Since this is a sermon/rant, I am going to relax some of my rules of engagement and make some assertions that I think are reasonably supportable – but I may not bother supporting them. We can discuss them in comments if you want to challenge them. Otherwise it’s difficult to write without producing a great big bodge of anti-{skeptical trope} defences to head off pyrhhonian challenges.
PZ [pha] was more connected to movement atheism than some of us, and still cares about it to a certain degree. I think that’s laudable, because religion remains a blight on the intellectual landscape and there are still plenty of people who are into debunking it. From a distance I feel and sympathise with PZ’s pain: it’s really sad to watch how movement atheism has turned into a shit-show of cheesy grifters and attention-whores. If you step back and think about it, it should be obvious why: atheism is going to tend to attract some of the same kind of people that theism does; they’re just a little tiny bit more sophisticated and can see through the obvious lies. Meanwhile, every movement has its parasites that realize that interest groups run by amateurs are a great place to find mis-managed money or to get people drunk and take sexual advantage of them, or for wanna-bes or has-beens to grab a microphone (or tweet) and make themselves a little more important-sounding. It’s “ho, hum” except that it’s real money and it’s real people’s lives and it’s a real issue. But, otherwise, it may as well be a bowling league. That’s not to dismiss bowling, which is an engrossing and interesting pastime, but it’s rather to explain how even amateur bowling leagues wind up with politics, edge-lords, nazis (probably), and perhaps even twitter feeds managed by querulous academics past their prime commenting grinding the “political correctness” axe because someone once told them to behave and they are still stinging over that slight.
I’m not trying to say that I have some kind of olympian view of this whole thing, but I do feel that I see things in a different context than someone would, who has been down in the trenches slinging the mud back and forth with some of those dubious characters. I also see Atheism+ as a well-intentioned effort to get some of the movement and dictionary atheists to realize that they have deliberately marginalized themselves by declaring, in effect, “this is the battle, the only battle that I choose to fight!” Well, good on them – someone’s got to hold the shallow end of the pool, after all. And that’s a deliberately chosen metaphor, which ought to sound suspiciously close to “big fish in a small pond” because that’s what’s going on. Let me contextualize that for you another way: Richard Dawkins has not had any thoughts about politics that are important enough to make him a footnote to a Cliffs’ Notes version of Plato, so he’s doing well sticking to the well-hoed field of atheism, where he can make arguments that would have elicited a yawn from Hume and an eye-roll from Voltaire. Atheism is easy. PZ et al were trying to get Atheist+ to see that and broaden their sights to more than just the trench in front of them; it’s an entire trench-system and it’s all connected and self-supporting.
On the illustration above, I was going to put “space aliens” and inside that bubble “big foot” but my computer doesn’t have pixels that small. Religion is a huge system of bullshit, and there are many sub-fields within religion, and anyone who wishes to can have a busy and productive life just attacking any one or maybe two of those sub-fields – in fact, I owe my perspective on movement atheism to Sam Harris and his shit-show posting about “Why don’t I criticize Israel?” [stderr] that made me realize that movement atheists simply do not have the chops to go after anything bigger and tougher than refuting religion.
What I’m saying is that folks like Harris, Dawkins, Shermer, Carrier, et. al., have found the place where they are as effective as they want to be, and they’re comfortable there. Oh, you want to argue about whether or not there’s evidence for the biblical jesus? That’s nice. Over in the deep end of the pool, they are arguing about whether there’s evidence that supply-side economics works and they’re trying to model what reparations for slavery might look like over the size of an economy like the United States’ and 400 years. Next up: what about the Indigenous Peoples? As far as I am concerned, the atheist movement hit its peak effort when a bunch of its stars stepped forward and then immediately fell all over themselves when they tried to express thoughtful opinions about politics. Remember when Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant contrarian, decided to emulate a murderous establishment ventriloquist’s dummy after declaring that he had travelled in Iraq and Iran – but, sure, we should kill muslims like they are mosquitoes. What the fuck? And Richard Dawkins ageing brain began firing in the patterns of his good christian upbringing as he searched for plausibly deniable ways to say “shut up, woman!” to one of the new generation atheists. I’ve already shitcanned Sam Harris, so that leaves Dan Dennet, who sensibly slunk back to the armchair of the academic and concluded that we have free will (with a little ‘f’ and little ‘w’) but it’s not the kind we really want, etc. Some horsemen. Some apocalypse. At least they didn’t have any rapists in the club.
Perhaps you have seen me comment something like:
No movement
No leaders
when someone starts talking about Atheism+ or movement atheism. That’s because having a movement is really not the point: we’ve already got a ground-swell. Sure, it would be nice if the last mega-church was shuttered on our watch but it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. Religion is going to continue for a very long time, but it’s mostly going to be in the form of nebulous gods in World of Warcraft, I.e.: “spirituality” AKA “who gives a fuck?”
The war has been won and there never will be a StarWars-like final scene in which the heroes are given medals of atheism and resisting political correctness. [Besides, if there was a medals-giving ceremony, imagine what a shit-show of preening old coots it would be.] There’s no glory left in running around taking gleeful part in the mopping-up action. Besides, that’s just an invitation to problematic behavior.
Let me adjust your perspective a bit:
Atheism fits into this because it defeats one tiny part of the bigger landscape: the divine right of kings. For much of human history, that was an important concept; King Thag would say “I rule by the grace of the gods!” and the high priest would gibber, burn some incense, and scream “IT IS TRUE!” If that didn’t work, King Thag had spearmen standing by ready to send you to meet your maker so you could discuss it directly. So, yeah, movement atheism is important but unfortunately the dreaded horsemen (it would be men!) of the atheist apocalypse couldn’t even get their big boy pants on enough to realize that they were tilting against cobblestones on the driveway leading to a windmill labeled “political control.” Spinoza, Voltaire, Hume and Nietzsche understood this and tried to explain it in various ways – if you can attack the divine right of kings then you have removed one of the cards from the deck, and the authoritarians who wish to rule you are going to have to play with only 51.
The reason movement atheism choked and died is because, as PZ said, it did not manage to lift its sights and gaze across no man’s land into the next trench. It didn’t even manage to look to its left and realize that class struggle is ready to go “over the top” in solidarity, and anti-racism and feminism and LGBTQ rights are also in those trenches and they’re on the same side. On the other side of no man’s land is: ruthless authoritarianism, upper class solidarity, and suborned masses of libertarian millionaires who have mistaken being given a good life as a servant of power for having a seat at the table. Movement atheism simply does not have the chops to tackle what it’s really up against, so it’s decaying into a squabbling bunch of vanity conferences and deep rifts. Nobody should give a shit. The enemy certainly doesn’t either.
There were times in the past when I went down and argued with true believers. Ooh, “contradictions in the bible” and epistemological challenges were all very heady stuff. It wasn’t until I had been doing it for a while that I noticed that the ranks of the religious are full of people like William Lane Craig who do not give a shit that their arguments have been refuted over and over and they were bad to begin with. If you’re arguing with some dipstick whose idea of state of the art apologetics is to dust off Aristotle and trot that out as if it was a serious explanation of something – you’re wasting your time. You may as well be arguing with a cinder-block. When I realized that, I noticed that it was not very different from arguing with a “conservative” about political economics: they’re going to trot out supply-side economics in a fantastic variety of paint-jobs and if you knock one of them down they’ll paint supply-side economics blue and come back and you with “here’s another way of looking at it! ${supply side economics}!” Meanwhile, there’s the usual pauses for tone-trolling, labeling, and epistemological pseudo-skepticism.
THE TRUTH?! YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH. YOU CAN’T EVEN NOTICE WHEN A WOMAN DOESN’T WANT YOU TO CREEP ON HER ALL THE WAY BACK TO HER HOTEL ROOM!
So that’s what happened to movement atheism. It’s not worth talking about anymore. The people who have been fighting down in that trench have been, perhaps, fighting in that trench because it’s a tractable part of the battle and they don’t have to look up and see the sun being blotted out by the belly of a gigantic armored vehicle with the words “climate change” stenciled on the bottom. This is not “whataboutism” but doesn’t it seem a bit silly to be lobbing epistemological challenges at catholicism (seriously, could there be a more ridiculous target?) (ok, mormonism) when the political reality of the time is that The People have no control over the political systems they live under in China, Russia, and India. The political unrest you’ve been feeling in Britain and the US is the surface manifestation of an internal debate among the oligarchs as to exactly how much political control the people are going to be allowed to think they have. Since China, Russia, and India and the US are huge and hugely populated, it appears to be a fact that more humans than ever before are living under some form of authoritarian rule.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the new authoritarian wave appears to have allied itself with global capital interests, which depend on fossil fuels. They have the reins of control firmly in hand and they have decided that the wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry is a necessary ally to put them and keep them in power. The new battle that’s shaping up is for global authoritarianism to pay back its backers by crushing any attempt to preserve the biosphere from their profit-making.
In that context, yeah, you can see why I am excited as all fuck about atheism.
Somehow I don’t feel like this. For some odd reason I routinely hear people telling me that I’m a sinner who will burn in hell, that I must repent my silly attempt to live as a man, that I should go to a kitchen, get married with a cis man, wear pink dresses, and make some babies (exclusively in the Missionary position, of course).
The concept of the divine right of kings was dead already over a century ago. And it wasn’t even atheists who attacked it back then.
There’s more to political control than just the concept of the divine right of kings. Religions are used for “divide and conquer” tactics, they are used to subjugate entire subgroups of the population (women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people who don’t believe in the dominant religion, and so on). For example, “God wants women to stay in kitchen. If you were born with a female body, then you must embrace a certain lifestyle.” Religions are also used to justify the status quo: “Is your life shitty right now? God must have a plan for you.” “You will be rewarded in the afterlife.” “You current suffering must be God’s punishment for some sins you have committed in the past.” “God rewards good people. The fact that God made this guy a billionaire means that he deserved this fortune.”
Atheism, as a public discourse, as a “movement,” has always struck me as fairly blockheaded. It misses the mark on at least two points.
The first is that the functioning of the discourse is built on Atheists and Theists talking past one another. This is a form of theater, wherein everyone gets to eat hotel food for three days, many people pay a fee, and a few people collect speaking fees. It is, at best, a form of entertainment. The Public Atheist asks the wrong questions, and the Theist gives wrong answers to completely different questions, everyone writes a book and trades in their old wives for newer models. It’s good fun all around, but it’s not discourse.
The second is, as you note, that religion is but one thread. It is a fallacy to attribute especially to religion the same things that afflict every human institution. If you know that bowling leagues and political parties tend toward the same authoritarian bullshit that a religion does, what exactly is your beef with a deity here? Are legs exclusive to mammals, because many mammals have them? What have legs to do with warm-bloodedness, exactly? Nothing.
I do not personally care if someone believes in a god or not. I believe any number of things that have no particular logical support myself, after all. My beef is with authoritarianism, and religion isn’t even the most successful tool in that box any more. Might as well bellyache about someone’s crescent wrench, when they mainly ruin bolts with their vicegrips these days.
My view of why the whole thing fizzled out is somewhat simpler: beating up on religion is pretty easy, and after a while it gets old. You need to do something else, which tended to land in either «rant against X» for other values of X, or «what other bad power structures can we do something about?». The youtuber dudes went for the first, the people hereabouts for the second. Nobody gave a second thought to monarchy.
I’m pretty bad at arguing, so I tend not to do it too often. And, as little as I do/did, I’ve lost interest in arguing over religion/atheism. In some ways, I don’t think that “belief” is an active choice. Granted, I think one can engage in behavior/thoughts/etc. that may question or reinforce “belief”, but I don’t think one can simply wake up and choose to either stop or start believing in a deity or whatever.
Mostly, I’m more concerned with how people treat each other. And, as multiple people have pointed out, atheists can be just as bigoted and shitty as any of the religious folk, and there are decent religious folk who don’t make judgments and treat everyone with respect.
What Andreas Avester said. You may as well go to Kinko’s and have a banner made for your aircraft carrier.
Sure, the tide seems to be turning that way in the parts of the world more visible to us, but it’s not universal, and there’s a lot of backsliding even in the West.
I think some of us go through stages if we come out of a religion. At first our focus is all about religion, but over time other concerns take over. I listen to Sam Harris’ podcast from time to time and it had very little to do with religion these days.
Nice post thanks.
cvoinescu@#5:
You may as well go to Kinko’s and have a banner made for your aircraft carrier.
Most Americans would have fallen for it if the navy had just renamed the ship the CVN Mission Accomplished.
The Divine Right of
KingsTyrants.Lofty@#8:
Bingo!
[I admit that the recent claims about Trump losing the “mandate of heaven” had something to do with the core of this rant.]
re the Divine Right of Kings
look at the current Australian prime minister: he’s very religious and from a prosperity gospel church, which is clearly influencing his policies and I would be very surprised if it doesn’t influence his thinking as to why he’s PM. His church justifies the capitalist plutocracy as the work of god and he’s in a powerful position, so it would be really strange for him to not believe that he had some right to rule because god.
i think the Divine Right sort of views are alive and well among religious authoritarians, a lot have just got more circumspect about voicing it.
(if you think about it those sorts of religion are totalising philosophies, there’s no space for something to not be the work of god. that includes current political systems. (they try to get out of it with the devil, but that’s either functionally another god or a tool of god))
It’s the same failing as first and second wave feminists, the same as cisgender gays and lesbians. They only give a hoot about their own interests and are perfectly willing to let everyone else rot if they get what they want for themselves.
Sadly, I see the same thing amongst white Transgender people. Most only care about non-white Trans people when counting statistics (“look how victimized trans people are!”), not when non-white Trans people face the majority of anti-Trans violence on a daily basis.
The worst type of conspirators: Oil-qaeda, a group with no central leadership but terrorist cells everywhere and the power to see their will done. Captalism has always hated democracy, from the days of the Hudson’s Bay company and United Fruit until the last glass of drinkablewater and breath of clean air is gone.
Andreas Avester is right; the war is nowhere near won. We still have deeply embedded antagonism to non-traditional geneder roles even in our more liberal societies; it’s just not noticed so easily by those of us not in those roles.
Consider the recent brouhaha on Stack Exchange about the new code of conduct saying that, when you find out that someone prefers to be referenced by a particular pronoun, you must use that pronoun when referring to them (within reason, of course). SE made some bad errors when dealing with a moderator who seemed to be insisting that she should be allowed to use “they” for people who prefer to be referred to as “he,” “she” or another purely singular pronoun, but the kerfuffle caused by those errors has also caused a suprising (to me! probably not to someone like Andreas) number of people who object to that to come out of the woodwork, with arguments about people’s right to free speech or religous sensibilities being violated if Alice must call Bob “she” rather than “he” when writing on an SE site because that’s what Bob asked us to do. It’s all couched in terms of “we need not to discriminate against Alice,” but it’s really just support for continuing discrimination against Bob.
Curt Sampson @#12
Obviously, it depends on how you define the war. A war against what?
If the goal is to figure out the truth about whether religions are factually correct, then this war really is over. It was over many decades ago. By now science has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no God, and that all major religions are factually incorrect. Doing yet another scientific inquiry about whether Biblical stories could be true is pointless. It’s also pointless to debate religious leaders in an attempt to “find out the truth” about how the world functions. Doing so would be beating a dead horse.
But there’s also another possible definition for “the war against religions.” The goal would be to eradicate religious bigotry and get rid of all religiously-inspired harm that is being done to sentient beings. This war is far from over. Religious beliefs are still widely practiced and cause tangible harm to various minority groups on a daily basis.
Yeah, I’m not surprised. My own experience has been that people don’t care about me wearing male clothes or having stereotypically masculine hobbies. I didn’t get discriminated back when those things were all I did. Shit started happening when I chose to use male pronouns. It got even worse when I went to some doctors asking for a surgery. My observation is that people seem willing to ignore the things I do. They start making a fuss the moment I demand them to “become my accomplices” by asking them to use specific pronouns or asking them to perform a surgery on me. The attitude is that I should have no right to force another person to accommodate my preferences. Of course, that’s a silly attitude, because nobody can either enable or prevent my chosen lifestyle. It’s my choice, and ultimately I will still do what I want anyway.
A few years ago I spent some time arguing with one of the members of the FTB collective, Anjuli, who exhibited a very good example of the kind of thing this post is about: she could not separate the religious components of islam from the political actions of muslims who were being manipulated via islam and who had existing political views. It was easy for her to blame islam for the whole mess, because I felt it was probably a bit too hard to sort out the effects of colonialism, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and British political chicanery, US neo-colonialism, and the oil wars. Atheists can look at that great big mess and say “it’s all religion’s fault!” which is … a very narrow interpretation of the situation.
That’s what I’m talking about, here. Yes, I’m being optimistic or dismissive when I say that religion’s a dead issue – but that’s because everywhere I see religion, I see politics and it’s the politics that are really driving events. The religion is just a way of contextualizing events, or an excuse to wear a big hat – it’s hardly even a driver in hatred, which is a trope many atheists (like Sam Harris!) love to deploy. Sam Harris does not appear to understand that when an insurgent yells “Allah Akbar!” when they see their ATGM hit a tank, they are not praying it’s just their way of yelling “YAAAAAY!”.
The same can be said about Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters. Are they his supporters because they are evangelicals or are they his supporters because they are racist, ignorant, authoritarian goons? I can’t even sort out which has a bigger effect on their politics: racism, ignorance, or submissiveness – but religion is part of that mix but I’d say we can see it’s not a large part: they cheerfully ignored all that “christian morality” stuff in favor of political power when Trump came to office. That argues to me that it’s about political power, not religion. Religion is window-dressing and it’s, at best, a good excuse for a bumper sticker on your truck.
When you see a truck with a Trump bumper sticker and a christian ‘fish’ sticker, do you see it as “look, religious people vote for Trump” or “look, it’s an authoritarian submissive.” The latter is how I see it. My cause-effect analysis is that they are religious because that’s also part of being an authoritarian submissive, not that they are authoritarian submissives because they are religious.
This shit is complicated; that’s why “dictionary atheists” want to hearken back to the simple days when they were arguing on one narrow axis of discussion where they could feel they were winning. My view is that the authoritarian submissive they were arguing with doesn’t care because the atheist is just making mouth-noises; the authoritarian submissive is just going to believe whatever they’re told, whether it’s by Trump, the pope, Qanon, or any other rando with good posture and a big hat.
dangerousbeans@#10:
he’s very religious and from a prosperity gospel church, which is clearly influencing his policies and I would be very surprised if it doesn’t influence his thinking as to why he’s PM. His church justifies the capitalist plutocracy as the work of god and he’s in a powerful position, so it would be really strange for him to not believe that he had some right to rule because god.
Sure, but don’t you think that if he had a choice between being out of power, and ditching the goddy talk, he’d ditch the goddy talk? My observation is that these wankers (speaking informally) are all about power and the goddy talk is just a portable smoke-screen they like to deploy to make themselves look good to people who are even more submissive to authority than they are.
To me that’s not religion, that’s politics.
lochaber@#4:
I don’t think that “belief” is an active choice. Granted, I think one can engage in behavior/thoughts/etc. that may question or reinforce “belief”, but I don’t think one can simply wake up and choose to either stop or start believing in a deity or whatever.
I agree, sort of. Nonbelief takes a lot of work, if you’ve already had your views set when you were a child.
