The Philosophical Primate, aka our friend G Felis, did a guest post at Eric’s blog a couple of days ago. One item in particular jumped out at me.
…the persistent and insistent claims that “something is missing” from the New Atheist world view is true: What’s missing is the siren call of easy assent to illegitimate authority — the human instinct to blend in and concede our autonomy to parent-mimicking authorities who, unlike actual (good) parents, do not have our genuine best interests at heart.
QFT, as the saying goes. I love that. It would make a nice bus ad.
What’s missing is the siren call of easy assent to illegitimate authority.
How peaceful the silence is.
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10 responses to “What’s missing”
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Yes, the philosophicalprimate’s point is excellent, and that is precisely why the faithful – such as the moral philosopher Margaret Somerville whom Eric MacDonald rightly and thoroughly takes apart in a subsequent post – are so anxious to pretend that legitimate authority is really no different from illegitimate authority, because if every authority is illegitmate, then their illegitimate authority can be given a (factitious) semblance of legitimacy. They haven’t the sense or imagination to see that, if what they claim is true, then there can only be a naked struggle for power, with the winner, if there is one, taking violent steps to keep the losers suppressed. And people like Margaret Somerville complain about the relativism of the age…
I also wonder if that explains the apparent need of the faithful to worship.
During debates or discussions, even if we stipulate a hypothetical god to our religious interlocutors, they cannot believe that we would not want to worship and glorify the hypothetical deity, but in fact would resist it with all our power.
This craven need to perpetually worship and “glorify” a patriarchal figure is dowright bizarre.
Bizarre but understandable. We can understand how the need for the father (or mother) has contaminated the believer’s ability to think or moralize. We understand how authority, whether by an individual or among peers and community can strongly influence a person’s behaviour, thoughts, emotions and beliefs.
Rather than evaluation or think, believers accept a large body of rules and procedures by default. All attempts at thinking are protected by emotional mechanisms such as fear or guilt, and thus the beliefs persists and delusion takes over.
And so, the psychology of the believer is fairly clear. What makes them a danger to themselves and others is that they have been taught not to think and not to be moral, but to instead copy and obey authority figures.
However, in order to function in the modern world, it is necessary to develop thinking and social strategies which are ‘compartmentalized’ when functioning ‘in the world’. And so believers can both think and make moral judgements when in context to situations that require it. This is a matter of having both a public secular identity and a private religious identity.
But when that religious identity leaks out into the public world, when religion becomes political, then the secular identity begins to shrink, and irrationality prevails.
What still puzzles me is the psychology of the accommodationist. The accommodationists are driven by some kind of moral premise to condemn atheists for speaking out and generally ruining the world by upsetting the very unreal natural harmony between religion and secularism. Apparently, we must not provoke the moderates otherwise they will become extremists. Is this the ethics of a moral coward? The weasel? I really don’t know, only that it puzzles me, it seems wrong in my mind, but I still grapple to try and understand it.
Egbert,
I used to speculate that accomodationists were asked by their religious acquaintances, perhaps at the various inter-faith groups that infect our social institutions, to put a muzzle on the “fundamentalist new atheists” who were sabotaging the bridges being built by both reasonable theists and “good atheists” (meaning non-confrontational) such as themselves. But I’m no longer convinced that this is the case. I’m not sure what motivates them.
I agree. The ‘missing element’ has been identified, and its nature is invidious and, for some, an essential amino acid. Without it, how can they function as a ‘whole’ person? Bereft of the comfort and benefit of the ‘illegitimate authority’, truly independent thought and personal autonomy are too much to bear. TPP’s observation (via OP’s proud banner in red) should be adopted by the emerging “Implausibility of Gnus”.
In his essay, “Islam, Middle East and Fascism,” Ibn Warraq says that Umberto Eco lists 14 features of fascism, but says that one of them is enough for fascism to “coagulate around it”. The one is the following:
The siren call. Let’s keep the silence. (For Warraq’s essays see the New English Review online.)
Another QFT, Eric!
“and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.” Boy doesn’t that describe it.
I greatly prefer Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism myself, as it’s more in depth. There is an interesting conflict within fascism over traditionalism vs modernism. The Nazis illustrate it well: they preach about a “traditional” Germany and “traditional values”, but ushered in a rapid industrialization of much of the German state. It’s all in the book, I really recommend it.
Umberto Eco’s Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. I liked this bit: