All? Really, All?
Weird statement for the day:
Of your first point, however, ___, the same cannot be said of the secularists. They were all on the side of the outrages committed in the French Revolution, in Stalin’s Soviet, and Mao’s China. They were all pushing the secular vision of progress.
‘The’ secularists – that’s an odd usage right there. As if secularism were a team, or a movement, or a club, or a party, or a faction. As if it were safe to assume that secularists act as a body. But the next sentence really takes the biscuit. Excuse me? All of ‘them’? They were all on the side of the outrages committed in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China? Dang, that’s news to me! I could swear I know of some secularists who weren’t one bit on the side of not only the outrages but the whole shebang – Bertrand Russell leaps to mind. He thought the Bolsheviks were dreadful right from the start, and said so, loudly. But I must be wrong, I must be misremembering, because all secularists were on the side of those outrages.
There are times when I just can’t believe what I’m reading. I blink, and look again, and blink some more, and look some more. I think I must have missed a word – a ‘not’ or a ‘nearly’ or a ‘some’…but no. ‘They were all on the side…’ There are no qualifications or negatives there. I keep thinking I can’t be surprised any more, and then…
I’ve been examining my vision of progress and I’m having a hard time finding the parts that include “the outrages committed in the French Revolution, in Stalin’s Soviet, and Mao’s China.”
As it happens, I’m reading a book by Darrin M. McMahon, “Enemies of the Enlightenment”, and he writes on page 14:
“The Terror was the product of the clash of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary extremes, not of either force in isolation.”
I haven’t finished the book, so don’t take this as a recommendation for your reading list.
I googled but couldn’t find the source of that ‘weird statement’. My question is: is it really worth the bother of machine-gunning gargabe like that?
Interpreted charitably, the author may merely be trying to say that there is such a thing as secular fanaticism which can be just as destructive as religious fanaticism: secularists like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot murdered with much the same gusto as the crusaders. But one has to be a very charitable interpreter indeed: if that was what he was trying to say, he certainly didn’t succeed in doing so.
At any rate, bashing this guy is more like hitting a barn door than engaging in the cut and thrust of debate. And his nonsense is certainly not of the fashionable variety you B&W people are meant to be fighting!
Yes, sorry about the anonymity, but I don’t want to hold the specific person up to ridicule.
But yes, it is worth challenging (I don’t think I’m machine-gunning!) garbage like that. For one thing, the person who said it is a historian, so a person not without influence. Therefore it seems reasonable to think that that kind of thing is out there in the world, and that it does need challenging.
I don’t think there’s any point in being all that charitable. As you say, that certainly is not what he actually said, and what he did say is quite poisonous. Therefore it needs challenging.
Barn door – well, you would think so, but as I say, he’s a historian. So…well I’m sure you take my point.
As for what we’re meant to be fighting – well for one thing we have a lot of leeway back here, in the back shop so to speak. It’s not the front page, it’s the blog-like section, so we don’t require ourselves to be as on-topic as we are on the rest of B&W. And even at that – I think I do pretty well! I think I stay pretty close to the subject. I don’t drone about personal stuff, I don’t gossip or chatter (much). Even on the rare occasions when I do drone about personal(ish) stuff, I often think better of it and erase it. I once did a long thing about sailboats on Puget Sound, just because I was looking at them and they were so pretty – but I erased it all the same. I once announced that it was my birthday, but I erased that too. So I don’t think you can complain too much!
More seriously – well but his nonsense is fashionable. Look at the comments of our long-winded unpunctuated friend – highly fashionable. It is fashionable (at least in the US) to defend religion and attack rationalists. So I’m on topic anyway.
I thought the problem was tortured syntax, not the lack of punctuation.
It took me about a minute to guess where the quote came from. It took me about two minutes to find it. I was unsurprised at the suspect. I registered and replied after work. You can look it up there, if you’d like.
“It took me about a minute to guess where the quote came from.”
Blimey, as long as that…
“As if secularism were a team, or a movement, or a club, or a party, or a faction. “
Ah, but it is apparently. It seems that the reason that the theory of evolution thrives whilst the “theory” of ID is rejected is also because of a worldwide conspiracy of atheists. This seems not a little strange. Afterall, the scientist who discovered the proof (and I mean proper scientific proof, that evolution, not religious “proof”) of the falsity of the theory of evolution would be an overnight celebrity faster than you can say “Nobel Prize”. Having been a conviction atheist for a few years now, I am beginning to wonder when I get an invite to join the great atheist conspiracy. I am beginning to think one desn’t even exist ;-).
Personally I think OB is spot on in machine gunning this kind of stuff. When this kind of nonsense masquerades as thinking, then no target is too small. It is because defective thinking goes unchalleneged so often that there is so much of it about (or at least publisised). If everytime someone said something daft, they were at least ridiculed for it, there may be less people willing to spout their defective reasoning on others.