I don’t like the language of psycho-babble so I cringe whenever I reference Altemeyer’s “authoritarian follower” but I do feel it’s a somewhat useful label. There are some people who just want to be led. And they’ll follow a religious leader or a political leader, with more or less the same fervor and the same level of introspection. Some of those break political, some break religious, and some do both. It’s when push comes to shove – which do they go with? Right now in the US we are witnessing an amazing thing: massive numbers of evangelicals pledging their political support to someone who is (in principle) objectively evil or at least massively disgusting. That tells me that they are motivated by politics more than they are by religion; the religion is a self-justifying mechanism to ratify their political actions.
In my own mind, I don’t think those people believe anything at all.
Andreas Avester@#13:
But there’s also another possible definition for “the war against religions.” The goal would be to eradicate religious bigotry and get rid of all religiously-inspired harm that is being done to sentient beings.
But that’s politics. The only way to get rid of religiously-inspired harm is to defang it politically. And, if we could do that, then I really don’t give a shit if they believe Jesus has a belly button or not.
Among other things, your first diagram implies that all economics is a system of bullshit. And your second diagram says this:
(1) No authoritarian states, monarchies, or pseudo-democracies are “systems of bullshit.”
(2) Some authoritarian states, monarchies, and pseudo-democracies are not “techniques of political control.”
(3) No monarchies are pseudo-democracies, and none are authoritarian states.
(4) No pseudo-democracies are authoritarian states.
If the diagrams themselves are systems of bullshit, I don’t know if they’re supposed to be in the part which consists of techniques of political control, the other part which is unlabeled, or perhaps both.
I don’t think you’re making it clearer. It would be silly to put everything in terms of what theists (or regressive atheists, etc.) think or do. That’s something to be concerned about, yes, but it’s not helpful to make the entire discussion revolve around that.
I mean, you can let X be practically anything in “those people are saying/doing X” or “they think of themselves as X,” and we will still have our own project to work on: trying to understand how we should live (what morality/politics should be), if the type of naturalistic metaphysics that we think is correct is in fact correct. (Very briefly: no gods, souls, afterlives, magic/psychic powers, or all sorts of other woo.)
If that’s a rough sketch of the basic proposal (that is, it’s what we think is a worthwhile thing for us to work on), then it makes no difference if those other people out there are engaged in a form of “politics” or whatever else you want to call it. Of course, if that’s the kind of thing which is being advanced/endorsed, then we (never mind them) will be engaged in politics, at the scale of entire societies (or subsets, down to morality at an individual scale). And doing that, coming up with a naturalistic form of ethics/politics, is of course perfectly fine. If you want to use “politics” as a dirty word sometimes, this is probably not the place you want to do it.
Anyway, we’re still starting with the world as we understand it. That’s the point, and it can’t somehow be left out. If you drop that part for whatever reason, then you’re not engaged in the same project anymore. What you’d be doing instead, I have no idea. But it would essentially mean you think there’s some other way of determining how we should live with each other in this world, besides looking around and trying to learn what’s true about it (and what’s false). That sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
Unless you think there’s a god (for example), you’re not going to have that in your set of facts, which we use to guide how we should act. It doesn’t matter how you characterize religions or theists socially/psychologically/etc., how optimistic you are, or whatever – it’s still not true that there’s a god, so we still can’t validly use it as if that were one of the facts that inform how we should behave. If the project I described is headed anywhere, nothing besides “a god exists” (for this particular example) would change that.
Since you don’t think there’s a god, it’s not clear what you are actually trying to say about atheism here, assuming it’s not something very strange like “I agree with dictionary atheism, but I feel like I shouldn’t be saying that I agree with it, because fuck those people.” If the message is supposed to be sort of like that, something like “racism is totally legit and reasonable, but I don’t want to associate with those specific racists over there (but my kind of racist is okay),” then we’re definitely not on the same page.
consciousness razor @ #18:
I noticed the things you point out too, but I took the diagrams as merely illustrative, rather than accurate and normative — an impressionist approach to Venn diagrams, so to speak.
Marcus @ #17:
I’d still argue that there are still many people who honestly but naively believe in their religion, and even more naively extend this belief and deference to religious figures, most of whom are not at all naive and know exactly which side their bread is buttered. This gives political assholes access to a lot of votes (or, in places where voting is not fashionable, a lot of raw support from people who conveniently attend regular meetings where they can be agitated in the right direction).
At least in this way, religion is still an important force in politics, if only as a tremendously effective skulduggery amplifier. You are right in questioning whether it’s religion itself, or simply a tendency for uncritical submissiveness, that is the actual problem. I say that religion makes uncritical submissiveness a socially acceptable passtime, and that it offers the hierarchy and organization that makes exploiting it a whole lot easier and more efficient. You could argue that, every now and then, it becomes socially acceptable to submit without obvious intervention of religion, but that is not the norm, historically (and religion is often still there in the background to help things along). Today, though, social media and belief-reinforcing recommendation algorithms self-organize users into vast homogeneous masses with even faster reaction times and more direct control than weekly or daily sermons can offer, and at much lower cost than a full clerical command pyramid.
I have to admit that this form of uncritical submissiveness scares me more than religion today. One reason is that amplification based on positive feedback lacks control: there’s no mild disapproval possible: it’s either ecstatic love or full-on rage. Only a madman would want to use controls like that.
If some factually incorrect belief was harmless and had no negative real-world consequences, I wouldn’t care about the prevalence of said belief. For example, I don’t care that some people believe in Bigfoot or knock on wood for good luck.
Regarding politics, I’m now wondering about how you define “politics.” Let’s say the EU passes a law stating that trans people have a right to surgically modify their bodies (that’s what I would call “politics”). Afterwards, some random doctor I run into happens to be a devout Christian. Because of their belief they choose to kick me out of their office. Instead of obeying the law and providing me the surgery I requested, they choose to search for some loophole how to get rid of me without getting sued. When some Christian privately chooses to discriminate me, are they engaging in politics? Alternatively, if I try to talk with said doctor in an attempt to educate them about how they are harming their fellow human being, am I also engaging in politics?
cvoinescu @#20
It goes beyond that—children born in devout families are indoctrinated since early childhood to be obedient and abstain from questioning authority figures. Religions don’t just make uncritical submissiveness socially accepted, they make it mandatory and enforce it upon everybody unlucky to be born in a religious family.
Andreas Avester @ #21:
[…] children born in devout families are indoctrinated since early childhood to be obedient and abstain from questioning authority figures.
Very good point. I have no idea how much of the authoritarian submissiveness Marcus decries is “natural” and how much is due to religious upbringing. I’m not qualified to even guess how strong the correlation is, but I can guess that there are at least two poorly designed studies (subjects: Western undergraduate students) that measure exactly this and confidently put two very different numbers on the strength of this effect.
cvoinescu, @ #20:
Widespread atheism is so rare in the historical record that I don’t think we can say what is or is not the norm in the absence of obvious religious intervention.
