This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat

Here’s an interesting little story. The state of Louisiana currently legislates for the equal teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The state’s governor endorsed the act, asking the rhetorical question, “what are we scared of”?

Disinvestment in science and technology is one thing. Students who hold that the laws of nature can be suspended at any point are going to struggle with the sciences. If the state education system will not foster a scientific culture it will not turn out new scientists and will drive existing ones away.

It’s an interesting illustration of the practical limits of neoliberal economic theory. Businesses love state investment. Capital needs an appropriately educated workforce. Equally it needs a healthy workforce with good morale. It needs a strong transport infrastructure, reliable utilities and waste disposal, post, telecommunications. It needs a guaranteed currency. It needs enforced property rights and well defined borders. It needs all these things and more. Capital requires an actor, something at least the size of a national state, to pool the necessary resources. Of course individual businessmen and women don’t want to pay for these things out of their own pockets, but it’s these factors, more than income or capital gains taxes, that affect investment choices.

Why has there been a continual drive in the United States to restore creationism as a legitimate scientific credo? Why would a ruling class hurt itself so? There are ideologues out there, and the bourgeoisie relies on the state to preserve its coherent unity as a class. Creationism is contested as well as advocated by bourgeois representatives. But this is also clearly part of a management problem, of hegemony. It is about how to deal with mass participation in public life.

We have gone on a lot about Truthiness on this blog. There are ideologies, and there are ideological assumptions, but part of what makes truthiness recent and real (and not just a humorous quip) is there are areas of public life where rational debate has been fully subverted in favour of things like “family values” or “legitimate concerns”. If you attack every iteration of the scientific method, particularly if you stop it from ever forming in the first place by, say, insisting descent through natural selection is at least as plausible as intelligent design, you render people incapable. The gain that the masses make through achieving universal education is, in this instance, nullified.

If you have no concept of what is scientific and what isn’t then you will not be able to discern something as basic as your own material interests. Each attack on science is a pre-emptive strike against a counter-hegemony trying to form. Socialism is as much about the preservation of four centuries bourgeois achievement as it is anything else.

Atheism, alliances and truthiness...

Irreligion is the fastest growing religion in Britain. Polly Toynbee, the outgoing head of the British Humanist Association is pleased. I don’t think it’s a bad thing either.

Consistently practiced atheism is a benefit to public life. Not that atheism is a key that unlocks great wisdom. If you are an atheist you can still be a fool, you’re just an atheist fool. Atheism subtracts belief in supernatural causes for natural events. It removes at least one barrier in public life to objective human experience being subjected to collective intellectual inquiry (in the broadest sense of the word): the unity of theory and practice which, amongst other things, is the basis of Marxism.

There’s one problem with this. Atheism in itself is no guarantee against superstition or bigotry. Supernatural forces find their way into all sorts of theories considered rational, for example the invisible hand that guides Adam Smith’s political economy. New Atheism, as some call it, is troubling, to say the least. What should be a theory of emancipation is often a cover for racism. Some people object to some religions more than others, usually predominantly brown-skinned religions.

But we also stand on the threshold of Truthiness in public life, the quality that allows someone to know something is true based on whether it feels right, regardless of evidence or logic. This is part of the general ideological move to shift public life from a rational basis. However atrophied we still have a political system that acknowledges class as the prime division in public life. If this basis is removed religion will be both a prime means of importing Truthiness into debate and of reconnecting the ruling class with the classes below.

Given our understanding of the united front over time we can expect to have all sorts of temporary allies. With what’s likely to come, strange as it may seem, we may have to ally with some of the New Atheists at some point. As atheism grows so the current government is trying, however hypocritically, to reinforce religion, particularly in education through Gove’s so called free schools. 

Special relativity? Liberal rubbish!

Just ask this scientician. He'll tell you that there's no evidence (apart from all that meticulously gathered evidence) that energy equals matter times the speed of light squared. Modern science is a just liberal conspiracy to promote thinking.

This week's thoughts for the brain...

A small story, perhaps, and the big news is this is not big news, however: 46% of Americans are out and out creationists. Another 32% believe in something called theistic evolution. On the face of it this is incredible for the country that's supposed to be the advanced outpost of capitalist civilisation (more incredible because these figures really haven't changed in years).

A few observations:

1) Tread carefully. Atheism is not in itself radical or left-wing, especially in a country like Britain. If it is it is more so in a place like the United States.
2) The separation of church and state is meaningless in conditions like these.
3) Beware, there are people paving the way for this kind of politics here.
4) National politics is impossible on the basis of economic self-interest, otherwise it suffers from the "sack of potatoes" phenomenon identified by Karl Marx. Long-term politics fade and passivity reigns, punctuated by occasional mass movements with little lasting impact. Economic interest is transformed into hegemony and counter-hegemony by ideology (an ideology is a set of ideas consistent with a defined point of view).
5) The Regan Revolution was a movement to counter and dismantle the achievements of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement in America. Popular religion already existed, however, as much as all class-based ideology was destroyed (we're not and never can talk in terms of absolute results here) religion has helped fill an ideological void.
6) Religion is a way of the 1% (as it's now called) remaining in contact with the rest of the population (and in control).
7) If the Tories are busy dismantling the basis and results of class-based politics in Britain, there will be a move by conservatives to replace this with a form of popular reactionary politics with religion at its core.

