October 25, 2007
Debating Hate Speech
Oliver Kamm reacts to Steven Rose's call to ban hate speech. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram responds to Oliver Kamm:
Oliver Kamm—“There goes liberty”—attacks Steven Rose for writing that hate speech ought to be banned because it violates the human rights of its victims. There are tricky debates to be had about what counts as a properly human right, but I don’t think there’s much mileage in forensically examining Rose on that point. Kamm’s point is that hate speech—unlike, say, racist violence—doesn’t harm its victims, strictly speaking. That’s a highly dubious proposition: being bombarded with the message that you are of lesser worth than others, are disgusting, repellent, vicious or stupid, may well cause you significant harms (and where genocidal crimes have taken place, it is often against the background of such messages being prevalent). But we can let that go as an instance of Kamm’s lack of imagination. What Kamm really has in his sights are restrictions on speech that are alleged to flow from the idea that we own one another respect, have duties of civility to our fellow citizens, and so forth. He’s surely wrong on this point, and for two reasons: first, in a a democracy of equal citizens it is important to see to it that the conditions are in place for people to participate as equals; second, no-one has any legitimate interest in the protection of hate speech, as such.*
Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:26 AM | Permalink
Comments
Aren't there responses to hate speech besides legislative ones?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 25, 2007 9:20:31 PM
Hate speech is depressing and sickening. People who produce it should get called on it by others who don't tolerate it, and they often do. There's a difference between a legal right to say or write something filthy and hurtful and a right to same with social or professional impunity, however. If we were to dignify this kind of "free" speech to the level of a crime by making it legally costly speech, it would only acquire more power and be practiced in secret by people who have banded together to do real harm, finding in the illegality of what they're doing a glamorous feather their caps, as if suppression were proof of virtue and heroism.
We do need, as a society, to mind very much when in the speech of any one of us people are belittled, compared to beings that are not human, or viciously singled out for their folkways. No less than James Watson needed to lose his job over what he said last week. So the social and professional cost of his words was high, was it not? He was in no way coddled as an elderly genius having a bad hair day. I understand that the argument to bring the law to bear pertains not to such as James Watson but to genuinely, unambiguously harmful people who exploit our precious freedom of speech to the limit and beyond, but I deeply doubt you can have the Speech Police without the Thought Police coming on their heels.
It's better for a child to learn respect for others, and the tempered speech it results in, as an aspect of moral life rather than as a point of law, there being many "better than legal" reasons why hate speech is bad. Shouldn't we have something more telling to say to a six year-old than that James Watson talked on the wrong side of the law? And once we start to legally disallow certain forms of speech, then we can by no means be sure that hate speech will be the only kind of speech disallowed, any more than we can be sure what will, down the road, legally constitute hate speech. In a time of Orwellian manipulation of language and eroding civil liberties, these are very much matters for finer feeling, not for the Roberts Court.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 25, 2007 11:13:09 PM
I want to agree with you in theory, Elatia, but what's the difference if the state lashes out against hurtful ignorance or if the mob intimidates employers into lashing. Isn't the effect identical?
I can't imagine Watson is any less a "hero" among his-sort-of-people for having been pilloried in the media and kicked to the curb by his lab than had he been fined, lashed, or even stripped of his rights by the state.
Instead, it seems to me the best way to marginalize hurtful speech is to simply ignore it. Alas, that's something impossible to do when the most offensive utterance du jour is replicated a thousand times by morning by a sensationalist media. You have to wonder, who's causing the most pain? The Bigot? or the Press?
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 26, 2007 12:02:48 AM
Sensationalism in the case of holding up a hate speech-ifer is useful, is it not?
Isn't it like a long, public aghast-ment?
Posted by: beajerry | Oct 26, 2007 2:47:37 AM
Cheaper (for the state) than a Maoist show trial.
But then you lose out on the publicized debate where the perp breaks down, sees his error and makes restitution (devotes his influence to starting a scholarship fund for Sahel Scholars in the Biological Sciences, for example).
Here we have lost that, plus any contribution he might have continued to make in the field, fundraising for his lab, and as a standard bearer for "a life in science."
I have occasionally come across people who were doing valuable things whose views made me cringe. Still make me cringe. Made me cringe just now, but the idea that the world should be deprived of the value of the real things they do because of faulty wiring in the judgement and compassion sector is beyond wasteful.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 26, 2007 6:57:58 AM
And.
