The Baby And The Snowblower
Unscientific America from Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum has been getting a bit of buzz and has opened a few discussions about religious accommodationists in the pro-science and pro-secular communities. Here’s my take, with one bad metaphor and minimal vulgarity.
I’m not going to talk about the book’s contents much because I haven’t read it, I have plenty of other good books unread in the queue, and based on early reviews by people other than PZ Myers, it doesn’t sound like a good use of my finite recreational reading time.
However, I’ve been following the (mostly critical) reviews of Unscientific America and the ongoing debate over how much one should risk offending the religious when promoting one’s agenda. And when I write ‘agenda’ I mean it in the plural sense. A post at No Jesus, No Peas caught my eye and I began a comment, then fleshed it out as a full blog post, then lost the post (never write anything you care about in a browser), then restarted from memory.
The gist is that I agree with the author but I still find something missing both in his post and in Mooney & Kirshenbaum’s (aka M&K) earlier blog writings. Sun Tzu tell us that we need to adopt tactics specific to our audience/opponent, time, and place. So while I find it irresponsible to abandon accommodationism out of hand, I find it equally as irresponsible to claim it’s the most, or only effective tactic available. Further, if my goal is to affect social change, for example, to promote secular rights and non-discrimination, accommodationism may not be a very good tactic at all.
To wit: accommodationism did not work very well in the racial and gay civil rights movement in the US. In both cases, the accommodationists preferred a lower-profile long, slow, patient process to the calculated confrontations of Martin Luther King or post-Stonewall gay activism. There were big fights within both the communities and since history is written by the winners, the confrontationists are portrayed as those that took the fight to the enemy, forced the issue, and won the day. And while I may be framing all this as a military campaign, for many it was just that - an armed conflict against a much larger, much better-equipped opponent for freedom and human dignity. Even if the conflict was fought only with pies. And as I recall, Martin Luther didn’t bend over backwards to avoid offending the Pope in his efforts to reform the church, and Christ wasn’t the go-along-to-get-along type either, so the story goes. So clearly, both approaches have their time and place.
The effectiveness of each approach is also related to the agenda one is pursuing. Take the NCSE - their goal is to ensure good science is taught in public school classrooms. As their research in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial showed, they are fairly effective in their goal to keep evolution in the science classroom and creationism out. They don’t do it by attacking religion not because religion isn’t the greatest threat to good science education (it is) but I suppose because they’ve not found it to be necessary or effective.
Likewise, the Center for Inquiry has been promoting science and a secular humanist outlook for decades. They have changed their approach over the years and are currently in a period of transition to being less scholarly and more activist as their recent work as an NGO with the UN attests. While being less confrontational than the NCSE, CFI is still more likely to wield a pen than a pie.
The case of Richard Dawkins is much less clear. Dawkins’ books on science, zoology, and evolution are superb - they are engaging, clear, detailed, and well-written, showing the awe-inspiring range of life on earth and the deceptively simple explanation for its many forms. You may find one or two jabs at Biblical literalism in his later works, but overall his science books do a great job fulfilling their purpose - explaining science.
Contrast The Ancestor’s Tale with The God Delusion. Dawkins goes on a long diatribe against the evils of religion, likening it to child abuse. While it’s not clear how many minds were changed by the book (if any), it is undeniable that it got the word out about atheism. Simply look at the sales figures and the number of languages its been translated to. In that respect, Dawkins succeeded at his goal of promoting unbelief.
Relatedly, atheist gadfly and biologist PZ Myers wrote of his experience getting expelled from a screening of that execrable piece of anti-evolution propaganda Expelled!. Myers legitimately finagled himself a invitation to the screening (more than one can say about the deceptive tactics the producers used to get Dawkins, et. al. on camera), got chucked out for just politely and quietly standing in line, and in doing so called out the utter hypocrisy of the filmmakers in possibly the most ironic manner possible. And all he had to do was quietly and politely leave when asked. The nerve.
So to recapitulate: The NCSE promotes good science in the classroom by researching in support of litigation and raising awareness of attempts to dilute science or replace it with religion and superstition in the science classroom. CFI does outreach to raise awareness of secular values, Richard Dawkins writes science books to promote science and writes atheist books to promote atheism, And in calling out the hypocrisy of some conservative Christian filmmakers, PZ Myers is a bad bad man, setting back the cause of promoting a more scientific outlook in America all the way back to the beginning of the universe, somewhere between 6,000 and 13,700,000,000 years ago, give or take. Also, Myers name is stupid and he smells bad.
Oh, sorry. That last one is a paraphrase of Kirshenbaum and Mooney at the time of the incident wherein they figuratively shat themselves when everyone else in the science blogosphere was having a good laugh over it. See, apparently in the Mooneyverse, any time a scientist does or says something (regardless of that person’s intent) that doesn’t promote science in a way that Chris & Sheril approve of, it immeasurably harms the goal of promoting science. And by ‘immeasurably’ I don’t mean ‘greatly’, I mean that M&K can’t show any actual, measurable harm. One presumably must take it on faith.
