WHY I AM NO LONGER A SKEPTIC

Posted on April 1, 2018 by septicskeptics

WHY I 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.

REASON IS NOT JUST FOR AN INTELLECTUAL ELITE

Of course, there is nothing inherently elitist about reason or the scientific
method. Critical thinking involves applying a few simple rules that are accessible
to everyone, at least in theory. And indeed, a lot of people become skeptics for
the best of intentions: to spread the word of reason and critical thinking, to arm
the masses rather than shoot them down. In highlighting bunk and deception wherever
it occurs, their aim is to protect the vulnerable against the hucksters,
charlatans, politicians and priests who exploit them.
But such is the character of skepticism that good intentions quickly get swamped by
bad ones. Look past the crocodile tears on any online debunking forum, and you�ll
quickly find that the majority of visitors are not drawn there by concern for the
victims of irrationality, but by contempt. They�re there to laugh at idiots. I�m
not going to plead innocence here: I�ve often joined in with the laughter, at least
vicariously; laughing at idiots can be fun. But in the context of skeptic sites,
the laughter takes on a bullying and unhealthy tone. It�s never pleasant to watch a
group of university graduates ganging up to sneer at people denied their advantages
in life, especially when for some of them it�s a full-time hobby. It�s an unfair
fight between unequal resources, and far too few skeptics care about this
inequality or want to do anything about it.

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.

To be fair, such unabashed sexists are a minority on skeptic forums, but to be

fairer, the general attitude to women isn�t exactly healthy. Women are present on
skeptic forums in much the same way that women are present in early Star Trek
episodes: while the men can take on a variety of roles, the women are always sex
characters. Their every attribute is sexualised and objectified. Intelligence in a
male skeptic is taken for granted; intelligence in a female skeptic is a turn-on.
When a male scientist knows about science, it�s expected and goes unremarked; when
a female scientist knows about science, she�s hot! And she�ll be barely visible
beneath the throng of nerds trying to fap off over her lab coat.

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.

As is typical of hatemongers, Dawkins is careful not to name his target directly:

instead, he works with insinuation � though that said, calling the victim �Muslima�
is particularly crass. As is also typical of hatemongers, he builds us a
generalised picture from a number of isolated and unrelated instances. Female
genital mutilation, for example, is nothing to do with Islam, as Dawkins probably
knows, though he�s quite happy to throw it in there and suggest it�s endemic. The
effect of his screed is to portray Islam as a kind of institutionalised woman-
torture in which all Muslim men are complicit, thus slandering about half a billion
people, and furthering the agenda of Fox News and the �war on terror�.
(Incidentally, the irony of the first paragraph doesn�t conceal Dawkins� lack of
compassion for the plight of �Muslima�. Looking for an example of skeptical
crocodile tears? I can think of none better.)

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.

The scientific method generally involves observation of reality, hypothesis based

on observation, and experimental testing of hypothesis. All of these elements,
particularly the first and third, involve the use of human perception � which, when
building models of objective reality, can introduce a dangerously subjective
element.

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.

Our observations are conditioned by the metaphors we have been exposed to

culturally, socially, and in our society�s history. This is what Newton meant when
he said he stood on the shoulders of giants: he was acknowledging the accumulation
of metaphors which helped him make his discoveries. Some of these metaphors were
provided by scientists, like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Others were provided
by philosophers, like Descartes and Francis Bacon, who helped transform the way
people looked at the world, introducing a mechanistic and empirical view. Other
metaphors still came from the cultural, political, social, economic and even
religious transformations experienced in Europe in the previous two hundred years.
The decline of feudalism, the emergence of a strong middle-class, renaissance
humanism, the Protestant reformation, all had a profound effect on the way
Europeans of Newton�s time could perceive the world. (And all those transformations
in turn were influenced by the influx of Islamic culture in the preceding
centuries, pillaged during the crusades�.)

