Cracking the code

I screwed up. A couple of weeks ago I introduced a new term into the discussion – “coded racism” – without doing my usual thought-piece beforehand:

To the list of code words that don’t sound racist but are, I would add ‘personal responsibility’. While personal responsibility is a good thing, its usage in discussions of race inevitably cast black and brown people as being personally irresponsible, as though some genetic flaw makes us incapable of achievement (which, in turn, explains why we deserve to be poor and why any attempt to balance the scales is ‘reverse racism’).

I have danced around the idea, and I have made occasional reference to the concept behind it, but I haven’t really explained what coded racism is. I will have to do that in next Monday’s post, so stay tuned for that. As a teaser explanation, I will simply point out that oftentimes phrases are used to identify groups in a sort of wink/nudge way, where everyone listening knows who the speaker is really talking about. It’s phrases like “Welfare queen” and “illegal immigrant” that do not explicitly name the group being criticized, but still carry with them the image of a particular race. It is not, as is the common objection, simply a phrase describing any criticism of racial minority groups.

Before we can really delve too deeply into coded racism, there is a truth that we must acknowledge and grok – that racism (like all cognitive biases) can happen at levels not available to our conscious mind. The second part of the grokking is that even though we are not aware of it, racism can influence the decisions we make. As much as we like to believe that we are free-willed agents of our own decision-making, closer to the truth is that a wide variety of things operate in our subconscious before we are even aware that a decision is being made. This is why an artist, an engineer and a physicist could all look at the same blank piece of canvas and see completely different things (a surface upon which to draw, a flat planar surface with coefficient of friction µ, a collection of molecules). We then build conscious thoughts on top of the framework of our subconscious impressions and arrive at a decision.

So when we tell ourselves “I don’t have a racist bone in my body“, what we are really referring to are those conscious thoughts. Most people refuse to entertain overtly racist attitudes, because those attitudes have become wildly unpopular and people recognize that racism is destructive. However, our decisions are only partially decided by our overt ideas, and we can end up engaging in patterns of behaviour that may surprise even us:

You are more likely to land a job interview if your name is John Martin or Emily Brown rather than Lei Li or Tara Singh – even if you have the same Canadian education and work experience. These are the findings of a new study analyzing how employers in the Greater Toronto Area responded to 6,000 mock résumés for jobs ranging from administrative assistant to accountant.

Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson and Michael Smith were 40 per cent more likely to receive callbacks than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Chinese or Pakistani names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh. The findings not only challenge Canada’s reputation as a country that celebrates diversity, but also underscore the difficulties that even highly skilled immigrants have in the labour market.

This phenomenon is well-known to people who study race disparity, but it is rare to see it make the pages of a paper like The Globe and Mail – hardly a leftist rag. People of colour (PoCs), or in this case people who seem non-Anglo, are at a disadvantage not because of how they look, or how they act, but simply because they have funny-sounding names. Now one would have to be particularly cynical to think that a human resources professional is sitting there saying “Fatima Sheikh? I don’t want no towel-head working for ME!” and throwing résumés in the trash. As I said, that kind of overt racism is rare, even in the privacy of one’s own head. What is far more likely is that, given a situation in which a choice had to be made between a number of potential candidates, the HR person made a ‘gut instinct’ decision to call back the person that they felt most comfortable with.

The problem is that when we feel different levels of comfort with people of different ethnic backgrounds, our aggregate decisions tend to benefit white people and disadvantage PoCs. This isn’t because we’re all card-carrying KKK members, but because we are products of a racist society. This kind of thinking isn’t relegated to how we hire, either:

An experiment was conducted to demonstrate the perceptual confirmation of racial stereotypes about Black and White athletes… Whereas the Black targets were rated as exhibiting significantly more athletic ability and having played a better game, White targets were rated as exhibiting significantly more basketball intelligence and hustle. The results suggest that participants relied on a stereotype of Black and White athletes to guide their evaluations of the target’s abilities and performance.

In a situation where an athlete is identified to study participants as either black or white, but performance is kept exactly the same (they listen to a radio broadcast), what is considered ‘athletic ability’ in a black player is ‘basketball intelligence’ and ‘hustle’ in a white player. The identical stimulus is perceived in different ways, based on racial ideas that are not readily available to the subjects (and, by extension, the rest of us). This finding on its own may be benign enough, but extrapolate the fact that innate ‘athletic talent’ in one race is seen as ‘intelligence and hustle’ in another – the black players are just naturally good; the white ones had to work for it. Poor white folks are ‘down on their luck’, poor black folks are ‘waiting for a handout’. Jobless white folks are ‘hit hard by the economy’; jobless brown folks are ‘lazy’.

And so, when we discuss the idea of words that are simply coded racial evaluations, we have to keep in mind that it is this subconscious type of racism that these phrases appeal to. Far from simply being a macro description of a real problem, the way they are used bypasses our conscious filters and taps right into the part of our mind we don’t know is there, and like to deny.

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Tough on crime

One does not have to plumb the depths of political rhetoric very far to expose the unbelievable hypocrisy and outright falsehood lying just beneath the varnished surface of its truisms. The right to publicly-administered health care is not slavery. Republicans are not better on the economy. The Harper Government™ is not tough on crime:

The Supreme Court of the Canada will hear arguments this week that will likely determine the future of Vancouver’s supervised injection site, known as Insite. The court will have to decide whether Insite is a health-care facility under the jurisdiction of the B.C. government, and whether closing it violates the rights of impoverished drug addicts.

Supporters, including the province, say a body of peer-reviewed studies has proven Insite prevents overdose deaths, reduces the spread of HIV and hepatitis, and curbs crime and open drug use. But the federal government rejects that evidence, arguing the facility fosters addiction and runs counter to its tough-on-crime agenda.