Andreas Avester @ #21:
Similarly, I’m not sure that the “born in devout families” qualification is really doing much there…
For most of history, practically everybody was religious, and if we look globally, almost everybody still is. People who are irreligious are so unusual that we should be extremely careful about inferring causal relationships between the presence or absence of religion and any other human variable.
consciousness razor@#18:
Among other things, your first diagram implies that all economics is a system of bullshit. And your second diagram says this:
(1) No authoritarian states, monarchies, or pseudo-democracies are “systems of bullshit.” […]
I wasn’t trying to produce a Venn Diagram – it’s more of an attempt to capture the relationship between and significance of things. I should have labelled it more clearly as pseudoscience.
Andreas Avester@#21:
When some Christian privately chooses to discriminate me, are they engaging in politics?
I want to avoid seeming evasive, but you know i’m going to say these are all squishy concepts. Here’s how I’d slice it in my mind: if they are concerned with following laws and not getting sued, then it’s politics (their priority is legalism and society) but if they are breaking the law because of their religious beliefs then it’s religion. That, however, is still pretty squishy – their actions remain within the real of political reality – they are denying you a real service involving medicine in the real world. I’d say it’s more clearly religion if you went in and they threw a curse upon you or something like that.
I should have said (I tried to imply it) that there are a lot of actions that are a mix of both; i.e.: “politics contextualized by religion.” The Jihadi I hypothesized earlier might be shooting the ATGM at a tank because he is in a sectarian civil war, and he might yell “Allah akbar!” when it hits because that’s how he has learned to cheer for victory. The act of shooting an ATGM at a tank is a political act (war being a subset of politics, per Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu) but the sectarian war is almost certainly a mixture of religion and geopolitics.
I’m not trying to say “we can forget about religion” in my posting. I’m saying why I choose to largely ignore religion anymore: it appears that the interesting things causing the world to become more shitty are political, not religious, even though the dupes doing the dirty work are often religious. When politics becomes “us versus them” religion is one of the go-to tools of the authoritarian; it’s a convenient way of defining who “them” are.
consciousness razor@#19:
If that’s a rough sketch of the basic proposal (that is, it’s what we think is a worthwhile thing for us to work on), then it makes no difference if those other people out there are engaged in a form of “politics” or whatever else you want to call it. Of course, if that’s the kind of thing which is being advanced/endorsed, then we (never mind them) will be engaged in politics, at the scale of entire societies (or subsets, down to morality at an individual scale). And doing that, coming up with a naturalistic form of ethics/politics, is of course perfectly fine. If you want to use “politics” as a dirty word sometimes, this is probably not the place you want to do it.
True; I am bumping up against language problems a lot. That’s why I opened with the disclaimer that I did; if someone wants to ask me “what is politics?” then I’m going to look like I am shovelling a lot of smelly stuff; that’s the lot of philosophers, I fear.
I also should have been clearer that I am not necessarily recommending any action. When I said “let me adjust your perspective” I meant exactly that: “here’s another way you can look at all this” which might make some people who are inclined to be “dictionary atheists” suddenly understand something. Or maybe not. It’s why I flagged the posting as a rant/sermon – I feel that allows me to loosen the rules of engagement and make a few assertions here and there without having to precede them all with “it is my opinion…” and “it appears that…”
I’m also (it’s probably not obvious, so let me make it so) uncomfortable with even using terms like “authoritarian” because I feel that they’re pop psychology psychobabble. On the other hand, it’s a useful label that invokes Altemeyer’s work on authoritarianism, which is much more readable than Adorno. There is this fascinating question in (?psychology, ?political science?) which is “why does it appear that there are some people who just want to be led?” Altemeyer comes perilously close to saying it’s in their nature; i.e.: that they are born that way, which is problematic. It brings in that whole nature/nurture thing in a particularly nasty way when you consider that other animals in the wild exhibit pack/leadership/submission behaviors. But I digress…
Anyway, we’re still starting with the world as we understand it. That’s the point, and it can’t somehow be left out. If you drop that part for whatever reason, then you’re not engaged in the same project anymore. What you’d be doing instead, I have no idea. But it would essentially mean you think there’s some other way of determining how we should live with each other in this world, besides looking around and trying to learn what’s true about it (and what’s false). That sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
I agree with that. It appears to me that I’m stumbling around the question of whether religion is the cause of politics, or the effect of it. Of course cause/effect is never comprehensibly simple – the answer would have to be that they affect eachother.
As an atheist sermonizing at fellow atheists, that would be my point: don’t just reach for the assumption that the other guys’ behavior is caused by religion. They could be playing politics and contextualizing it as religion. (briefly, when I say “contextualizing it as religion” I mean that they are using the vocabulary of religion to describe their politics. For example, the evangelical who said that Trump may be losing the mandate of heaven appeared to be saying that polling results represent the mandate of heaven. The evangelical is talking nonsense but is doing so in a way designed to be comprehensible to other evangelicals that are able to consume that particular kind of nonsense.)
Since you don’t think there’s a god, it’s not clear what you are actually trying to say about atheism here, assuming it’s not something very strange like “I agree with dictionary atheism, but I feel like I shouldn’t be saying that I agree with it, because fuck those people.” If the message is supposed to be sort of like that, something like “racism is totally legit and reasonable, but I don’t want to associate with those specific racists over there (but my kind of racist is okay),” then we’re definitely not on the same page.
My message, which I appear to have failed to convey, is to encourage atheists to not simply assume that their opponents’ actions are really driven by their opponents’ religion. It could be their opponents’ politics – and, if we understand that, we ought to realize that no amount of atheist intellectualizing is going to do anything to scratch the surface of their beliefs.
I suppose I just reiterated Upton Sinclair:
cvoinescu@#22:
I have no idea how much of the authoritarian submissiveness Marcus decries is “natural” and how much is due to religious upbringing. I’m not qualified to even guess how strong the correlation is, but I can guess that there are at least two poorly designed studies (subjects: Western undergraduate students) that measure exactly this and confidently put two very different numbers on the strength of this effect.
Bingo!
There’s Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians which does a good job of pointing out that (shock:) a lot of authoritarians are religious. Or is it that a lot of religious people are authoritarian? I forget which. And Altemeyer even has an “authoritarianism scale” which is a questionnaire that purports to measure how authoritarian someone is. In other words it measures how well you fit on the scale that it measures. That’s a standard complaint I and many others have with social science questionnaires and IQ tests, etc.