It�s impossible to imagine the breakthroughs of Newton or Copernicus or Descartes

happening in 14th-century Europe. The medieval mind did not perceive the world in
the right way to make them. It was too clouded with metaphors of heaven and hell
and angels and divine will and oaths and tithes and loyalty and hierarchy and
feudal exchange; metaphors that, in our understanding, obscured its perception of
reality. When these metaphors were transformed and replaced, people could see more
clearly; but these transformations were not and could not have been wrought by the
scientific method alone, even if such a thing existed at the time. Scientific
advance was inseparable from political, social, and economic advance. And the same
has been true of all scientific advances. It�s just as impossible to imagine
Darwin�s breakthrough in Newton�s time, or Heisenberg�s in Darwin�s time.

Skeptics, in insisting on the primacy of scientific knowledge, deny the value of

non-scientific metaphors in future scientific advance. As far as they are
concerned, western liberal democracies have made all the political, social,
cultural and economic advances they need to. Western thought is already so free
that anyone who tries can perceive reality direct and unmediated, with no obscuring
metaphors in the way. To the trained western eye, the truth simply reveals itself,
in as much detail as our scientific understanding allows. It�s difficult to imagine
a more absolute statement of confidence in liberal democracy.

Similarly, when skeptics insist that scientific thinking should be spread

worldwide, they necessarily mean that liberal democracy should be spread worldwide.
Which is to say, they are neoliberals.

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.

SCIENCE ALWAYS HAS A POLITICAL DIMENSION

Because we perceive the world through metaphors, all observations, theories,
experiments, statements and facts have a context, including a political context.
Our science is necessarily and unavoidably contaminated by our political system;
political ideologies propagate through science, and science on its own is incapable
of purging them. This is widely understood by people who study scientists, but less
often by scientists themselves, and never by skeptics.

Skeptics like to portray science as a hermetically-sealed, self-correcting

enterprise, where false theories naturally yield to conflicting evidence, and the
truth will always out. To support this position they always trot out the same old
anecdotes. I�ve lost count of the number of times I�ve read the heartwarming tale
of the old geologist who happily dismantled his life�s work once the truth of plate
tectonics was demonstrated to him. However, the history of science shows that such
tales are the exception, and that old theories, and old scientists, have greater
stubbornness. Much more common is the scenario described by Max Planck:

�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.

What parts of reality do the metaphors of present-day liberal democracy obscure?

I�m willing to believe that it affords us a very good view of physical reality: the
�hard sciences� have truly prospered under the last few hundred years of political
progress. Facts like �the Sun is larger than the Earth� or �the Earth is billions
of years old� or �humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor� are unlikely to be
rendered obsolete by political progress, certainly not progress of the positive
kind.

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.

