One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our two-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------

* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Cue the Laugh Track

Richard Dawkins, the Clown Prince of the New Atheism, is at it again.  I suppose he's always at it, but I don't follow him on Twitter and only notice some of his wackier performances.  This past weekend he posted this:

Followed a day later by this one:

The first thing to notice about these tweets is that they are not examples of "science's truths," not produced by the Scientific Method <genuflect>, not science or scientific at all.  They're just Dawkins in his familiar idiotic hawker mode, ranting about issues he doesn't understand.

Let's begin with the first tweet.  Typically for him, Dawkins equivocates.  "Science" does not only mean "science's truths."  It means science, and for Dawkins that means Western science, which is a historical and social construct that did not always exist and may not always exist in the future.  Western science originated as a form of magic, seeking not only knowledge but personal power for the practitioner.  Notoriously, some crucial figures saw Nature as a woman to be forcibly disrobed, her private parts probed.  (The metaphor of Nature as the [male, of course] scientist's female adversary, trying to keep her secrets covered, is still very much with us.)  As a historical phenomenon, Western science has often been wrong.  Far from being disinterested seekers after "truths of the real world," scientists have always served the state and the military.  None of this has any eternal, independent existence: it's shaped by human (again, mostly male) hangups and other limitations.

A day after the first tweet, having realized or been told that he hadn't made his point well, Dawkins returns to the fray.  "OBVIOUSLY", he begins, proceeding to pontificate things that aren't obvious at all.  And then he talks like a religious apologist, which is what he is: you can't blame Science for what are now considered bad doctrines, they are the result of human frailty and error.  The trouble with those "scientific beliefs during any particular era - phlogiston, etc." is that in their era they were not "beliefs" but "science's truths," "objective reality."  And scientific progress is not impeded only by religious institutions, perhaps not even mostly by them; it's resisted by scientists, like the Ptolemaic astronomers who rejected Copernicus, or the biologists who rejected Darwin; partly for scientific reasons, such as his lack of a theory of heredity or the fact that his theory required longer periods of time than science's truths at the time allowed.  Another reason for scientific resistance to Natural Selection was that many biologists wanted to believe in evolution as a linear, goal-directed process rather than the messy non-linear one Darwin theorized.  Einstein's resistance to quantum mechanics didn't even pretend: he just didn't like the kind of universe it presupposed.

That's why that bit about "the truths about the real world that science aspires to find" is so funny: Dawkins is canny enough to qualify his claims a bit, and he knows that the "truths" scientists claim to have found often turn out to be false.  (By the way, there is no "science," only scientists.)  Even when scientists' claims hold up for a while, it is never certain that they won't have to be rejected later.  But more important, and more unsettling, it's never certain that the truth about the real world will be found.  Take the extinction of the dinosaurs: the theory that it was caused by an asteroid striking the earth looks pretty good for now, but there are other candidates.  We may never know what happened, and it's not science's truth until science has actually found it. I'm reminded of the "Princeton Bible" postulated by certain Biblical scholars a hundred years ago: the text of the original autograph manuscripts of the Bible, which are irrecoverably lost and therefore can't be appealed to.

As for "objective reality," what is it?  It's one of those terms, like "science," "religion," "truth," or "beauty," that people love to throw around without defining them because OBVIOUSLY, everybody knows what they mean and only "post-modern pseuds" pretend otherwise.  Phlogiston used to be objective reality; so was eugenic sterilization.  I regret having to harp on the latter, but it's still with us, and you may remember that Dawkins recently tried to defend eugenics as a coherent scientific program.  Even if he rejects sterilization of the "unfit", as I suppose he does though for non-scientific reasons, his sputtering efforts to validate eugenics last year showed that he thinks that "improving the species" has some kind of agreed-on meaning, which it doesn't.

I'm a social constructionist myself, though I disagree vehemently with many other social constructionists.  I'd even answer to "postmodernist," for some versions of the term -- it's like "faggot" in that regard, it's meant to refer to people like me, even though it may or may not fit.  But I haven't found that many self-identified postmodernists do any better with the concept than someone like Dawkins does.  But I also concede the validity of "objective reality," as the nutcase Philip K. Dick defined it: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."  The trouble, whether you're a philosophical naif like Dawkins or a quasti-Gnostic mystic like Dick, is that even though "objective reality" is right there in front of us, we can't quite get at it.  Science is, among other things, the attempt to make models of and describe that reality, but models are not reality and descriptions aren't reality either, so they are always incomplete at best.  At best they're good enough that there aren't very dire consequences from using them; but you never know in advance where or when they'll fail you.

The discussion, to put it loosely, that followed Dawkins's tweets was entertaining.  Several of his crew claimed that Science is like Mathematics.  One declared that pi is science, true before the foundation of the world and true after it.  But pi isn't out there in objective reality, like phlogiston or the Selfish gene: it's an irrational number, and that irrationality has always frustrated those who wanted the world to make sense.  The relationship between mathematics and science is contested, to put it gently, but Pythagoras didn't produce his theorem by studying thousands of right triangles in the lab and producing a theory about them.  Mathematical proof is not remotely like science, and though scientists like to concede the point, insisting that scientific proof is totally different from mathematical truth, they find it difficult to remember their concession for long.

Even if Dawkins were right about the nature of scientific knowledge, that wouldn't mean that his statements about society, religion, women, philosophy, or any other subject, should be taken seriously.  None of them are the result of scientific research, and they seem to spring from nothing but his personal neuroses.  From that point of view Dawkins might merit our sympathy (forgive him, for he knows not what he does).  Even in his field he can't be trusted, as in his incoherent use of "selfish" in his best-known work The Selfish Gene.  His popularity in certain circles can't be because he's right, since he isn't.  His burblings must have some emotional appeal, just as religion does.

The Call of Science

I added an important update and reconsideration below.

In October Scientific American endorsed Joe Biden for the presidency, the first time it had endorsed a candidate in its 175-year-history.  No wonder he's been saying "Trust the Science."

The trouble is that Science is a lot like God, in that we laypeople have no direct access to Its truths.  We have to rely on human intermediaries, and even they admit that they are flawed, imperfect vessels.  Yet we must hearken and obey.

First we have the scientists themselves, but they rarely pollute themselves by speaking to us directly.  So we must also rely on science coverage in the corporate media, despite the fact that scientists constantly attack science news for incompetently or maliciously misrepresenting True Science.  And they're not entirely wrong about that.  Like politicians, though, scientists are apt to claim they've been misquoted even when they have been quoted accurately.

Think again of last week's Great Conjunction, commonly called "the Christmas Star" in even nominally secular news media.  I still don't know why they got the facts -- the Science -- so wrong so persistently, but they did.  Even the scientists they quoted directly mostly bollixed it up.  And this was an event of no worldly importance at all, so there could hardly have been outside pressure from interest groups or sponsors to make them distort the science.  Nor was it highly advanced science on the order of quantum or string theory.

So take something like the novel coronavirus and the new vaccines currently being distributed.  That's very important to people's lives and livelihood, so the scientists and the media would try much harder to get it right, wouldn't they?  No.  There are billions of dollars at stake, and the Science is being filtered through pharmaceutical companies who have an interest in beefing up their prestige and making a return on their investments.  The news media could, in principle, scrutinize their claims, but in practice they rarely do that.  Even 'educational' media like our public broadcasting systems, despite their devout Scientism, identify Science with corporate-branded research and production.  Look for BiDil in this post, a drug marketed (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) as an African-American-specific treatment for high blood pressure: even after it had been discredited and taken off the market, an NPR science program endorsed it to promote a scientific-racist agenda.