Those of you not familiar with Vancouver’s safe injection site should read Ethan Clow’s excellent analysis of the issue. I will do my best to summarize. As we learned from the United States in the 1920s (and from our own failed national experiment), prohibition is a really stupid way of trying to stop people from doing something. There are generally two ways of preventing an unwanted behaviour – enforcement and outreach. Prohibition puts the emphasis firmly into the first camp by creating stiff penalties for engaging in the unwanted behaviour. With respect to drugs, this means punishing those that use and sell drugs.

One of the biggest looming issues facing Canadians with the Republican North majority is the introduction of the omnibus crime bill. Basically, this bill calls for money to be funneled into the prison system, including the construction of new incarceration facilities. Of course, this comes at a time when crime rates are in fact dropping, but the RNP has a solution for that too – make more things crimes! Mandatory minimum sentencing is one tool in the arsenal of a prohibitive government – take legal leeway out of the hands of judges and force standard jail terms regardless of the severity of the crime.

The problem, as anyone with even the slightest insight into human behaviour and psychology will be able to tell you, is that people are generally going to do whatever they want if they don’t think they’ll get caught. When it comes to drugs (especially drugs like marijuana with negligible personal risk due to use), people will always want to get high, and unless you have cops on every street corner and outside every window, people will find a way to do just that. While drug use may be a bad thing (I think the issue is more nuanced than that, but let’s just grant the assertion for a moment), if your goal is to reduce drug use, your policies should be targeted at doing just that.

If you don’t think that drug use per se is bad, but rather the consequences of drug use (addiction, self-harm, overdose, loss of control) are bad, then you would likely favour an approach known as “harm reduction”. Basically, the idea is to find a way to allow people to do what they want but to minimize the negative repercussions. For example, alcohol is regulated in such a way as to minimize the damage – only licensed facilities may dispense it and staff must be trained to recognize intoxication; only people of a certain age may purchase it; purity of ingredients is inspected by the government – people still drink, but in a way that is much safer than it used to be before those regulations were in place.

In the case of Insite, the negative health consequences of intravenous drug use are mitigated by providing clean needles (that are not infected with HIV) and a safe place to get high. Needles are disposed of safely (rather than in the streets, where any number of things can and do happen to them), and overdoses are managed by professionals. It is certainly not ideal – ideal would be to have zero drug users – but it does save lives, reduce infection rates, and actually saves the city a lot of money. It is the kind of local control for a local problem that small-government conservatives and libertarians should applaud.

Not so the Republicans though. They claim to be “tough on crime”, but what they actually are is litigious on crime. They endorse laws that expand the role of the federal government to interfere in municipal matters and take discretion out of the hands of judges and place it in the (completely incapable) hands of elected officials. This is the kind of behaviour, of course, that Conservatives (note the capitalization) constantly accuse Liberals of; however, it’s only wrong when it’s something Conservatives don’t like. When it’s for their own cause, there is always some bullshit rationalization.

I have a friend who is a prison guard (actually I have a few, but I am talking about this one in particular) who was overjoyed over the RPN majority election. His rationale was that there would finally be attention paid to the state of the prison system, and no more coddling of criminals. Far be it from me to question his expertise in terms of what the inside of a prison looks like – he’s in one every day and I haven’t even visited. However, I think his assessment is short-sighted. The omnibus crime bill creates more criminals, it does not reduce crime. If anything, it statistically increases crime (convenient, when you have all these new prisons to fill) by creating new criminals. It does not reduce the harms caused by criminal behaviour, nor does it do anything to reduce the true underlying causes of criminal behaviour (income disparity, lack of opportunity/education, living conditions).

Both the political left and right undoubtedly want to reduce the incidence of crime. It is in nobody’s best interest for there to be more crime. However, one side of the political debate has chosen a method that is proven not to work, and does so in the name of being “tough on crime”. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we are all about to learn this first-hand.

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Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao… all irrelevant

Anyone who has ever watched a debate between a theist and an atheist has seen this familiar scene: 1) the atheist points out that religion, despite its claims to inform human morality, has been (and continues to be) responsible for many atrocities and moral outrages; 2) the theist counters that the greatest mass murderers in the history of mankind (usually some combination of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao) were atheists; 3) the theist wins the argument (note: step 3 may or may not be completely made up). Like the sun rising in the morning, the leaves changing colour in autumn, or the Rapture happening two days ago (remember how awesome that was?), this line of argument is so predictable as to be almost laughable.

There are so many flaws with this argument that it makes the head spin, so I am going to try and walk you, the reader, through them sequentially.

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were atheists

This is debatable. Leaving aside Hitler for a moment (who was baptized Catholic and used Christian religious imagery extensively as the justification for his racist political ideology), there certainly have been leaders that have killed many of their own people, many of whom were openly atheist. However, none of the people that are commonly listed (and some that are less commonly mentioned like Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, and Kim Il-Sung) left religion out of the picture. Instead of worship of a supernatural deity that speaks directly into the ear of the leader, these men simply bypassed the middle man and pronounced themselves akin to the deity.

Without exception, if you look at how these men ruled their countries, they made themselves a figurehead and object of worship. Even today, there are pictures of Castro and Guevera plastered all over Cuba. Idi Amin was Uganda and erected a quasi-religious framework around him; ditto for Stalin (but even more so). Pol Pot and Mao, arguably the closest to being truly atheistic dictators, still installed themselves as nearly-supernatural beings whose word was divine law; in the case of Kim Il-Sung this is quite literally true. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t qualify as atheism. There is a world of difference between saying “there are no gods” and “I am a god”. It exploits the seemingly-innate propensity of human beings to subjugate themselves to something – far closer to the religious position (“I speak for the gods”) than the atheist position.

But, even if that were true…

Let’s pretend for a moment that we can accurately label the above listed dictators as being atheists (in the interest, perhaps, of avoiding being inaccurately accused of using the “No True Scotsman” fallacy). The argument is still invalid because the crimes these men committed were not done in the name of atheism. Whereas theistic murderers often use religious scripture and theological ‘reasoning’ to justify why suchandsuch group of people are deserving of the end of a sword, I know of no examples where someone has said the following:

Because there are no gods, we have the right to murder/oppress this group.

Such a statement would be on par with the justifications that come from religiously-justified crimes against humanity (“God hates fags”, “Unbelievers deserve hell”, “Jews killed Jesus”). And while there have been many atrocities that have happened for non-religious reasons, it is not reasonable or consistent to classify anything that is not pro-theistic as being atheist. The statement “there are no gods” could be twisted to support the murder of people if one was particularly psychopathic, but I don’t think it ever has.

But, even if that were true…

But let’s for a moment imagine that someone unearthed such an example, where the lack of god belief was used as a justification to commit a crime against humanity. Even then, this argument would have no value, since atheism is not a morality claim. The whole purpose of raising the atrocities committed with religious justification is to poke holes in the argument that religious faith is the source of morality, or that adherence to religious codes makes humanity more moral. If this were the case, it would be a rare exception that religious fervor could be twisted to serve a genocidal purpose – people’s faith would steer them away from the clear evil of mass murder.

The fact that even ‘atheistic’ mass murderers used the trappings of religious adherence and unwavering faith to rally people to their clearly immoral cause suggests that, if anything, religion makes people less moral. At least it seems to be useful in getting people to short-circuit their critical thinking faculties and engage in behaviour that, if they were to sit and think rationally about it (or, in hindsight) they would rightly recoil from. Even so, the cup of religion overfloweth with claims of superior morality – claims not supported by the available evidence. Atheism has no such morality claims; it is simply the lack of god-belief. It is entirely incidental (or, more likely, due to a third variable like propensity for independent introspection) that atheists are less likely to murder, rape, etc.

But even if that were true…

Even if we, for the sake of argument, granted all of the above (untrue) assumptions – that atheistic dictators committed their crimes from a position of atheistic moral authority – this argument would still be completely worthless. The issue of whether or not atheism is nice has absolutely no relationship to whether or not atheism is true. Even if we were to grant that atheists are just as shitty are theists, that doesn’t say anything about which of the two positions of correct – all it says is that people suck. Making the assertions that morality comes from the divine assumes the existence of the divine. Failure to demonstrate the existence of the divine (we’re still waiting, by the way) completely invalidates the theistic moral position. Saying that theists are super-nice doesn’t mean that the gods exist any more than saying atheists are shitty people does. Both positions are entirely orthogonal to the central claim of whether or not gods are real.

In summary

I’m honestly not sure why this argument is perceived to carry any weight in a serious debate. Surely respected theists are aware of Godwin’s Law, and while I hold out no expectations for people debating issues on Reddit or on someone’s Facebook wall, I would imagine that enough people have at least thought through their position long enough to realize that such an assertion has no bearing whatsoever on their position. And yet, keep your eyes and ears open for the next big debate between an atheist and a believer – I’ll be willing to bet cookies that the rotting, shuffling corpse of this thoroughly-useless argument will rise again and attempt to devour the brains of the audience.

Remember, aim for the head.

TL/DR: People are often pointing out that some of the greatest mass murderers in history are atheist. Even if they were, they didn’t kill in the name of atheism. Even if they did, atheists don’t make claims of superior morality because of atheism (whereas religion does). Even if they did, that is irrelevant to whether or not atheism is true.

So predictable

One of the first posts I ever wrote for this blog was discussing why belief based in science is much better than belief based in religious faith. Even if we were to grant the wildly unsupported and ridiculous assertion that religious narratives and scientific observations are equally accurate methods to describe the way the world came to be, the fact remains that religious narratives are consistently inaccurate when it comes to predicting the future. For all the talk of ‘prophecy’ that is in the Bible, most of it is simply an expression of rudimentary understanding of human nature. If you couch your predictions in vague enough language, everything becomes a ‘fulfilled’ prophecy.

Of course those who do dare to tip-toe outside the safe boundaries of non-specific prognostication and actually put their reputations on the line by selecting a specific date and location for an event are always proved wrong. Predictions of this specific type would actually be useful – being able to, for example, know when a plague or a famine or a natural disaster was going to strike a certain region would be incredibly useful. Assuming for a moment that religious truth picks up where science leaves off, and science isn’t capable of predicting these events, using this other ‘way of knowing’ would be an incredible boon to mankind. We could use the Bible (or Qu’ran or Vedas or whatever you want to use) to predict when this would happen, and then use science to minimize the damage such things would cause.

However, that’s not the case. So instead we get stuff like this:

More than 22 earthquakes struck Italy by noon on Wednesday, as is normal for the quake-prone country but none was the devastating temblor purportedly predicted by a now-dead scientist to strike Rome. Despite efforts by seismologists to debunk the myth of a major Roman quake on May 11, 2011 and stress that quakes can never be predicted, some Romans left town just in case, spurred by rumour-fueled fears that ignore science.

Many storefronts were shuttered, for example, in a neighbourhood of Chinese-owned shops near Rome’s central train station. And an agriculture farm lobby group said a survey of farm-hotels outside the capital indicated some superstitious Romans had headed to the countryside for the day.

Some people I know are superstitious, or believe in horroscopes and the like. Contexually, it is a harmless enough fancy – for the most part they use logic and good sense to make their life decisions. In principle however, these kinds of beliefs can be incredibly destructive. When people begin abandoning their homes and work over a superstition that violates scientific principles it’s not simply something to laugh off. People leaving their jobs means a serious burden to the national economy; people leaving town ties up roads and puts an additional strain on emergency services; the efforts spent trying to disabuse people of a false belief could have been better spent in any number of fields. I’m not saying that people can’t take a day off, but when hundreds do so at the same time for an extremely poor reason, you kind of have to give your head a shake.

When those same people spend millions of dollars to propogate a superstitious belief, you kind of wish you could shake them instead:

Billboards are popping up around the globe, including in major Canadian cities, proclaiming May 21 as Judgment Day. “Cry mightily unto GOD for HIS mercy,” says one of the mounted signs from Family Radio, a California-based sectarian Christian group that is sending one of its four travelling caravans of believers into Vancouver and Calgary within the next 10 days. Family Radio’s website is blunt in its prediction of Judgment Day and the rolling earthquake that will mark the beginning of the end. “The Bible guarantees it!” the site proclaims, under a passage from the book of Ezekiel, which says “blow the trumpet … warn the people.”

You didn’t misread that – Family Radio (why is every fundagelical group ‘Family’ something – as though only Christians have families?) has determined through some serious Biblical research that the final judgment of all mankind is happening two days from now (or maybe less, depending on when you’re reading this). Oh, and when I say “serious Biblical research”, I mean some random shit that he’s made up:

I remember a few years ago, I was reading an article by a Rastafari preacher in a Bajan newspaper. He was telling people that you shouldn’t eat ice cream, because it sounds like “I scream”, and therefore it meant that your soul is screaming when you eat it.

Year earlier than that, a guy in one of my high school classes used the same ‘logic’ as Harold Camping to demonstrate that Barney the Dinosaur was actually the devil – apparently the letters in BIG PURPLE DINOSAUR, when converted to Roman numerals (substituting ‘V’ for ‘U’, as is the style in Latin), and removing all letters that don’t correspond to numerals, add to “666”. At least when Lee said it, he was joking. The followers of Mr. Camping are selling their homes, quitting their jobs, and basically giving themselves no Plan B. This is seriously disruptive not only to their lives, but to the lives of those that depend on them. The sad part is what will happen to all of these people when the sun rises on May 22nd and nothing’s changed.

If I am moved by a spirit of uncharacteristic generosity, I will grant that religion helps people deal with existential crises by giving them convenient and non-falsifiable answers to complicated questions (by teaching them not to deal with them at all, but whatever). However, when it comes to making claims about the material world, religion can and must be completely ignored as a source of reliable information. Faith is simply one of the remainders that falls out of the long-division of our evolution-crafted mental processes. Just like we can control our urge to defecate on the ground and have sex with teenagers (well… most of us anyway), we can control our urge to believe in ridiculous claims of superstition when it comes to answering the only questions that matter – how are we to live in the world?

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Willfully blind

There is a particularly frustrating argument out there that seems to come out of the liberal tradition, but has been readily adopted by conservatives as well. The argument is that paying attention to a thing is inherently discriminatory. For example, in discussions of race, otherwise well-intentioned people repeatedly make the claim that noticing race is the problem, and that if everyone just ignored it the problem would solve itself. This makes a sort of superficial sense, as long as you don’t think about it too much. The problem is that colour-blindness is a failed idea – failed because there are real disparities that fall along colour lines that aren’t solved by allowing the status quo to perpetuate. Simply ignoring the problem doesn’t lead to a more equal world, and helps create an environment where racism can become more deeply entrenched.

Critics of outspoken atheists often make a similar statement – why not just live and let live? It’s one thing if you don’t believe in a deity, but why do you have to go shouting your disbelief from every rooftop? Why not just let people believe whatever makes them happy? Once again, provided you don’t put any thought into the implications of the statement, then it seems to make sense. However, it neglects the fact that belief is assumed (in our culture) to be normal, and disbelief to be aberrant. It neglects that people make decisions that affect other people based on their beliefs, and those are often very negative. It neglects, most of all, that the truth is important and worth understanding as best we can. The balloon of faith needs to be punctured as many times as possible by the arrows of logic (why are we shooting arrows at a balloon?)

In the backlash of a lot of the anti-bullying campaigns that have cropped up around America and in various other places around the world, we’re hearing another version of this argument pop up as a rejoinder to focusing attention on helping ensure gay kids don’t kill themselves. “We should focus on all bullying, not just gay kids. Straight kids get bullied too – concentrating only on this one group is unfair!” As with the above two examples, this objection makes a kind of superficial sense, so long as you don’t put any thought into what you’re actually saying. First off, there are already lots of anti-bullying campaigns that don’t focus explicitly on straight kids – it’s not as though only gay kids are getting any attention. However, gay kids are far more likely to be targets of bullying and disproportionately represent a suicide risk when compared to straight kids. It’s like saying that providing cancer care is unfair because some other people have heart attacks. When we have a bigger problem, we need to pay more attention.

Beyond the simple reality that anti-gay bullying is a disproportionately larger problem than bullying in general, there are issues that are germane to gay kids that don’t make much sense except in the context of homosexuality. Imagine telling a Pakistani kid that’s catching a lot of racist shit at her school the inspiring story of how Rosa Parks stood up against slavery; the allegorical relationship to her situation is so tenuous as to be essentially useless. Any public health advocate will tell you the importance of balancing general health approaches (clean water, vaccination campaigns, ad campaigns) with targeted health promotion approaches that reach out particularly to high-risk populations. Much can be done when these two approaches are taken in concert, but recognizing a population’s specific needs is not discrimination against the majority.

If I were to speculate on the motives for people making this flawed argument, particularly in the last case, I cannot help but conclude that these people are intentionally being stupid about this issue; refusing to entertain any sort of rational thought on the subject because they’ve already reached their position and are not looking for anything other than confirmation. That is certainly the case in South Africa:

The brutal killing of a South African lesbian activist has been condemned as a hate crime by Human Rights Watch. The US-based group has urged the police to do more to find those responsible for the recent murder and rape of Noxolo Nogwaza.

South African police ministry spokesman Zweli Mnisi says that the police prioritise violence against women and children but do not look at sexual orientation when carrying out their investigations. “To us, murder is murder, whether somebody is Zulu, English, male or female – we don’t see colour, we don’t see gender,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.

If I were to give the police the benefit of the doubt, I would interpret this as them saying “no matter who is killed, we will do our absolute best to solve the crime. We will not work less hard because of the sex or orientation of the victim.” I’m sure that’s what they hoped they were saying. However, the cynic in me can’t help hearing “so a gay person got murdered… people get murdered all the time! Why is she special?” In this case, and in the case of most hate crimes, the effects of the crime reverberate far beyond the simple act of murder – it sends a message to anyone else that would think to step up and advocate for gay South Africans: “this is what happens when you speak out.”

So while I recognize the shallow appeal of the admonition to just “treat everyone the same”, that kind of approach inevitably benefits the status quo at the expense of the minority. We must recognize that different groups may have particular needs, and if we want to achieve ultimate equality we must, at least for a time, swallow a bit of inequality.

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Mixed up

Those of you who have read this blog for a while, or who know me personally, know that I am what is technically known as “mixed race”. Generically, this means that my parents identify as two different ethnic groups. More specifically, my father is black and my mother is white, which according to the racist nomenclature of Jim Crow era America makes me a “mulatto” (a word meaning ‘mule’). At various points in my life, my ‘mixed’ status meant different things to me.

When I was very young, it used to irk me that people in my mostly white home town, who knew I had one white parent, didn’t see me as half-white. After all, technically speaking it was just as true that I was half-white as much as I was half-black. However, nobody else seemed to think along those lines. When I mentioned it to my dad, he imparted to me one of the first lessons I ever had to learn about race: it doesn’t matter what you are, it’s what other people think you are that matters. It affects the way they treat you, the way they think of you, and the way they see you.

I had the opposite experience living in Mississauga, where there were white kids, “really black” kids, and then me. As if I wasn’t enough of an outcast, being a recent transplant to Ontario, not knowing most of the kids I went to school with, and not really having been exposed to other black kids before, I was viewed with deepening suspicion and ultimately kept on the outside. As much as the kids I hung out with (mostly white, as that was who I was used to being around) accepted me, I knew I didn’t fit in. Most of them were Italian, Maltese, or of another Mediterranean extraction.

As a result of my mixed heritage, I never really connected with the black community where I grew up, only able to view it from the outside. Being in a special-ed program that didn’t exactly overflow with black kids didn’t help much either. To this day I wonder whether the system passively discriminated against the black kids – failing to identify them as “gifted” (in the language of the time – who knows what it’s called now?) because of pre-conceived notions of how black kids are supposed to be. I wonder if that’s the case, or if kids that were intelligent enough to qualify weren’t encouraged at home. As for me personally, I had tons of support. That’s neither here nor there, vis a vis this story, I just thought I would big up my home environment.

People of mixed race have been around for as long as there have been distinct racial groups, but as a sociological phenomenon, there has been a marked shift in how kids of my ilk are viewed. First, people no longer call us “half breeds” a term I hated when I was younger – my parents aren’t horses or dogs; they didn’t breed. Furthermore, the idea of someone being “pure” anything is mostly nonsense – everyone is a mutt no matter where they come from. We are called “part _____”, which is a much more flexible descriptor that allows for people who are a mixture of many different things. We’ve gotten over our obsession with fractions.

Secondly, people of mixed heritage are no longer seen as an exotic oddity (at least not to the extent that we were before). Perhaps with the rising prevalence of interethnic marriages, some of the shine is off the penny when it comes to the novelty of identifying with more than one group. Even the census and most other questionnaires that ask about ethnicity use a “check all that apply” rather than forcing people to choose one that applies best.

Last week a white supremacist showed up in the comments section. While I’ve dealt with that type before, there’s always a part of me that gets apprehensive because it raises an old spectre that I don’t like thinking about. That is, if genetics (along racial lines) do influence things like intellect and “personal responsibility”, what does that mean for me? They don’t, of course, but what if they did? Is my interest in science and academic topics the result of my “white” half? Is my love of music and dancing the result of my “black” half? Do traits break down like that? Am I a lucky composite of two complementary characteristics?

I am always able to beat those kinds of introspections back with a little bit of skepticism. Are there not many prominent intelligent black scientists out there? White musicians? Haven’t we learned through history and experience that the reasons that one group does something better than another is simply a product of culture rather than genetics? The stereotypes we paint each other with are just the result of sloppy thinking. Still, it’s always a struggle to have to deal with those fears every day.

Through this blog, I am trying to encourage readers to engage in skeptic thinking when it comes to race. Above and beyond my love of skewering religious topics, if there’s one thing I’d like you to do it’s learn to recognize and challenge the nearly-inaudible voice of cultural indoctrination when it comes to race. We all have embedded assumptions about groups not like our own (or even of those within our own group), and learning how to catch ourselves when we start unconsciously following those assumptions is a useful tool for dealing with each other fairly.

I learned this trick by reflex, living my entire life trying to figure out how I fit in. I don’t have the option to turn it off, nor would I want to if I could. We can find a way to make our unique set of interactions work well if we are just a combination of open-minded, careful and honest. If we can all be “mixed” in this way, we can learn important things about each other, and about ourselves.

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Believers are still out there

Being a skeptic is incredibly hard work. I’m not referring to the fact that many people have a completely vacuous and dizzyingly inaccurate idea of what ‘skepticism’ means – that it’s simply the refusal to entertain or accept new ideas – that’s tough enough. No, even if everyone had the definition right (skepticism being the practice of questioning all assertions about reality and apportioning the strength of one’s belief to the strength of the available evidence), it would still be a slog. Not only does a skeptic have to question the opinions of others, she/he must repeatedly check her/his own assumptions and thoughts constantly.

Skepticism, like the concept of ‘enlightenment’ found in Zen teaching, is an abstract; a goal that can never be fully attained but which should be constantly pursued. Nobody can ever be a ‘true’ skeptic, as we constantly find ourselves falling back into our human failings. One of the things I keep finding myself blindsided by is the occasional realization that while, as far as I’m concerned, the supernatural aspects of religious belief are the stuff of juvenile fantasy, there are still lots of people out there that really do believe that shit:

Belief in a god, or a supreme being, and some sort of afterlife is strong in many countries around the globe, according to a new Ipsos/Reuters poll. Fifty one per cent of the 18,829 people across 23 countries who took part in the survey said they were convinced there is an afterlife and a divine entity, while 18 per cent said they don’t believe in a god and 17 per cent weren’t sure.

But only 28 per cent believe in creationism, the belief that a god created humans, compared to 41 per cent who believe in human evolution and 31 per cent who simply don’t know what to believe.

From my personal experience, even those religious people I regularly spend time with say that most of their beliefs are more allegorical than literal. They believe in ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ in abstract terms representing a belief in some sort of ultimate justice. They believe in ‘god’ as a vague description of some kind of greater organizing force that permeates the universe. As such, they describe themselves as ‘religious’ in the sense that they do not accept that the universe can be entirely explained through cause/effect chains. If you really drill down to the core of modern theology, it eventually becomes various forms of this kind of ecumenical refusal to be certain about anything.

While infuriating from a rationalist point of view, this kind of belief system is not the kind of thing that inspires people to go out and murder their fellow man or oppress her rights, and often these people are able to pivot that kind of fuzzy ‘religion’ into something constructive (which, I think, points even more strongly to the fact that belief is entirely ancillary to human virtue). And while I think this kind of belief is an intellectually lazy way of having your cake and eating it too, I can at least appreciate the impulse to retain some kind of belief in the supernatural.

That’s why I am gob-smacked when I am confronted with the fact that more than half of my fellow creatures believe in the literal truth of life after death and an ultimate supernatural entity. Not as a vague abstract notion, but as a real being with conscious decision-making abilities and a penchant for judgment. I can handle the abstract concept of people who believe this kind of stuff, but from time to time my brain grabs onto it semantically, shakes my conscious mind and says “can you believe this shit?”

And of course, they do:

Mexicans were the most likely to accept the idea of an afterlife, but not heaven or hell, followed by Russians, Brazilians, Indians, Canadians and Argentines. Believers in creationism were strongest in South Africa, followed by the United States, Indonesia, South Korea and Brazil.

Of course there are two different ways of looking at these findings. Yes, depressingly 3 or 4 billion people in the world think that their entire lives are nothing more than the staging area for some post-mortem talent contest judged by the ultimate Simon Cowell. However, it’s almost perfectly balanced by people who either recognize that there’s no evidence for such an assertion or simply reserve judgment on that particular issue. Nearly half of my fellow creatures live their lives under the operating assumption that this life actually matters, not as a screening process for some kind of real life that happens after you die, but to the planet they live on and the beings that share it. Even if it turns out that there is an afterlife (although the very idea seems preposterous – what part of you goes to the afterlife? And no, ‘soul’ isn’t a meaningful answer to that question), the world we do know exists is made better through the actions of people that live as though their existence matters now.

Opinion polls are largely unimportant when it comes to determining truth about reality (saving those exceptions where we are trying to describe the reality of human belief), but they do give us a pretty significant nod in the direction that our policies and decisions will take us. It’s crucial to never underestimate the fact that while I (and many of you, I’d imagine) have abandoned the false promises given by those who claim knowledge of the afterlife, we share our space with literally billions of other who every day trade the cow of their life for the magic beans of faith.

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Mining a silver lining

First off, I want to apologize for shirking my duties this past week. I squandered my weekend, when I should have been writing the posts for last week, doing other stuff. When Monday came around, I had decided to write a post-mortem on the election after the results were in. However, by the time I got home from working at the polls I was so tired and disgusted with the outcome that I couldn’t really marshal my thoughts enough to write anything that I could feel good about. This is the reason why I usually set up a buffer of posts, so as to avoid this exact type of thing.

Secondly, I find it troubling that the week that I decide not to post, my hit count explodes 😛

Finally, this post is going to be a sort of amalgamation of some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for the past week since the election. I’ve titled this post ‘mining a silver lining’, because while it pretty much goes without saying that I am disappointed and fearful about what it means that the Republican North party has a legislative fiat (both in the Parliament and ostensibly in the Senate), I think there are some real good news stories to come out of the election. The political content of the archives of this blog should be sufficient to explain why a Republican North majority is a bad thing for Canada; I will instead focus on some good news speculation.

ALL THE PROGNOSTICATION MEANS ABSOLUTELY DICK

There will be a lot of political commentators (myself among them) who will make predictions about what will or won’t happen under a Republican North majority. The sheer variety of opinions and predictions ensures, mathematically, that most of them will be wrong. Political decisions are influenced by ideology and promises, but occur on a day-to-day basis and are affected by human events. Nobody can predict exactly what human beings will do, as this world is a chaotic place. Nobody would have expected U.S. foreign policy to make a dramatic series of shifts based on events in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Fewer still would have predicted that Japan’s economy would take a tumble after an earthquake and resultant nuclear accident.

My point here is that no matter who makes the predictions, policy will adapt to the the immediate circumstances around it. Changes in technology, in climate, in foreign politics, in any number of things will have a strong influence on how Stephen Harper’s policy decisions will be made. Trying to predict specific actions over a four-year period is a complete waste of time, and can be enjoyed only as an intellectual masturbatory exercise.

Now I will commence to fapping.

STEPHEN HARPER IS THE LEADER OF A DIVIDED PARTY

The Republic North party is made up of two core constituencies: social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. The perhaps unspoken (or certainly under-spoken) reality that accompanies such a grouping is that while they may claim to be related ideologies, the two are in fact orthogonal. There is nothing in the doctrine of social conservatism that lends itself to fiscal conservatism – in fact the two are often at cross purposes. Libertarians and Classical Liberals believe that the government has no business whatsoever legislating either social issues or economic issues – only in safeguarding individual liberties. The reason the Republican North party was able to pick up so much support is because they catered to the economic centre/right, which is also a part of the Liberal party’s core constituency.

