My answer to both questions above would be “no”. Although there are atheist conventions, groups, and websites (this isn’t one: I am a nonbeliever and write about it, but deal with many things other than godlessness), I don’t think of myself as part of an atheist “movement”, and I doubt that many readers do, too. And if there isn’t an atheist movement, then we don’t have to worry that it’s been “destroyed” by misogyny.
But if there is such a movement, has it been wrecked by “haters”: misogynists and harassers who have driven women, humanists, and all reasonable people away from atheism?
Salon has repeatedly dealt with both of these questions, bringing up the same tropes again and again to give an answer of “yes” to both questions. They’re particularly fixated on Sam Harris, but will take a shot at any prominent atheist if they can. This is also happening at some atheist blogs that I don’t need to name.
Now it’s surely true that many nonbelievers are sexists and misogynists. It has to be that way, because there’s no logical link between not believing in gods and seeing women as moral and social equals. A certain proportion of men will be sexists no matter who they are. I also happen to believe that the general increase in secularism and well being, documented in Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, will eventually displace religion, for we know that a higher societal well being produces less need for religion. In that way there is a connection between atheism and humanism, but it’s one based on historical inertia, not definitions.
Still, I’ve been to a fair number of atheist meetings, and know a lot of nonbelievers, and I don’t see them as raving misogynists, or that the incidence of sexism among them is higher than among the general populace. In fact, I’d say it was lower. That’s just my impression, but mine is at least as good as Alex Nichols, author of the piece under consideration (see below).
But the argument for the Death of Atheism by Sexism doesn’t proceed by statistics: it proceeds by anecdotes. All you have to do is find some nonbelievers who are jerks (and there are plenty), or take quotes out of context (who among us can’t be mischaracterized by that method?), and voilà: the Atheist Movement is riddled with toxic sexism.
That, at least, is the argument of Alex Nichols in his new Baffler piece “New Atheism’s idiot heirs.” The heyday of Good Atheism (supposedly the first decade of this century) has, says Nichols, been replaced by the Bad Guys (they’re all guys, of course): ThunderfOOt, James Damore, Stefan Molyneux (never heard of him—have most atheists?), and, god help us, Ben Shapiro, who isn’t an atheist at all but an orthodox Jew. That doesn’t matter, though, as Ben is guilty by association because atheists are said to use his tactics. Nichols says this:
Ben Shapiro, formerly of Breitbart and now editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, has made a project of adapting the pedantic rhetorical style of New Atheism to conservatism, an ideology that persists in constant tension with rational thought. His speeches and television appearances are a mainstay of “Feminist DESTROYED by Facts” YouTube, and they often accumulate millions of views. His orthodox Republican political positions are nearly identical to those of the nutjob theocrats New Atheists gleefully tore down during the Bush years—including that homosexuality is a choice, transgenderism is a mental illness, pornography should be illegal, and G-rated TV shows are corrupting our children. Even so, he frequently professes to love “science,” which is all his credulous fans require. Comically, given his religion-derived worldview, Shapiro’s current catchphrase is “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
Since Shapiro is said to use the rhetorical style of New Atheism (I don’t see any commonality of “style” among diverse atheists who write), and Shapiro and his followers are odious, then New Atheism must be odious too. QED. How lame can you get?
Nichols even recycles the tired old “Elevatorgate” anecdote, which is always mischaracterized as male overreaction to a woman’s reasonable complaint about being hit on. But it was far, far more complicated than that, as the protagonist proceeded to engage in public shaming of her critics and mockery of men. Nichols brings up GamerGate, too—something I haven’t closely followed, but its connection with atheism seems tenuous at best.
But never mind. Four or five jerks who identify themselves as atheists (and one conservative who’s an observant Jew but supposedly acts like an atheist) do not a movement make, or make that movement toxic.
A curious thing about Nichols’s argument is that he mocks atheists for touting their reliance on reason and logic, and yet uses reason and logic to try to prove his point:
The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. We saw this play out with James Damore. . .
Whatever you think of Damore or his arguments—and I happen to think that possible biological differences between male and female behaviors and preferences, and their effects career choices, is a subject that isn’t taboo—surely there’s nothing wrong with revering logic, evidence, and science, for that’s the only way to get at the truth.
Finally, Nichols resorts to mockery and name-calling, even using “neckbeards” and fedoras as the signature look of atheists (I thought those were associated more with hipsters than nonbelievers); and implies that atheists, by and large, became Republicans as New Atheism disintegrated:
IN THE HEYDAY OF THE INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD, let’s say in the 1990s, a certain species of idiot materialized. He was male, aggressively pedantic, self-professedly logical, committed to the hard sciences, prone to starting sentences with “actually,” and almost always devoted to the notion that his disbelief in God imbued him with intellectual superiority. This archetype’s golden years were the 2000s, a decade that saw George W. Bush’s politicized creationism and the use of web forums peak in unison. Once that decade ended, the internet tired of his antics and made him central to a series of in-jokes —“neckbeard” described his less-than-stellar grooming habits; and his hat of choice, the fedora, became the butt of innumerable jokes during Obama’s first term. No longer needed or tolerated, this misunderstood paragon of Enlightenment-core values began a journey that brought him to the worst possible destination: the Republican Party.
Yet the data show, as you probably know, that the percentage of Democrats who are atheists is nearly three times higher than Republicans (13% vs 5%), and religiosity is correspondingly lower among Democrats. But there are no data in Nichols’s argument, just vituperative.
Finally, Nichols raises the old trope that atheists should all be humanists, and to the extent that they aren’t, they’re toxic. In fact, he asserts, they’re no more humanist than are Republicans:
The only surprising thing about this marriage of convenience between the most irritating rhetorical style and the dumbest possible ideology is that it took so long to come about. Whatever merits anti-theism may have with regard to social issues, humanism was never the prime mover for New Atheism’s most devout adherents. They were after the burst of dopamine that comes from feeling smarter than other people, from exercising some pathetic simulacrum of masculine power, from seeing someone else feel bad and knowing they were responsible. Strangely enough, this is also the goal of modern right-wing politics. Just as conservatives discovered they could skip straight to the “angry liberal” portion of the argument by electing Donald Trump, the worst New Atheists discovered they didn’t need atheism at all. They could just be as insufferable alone, on Youtube, spitting nonsense into the vacuum. The Greeks, those purported inventors of Western logic, had a name for such a man divorced from the public good. They called him “idiot.”
This is nonsense. Where are the data here? I have none except for that cited above, but I suspect that you’d find a much larger proportion of atheists than believers holding “humanistic” values: equality for women, gays, and ethnic minorities, socialized medicine, a tax code fairer to the poor, and so on. In the absence of data, what we have here is a man doing a hit job on atheism based on anecdotes: he simply doesn’t like New Atheism and trots out the same Salon similes that have been put in the ring for years.
Well, I could write exactly the same article but going after believers rather than atheists, simply by singling out the machinations of religious people. (And I have the advantage here because in many religions sexism is an explicit part of the dogma. That’s not isn’t true of atheism, which has no dogma beyond “no evidence for gods”).
I won’t go on, but I will say that before this fellow Nichols calls us “idiots”, he should check the beam in his own eye.
