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Bond - Whyi Am No Longer A Skeptic
Bond - Whyi Am No Longer A Skeptic
by
Stephen Bond
Former Skeptic rejects the Skeptic Movement and explains why
REJECTING SKEPTICISM
This is not a tale of how I found Jesus, of how acupuncture cured my haemorrhoids,
or of how my alien abductors revealed the ultimate truth about 9/11. I still have
no faith in anything supernatural, mystical, psychical or spiritual. I still regard
the scientific method as the best way to model reality, and reason as the best way
to uncover truth. I�m no longer a skeptic, but not one of my core beliefs has
changed.
What has changed is that I have come to reject skepticism as an identity. Shared
identities like skepticism are problematic at the best of times, for numerous
reasons, but I can accept them as a means of giving power and a voice to the
disenfranchised. And indeed, this is how skeptics like to portray themselves: an
embattled minority standing up for science, the lone redoubt of reason in an
irrational world, the vanguard against the old order of ignorance and superstition.
As a skeptic, I was happy to accept this narrative and believe I was shoring up the
barricades.
However, it�s a narrative that corresponds poorly with reality. In the modern
world, science, technology and reason are central and vital, and this is widely
recognised, including at the highest level. On any major political decision, the
technocrat speaks louder than the bishop, or anyone else, for that matter. Sure,
Bush and Blair were noted god-botherers, but if you seriously think that, say, Gulf
War 2 was their decision alone, or that that �God wills it� would have convinced
anyone they had to convince, then you�re subscribing to a cartoon view of history.
Such decisions are always calculated, reasoned, and backed by dozens of
accommodating scientific experts.
Science has a high media profile and a powerful lobby group: in the midst of a
global recession and sweeping government cuts, science funding has generally held
up or even increased. Hi-tech corporations have massive wealth and influence, and
their products are omnipresent and seen as ever more desirable. In fact, the world
today would be unthinkable without the products of science and technology, which
have infiltrated into almost every economic, political and social process. We live
in a world created by and ever-more dependent on science, technology and reason, in
which scientists and engineers are a valued and indispensable elite.
That�s right: the nerds won, decades ago, and they�re now as thoroughly established
as any other part of the establishment. And while nerds a relatively new elite,
they�re overwhelmingly the same as the old: rich, white, male, and desperate to
hang onto what they�ve got. And I have come to realise that skepticism, in their
hands, is just another tool to secure and advance their privileged position, and
beat down their inferiors. As a skeptic, I was not shoring up the revolutionary
barricades: instead, I was cheering on the Tsar�s cavalry.
If anything, I�m convinced that most of them would prefer to keep the resources
unequal. The average skeptic has little time for spreading the word of reason to
the educationally or intellectually lacking. His superior reason is what separates
him from the chumps around him, and he has no interest in closing the gap. For him,
the appeal of the skeptic clique is its exclusivity. It�s a refuge from the stupid
masses, and a marker of his own special privileges. It�s Mensa rebranded.
About ten years ago there was a short-lived movement to rebrand skeptics as
�brights�. This proposal was widely derided within the community, perhaps because
it revealed too much about the skeptic mindset. Many skeptics indeed see themselves
as �brights� in a world of �dims�. And rather than illuminate the world, they
prefer to gather on skeptic forums and try to outshine each other.
Online forums, whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer;
over time, most of them tend to become dominated by small groups of snotty know-it-
alls who stamp their personalities over the proceedings. But skeptic forums are
uniquely meant for such people. A skeptic forum valorises (and in some cases,
fetishises) competitive geekery, gratuitous cleverness, macho displays of
erudition. It�s a gathering of rationality�s hard men, thumping their chests,
showing off their muscular logic, glancing sideways to compare their skeptical
endowment with the next guy, sniffing the air for signs of weakness. Together, they
create an oppressive, sweaty, locker-room atmosphere that helps keep uncomfortable
demographics away.
