I’m a pretty well educated man, I think it’s fair to say; I like logic, and I like language. But the language of logic and reason, invented during the enlightenment to break through the arguments that kings had a divine right to rule as they wished, has now been fully subverted by the new ruling class. It can be used dishonestly while giving an impression that you are the reasonable one, it can be used to insult people while appearing polite, and it can be used to confuse conversations that involve arguments you don’t want to actually engage with. The consequences of this are all around us: it is used to justify wars of aggression designed to enrich our overlords and leave us in pieces on a foreign field, it is used to antagonize people and destroy solidarity, it disempowers people and maintains hierarchies in our society – a perfect reflection of what it was created to fight.
A century ago, white supremacy was justified with the idea that whites were entirely superior to all other races, but this idea could not stand in the aftermath of Jesse Owens beating the arses of the nazi supermen at the 1936 Olympics. To replace it, a new understanding was created among racists, where whites are held to be the most logical and intelligent, but blacks have a better connection to nature, were more emotional and artistic, and more physically impressive. “Logic” has been enshrined as a core cultural value in the minds of western people, and it gives them the impression that they make better decisions and should be in charge. Like any lie told to further injustice, it chafes against experience and reality. I’ve always said that the most interesting thing about racism is how stupid it is.
I saw this in a recent (and utterly unhinged) Foreign Policy magazine article called “It’s time to bomb North Korea”. In the article we see the idea that these foreigners are children who don’t know better on full display: the author advocates a bombing raid that would almost certainly provoke the north to fire a billion explosive rockets into Seoul, a city with 25 million people living in it. He then states that it’s actually the fault of South Korea if all those people die due to their “deliberate inaction”. I dunno what they were meant to have done, picked up and moved their 2000-year old capital city away from the line drawn on the map by the Americans at the end of an imperial war that killed a third of the people on the Korean peninsula? Who can say! In a nod to the ravenous military industrial complex the author suggests they buy a missile defense system that could cut those billion rockets down into a nice, manageable two hundred million, and in another nod to the humanitarian impulses of Myra Hindley offering a child a lift, perhaps they could try evacuating Seoul before the bombing raids begin.
Here we get back to how racist beliefs make you stupid, no matter how “logical” you’re trying to sound: the threat that Seoul would be leveled if the North is in any way molested is a conscious and frequently stated part of North Korea’s foreign policy. So can you imagine what it would look like in North Korea when they suddenly see fucking millions of people leaving the South Korean capital? If you’re from the superior race and you think that the Koreans are some kind of half-devil half-child halfwits, of course you’re gonna discount the obvious: that the North would immediately figure out that a sudden evacuation of Seoul would be the final presage of disaster.
This article is written in forceful prose and makes arguments that appear logically sound, sure, but the lack of basic empathy shines through in its utterly insane and bloodless conclusions. Watching this guy trying to make a moral argument is like reading the diaries from Se7en, where someone tries to sound rational and normal and winds up painting themselves as terribly maladjusted. Of course, I’m not reading the diary of a serial killer, I’m reading one of the most influential foreign policy journals in the United States – go figure.
I’m no fan of imperial war of course, but this attitude also plays out a little closer to home for me. I’m not a religious man, and the diaspora of the atheist congregation has made the internet a haven for people, like me, who don’t think there are any gods running around. But if you’ve been on the internet in the last ten years you can’t help but notice that the discussion about godlessness and what it means is dominated by the right. Even if you look up a sensible and even-handed atheist video on Youtube, and you’ll be recommended a hundred different channels where you can watch a chemical toilet that was magically brought to life attempt to communicate by flapping their lid for five hours about how illogical age of consent laws are. Sitting through even one of these things is painful but they’re pretty popular – Sargon of Akkad, a fat IT technician who named himself after a badass Mesopotamian conqueror, has three quarters of a million subscribers. This is a dude who argued that we’d get a better deal from Brexit if all of his fans posted comments about how great Britain is in order to fool the EU into thinking we’re stronger than we are; maybe this was a cynical scheme to turn Youtube’s comment section into even more of a sewer (in which case congratulations), but I think he really meant it.
The attitudes of these shitty dullards are reflected in the public leaders of the Atheist movement. In a just world, Sam Harris would be just another boring dumb internet pedant. However, he made a move available only to people with parents rich enough to bribe a university to give you a neuroscience doctorate, and off the back of his credentials and his family’s media connections he catapulted himself into the limelight by arguing that Muslims are all terrorists because of their violent and evil religion. That’s how our society ends up with another media dumbass whose burbling idiocy will never leave our ears. I’d say a guy who spent an entire book trying to draw moral conclusions from the mechanisms of evolution – literally taking hundreds of pages trying to go from “is” to “ought” – is not a respectable atheist philosopher. But here we are, and this dude’s awful politics and insufferable beep-boop superiority complex are presented in the media as an example to all young atheists.
Unlike Harris, Richard Dawkins has actually done good work. However, for all the time I’ve known of him, a steady stream of unhinged, cruel, oblivious or bigoted statements have come from his mouth. He has the comfortable attitude of a toffy professor, that much is clear, and his celebrity has made him shameless. I suspect that he appreciates people of all races, creeds and sexes – provided they act on his terms and don’t truly challenge him. Handling fundamentalists who crash his talks from Liberty University is easy, but examining and unpicking the assumptions of white supremacy and colonialism, a system that he has directly gained from? That is a lot more unpleasant for him. It pains me to say all this because of the esteem in which Dawkins is held, but it fatally compromises him to the point where I doubt he is really liberating people anymore.
It’s not only atheists who are so afflicted. We’d all like to believe we are freeing people from oppressive institutions and ways of thinking, just as the enlightenment heralded the intellectual end of the age of kings. But it’s not enough to just be “logical”; there are many ways to learn about the world and to get a sensible picture your imperfect human brain will need to use them all. To quote Fred Clarke, empathy is a way of seeing, and therefore a way of knowing. Using it makes you smarter and wiser, not using it makes you dumber and more foolish.
And we can’t afford to be dumb and foolish.