This post from Naked Capitalism makes some important criticisms of the promotion of the Pfizer vaccine, and this one shows that Pfizer carefully made important information almost inaccessible in the published report on it.  Does that mean that Pfizer's vaccine is bad?  No, it means that we don't and can't know things we need to know about it to try to decide whether it's good or not.  By "we," I mean not only you and I but medical and other scientific professionals who couldn't get at the data.

[UPDATE: A reader sent me a link to this post by Marcus Ranum, which is a good critique of the Naked Capitalism post I linked above.  The writer doesn't address the question of data exclusion (though one of his commenters does), but his arguments against the post are good.  He shows that the anonymous doctor who wrote the NC post misrepresents some of his examples, notably the Cutter Incident of 1955 in which a batch of defective polio vaccine caused 40,000 cases of the disease; "within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned."  This was, as the blogger stresses, a production failure, not the result of inadequate testing of the vaccine as Doctor Anonymous claimed.  Other errors and disingenuous takes in the NC post pretty much discredit it, it seems.

[Rather than revise this post to eliminate mention of Doctor A, I'm leaving him in.  If I hadn't linked it, I wouldn't have learned about Ranum's critique; so I, and I hope readers, will be better informed as a result.  The reader who sent it to me accused me of too much skepticism; it should be obvious that I wasn't skeptical enough. Ranum begins by noting, "It’s hard to tell contrarianism from disinformation or just ignorance and usually my approach is to try to detect the signs of dishonest or motivated reasoning."  I agree, though I feel that at times Ranum skates close to authoritarianism with his references to "heroes" and the like. Reliance on experts is often a necessity, because there's too much we need to know, but it's an unfortunate one. I think that one warning signal of what Ranum calls "contrarianism" is a refusal to question one's own authority.  As Nietzsche wrote, the important thing is having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.  Anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, Trump cultists aren't really skeptics in that sense, and don't really reject authority.]

This post, which I found in Vagabond Scholar's annual blog roundup, also discusses a question that had been stirring in my mind ever since the first announcements of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines: Just what does "95 percent effective" mean?  The explanations I heard didn't really add up.  Out of curiosity I looked up the effectiveness of polio vaccine: according to the CDC, "Two doses of inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) are 90% effective or more against polio; three doses are 99% to 100% effective."  That makes me feel a little better, but then we have sixty-five years' experience with polio vaccine.  The flu vaccines now in use are much less effective, though I'm not sure by how much: the CDC fudges by using a different criterion of effectiveness: "recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine."

Like Thomas Neuberger, who discussed effectiveness in the post I linked to, I'm not saying that people should not get vaccinated when they get access to it.  "This," Neuberger wrote, "is not a recommendation not to be vaccinated against Coronavirus. It’s an encouragement to decide for yourself and your family when to be vaccinated and which vaccine to choose based on the most accurate information available."  The trouble is that Pfizer's and Moderna's promotional material, or media reports that simply repeat it, are not necessarily the most accurate information.  I'm not gloating over the limitations of science, I'm very concerned about them and their ramifications for ordinary people like you or me.

Think again of Doctor Anthony Fauci and his public claims that Santa Claus is immune to COVID-19 (true of the fictional Santa, not true of the human beings who play him during the Christmas system) and that he personally had vaccinated Santa.  The latter is a flat-out lie, but most adults think it's cute to lie to children. I just finished reading the historian Stephen Nissenbaum's book The Battle for Christmas (Knopf, 1996), which traces the development of Christmas in (mostly) the US since the colonial period.  Nissenbaum makes an interesting suggestion about the importance of Santa Claus to adults: although he was a commercial figure, he stood for a pre-commercialized ideal of gift-giving outside time and history.  "In that sense, it was adults who needed to believe in Santa Claus" (175).  Many adults, including Fauci, need to lie to them.  Besides, Fauci thinks of the public as children who must be ordered around by men of Science like him, so he has no compunction about lying to us. See him lying to the naughty children in the clip Krystal Ball plays a few minutes into this commentary; the whole clip is worth watching for its catalog of institutional failure during the pandemic.  As Ball says, Fauci is far from the worst high-level figure in the story, but the adulation liberals are heaping on him has nothing to do with his real virtues.  It's because of his grandfatherly manner and because they see him as an anti-Trump figure.

This isn't just about Fauci, of course.  If we're to trust duly credentialed experts, our government, Science, they must earn our trust.  If the vaccines blow up in our faces, it will detonate trust in them, and they won't be able to blame anyone but themselves - not that they won't try.  Again, though: it's not about them, about their status, about saving face.  Human lives are at stake.  That basic reality keeps getting lost.

P.S.  Because I evidently haven't made it clear, let me stress that I am not against vaccination, not an "anti-vaxxer."  I get a flu shot every year, I've had anti-shingles and anti-pneumonia vaccinations as my doctors have prescribed. I got polio and other shots as a child, and though that wasn't my decision, I have no regrets about it.  I probably haven't stressed enough that I accept the FDA approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, though as I think I said, I am concerned about the necessary rapidity of the process, and I think everyone should bear in mind the "emergency" nature of the approval.  I thank Marcus Ranum clarifying the precautions being taken against allergic reactions when someone gets the vaccine: someone is standing by with an epipen in case of trouble, since allergic reactions show up show up almost immediately.  I think many people would be reassured if the media pointed this out in their video coverage of people getting the vaccine; so far I have not noticed them doing so.  That would take precious time away from speculation and baseless predictions about What the President Will Do or What Senator McConnell Might Do, however.  What I was ranting about in this post was bad science reporting, and poor communication from medical spokesmen like Fauci.  But just as I find I'm too naive when I'm accused of cynicism, I find I'm not skeptical enough.

Take Your Medicine!

I should have posted this several days ago, but I don't think it's outdated yet.

As everyone probably knows, Pfizer's vaccine for COVID-19 has been approved for emergency use by the FDA, and the inoculations have begun.  (The Moderna vaccine seems poised for approval within a day or two.)  Not without some glitches, of course, especially as our rulers and betters have tried (often successfully) to jump in line ahead of unimportant, disposable people such as frontline healthcare workers.  And there have been some mixups in shipping sufficient numbers of doses, at both the Federal and state levels.  But it's okay, everything will work out eventually, we have to trust the experts and other authorities, especially now that Joe Biden has been elected and Science will save the day.

Once again, NPR's Morning Edition gave me food for thought, with indigestion, three stories in one day.  This one, for example, though it began by giving me a laugh when the host, Rachel Martin, said that most of the patients served by her interviewee are "first and second-generation Latinos."  Yes, I know what she meant, and it isn't entirely her fault since American discourse on ethnicity stinks to high heaven, but still.  She's using "Latino" as a racial category opposed to "whites," which is problematic for many reasons.  Imagine if she'd said "first or second-generation whites."  Really, Rachel, "first or second-generation Americans" would have done the job admirably, and it's what you meant anyhow.

Anyway, the physician Martin interviewed, Eva Galvez, gave this example of inadequate information among her patients.