SEXIST BASTARDS
One demographic skeptics are particularly uncomfortable with is the female of the
species. It�s an increasingly acknowledged fact that the skeptic community is rife
with sexism � especially in the wake of the �elevator guy� controversy, about which
more later. Women are a small minority in the skeptic world, and the few who get
involved get shit thrown at them constantly by their skeptic peers. Every day, they
suffer the whole gamut of attitudes from sneering to leering.
[Note by Jime: see an example of sexism and misogyny by male skeptics and atheists
in this link]
Skepticism, of course, is only one of the many online interests which attract
barely-closeted sexists. But the particular attraction of skepticism is also its
particular problem: it allows the sexist to disguise his prejudice as rationality
and �common sense�. You can spot guys like this easily on skeptic forums: the word
�feminism� brings them crawling out, like slugs after a downpour. For them,
feminism is an unscientific discipline (but how could it be otherwise?), as
nonsensical as astrology or Roman Catholicism, and as ripe and essential for
debunking. They�re okay with women�s lib, within reason; but now it�s gone too far,
and the firm hand of reason must rein it in. Reason, weirdly enough, never seems to
disrupt their own grip on power. It�s always on the side of the patriarchy.
Too often, the skeptic nerd who tries to display his women-friendly credentials
ends up revealing himself only as a sexist creep. He�s all in favour of women, as
long as they satisfy his own ideals of what a woman should be. This kind of
attitude is typified by the skeptic-oriented webcomic xkcd. �I like nerdy girls�,
says Randall Munroe � but can he tolerate any others? I looked through hundreds of
his stick-figure strips, god help me, and where his females are characterised at
all, they inevitably conform to the same constructed ideal � geeky, quirky, all-
knowing, whimsical � an ideal largely constructed around Randall himself, or his
own self-image. This female ideal says a lot more about his vanity than his
feminism; and it�s an ideal shared by many guys in the skeptic community.
Idealising women is not the same thing as feminism � in fact, it�s usually the
opposite. Throughout history, the concept of the �perfect female� has been more
about men forcing their impressions on women, stifling them, not allowing them a
voice. The Virgin Mary was not a progressive figure, and neither was Joan of Arc,
and neither is the skeptic chick of your dreams, guys, whoever she may be. Wrapping
women up in your clammy fantasies is not much different from wrapping them up in a
burkha.
ISLAMOPHOBIA
Only a minority of Muslim women wear burkhas; some of them do so by choice, as a
statement of cultural identity. Some others do so purely on the insistence of the
men in their family. Some of those men are traditional sexists of the kind you
might find in the skeptic community; many of the others are guided by the same kind
of wrongheaded chivalry that makes nerds idealise quirky science chicks.
I don�t want to blow my own trumpet unduly, but I believe the above paragraph to be
a more measured and factual statement about Islam than you will find in all the
work of Prof. Richard Dawkins or his co-thinkers. In fact, in the skeptic community
it�s much more common to find statements insinuating that all Muslims are women-
hating, freedom-hating, clit-butchering, suicidal terrorists, and furthermore, find
those statements accepted without comment. Under the guise of atheism, liberalism
and rationality, ugly Islamophobia thrives.
A recent shocking example occured in the aftermath of the so-called elevator guy
controversy. At a skeptic conference in Dublin, prominent skeptic Rebecca Watson
(aka �Skepchick�) was propositioned by some creep in an elevator at 4am. She
politely refused and later video-blogged about the incident, saying that, guys,
elevator come-ons are not such a good idea. Fair enough, one might think. But
predictably for the skeptic community, her words incited the fury of a number of
sexists, including Prof. Richard Dawkins, who couldn�t resist dragging in one of
his other prejudices from left-field. It�s worth quoting his words in full:
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a
razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don�t tell me yet again, I know you aren�t
allowed to drive a car, and you can�t leave the house without a male relative, and
your husband is allowed to beat you, and you�ll be stoned to death if you commit
adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American
sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep�chick�, and do you know what
happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee.
I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee.