Altemeyer also dances around the observation that children of authoritarians grow up being more likely to be authoritarians according to the questionnaire. Is it nature or nurture? I don’t fucking care because it’s just another damn social science questionnaire and it’s worth a bumwipe on a good day. I can imagine that the child of an evangelical is going to grow up beaten into the shape of an evangelical – or else – or perhaps they believe in it. What I want to see is the “authoritarian gene” detectable in twin studies and located on a specific site on some chromosome or other.
Marcus, @ #27:
Even if it does have a robust genetic basis, it’s almost certainly a complex trait involving many different genes, and its expression is almost certainly modulated by a multitude of environmental factors. This sort of genetic reductionism doesn’t really work even with relatively simple things like height… Yet nobody argues that height isn’t a real thing. And it would remain a real thing even if you could only measure it by comparing people to each other, rather than by reference to some objective external standard.
Dunc@#28:
Even if it does have a robust genetic basis, it’s almost certainly a complex trait involving many different genes, and its expression is almost certainly modulated by a multitude of environmental factors. This sort of genetic reductionism doesn’t really work even with relatively simple things like height… Yet nobody argues that height isn’t a real thing
Exactly. It’s going to be so complex to figure out that it’s not even worth it. Suppose that “authoritarianism” (whatever that is) is partly inherited and partly a matter of environment; well, which has the greater effect? Is it 99% environment and 1% inherited? Or the other way around? Genetic determinism is easy to shit-can by introducing the question of degree of effect.
This is opinion but here’s what I think may be going on:
Let’s hypothesize that children (and probably horses, dogs, and all social animals except cats) (just kidding) have a critical period in which they are prepared to learn things based on authority. For example, I once witnessed a mother bear teaching her cubs how to cross the road, using gentle mother-bear swats on the ass to explain things to the cubs. The cubs learned pretty fast. Let’s hypothesize that human children have similar mechanisms: when you’re a toddler, you don’t want to challenge your parents epistemological foundations when they say “do not put your tongue in the light socket.” You want to learn not to do that without having to have the experience, and you want to never challenge that learning because, well, challenging that learning is best left to people like Joe Rogan who are skeptical about all the things. In other words, there may be a critical period in which young creatures are more willing to learn and to maintain those lessons as uncritically accepted beliefs.
It actually makes sense! It’s just like giving your AI a training-set that does not include “first challenge the origin of your training set!” as an important concept. So, if learning happens due to the vagaries of time and perhaps there’s even some genetic determinist influence, some people learn that listening to rules that are delivered in a certain tone of voice, or by a person in a big hat – those are the good rules. Adopt them!
I will note that a big piece of the “make a training set” game for AIs is figuring out whether the AI should favor things that it learns early in its life, or whether it should favor new learning. In a human, would that express itself as “confirmation bias”? And there are studies that indicate it is harder to train out a learned behavior than it is to learn an entirely new behavior. Could it be that what we’re seeing is similar: a preference for an early period in which we accept knowledge more uncritically?
Shit, did I just commit some evolutionary psychology there or what?
I’ll let you off since it’s your birthday…
Look, I would say that you are doing politics, when you say things like “this is how society should be.” That is just a moral claim, pertaining to larger-scale groups and systems, rather than smaller-scale interpersonal relationships and so forth. They’re the same thing, although we do have a separate word in English that’s normally used for “bigger” groups and less often for “smaller” ones. Sounds good so far?
Many aspects of religions are about making political/moral claims like this. That’s an empirical fact, and I don’t think you want to deny that.
But I don’t think it’s a question of whether those parts of the religion “cause” the politics or the other way around. A religion is (in part) a particular way of doing politics. Some parts of religions aren’t a way of doing politics. So we should remember that, but it’s easier to use “religion” as a shorthand, if that’s understood.
An analogy:
You could get from your house to the store by walking. You could get there by driving a car. And so forth. There’s a way of doing it like this, and there are others like that.
When we’re dealing with something like this, it’s hard to make sense of your question. “Did transportation method A cause the trip to the store, or did the trip to the store cause transportation method A?” I would say neither, and maybe should’ve asked a different question which may have a more interesting answer.
I don’t know what other types of things (which are neither transportation methods nor trips to the store) may have caused this to happen, such that you make decision A rather than another one. And to be clear, there’s no denial that some set of things caused you to pick method A. But no matter what that is, the fact is that you are still (one way or another) taking a trip from your house to the store.
We definitely already knew that sort of fact. (It’s why we were talking about any of this in the first place.) But the goal was to understand what’s going on. Of course, with my very simple example, doing so isn’t very difficult. In any case, understanding it doesn’t always mean we need to map the terms so that we end up with something like “method causes trip” or “trip causes method.” Because causation isn’t always the type of relation two arbitrary things have with one another. So you’re not going to understand them, or you’ll confuse matters, equivocate, etc., if you tried to fit it into that mold anyway, where it doesn’t really belong. Makes sense?
To get back to the point, I should have said religion is not just “a particular way” of doing it, but is also “a particularly bad way” of doing politics. Why is it bad? It gives bad results, the epistemology is fucked up beyond all recognition, and it depends on nonexistent entities. You could point at all sorts of problems with it, from start to finish. I can try to imagine a world where there are no religious people or few enough that nobody should worry all that much about it. Even in that very different world, somebody could entertain different possible approaches that might be taken, and they should also conclude that religious ones would be a thoroughly terrible idea.
Dunc @#23
I was born in an atheist family in an atheist city. Growing up, at school I interacted with about 100 people (my classmates, all the teachers). Among all of these people, I only knew two who at some point told me that they are Christian. One of my classmates told the rest of us about the Sunday school she was attending, and my Russian teacher told in a private conversation about being a member of some church. The rest of the people I knew at school either didn’t talk about their religious beliefs or were nonbelievers.
I grew up in an environment where I was mostly encouraged to ask question and question the things I’m being told. Some of my teachers even tried to explicitly teach us some critical thinking skills. Sure, I ran into a couple of adults who wanted discipline and expected kids to not ask questions, but those were the exceptions.
I have spoken with people who grew up in devoutly religious families and experienced a very different upbringing, they were taught to consider the Bible and everything a pastor says as absolute truth, they were taught not to question their beliefs. As children, they were punished each time they dared to audibly disagree with some religious authority.
Of course, I understand the shortcomings of anecdotal evidence. But I do think that children are raised differently in various environments, and certain kinds of upbringing are likely to encourage specific behavior.
By the way, I also know people who grew up in religious families where questions were allowed and critical thinking encouraged. I’m not claiming that all religious families and schools teach blind obedience.
Marcus @#25
Of course, I wouldn’t want to define “politics” either.