It was a family who came in to get care for their children. And so the visit really was not a visit for Mom and Dad. But Mom asked me if the vaccine was safe, and she had heard some information on a social media platform that the vaccine had long-term side effects and that the vaccine was actually risky. And then she asked me, how can you ensure that this vaccine is safe? And then what I told her was that we had done very many studies, and it had gone through a rigorous process and that, based on my reading, that it was safe. And what I conveyed to her was that all vaccines have side effects, but that the risks of the side effects generally are less than the benefits of getting the vaccine. And that was how we ended up leaving the conversation. So she didn't tell me that she was going to get the vaccine, but she certainly seemed open to the vaccine. And so it's really fighting two battles here. One is trying to convince people that the vaccine is safe and that it is important, but at the same time is also trying to rectify all of those messages that they have been getting from other sources. So these conversations really do take time.

This is good, because instead of telling the woman she was stupid and anti-science, she took her questions seriously and tried to answer them.  But look at the bit about hearing on a social media platform that the vaccine had long-term deleterious effects.  That's not unreasonable or alarmist, though it's unavoidable given the rush to produce and certify the vaccine.  It should be remembered and stressed that the approval is for an emergency situation.  (It occurs to me also that flu vaccines, which must be revised each year, also don't get long-term studies before they're approved.)  The discussion I've found always focuses on immediate effects, such as pain at the injection site for a day of two afterward.  That, if I recall correctly, is also a possible effect of the flu shot and other vaccinations I've gotten in the past several years, though I've never experienced it.

So I appreciate Dr. Galvez' candor with her patients.  I'm not so happy with the next doctor Martin interviewed, Anthony Fauci.  Martin began with a typically dumb reporter's question, if the first inoculations "feel like the beginning of the end to you?"  Fauci responded with some vacuous platitudes.  Martin then asked wouldn't it be terrible if people refused to get the vaccine, and what should we do?

It isn't only African Americans. It's Latinx and many white people feel the same way. We've got to get the message across and explain to them what their hesitancy is and what their reluctance is and try and reason as to why they're understandable, but they're really not based on facts. If you look at what goes on historically with vaccines, overwhelmingly they are the safest and most effective interventions in medicine when it comes to infectious diseases. We've got to keep trying to get that message out because it's to the benefit of the individual, but to the benefit of the entire society.

I haven't been impressed by Fauci as a spokesman for Science.  There's no reason why he should be any good at it, I guess, but communication is part of a physician's job, and on top of that he has been anointed by the media as the Anti-Trump of the pandemic.  So it's not good that he says here that "we" should "explain to people what their hesitancy is and what their reluctance is and try and reason as to why they're understandable."  This is authoritarianism, understandable in a physician of Fauci's generation but unacceptable.  First you have to listen, to let them tell you what their hesitancy is.  Even if their hesitancy is irrational, as it often is; sometimes it isn't, though.  

After all, Fauci has been saying that Santa Claus "is exempt from this because Santa, of all the good qualities, has a lot of good innate immunity," a line that sounds as if it were composed by Pete Buttigieg's platitude AI.  USA Today explained, "But with millions of Americans already sick with COVID-19, children have been worried about Santa, especially this Christmas Eve when he visits millions of homes. And there's no denying that Santa, because he is older and overweight, would at first glance appear to be at higher risk of developing severe disease from COVID-19."  Speaking of "not based on facts," this is the trouble with impressing children with the reality of a mythical being: when something goes wrong, you have to come up with crap like Fauci's reassurance. But grandfatherly Dr. Fauci knows what's best for you.  

And today he told the nation that he'd given Santa the vaccine; even that he "measured [Santa's] immunity," which is how you say, not a thing.  I know he's a grandfather in private life, but Fauci comes across as the kind of patronizing adult who neither understands or likes children very much.

The fictional Santa is safe from COVID, it's true, but unfortunately he's not the only Santa.  On that same morning, Rachel Hubbard reported on Morning Edition that her parents play Santa and Mrs. Claus every year.

My dad is not a mall Santa. He and my mom live in Cordell, a small town about 100 miles west of Oklahoma City. Working in rural Oklahoma, my parents spend their time visiting with people at community events, in nursing homes and at schools. Most years on Christmas Eve, dad is visiting people in their homes. People just expect to see him around town.

"They've always seen Santa, and he's always been around when they need him, and he can just come by their house," my dad said. "It's just not the same this year." 

NPR is not usually kind to religious people and others who don't want to give up their traditions because of the pandemic, but apparently Santa cosplayers have special status.  However, as Hubbard acknowledged, Fauci's claim that Santa is immune isn't true.  I wonder if it even occurred to him that there are real people out there who have to cope with children's beliefs about them.  But Doctor knows best.

Stephen Arnold is president and CEO of the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas (IBRBS). He says at least three of the organization's 2,200 members have already died from the coronavirus. (One in Florida and two in Texas.)

"That has created consternation amongst ourselves. Whether we cancel the season altogether, whether we ignore the warnings or whether we find a compromise," Arnold said.

Many of these men rely on the Christmas season to supplement their income, so it isn't just a matter of self-regarding ego. 

According to an informal survey IBRBS did of its membership, about one quarter has decided to proceed with Christmas appearances without masks or social distance. Another quarter has canceled their seasons altogether, and the rest have landed somewhere in the middle.

Hubbard and her siblings are properly concerned about her parents' health.  Santas around the country have been creative in coming up with creative alternatives, and even Hubbard's parents have had to bend to reality.  If they are valuable to their community, and they clearly are, they need to be around next year too.

In a recent digital event, children were able to ask Santa questions. While there were questions about what kind of cookies Santa likes (sugar cookies with lots of sprinkles) and whether Rudolph always leads the sleigh (yes, his nose lights the way), kids also expressed anxiety about what was happening.

My dad told them this: "I know some of you are having to do school at home, and your parents might not be working right now. I just want to let you know that Christmas is going to be OK. Everyone is going to make it; we're going to make it through this."

I don't say this because I don't care about kids, but because I do.  It is a pity that Fred Rogers isn't with us anymore: he could have helped find ways to explain the pandemic to children without condescending or lying to them.  He's dead, though, so the rest of us must grow up and be helpers ourselves. Where children are concerned, Fauci isn't helping.

Resistance, even antagonism, to authority has its upside and its downside.  I think we've made a lot of progress in the past half-century when it comes to holding authorities accountable, requiring them to explain and justify themselves.  They still don't like it, and NPR is on their side, along with most corporate media.  We have to be responsible about it, not just yelling "No" like two-year-olds; we have to exercise critical thinking, as difficult and unpopular as that is with authoritarians.  There's no easy way to do it.  

I myself intend to be vaccinated when it becomes available to me, which will probably be in a few months.  But I'm glad for the interval, so I can wait and see how it goes in the meantime.

Do You Believe in Science in a Young Boy's Heart?

A friend of mine posted this meme on Facebook recently, and I'm afraid it annoyed me more than perhaps it should have.  That's partly because "believing in science" has become a mantra in our culture wars and especially in electoral politics.  Biden supporters, like Obama and Clinton supporters, say that they want a President who believes in Science, just as Trump supporters want a President who honors God.  Of course Trump, like his Republican predecessors, puts God after his donors (just as Democrats do), and Obama put his donors before the science about climate change.  Biden has made it clear he'll do the same. Obama also put his religious beliefs ahead of Constitutional principles about equality in order to block same-sex marriage during his first term; how can you honor God more than that?  But then his deeply held beliefs threatened to get in the way of his re-election, so he ditched them.