Do you imagine if you went over the Theistiphobic writings and off-the-cuff remarks of Dennett and Dawkins you wouldn't find statements every bit as hateful as Watkins'?
Of course you would. Someone, as an excercise, perhaps Dennett himself, should re-release a series of his papers with "dark-skinned" substituted for "religious," just to see how cringy it makes people feel to read them.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 26, 2007 7:07:34 AM
Carlos, could you provide us with such a statement from Dennett or Dawkins?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 28, 2007 9:37:17 PM
k. if you don't mind the most cursory google pass (which is probably within your own abilities)
...Whites.
Enough? No?
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/
...the more likely you are to be white?
Shall I get the torches? Or will you?
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 1:08:20 PM
Carlos -
Whether you like or dislike Dennett and Dawkins, there is surely a straightforward difference here between "dark-skinned" and "religious":
Everyone agrees that skin color, in and of itself, has nothing to do with the intellect. Even the Watsons and Charles Murrays of the world only talk about correlations between race and intellectual ability.
By contrast, being religious (or irreligious) quite obviously involves at least some use of the intellectual apparatus, for example to determine the best explanation of the cosmos as it is. It is perfectly kosher to think poorly of ideas / opinions (and by extension, of the people adhering to them) if they seem ill motivated or unsound.
There is no fundamental reason why one should be able to think ill of the intellectual qualities of supply siders, vegans, neocons, communists, Britney Spears fans or Nuclear power proponents but not those of Mormons, Hare Krishnas, Atheists or Unitarians.
Posted by: D | Oct 29, 2007 2:00:50 PM
For people who want to do it, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to think ill of anyone they disagree with. For the last 7 years, I've had a bad problem with Republicans, for instance. I see they went to prestigious colleges, hold responsible jobs, read good poetry and fiction -- but still, you know...how smart are they really?
On the subject of faith and whether it's an OK thing to poke fun at people who have it, there's a slightly different dynamic, however. While an atheist may well be convinced there's something kind of stupid about being religious, he couldn't demolish a religious person's belief system in the same way he could show them their math was bad, or why, if they're Republicans as well as church-goers, their politics are bad. What one of the "brights" might call primitive thinking is, according to a religious person -- who may actually be horribly bright -- the ground of all being.
The religious person is aware of the presence of God, the atheist is not. This is a slightly different matter than whether one "believes in" God, because if you are aware of His presence you are untroubled about whether to believe in Him. If, as a religious person, your awareness of His presence ceases, then you're likely to see that as a crisis of faith, not as evidence of God's non-existence or grounds for disbelief in Him. You might, like Mother Teresa, have decades of this kind of crisis. Though an atheist would likely regard Mother Teresa's dilemma as figmentary and sad without being moving, I don't know too many religious people who think atheists are intellectually deficient or unsound of mind. That's because for the most part they know that an awareness of the presence of God is experiential, and that without that awareness -- well, faith is very, very hard.
But wait! I'm writing like these are truisms, when in fact they obtain mainly to highly educated people, religious and not. What about all the Bible-thumpers there are? I once wore a Chinese dress embroidered with a dragon to a party for an old friend who was getting married in the Bible Belt -- where I was born and raised. The bride, an intensely religious Southern Baptist, steered clear of me -- the dragon on my dress marked me as one of Satan's own. Is it OK for me to make fun of her because she was demonstrably backwards, not just religious? Well, I did it -- not at the party, of course. I would have felt badly putting the knock on her for being uneducated and generally backwards, but I had no problem deriding her religion... Hey! she assumed I was "of Satan," what would you have done?
It may be, Carlos and D, that the aspect of hate speech called into question here is one of classism, where taking a cheap shot at someone's folkways is the main thing. I think this is beclouded by making it into an intellectual argument that separates the brights from the not-quite brights. The demographics of religious belief point up class markers we would all be uncomfortable taking on undiluted. Heavens, what can one do? -- stop putting others down entirely?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 29, 2007 3:16:34 PM
Well I actually like them both quite a lot. Few things are more fun than listening to brilliant speakers stomp and fume on stage or on paper. But I also think they are bigots equal if not superior in scope to poor old Watkins, who doubtless means far less ill to those he looks down on than D & D, no matter how carefully they couch their distain.
Both "dark-skinned" and "religiots" (Dennett's word) are xenophobic concepts of the same stripe. With just as much societal acid in them. These days, mostly racism is a personal private conceit. The only ones wearing the jack-boots (on stage for now) are the bigots of the anti-religious kind.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 4:32:08 PM
Position 1
Position 2
Well, either the latter or the former, but it should not depend on the owner of the ox.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 5:31:43 PM
Did I miss something? Calling a person -- in a civil fashion -- on hate speech is a good thing to do. Peer pressure stops a lot of it cold. Refraining from putting a person down for what you perceive as an intellectually limited belief (religion, although there are others) but which may in fact reflect deeper, broader forms of elitism is also a civil thing to do. On the subject of religion, I would definitely like to see less derision of and by people who can't agree. But, Carlos -- what about this ox???
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 29, 2007 6:15:48 PM
Carlos, I think you evade my point, which was the distinction between a physical attribute a person possesses and an idea he upholds. Of course D&D (nice coinage, btw) have disdain for religion; lots of people are contemptuous of lots of things. Contempt is not the same thing as bigotry though, and Dawkins is a "bigot" to only about the same extent that Jon Stewart, Bill Maher or Ramesh Ponnuru are. Merely expressing harsh views about an idea - any idea - does not make one a bigot, surely. Otherwise everyone from Noam Chomsky (quite vituperative about US foreign policy) to Norman Borlaug (rather brusque with organic farmers) to Michael Moore (pick a film) would be a bigot. And don't even get me started on Al Gore and Global Warming skeptics.
Elatia - I appreciate your point about religious views being almost unshakeable and precious to their possessors. What then do you recommend for handling religion in the public square? I am very uncomfortable about any idea in the marketplace - let alone one so powerful as a religious one - being given the kid glove treatment, simply because its adherents cherish it very much.
It would be one thing to keep mum about faith in a world where political arguments were conducted on the basis of a public reason and religion stayed at home - no one insists on telling someone they have an ugly baby, even if it is true. Things are different when, as today, religion seems to have made an emphatic return to the political realm
Posted by: D | Oct 29, 2007 7:32:36 PM
D, you're right -- it's back in the public realm, religion. It may have started coming back with The Moral Majority ca. 1980. But did it come back because the Law allows it? Because religious people were treated in a hands-off way and so their numbers increased? Or -- my favorite thesis -- did it rear its head in a big way because of the fear and rage that have driven religious fundamentalism worldwide?
Late Capitalism is enraging, nuclear proliferation since the end of the Cold War is frightening, the degradation of the biosphere is hardly encouraging, and we have much more to be scared about today than our parents did at our age. A particular characteristic of Christian fundamentalism is the easy embrace -- on behalf of all of humanity -- of a horrible fate: the Ending of Days. Would that the people who contemplated enthusiastically that prelude to their heavenly salvation put the same energy into averting Hell on earth. I wish, too, that everyone who quarreled over religion (as in -- is it only for stupids?) would try to see it as a symptom not a cause. When times get this scary, people will look for the "something" that is out there for them -- even people like some of the "brights" who don't think they're religious but who practice what Joseph Campbell called "disciplines of escape."
People who think that religion is empowering corporate greed and disastrous geopolitics might ask, too, if some of the same base motives are not propelling all these things -- dedication to short term profits, the exaltation of a sunset industry like the oil business over the long term interests of everyone, the placement squarely on the shoulders of today's toddlers of many trillions in debt. Whether religious people need to be protected from hate speech, and whether they're bright like atheists, are actually not the real questions but a side show diverting us from properly understanding our dangerous and wonderful world. There is much written in these pages and elsewhere about atheism being for the brave and the bright. I don't think so -- the brave and the bright, whatever they believe, are the ones who are looking at our problems through every possible lens, trying to get to the problem underlying the problems before we all reach the point of no return, the point at which, we have seen, every philosophy breaks down.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 29, 2007 8:31:24 PM
Well, Elatia, I guess I'm confused as to when something is "Hate Speech." and when it is only a "Put-Down." It seemed that when Watkins revealed his bigoted outlook it was Hate Speech, but when you reviled your backwoods Southern Baptist friend's religion it was only a put down. Negative peer pressure is good for the former, as you say, but then you seem to be giving yourself a free pass.
Sickened by Watkins, while merely chiding Dawkins for lacking restraint (if even) and chalking your own lapse as human nature; the ox I refer to is from an old story about double standards.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 9:00:01 PM
You may have a point. The ending of days might figure highly in the psyches of the "Believers" who have begun to take a burgeoning interest in the politically driven social structure of this country.
But it is only about Capitalism, the Cold War, or the Biosphere?
I hate to say anything that will get me branded as a "Hate Speechifier," but to me it seems far more likely that what has awakened the Christians are those bits of the Bible which touch most closely on the heart and the family. "How many millions upon millions more babies (that's what we have always called them when we lose them) will we destroy before God comes?" "What side will God say I was on?" are the difficult questions that may be more relevant to peoples of the Book. And I would add if God is not coming now, how long until the unending river of blood at our own hands sickens us all even more than we are sickened by mere words and ideas?
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 9:22:28 PM
It seems to me that someone holding a negative opinion about my provenance is something that (since I can be expected to do nothing about it) should be of far less concern to me than that persons opinions of my most cherished beliefs, particularly if that person seems devoted to the destruction of those beliefs, and still moreso if those ideas are emphasized by an increasingly vocal cadre of self-styled elites who complain that these others are ruining it for the worthies. We don't have to look back very far in time to see that sort of xenophopia turning out very badly.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 29, 2007 9:34:07 PM
Hold your horses, Carlos! A "great man" making very much in public a withering and scientifically unjustified observation that could be used to support outmoded and harmful thinking is rather different from an eye-rolling remark I made privately to a friend 20 years ago at a party when another person there thought the dragon embroidered on my vintage Chinese dress was a sign of my being a satanist. The connection between the remarks I cited above is the one that holds -- classism, a subject that is often religiously freighted, that is subtextually present in many discussions of atheism vs. belief, and that is, moreover, my real point two posts above. If the person I was talking with, knowing that he alone had heard what I said, had replied, "Oh, don't put her down -- she's just pathetically superstitious," that would have about summed it up. I don't see the double standard, but if you still do, please write to me at my email, since probably no one but ourselves is interested!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 29, 2007 9:43:13 PM
Carlos, why does it matter how cherished someone's beliefs are?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 30, 2007 3:06:05 AM
Because this thread is about "hate speech," and we are discussing how we might cause offense, or react to offense caused by others.
I don't mean to suggest you shouldn't discuss them, and if that's your level, you can even demean them and proclaim them to be inferior to your own presumably more intelligent, and demonstrably far whiter beliefs. That's completely fine with me (like I said, I enjoy Dennett & Dawkins). But then you need to give Watson a pass, or even defend him, and I am surprised D & D haven't weighed in on the issue, one way or the other. Selfish genes, perhaps.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 6:32:20 AM
What's wrong with proclaiming one belief inferior to another?
If I understand your position, you are saying that you are not bothered by criticism of your provenance, since your not responsible for your provenance and therefore that's not really a criticism of you. But you are bothered by criticism of your opinions, because you are responsible for your opinions and therefore that is a criticism of you.
Is that correct?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 30, 2007 1:00:45 PM
No Sagredo!
I have been very clear.
I don't mind at all what you have to say about me, my mom, or my God.
My God is not an opinion. Why should I care if you choose to rail against him?
What I do see though, is that other people get very tense and nervous when others...let's call them self styled elites...start claiming that those who are not like them for any reason: genetic or epistomological, are inferior, or that their kind should be eliminated. That is not what Watkins wishes for those he looks down on, but it is surely what D&D desire for the objects of their distain. They want Religious people to be erased off the surface of the earth.
All I am maintaining is that, if anything, D&D are far more guilty than old Watkins of any ill-will, and should be treated no less harshly by a fair-minded community of peers or the media.
But this has not happened. Nor, I suspect, will it.
It's good to be elite.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 2:01:27 PM
Do D&D want religious people erased off the surface of the earth, or do they merely want them to lose their silly (in their view) religious beliefs?
Aren't those who don't believe something unjustifiable superior in at least some small way to those who do?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 30, 2007 3:46:16 PM
Per part one: History tells a sad tale about such apparent dichotomies. "We won't need the labor camps, because the re-education will go just fine"
Fool me once...
