Sunday, September 20, 2009

Why Atheists Become Leftards

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.
F.A. HAYEK

Attend any meeting of atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers, and you will find in a relatively short period of time that most atheists are leftists in their politics. Granted, there are a minority of libertarians like myself and devotees of Ayn Rand. But my personal estimate is that this amounts to about 10% of the atheist community. This begs a certain question. How can so many smart people be so stupid?

The reality is that most atheists are no different from the fundies they claim to be against. Fundies believe they have a superior revelation of knowledge than the rest of us, and this entitles them to tell us what to do. Well, statist atheists do the same thing. Because they believe their knowledge is superior, this gives them the right to rule. Where a fundie might want to keep you from getting an abortion, the atheist will go after your love of Big Macs. For the atheist, anal sex with your gay lover is quite alright, but don't you dare light up a cigarette when you get done. Needless to say, these people are quite obnoxious to be around. I must confess that I despise them. I find the Christians in my libertarian circles to be much more tolerable mainly because they don't want to run other people's lives in spite of their religion.

When you hear a typical atheist discuss politics, he or she always does it with a smirk. Sam Harris would be a great example of this. Because Islam is a deluded religion, he extrapolates from that truth to conclude that US foreign policy should follow neoconservative policies such as preemptive war and torture, and he says it in the air that such policies are self-evident and to doubt them is on par with being a flat earther. As you can guess, Sam Harris is an idiot. As for neoconservatism, it is really the old Wilsonian liberalism. The irony of Harris's position is that it puts him in alliance with members of the GOP. This is also why we find Christopher Hitchens supporting some of the same neocon positions such as the invasion of Iraq even though he excoriates Henry Kissinger for war crimes. I suppose they only amount to war crimes when the targets are leftists.

Atheists are devotees of what we know as "scientism." This is a quasi-religion of sorts that Michael Shermer discussed in his famous essay, "The Shamans of Scientism." Essentially, the primary tenet of scientism is that science applies not just to issues like biology and physics but also to areas such as art, literature, politics, and other questions of value. This is an utterly absurd position to take. Yet, atheists take this position again and again. Hayek warned us of this in the quotation I referenced at the beginning of this post. Because these people believe they have some of the answers, they have all of the answers. But this is not science.

The core of science is a belief that science does not have all the answers, but it does have all of the questions. The essence of the scientific method is empirical skepticism. A scientism devotee would claim to believe in this empirical skepticism, but this is simply not true. Empirical skepticism has no endpoint in the process. There are no settled issues. To be an empirical skeptic is to live in a perpetual state of questioning. Devotees of scientism do not adhere to this. They want science to serve a normative function. The result is that these people have a wide streak of tyranny running through their core which is every bit as scary as anything an Islamist could dream up. It amounts to a new religion.

The devotees of this new religion argue in the same predictable patterns. If you disagree with them, they do not argue with facts in a scientific manner but seek to marginalize critics by lumping them in with deluded people such as creationists, flat earth people, Holocaust deniers, etc. Anyone can recognize the ad hominem fallacy in this except the devotees of scientism. The scientism people also make numerous appeals to authority and consensus to back up their positions in much the same way theologians would cite prior theologians and Scripture. This is not science. Flattered scientists in roles of authority also do little to dispel such veneration. We can laugh when a Bible college professor comments on evolutionary biology, yet shouldn't we also laugh when an evolutionary biologist tries to make comments on economics?

Because so many atheists are devotees of scientism, they believe they have all the answers especially to political problems. Freedom is fine but only as a precursor to their scientific control of every facet of human existence. Critics will scoff, but this same rationale is what animated Marxism and still animates it. Marxists believe in the historic inevitability of their position. The debate is over for them, and they move to action. The end justifies the means.

Libertarian atheists recoil at this justification of tyranny. I find that libertarian freethinkers are that way precisely as a consequence of their epistemology. This is why Michael Shermer and Penn Jillette and yours truly oppose tyranny. It is a natural consequence of skepticism. Truth is arrived at not because of a rational set of principles followed by enlightened people but as a result of trial and error. This experimentation necessitates the freedom to try and fail and to question things. Devotees of scientism do not believe in this trial and error process. It is not unlike fundies claiming that the canon of Scripture is now closed. Nevermind that this trial and error process is what gave us the knowledge we have today. Scientism people believe this process is done which is why they always move from debate to action. They don't want to be bogged down in questions. They want "progress." It is really pathetic to watch.

Given power, the scientism devotee will no longer rely on freedom and openness and education and other enlightened methods that bring lasting and humane progress. Instead, they will resort to the blunt force trauma of tyranny. This is how you get a Sam Harris championing war against the Islamists. Because they have superior knowledge, they get to rule. Because you have inferior knowledge, you have to forfeit your rights. This is not enligthenment. This is pure evil. What Spanish Inquisitor did not think in the same manner?

I hear my atheist friends talk constantly about prejudice and discrimination against atheists, yet I experience almost none of it in my own life. I have wondered why this was the case, but I think I may have the answer. Because my atheism is tempered by my libertarianism, religious people see me as a someone with simply a difference of opinion even when I call them "godidiots" and "religious fucktards." But leftard atheists aim to rule, and religious people see these people as a threat which is understandable. The philosophy of scientism is simply pre-tyranny. Today's victims are tomorrow's tyrants. You learn this from Nietzsche.

I predict that the atheist community will eventually split along these leftist-libertarian lines, and it should. You can witness the discomfort when a guy like Michael Shermer writes pro-market pieces in Scientific American or questions the orthodoxy of the scientism establishment. This is a debate that needs to happen. Atheists need to decide between enlightenment or merely a new form of tyranny.

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NOTES

1. http://www.michaelshermer.com/2002/06/shamans-of-scientism/

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