On its face I can't disagree with most of what this meme says, though it's disingenuous and ultimately dishonest.  Its account of how scientists work is incomplete: scientists do collect data and are supposed to revise their conclusions in the light of new information.  But scientists also work out hypotheses without working in the laboratory at all.  Einstein and other physicists are the most famous examples of this aspect of science; Einstein did math, published papers, and waited for others to do the experiments that would confirm or disconfirm his theory.  When the first tests failed to confirm his predictions, Einstein didn't go back to the drawing board.  As the physics-trained philosopher Paul Feyerabend tells it, "Einstein's theory of special relativity clashed with evidence produced only one year after its publication. Lorentz, Poincare, and Ehrenfest withdrew to a more classical position. Einstein persisted: his theory, he said, had a wonderful symmetry and should be retained. He gently mocked the widespread urge for a 'verification by little effects.'"  This isn't a bad thing: If scientists threw out promising theories when they encounter obstacles, no theory would last for long.

It's also been argued - I'm not sure how accurately - that many scientists never adopt newer, better theories such as Relativity.  They do their best to cling to what they learned in their youth, and bitterly attack the crazy new ideas that students are wild about.  This suggests that the young scientists aren't necessarily wiser, they just go with the flow, to get jobs and teaching posts and grants - and in their time, become a drag on the field, refusing to adopt whatever comes next.  But again, some conservatism is necessary.  Every theory has holes in it, anomalies it can't explain, and its adherents simply have to have faith that eventually those holes will be patched over.

And you know that joke that compares scientists to a drunk looking for his lost keys under a lamppost instead of looking in the dark where he actually lost them, because the light is better around the lamppost?  Scientists tell that joke on themselves.  There's a similar one that compares scientists to a besieging army that encircles a walled town, and if the walls hold out, the army moves on to the next town, hoping for easier prey.  It's okay for scientists to joke about such things, just as clergy and other professionals do about their respective domains, but the laity had better not.

Scientists are also, let's say, inconsistent about the self-scrutiny they brag about.  Consider this example, from Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow, 2016, p. 178). It refers to engineering research, but you'll find similar descriptions of the peer review to which scientific journals subject submissions.

Building an airplane was nothing compared to shepherding research through Langley’s grueling review process. “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it”—that was the Langley way. The author of a NACA document—a technical report was the most comprehensive and exacting, a technical memorandum slightly less formal—faced a firing squad of four or five people, chosen for their expertise in the topic. After a presentation of findings, the committee, which had read and analyzed the report in advance, let loose a barrage of questions and comments. The committee was brusque, thorough, and relentless in rooting out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, incomprehensible statements, and illogical conclusions obscured by technical gibberish. And that was before subjecting the report to the style, clarity, grammar, and presentation standards that were Pearl Young’s legacy, before the addition of the charts and fancy graphics that reduced the data sheet to a coherent, visually persuasive point. A final report might be months, even years, in the making.

Even after publication, we're told, scientists, are ruthless in tearing apart each other's work in their dedicated pursuit of truth.  And that's good.

Except when it isn't.  When the entomologist Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the book inspired controversy and searching criticism from other scientists.  Scientists who were attracted by Wilson's doctrines protested that this wasn't fair, as if a scientific publication wasn't supposed to be scrutinized by colleagues in the field.  In Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (Oxford, 2002), evolutionary biologist Kevin N. Laland and psychologist Gillian R. Brown complained that even colleagues in Wilson's own department picked on him.

[They] vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist. Yet most biologists could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity. The debate became polarized and highly political, with the sociobiologists accused of bolstering right-wing conservative values and the critics associated with Marxist ideology [5].

Laland and Brown concede that there were a lot of scientific problems with Wilson's book, but they try to explain away the criticisms as politically motivated.  Wilson's highly speculative application of his ideas to human beings in the final chapter, with no real scientific support, were somehow exempt from suspicion of ideology.  Laland and Brown lament what they represent as emotional, "knee-jerk reactions" to Sociobiology, which not only confuses moderation of tone with moderation of substance, it erases the scientific objections that were made.

It's doubtful, though, that pronouncements about human beings and the societies we live in can ever be free of politics.  Consider BiDil, a blood-pressure drug that the FDA approved for use by "patients who identify as black".*  NitroMed, the company that owned BiDil, "funded the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Medical Association, the Association of Black Cardiologists, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, all of whom encouraged the FDA to approve the drug."  Critics "described BiDil as a cynical effort to exploit race and loopholes in patent law and FDA policy to extend patent protection on an old drug ... Defenders of the drug went so far as to accuse social scientists of trying to kill black people by sowing controversy about BiDil and misrepresenting it as a racial drug, even though it was Cohn [the cardiologist who had patented the drug] and NitroMed who had pursued the race-specific approvals in the first place" (164).

However:

BiDil did not turn out as expected. Despite projections of a billion-dollar bonanza, the drug proved to be a commercial failure. NitroMed lost $108 million in the first year after FDA approval. It is not clear which of several factors contributed most to its demise. NitroMed priced the drug high—$1.80 per pill, or $10.60 per day for a common dose. Since BiDil was simply a fixed-dose combination of two existing drugs, each of which was available as a cheaper generic, many insurers simply substituted the generics whenever physicians did prescribe BiDil. Moreover, the controversy over the “black drug” was read in many ways by patients and doctors. While some saw it as something valuable, others saw the “special treatment” as uncomfortably reminiscent of Tuskegee. Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165].

After discussing some other examples of "racial differences in drug response, Jones notes that "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).

Several years after NitroMed stopped marketing BiDil, however, I heard it touted on an NPR science program as a casualty of 'politically correct' hostility to race as a scientific concept.  The popular complaint that the Left has politicized the science of racial difference and made it professionally dangerous to study it, reverses the facts.  Despite the ongoing and consistent failure to find meaningful racial differences, scientists still pursue that Holy Grail, and have no evident difficulty getting funding to do so.  Even if science weren't political, funding for science always will be.  The same thing goes for sexual differences, which male scientists continue to assert while claiming to be not only Scientists but Feminists.  Is this Science to believe in?

Scientists and their apologists do admit their fallibility - but usually only after they've been caught in some egregious error.  Before that happens, they demand that you respect their authoritah, else you are (gasp) Anti-Science.  The more loudly they demand it, the more skeptical I become.  (I lost a lot of respect for the philosopher John Searle when he referred to the historians Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend as "anti-science," and hinted darkly that the difference between them and the "pro-science" Karl Popper wasn't "as great as many philosophers and scientists think.") **  It's a lot like religious authorities admitting their human fallibility when they're confronted with some issue on which they have proven embarrassingly wrong - race, for example.  Or the question of wearing masks in this pandemic: early on, Scientists brushed aside their value for protection.  This was primarily because they wanted them to be reserved for front-line healthcare workers, but if they weren't effective, why would the doctors and nurses need them?  The severe shortages of PPE made it reasonable to give priority to health care workers, but Anthony Fauci and others waffled and confused the issue.  "Waffled" is too kind, since they knew very well that masks are effective.  I think it's fair to suspect that they are so used to asserting authority, instead of treating the public as adults who can understand what's at stake if it's explained seriously rather than condescendingly, that they simply saw no reason to bother.  Is that Science to believe in?

