Pity the white liberal man

For the record, I hate you because you're wearing that T-shirt

On Tuesday, New York magazine posted an article by Jonathan Chait attacking "political correctness", and Twitter took notice. Since then, loads of responses have been written, running the gamut from supportive to combative to dismissive to outraged. My initial reaction fell nearest to "dismissive". I have a very low opinion of Jonathan Chait, and I have a very low opinion of complaints against "political correctness". An article by Jonathan Chait complaining about political correctness... I was afraid the eye-rolling might never stop.

I knew what the article said before I read it. No, that's not true. I knew Chait's basic thesis before I read it. To his credit, this isn't a standard expression of straight/white/male resentment produced on auto-pilot. This is a standard expression of straight/white/male resentment produced with great care and skill. I guess that's a pretty back-handed compliment, and there's no getting around that, but I don't mean it to be. What I'm trying to say is that Chait argues his position about as well as it can be argued. And I'm glad he did, because I think this argument is very much worth having. It's not going away, in any event.

Chait's article provides a number of examples which convey his point very clearly, and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to it. It's easy for me to identify with his perspective. I think it's outrageous that a guy should lose his job at one publication for having written a satirical piece in another. I agree with him on most of the examples he gives. Chait's article attempts to bundle these examples together into a dangerous trend of political correctness run amok, but it's not clear to me what broader issues connects his examples. He calls it "political correctness", and he defines it as a "is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate." But there's a practical problem he doesn't seem to have noticed.

PZ Myers puts his finger on it: What exactly do you want, Jonathan Chait? It seems like a pretty innocuous question, but it is in fact utterly lethal to Chait's entire position, because Chait cannot even begin to answer it. It's not that there is no answer, but that any answer he might honestly give will be discrediting. He wants leftists to stop doing stuff he doesn't like. That's the long and the short of it. The most charitable answer (charitable because it assumes that he's right about everything) is that he wants people to stop being wrong about everything. I want people to stop being wrong about everything too. But the people who I think are wrong about stuff (like Chait) usually think that they're right.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Chait's article that would have any hope of convincing anyone towards Chait's point-of-view. That is to say, if you resemble the villains of political correctness Chait describes in his piece, there is nothing in the piece to explain why that's a bad thing. In all of the examples he uses, he never explains why his view of the controversy is correct. Partly that's because he chooses his examples in order to create the impression that he is correct. Partly it's because he skews his presentation of those examples to reinforce that impression. Mostly, I think, it's because it never occurred to him that he might have anything to learn from anyone to his left.

In every one of Chait's examples of leftists "going too far", the leftists in question disagree that they are going too far, and Chait doesn't even bother to argue the point. You need to do a lot more work to give "going too far" any kind of content as a criticism, and Chait doesn't even bother. To be fair, he can't, because categories like "too far" and "not far enough" are too simplistic to accommodate the wide range of disparate issues Chait is trying to address all at once. There is no one argument that simultaneously explains why that guy shouldn't have been fired and why trigger-warnings are unnecessary, for example. Each of those issues requires its own argument to establish what is the appropriate position. There is no broad principle, not even "political correctness", that ties it all together.

But Chait's piece has struck a chord with aggrieved white liberals, including many of atheism's white liberal "leaders" like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Chait's article doesn't make any mention of atheism, but the "political correctness" he's talking about is precisely what has caused "deep rifts" in the online atheist community. Like Chait, Dawkins has frequently been the target of criticism from his left, and that clearly gets under his skin (for example, see Adam Lee's The Suppression of Richard Dawkins). For Chait, the criticism tends to come from Ta-Nehisi Coates and "black Twitter". For Dawkins, it's what he calls "radical feminists" (it's really mainstream feminists, but he doesn't know that). They are both complaining about being criticized from the left, and they both feel (genuinely, I'm sure) bullied and intimidated by people who don't seem to recognize their inherent goodness. 

