internet, I was solely concerned with tracking down all the Atari 2600 games I recalled as my first gaming experiences. Lots of people who have fond gaming memories end up trying to recreate them at some point, whether that means digging their old consoles out of their parents' attic, downloading an emulator and scads of ROMs, or buying back as much as possible.

What makes this apparent trend of N64 nostalgia interesting to me is that it looks like the first steps in finally moving beyond the threadbare trend of 8- and 16-bit nostalgia that is especially problematic in indie game circles, where it has been holding developers back from exploring original ideas for at least a decade. Don't get me wrong, I don't really want to see 8-bit nostalgia replaced by 64-bit nostalgia (new ideas are almost always preferable), but it would be a refreshing change of pace. How would this kind of nostalgia look? Would artists try to recreate the N64's muddy, low-rez textures and blocky polygons? Will graphics that were ugly even in their time suddenly become as chic as squat little 8-bit sprites have become?

Also interesting is the fact that this wave of nostalgia seems to be sweeping over the terminally unhip first. The self-aware hipsters who shop at my store still flock to the NES and SNES (and sometimes PS1, but only for games that look 16-bit anyway), leading me to wonder how bad the revisionist history will be in a few years when every indie game looks like Ocarina Of Time.

My prediction: it'll be totally sick, bro.

Dickwolves

If you don't immediately get the significance of that title, you can get caught up here and here, and finally here (scroll down to the last post). Got all that? Good.

My first reaction to this controversy was pretty much in line with that second link above. Everyone gets offended by things, and everyone has the right to voice his or her offense. I've done it myself, and I'm sure I'll do it again. It sucks when someone you like offends you, and it's even worse when you go to that person hoping to make them see your side of things and they make a t-shirt mocking you for being offended in the first place.

That doesn't mean you weren't wrong to be offended in the first place; it just sucks. Life is complicated.

I have to admit, though, reading that last post made me finally see the other side of the issue in a way I had previously failed to. I hadn't thought about what it would be like to be a woman (or maybe a man) whose life has been directly affected by rape, walking through a crowd of hundreds of sweaty adolescents (or adults for whom aging provided no escape from that desperate situation), trying to avoid making eye contact with the ones wearing that t-shirt--the one the people you thought were your friends made to mock you for being hurt by something they said, oh and also for having been hurt by sexual abuse.

That, purely and simply, is bullying, and Penny Arcade was enabling it. I don't believe for a second that that was their intent, but they're in a unique position to both make the t-shirt and provide the forum for victims to be mocked and vilified. Again, life is complicated.

The point of this post is not for me to get on my high horse and point out my own moral superiority. If anything, it's to come to grips with my own wrongness. While I support freedom of speech even when I find that speech abhorrent, I also believe in holding people responsible for what they say. I'll still defend the two comics I linked to above. It's unreasonable and harmful to demand that nobody ever talk or even joke about potentially offensive subjects.

But in retrospect, it's pretty easy to see that the t-shirt took things too far. Like Sarah Palin's gun sights ad, it encouraged solidarity between the sane (those who disagreed with Gabrielle Giffords's politics or found the world "dickwolves" funny) and the insane (those who actually wanted to kill Giffords or those who would actually commit rape). The sane always lose with that arrangement. We should avoid it.

Does Not Liking Hip-Hop Make Me a Racist?

A few months ago, I replied to a friend on Facebook who was asking people to list their 10 favorite albums. I didn't think my list was particularly controversial, especially to people who know me. Most of my favorite bands were operating in the late '80s to mid '90 in the UK. Most were part of the shoegaze movement that took off around that time. Like others who responded, most of the albums on my list landed in one or two closely related genres. It never entered my mind that my love of fey British alternative bands would surprise anyone.

It did, though, and soon the "whiteness" of my list was being mocked--exclusively by other white people. I wasn't offended, since the mockery was good natured and pretty funny. But after yesterday's post, in which I might have implied that mainstream music critics spend so much time talking about hip-hop because they don't want to be perceived as racists, I thought about the Facebook incident again. Specifically, I thought (as I did at the time) about why it was acceptable for me to be mocked for listening to so much "white" music when I would never have considered firing back that others' lists were too "black."