Repent unto almighty Atheismo!

A funny thing happened to me on the way to Lenin's Tomb, I bumped across the Jesus and Mo controversy, which has escaped from Central London university campuses and into the national press, see here and here for example. The usual band of right-wing moonrakers and I'm-not-a-racist racists have jumped on board. According to the Wikinews report in the second link, and this is a quote, unsourced but a quote:

Atheists, secularists and supporters of free speech rallied in London today to protest what they feel is an "increased confidence of Islamists to censor free expression publicly".

Which is an incredible position to take, given the wall-to-wall racism and general odium aimed at Muslims by mainstream media and politics. The point about the cartoon itself, images from which were re-used on the Farcebook page of the UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society, is explained rather neatly, I think, by the UCL SU statement:

"The atheist society has agreed they will take more consideration when drawing up publicity for future events.

"The society was asked to remove the image because UCLU aims to foster good relations between different groups of students and create a safe environment where all students can benefit from societies regardless of their religious or other beliefs."

Whoever it is who makes the original cartoons does so, I presume, privately, at their own risk and responsibility. I should say no more, not having read them.

Universities are, or should be, an environment, where young people from varied backgrounds can come together to learn about the world and about each other, safely and respectfully, in a spirit of equality. Asking a society to remove certain pictures from its websites does not amount to censorship. The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society still exists, still meets, still expresses its opinions, for the sake of good relations it has to moderate its interaction with the rest of the student body.

That said, what a depressing state atheism has reached. I am an atheist, yet when I see most declared atheists go about their business I shudder. The kind of atheism that's peddled today is not the rejection of belief in the existence of deities but a crude statement: militant atheists are more-enlightened-than-thou. It is a matter of asserting superiority, usually of white people over the dark, lurking masses (and their muslamic rayguns). This alleged-militant atheism makes things all the more difficult when the likes of Cameron and co use religious unction to lubricate their crimes.

Even taken at face value, the blank assertion of the obvious contradictions in different religious doctrines does not relieve people of the burden of religious belief (or religious bigotry). Man made god in his own image. You have to look at why people make gods in order to start overcoming religion.

From now on we should refer to Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies as Big and Clever societies, because that's what they are.

World of Stupid 2... Godwin's Revenge!

Rhetoric 101: everyone is opposed to fascism, find a link between your opponents and fascism, even if it's just a cheapjack neologism like "feminazi" or, in this case gaystapo, and you will prevail in your argument. See here:

An Anglican newspaper has defended the publication of an article that compares gay rights campaigners to Nazis, saying the author has "pertinent views".

Pertinent is a synonym for relevant. What are these views relevant to?

In his column [Alan] Craig referred to a number of high-profile legal cases where Christians claim to have been penalised for their views on homosexuality.

He wrote: "Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK's victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.

"Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it's only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated."

Yes, before you know it they'll be sending heterosexuals to the gas chambers. Pertinent, in this case means relevant to Alan Craig's vivid imagination (as a side note - I hope, for the sake of sanity that Alan Craig is mixing his metaphors and doesn't actually think the Gestapo led the French Revolution).

It may not have always been the case, privileged, white, heterosexual men have insisting that they are the most downtrodden in society. It is a nice illustration though of the superiority/fear dialectic of bigotry. Bigots simultaneously feel superior yet consistently undermined by the object of their hate. They have the upper hand, yet everywhere they see inevitable doom, in this case hallucinations of pink swastikas. They may be dominant, but their enemy is vital and alive.

There's almost certainly a degree of projection here too. It's rather like Martin Amis's characterisation of Muslims as fascists, followed by thought experiments in a final solution.

We may want to give Alan Craig the benefit of the doubt on this account. I certainly have never heard of him before, and let's not forget for every one of him there may be many Giles Frasers are there?. But why bother? He sounds like an absolute scumbag.

Giggles

Republican presidential hopeful Michelle Bachman is opposed to the HPV vaccine (not to mention the Soviet Union).

These people run the world, folks.

Me, myself, I don't know what she's so worried about, vaccines don't exist. No, they're magic serums. Vaccination doesn't occur because it is the interaction of amino acids, proteins, genetics and, ultimately, the descent of species through billions of years of natural selection, and that didn't happen folks, and there's no evidence it ever did!

Now stick your fingers in your ears and yell "lalalalalalala" until the rapture comes.