The Bluestocking, vol 118: New Atheists, Old Magazines and Double Agents
Happy Friday!
Last night I interviewed Patti Smith on stage, an experience I confidently expected to be terrifying. It was, a bit, but hearing her perform "Because The Night" in a cathedral, accompanied only by a guitar, with everyone singing along to the chorus, made up for it.
This week, I wrote about how this election is a desperate gamble on all sides, and how a new exhibition upgrades the women of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement from muses to artists in their own right.
Finally, a member of my feminist-sceptic family started to read my book this week, and declared it to be "a bit like Sapiens". BRB, browsing property in the Hamptons.
Helen
New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed
What happened to it?
I think it seamlessly merged into the modern social justice movement.
This probably comes as a surprise, seeing as how everyone else talks about how atheists are heavily affiliated with the modern anti-social justice movement. I think that’s the wrong takeaway. Sure, a lot of people who identify as atheists now are pretty critical of social justice. That’s because the only people remaining in the atheist movement are the people who didn’t participate in the mass transformation into social justice. It is no contradiction to say both “Most of the pagans you see around these days are really opposed to Christianity” and “What ever happened to all the pagans there used to be? They all became Christian.”
This essay, in classic Slate Star Codex fashion, is extremely long, but it answers a question that's nagged at me for a while. When I graduated and started to spend too much time online, I was drawn to the New Atheist movement. I read Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris and weird blogs about pandas' thumbs. But atheism isn't a big part of my identity any more. (I was never that keen on the macho intellectualism and snobbery of the movement, anyway.)
Here, Scott Alexander suggests that the creation of "Atheism Plus", the attempt to make New Atheism a less obviously embarrassing forum for hero-worshipping a couple of male grandees, was the turning point. (Seriously, it was painful to watch a movement that mocked the alleged sheeplike nature of believers melt into fanboyish goo at the mere mention of the word "Hitchens".) He suggests that New Atheism failed because of its conception of sin.
The idea that rationality separated them from the other side initially appealed to leftish Americans, who were turning the Democratic party, once a vehicle for political change, into the "Blue Tribe", an in-group which gave people an identity. "As it took its first baby steps, the Blue Tribe started asking itself “Who am I? What defines me?”, trying to figure out how it conceived of itself. New Atheism had an answer – “You are the people who aren’t blinded by fundamentalism” – and for a while the tribe toyed with accepting it," he writes. But the left soon realised that their coalition contained too many believers (and perhaps as anti-religion sentiments turned more explicitly into anti-Islam sentiments, it came to feel racist). So after 2008, "The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: 'Who am I? What defines me?', and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better. 'You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.'"
It's a provocative thesis, but I like it, because it ties into something I've felt increasingly about online social just movements: they function as secular religions. They have popes (leaders), who sell indulgences (let off the in-group when they err), punish the guilty (the out-group, when they err) and treat disagreement not just as a difference of opinion, but as blasphemy and heresy.
What's Left of Conde Nast?
In an attempt to compete with tech-company perks, the 33rd floor, home to Co/Lab, had couches, Ping-Pong tables, and excellent snacks. “Word got out,” one employee told me. “They had seltzer, string cheese, good beer, packets of hummus and guacamole, Chex Mix. There were containers of walnuts and almonds and those really good pretzel chips.” Editorial employees started making their way from other floors “like ants marching up and down.” One Co/Lab staffer told me New Yorker fact-checkers often appeared on Friday afternoons to stuff their backpacks with beer. It created a new social dynamic in which certain developers now identified themselves as a higher caste in much the same way Vanity Fair and Vogue staff used to look down at their counterparts at Details and Brides. Some developers started to complain about the encroachment by the proletariat. “It turned into this weird French Revolution vibe where everyone in tech was allowed to have Cheetos but editorial assistants weren’t,” one Co/Lab employee told me.
Come for the snacks, stay for this sentence: "[Rashida] Jones’s Vanity Fair is trying to embrace a more progressive future — a recurring theme at the new Condé is trying to monetize stylish wokeness..."
I Guess I Like Frasier Now
These are things that make Frasier all the more enjoyable to me now. Its problems are distinctly adult, which doesn’t mean they aren’t funny (like all the wine snob jokes when Frasier and Niles both vie to be president of wine club). I laughed out loud so often through the show’s early seasons that I surprised myself. For years I’d maintained that Frasier was boring and unfunny, I guess because that was the decision 12-year-old me made, and apparently she knew everything. You don’t have to tell me that’s dumb. I know. That is the entire reason I’m here.
Join usssssssssss.
Double Blind
During the next few months, Fulton and I met several times on Platform 13. Over time his jitters settled, his speech loosened, and his past tumbled out: his rise and fall in the Irish Republican Army, his deeds and misdeeds, his loyalties and betrayals. He had served as a covert foot soldier in what has come to be called the Dirty War: a cutthroat and secret British effort to infiltrate and undermine the IRA, carried out in the shadows of the infamous Troubles. “It was a lot grayer and darker,” Fulton said of the clandestine war. “Darker even than people can imagine.
But there’s this: it worked. British spies subverted the IRA from within, leaving it in military ruin, and Irish Republicans—who want to end British rule in Northern Ireland and reunite the island—have largely shifted their weight to Sinn Féin and its peaceable, political efforts. And so the Dirty War provides a model for how to dismantle a terrorist organization. The trick is to not mind killing, and to expect dying.
Big thanks to Tom McTague for recommending this piece about how British intelligence infiltrated the IRA, and the high price it was prepared to pay to do so. It has an incredible twist about a dozen pars in.
Quick Links:
Beautiful piece from Devika Bhat on miscarrying her daughter at six months.
"The world is messy, there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you." Barack Obama, YOU WOULD LOVE MY BOOK.
Deadspin, part of the old Gawker network, has exploded extremely publicly after its writers were told to "stick to sports". This piece by the former editor-in-chief, PUBLISHED ON DEADSPIN, reminded me of some conversations I've had with "numbers guys" who thought publishing pieces on feminism was some kind of ethnical indulgence, whereas (shock) they were actually extremely popular with readers. The "two cultures" mindset - loss-making quality journalism vs profitable clickharvesting - was simply too ingrained.("My colleagues and I know that most Deadspin readers do not want the site to stick to sports. I know this because I have 18 months of experience running the site and 12-ish years of experience reading it, and because I work with people who have seven or eight or nine years’ experience writing and editing for it," writes Greenwell.) This New Republic piece on Deadspin, about the way predatory venture capitalists are screwing the journalism industry, is also worth reading.
Guest gif: A clue about my plans next week.
See you next time . . .