It’s just that when you said, “But that’s politics. The only way to get rid of religiously-inspired harm is to defang it politically,” I immediately thought of some forms of religiously-inspired harm that cannot be eradicated by passing new laws. I was about to argue against your statement, but then I realized that maybe your idea of “politics” differs from how I’d define it.
Marcus @#27
I just looked it up. I also did the test at https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ All my answers were either “very strongly disagree” or “very strongly agree.” According to this test, I’m as non-authoritarian as possible. That being said, this test sort of sucks. Firstly, it doesn’t measure how “authoritarian” someone is. It measures how conservative and religious they are. All the questions were about a specific set of opinions American Christians tend to have. Basically, it goes like this, “Do you have the standard set of beliefs an average American Christian is likely to have? Yes? Then you are ‘authoritarian.’” WTF? A non-religious white supremacist who wants a new Hitler as the president is bound to score lower in this test merely because they probably don’t hold some Christian-specific beliefs. But would such a person really be “less authoritarian”? Of course not.
This reminds me, one of the questions in this test was about nudism. Last summer I was in a nudist beach where I had a conversation with a bigot who opposed LGBTQIA+ rights and hated Jews and was willing to oppress them in every way imaginable. Simultaneously, he was relaxing in a nudist beach and had no problem with women’s rights. People who are willing to oppress others and obey some authoritarian leader can have a mix of various political opinions.
Marcus @#26
My own assumption is that probably genes influence how willing some person is to obey others. That being said, my bet is that nurture is likely to be more important. A naturally obedient child who is taught critical thinking skills and encouraged to ask questions and allowed to disobey is likely to grow up as less authoritarian than a naturally disobedient child who gets beaten up each time they dare to question something.
For example, back when I was a small child, I somewhere heard that spanking children is illegal in my country. That meant I was allowed to fight back. And I sure did. I “won” several fistfights against adults. It usually went like this: Some adult wants to discipline me and hits me. I hit back. We exchange a couple of punches. I absolutely refuse to give up—the more they hit me, the more desperately I fight back, totally ignoring the pain from any hits they managed to land on me. The adult realizes that their attempt to discipline me isn’t working—unless they break all my limbs, I won’t give up. At that point the adult gives up. I have “won” the fight. My ego skyrocketed. In my childish naivety, I believed that I must be absolutely amazing if I won a fistfight against an adult (it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t “winning” these fights, adults simply decided to stop). I wasn’t hurt or traumatized, I was absolutely happy. And did I mention my ego skyrocketed after each failed attempt to discipline me?
“Stubborn” just happened to be one of my personality traits that I was born with, which is why I refused to obey and fought back, but there’s more to it. I was raised in an environment where spanking was illegal. An adult couldn’t just show up at a hospital with a beaten up kid and get away with it. Besides, even if light spanking was socially semi-accepted, seriously beating up a child was not. This is why each attempt to force me to obey failed so miserably. Each time I tried to disobey an authority figure, I succeeded, I received tons of positive encouragement to keep on being disobedient, because it worked so well for me.
Now let’s imagine another child, just as independent and stubborn as I was. He is raised in a society where seriously beating up a child is allowed and even encouraged. Each time he tries to disobey, he gets badly hurt. He gets negative feedback teaching him that it is better to shut up, get on his knees, and obey. Such a child is bound to develop a different behavior patterns and personality than I did even if our genes and natural inclinations were identical.
By the way, I was a weird kid. When some teacher told me, “You must study hard in order to get good exam scores, in order to get accepted in a university, in order to get a good job as an adult,” I obeyed, I really studied hard and whatnot, my grades in some school subjects were absolutely perfect. When some other teacher told me, “You must study hard, because I say so,” I refused to submit any homework and literally slept during the lessons. Depending on how some teacher talked with me, I could be either the most obedient or the most disobedient child in the entire class. I was willing to follow instructions but only as long as I believed that there’s a reason for me to choose to do so. Otherwise I just refused to submit to pressure. And I was really stubborn. Oddly enough, most of the time when I disobeyed adults, afterwards I got positive feedback and encouragement to keep up with it. It was sort of fun and amusing to piss off annoying teachers with some authoritarian tendencies.
The connection between religion in general and authoritarianism in general actually seems pretty weak to me. Some religious people are authoritarian in their politics and perhaps their general mindset, but so are some non-religious people. Some of the most authoritarian regimes of the last century were officially atheist. As far as I can tell people can be religious or non-religious for a wide variety of reasons, and there is no clear connection between religion and a specific type of politics if you look at the whole world and the whole sweep of human history. Even if you are looking at a specific place and time, say the USA in the early 21st century, the picture isn’t as clear as a lot of people think. At most we can say that certain subsets of religion tend to correlate with greater likelihood of certain political views.
I read The Authoritarians by Altemeyer over the past two days. I’m mildly surprised about the fact that you talked about this book favorably. I mean, I thought you dislike psychology and its assumptions.
Personally, I have gotten really skeptical about psychology. I figured out on my own that IQ tests are problematic, later reading The Mismeasure of Man only showed me that the problems are deeper than I expected. Recently I got even further annoyed upon finding out that Brian Wansink was a fraud. A few years ago I read his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think and found its claims plausible and interesting. Finding out that he mislead his readers and lied about the findings sucked, because I personally had been tricked. Now I have come to the point where I automatically suspect all the claims about psychology.
When it comes to Altemeyer, I have one more reason to be skeptical about his claims: I don’t want to accept some claim only because I like it. Altemeyer basically says that I’m better than all those authoritarian followers, he gives me a reason to pat myself on the back. Yet if I want to avoid accepting false beliefs, I must rein in my arrogance. Many years ago, back when I was 12, I got extremely high score on an IQ test. When my school teacher claimed that IQ tests are reliable, I wanted to believe this claim because of my arrogance. I liked the idea of being smarter than everybody else I my class, so I just accepted that IQ test scores are meaningful. I don’t want to make the same mistake again. Being told that I’m better than others feels good, which is why I must be extra suspicious whenever somebody tells me that.
And suspicious I was. As I was reading the book, my mind constantly offered reasons why author’s claims could have been far-fetched and alternative explanations for the questionnaire’s results. Let’s start with the central questionnaire of the book and why it is problematic. Altemeyer stated that “authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority.” That’s definitely not what the survey measured, it was basically an attitude survey.
In a footnote to the first chapter, the author addresses my criticism:
Here’s the problem—just because the author understands and acknowledges the shortcomings of his survey doesn’t stop these shortcomings from being there.
Some of the questions in this survey are exactly what he claimed such a survey shouldn’t have:
“Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.”
“The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and the ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live.”