(Some will probably reply that all the idiots and morons out there have no Faith in Science and are too stupid to understand it anyway.  They should remember that Fauci was addressing them, the wise sheep with true Faith, no less than the morons.  Maybe they do consider themselves stupid, and want to be lied to for their own good if Science is doing it.  The concept of the Holy Lie is familiar in religion, too.  But such people are in no position to cast the first stone.)

As an atheist, I insist on remembering human fallibility in science, religion, politics, and any other area.  I also insist that dissent must be informed and rational.  But then, so should assent, and I find that most people who wave around their faith in Science don't know much about the Science they believe in.  Think of the LGBT people and allies who continued to talk about the Gay Gene long after the scientists they relied on had abandoned the concept for vague talk of "epigenetic factors" and "genetic predisposition."  Trans people have taken up the claim that trans identity is genetic, totally without evidence.  Home DNA testing has become popular among African-Americans, although it doesn't really reveal the Roots they're hoping to find -- just as racially-specific drugs were pushed by prominent African-Americans who, it's safe to say, had no idea whether the Science was valid or not.

Faith in Science can't be reconciled with recognizing its limits.  If you recognize that scientists can be wrong, then you won't and shouldn't have faith in them.  You should take their claims seriously, but skeptically, and skepticism is the opposite of faith.  As the examples I've given show (and they can be multiplied), scientists don't welcome skepticism, especially from outsiders no matter how well informed.  It's my position that science is not something anyone should have faith in, and those who say we should have faith in it don't understand science.

----------------------
* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article.

** "Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room."  In Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, ed. John Preston & Mark Bishop (Oxford UP, 2002), Kindle edition loc 914.

Losing My Innocence, One Chunk at a Time

An old and wise friend posted this meme on Facebook today.  Of course my first reaction was doubt about the attribution.  One might think that an organization like UNESCO would never post a bogus quotation, but one has learned otherwise over the years.

So I looked it up, and sure enough, it is probably not an African proverb.  I found it attributed to the poet Maya Angelou, though in that version she went on to contradict herself: "I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place."

I also found a version from the British fantasy writer and satirist Terry Pratchett: "If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong."  And another variation by the novelist and essayist James Baldwin: “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”  It sounds to me like it's a platitudinous proverb that might have come from anywhere.

But, and I think this is more important, I don't think it's true, whether it refers to individuals or to societies and countries.  Life as a journey is a very old metaphor, but it makes little sense if you literalize it.  I know that I came from a woman's body, I'm going, ultimately, to a crematorium.  For many people, I think this platitude is connected to the poisonous metaphor of "roots," that people are determined not only by where they were born, but where their ancestors were born and who their ancestors were.  As far as I know, my ancestors came from two or three European countries, and none of them has much to do with who I am.  Where I was born -- northern Indiana -- is more relevant, but it doesn't determine who I am either, nor did it tell me what to do with my life.  In most respects, my background is utterly opposed to where I've gone: as a gay man, an atheist, an anti-racist, a critic of my government and my country.  Nothing of where I came from told me where I was going, and when it did, I didn't listen.

The same applies to history, especially since so much "history" in all cultures is myth and propaganda.  Nobody knows where we're going, because the future is not determined; the past can be and generally is used to discourage people from doing what they think right.  It's doubtful that the past has much to teach us, even if we have reliable information about it, because no one knows which lessons to draw from history.  Usually people construct a historical narrative to suit their wishes and plans, but to repeat: the future is not determined.  The events of the past few years, most dramatically the coronavirus pandemic, have shown us very forcefully how little we can predict the future from the past.  It was a good idea to prepare for future epidemics, and a very bad idea for Trump to dismantle the agency set up to make such preparations, but little specific knowledge of history was needed to know that.  Nor did it take much knowledge of history to know that the current economic system was going to lead to another crash and depression eventually; it only took working knowledge of events in living memory, and both Obama and Trump ignored that.

It makes me very uncomfortable to say all this, I admit: I grew up on Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", I've read a lot of history, it interests me and it feels important to me.  But when I think about it, I wonder how much it really matters, not despite but because I've read so much history.  And while experience can teach us some things, such as the necessity of planning for disasters, it can't tell us where we're going.

As Barack Obama's presidency destroyed the last remnants of my naive faith in the effectiveness of voting; as the flipflops of epidemiological experts on the value of masks (and other matters) have undermined what remained of my trust in scientific expertise; so this meme revealed the crumbling of my faith in the value of history.  What will go next, I wonder?

Faithful and True

I don't know why I decided to pick up Gainsborough Pictures' 1945 melodrama The Wicked Lady from the display shelf at the public library, but it turned out to be a good choice.  It's an astoundingly raunchy film for the period, featuring adultery, highway robbery, multiple murders, gender transgression, plunging necklines and more.  Before it could be released in the US, several scenes had to be reshot with more modest costuming of the ladies, which shows the idiocy of censors: the glimpses of bosom are the least of The Wicked Lady's transgressiveness.  The title character, Barbara Skelton, steals her cousin's fiance, takes up robbery to get back a jewel she'd carelessly gambled away, finds she likes crime, has a wild affair with another highwayman, kills two people, and eventually is shot dead, dying alone as she crawls piteously on the floor of her lavish boudoir.

The Wicked Lady was based on a best-selling historical novel by Magdalen King-Hall. Lady Skelton is a semi-fictional character derived from the real-life Katherine Ferrers Fanshawe (1634-1660), celebrated with prurient delight in late nineteenth-century folklore.  In the introduction to a recent reissue of King-Hall's Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2016), Rowland Hughes shows that there's no contemporary evidence that Ferrers actually did any of the exciting things King-Hall describes, and it's likely she died in childbirth in London rather than of a bullet wound in Hertfordshire.  The legend of the Wicked Lady seems to have appeared full-blown two centuries after her death, ripe for exploitation by King-Hall and Gainsborough Pictures.  (There's also a 1983 remake starring - Faye Dunaway?)

I enjoyed The Wicked Lady and intend to have a look at Gainsborough's other "wicked melodramas."  What I'm interested in today, though, is what it implies about faith, especially now that liberal Democrats and Republican NeverTrumpers are wrestling with Robert Mueller III's apparent failure to vindicate their faith.  A popular motif in atheist / secular attacks on religion is the gullibility of people who believe in supernatural "fables told by Bronze Age goatherds." But there's nothing supernatural about what Russiagate believers hoped would be revealed, or about many other beliefs that people cling to without evidence or in defiance of evidence.  It's tempting to dismiss such faith as religious (or perhaps religion-like?), and I've been to known to succumb to that temptation myself, but I think it would be more accurate to turn it around: I think that "religious" faith is a subset of the way human beings think about and discuss the world, and it's not different in any important way from other beliefs -- even well-supported beliefs.  That latter is the scary part.

