SSA Con was MAGICAL.

So, as ever, the Secular Student Alliance Annual Conference was absolutely amazing. I spent the entire thing with amazing people, one of whom in particular made it incredibly special, and the talks were, for the most part, amazing. SB Morgaine in particular gave an a-fucking-mazing talk on ableism and making groups accessible for differently abled people. Greta and Hemant were amazing as well, as was Brendan Murphy, a good friend of mine who talked about mental illness. There was also some tall New Yorker schmuck who talked about social justice.

Speaking of which, I got called a fascist for the first time ever! According to a comment on my post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I'm just like Mussolini, Hitler, the Communists, and the KKK because I think social justice matters. Just throwing that out there in case the lot of you didn't know. Rawr.

Anyways, I probably won't do a full recap of the conference because my brain is fried and I need vacation time, but more regular blogging service shall resume shortly.

Until then, DANCE.

Privilege for Atheists: An Introductory Guide

The following is a post based upon the talk that I gave recently at the Center For Inquiry's Leadership Conference; video/audio is not up yet, but I will be giving another talk with most of this one's content at the Secular Student Alliance's annual conference in just under two weeks' time. In it, I draw upon many sources, notably the work of Lorraine Code, to make a case for greater secular work for social justice.

TRIGGER WARNING: descriptions of violence

I'm writing about this today because I think the atheist/skeptic/humanist/insert chosen descriptor here movement is way, way out of touch with the world.

This concept shouldn't be too unfamiliar with any of you who read Ed's blog, or many of the other great voices on FTB; this network has become the awesome place that it is because it is so incredibly diverse, that rather than the echo chamber (or, as Jamie Kilstein put it at the conference, third level of hell) that the Pharyngula comments have become, FTB bloggers may agree on certain issues a lot, but the perspectives are incredibly diverse. It's not just scientists, but it's anti-racist experts like Crommunist, trans* activists like Natalie Reed, sex-positive writers like Greta, and utter badasses like Sikivu Hutchinson who are creating the discourse.

This is not to suggest that science, separation of church and state, or other issues that have traditionally been what the movement has focused on are unimportant. However, in the following post, I want to posit that, ultimately, their privileged status needs to be seriously reexamined in the face of what is actually happening in the real world outside of the communities who care about science over everything else.

Now, it is impossible for me in the space of a 20 minute presentation or a blog post to present the entirety of institutionalized oppression and violence in any way that would properly describe it. So, I'm going to focus on two issues that I think are most prescient to the discussion relating to atheism: reductionism and privilege.

The first I originally did not intend on including in the presentation, at least not under that guise. However, after Dan Fincke outlined it during his Blogathon for SSA Week, I realized that it fit quite well into my framework. He said:

Atheists sometimes have an annoying tendency in my experience to be reductionists, especially about matters that are part of the social or moral or psychological world. They often want to say things like we’re all really just a bunch of atoms. There is a tendency to talk like the only level of explanation that is at all meaningful is on the physics level. Now, of course everything in our experience is ultimately physical and made up of atoms, which are further composed of subatomic particles. But that does not mean that atoms are the only level on whichtrue things can be said. Those atoms combine in remarkably complex patterns that give rise to the objects of study in chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. Those emergent patterns are real. It’s not like in biology we say, “There’s no such thing as evolution because this organism and its descendants are really still just patterns of atoms”. The differences in the patterns of atoms that make up one organism and its offspring are significant. They are worth saying there is something new evolved in nature when an organism is distinct enough in the patterns of its properties from its ancestors. These are real subjects of study. Real differentiations in nature. It would be stupidity to judge those patterns as somehow artificial simply because there is a way to conceptualize the organisms in purely atomic terms that pay no attention to the features that are interesting on the biological level.

In my thinking, this sort of reductionism is the kind of belief that leads directly to erasure and marginalization, as Dan briefly mentioned. The reductionist mindset allows one to remove the personal from life; when there are only atoms, why should we worry about anything that make them up? Whether or not this attitude is consciously constructed or not, it is the one that prevails currently in many atheistic circles, and what it has resulted in is yet another reinforcement of the old white male-driven hierarchies.