Of course she said no, and of course he didn�t lay a finger on her, but even so�
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow
up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
This comment was not made by some low-rent Youtube troll, or by a declared BNP
member, or even by a malicious impostor; as was later confirmed by PZ Myers, these
are the words of Richard Dawkins himself. That�s the Richard Dawkins, author of
Unweaving the Rainbow and The Blind Watchmaker, professor emeritus for the public
understanding of science at Oxford university, the skeptic�s ultimate skeptic. And
his words are hate speech, plain and simple.
To their credit, many big-name skeptics (including PZ Myers and Phil Plait) called
Dawkins out on his obvious sexism; but to my knowledge � and correct me if I�m
wrong � not one of them has said a word about his Islamophobia. It seems as though
this racist trash is as accepted within the skeptic community as it evidently is
within the common rooms of Oxbridge.
And racist trash is what it is. Some Dawkins apologists claim that he is not
Islamophobic, but simply a militant atheist combatting the evils of religion
wherever he sees them; but Dawkins sees his evils rather selectively. Indeed, he is
markedly sympathetic towards the faith of his childhood, the good old C of E � so
much so that I suspect the �God Delusion� per se is not his main concern. From his
writings, I gather that Dawkins would be content to live in a world where gentle
Anglican vicars presided over their bored, civilised congregations in England�s
vales and hills, while the British Empire did its dirty work elsewhere, in places
like Kenya, India, and West Cork. He saves his real ire for the creeds of the
unruly natives � all those nasty Muslims and Catholics and tribalists who don�t
know their place. Not that he�d want to associate himself with the bloodshed done
in his name. Like a lot of gentle liberals, he hypocritically declared himself
against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while continuing to poison the atmosphere
in their favour with his hate speech. At least his buddy Christopher Hitchens, for
all his thuggery, was consistent enough to follow his views to their logical, and
repugnant, conclusion. But then, Hitchens is better aware of what skepticism is.
SKEPTICISM IS NEOLIBERALISM
As we have seen, skepticism is a broad and varied church � welcoming, among others,
elitist, sexist and racist views. One thing all skeptics have in common, though, is
that they support the freedoms they believe to exist in present-day western
civilization, and think those freedoms should be spread worldwide. In other words,
all skeptics are neoliberals. They might disagree, like Hitchens and Dawkins, over
the correct strategy to win the latest neoliberal crusade, but they can usually be
relied upon to support it, at least in principle.
All skeptics are neoliberals: if you do not consider yourself a neoliberal, you
should not consider yourself a skeptic. I realise this can sound like a contentious
claim, so please let me explain.
Skeptics are people who believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source
of knowledge. For a skeptic, all knowledge derived through other means is either
inferior or spurious. Extreme skeptics like Dawkins come close to claiming that the
scientific method is the onlytrue source of knowledge, and that what is presently
non-scientific knowledge � like morals and culture � will eventually become more
rigorously and correctly established through the scientific method.
We perceive the world through metaphors: mental models that help us interpret and
understand our raw perceptions, and construct our observations. Some of these
metaphors are inherited and probably immutable without some kind of biological
engineering: a rock wall is mostly empty space, but we�ve evolved to see it as
solid mass. Other metaphors are learned, and liable to change or be transmitted to
others in the environment. As an example, one can regard events as having apurpose,
or one can regard events as having a cause; these are very different metaphors,
that lead to very different perceptions of reality. The existence of such metaphors
is uncontroversial, by the way; this isn�t wishy-washy pomo stuff. Even Dawkins
acknowledges them: he calls them memes.
This is not the place to describe the many problems and hypocrisies of
neoliberalism. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that liberal democracy,
which condemns the majority of the world�s population to varying degrees of
slavery, is a perfect system. I do not believe that the metaphors of liberal
democracy allow us a perfect view of reality. And therefore I do not believe in the
primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. It might be the best
we�ve got, but when it comes to human advancement � including the advance of
science itself � other sources of knowledge can be just as useful, and often more
important.
It is my hope that human beings will one day live in a more just society, a more
free society, than any that has yet existed in our history. I am certain that the
people of such a society would look back at us and regard our minds as clouded
today as we regard those of medieval peasants, and look back on those who insisted
we had it all � today�s skeptics prominent among them � as we look on friars,
preachers, despots and other historical enemies of progress.
