My Atheist Ambivalences

So, in November I gave a talk called "My Atheist Ambivalences" to the university's Atheist Student Organization (I used to be their faculty advisor). Somebody at the Unitarian Church got wind of it and asked me to give a similar talk there, so I'm preaching again on December 29. Since I have more atheist issues than can actually fit into a half-hour talk or a one-page handout, I'm putting the complete list here. Maybe I'll write or talk about some of the neglected issues later.

Full list of atheist-ambivalence questions of Jean (as of Dec 2013):

Language gaps: Without recourse to "I'll pray for you," how do I show compassion? How show humble gladness without "thank God"? Shall I just go ahead and say "pray" or "god" or "faith" or "spiritual" whenever it's convenient, but mean the words in a different way than theistic believers mean them?

Is it okay for me to adopt the language/rituals of believers when among them? Would it be insulting for me to partake in the sacraments? If yes, why? (On Buddhist retreats, I have no discomfort whatsoever doing all the chants and prostrations.) Why did I get so nervous when my Dad wanted to make a speech at my wedding (1987) about our family's Mormon heritage, given that I had already agreed to have a Jewish wedding to please my Jewish fiancé and in-laws? I told Dad I didn't want to give a false impression that I was Mormon, but as he pointed out, it didn't seem to bother me that I was giving a false impression that I was Jewish.

How much do I need to respect other people's religious qualms that violate my own ethical standards (e.g. taboos about menstruating women)? If, as I believe, there is nothing "up there" to blaspheme against, then isn't the concept of blasphemy just as bogus a category of reproof as miscegenation, and it all just comes down to just human politeness and clashing etiquette codes (or the exertion of privilege/power)? How do I feel about live Mormons baptizing (e.g.) dead Jews? How do I feel about the Danish cartoons? How about that time at Borobudur where there's this thing that you try to touch the Buddha statue to get a wish, but women touch on the foot and men higher up?

What are my moral obligations with respect to coming out of the closet as an atheist? How do I present myself to minimize offense and other bad outcomes? How does context matter? Especially, how do I handle myself in the classroom? When, if ever, is it a good idea to engage in metaphysical debate with believers?

Bill and the Darwin fish (see blog post titled "Letter to Clyde").

Biggies:
#1. Are religions bad/dangerous?
           On the one hand, the New Atheists have some points. On the other hand, I know a number of excellent people, kind and centered and emotionally intelligent, for whom religion acts as an organizing principle. Would they really all have done just as well without it? Certainly I don't want to snatch it away from them! Thought experiment: There's at least one person I know who I wish would find Jesus.

#2. How much does belief in god matter—emotionally, intellectually, morally—shorn of other (tribalist) baggage? What if creedal beliefs (as opposed to attitudes and emotional styles) are largely irrelevant for most people? Supposing the chasm which appears to yawn between us is largely illusory, how do I bridge the gap between me and a believer with whom I share most of my important values? What are the best alliances we can form and how do we form them? I'm really liking that Pope Francis!

#3. The future of secularist movements:
What should atheist organizations be like? Should believers be welcomed to participate? At the first meeting of UTPA's Atheist Student Organization I was disconcerted to see a former student who had caused difficulties in one of my classes with his constant proselytizing and opposition to literary language and topics he considered inappropriate. Based on this prior experience, I very much doubted he was atheism-curious, seeking to learn more. No, he was here to teach. Taking the most charitable possible view of his motives, squinting sideways and granting a few erroneous premises, I could assume he meant well, mostly, but at best he had always been a time suck and I didn't want to have to keep considering his feelings. This group was supposed to be for people like me. There should be safe spaces for atheists where they don't have to censor themselves for the sake of believers' feelings. ...Yet if secularists get too zealous about enforcing our boundaries, are we maybe repeating the errors of many religions? Becoming sectarian, insufficiently inclusive?  For now, it should be borne in mind that in the US at this time the generally privileged group is believers, not nonbelievers (look at the professions of belief among US politicians if you doubt the accuracy of this big-picture claim).

Conversely, should atheists push for seats on interfaith councils? Can/should atheism take its place among other (religious) lifestances? Can/should atheists pitch themselves as one among many other "faith" options? Create atheist churches? As a matter of branding, what should we call ourselves?

After the Sermon (Jean's Sermon #1, "Moral Foundations")

It's been a week and a half since I gave a sermon titled "Moral Foundations" at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Juan, Texas. I'm still psyched, and I will probably give some more sermons in the future if they want to have me again. I also collected the names of several people who might like to work through Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs in a reading group with me this fall semester.

