I have a post coming up that is mostly notes from a bunch of different books, because when I didn't have time to blog, that's what I had time to do - so I'm just warning you about that.
In the meantime, a quick post that isn't really a complete blog entry, just something on my mind lately -- the phenomenon of atheists, particularly New Atheists, as Christians who have simply rejected belief.
Most atheists in the West have been raised in a predominantly Christian culture and environment, whether or not they grew up in a church-attending Christian household. One of the consequences of diminished religious literacy is that Christians don't know much about other religions (nor their own); one of the consequences of that is that ex-Christians turned atheist continue to deal with religion from a Christian framework, because although in theory they've rejected all religion, in practice and of necessity their rejection is far more narrow, much like the kid who has "given up on girls," when what he means is he has given up on Denise and that at the moment all girls are viewed through post-Denise-colored lenses.
We see this in shooting-the-shit political thought all the time and are familiar with the problems -- the college kid, or fortysomething who ought to know better, who has given up on "the whole thing" and, though insistent that "both parties are just as bad and indistinguishable from each other," has little to no knowledge of political systems or ideologies in other countries, except maybe a little internet libertarianism or fanzine anarchy. Their immediate experience of a thing was dissatisfying enough to convince them that it was more valiant to opt out than to thrust their fists against the posts.
But why does this matter, the New Atheists insist, if they chuck the whole thing out? If they throw the whole box out, does it matter if they know what's in the box? Why should they care about the variations between different flavors of make-believe?
It probably shouldn't. But there are a few reasons why it can.
One bears on the difference between the New Atheists and the atheists who came before them: the new furor and aggression, the new insistence on not just rejecting religion but characterizing it and making claims about it, despite what I've just described as a pretty comprehensive ignorance of it. Even the New Atheists' atheism is constructed from a conservative Christian point of view, given that it treats as synonymous atheism and irreligion, ignoring a long history of non-theistic Hindus and Buddhists, and the strong traditions of doubt, deism, nontheism, or agnosticism within the Abrahamic religions. The fundamentalist firebrand and the New Atheism convert both agree: those folks don't count. They're cheating somehow.
Atheists who are still culturally Christian continue to deal with religion in Christian terms. They continue to treat Christianity as the normal religion, and continue with the common Christian misconception that on some level insists that other religions are basically analogous to Christianity with different names and different lists of sins. Because the New Atheists favor the fundamentalist view of Christianity, this not only validates fundamentalism, it feeds into Islamophobia and other areas where the borders between racism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry are especially blurry. Any examination of the Granite State (the least church-attending state in the country) on Facebook makes this pretty clear, as does every damn word out of Dawkins' mouth this year.
It's the combination of these things that causes the problems. Simple rules that ought to hold true all day long hold just as true where religion is concerned: if you don't know anything about it, you probably don't need to express your opinion on it, and certainly should think three times before actually arguing about it.
This, I think, is one of the things that has been bugging me for a ... for the 21st century, I suppose, because the new converts to atheism and especially the new writers on atheism (coming from different academic backgrounds and intellectual traditions than the older writers) say such different things than I was used to hearing from the atheist side before. The aggression was easy to identify, and the misinformation had been catalogued long before Bill Maher decided to get on board and make things worse. It took the recent rise in Islamophobia for me to put my finger on some of the rest.
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
moral psych, continued
More from my moral psychology reading --
One of the oldest questions in the social sciences is where the incest taboo comes from. In almost every culture, we find a strong condemnation of sex between close relatives, and any time we find ANYthing in "almost every culture," we ask why that is. Is it biological, like the maternal bond? Is it a common reaction by disparate cultures to common environmental challenges, like the traditions of cooking meat or making clothing? Is it something else?
It's an interesting question in of itself, an interesting series of questions -- you can break it down into the two fundamental components, "why do people have an aversion to sex with their close relatives?" and "why do they condemn incest committed by others?" There are testable mechanisms of kin aversion that suggest an answer to the first question (siblings raised together but unrelated by blood share the aversion, for instance, suggesting a mechanism based on childhood coresidence).
The second question is tougher. It's easy to understand why individuals support the idea that murder's wrong -- because the more individuals who do so, the less likely they'll be murdered. But opposing third-party behavior that doesn't involve you and doesn't use your resources, there's no clear benefit there.
The chapter isn't just concerned with incest. That's the jumping-off point: this is the broader and more pertinent question, this idea of where this subset of moral sentiments -- these feelings we have about the things people do that don't impact us -- comes from. One of the suggestions is that the way human cognition and theory of mind work leads to us evaluating actions as though we were a participant, i.e. our own kin aversion leads us to condemn others' incest because on some uncontrollable level we are still reacting as though it's incest we're part of. If it's gross for us it's gross for everybody.
Have you ever been grossed out by watching somebody eating food you find disgusting, or just hearing about it on Facebook? This argument is saying that it's a similar effect (it's not saying the same mechanisms are involved; this is just an analogy).
I don't know yet if the explanation works for me, and besides, I haven't even finished the chapter, but it's interesting to look at in light of many of the social issues of the last couple years:
* The guys who don't understand what the big whoop is about Orange is the New Black, because there's no male character for them to relate to
* The religious right's obsession with other peoples' sexual behavior
* In particular, the insane response to gay marriage that has people arguing that some dude is going to marry a fucking walrus or something
* The difficulty some people have understanding why it's necessary to say Black Lives Matter, and that this isn't implied by "All Lives Matter"
I think what I'm getting at is that on the one hand we have an empathy gap that's behind a lot of culture war problems. The empathy gap is what causes somebody to see their misfortunes as bad luck and somebody else's as evidence of not trying hard enough, for instance, or prevents someone from understanding the importance of representation in media, politics, civil service, leadership, etc.