Ophelia,
As if you never made a sweeping generalization about religions consequences for humanity? [The commenter’s {edit}] point was that many crimes have been committed in the name of secularism and much good has been done in the name of religion. Now is that so hard to admit?
John,
Your ability to figure out who it was is not surprising, since you obviously are a regular reader. It wasn’t meant to be a deep dark secret, it was just meant to be an avoidance of name-calling. To be blunt, the comment is so embarrassing that I didn’t want to name the person who wrote it. Naturally, anyone who reads these Comments regularly would be likely to guess who it was, so it’s not particularly boast-worthy that you figured it out – but not everyone does read them regularly. So it would have been nice – polite, at least – if you hadn’t opted to name names, for the reasons I’ve indicated. For reasons of blush-sparing.
(No, lack of punctuation is a problem too. No paragraphs, for instance, makes your comments very hard to read.)
“It is because defective thinking goes unchalleneged so often that there is so much of it about”
Exactly. Just for one thing, non-defective thinking is learned, it can be taught. One way of doing that is to point it out when you see it and say what’s wrong with it – just what Julian does with Bad Moves, for example.
David,
But this particular comment was more than a sweeping generalization, it was a (highly inaccurate) factual statement. No, I don’t think I do make those; I certainly try not to; and if I do, they should be pointed out.
“[The commenter’s {edit}] point was that many crimes have been committed in the name of secularism and much good has been done in the name of religion. Now is that so hard to admit?”
How do you know that was the point? It is certainly not what was said. I took the boringly conventional approach of addressing what was actually said as opposed to a (weirdly broad) interpretation of it. The reason I did that is because I think what was actually said was both mistaken and ill-judged.
By leaving out the caveat of “if you hold me responsible for the crusades,” you leave out an important caveat. Nobody holds Ralph responsible for the crusades (and since he hasn’t pulled down the post and has now linked to it, I’m assuming he ain’t embarrassed by it. Nor is my reading wierdly broad. It is based on colloquial speech. The phrase “They were all on,” or “They were all over,” doesn’t mean every single person. It can mean, for example, a group who took something to an extreme or administered . “The Pacers whipped the Pistons last night. They were all on them.” Now if you know baseketball, you know some Pacers didn’t play and some were not as good as others. The point is, the Pacers administered a big-old beat down on the Pistons mostly because of one or two Pacers in particular. Or consider “I was all on the side of Howard Dean until he made that speech.” “They were all on the side of..” can actually mean a few secularists were rabidly on the side of. More to Ralph’s point, it is pretty silly to talk about past outrages committed in the name of religion when discussing how to combat present evils and every vote counts.
David Salmanson
I didn’t ‘leave out’ anything. There is no mention of the Crusades in the comment I quoted from.
As for assuming he isn’t embarrassed by the post, yes, that seems safe – it seems pretty safe to assume that he isn’t embarrassed by anything at all. Calling me Madame Defarge, for example – then, pleased with that fancy, calling me it again, this time on the main page in a link to B&W. Good old Christian morality, ya know? There’s just nothing like it.
You’re joking with the colloquial speech bit, right?
No, I’m really not joking about colloquial speech. Maybe the fact that I use oral history in my research and that I teach teenagers makes me more sensitive to colloquialisms, but Ralph is a southerner and that’s where the usage comes from. B and W certainly has a highly stylized (some might say pretentious) style but I don’t hold it against you all. Consider terms like “woolly” (I’m not even sure I spelled that right). I haven’t even read it the way you all used it except in the Victorian novels of certain British authors. Now to me, woolly thinking has something to do with sheep shearing, rug-weaving, and the tourist trade, but the only time I ever encounter the word is when I’m out on the Navajo rez.
I love the idea of the word ‘woolly’ being pretentious.
Yeah, that is good, isn’t it.
Really, David – “woolly thinking” is fairly common usage, in the US as well as the UK. But then, I suppose people who think the phenomenon it describes is a problem are more likely to be aware of both the phenomenon and the term than people who don’t. Suffice it to say, we’re aware of it.
As for the particular usage in question – hmm. No, I don’t think I buy it. Consider the context (after all, I’ve been accused of not considering it) – a statement about what a certain group of people did. Secularists. Okay – substitute some other group. Jews, black people, immigrants, peasants, women, gays, Indians – whatever you like. Don’t reasonable people tend to take care when they’re talking about groups of people? Isn’t that very activity known to be a minefield? So would anyone (especially a civil rights historian!) for instance say “the same cannot be said of the [black people]. They were all on the side of the outrages committed in the French Revolution, in Stalin’s Soviet, and Mao’s China. They were all pushing the secular vision of progress.” without actually meaning “all” in its usual non-colloquial non-Southern sense? Really? Really? I don’t think so.
Nope. Especially given the wild name-calling and the lying about what I actually said that has come since, I think that quotation reflects pure animus.