I've recorded the sermon and I'm going to make it available on youtube for the people who were interested but couldn't get to the church that day. Something went wrong with the camera that I don't immediately know how to fix: sorry about that big black rectangle. I'm going to post it anyway, even with its flaws. And I'll also make available on Facebook the powerpoint I created for the sermon after the fact. This should make it simple for anybody who wants to follow along. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMLA7tTl1KA

Extended response to V.:

On the day of the sermon itself, during the Q and A, one person made a pointed commentary about my decision to use honor killing as an example of an atrocity (the word I used in the sermon was "abomination"). He thought it was inappropriate for me to use what he called a statistical "outlier" in philosophizing about the sort of ordinary functional moral theory that my U.U. audience was probably interested in, and likewise inappropriate to go pointing fingers at a culture not my own. (He claimed I had "typified an entire culture" by one hideous practice.)

I was just unsettled enough by his critique to want to respond at leisure and in depth, so here we go. First, I had no intention of "typifying" any culture: I don't consider myself an authority on any society but my own, and not even all parts of that; that's why I specifically built into that example a thought experiment in which I would meet and debate with an alternate-reality version of me who was raised to believe (and does believe) that honor killing is a moral necessity in some circumstances. I don't think that hypothetical alt-Jean is inferior to me; I don't think her culture is inferior to mine across the board; very probably it is superior in many respects which she understands deeply but that I have little sensitivity to. All I say is that she's wrong on this point, and also on some other preceding moral premises or rules that she may have relied on to reach that conclusion. ("Men rightfully have moral responsibility for women"? "Loss of face injures a high-ranking person even more than bodily assault or death injures a low-ranking person"? "Nothing really bad can happen to a truly innocent person, because God (or 'the universe' or 'karma' or whatever) watches over and protects the deserving"? I'm only guessing at exactly what's amiss in alt-Jean's moral reasoning, but I do know that something is amiss. NB: I am far from supposing that my own moral reasoning is flawless.)

Second, it's true that I chose a relatively unchallenging example of morally wrong behavior, given the audience to whom I was preaching. There are of course a wide variety of examples I could have chosen to illustrate the concept of "abomination" and why I have chosen to retain the concept in my own thinking rather than dismiss it as naïve or antiquated. I could have spoken of things I find shameful in what my own country's highest-ranking folks have ordered or let happen in recent years: Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, "enhanced interrogation techniques," prison privatization, etc., etc. Maybe it was just a bit too easy, choosing something very clear-cut and also very far away that I knew my audience could comfortably deplore. But….

But I only had 20 minutes and my thesis was not about any particular moral conclusions nor was it a call to any particular moral actions. The sermon was not intended to be of the genre that exhorts the flock to behave better their own selves. (Not yet, anyway! Foundations come first, before building.) Au contraire, it was intended as encouragement to those who, like me, lack moral confidence.  The one thing I wanted to establish in this, my maiden sermon, is that "hedgehogs"—believers in right and wrong—don't have to be fundamentalists, nor ignoramuses, nor arrogant self-righteous power-grabbers. In other words, you don't have to lack all conviction, just to distinguish yourself from folks you find distasteful who are full of passionate intensity.

Finally, even if honor killing is a bit of an outlier, in the sense of being relatively rare, I think it's deeply connected with other practices which are more widespread. Female genital mutilation, for instance, or closer to home the impulse to deny reproductive autonomy to women. Close inquiry into what we in our neck of the woods all pretty much agree is the faulty moral reasoning of the proponents of honor killing could still provide useful insight into our own possibly disordered thinking.

What Universities Are For: an Open Letter to UTPA President Nelsen

Dear President Nelsen:

Toward the end of this semester I hurriedly completed my evaluation of all the administrators who serve above me, including you. Since then I've been fretting about one of my answers, even though I was (obviously) anonymous. I gave you the highest score possible on "Demonstrates concern for the students" but then in the optional comment field I wrote "Sometimes a bit too dang concerned about the students." Can't you just imagine my careless remark quoted on talk radio, exploited to reinforce the caricature of tenured radicals who at best condescend to the public they're supposed to be serving, who are more concerned with faculty privilege than anything else? So here is the thing I am willing to breach my anonymity to explain: yes, for me there is something in the university enterprise—for now I'll call it academic ideals—that looms even larger than the students. As I think it should for all of us at the university.