These are hardly profound thoughts. We're all aware of concepts like "reverse" racism, white guilt and tokenism. While I don't think that white people who love hip-hop are necessarily guilty of engaging in any of the above, I have to admit that my comments yesterday were intended to make readers question whether any are present when white hipsters heap praise on "Kanye." Of course it's completely possible for someone to genuinely  love both hip-hop and indie rock, but one wonders whether it's really possible to connect with both in the way some critics want claim to.

While I don't think there's a genre of music out there that I inherently dislike, I have to admit that very little hip-hop appeals to me. When it does, it's generally in the vein of early '90s Public Enemy and Ice Cube records, and the appeal is almost entirely technical. Those were some of the best-produced records of their time, but that's as far as my interest goes. I don't--and, thanks to my socio-economic background, can't--identify with the sentiments being expressed in the lyrics. As much as I appreciate the craftsmanship of the beats and the significance of the chaotic soundscapes, it's an intellectual appreciation. My favorite Ice Cube track doesn't move me the way even my least favorite Cocteau Twins track does.

I've always felt like this is a pretty honest assessment of the situation, and not one that leaves me open to charges of racism. I've always rejected the claim, often made by hip-hop's detractors, that it's an inherently inferior form of music since it is often based on samples and allusions rather than completely original musicianship. The same complaint has been lodged against musical styles that I love, like electronic and industrial, for years, and it has always rung just as hollow. I don't have a grudge against hip-hop, but that doesn't change the fact that none of it has ever spoken to me at a level that made me cherish it the same way I cherish records by Slowdive, The Cure, The Pet Shop Boys, and so on.

I don't think my taste in music is "too white," nor do I think that others' taste is "too black." You should listen to the music that moves you, makes you feel sorry for all those poor bastards who didn't live long enough to hear it. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time.

Music Journalists Are Incom--Oh, Never Mind

'I give props to Bruno Mars' Doo-Wops & Hooligans, but I'd rather get lost in Ariel Pink's trippy Before Today, which sounds like an album made by an alien who visited Earth in 1976, listened to a ton of AM gold, then tried to replicate the sounds he heard, from very imperfect memory, some 30 years later—check out "Can't Hear My Eyes" and "Menopause Man."'


This snippet of an article from Slate's Jonah Weiner encapsulates why I don't read much music journalism anymore. I like the idea that the purpose of criticism is ultimately to tell the audience about one's own subjective experience of a work, but there's no lazier way to do that than with tortured similes like the one quoted here. The only thing that can push me away from an article faster is when some cheeky writer decides to invent a new genre to describe a not-particularly-original artist, as when Pitchfork described Melissa Nadler's sound as "narco-folk."

Even when I do manage to get all the way to the end of a piece of music writing these days, I usually find that
every critic has pretty much the same tastes: mostly indie darlings like Vampire Weekend, as well as a few hip-hop superstars (usually Kanye West, or just Kanye as he's invariably called) thrown in to prove that they're not snobbish racists.

Weiner goes on in the same article to praise records that "[burst] with ideas and references and signifiers that can be like oxygen to people whose jobs necessitate that they find interesting, involved things to say about music all day." But is it really interesting and involved to play a public game of spot the allusion with every album you listen to? I submit that Weiner's need to point out that he got it when Vampire Weekend referenced The Source and Wire demonstrates that it is not.

I used to devour music magazines in order to discover new artists, but these days I'd vastly prefer to let Last FM or Pandora serve that purpose. I still love music, but I've found that I don't much care what artists have to say about their own work, much less what most music critics have to say about it. I imagine this has something to do with my taste for ethereal and shoegaze bands, who put sound above message. I've never wanted to hear Kevin Sheilds or Liz Fraser say what their songs are really about, because I suspect the truth couldn't possibly live up to my experiences.

Maybe if I listened to more music in which lyrics are of central importance, I'd feel differently, but then again maybe not. A few years ago when I was obsessed with Joanna Newsom's Ys, I intentionally avoided any discussion of the songs' meanings. I knew what they meant to me, and that was good enough.