Per part two: I don't see why, unless you are trying to justify the 20th century experiments with nationalized atheism. If so, have at it(?)
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 8:19:05 PM
I'd like to see some recognition of the relationship between power and hate speech, preferably without the meaningless term "elite." Doing so might mitigate the false equivalencies being bandied about here. It seems like that's the direction Elatia Harris was going with her discussion of class, and the difference between hate speech and a put-down.
Carlos, your point re: Dennett's writing is unilluminating. I could propose swapping the word "babies" for "broccoli" in a vegetarian cookbook; doing so would hardly make its author a cannibal.
Posted by: David Drake | Oct 30, 2007 8:57:47 PM
Hey! Who turned out the lights?
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 9:36:30 PM
Nice use of the Double D though.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 9:38:26 PM
Fine. It seems I will take your comment seriously, after all.
Let's examine the relative power of the following:
1. An old decrepit who the media couldn't wait (apparently) to pile on; destroyed in a heartbeat.
2. A pair of hate-speechifiers who, no matter what they say; how identical in content to the bigotry of Watkins, will never be called to task by their academic sycophants and an adoring media.
"elite" remains. Sorry. Elatia's incite-full leveraging of class into the discussion does you no good.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 30, 2007 9:54:36 PM
Per part 1, Are D&D recommending re-education camps? Or are they merely trying to change people's beliefs through argument and polemic, like everyone else?
Per part 2, is one not improved as a person if one ceases to believe something ridiculous?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 31, 2007 12:27:29 AM
Are you two talking about me? OK. But what I mean is, Dawkins & Co, though they are exhorting people only to be rational by ceasing to believe in a God whom they (Dawkins & Co) are satisfied does not exist, making no noise at all about other aspects of the lives of believers that demographers have cited, are in fact firing their directions at people with a huge statistical chance of being less learned, worse compensated, less traveled, worse fed, and more pigmented than they, as highly placed white men who are the products of elite educational systems, have ever dreamt of being.
This is the classism that inheres in their message, making it so particularly condescending to my ear. They can say that's silly and that they mean no such thing, that they are flogging atheism for all people regardless of their (fill in the blank), but I believe they are highly sensitive to the elitism in their appeal: it wasn't me who started calling young recruits "the brights" -- was it? Or who coined "religiot." If they took a look -- photos and/or statistics -- at the standard of living of many people they call religiots, they might feel they'd have to confront head-on the class implications of what they say, and in so doing could change their rhetoric to be less /really nasty./
Classism isn't hate speech, especially when it's encrypted, but it does have the power to win you the wrong kinds of friends. However we feel about Watson crashing and burning -- and I feel badly about it too, for he is a great scientist brought low -- we might have tolerated his remarks a little better if he had unfaired against "black upper management" and not "black employees." The parallel here is that Dawkins & Co are not deriding the beliefs of people who have power over them -- well, I guess the Archbishop of Canterbury can be displeased but he can't fire them -- only the beliefs of people around the world who have less of everything than they do, often much, much less.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 31, 2007 12:45:49 AM
Oh wow. Elatia, can you really be suggesting it be declasse for anyone to attack any belief likely to be held by someone with a "huge statistical chance of being less learned, worse compensated, less traveled, worse fed, and more pigmented" than one? Your argument would seem to suggest we simply refrain from all argumentation till such time as everyone is equally well educated, rich and well traveled. Good luck attacking female circumcision.
The very point of free speech is to let competing ideas battle it out openly in the public, without descending to actual bloodshed, to let the better idea win. Assuming only that education (for example) matters, terrible ideas will not infrequently (not exclusively, mind you) be associated with lack of education.
Posted by: D | Oct 31, 2007 6:15:35 AM
Sagredo. I think one is much more improved as a person without a bias that makes him assert that anything he cannot know is false.
The case should probably begin by focusing, first, since you would like the (obviously useless) wings to be removed from the plane, on how you are going to replace all the things Religions do, first, before concerning yourself so much with how ridiculous you think (for example) the women at the Church soup kitchen really are. Even Jimmy Carter does what he does in the Name of God, for God's children. You might say, hell, he'd do it anyway, but would he? Would people follow? Help? All you can make at this point are assumptions, your empiricism just went out the window.