The only way (as far as I can see) that the RNP was able to stitch these two groups together was to simultaneously forge a false equivalence between these two perpendicular political perspectives, and to publicly proclaim disinterest in social policy while quietly whispering assurances to their social base that those issues would come to the fore once a majority was achieved. Now that this is a political reality, Prime Minister Harper will have to ‘pay the piper’, so to speak, by advocating positions that are wildly unpopular among the Canadian majority. If he fails to do this, social conservatives who have long felt ignored by the federal government will abandon the RPN and revive the Reform party. Should he capitulate to their whims, he will alienate the Libertarian/Classical Liberal wing of his party.

This must be a deft balancing act that will take an extraordinary statesman and leader to accomplish. Stephen Harper is neither of these.

JACK LAYTON MAY EXERCISE A GREAT DEAL OF CONTROL

Part of the success of the RPN during their successive minority governments was Stephen Harper’s ability to keep the reins of his party tightly held. Information did occasionally leak, but for the most part the government spoke from one perspective only. Considering the number of wingnuts in the party, keeping that communication clamped down was an extraordinary achievement that served the party’s interests well. Jack Layton may be able to exercise the same kind of party discipline, albeit in a dramatically different way.

Nobody really predicted that the NDP would make the strides they did in this past election (owing largely to Quebec, but also partially due to the implosion of the Liberal party). Jack Layton now finds himself the leader of a party with 102 seats, many held by rookie politicians. The NDP brand has been, since the early 2000s, consistently centred on Jack Layton himself, rather than a particular policy position. The rookie MPs will be looking to Mr. Layton for guidance and instruction, more so than would a team of seasoned veterans. While Jack will have to pull in some of his own wingnuts and handle more than the ordinary number of blunders born of inexperience, he will also have a party that gets virtually all of its cues from him. In this way, the NDP can appear more organized and credible than they legitimately are. This means that progressive decisions and policies can be articulated without seeming like they’re coming from the hippie fringe.

ELIZABETH MAY WAS ELECTED

I am not a Green voter. I did vote Green in 2006, because my riding was a safe bet and I supported electoral reform. I think the Green party can articulate a non-corporate perspective that is sorely and noticeably absent from the other three major parties. Elizabeth May is a gifted speaker and is able to articulate environmental policy issues well. She’s also shown herself to be indomitable and highly resistant to intimidation in the face of overwhelming opposition. While I don’t necessarily agree with her party’s platform on many issues (medicine and health care being chief among those), I am glad to see a more pluralistic Parliament.

Her election also serves the purpose of giving the Green party legitimate political status. Voting Green is now a legitimate alternative, and while the party is still in its infancy in terms of credibility, having elected an MP (over a RPN cabinet minister, no less) certainly vaults it into the standings. After all, they only have 3 fewer seats than the Bloc, who used to be the official opposition 😛

POLARIZATION IS BAD, BUT NOT ALL BAD

One doesn’t have to look much further than the United States (a name that is becoming progressively more ironic) to see how dangerous political polarization can be. Polarization forces people to make choices to support positions they don’t agree with in the name of party affiliation. Having a plurality of perspectives means that government will be more stable, rather than erratically jerking back and forth from right to left. Canada has elected a far-right government with a far-left opposition (although I don’t think either of those descriptions are really fair in the general scheme of things), meaning that for the first time in a long time we see a stark separation between the usually moderate people of this country.

However, there is one upside to polarization that has to do with a necessary consequence of good government. When the government is largely running things behind the scenes and caters to the will of the majority, people become complacent. Why bother getting up in arms about a government whose actions are largely invisible and that I agree with for the most part? Having the debate happen more to the extremes, with policies to match, means that government activity will become increasingly salient to the average Canadian. People will see that their actions (or inactions, as the case may be) can allow dangerous legislation that is contrary to their personal interests to be passed largely without comment. Perhaps having a RPN majority government is what Canada needs as a kick in the pants to spur increased political involvement by its populace.

SUMMARIZING THOUGHTS

As I’ve made clear, I’m not happy about this election. My best-case scenario would have seen a diminishing Harper minority with a strong NDP opposition – allowing the further fragmentation of the right and bringing progressive issues to the fore. What I got instead was a bizarro world in which a 2% increase in political support for the RPN means 30 more seats and the Bloc has all but evaporated. It is an interesting time for Canadian politics, and while there will undoubtedly be some serious damage done in the interim (I’m thinking specifically of crime, climate change and the strength/direction of the Canada Health Act), there may yet be some positive stories to come out of this.

I am back to my regular self, and am recommitting myself to articulating my position. I promise – no more weeks of rage (well… hopefully).

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“Natural Law” – When to ignore someone (pt. 4)

Arguments are powerful things in the world of rhetoric. When considering any given topic, familiarity with the cognitive and evidentiary frameworks that pertain to that topic can be of great use both in understanding and defending a position. Some arguments (albeit few) are powerful enough to justify a position all by themselves; most positions require a variety of arguments to be fully persuasive. Conversely, there are some arguments that are so weak that it is reasonable to completely ignore anyone who would try and press them into service.

I have so far dealt with four such arguments: “common sense”, “I’ve done my own research”, any sentence that starts with “I believe that…” and back-filling explanations to satisfy an a priori conclusion. “Common sense” is a poorly-named concept, because it presumes that people perceive and process information in a uniform way. Doing your own research rarely meets the standard of “research” required to be authoritative or replicable. A person’s individual belief in a thing does not grant it legitimacy, regardless of the sincerity of that belief. Finally, reliable information cannot be gained by assuming the truth of the conclusion, then looking for confirmatory evidence.