I just finished reading archaeologist J. M. Adovasio's The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (Random House, 2002), about the controversies surrounding the first human settlers of the Western hemisphere.  Its core is the "Clovis bar," the belief held by many archaeologists that "Clovis man" was the earliest inhabitant, arriving about 12 to 13,000 years ago.  Adovasio's excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania during the 1970s were the first strong evidence that Clovis culture had predecessors, and he details the debates that raged over the issue.  He depicts his opponents as driven by an irrational refusal to change their position, though they don't see themselves that way: they see themselves as rational critics, doing the necessary work of Science.  He gives an exhausting account of a scientific summit held in Chile to evaluate another possibly pre-Clovis site, and while I'm basically sympathetic to the pre-Clovis position (for not particularly rational reasons), I can only rejoice that neither faction had the power to do more than hiss at each other.  Though apart from the scientific questions, there are real-world matters at stake: research funding, professorships, publications, etc., nobody was put to the rack or burned for heresy.  Given the very high emotional temperature Adovasio reports (and embodies himself), though, I wouldn't assume that torture and execution wouldn't have happened if the parties involved had the power to inflict them.

The conventionally religious will reject my suggestion as fiercely as the conventionally non-religious.  Both sides want to see religious faith as a special case, distinct from all the others and privileged.  One reason I don't see it that way is that religious believers, especially but not limited to Yahwist monotheism, lightly dismiss the religious beliefs of other believers, even other members of their own sect.  If faith is so sacrosanct, beyond rationality and question, why don't believers respect other believers' faith?

The Right to Be Silly, Part 2: Is It a Lifestyle Choice?

Owen Jones is a youngish gay left British journalist and the author of a fine book on class prejudice in England.  He's written and said a lot of things that I like, but he's a bit erratic, and yesterday on Twitter he linked to an article about a Brexit Party MEP, Ann Widdecombe, who has a long history of antigay bigotry.

The former Tory home affairs chief was hauled up on a 2012 article that defended "gay conversion" therapy, and said the "homosexual lobby" was stopping people who want to turn straight from doing so...

But Ms Widdecombe today defended her comments and went further, telling Sky News science may yet "provide an answer" to the question of whether people can "switch sexuality"...

Ms Widdecombe suggested today that it would be wrong to "deny people the chance" to change if they are "discontented" with being LGBT.

Ah yes: advocates of conversion "therapy" have long pretended that they care about poor downcast gays and just want to give them a chance to be happy, as opposed to hateful gay activists who attack them.  There may be exceptions, but in most cases critics of conversion therapy do not attack those who want to change -- we attack the quacks who falsely claim to be able to change them.  Of course, in many or most cases, especially the very young, the patients are forced to undergo the "therapy," and people like Widdecombe take for granted that if homosexuals are unhappy being gay, the correct remedy is to turn them straight.  That might even be true, if it worked; but it doesn't.  Since it doesn't, the proper alternative is, first, to help the unhappy person learn to be happy, and second, to change the social pressures that cause or contribute to their unhappiness.

Jones's comment on Widdecombe was predictable, and was echoed by numerous people quoted in the Mirror article:

Ann Widdecombe suggesting "science may produce an answer" to being gay shows why the Brexit Party is such a threat: they are going to reopen debates about the rights of minorities which were supposedly settled long ago. We must fight them.

I agree that such people must be fought, but I was amused by Jones's remarks anyway.  The key word might be "supposedly": those debates were never really settled, for a number of reasons.  One is that bigotry may retreat, but it never goes away, and Jones knows full well that antigay bigotry is still alive in the UK and in Europe.  "Long ago" could only feel like the right term to someone as young as Jones.  Another is the appeal to science: gay people have been extremely excited about "science producing an answer" to the nature of homosexuality for a century or more, and like our opponents we have mostly gone with the wrong answers.  Though biological explanations of homosexuality are constantly being refuted, along with biological explanations of race and sex/gender, many gay people and our allies still find something very satisfying in the false (meaningless, really) belief that we were born this way.  And they cling to it no matter how often it's refuted, just as people like Ann Widdecombe cling to the hope that science will find a way to make us straight.

Oddly, Widdecombe seems to accept transgender and transsexualism: she tries to draw an analogy between scientifically changing a person's sex and changing their sexual orientation.

Asked about her 2012 remarks, she said: "I also pointed out there was a time when we thought it was quite impossible for men to become women and vice versa.

“And the fact we now think it’s quite impossible for people to switch sexuality doesn’t mean science may not yet produce an answer at some stage.”

The analogy breaks down when you remember that people adjust their bodies to conform to their gender identity because they want to, not because someone makes them do it -- that would be just as unethical as forcing people to change their sexual orientation, even assuming that it could be done.  It seems that she's willing to scuttle anti-trans conservatism in order to preserve her anti-gay beliefs.  If Widdecombe ever denounces forcible attempts at orientation conversion, I might take her more seriously.  I won't hold my breath.

Many gay people become furious when the failure of the born-gay paradigm is brought home to them, and they declare that if we aren't born gay then They could legitimately force us to change.  This isn't true, any more than sex-reassignment surgery can be imposed on people who don't want it.  It's common for both pro- and anti-gay people to claim that if we aren't born gay, then it is a choice (which is an invalid leap anyway), and we can't be protected by civil rights laws, which only cover immutable conditions; this is also false, since civil rights law also covers religious affiliation and marital status, both of which are lifestyle choices.

I don't know how many gay people would like to become straight, but I believe the numbers are not small, even among those who claim to be happy as they are with their gene-given sexuality.  I've mentioned before the self-proclaimed proud gay man who said that if it were proven definitely that homosexuality was a choice, someone would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice.  He said this publicly, in front of a class of prospective social workers, which was pretty remarkable for him to do.  No one attacked him, and I -- militant faggot though I be -- felt only sadness for him, not anger.  That depression, suicide, and substance abuse are still widespread among us are also indications that there would be a market for change if it could really be done.  I believe that a lot of declared gay pride is basically whistling in the dark.

Back in in the mid-1990s, a gay journalist named Chandler Burr wrote an article, later expanded into a book called A Separate Creation, defending the position that homosexuality is inborn.  That in itself wasn't surprising, given the high profile of that position generally.  What shocked many of Burr's readers and reviewers was that he went on to argue that Science would eventually be able to modify our genes and make us straight, and he declared that on that happy day he would willingly undergo gene therapy, in order to conform to Society as a good person should.  I was wondering what became of him, and I see that not only has he become a famous perfume maven, but he's married to another man and has two adopted sons.  I guess he got tired of waiting to be changed.

But you know something?  Those people have a right to want to change, and as I've said for many years, I think the gay community would be better off if they could.  It can hardly conduce to anyone's quality of life to have so many people who are here because they feel trapped by their biology, who are miserable and often take out their misery on other gay people.  But Ann Widdecombe to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that science or any other institution will ever be able to change us.  We're here, we're queer, get used to it.  There are bigger problems in the world.

Faithful and True; or, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

While I was working -- well, procrastinating -- on another, still unfinished post, I happened on this tweet:

I’m so glad you at least waited the customary 10 days after a massacre in a mosque to compare Islam to cancer.

It referred to this image:

And referred back to a previous tweet featuring Dawkins' letter to the editor of the London Times, denouncing Cambridge University's rescinding of a fellowship offered to Jordan Peterson, a well-known crank philosopher with arguably racist and sexist views.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Dawkins "compare[d] Islam to cancer."  He was attempting, with his customary tin ear, to draw an analogy.  True, the analogy depended on Islam being bad, but it's not exactly news that Dawkins is hostile to Islam.  Presumably, and I'll return to this, he is equally hostile to all other religions.  The point he was trying to make was something along the lines of "Hate the sin, love the sinner," which is no more convincing from him than it is from Christians.