As for Dawkins, well, The God Delusion is a piss-poor advertisement for science. Why there’s hardly any science in it all, just a long set of screeds about how there’s no evidence for God and the effect of religion for most of history has been one horrible orgy of rape, repression, and murder after another. Good grief - what churchgoing American is going to be convinced that science has value and should be taught in school and used to craft governmental policy when all Richard talks about is a belief system that convinces swarthy nutters to pilot airliners into skyscrapers!
Give me a moment to stagger to the fainting couch.
I do not wish to imply that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are stupid. They aren’t. And I sense that they understand that when Dawkins wants to communicate science, he writes a book like The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker or The Ancestors Tale. Similarly, when PZ Myers wants to promote science he blogs about, oh, the evolution of snake fangs. They also must understand that Dawkins wants to communicate atheism, he writes something like The God Delusion and Myers provokes those lovely right-to-life Catholics into writing him death threats by desecrating the body of Christ tossing a cracker in the trash in order to prove a point about religious hypocrisy, Certainly Sheril and Chris must understand that one person may be pursuing more than one goal at a time (e.g. atheist activism, science communication) and that actions taken in pursuit of one goal may not be taken with the intent of achieving another.
Or to give a very simple example: if one has a sleepy baby and there’s snow covering the driveway, one puts the baby in a bassinet and clears the driveway with a snowblower. One person, multiple goals, different actions taken to achieve each goal. Easy peasy, right?
I can only assume there’s some deeper reason than rank stupidity that Mooney & Kirshenbaum willfully refuse to acknowledge this. In their eyes, Dawkins is a bad science communicator because he’s an outspoken atheist. Myers is a bad science communicator because he offended Catholics and showed the Expelled! producers to be hypocrites the size of Mt. Fuji. By this logic they’d accuse me of putting the baby in the snowblower.
Bad babysitter.
Mooney has been spatting with Myers for what seems like years, with Mooney doing most of the kvetching. First it was the squabble over “framing” (speaking to your audience, putting the baby in the bassinet, etc. - easy peasy), then it was over the Expelled! incident, and then it was over The Case of the Purloined Eucharist. Now Mooney has published a book which (according to reviewers) spends an inordinate pagecount rehashing his previous spats with Myers, culminating in the current spat about why Myers, et. al. are panning Mooney’s book. Unsurprisingly, Myers’ review of the book did not respond to the personal attacks made against him in the book; in a nutshell, he said the book was weak, doesn’t adequately support its premise and offers no tangible solutions. And he’s not the only one saying that.
So for the record, I can see where an accommodationist stance may be more effective in front of a jury or local school board than flat-out calling bullshit on the locals’ version(s) of god. I can also see where publicly calling bullshit on gods raises awareness and consciousness and can mobilize a long-abused and silenced minority to action. Few have pointed out that while being pro-science, pro-secularism, and pro-atheism often leads to very similar positions, promoting science, secularism, and atheism are also distinct and different goals. It appears that Mooney & Kirshenbaum either don’t grasp this point, or - more likely - ignore it to promote themselves and their ongoing grudge against Myers, Dawkins, and presumably anyone else they disagree with that happens to be more engaging and popular than they are. That’s a big accusation, but honestly I cannot explain Chris & Sheril’s increasingly unpleasant behavior in anything other than junior high terms.
Why do I even care about this? Like I said, I’ve got better things to read right now and a lot of them. Granted, a solid science article takes a lot more effort than an essay like this one, so maybe I shouldn’t fault PZ for having more posts on atheism than on biology. That said, Pharyngula is like a cereal box of atheism posts with the very occasional secret toy surprise of a science post in it. And while I saw the point of it, I felt the whole Jesus-in-a-Biskit thing was gratuitious and juvenile. As for Dawkins, I thought The God Delusion was weak in a number of areas, not nearly the bulletproof case he presents in The Blind Watchmaker or The Selfish Gene; to be fair, science is usually much easier to focus and substantiate than claims about religion, for or against. So, no, I’m not some mindless minion in Dawkins’ or Myers’ putative “horde” and neither needs me to defend them.
No, what I think is important and what I’m angry about is Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s use of the infamous Shut Up, That’s Why argument. Their book could have questioned their basic assumptions about the conflation between science, atheism, and secularism and asked how activism in one area can conflict with the others. It might have led to a really interesting discussion. But it didn’t because reviewers would have pointed that out as a positive if it had. Instead we get more of the same whiny counterproductive PZ-baiting from M & K, yet more blog spats that Mooney will end up on the losing end of, and more faux-accommodationist concern trolling all so he can tell the rest of us to Shut Up, That’s Why.
No, thank you.
Coda: I’ve stayed up far later than I intended, written far more than I intended, and ended up with a post with a completely different tone than I intended. I still believe drawing the distinction between activism for science, secularism, and atheism is important and I want to see this fleshed out if only to satisfy my curiosity.
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