Medical science. In criticising homeopathy, chiropractic, faith healing and the

like, skeptics tend to overstate the integrity of medical science, which for all
its achievements is still rife with difficulties. I can�t help but be suspicious of
a field in which research is dominated by a handful of particularly large and
unscrupulous corporations. But even if Big Pharma doesn�t bother you, you should
consider, for example, the political assumptions inherent in the sciences of
pathology and psychopathology. Symptoms can be empirically there, but the decision
to categorise a set of symptoms as an illness is frequently a political call. Over
the years, medical science has tended to pathologise those sets of symptoms which
interfere with an individual�s participation in the profit system (like physical
disability), or which confirm existing social prejudices (homosexuality and female
hysteria were once considered mental illnesses), or which can be profitably
�treated�, regardless of whether the symptoms are actually debilitating (a process
known as disease-mongering). It is conceivable that to a future society all these
decisions might seem as barbaric as the decision to categorise a set of cranial
measurements as characteristic of an inferior race.
Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, etc. These fields are largely bogus, and
almost everyone associated with them, however tangentially, is a purveyor of
poisonous bullshit. The modus operandi of evolutionary psychology is to take some
observation about human behaviour (which is typically a statistical artifact of
dubious significance), shear it of all cultural, historical, social and political
context (other than the scientist�s own), and explain it as a necessary consequence
of our genetic coding or hunter-gatherer past � typically in a way that endorses
the scientist�s political and cultural assumptions. In fairness, skeptics like PZ
Myers and Ben Goldacre regularly criticise the most obviously loony excesses of
evolutionary psychology � but the methods and conclusions of celebrated friend
o�skeptics Steven Pinker are just as bogus, and are seldom remarked upon. Perhaps
because his politics are generally in line with the skeptic consensus.
Linguistics, Computational Linguistics. These have been dead-end fields for
decades, chiefly because their practitioners are anally obsessed with syntax and
semantics, the elements of language most easily tackled by scientific methods and
of least importance to human communication. I�m convinced (and Wittgenstein agrees
with me) that the pragmatics of language � its use in context � is much more
significant; but a proper study of pragmatics (and not the quasi-semantic junk you
usually see) would require dropping those clumsy logico-empirical tools and
admitting the presence and value of non-scientific knowledge. Want to know why we
won�t be remotely close to a talking AI any time soon? Blame skeptics.
Economics. A lot of the claims of free-market economics, such as the notion of
endlessly increasing growth, sounded rather dubious to my skeptic ears, and still
do. I�ve seen skeptical exposes of Ponzi schemes (where people are incited to buy
into an idea that only tiny minority at the top have a chance of profiting from)
and Scientology�s Sea Org (where, in order to afford the cult�s most desirable
products and treatments, poorer members are forced to slave away at shitty jobs for
a meagre salary, or otherwise risk ignominy and destitution), but have yet to see
any skeptic make the obvious observation that both of these scams are just
capitalism in miniature. Perhaps it�s because the capitalist perpetual-motion-
machine underpins the political assumptions of skepticism that no skeptic is
interested in debunking it. On the whole, they�d much rather debunk fairground
sideshows.
WHAT�S SO BAD ABOUT FORTUNE TELLERS?
In their fevered debunkings of astrologers, hypnotists, mystics, spirit mediums and
the like, skeptics usually miss the fact that these are simply sources of
entertainment for a lot of people, and taken no more seriously than the plot of any
random Hollywood blockbuster. For paranormal sideshow acts, hocus-pocus is all part
of the spectacle, a fact skeptics are willing to overlook in performers who meet
their approval. If anything, the psychobabble that friend o�skeptics Derren Brown
uses to sell his mediocre conjuring tricks is more fraudulent than the the mind-
power nonsense Uri Geller uses to sell his, if only because Geller has apparently
deluded himself more than his audience.

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.

SCIENCE AS A WARM BLANKET IN THE DARK

Arguably the worst purveyors of bunk are the conspiracy crackpots and
pseudohistorians, who really do fill the minds of their followers with some
reprehensible opinions. But in picking apart the nonsense they come out with,
skeptics miss the most important question, which is why they felt the need to
create this nonsense in the first place.

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.

To convert their followers to skepticism, there�s no use in preaching, like Dawkins

and Phil Plait, about the wonders of objective reality, however eloquently they may
do it. Objective reality in a liberal democracy might well be wonderful if you�re a
media personality or a tenured professor in a leafy college town. But for most
people, reality sucks. And if they choose to reject it, I can�t blame them.
Proselytising skeptics certainly offer them no incentive to change their minds.
Skeptics ask society�s castaways to leave a reality in which they are good and
valued people, and enter one in which they are pieces of warm garbage. Little
wonder that so few take up the offer.

But as much as hocus-pocus is a comforter for the disenfranchised, skepticism is a

comforter for nerds. Even the privileged need to be reassured in their ways; no one
is too old or too grand to be tucked in at night with a conscience soother. For
nerds, skepticism is the perfect self-justifying schema: a personal theology that
validates their interests, their deeds, their prejudices and their politics. In
this sense it�s markedly similar to one of skepticism�s favourite targets.

That skepticism is a religion is a idea frequently ridiculed and debunked on

skeptic forums. As so often in the skeptic world, PZ Myers says it best (and here,
by �the New Atheism�, he means more or less exactly what I understand by
�skepticism�):

�[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.

SKEPTICISM�S UGLY AESTHETICS

Philosophising won�t persuade anyone to change their views; we�re all epicureans,
and we believe whatever gives us the biggest kicks. If one philosophy doesn�t do it
for you, you can easily find one that does; there are plenty of fish in that sea.

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.

And so I came to look at skepticism as I�d look at an old embarrassing album by a

band whose work I�ve long since disavowed. Any time I found it taking up space on
my mental shelf, I�d think �why is this crap still here?� And now that I�ve thrown
it away, I feel much the better for it.