I'm sure a lot of artists and critics would be appalled by this, but at least I know I'm not a hypocrite. I've written music for most of my life, and one of the most thrilling moments I ever had as a songwriter was when a friend told me what she thought one of my songs meant. She was completely wrong, but I didn't care. I was happier that she had imposed her own subjective meaning on my lyrics than I would have been if she had known exactly what I was singing about.

By now I've completely lost the plot of what I was even writing about at the beginning of this post, so I'm not going to sum up. I'm just going to implore music journalists to be more concerned with passion than the need to make sure everyone knows that they get it.

Smugness

In my last post, I wrote about a recent trend in liberal Christianity, namely lashing out at the so-called New Atheists for failure to approach disbelief in God with a certain degree of sadness and gravitas. New Atheist writers are often deemed insufficiently intellectual on the basis of tone and unwillingness to be miserable in a godless world--but never, as far as I've seen, on the basis of specific arguments that they've made.

Despite the fact that I took Scott Stevens to task for this in my last post, I want to point out (in the interest of not being unphilosophical myself) that I don't think it's necessarily impossible to make the case that he was trying to make--namely that the only proper response to disbelief is a kind of monkish solemnity. It's just that Stevens, like the leading names in liberal Christianity, haven't even tried to make that case yet. They've asserted the conclusion, then scoffed at people like me who ask for an argument to support it as if it's self-evident even to children of below-average intellectual capacity.

In short, they do just what they accuse the New Atheists of doing: substituting smug self-confidence for rigorous argument.

This is irritating not just because hypocrisy is always irritating, but because it so willfully ignores the actual state of affairs. I'm sure there are smug atheists--there are smug people in all walks of life, and all belief systems. While I don't deny that the New Atheists have all openly mocked religion, I do reject the implication that mockery and smugness are always the same thing. This leads me to believe that the New Atheists' critics are either reading smugness into attacks on their position, or they aren't reading the New Atheists' books.

One of the most famous bits of supposed smugness in the New Atheist canon is Richard Dawkins's screed against the God of the Old Testament:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

That's harsh, but it's not smug. If it were smug, it would be focused on deriding the stupid faithful who believe in the existence of a divine super-being that any idiot can see doesn't exist. But Dawkins isn't doing that. His ire is focused on what he believes is a fictional character, not the people who think the character isn't fictional.

Moreover, while I'm sure Dawkins believes wholeheartedly in this assault, I'm equally sure that he recognizes the humor inherent in it. And a good part of that humor plays on the thought of how much trouble Dawkins is in if it turns out that he's wrong. That's not smugness--it's practically self-effacing.

So why shouldn't Dawkins and the other New Atheists have a sense of humor about disbelief? How is this any different from saying that Christians should go shuffling around, staring down at their navels in abject misery because they've realized they don't believe in Allah. Of course some people do, in fact, feel sad when they cease to believe in God. But it doesn't follow that all of us must feel sad about our lack of belief.

To say that we must is...well, smug.

"Unphilosophical"

Scott Stevens, Religion and Ethics Editor of ABC Online (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American Broadcasting Company) has written a piece called "The Poverty Of the New Atheism," the content of which it should be easy to discern from the title. As with most such pieces, Stevens is unable to discuss the ideas of the New Atheists without spending most of his time criticizing their delivery. In fact, he's so focused on the tone of Dawkins et. al. that he forgets to even make an argument.

Therefore, as much as I'd like to, I can't say that Stevens commits an ad hominem fallacy when he calls the New Atheists "unphilosophical," because to call it a fallacy would imply that Stevens has made an error in his reasoning. He hasn't, because he's not reasoning so much as lashing out.

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life - one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx's great observation about the "theological" dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the "New Atheists" look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

In short, Stevens is all for criticism of religion so long as one does it with a proper attitude of reverence for what one is criticizing. This is nothing new--it's become quite the popular sentiment in liberal Christian circles since the New Atheists' rise to fame. But it's not an argument. It has nothing to do with what Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennet have said, and everything to do with how they have said it. Stevens does go a bit farther than previous critics, though, in directing some scorn at the New Atheists' readers, as well. (So is Stevens also illiterate, or has he not read any of the books he's criticizing?)