�A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it.�
This �new generation�, not incidentally, tends to be armed with new political
attitudes.
The idea that politics could or should have any input into science is anathema to
skeptics. They often bring out the examples of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, or
the racial science of Nazi Germany, to illustrate the dangers of allowing science
to be contaminated by political ideology. They less often acknowledge that racial
science was not unique to Nazi Germany, and that the same kind of racist garbage
was enthusiastically pursued by scientists in the most enlightened liberal
democracies of the time, and found in all the standard British and American
anthropology textbooks. Eugenics, including racial eugenics, wasn�t just supported
by Nazis, but by people who considered themselves among the vanguard of all that
was good and progressive. Liberal democracy was no guard against the influence of
political ideology on scientific thought. (On the contrary, liberal democracy is a
political ideology that influences scientific thought.
What�s more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by
political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that
could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their
racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist
observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of
World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became
politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of
the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method;
instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and
replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.
And when the political consensus shifts, other sciences could go the same way.
Whatever science you support, future generations might well regard it to be as
wrongheaded as we regard racial science today. We look at reality through a thicket
of political metaphors; as these metaphors come and go, different parts of reality
become more or less visible; it can become easier to see where we were wrong at
earlier times, and harder to see where we are wrong at the present.
I�m less willing to believe that liberal democracy affords us a good view of the
realities of human experience. I�m as deep in the liberal thicket as anyone else,
so I can�t say for sure, but I suspect many human sciences as they are practised
today are heavily clouded by dubious political assumptions. The most dubious of
these is the assumption the liberalism itself is a politically neutral context.
This has led to the widespread fetish for reducing complex psychological or social
or cultural problems to �quantifiable� data amenable to scientific study. When this
data and the conclusions drawn from it are subjected to the scrutiny of free-
thinking liberal experts, the results will necessarily be unbiased � or so the
assumption goes. That assumption can fuck right off.
Which is not to say that the human sciences are entirely wrong or useless as
currently practised: I�ve no time for the hardcore skeptics who dismiss anything
that isn�t maths or physics. But skeptics should be careful of cheerleading
indiscriminately for all science, any science. Here are just a few examples of
where the problems could lie.
And if you truly believe in any of these frauds, so what? They�re mostly just a
harmless diversion, a faint ray of amusement to guide us through the long and
darkening days. Uri Geller fans, if indeed such people exist, are not hurting
anyone. Evil hypnotists are not programming people�s minds. And astrologers, except
in the paranoid fantasies of skeptics, have virtually no influence in the modern
world, for good or ill. Skeptics aside, the only person who believes Ronald
Reagan�s former astrologer had an impact on US policy in the 80s is Ronald Reagan�s
former astrologer. (That Reagan employed a court astrologer, by the way, was the
least of his crimes. Skepticism would be better directed at the scum he put into
positions of actual power.)
There�s a lot of phony outrage on skeptic sites about spirit mediums like John
Edward, who purport to channel voices �from the other side�, and in so doing
exploit the grief of the kind of people skeptics laugh at anyway. Edward is
obviously slime, but I�m convinced that many of his customers are quite aware of
that. They know he�s feeding them lies, but they�re comforting lies, lies they feel
the need to hear at that moment in time. And the cash transaction and the audience
setting and the hocus pocus and even Edward�s clumsy name-flailing all help
legitimise them. Edward�s customers are looking for the kind of catharsis he
provides; to claim he simply cheats them out of their money isn�t the whole truth.
And even at their worst, the hucksters of mumbo-jumbo are only minor-league con
artists. Their crimes pale next to those of our financial institutions, and all the
others who convince the public to throw their life savings at the stock market,
take out mortgages they can�t afford, buy junk they don�t need with money they
don�t have, and pay for the fuck-ups of bankers and the greed of speculators. But
which skeptic is going to debunk these swindlers?