Let me attempt to disentangle some of the threads of Stupid in Dawkins's tweet. First, bigotry does not necessarily refer to hostility to persons as opposed to their belief systems.  One can be bigoted toward belief systems too, for example by assuming that they are uniform and unchanging, and that all adherents share exactly the same implementations of their system of choice.  I reject Islam, as I reject all belief systems which claim the authority of a god to support their teachings and practices.  But I also recognize that its teachings are internally inconsistent, subject to many (including sectarian) interpretations, and that its adherents vary widely in their observances.  For simplicity's sake, consider the hijab, one of the practices that particularly exercises Dawkins: not all Muslim women wear it, and those who do vary widely in how much they feel God wants them to cover up.  I don't know Dawkins's opinion on this particular issue, but as I've said before, I object to secularist societies which ban the hijab as strongly as I object to societies which require it.  (Should I condemn secularism as a cancer because of its history of intolerance and oppression of, inter alia, women and homosexuals?  By Dawkins's logic, I should.)  A better analogy, though not useful for Dawkins's purposes, might be to "cellular growths" rather than cancer: some are benign, others malignant, some constitute more of a threat to the host than others.

Second, religion is not an "affliction."  Even if it were, we don't blame people with illnesses for their condition.  It is something that happens to them.  The whole point of the medical model is that the patient is a patient, not an agent, with respect to his or her disease.  We don't jail cancer patients, nor do we bomb hospitals to drive the cancer out of them.  Religion is a lifestyle choice, and it's appropriate to criticize morally the choices believers make, though not before we've examined our own.

Sometimes we bomb hospitals for the sheer hell of it, though.  I don't know the basis for Dawkins's claim that Muslims are the principal sufferers from Islam, but Christians and Jews have been doing their best to win that competition for centuries.  As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Everybody wants to get in on the act."  Perhaps Dawkins would acknowledge that Christians are the principal sufferers from Christianity, Jews the principal sufferers from Judaism, Hindus the principal sufferers from Hinduism, and so on, but such acknowledgement wouldn't play as well in a political context that demonizes Islam and Muslims while ignoring the religious component of Christian and Jewish and Hindu offenses.  Indeed, condemning the crimes of a Jewish state is a very serious thoughtcrime in Christian and secularist societies.

Third, and related: the first thing that occurred to me when I read Dawkins's remark about "homosexuals" was "Tell that to Alan Turing!"  Turing, you may recall, was forced by the State to take hormone "therapy" for the crime against Nature of having sex with other males.  Until the early twenty-first century, secularist science in the US was tolerant of secular attempts to "cure" homosexuals, decades after homosexuality was removed from the index of mental disorders and it was widely known that sexual orientation cannot be changed.  It's not clear to me why scientists changed their views on the status of male homosexuality; it doesn't seem to have been because of evidence, because whether a condition is an illness or not is not something that can be settled by evidence. And the whole edifice of psychiatry is of very dubious validity in general.  It reminds me of the way Bob Jones University, which insisted for decades on the Biblical doctrine of racial separation, suddenly awoke one day to discover that there was no such doctrine and they couldn't remember what it was supposed to be.

On women, the record of the "hard sciences" is comparable to that of "religion."  Not only were women regarded by (male, of course) scientists as a lesser breed than men, almost a separate species, but their health issues were largely dismissed.  I've pointed out before that militantly anti-religious scientists are terrible on issues like rape, which they seem incapable of understanding.  But male scientists, not only those of a certain age, still resist with great fierceness allowing women into the labs.  True, this guy is Not All Male Scientists, but he doesn't stand alone, and it's significant that a highly respected newspaper gave him a platform.  And as someone else pointed out, this scientist's claim that "it's not as if they ... build walls to keep women out," is false.  But maybe I should just conclude that scientists are the principal sufferers from science?  If that were so, I might have more sympathy for Dawkins, but it's not so.  Two words: eugenic sterilization.

Perhaps the worst error in Dawkins's analogy between religion and disease is that it's based on the assumption that religion is an external entity, like a radioactive virus, an "affliction" from which human beings "suffer."  Religion is, as an atheist like Dawkins ought to know, a human invention.  If a religion upholds male supremacy, even if all religions uphold male supremacy, a rational thinker should ask why they do so -- especially since Science also does so.  The conviction of female inferiority and the consequent belief that they should live under male tutelage (aka patriarchy) is plastic -- societies, including Muslims ones, vary widely and within themselves on how far women are disadvantaged -- but it's remarkably tenacious.  If it's a precept of many religions, including Science, it must be because male human beings put it there.  This presumption generalizes.

Recently I acquired a copy of a book I've wanted for a long time, a photographic essay about the Naked Festivals in Japan.  It includes some quasi-ethnographic articles about the history and rationale of these festivals, which prompted me to wonder why people decided that the gods wanted young men to strip to loincloths (or less, sometimes) and mass together for a giant game of Keep Away involving various sacred objects.  The visual appeal of such a rite is obvious to a pervert like me, but to the gods...?  At around the same time I saw some discussion of Roman Catholic High Mass.  We know more about the history of this rite rendering service to Yahweh and his Only Begotten Son, but again, people simply invented it in all its complex spectacle or music, costume, scent, and so on.  If one is an atheist, one can hardly claim that it is an expressive of, or compliant, with God's will.  It should be obvious to an atheist (though surprisingly often it's not) that none of the many religious rites or doctrines are the will of any god.  They are the will of the people who perform them.  In many cases, as with the Naked Festival, they are not imposed from above, let alone from outside, but are welcomed by the participants and observers, who not only enjoy the sight of massed naked men in the streets but are deeply moved and edified by it.  Blaming any human practice or belief on "religion" is an act of extreme intellectual and often moral laziness.

One more point, which actually was my starting point for this post.  Someone else commented on this thread:

Dawkins converts more atheists to agnostics than he turns away from faith altogether. Arrogant, dickish, islamophobic. Who would want to co-sign that unless you were one or more of those to begin with?

This annoyed me. I replied:

Any atheist who changes their opinion on atheism because Dawkins is an asshole is a sheep. Certainly can't claim to be an independent thinker. I'm an atheist on the merits, not because of who else is an atheist. If that's your approach, I wouldn't want to co-sign with you either.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that the truth or falsehood of a claim about the world has anything to do with the personality of the person who makes the claim.  His or her personality may be relevant if he or she tries to make it so, but that can be a distraction, and certainly is here.  I've criticized philosophers before who complained that the New Atheists come across as unpleasant.  (Don't forget that Dawkins himself notoriously whined about the "inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault" in her review of The Selfish Gene.  "I deplore bad manners as much as anyone...", he complained dishonestly, and also claimed falsely that Midgley hadn't read the the book before she reviewed it.  But all of this only influenced my opinion of Richard Dawkins, not of atheism.

And why, now that I think about it, would Dawkins's obnoxiousness make people abandon atheism for agnosticism?  Is there any actual evidence for the claim anyway?  Someone, I think, doesn't know what these terms mean.  But there's a lot of that going around.

Cut!

Speaking of tribalism, tribes, and primitive people, Samuel R. Delany wrote a long post about circumcision on Facebook the other day.  His father, he says, was not circumcised; Delany is.

Again and again I have wished I were not cut and have spent money on attempts to restore my foreskin. That presents two problems. First, it is purely for looks. It does not restore all the nerve endings that were removed in the circumcision itself. And further surgery would only destroy more—so that, for that reason, I have never thought about it at all seriously.