But for all this abuse to constitute a fallacy, Stevens would have to be using it as a counter argument, and as nearly as I can tell, he's not. He yammers on about Marx for a bit, but it's just paragraphs of throat clearing.

But Marx's critique of religion has an unexpected twist, a barb in the tail that implicates [the New Atheists] by exposing the deeper complicity concealed by their cynicism. For, to be "dis-illusioned" in Marx's sense is not heroically to free oneself from the shackles and blinders of religious ideology and thus to gaze freely upon the world as it truly is, as Dawkins and Harris and even Hitchens would suppose.

Rather, to be "dis-illusioned" is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called "the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth".

Being one of the New Atheists' illiterate readers, I barely feel qualified to comment, but it seems to me that Marx's "dis-illusionment" is precisely to "gaze freely upon the world as it truly is." Unless Stevens is suggesting that exposing "oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence" is somehow to construct another illusion to replace the religious illusion one has cast aside.

This still isn't an argument, though. It's just a contrast, and a confused one at that. Stevens accuses the New Atheists of cynicism, but praises Marx for recognizing that the world as it truly is, is a pretty terrible place. Illiterate though I may be, I have at least read Dawkins, and his message is that life gets better when you cast off religious illusions, not worse. What's really bowing us downwards to the earth is not reality, but the delusion that an omnipotent, omniscient being is judging us every moment of every day. The good news is that we all have the innate capacity to see through the delusion, if we want to use it. That's not cynicism--if anything, it's too optimistic.

Stevens, on the other hand, thinks that getting rid of illusions should leave us with nothing but misery. Why? His concern with being philosophical might have prompted him to offer an argument, rather than insults and appeals to Marx. Stevens, it seems, is not even unphilosophical--he's just angry and, yes, cynical. That doesn't make him wrong, of course--it just makes him uninteresting.

Oversimplifying Abortion

Apparently a creationist website called Uncommon Descent is attempting to get 25 influential atheists (some may say the 25 most influential) to answer a list of grossly oversimplified questions about what rights, if any, fetuses and newborn babies have. Seriously, go read that list of "five simple questions," for which UD is only willing to accept yes or no answers. The fact that anyone thinks such questions are simple goes a long way in explaining the vitriol fundamentalists spew at anyone who sees abortion as a viable, morally acceptable action.

Well, I may not be one of the 25 most influential living atheists, and I'm definitely not going to play by UD's rules, but I am going to answer the questions. Let's just get this out of the way upfront, though:

I realize these questions are designed to make abortion rights supporters look like monsters, but I'm also hoping that giving reasonable answers to unreasonable questions will help expose the intellectual deficiency and/or dishonesty behind the way a segment of the pro-life side tries to frame the debate.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? This one's actually easy. Of course a human baby is fully human. But wait..."fully" human? Why "fully"? Given the context of these questions, the inclusion of that word seems to suggest that there could be such a thing as a half-human, or maybe a quarter-human, and further that such an entity might have a different moral status than a full human.

The only way I would consider giving a different response to this question is if the context were evolutionary, and we were speaking hypothetically about a transitional form between humans and a new species that evolved from humans. But then the question would be irrelevant. Species divisions are arbitrary and man-made, and there's often quite a bit of argument about which species a given specimen belongs to. So maybe a newborn human baby could be closer to a non-human species than either of its parents, but it's hardly a yes or no question.

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? I loathe this question. The argument over what constitutes personhood is a huge quagmire that is, in my opinion, best avoided even when doing ethics. I vastly prefer to leave everyone to her own definition and look for solutions that work no matter what that definition is. This is why I love Judith Jarvis Thompson's defense of abortion. Rather than arguing over whether fetuses are persons, she simply concedes that they are (on whatever definition of "person" you prefer) then argues for why abortion is still morally permissible. 

That said, I tend to view personhood as falling on a continuum between the ability to experience flourishing and suffering, and the lack of said ability. As with all these "simple" questions, there's no easy answer, so I won't give one. Instead, I'll just say that I think it's possible for babies to be more or less persons.

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? My position on rights is that talk about them is meaningful only within a legal context. You have rights only to the extent that your society grants them. Of course we can argue about whether granting more or fewer rights is in a society's best interests, but convincing me that rights are inherent to human beings would require a truly brilliant bit of metaphysical reasoning.