On the other hand we have this bizarre fussiness-fueled hatred where people -- sometimes the same people -- just can't stop worrying about what other consenting people are doing with each other, and the suggestion made by this moral psych reading that that reflex originates with these people imagining themselves getting gay married all over the place, gay married the hell out of. I suppose that's not surprising given how often "but it sets a bad example for the kids" comes into the conversation with these turdballoons.
That "other hand" isn't an overabundance of empathy or anything like that, but it's clearly something that draws on the same cognitive capacities, something from the same engines of humanity. (So too with the need to post a Facebook status about every tragedy in the news to somehow make it about you -- it's irritating, but the mechanisms involved still come from the same toolbox as the one that makes people run back into burning buildings to save the other kids, etc etc.)
The empathy gap is something I aim to talk a lot about. I didn't mean to bring it up before having the time and mental space to devote an entry to it.
But everything I'm talking about here is, at any rate, an interesting lens through which to look at morality. Most people don't reason about their morality much. They memorize codes and processes and dos and don'ts. They get very upset when their resulting lists are challenged or changed. Most people, in my experience, don't even think much about where they derived their morals from, and if they do, they are usually wrong.
A lot of these blog entries are just going to taper off, because I'm just jotting down thoughts I have after reading something -- often, things I think about while swimming in the morning after morning reading -- and those thoughts don't necessarily arrive neatly packaged.
One of the oldest questions in the social sciences is where the incest taboo comes from. In almost every culture, we find a strong condemnation of sex between close relatives, and any time we find ANYthing in "almost every culture," we ask why that is. Is it biological, like the maternal bond? Is it a common reaction by disparate cultures to common environmental challenges, like the traditions of cooking meat or making clothing? Is it something else?
It's an interesting question in of itself, an interesting series of questions -- you can break it down into the two fundamental components, "why do people have an aversion to sex with their close relatives?" and "why do they condemn incest committed by others?" There are testable mechanisms of kin aversion that suggest an answer to the first question (siblings raised together but unrelated by blood share the aversion, for instance, suggesting a mechanism based on childhood coresidence).
The second question is tougher. It's easy to understand why individuals support the idea that murder's wrong -- because the more individuals who do so, the less likely they'll be murdered. But opposing third-party behavior that doesn't involve you and doesn't use your resources, there's no clear benefit there.
The chapter isn't just concerned with incest. That's the jumping-off point: this is the broader and more pertinent question, this idea of where this subset of moral sentiments -- these feelings we have about the things people do that don't impact us -- comes from. One of the suggestions is that the way human cognition and theory of mind work leads to us evaluating actions as though we were a participant, i.e. our own kin aversion leads us to condemn others' incest because on some uncontrollable level we are still reacting as though it's incest we're part of. If it's gross for us it's gross for everybody.
Have you ever been grossed out by watching somebody eating food you find disgusting, or just hearing about it on Facebook? This argument is saying that it's a similar effect (it's not saying the same mechanisms are involved; this is just an analogy).
I don't know yet if the explanation works for me, and besides, I haven't even finished the chapter, but it's interesting to look at in light of many of the social issues of the last couple years:
* The guys who don't understand what the big whoop is about Orange is the New Black, because there's no male character for them to relate to
* The religious right's obsession with other peoples' sexual behavior
* In particular, the insane response to gay marriage that has people arguing that some dude is going to marry a fucking walrus or something
* The difficulty some people have understanding why it's necessary to say Black Lives Matter, and that this isn't implied by "All Lives Matter"
I think what I'm getting at is that on the one hand we have an empathy gap that's behind a lot of culture war problems. The empathy gap is what causes somebody to see their misfortunes as bad luck and somebody else's as evidence of not trying hard enough, for instance, or prevents someone from understanding the importance of representation in media, politics, civil service, leadership, etc.
On the other hand we have this bizarre fussiness-fueled hatred where people -- sometimes the same people -- just can't stop worrying about what other consenting people are doing with each other, and the suggestion made by this moral psych reading that that reflex originates with these people imagining themselves getting gay married all over the place, gay married the hell out of. I suppose that's not surprising given how often "but it sets a bad example for the kids" comes into the conversation with these turdballoons.
That "other hand" isn't an overabundance of empathy or anything like that, but it's clearly something that draws on the same cognitive capacities, something from the same engines of humanity. (So too with the need to post a Facebook status about every tragedy in the news to somehow make it about you -- it's irritating, but the mechanisms involved still come from the same toolbox as the one that makes people run back into burning buildings to save the other kids, etc etc.)
The empathy gap is something I aim to talk a lot about. I didn't mean to bring it up before having the time and mental space to devote an entry to it.
But everything I'm talking about here is, at any rate, an interesting lens through which to look at morality. Most people don't reason about their morality much. They memorize codes and processes and dos and don'ts. They get very upset when their resulting lists are challenged or changed. Most people, in my experience, don't even think much about where they derived their morals from, and if they do, they are usually wrong.
A lot of these blog entries are just going to taper off, because I'm just jotting down thoughts I have after reading something -- often, things I think about while swimming in the morning after morning reading -- and those thoughts don't necessarily arrive neatly packaged.
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