Cheating people out of their money is one thing, but cheating them out of their
lives is quite another. To read some skeptic takes on alternative medicine, you�d
think only heart disease rivalled it as a killer. It�s true that alternative
medicine is not going to cure anyone of serious illness, but it�s also generally
true that the terminally ill only turn to it when real medicine has given up hope
on them. And the value of hope in one�s final days is not to be dismissed so
easily. The relaxed swagger of a charlatan can be far more comforting than the
stress of an overworked hospital registrar, and the charlatan typically receives
his patients in more comforting surroundings than a hospital. If I�m going to die
anyway, I�ll take aromatherapy over chemotherapy every time.
The placebo value of alternative medicine should also not be so easily dismissed,
and neither should its emphasis on �wellness� instead of illness. If a homeopath
cures your imaginary itch by giving you diluted water, is it really much worse than
a GP curing your imaginary itch by prescribing you paracetamol or antibiotics? It
might be nonsense from start to finish, but alternative medicine helps millions of
people get through the day, with no side effects apart from spouting the occasional
line of bullshit. Real medicine is better at curing its recognised ailments, but
alternative medicine seems to be better at helping with a chronic unrecognised
ailment: daily life under the capitalist system. And so it shall remain until
opiates are freely available in pill form.
Our political system, education and culture leave a lot of people marginalised,
lost, impotent, irrelevant, and made to feel so daily. But these people are not
complete idiots. They know something is wrong (though they�re not sure what), they
know they have been denied knowledge and power (though they�re not sure by whom),
they know that official life has left them on the scrapheap (though they�re not
sure why). They look at the reality that has been dealt to them and ask, can this
be all there is? Is this as good as it gets? And so, quite justifiably, they invent
an alternative. An alternative reality where the people who marginalised them are
reduced to easily-identifiable comic-book villians, plotting in underground
hideouts. An alternative reality where, more often than not, they and their people
are the heroes: the rebels, the fearless investigators, the pioneers of science,
the true keepers of knowledge.
And the same is true of almost all bunk, from cryptozoology to Christianity: it�s
an alternative reality for the disenfranchised, a wonderland where the losers are
promised triumph, and The Man holds no sway. The masters of bunk � the bishops and
wizards and cult sages � can wield considerable power in objective reality, but
their greatest power is always over the downtrodden and the cast aside.
�[The �New Atheism�] is about taking a core set of principles that have proven
themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world � you�ve probably noticed
that many of these uppity atheists are coming out of a scientific background � and
insisting that they also apply to everything else people do. These principles are a
reliance on natural causes and demanding explanations in terms of the real world,
with a documentary chain of evidence, that anyone can examine. The virtues are
critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are
dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural. There is
no holy writ, and a central idea is that everything must be open to rational,
evidence-based criticism � it�s the opposite of fundamentalism.�
I�ve got a lot of time for Myers, but I can�t agree with his claim that dogma plays
no role in skepticism. The skeptic dogma is, of course, the belief that �a core set
of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific
world also apply to everything else people do�. This belief is as simple and
seductive as any of the claims that priests and mullahs and gurus have made over
the millennia � and almost as wrong. While science in its material domain has
worked miracles, in the social and emotional and political domains its achievements
are highly questionable, to say the least.
But if the skeptic dogma sustains you through the day, I can�t blame you: most of
us here are just trying to get by, with as much comfort and dignity as we can
scrape together. And indeed, skepticism was once a faith I found comfort in myself.
And as long as it does no harm to them and others, I wouldn�t want to disabuse
anyone of their faith, or deprive them of their warming blanket. While ultimately I
believe the world would be better without religions of any kind, faith can still
motivate people for good. Skeptics follow a faith with fundamentally well-meaning
principles; not all of them are kneejerk science fans; some of them make a decent
and positive contribution to the world through their skepticism. I�m not going to
dismiss them personally just because their creed is even more discredited than
Christianity.
POSITIVISM IS PAST IT
�Positivism� is not a word you see often in skeptic circles, which is odd, because
it�s basically the old name for skepticism. The positivist movement in philosophy,
which began in the mid-19th century, involved a loose collection of thinkers who to
some extent or other believed in the primacy of reason and the scientific method,
and set about trying to establish the basis of human knowledge on those terms.