We haven't been looking to break down the old ways of knowing; instead, we have coopted them and slapped a secular label on them. We have been trying to create a permanent, ahistorical, neutral set of standards by which all knowledge and worth is to be judged; that of science, atomism, whatever we choose to call it. It's the same type of framework that has been used by popes, priests, and dictators for centuries; the enemies of freethought, of rationality, the things we have been supposedly fighting for. By inhabiting this reductionist philosophy, we have never looked outside the box; the framework does not allow, epistemologically, for questions of identity to enter our conception as being a worthy aspect of investigation, for it is such a subjective thing; our conceptions of our and others' being is always in flux, always depending on sense data gained from experience. It resists quantification.

The result of this rejection of identity has been ignorance of the concerns and circumstances of those who do not fit the norm set out by the knowledgeable class who propagate the ways of knowing I have briefly set out; the Dawkinses, Harrises, Krausses, etc., have never to my knowledge ever stopped for a moment to consider the issues and oppressions that their objective mindset, in a way, helps to reinforce; in the former's case, when he did, he ended up only revealing his ignorance on such matters.

Frankly, they have no compelling reason to do so. As I will come to below, issues outside of the malestream (to borrow from Lorraine Code) are frightening to those of us within our safe environs. We get worried over whether or not evolution is being taught properly in school; a trans* woman of color has to worry about being killed for being who she is every single day of her life. The majority of you reading this are, I am willing to bet based upon statistics on atheist demographics, like me in appearance; white, male, reasonably well off, probably college educated, have a dependable safe place to live, etc. You do not have to rationally worry about being shot at, or killed, or robbed, or suffer any other such form of violence. This is called privilege.

Allow me a moment to emphasize: privilege is not a dirty word. It has often been treated as such by deniers in our movement, but, simply, privilege refers to all of the unearned advantages that a dominant group holds over others. To borrow Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's concept of kyriarchy, we hold many different forms of privilege at the same time, all of which intersect with and reinforce each other; for instance, we certainly live in a patriarchal culture, where the male gender is held in greater esteem above all other gender identities and thus holds greater power because of it. Rather than go into all of the technical aspects of intersectionality and make a long post even longer, I'll point you to Jason Thibeault's excellent post on the subject, as well as one of the classic works on privilege by Peggy McIntosh.

Ultimately, what these privileges do, by giving us power in society, is allow us to live free of oppression and violence. As a white male, I will not be viewed as suspicious by law enforcement; while living in one of the most segregated cities in America, I can choose to live in a neighborhood where violence does not happen at a higher rate than it does in Afghanistan. I don't have to worry about being catcalled or harrassed as I simply walk down the street, something that happens to my female-identified friends every single week.  I do not have to worry about such activities leading to being sexually assaulted, as one in four women report happening to them; since that number only includes official reports, the number is most likely far higher. As a cisgendered male, I do not have to worry about being murdered simply for expressing my identity as such, unlike Paige Clay, a trans* woman of color, who was shot in the head in Chicago on April 16th, or Brandy Martell, who was murdered in Oakland on April 29th. Agnes Torres Sulca was tortured and killed March 12, 2012. Deoni Jones was stabbed to death February 4th in DC. Lashai McLean was killed in DC on June 21, 2011. Cece McDonald has been sentenced to prison for defending herself against a group of transphobic attackers, during which she killed one of them, and will most likely be placed in the male section of the prison where she will serve time, and most likely not receive proper medical care during that time.

Those half dozen instances are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the avalanche of attacks on trans* people throughout the world, particularly against transwomen of color. A nationwide survey of bias-motivated violence against LGBT people from 1985 to 1998 by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that incidents targeting transgender people accounted for 20% of all murders and about 40% of all police-initiated violence. According to the same project, in 2010 

44 percent of LGBTQH (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and HIV-affected) murder victims were trans women, and in 2009 trans women were 50 percent of murder victims. Yet trans people as a whole are only about 1 percent of the LGBTQH population. Trans women also more often experienced multiple forms of violence and more severe violence, as well as more police bias and violence.

Against all of these happenings, I really cannot get pissed off or self righteous about whether or not it says God on my money or not. When people are being murdered in America at higher rates than those in decades-long war zones, I have a lot of trouble caring about whether we have free will or if it's all determined. 