Mind you, teaching at a "student-centered" institution suits me fine. I'm a passionate teacher; I reckon the lion's share of my professional energies is devoted to my students—somewhat at the expense of my own writing time and career advancement. But I'm still uncomfortable with the unending local refrain that nothing matters except "what's best for the students." There is no such thing as best-for-the-students simpliciter, only competing desiderata and tradeoffs. What's best for my least savvy students is accessible and entertaining materials to whet their intellectual appetite; the structure and review that they need to feel secure even as I try to wean them from the idea that their relationship to me is as employees whose chief duty is obedience; and exposure to a seminar atmosphere in which they can see others genuinely curious and engaged in intellectual pursuits. What's best for my most advanced students, meanwhile, is to be segregated away from the laggards; they would be better served by much higher admissions standards and less concern for retention. They need the bar set high enough to challenge them, they need to sample the most rigorous studies, and they need to know that competition is stiffer in many places than what they're used to from their previous education in south Texas.

What many of my students regard as their best educational interest is maximizing the ratio of output earned (the grade or credential) to effort put in. What some others regard as their best interest is whatever will maximize their lifetime income. These are both rational, outcome-oriented positions, but I take it that relatively few educators see their "product" primarily in such terms. Many legislators, though, are thinking along similar outcome-oriented lines when they impose credit-hour caps and other measures designed to reduce time to degree, or seek to configure university education to the anticipated job market. They want education to be the shortest distance between two points, with no wasteful meanders in it. For me, the meanders are the education. How do students aged 17, 18, 19 have the wherewithal to make a one-time, binding choice about the mental furniture they'll have for a lifetime when they have no idea even what the range of options is?

Clearly, educational policy decisions aren't made in a context-free vacuum but are relative to other philosophical commitments. Certain legislators are thinking of students mainly as potential participants in the national economy and so they want what's best for business interests—er, the students, I mean—in economic terms. But I am thinking of students as participants and potential participants in something I consider much more significant: the grand, centuries-long human quest for knowledge and understanding. This quest is intimately connected with but is not identical to promoting the material wellbeing of humankind. "Education is my religion," I say in class sometimes. The students laugh, but I'm not really joking.

My ideal of the university is an institution firmly set apart from either commercial or state interests; though it may derive funding from some combination of those two major social forces, it should never be beholden to either. The purpose of the university is to study the nature of things as they really are irrespective of what may be immediately profitable or what would consolidate and preserve power. In the long run holding accurate information about things as they really are benefits a nation and thus wise governments have motive enough to support universities but also to avoid interfering with them. Tenure and academic freedom are the safeguards that maintain the necessary separation of university and state, university and commerce. They have a price but the price is worth it.

During the 1980s, I used to make a living as a Russian translator. Where US politicians relied on certain stock phrases, Soviet politicians rolled out whole stock paragraphs extolling the virtues of their rationalized central economic planning—waste free, unlike the West! Workers' councils were said to be enthusiastically supporting the Five-Year Plan, competing in friendly fashion to "fulfill and overfulfill" their quotas even earlier than last quarter, though the quotas were set even higher now and will be set higher still for next quarter. Some of the conversations going on at UTPA now remind me of those olden days. The provost, for instance, discusses tenure in terms eerily similar to Soviet lingo: continual escalation of targets is desirable and supposedly achievable; faculty should "meet and exceed," not just meet, tenure requirements. And the revision of the core curriculum is a monument to central planning if there ever was one—do you think the (presumably capitalism-loving) planners that kicked off this curriculum reform in THECB will be able to predict and control the future better than the communist ones did back in the failed, fallen command economy of the USSR? Even by the early 1980s it was obvious that no one, not even the speakers themselves, believed those words about the plans, the overfulfillment, the enthusiasm. It was just what they thought they had to say to maintain their own positions.

I wonder if many people in the US today still have faith in the fad for numerical accountability at every level of education. Every time you turn around some fresh scandal about fudged assessments is in the news. Anyone's who watched The Wire understands how official pressure from above leads to "juking the stats." How many of our education-reforming politicians are sincere, and how many, like the Soviet blatherers, are completely cynical? The problem with all outcome-oriented approaches to education is the same thing that did the Soviets in: if we're really committed to progress we can't know in advance where we're going to end up. If we're really committed to what is actually true then that, not ever-increasing numbers, has to be our top priority.

Dr. Nelsen, I regret my choice of words on the administrator evaluation form. I love my students, I do. But I could not love them, dear, so much, loved I not academic ideals—disinterested and unfettered intellectual inquiry into what is actually the case in the real world— more.

Sincerely yours,

Jean Braithwaite,
Associate Professor (the nonfiction person),
English Department