The great blog Genealogy of Religion posted this video with a somewhat approving commentary:
The video started off with panache and promised some entertainment, however, I found myself increasingly annoyed as the video continued. The problem is that this is an exchange of cliches that pretends to be a fight of truth against ignorance. Sure, Storm doesn’t put forward a very coherent argument for her position, but neither does Minchin. His description of science vs. faith is laughable (being in awe at the size of the universe, my foot) and nowhere does he display any nuance nor, frankly, any evidence that he is doing anything other than parroting what he’s heard on some TV interview with Dawkins. I have much more sympathy with the Storms of this world than these self-styled defenders of science whose only credentials are that they can remember a bit of high school physics or chemistry and have read an article by some neo-atheist in Wired. What’s worse, it’s would be rationalists like him who do what passes for science reporting in major newspapers or on the BBC.
But most of all, I find it distasteful that he chose a young woman as his antagonist. If he wished to take on the ‘antiscience’ establishment, there are so many much better figures to target for ridicule. Why not take on the pseudo spiritualists in the mainstream media with their ecumenical conciliatory garbage. How about taking on tabloids like Nature or Science that publish unreliable preliminary probes as massive breakthroughs. How about universities that put out press releases distorting partial findings. Why not take on economists who count things that it makes no sense to count just to make things seem scientific. Or, if he really has nothing better to do, let him lay into some super rich creationist pastor. But no, none of these captured his imagination, instead he chose to focus his keen intellect and deep erudition on a stereotype of a young woman who’s trying to figure out a way to be taken seriously in a world filled with pompous frauds like Minchin.
The blog post commenting on the video sparked a debate about the limits of knowledge (Note: This is a modified version of my own comment). But while there’s a debate to be had about the limits of knowledge (what this blog is about), this is not the occasion. There is no need to adjudicate about which of these two is more ‘on to something’. They’re not touching on anything of epistemological interest, they’re just playing a game of social positioning in the vicinity of interesting issues. But in this game, people like Michin have been given a lot more chips to play with than people like Storm. It’s his follies and prejudices and not hers that are given a fair hearing. So I’d rather spend a few vacuous moments in her company than endorse his mindless ranting.
And as for ridiculing people for stupidity or shallow thinking, I’m more than happy to take part. But I want to have a look at those with power and prestige, because they just as often as Storms act just as silly and irrationally the moment they step out of their areas of expertise. I see this all the time in language, culture and history (where I know enough about to judge the level of insight). Here’s the most recent one that caught my eye:
It comes from a side note in a post about evolutionary foundations of violence by a self-proclaimed scientist (the implied hero in Minchin’s rant):
It is said that the Bedouin have nearly 100 different words for camels, distinguishing between those that are calm, energetic, aggressive, smooth-gaited, or rough, etc. Although we carefully identify a multitude of wars — the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, and so forth — we don’t have a plural form for peace.
Well, this paragon of reason could be forgiven for not knowing what sort of non-sense this ‘100 words for’ cliche is. The Language Log has spilled enough bits on why this and other snowclones are silly. But the second part of the argument is just stupid. And it is a typical scientist blundering about the world as if the rules of evidence didn’t apply to him outside the lab and as if data not in a spreadsheet did not require a second thought. As if being a PhD in evolutionary theory meant everything else he says about humans must be taken seriously. But how can such a moronic statement be taken as anything but feeble twaddle to be laughed at and belittled? How much more cumulatively harmful are moments like these (and they are all over the place) than the socializing efforts of people like Storm from the video?
So, I should probably explain why this is so brainless. First, we don’t have a multitude of words war (just like the Bedouin don’t have 100 or even 1 dozen for a camel). We just have the one and we have a lot of adjectives with which we can modify its meaning. And if we want to look for some that are at least equivalent to possible camel attributes, we won’t choose names of famous wars but rather things like civil war, total war, cold war, holy war, global war, naval war, nuclear war, etc. I’m sure West Point or even Wikipedia has much to say about a possible classification. And of course, all of this applies to peace in exactly the same way. There are ‘peaces’ with names like Peace of Westphalia, Arab-Israeli Peace, etc. with just as many attributive pairs like international peace, lasting peace, regional peace, global peace, durable peace, stable peace, great peace, etc. I went to a corpus to get some examples but that this must be the case was obvious and a simple Google search would give enough examples to confirm a normal language speaker’s intuition. But this ‘scientist’ had a point to make and because he’s spent twenty years doing research in evolution of violence, he must surely be right about everything on the subject.
Now, I’m sure this guy is not an idiot. He’s obviously capable of analysis and presenting a coherent argument. But there’s an area that he chose to address about which he is about as qualified to make pronouncements as Storm and Minchin are about the philosophy of science. And what he said there is stupid and he should be embarrassed for having said it. Should he be ridiculed and humiliated for it the way I did here? No. He made the sort of mistake everyone makes from high school students to Nobel laureates. He thought he knew something and didn’t bother to examine his knowledge. Or he did try to examine it but didn’t have the right tools to do it. Fine. But he’s a scientist (and a man not subject to stereotypes about women) so we give him and too many like him a pass. But Storm, a woman who like so many of her generation uses star signs to talk about relationships and is uncomfortable with the grasping maw of classifying science chomping on the very essence of her being, she is fair game?
It’s this inequality that makes me angry. We afford one type of shallowness the veneer respectability and rake another one over the coals of ridicule and opprobrium. Not on this blog!
Juliana Coutinho via Compfight
UPDATE: I was just listening to this interview with a philosopher and historian of science about why there was so much hate coming from scientists towards the Gaia hypothesis and his summation, it seems to me, fits right in with what this post is about. He says: “When scientists feel insecure and threatened, they turn nasty.” And it doesn’t take a lot of study of the history and sociology of science to find ample examples of this. The ‘science wars’, the ‘linguistics wars’, the neo-Darwinst thought purism, the list just goes on. The world view of scientism is totalising and has to deal with exactly the same issues as other totalising views such as monotheistic religions with constitutive ontological views or socio-economic utopianisms (e.g. neo-liberalism or Marxism).
And one of those issues is how do you afford respect to or even just maintain conversation with people who challenge your ideological totalitarianism – or in other words, people who are willfully and dangerously “wrong”. You can take the Minchin approach of suffering in silence at parties and occasionally venting your frustration at innocent passerbys, but that can lead to outbreaks group hysteria as we saw with the Sokal hoax or one of the many moral panic campaigns.
Or you can take the more difficult journey of giving up some of your claims on totality and engaging with even those most threatening to to you as human beings; the way Feyerabend did or Gould sometimes tried to do. This does not mean patiently proselytizing in the style of evangelical missionaries but more of an ecumenical approach of meeting together without denying who you are. This will inevitably involve moments where irreconcilable differences will lead to a stand on principles (cf. Is multi-culturalism bad for women?) but even in those cases an effort at understanding can benefit both sides as with the question of vaccination described in this interview. At all stages, there will be temptation at “understanding” the other person by reducing them to our own framework of humanity. Psychologizing a religious person as an unsophisticate dealing with feelings of awe in the face of incomprehensible nature or pitying the atheist for not being able to feel the love of God and reach salvation. There is no solution. No utopia of perfect harmony and understanding. No vision of lions and lambs living in peace. But acknowledging our differences and slowing down our outrage can perhaps make us into the better versions of us and help us stop wasting time trying to reclaim other people’s stereotypes.
UPDATE 2: I am aware of the paradox between the introduction and the conclusion of the previous update. Bonus points for spotting it. I actually hold a slightly more nuanced view than the first paragraph would imply but that is a topic for another blog post.