However, going back to what was said above about intersectionality, that does not mean that I am saying that those issues do not matter. I would rightly be ridiculed if I were to say that proper, rational education of our children did not matter, or that I did not think that our nation should be a secular one, free of the influence of regressive religious institutions. What I am saying here is that if we want to be a movement that is relevant, that is interested in making our country and world more rational, more reasonable, a place where all are equal, then we cannot say things like "atheism isn't involved in social justice" or "our movement is only concerned with THESE issues; we should leave the others to the feminists/queers/socialists." In order to solve the problems that we have traditionally been associated with, we have to tackle issues of violence against marginalized groups too. In order to be secular, we have to be anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-transphobic, anti-homophobic, anti-every single aspect of oppression that plagues our society.

Admittedly, as I said above, I have not gone into detail on every aspect of intersectional oppression. However, what I hope I have done is provide enough of an outline to open a reader's eyes a bit more. To fully explain these issues in one place is functionally impossible. Instead, please follow the links I have included, and explore more about these issues; education is power. Particularly Jason and McIntosh's pieces are very important, and read the bloggers I listed as well. The Incite! Women of Color Against Violence collective has many excellent books out on these subjects, and I would highly recommend you support them. Resources are everywhere; as good skeptics, I think we can all find them and investigate them.

Right now, this movement at large does not include everyone. It does not give everyone equal time. Instead, it lionizes the classic fount of knowledge; the white, male academics. We must include everyone in our struggle, or be swept aside into irrelevance.

All's Aflutter

Hi all,

So, my promise to blog more after Blogathon hasn't really come to fruition, mostly because I've been spending my time since then frantically preparing for the Center for Inquiry conference at which I spoke, paneled, rabble-roused, and have finally just returned from and slept off. The audio/video from my talk will hopefully surface soon, in which you'll get to see just what it looks like to be ridiculously nervous, somewhat unprepared, sleep deprived, and angry on stage.

In the meantime, I'm working on turning that talk into a blog post, and reworking it a bit for the Secular Student Alliance conference in 10 (!!!!!!) days. Before then, and before I jet off to Connecticut for three weeks of desperately needed relaxation, I hope to complete another post stemming from my discussion of Habermas and Taylor, and advance my philosophical project a bit.

Before I go, a huge, huge thank you to Debbie Goddard for bringing me out to Amherst for the conference. Despite being extremely tired, I had a great time. I met so many incredibly awesome people, including Rebecca Watson, and hung out with lots more who I knew, some well and some not so much, from previous conferences. James Croft and I even avoided challenging one another to a duel! 


All in all, it was a blast, especially hanging out in the green room with Amanda Knief and Ed Brayton, who I give full credit (along with Sarah and Ben) to keeping me sane through my darkest moments. 

Til later.

My Kingdom for a Decent Mayor

What is it about American cities having evil mayors? It seems like it has been a theme throughout our history, from Mayor Ogden building Chicago on the back of speculation capital to line his own pockets, and continuing ever onwards; even in films, it seems like it's always the mayor who's the scheming mastermind (Bullitt comes immediately to mind for my fellow McQueen fans), to the contemporary example of Boris Johnson in London, who until recently I did believe was actually a character on a BBC show and not actually their mayor. He is that much of a comedy villain.

So, for the past couple of years, there has been some solace in my heart knowing that, after years of the likes of Giuliani and Jerry Springer (yes, he was really the mayor of Cincinnati. For real), that All American Hero Cory Booker was holding down the fort in Newark, New Jersey. This dude seemed like the real deal: a Rhodes Scholar, who while at Yale Law School ran free clinics for low-income people in New Haven, during his tenure he has vastly reduced Newark's sky high violence rate, spent hours of his own time patrolling the streets where police presence has been low, and just recently, sent the nation a-swooning when he first shoveled an old man's driveway after his daughter asked him on Twitter to help because she feared her father could not do it, and then topped that by running into a fucking burning building, unable to be restrained by his police escort, and carried a woman to safety from it.