I've often encountered complaints like this, and they baffle me.  I'm circumcised, and I don't mourn my foreskin at all. I'm not aware of any decreased sensitivity (how could I be? I have no basis for comparison). When I first saw uncircumcised penises, I thought they were gross and ugly, because they didn't look like mine; we had a mix of cut and uncut in my junior-high PE class shower room, so I thought the differences were just 'natural' variation. (Not least because foreskins, like all natural features, vary widely. Some still look ugly to me.) I disagree that (as one commenter on Delany's post claimed) an "intact lover is a rare treat in the USA" -- I've encountered plenty, and I have not noticed any difference in their skills.

I say this just to offer a different perspective, one I very rarely see when circumcision is discussed. If I were consulted about a newborn male, I would respond with something like Delany's position:

As a tribal decision imposed on males before they can consent to it, I will never believe it’s a good thing. Nor do I believe most men would consent to the surgical mutilation of their genitals once they pass the age of reason, at what ever age it was set—especially when it is NOT the way of the tribe.

There isn't any good reason to do it, so don't do it, let the kid decide for himself when he's old enough to do so. But I don't feel deprived, mutilated, damaged, disabled, incomplete, etc. I also don't feel bad because I'm different from some other males in this detail. (Which apparently is a major factor in parents' decision to circumcise their sons: so they won't feel different from other boys in the locker room.  Not really a problem, since boys don't usually see each other naked in the locker room anymore -- we now protect their privacy, and have abandoned group showers so boys won't be traumatized by the sight of other boys' naked bodies.  But what a terrible rationale!  If everyone else jumped off a bridge ...)  I'm different from other people in so many ways, and this one seems minor to me by comparison. I feel sorry for those circumcised men who feel impaired by it; feelings are, and that can't be argued with. But I myself am totally comfortable with my lack of foreskin.

Notice the word "tribal" in Delany's remarks.  There's a lot of ambivalence about tribes in educated American discourse.  I see a lot of stuff on the Internet and elsewhere about the primal wisdom of tribal people, about how we shouldn't assume that we modern white Westerners are smarter than they are -- unless, as in this case, we don't agree with or approve of their wisdom.  Which is good, because no authority should be exempt from doubt or criticism.  It appears, however, that circumcision was a widespread though not universal practice among the ancient Egyptians, who can hardly be dismissed as "tribal" primitives.  (Warning: scary uncut mummy photo at that link.)  They were truly civilized!  They built the Pyramids!  They cut off their foreskins!  How dare barbaric modern Westerners disrespect them?

Delany continued: 

From a notoriously active sex life in my younger years—age 18 to (arbitrarily) 65—with many thousands of partners, here and in Europe, I gained the impression that, in the U. S. at least, circumcision as an extension of our anti-pleasure society has taken over. 

Not only Delany but several of his commenters remarked on the "anti-pleasure" US culture that practices circumcision, as opposed to -- Christian Europe?  All cultures, from what I can tell, are at best ambivalent about pleasure.  The apostle Paul is usually seen as "anti-pleasure," but it was he who rejected and forbade circumcision for gentile converts to Christianity.  Not, I'm sure, because he cared about their sexual pleasure; but at least he didn't endorse "becoming eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven" as Jesus did.  Catholic Europe was anything but pro-pleasure, but neither Catholics nor the most repressive Protestants mandated circumcision as part of their anti-pleasure agenda.

A certain amount of anti-Semitism tends to lurk beneath the surface of contemporary anti-circumcision discourse, and there's an interesting debate about that question in Susan Miller Okin's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, 1999).  Though of course circumcision is also mandated by Islam, the religion of 1.2 billion people worldwide; so condemning circumcision as a primitive tribal practice is Islamophobic, right?  I know of some South Korean men who chose circumcision for hygienic reasons as adults, during their mandatory military service; but I have no idea how common that is, or whether it predates the influence of European medicine in Korea.

But if there's anything to the "anti-pleasure" trope in connection with circumcision, it would have to connect to Science.  That's the current rationale for its prevalence in the United States, and you cannot go against the word of Science.  According to an article in the Washington Post, younger Americans ("millennials") are much less in favor of circumcision than their seniors: "The age gap on circumcision is of a piece with millennials' skepticism about vaccines."  Which ought to set off alarms for all good believers in Science, shouldn't it?  As of 1999 the American Academy of Pediatric Association no longer recommends infant circumcision as a medical default, but they seem to be waffling, and in 2012 they recommended it again.  In 2014 the Mayo Clinic published new data on (slightly) declining rates of circumcision in the US, which it deplored.

"Infant circumcision should be regarded as equivalent to vaccination," said Brian Morris, coauthor of the new report and professor emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney, in a press release. "As such, it would be unethical not to routinely offer parents circumcision for their baby boy. Delay puts the child's health at risk and will usually mean it will never happen."

I guess Australian doctors are anti-pleasure too.  It's curious how lightly scientific consensus can be dismissed by highly educated Americans who'd jeer at anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers and Creationists for rejecting the consensus of Science.  Delany himself is not a reflexive Science worshiper, but I'm not so sure about his commenters.  In comments, Delany also talked about the wisdom of Nature, to which I don't defer.

So, how interesting.  When you have contradictory categorizations of a practice, and opposition to it on contradictory (if not incoherent) grounds, something is going on: on the one hand, circumcision is "tribal"; on the other, it's the product of an "anti-pleasure" society.  Also Science, but we can ignore Science when we want, as long as we accept evolution and climate change.  To repeat: I am not endorsing, recommending, or mandating circumcision.  I'm just not sure of the quality of the objections I'm seeing to it.

Much of what people were saying in this discussion, about circumcision and its effects and significance, reminded me of some things people say about gay men.  That if you're not a particular physical type, no one will have sex with you because all gay men are obsessed with looks.  Or that if you're older than twenty-five or so, no one will have sex with you, because gay men are obsessed with youth.  Or that gay men are incapable of committing themselves to long-term relationships.  All these claims are common knowledge among gay men, even among gay men who know from their own experience that they aren't true.  Much of what people (and not only gay men) were saying about circumcision felt to me like the same kind of folklore.  I began to wonder if some of what other circumcised men were saying was stuff they'd heard and absorbed, even if (or because?) it made them feel bad about themselves.  The oddity would be that I, who have always been ready to feel bad about myself, never bought into the folklore about the inferiority of the (my) circumcised penis.  To repeat: I don't think that the uncircumcised penis is inferior either.  I do get the impression that they're working hard to convince themselves, and each other, that they are hopelessly damaged, which seems to me out of all proportion to what was actually taken from them.  Perhaps, as a very wise man once said, what they need is a good facial.

But maybe not.  I don't want to go too far in the other direction and tell them what they ought to feel.  I can't tell gay men who feel that being gay is a curse what they ought to feel either.  Just because I feel differently, doesn't mean that they must feel as I do.  If anything, I'm surprised that I don't feel a "morose delectation," as the Jesuits and Andrew Holleran might call it, over either condition.

In the past gay men could and did blame their parents, especially their mothers, for having made them gay.  With belief in gay genes hegemonic among us now (though just as bogus as belief in the Close-Binding and Intimate Mother), they can't do that anymore.  But they can blame Mom and Dad for letting the doctors snip away their foreskin.  Just as long as they blame Science too.  And tribalism.