People are less charitable now, as individuals, and Atheism is more prevalent. Is it logical to refuse to consider the relationship? Poor people are also more likely to be generous, as they are more likely to be religious. Is it scientific to declare their humanitarianism is due to their poverty rather than their beliefs? Or do want to go one better and assert it is due to their inferior mental capabilities?
But this thread is not about that, this thread is about the similarity in D&Ds tactics to the excoriated bigotry of a man we have now destroyed.
Tell me, do you approve of their methods because the people they insult deserve it? Or because they make you feel better about yourself?
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 31, 2007 7:00:04 AM
D, I most certainly don't suggest the argument be shut down for its implicit classism. I wrote only that those who make the argument could take it into account and change their rhetoric. The analogy you make to FGM is an excellent one, in that the people who have been the most effective in aiding its disappearance have been those who present it to women as being about their own choices, not about how Western hygiene is superior to their primitive practices.
What you say in your second point is perfectly true, as well -- free speech is better than armed conflict, and education can dispel some very bad ideas. But exhorting people not to believe in God (and the whole nine yards...) is not the same as educating them. If it were, then Paul Farmer would need a crucial bit more education so that he could become more effective. Literacy, numeracy and hygiene fit into an either/or model, but being religious doesn't quite, does it? And, if anything, don't people tend to see religion as less important the more education they acquire rather than acquire education only after they have cast religion aside? These are things for Dawkins & Co to think over, if the New Atheism is not about the self-preening of the "super-brights" rather than the education of the unenlightened. If on the other hand the New Atheism is a creed in deep but imperfect disguise, then Dawkins & Co are entirely free to proselytize letting the chips fall where they may.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 31, 2007 9:41:27 AM
Carlos, in answer to your question, I don't particularly disapprove of people claiming to be superior for not believing something they think is ridiculous.
Should we believe something simply because those who believe it are more likely to be charitable?
Is one not improved as a person if one asserts that there's no reason to believe something one cannot know? D&D's argument for atheism is "why believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or God either)?" rather than proof that the FSM cannot exist.
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 31, 2007 1:46:25 PM
Elatia, I was only criticising the idea that we should look down upon anyone who challenges ideas held by the less educated / the poorly traveled / the unsophisticates. That rule of thumb would, I think, be a quite intolerable imposition upon the public discourse
I wasn't claiming that making people irreligious is analogous to educating them - that's a bit too Dawkinsian for me. In any case, the question of whether he is effective as an advocate is a separate one from whether speech like his should be stigmatized / shunned as hate speech.
Posted by: D | Oct 31, 2007 4:03:52 PM
D, I didn't think we were assessing Dawkins as a producer of hate speech -- of course he isn't any such thing. He's an academic superstar with a point of view he has a perfect right to use his prominence to put over. My criticisms of him are all to do with tone and approach. I should re-read everything and see if I can find where we made a detour, but I have offline demands that are clamorous. I DO think he is trying to educate people, however, and, for all I can remember, no one until just now has introduced the idea of his speech needing to be stigmatized as hate speech. Oh, please!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 31, 2007 4:20:26 PM
"Oh, please!"
Well that might be me. The definition of Watkins comments as hate speech presupposes that any academic who identifies any other group as less intelligent than his would be in the same boat.
Please tell me how I am wrong.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 31, 2007 4:38:56 PM
Watkins was citing research, was he not?
Here is some research:
Is that "Hate Speech?"
You can re-read it without the word substitution, here:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/
Please do note that this very topic seems to be an active area of research with them. 43 studies!
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 31, 2007 4:51:17 PM
And finally--one can only hope--it is clear from this that Dawkins does not reject IQ as a measure of intelligence, isn't it? What nailed Watkins was his use of disapproved (racist) criteria. Dawkins, embracing the very same criteria, must surely side with old Watkins on the other applications of the IQ test as well.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Again, shall I fetch the torches? I didn't get a response last time.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 31, 2007 5:03:56 PM
Intelligence is not used to make race, which we're born with. Intelligence is used to make belief. So why should not belief be evidence of intelligence?
Is this also a call for the torches?
Posted by: Sagredo | Oct 31, 2007 9:39:25 PM
"Is this also a call for the torches?"
Your call, if you can find someone who actually said that.
My example has the advantage of being an actual quote of a real hero of yours, but like I said, all I'm after is consistency.