So technically my answer to this question is "If we're talking about America, then yes, I believe that a newborn baby has a right to life, because it is granted under American law." But let's remember that there's a huge ceteris paribus there, and if a baby is born with no chance to lead a productive life (that is, with no chance to experience anything approaching a reasonable degree of flourishing), then it has less of a right to life than a baby born with a normal capacity for flourishing. Still, I want to make it clear that I see this as an entirely legal question, and not a moral one.

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? This one actually is simple: absolutely not. Having given that answer, though, let's quibble a bit about semantics. How does the questioner define "killing"? Is he referring to murder, or any action that would directly cause the end of the baby's life? If it's the latter, then it's easy to think of examples in which "killing" a baby is morally permissible, e.g. taking a child with no chance to ever breathe on its own off of life support. If it's murder, then I would still say "no," but with the caveat that it's much harder to think of actual world examples in which I would say such an act is morally permissible. In terms of possible worlds, though, it's much easier. Imagine a possible world in which you could travel back in time and murder Hitler in the crib. Would you have a moral duty to do so? I say you would.

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? This question comes with the same semantic quibble as (d). If we're talking about causing an end of life, then there are medical cases in which "killing" is not morally wrong, and may even be morally required. If we're talking about murder, then yes, I think a newborn baby has the same rights (again, using my legalistic definition of "rights") as an adult. It's not inconceivable to me that there could be a case in which murdering a baby is the moral thing to do, but I don't know of any such cases in the actual world as it exists at this moment.

My answers to these "simple" questions aren't as important as pointing out how messy and difficult the questions actually are. Only someone firmly in the grip of dogma (religious or otherwise) could think otherwise.

Having Ideas Is Hard

I'm not a fan of South Park, but I do like Jesus and Mo. The two recently intersected:

My problem with South Park doesn't come from it having made fun of something I hold dear. Like the strip linked above makes clear, it's a mark of both intellectual and emotional maturity to face criticism without anger. I probably won't watch the South Park episode in question, but it's because I'll probably have forgotten all about it by the time it airs, not because I refuse to hear any criticism of a position I hold.

So why don't I find the show as hilarious as everyone else? It's because its creators attack everyone from a privileged position: that of having no discernible ideas of their own. It's fine to mock everything up to a point, but even well-crafted mockery starts to wear thin if it never goes beyond merely lashing out. South Park has long since proved that it has nothing to say beyond "Everything's stupid." You can believe that if you want, of course, but it sure seems like a depressing way to live.

Roger Ebert made the point well in his review of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's movie Team America: World Police:

If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I'd be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it...At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter.

You can say that Ebert is oversimplifying or being self-serious, but he has a point. I imagine it's one that will continue to ring true if and when South Park takes on atheism.

We Hate It Until We Love It

If you've played any indie games in the past couple of years, you've probably noticed that a lot of the people who make them really like Japanese games from the mid-to-late '80s. In particular, Capcom's Mega-Man franchise has launched a thousand indie games. Which is to say, lots of indie devs have shamelessly copied it.

I don't have a problem with that, per se. Copying, even shamelessly, can have great results. I didn't think so back when I was in eighth grade reading and rereading The Catcher In the Rye, and buying into Holden Caulfield's message that everyone who isn't aggressively living for him- or herself every moment of every day is a phony, but it was (maybe ironically) going to college and being an art major that changed my mind. I learned that copying is a part of artistic growth. Very few people can find their own style without first imitating the styles of their heroes.

But you don't even always have to find your own style. Look at Kurt Heasley, whose band, Lilys, have made a career out of reconstructing genres, from shoegaze to garage rock. Heasley said of the band's first album, In the Presence of Nothing, that he wrote it because he wanted to see if he could have made My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything. Turns out he could have, and on subsequent albums he proved that he could have made a lot of other famous records, as well. Lilys have never done anything I would consider remotely original, but they operate within established conventions so perfectly that you'd have to be a real ass not to at least appreciate their skill.