Is your chest swelling? Did you sit up a bit straighter? Let a bit of light in, hum something patriotic, think, just for a moment, that everything's gonna be okay, because Cory's out there somewhere, being a badass on the mean streets of Newark?

Yeah, mine did too there for a while. Then this happened:

Cory Booker, the popular and progressive mayor of Newark, New Jersey, attacked the Obama campaign for making an issue of Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital during an appearance today on Meet the Press. 

Romney has placed his career at Bain the center of his campaign. On several occassions Romney has asserted that, while at Bain, he was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs. Multiple independent fact checkers have concluded that Romney’s claims on jobs is simply false. 

The Obama campaign has responded by highlighting instances where Romney’s actions at Bain Capital resulted in substantial job loses. On Meet the Press, Booker called criticizing Romney’s time at Bain “ridiculous” and “nauseating.” He also equated criticisms of Romney’s buisness record with racially charged attacks against Obama centered around Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Yeah, you read that right. Our hero, like so many others, has fallen to corporate cash and influence. Turns out he's got massive ties to Wall Street, and is looking to preserve those for future campaigns.

I mean, come on. This is just madness, now. I still like Cory Booker as a person; the amount of effort he puts into his city are unparalleled, and he's done a lot of good things. Fact of the matter is, the realist/pessimist/miserabilist (delete as accurate) in me has to admit that you only get elected in this country these days with massive amounts of money; just look at the recall in Wisconsin. He's clearly making a pragmatic move, hopefully to continue doing good deeds.

But fuck it, Mr. Mayor. I can't help but be depressed. This might just be the last straw, man. While it's never been strong, I've always had a tiny flickering light of optimism in me in regards to politics. There have been just enough decent people, like Bernie Sanders, Jan Schakowsky (minus the Zionism), Sherrod Brown (ditto), Pete Stark, and Elizabeth Warren, who have kept that lick of flame alive. Five people out of 535 Congresspeople, governors, mayors, and president ain't a whole lot, but in sad times, it was enough. Shit, those hundreds of people I mentioned above are mostly fighting to end women's rights, destroy education, and make everything privatized while bombing as many brown people as possible. But when Bernie Sanders gets on the floor and rails against corporate greed, I get a little bit of optimism back.

You, Mayor Booker, were one of them. You were the shining light amongst the mayors, against free-speech hating Rahm Emanuel and Thomas Menino, against megalomaniac supervillain Michael Bloomberg. Now, you're not crushing your own constituents, but the superhero guise is gone.

You're just Clark Kent now, Mayor Booker.

And in the end...

Well, today has been something quite amazing. This blog has gotten fully four times the number of pageviews it had in total before today, and I have written on everything from high school to Husserl to The Who. I really enjoyed the experience, and hanging with Chana, and getting suggestions and feedback from all y'all.

I hope you'll stick around and listen to me rant some more in the future. I also regularly write over at In Our Words, I'm on Twitter, and this summer I'm very happy to announce that I will be speaking at the Center For Inquiry Student Leadership Conference in Buffalo, NY as well as appearing at the Secular Student Alliance Annual Conference in Columbus, OH. I hope to talk to/meet some of you soon!

Why I Think That Art, and Art History, Are Important

For my final full post today, I want to write about why I study art history and why I engage in the art world.

I probably get more shit for my art history major than my philosophy major; there's either a snort, a roll of the eyes, or at best, a "do you want to teach?" type of question. It's a discipline that's seen as old fashioned, from that Walter Pater era of lace cuffs and learned white dudes with whigs who hung out in salones. And, to a degree, that's fairly accurate even now; the history of art, like its practitioners, has been made out in a canonical sense, so that the artists that are well known and celebrated are the reflections of those who write art history: white, male, conservative. Think: who do you think when you think art? You think Leonardo, Michelangelo, Monet, van Gogh, Pollock. White dudes. The classic essay on this topic, by Linda Nochlin, is a great starting point to understanding why.

It makes sense, in a certain way, given that, with certain exceptions, societal constraints meant that anyone who didn't fit that description could not become artists, much less make work or be noticed by patrons. Similarly, those in power were white and male; why do I point all this out? Because of my belief that art matters because it reflects the political circumstances of when it was made. Art was used to back up the regimes of kings, to subvert the power of others, to give voice to marginalized groups. Visual culture, meaning everything from paintings to manuscripts to movies, has always been primary in society, for good and for ill. The history of art is the history of human civilization.