One reason you don�t hear about positivism often in skeptic circles is that
skeptics have no time for philosophy; many skeptics hate and fear it. It�s the
skeptic Kryptonite. As a fundamental, rigorous, intellectually respectable but
defiantly non-scientific discipline, philosophy makes a lot of skeptics feel
threatened. Skeptics are like a naval fortress, with weapons fixed to sea; while
they regard themselves invulnerable against fleets of art grads, paranormalists,
and true believers, they know that philosophers can strike them freely in their
defenceless rear. Little wonder that philosophers bring out their inferiority
complex. Some skeptics would love to dismiss philosophy, all philosophy, in the
same way they dismiss religion, but they�d be afraid of appearing stupid or
attracting ridicule in doing so. If anything, they�re afraid philosophers already
find them ridiculous.
Which brings us to the other reason positivism isn�t mentioned in skeptic circles:
it failed, badly, and became discredited, badly, to the extent that �positivism� is
almost a swearword on many philosophy campuses, and �positivist� an all-purpose
insult. As a philosophical movement, traditional positivism has been dead since the
1950s (though it lives on in the natural and human sciences in all but name).
�Postpositivists� like Karl Popper have tried to salvage something from the
carcass, but among philosophers, their work is widely seen as reactionary. (By
contrast, Dawkins in The Devil�s Chaplain disdains them as he would disdain new age
crystal merchants.)
But why did positivism fail, and why did it become discredited? Well, I�m no
philosopher, but I was for some years unwittingly involved in one of the last
holdouts of hardcore, balls-out, unabashed logical positivism in all academia. And
having seen some of its contradictions and failures firsthand, I think I have a
good idea of the answer. But that�s something I want to cover elsewhere at greater
detail and from a different angle. Christ knows, this webpage is already long
enough.
The truth is, I became a skeptic for aesthetic reasons, and the truth is, its
aesthetics now repel me. I increasingly find the core skeptical output monotonous
and repetitive: there are only so many times you can debunk the same old junk, and
I�ve had it up to here with science fanboyism. And when skeptics talk about
subjects outside their domain of expertise, I�m struck by how irrelevant their
comments are, and how ugly, shrill and trivial.
Dawkins was a big influence on me in my early 20s, so to repeatedly call him out
feels a bit like patricide; but it must be said that this kind of stuff does not
cast him or his followers in a good light. In the linked article, Dawkins uses Pat
Robertson�s comments on the Haiti earthquake as a launching point for yet another
rant about religion. It�s an unreadable screed, the ravings of an obsessive, in
style and content hardly less repulsive than Robertson�s original. And it�s all too
typical of Dawkins� output lately.
It also must be said that on many topics, the best religious people have more of
interest and insight to say than the best skeptics. Take this Christian response to
the above Dawkins article, for example. Its author Doug Chaplin rightly criticises
Dawkins� explanation for the �catastrophe� in Haiti. It was not, as Dawkins says,
due to tectonic plates colliding; that was simply the cause of the earthquake.
Thecatastrophe was caused by the earthquake happening in a poverty-stricken,
overcrowded nation which has been raped by imperial powers for its entire
existence. Scientific facts alone give a completely inadequate picture; but you
won�t find too many skeptics admitting that. Chaplin also astutely observes that
Robertson and Dawkins are two sides of the same coin: both hide behind a shallow
empiricism to justify their right-wing politics. When they come to pronounce on
world events, they�re both equally ignorant and self-serving.
And Dawkins is far from the worst offender in the skeptic community. At least when
he sticks to the science, he reliably brings an infectious passion and sense of
wonder; I still have a lot of respect for him as a science communicator. A lot of
the most prominent skeptics, though, are ugly all the time. Loudmouth libertarians
like Penn Jillette, touchy-feely dorks like Randall Monroe, lazy comedy hacks like
Robin Inceand Charlie Brooker, neoliberal thugs like Christopher Hitchens and David
Aaronovitch, the sniggering philistines at reddit/atheism: no one I respect could
hang out with this crowd. I feel a rush of self-loathing just browsing the same web
forums.