Now Capcom, after years of getting ripped off by small indie developers, has shamelessly ripped off Twisted Pixel's 'Splosion Man with their new iOS game MaXplosion. And indie fanboys are outraged. How dare Capcom copy a poor, defenseless indie developer! Why aren't they being more original? What they should be asking, though, is why they didn't mind when 'Splosion Man stole jokes from Portal and The Family Guy, or why calling the upcoming sequel Ms. 'Splosion Man is so much more brilliant now than when Namco did it with Ms. Pac-Man in the '80s.

Now I'm not a Twisted Pixel fan, but it's not because they're unoriginal--it's because they don't do anything interesting with what they steal. Like Chris Farley's desperate celebrity interviews on Saturday Night Live, they're just repeating anecdotes about more interesting games, TV shows, etc. and saying "Remember when that happened? That was awesome!"



Of course when the shoe is on the other foot, and a major publisher is doing to Twisted Pixel what they've done to other major publishers, the fanboys are out for blood. This ridiculous double standard is the major reason I can't maintain interest in indie games. In practice, indie fanboys realize that there are no wholly original ideas, as evidenced by their championing things like Ms. 'Splosion Man and Braid's call-backs to Super Mario Bros. But they loudly and obnoxiously chastise "mainstream" games for not being more original, as if anyone with a budget is incapable of the ironic references they so cherish in low budget games.

This is the same double standard on which all of hipster culture is built, and it's why I find that culture so depressing. Rather than just appreciating what they appreciate, every new fad has to be "jumped in," as it were, being loathed until it suddenly turns some arbitrary corner and becomes beloved. Look at the "three wolf moon" t-shirt phenomenon, in which an ugly t-shirt for sale on Amazon went from being an object of universal derision to being TOTALLY AWESOME almost overnight. It's the same with the current rash of indie mascot platformers, from 'Splosion Man to Super Meat Boy. Games like Kid Chameleon and Awesome Possum were hated for so long that they've turned the corner and become beloved again, and we've forgotten all the good reasons they were hated in the first place.

These shifts tend to happen more quickly today, though. It will probably only be a week before MaXplosion is a beloved "cult classic," and having it on your iPad will score you serious indie cred.

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Addendum: Just after posting this, I looked at Joystiq, where I saw that an indie studio I love, Zombie Cow, decided to cancel its upcoming game Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican, saying:

Writing Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican, it felt like we were going over old, worn ground. Again and again. We've done all this. We've seen it all before. There’s nothing fresh or new and exciting about it...

If only more indies were so honest with themselves, we'd all be better off.

The Tyranny of Extroversion

Here are two examples of a phenomenon I can't stand:





Spending a lot of time in crowded spaces has always been difficult for me, and though it's gotten a little easier in the last few years, I still have the occasional flash of panic if I get stuck in too big a group of people. I realize that public spaces are just that--public--but I still think people can reasonably expect to go about their business without being interfered with.

That's why I find stunts like those linked to above so irritating. The people who organize them (they're anything but, as the second video implies, "random") probably think they're brightening everyone's day, but for some of us, they're just making things harder.

The problem is that a lot of people don't consider these to be "opt-in" events. They think that those who don't want to participate are somehow lesser people than those who do. Just look at the comments generated when The Friendly Atheist linked to the high five escalator video. The most egregious says "The more you hate this idea, the more you need it." Really? I had no idea that high fives cured agoraphobia.

The people in the first video at least seem to have good intentions. Those in the second come off as pretentious twats. There are numerous examples of this same stunt on YouTube (I'm not sure if it's always done by the same group), and they always happen in malls or big department stores. At the end of the video above, someone holds up a sign reading "You've just experienced a random act of culture." The implication, to me, is that these people who would lower themselves to shopping at a mall are clearly culture starved pleebs, desperately in need of some classical music. Is it impossible that some of the people out shopping hate having to go to the mall, hate the chain stores and the consumerism, but wanted to buy a gift for someone, and want to get in and out as quickly as possible? If only those singing idiots weren't blocking all the exits...

I wonder how many of the people who champion this kind of public performance are morally opposed to graffiti. I fail to see a difference. Both are acts of people who feel superior enough to think that their values need to be forced on the general public, especially those who just want to go about their business and not be bothered.