And, if history is doomed to repeat itself, I want to know what's coming. Because, if art history has taught me one thing, it's that human's tastes for the gaudy and shameless never really change.

Phenomenology, Part 2

Last post, I very briefly introduced you to the thought of Edmund Husserl, specifically relating to his philosophy concerning the natural sciences in order to illustrate to you the kind of reason why many "rationalists," particularly atheists, scorn not just continental philosophy but the discipline as a whole. I will now follow the same formula for Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, but hopefully, will leave you with a very different conclusion.

The first point to make about Merleau-Ponty, and in fact for his relevance to us, is that his philosophy in Phenomenology of Perception in particular is based in a basic refutation of Descartes' dualism. In the latter's famous claim of “I think, I am,” from the Meditations, the subject's knowledge of itself is its basis for understanding all of the other things around it, as based upon the sense. It is an essentially egotistical view, as everything comes through our biased lens and thus gives us a sense of power over the things around us. Merleau-Ponty takes the opposing view to this, arguing that in fact we cannot have any true understanding of those things that are not us, for they are “transcendent... I do not possess them... they are transcendent to the extent that I am ignorant of what they are, and blindly assert their bare existence” (Phenomenology of Perception, 168). We can certainly see that there are things in the world around us, living and otherwise, but we can never truly know anything of their “factual existence.” It is precisely because we perceive the world around us in this manner that we cannot understand that which is not us, because then it is us who ascribes meaning and information to the world. No human being has or will ever be able to fully comprehend the ashtray that Merleau-Ponty speaks of, because it is viewable from a myriad of angles; never in one of those do we see all of its sides, or every burned-in mark from discarded cigarettes.

This line of reasoning follows to matters relating to ourselves as well. In discussing those strongest of feelings, love and will, which always seem the most true and authentic to us, Merleau-Ponty complicates the matter by investigating feelings that are found to be illusory. If these feelings are genuine, then how are we to explain that I lost the romantic intentions I had towards the beautiful woman I met at the bar after a few months of dating, for no discernible reason? It is, the philosopher says, because when I seemed to fall in love with her, I was not, nor am I at any time, fully in possession of an understanding of myself. In falling for the woman, I left my true self behind, and became enraptured by some aspects of her; her smile, her hair, her quick wit, but only aspects nonetheless; it was not true love because I did not love her entire being, and was only able to realize my misstep when I returned to my true self and was able to cast an eye back over my conduct; only in this way can we know ourselves.

This is not, however, to be an argument for doubt, for an existence so steeped in a need for authenticity that it keeps us from going into the world and experiencing life; instead, Merleau-Ponty states that “My love, hated, and will are not certain as mere thoughts about loving, hating and willing; on the contrary the whole certainty is owed to that of the acts of love, hatred or will of which I am quite sure because I perform them” (181). Our inner thoughts about the world around us cannot serve fully as rationales for living because we cannot be perceived by ourselves; we make our own realities, and only through doing can we find ourselves. By doing, we are able to relate ourselves to the world, and here is where understanding, and Merleau-Ponty's argument comes to its conclusion: instead of Descartes “I think, I am,” we should instead say “I am, I think,” for perception can only exist if we are beings in our worlds.

This is a MASSIVE conclusion, one that goes against centuries of philosophical background that essentially took the cogito to be gospel. Why is it important? Because in the years since, science has proven Merleau-Ponty's assertion; neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes' Error (which should be, I think, required reading for EVERYONE), presents evidence for the refutation of the cogito based upon empirical studies of human behavior. His studies of emotion have been accepted and are now taught, and his book is considered a classic 50 years after Merleau-Ponty published his argument. Even though the latter was certainly hostile to the scientific establishment (thought not necessarily the practice of science itself), he was way ahead of the labs in this arena.

My point is, please do not give in to the hubbub and lazy talk of philosophy being for dreamers and impractical types. Yes, some philosophers are scary in that they speak foreign languages and get mistranslated, but that's not a reason to write them off, as I think I have demonstrated here.