If you are OK with your views being represented by one of Watson's soulmates, so am I.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 31, 2007 9:48:38 PM
Carlos, are you conflating Watson and Dawkins into your "Watkins" intentionally, or is that a slip of the cyber tongue?
I think the social capital currently enjoyed by the religious in our culture dilutes the analogy to more "traditional" subjects of hate speech such as women, people of color, or LGBT.
But the Brights are clearly intolerant of worldviews diverging from their own, which is why they must ridicule them (and pretend that they pose an actual existential threat to us all, when in fact they threaten only those who consider the scientific worldview as mutually exclusive with all others). This intolerance extends even to fields of academic study, as in E.O. Wilson's "consilience," which is nice word for academic imperialism. In this scheme, it is not just theology and cosmology that are slated for subsumption into the hard sciences but also psychology, history, and even literary theory.
In the Salon article Carlos links to, Dawkins reveals pretty plainly just how dim a "bright" can be. He does this is just about every interview he gives, letting his zeal for science overcome his better judgement, as when he came out in favor of criminalizing the transmission of religion to children last year, or more recently implied that there was a disproportionately potent "Jewish lobby" which could serve as a template for atheist activism. Or when he repeatedly accused Mary Midgley of not having read The Selfish Gene before reviewing it, long after his supposed source for this fact (the writer Ullica Segerstrale) denied there was any truth to it. (As any fool who reads Midgley's piece can see.) Maybe he thought no one would notice.
In the Salon piece, Dawkins belittles the "big" questions of life, e.g., Why are we here, What is the purpose to our life, replying that these questions "don't deserve an answer." It's a remarkable statement that even Dawkins' fiercest critics seem not to have seized on (I mean his more legitimate academic critics, rather than clerical demagogues). It's absolutely fantastic for Dawkins that he is untroubled by the question of life's meaning, but there are surely many who wish he would share his secret. Characterizing the greatest dilemma that faces each of us--how to spend our short, fragile, insignificant lives--as a question "not proper to be put," indicates an astonishing deafness to the human condition and to the sources of most human suffering.
Pressed by the interviewer on this matter, Dawkins counter-offers these questions as actually "legitimate:"
Look at the corner we are painted into when we decide that the only questions we can answer are those about objectively observable quantifiable phenomena. Dawkins writes as though there are no humans in the universe at all, only diverse molecules interacting in accordance with physical laws. In the Selfish Gene he attempts to rewrite history so that the real protagonists are nucleotide fragments. Humans, like all organisms, are illusory, existing only as temporary constellations of organic material furthering the goals of their masters, the "replicators." Forget for the moment the question of whether or not this is good science. As cultural myth, it discourages us from considering our own needs, our own perspective, our own interests, and how these intersect with the world around us. It calls those questions, in fact, "remarkably stupid."
All of which is a longwinded way of asking, what's so damn bright about humans saying that humans don't matter?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Nov 1, 2007 12:26:47 PM
Funny. No, slip of the tongue. But I may stick with it.
Posted by: Carlos | Nov 1, 2007 12:37:31 PM
But if I understand your second sentence correctly, I can't agree.
Certain claims were made, years ago, that it was impossible for a Black man who hated White people to be considered racist. I say that is obviously wrong. Not because of its power to hurt a vulnerable minority but because of its power to instill hatred in that minority.
But more, I don't think the claim that Watson actually "hates" peoples Blackness is anywhere near as supportable as the claim that Dawson (compensating) hates peoples Religiosity.
Posted by: Carlos | Nov 1, 2007 1:13:27 PM
Still waiting on a serious answer to my serious question.
If Watson's belief that IQ tests reveal that those he looks down upon are inferior in intelligence to the rest of the world results in his being accused of Hate Speech and driven from the stage...
then why is not the same standard applied to Dawkins, if not in the mindless media, at least here among thoughtful people?
The danger, as I see it, is that it really is the precise same argument. Elatia charitably wishes to elevate it to Classism but what does that really buy us? "Common" and "Not our sort of people," if anything, use an even sharper lens, but it is still primarily a racial one. The first article in the Economist's special report on the New Religious Wars point out, too, that Religion is a far stronger force in Nigeria than National or Tribal issues. Does anyone doubt that Watson and Dawkins see the problem through the same lens?
Posted by: Carlos | Nov 3, 2007 10:27:19 AM
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