They both think they're dealing with a new kind of toxic leftism which has emerged only in the last few years. They each have a sense that social media is somehow driving the problem, but neither one has yet grokked the real story... in a world of social media, they are no longer the gatekeepers of respectable opinion on the left. Before Twitter, leftist opinions were confined to academia because they were excluded by the media. Anything to the left of milky-white liberalism is still mostly excluded by the media, but not social media. The only way this problem will ever go away to the satisfaction of Chait and Dawkins would be if leftists were once again marginalized and denied a voice in the conversation. The honest answer to PZ's question is that Chait wants to go back to a world where opinions to the left of his own were ignored, excluded and suppressed. 

The elephant in the room

I feel like there is a topic looming over this blog that I have to address, but I'm not sure how to approach it. I'm not at all ambivalent about the issue itself, but I'm conflicted about how to talk about it. I feel like the stakes are very high, but I don't understand why that is. I have either witnessed or participated in enough of these conversations to know that they can turn very nasty very quickly. I'm also acutely aware that discussing this topic will probably alienate me from a significant portion of the audience I'm trying to reach. On the other hand, the two main goals of this blog are to address issues of consequence from an atheist perspective and to address controversies within atheism, and this topic sits at the intersection of those goals. 

The topic is feminism.

I'm surprised by both the extent and the intensity of the hostility atheists have toward feminism. Surprised and disappointed. I'm also surprised and disappointed when prominent atheists who rarely discuss political issues not directly related to atheism still go out of their way to attack feminism. I'm surprised and disappointed that this is the issue around which factions are being formed. But if I must take a side, then I must side with feminism.

If you'll allow me a brief digression, I was aware that Richard Dawkins was controversial and divisive before I knew why that was so. Around the time that "The God Delusion" was published, I started to notice that he was frequently being denounced in rather harsh terms, and I started to wonder why. Whenever I saw one of these controversies flare up online, I would always look into it, and every time I would come away with the impression that Dawkins's critics were being totally unreasonable. After this happened a few times, I gradually became of fan of Richard Dawkins, and I owe it all to his critics.

I mention this because a very similar process brought me around to feminism. It all started with "Elevatorgate". At some point I became aware that there was a raging online controversy involving this person I had never heard of before. Her name was Rebecca Watson, and wanting to see what all the fuss was about, I watched her infamous video in which she relates a personal experience about an encounter with a man in a hotel elevator. I'm not going to go through the whole story. Suffice it to say I quickly concluded that Watson's point was quite reasonable, and I was stunned and horrified by the reaction she got for it. It just seemed grossly out of proportion, and so very hateful. When I saw that other women were dealing with similarly hateful attacks in response to similarly reasonable points, I decided that it was no longer enough for me to be passively supportive of feminism in principle. That's when I became a feminist.

To tell you the truth, I really don't understand the other side of this at all. When they talk about feminism, I don't recognize what they're talking about. They describe this authoritarian monster that ruthlessly enforces a strict conformity to dogma, but I don't see any of that. Besides, how would that even work? Shouldn't there be a trail of victims: a long list of careers ended by angry feminists? I can think of many careers which have survived angry feminists, but I can't think of any that were ended.

One thing that puzzles me is that it's not enough for anti-feminists to just disagree with feminists about something. Anti-feminists seem to believe that merely expressing feminist opinions is inherently harmful in some unspecified way. In discussing the "shirtstorm" controversy, Richard Dawkins concluded not only that the shirt was perfectly appropriate, but also that it was an outrage for anyone to think otherwise. I am aware that some opinions are so vile that they are an outrage unto themselves, but I can't see how questioning the appropriateness of a shirt could ever meet that standard.

There's something weird going on here, and I'm fascinated by it, so I'm going to talk about it on this blog. You can expect me to weigh in on these kinds of controversies in future as they arise. In addition to that, I'm also interested in applying some good old-fashioned skeptical rigor to the claims of the anti-feminists, because I don't think they hold water. As for the broader picture, I believe that some women have been driven away from atheism in part due to its hostility to feminism. I think that weakens us as a movement and hurts us as a community. That sucks, and I want to help reverse it if I can.