All of these are just opinion questions. They don’t imply that the person answering them also wants to force their personal preferences upon others through abuse. Why are such questions even in the survey? Because answers to these questions correlate with the rest of the questionnaire? So what?
Altemeyer also admits that this survey was created for North Americans and would be useless in different cultures, for example, a Communist state where the socially accepted beliefs differ.
My suspicion is that this survey is problematic even in the North America. It catches religious authoritarian followers while failing to identify everybody else with the same personality but different beliefs. What about a TERF lesbian who is an authoritarian follower willing to inflict suffering upon trans women? What about authoritarian atheists?
Let’s look at cases like the Elevatorgate or Rationality Rules transphobic YouTube videos. In each of these cases an atheist leader got criticized, and his fans and followers immediately excused his shitty behavior, protected their dear leader, and started to assault whoever opposed the atheist leader. Isn’t this the same behavior? Don’t atheist authoritarian followers have the same personality as Christian ones? But the questionnaire is about specific beliefs, hence atheists will score low in it.
If you wanted a questionnaire that can detect “a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority,” questions should be vague so that a Communist, or atheist, or a Christian could all get high scores in the survey; you shouldn’t have questions about Christian-specific beliefs.
Next Altemeyer uses the results of such a biased survey in order to claim that religious people are more prone to having this psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority. Well, duh—the survey was purposely made to make it much harder for an atheist or a Nazi or a Communist authoritarian follower to get high scores in this survey.
By the way, here’s a quote from Altemeyer: “The Weschler Adult Intelligence Survey, probably the most widely used IQ test, has a reliability of about .90. So also does the RWA scale, and nearly all the other tests I have developed that are mentioned in this book.” Seeing the author praise IQ tests as reliable sure didn’t inspire in me any confidence in his work.
Of course, the problems don’t end here. So you have made a questionnaire and gotten some correlations. Great. But how do you know that your interpretation of what this correlation means isn’t farfetched? Maybe there are alternative explanations for the results you got?
There’s a difference between personality vs. attitudes. The latter aren’t necessarily a reliable proxy for measuring the former. Let’s imagine a Christian who goes to church on Sunday and hears a sermon about how gays must be punished and corrected. The next week he fills out the questionnaire. Maybe he doesn’t have the authoritarian personality trait? Maybe in the questionnaire this person merely repeats whatever the preacher told him? If gay stoning happened for real, the chances are he wouldn’t even want to participate, and his peers would have to coerce him to join. In an attitude survey it is perfectly possible for a person to report something that isn’t reliable and doesn’t truly reveal some hidden personality trait.
Next question: do fixed personalities even exist? I’m skeptical. Let’s consider a very trivial trait—introversion vs. extroversion. In my case I’m neither. If I’m in a group of people I like and discussing a topic I find interesting, I can be very talkative. If I’m bored or worried about something else, I can spend an entire evening without saying a word. What we call “personality traits” simply refers to common behaviors. If you commonly tell lies, you will be labeled “dishonest,” if you commonly argue for yourself, you will be labeled “assertive.” And so on. But how a person behaves can depend on current circumstances and change in various situations.
My own answers for the authoritarian followers test were straightforward—atheist, therefore low scores. The test for social dominators was more interesting. I support equality, which lowered my score. But this says nothing about my personality. I happened to be born with a female body, in a poor family, queer, and bisexual. I want equality, because otherwise I’d be the first one to get crushed in a non-equal world, I’d have no chances in life whatsoever. If I had been born white, male, straight, cis, and wealthy, the chances are that my political preferences would differ.
Moreover, for pretty much all the questions in this questionnaire my answer was “it depends”:
“Would you be cold-blooded and vengeful, if that’s what it took to reach your goals?” It depends on the situation.
“Do you enjoy having the power to hurt people when they anger or disappoint you?” I might. I would enjoy being able to hurt a transphobe. I would intentionally abstain from hurting an irritatingly loud child.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world where you have to be ruthless at times.” It depends. Some social groups are caring and kind to their members; other behave as if we lived in a dog-eat-dog world. I choose to cooperate and be nice to people who are willing to do the same to me. However, if I was challenged by some wannabe bully, I’d crush them. I prefer to crush others rather than be crushed.”
“Charity (i.e. giving somebody something for nothing) is admirable, not stupid.” It depends. In some situations it can be admirable, in other occasions—stupid.
“Do you enjoy taking charge of things and making people do things your way?” It depends on the situation.
“Do you like other people to be afraid of you?” It depends. For example, if I could make transphobic doctors afraid that I might sue them, then that would be nice.
Do I even have a fixed personality? Who knows…
Maybe other people’s actions are more fixed and less variable than my own, but I’m sceptical about psychologists’ ability to measure personality traits. Never mind that survey respondents do a miserable job fairly evaluating themselves. Or even their own attitudes. For example, I know lots of people who verbally claim that charity is admirable while failing to donate even a single cent.
IQ tests measure a person’s ability to solve a specific kind of tasks. Claiming that psychologists can measure inborn “intelligence” though such a proxy is false. Any tests that claims to measure “psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority” is bound to have the same problem.
In the book there were various claims, interpretations, explanations why authoritarian leaders or followers behaved in some specific way. Each time I read those, I kept coming up with alternative explanations. I could quote passages from the book and give examples for what alternative explanations I can come up with, but this comment is already getting too long, so I’ll skip that. I think the source of my doubts should be clear by now.
Never mind a core question like what makes some people more prone to be willing to submit to some authority figure. Who knows… Maybe the author’s guesses were correct, but I’d rather suspend my judgment and conclude that I cannot know the truth about why some people do some harmful things.
After reading this book I’m not any more knowledgeable about this question. What I’m willing to accept remains the same as what I was willing to claim before reading this book:
(1) Some people appear to be more willing to submit to some authority figure than others;
(2) It could be caused by either nature or nurture, probably a combination of both;
(3) There might be some correlation between submissiveness to authority and religiosity, but I won’t make claims about which causes which. Maybe children born in religious homes are raised differently and become more submissive. Maybe people who are genetically prone to submitting to authority are more likely to join some religion.
Words like “appear to be,” “could,” and “might” are used on purpose.
Altemeyer’s speculation about what might be going on seemed somewhat interesting for me, but that’s all. I’m not accepting his theories as facts. I barely finished this book, I wouldn’t recommend it to others, because it has all the usual shortcomings of psychology research.
Wow, Andreas. Hell of a long diatribe, there.
Not gonna address the vast bulk of it (after all, your opinion is your opinion), but:
You should be aware that ‘reliability’ in that context refers to consistency, not to validity; that is, taking the test again will yield similar results. Nothing more.