These are all specious and worthless arguments, and carry with them no persuasive force when the audience is able to think about them critically. To this list, I would like to add any argument that is contingent on the concept of “natural law”. There are a surprising number of thinkers and theorists that use this concept, and a separate definition for each. The particular understanding of the concept that I find to be most vacuous is perhaps best articulated by the Catholic Church:

The natural law expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie: The natural law is written and engraved in the soul of each and every man, because it is human reason ordaining him to do good and forbidding him to sin… But this command of human reason would not have the force of law if it were not the voice and interpreter of a higher reason to which our spirit and our freedom must be submitted.5

The general thrust of this definition is that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, and that this sense is both reliable and derived through human reason. The weaknesses of the Catholic position (the conjuring of the existence of their specific god and a human soul) aside, the very concept is still meritless, or at least not borne out by evidence. Given the diversity of ways in which people react to similar moral quandaries is evidence that there is not a uniform moral sense. The existence of quandaries – situations in which a reasonable case can be made for or against a given action – is evidence enough that there is nothing “written and engraved in the soul” of anybody.

There are a variety of reasonable ways of arriving at a moral decision – the entire field of ethics attests to this fact. A variety of ethical constructs and theoretical scaffolds have been invented to codify a method of consistently arriving at conclusions that maximize the good and to minimize the negative. However, when a given action may cause both good and evil (e.g., giving a life-saving blood transfusion to a Jehova’s Witness against her/his will), our supposed innate moral sense fails us. One person may choose to ignore her innate moral sense to preserve life in favour of obeying the patient’s wishes, while another may reject the patient’s irrational belief in favour of giving him life-saving treatment. Both of these choices are justifiable (although, for the record, medical ethics fall firmly on the side of patient autonomy). Neither can be said to either violate human reason or some kind of ‘natural law’.

While this argument would be merely annoying if invoked in abstract, it is sometimes assumed to be valid, and then used to justify all manner of harm:

…tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:

Basing regulations on the non-existent natural law is dangerous and detrimental to those caught outside the realm of what the authority deems acceptable. Two women that are in love, or a man that wants to leave his abusive wife, are shit out of luck because those things are ‘against natural law’, as though loving who you choose and self-preservation are some kind of irrational goal.

What we see in both the conception and application of ‘natural law’ is simply a collision of ‘common sense’ and back-filling. “I don’t like these things for whatever reason, and so I will look for a justification for my dislike that makes them seem rational.” As an argument, it is the equivalent of throwing up your hands and saying “because I said so, that’s why!” It takes courage and honesty to recognize that things you don’t like may be honestly justifiable to some, based on valid precepts (and no, I don’t count cultural norms or appeals to tradition among the list of valid precepts). Homosexuality seems weird to me, and I may not like it (for the record, I don’t really have strong feelings one way or the other, although I am immensely proud of our society whenever I see a gay couple together openly). I don’t agree with polygamy. I think that religious rules about diet or medical treatment are stupid. My personal discomfiture with a practice is, however, not evidence that said practice is ‘against natural law’. It just means I don’t like it.

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The barbarians are still at the gates

Twenty-four years ago, a marginally-talented artist decided to make a statement about the way in which religious figures have been misrepresented by their religious organizations. A fine statement, all things considered. This artist decided to express this opinion by encasing a crucifix in a jar of his own urine and called it, somewhat uncreatively, Piss Christ. However lofty the sentiment may have been, the execution is somewhat juvenile and rudimentary. It’s the sort of “shock factor” statement that a high school student would make – like crudely drawing the Madonna fellating the Buddha or something like that. Considering the wide variety of ways in which religious iconography is shown disrespect, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is rather tame.

Fourteen years later, Piss Christ is still generating controversy and outrage from idiots. This time, though, the idiots have hammers:

When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion. Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an “anti-blasphemy” campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon. The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun, has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Christian fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy’s use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year.

It is so common as to be cliche at this point: someone uses an art medium to criticize a religious subject, and the followers of the “Religion of Peace” du jour decide that their hurt feelings are justification for that work’s destruction. As though the argument hasn’t been forward literally thousands of times that the way to fight art you don’t like is to ignore it, and to encourage others to do the same. Suppression of ideas is a giant waste of time, and so counterproductive as to be almost comical.

Perhaps more frightening is the fact that this complete abdication of reason is being actively stoked by a political entity to gain support. In a country like France, where secularism was literally purchased with blood, it’s chilling to see someone fanning the flames of the conflict between religious people and secular society, especially for something so craven as re-election. It is one thing to discuss and point out differences of position, it is another entirely to turn it into a “they are coming to burn your bibles” situation, as Sarkozy appears to be willing (if not eager) to do.

I am not interested in defending the Piss Christ. I don’t think it takes much talent or imagination to submerge an object in urine. I don’t really see the connection between exhibiting a urine-soaked crucifix and the ostensible message criticizing the misuse of religion. I think there are far more clear and creative ways to get that point across. To my eye, this is the equivalent of a radio shock jock using racial slurs to gin up controversy. However, with their trademark inability to appreciate irony, the religious mob has decided to prove the exact point that the installation is criticizing.

Of course, this is the smashing of a plexiglass container of urine. Anyone wishing to replicate this priceless work of art can send me 50 bucks, a Powerade, a mason jar and a crucifix – I’ll happily provide the rest. While the original work has been destroyed, the statement is alive and the artwork itself is simple enough to reproduce if need be. Smashing it is a shitty thing to do, but it’s not as though the world has lost Michaelangelo’s David or Picasso’s Guernica – if we were really concerned about this priceless treasure, we could make another one, and unless you knew the story of the original you wouldn’t know the difference.

No what is truly frightening is the prospect that there are people who won’t stop at simple destruction of property to express their outrage at whatever imagined light was perpetrated against their Collective Delusion. There are people who are so god-bothered that they feel they have the divinely-granted authority to kill human beings for saying things they disagree with. This is the system that people say humanity can’t possibly do without.

The fact is that rationality has surpassed our need for imagined explanations and intuitions  to govern our society. We can govern ourselves based on secular reason – furthermore, those regions that do this more are doing much better than their less-reasoned brethren. Those who would react to an idea by trying to destroy it, and those that think it, must not be the ones to rule us. They should be thought of, in our walled palace of reasoned thought, as barbarians banging at the gates.

The barbarians are at the gates, and they’re armed with bibles.

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