Author: Jacques Rousseau

Jacques Rousseau teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the founder and director of the Free Society Institute, a non-profit organisation promoting secular humanism and scientific reasoning.

More on dealing with trolls

As submitted to Daily Maverick

(Note to pedants: I realise that the previous post – and this one – uses the word “troll” atypically. This is both because I think the definition could usefully be broadened, and because it’s a useful, evocative word).

If you don’t believe that hostility (or sometimes, something more accurately describable as abuse) on Internet comment threads is a problem, then this post will be of no or little interest to you. I say this to let you know that you should cease reading, rather than skipping to the end to leave a hostile comment. You always have that option, even though people seem more and more reluctant to exercise it.

But if you do think this a topic worth discussing, you’d most likely recall that last week I discussed what appears to be a marked decrease in civility on the Internet. What used to be localised has arguably been generalised, and we’ve now got a significant chance of encountering a troll in the comments thread of Daily Maverick, never mind their ancestral homes of News24 and PoliticsWeb.

One thing that we can all do about this is to temper how we respond to provocation, whether perceived or otherwise. This is part of the remedy for situations in which we might be perceived to ourselves be the troll, or perhaps where we provide one of them with a useful provocation. The advice to not feed trolls remains sound, but it perhaps doesn’t go far enough.

This is because what I’ve always understood as not feeding a troll is simply not responding to their provocations. While mocking someone who seems deserving can provide pleasure – both to other commentators and to spectators – it’s mostly just a way of feeling superior. It usually won’t change anyone’s mind, and serves simply to affirm a group identity as one of the smart, sophisticated set (or so you might think of yourself), rather than the sort of person represented by the ingrate you’re now making fun of.

In other words, directing your scathing wit at a troll might be encouraging another sort of negative aspect of character, while doing nothing to modify the target’s behaviour – except for encouraging him (sadly, it usually is a him) to try harder. It’s perhaps these sorts of considerations, among others, that led Jean Kazez, a philosopher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, to offer what I thought to be three quite useful prescriptions.

The first prescription she offers has already been addressed, above and last week, and calls for some reflection on appropriate uses of our time and energy – particularly for those of us who do act like trolls online. The second and third, however, call for a complete disassociation from those who do, rather than the more typical exhortation to not encourage them.

Kazez suggests that we should cease any participation in fora where significant bullying takes place, and also cease from interacting with people who do participate in those fora. In summary, both those who bully and those who enable the bullies need to discover that they will lose their “seat at the table” of adult debate.

In a local context, perhaps this could mean never even attempting to engage in a comment thread on certain sites, or promptly removing oneself once certain commentators arrive to hijack the discussion. If the chances are high enough (and sometimes they seem certain) that the usual race-baiting will ensue, what’s the point of yet another attempt to call for a nuanced consideration of how (for example) neo-liberalism is being used as a catch-all term meaning “an economic stance that I don’t agree with”, and is therefore not a useful contribution?

My primary concerns around the advice to disengage involve the potentially instructive role that more sober comments can play. Even if it’s true that engagement typically encourages, because trolls love being given attention, there are nevertheless some fence-sitters lurking who are potentially receptive to productive disagreement.

Withdrawing entirely from debate costs us those opportunities. Limiting or ceasing interaction with those who do participate is even more radical, and involves forsaking the opportunity to set an example, persuade or encourage others to be more reasonable. But perhaps this is the point – we are still too optimistic about how often such opportunities arise, and about how often there’s any reward from taking them.

As someone who has by now spent more than two decades at a university, it’s perhaps easy to accuse me of naiveté here – maybe this is just how people talk in the “real” world, and it’s the Socratic dialogue that was always the fantasy. If it is civilised conversation you want, in other words, have it with carefully selected friends or in a filter bubble you’ve created for that purpose.

Outside of those environments – which bring with them a limitation on our own capacity to learn from difference, and from debate – it sadly seems true that most of the time, our engagements with abusive elements of the Internet are doing nothing to stem the tide of anger and misunderstanding. In the meanwhile, though, they do give the trolls something else to scream about.

On dealing with trolls

As submitted to Daily Maverick

One of the things that the Internet has been good for is broadening the range of perspectives in any given conversation. Of course certain barriers need to be overcome: to participate, you need an Internet connection and a suitable gadget. Nevertheless, conversations have been democratised, thanks at least in part to being able to more easily discover who is interested in talking about the same things as you, and the fact that it’s relatively inexpensive to join in.

However, the filter-bubble remains a problem. Not only do the personalisation features of search engines like Google give you results that reinforce existing prejudices; we also like it that way – it’s called confirmation bias, and too few of us take active steps to combat its negative implications (if we’re even aware of the potential need to do so). There’s another concern though, one that I’ve mentioned in the past but would like to explore a little further today: the question of online abuse and the extent to which it might cause some voices to withdraw from the conversation entirely.

An example from a few minutes ago will serve to illustrate: “screw u, u doos, first of 90% of big business in S.A is owned by whites and top man is white, so cry me a river!!!” is what someone just told me on Twitter after I repeated an overheard joke about members of the UCT Senate’s prospects of employability at Woolworths.

Now, seeing as some folk have been calling me a racist for a few weeks now, thanks to my defending  Woolworths and SAA’s affirmative action policies, we can be sure that the grammar-impaired person who tweeted that at me is clearly unaware of this context. That’s fine – I’d expect most people to be. However, just in case there is some context, one might think a little tempering of the hostility is merited when (over)hearing something that offends you.

Not so for this person, it seems, and increasingly not so for those who comment in these pages and elsewhere. And then there’s the next layer of trouble, which is where the filter-bubble ends up resulting in a congregation of these hair-trigger folks into one “room”, as it were. At some point, all possibility for debate ceases to exist because of the mutually-assured idiocy of a collection of angry people, each paying less attention than the next.

Because there seems to be no chance of changing anyone’s mind, some of those who might otherwise try to do so eventually resort to measures like turning off comment functionality, stop engaging in comment threads, and eventually – stop engaging with certain pockets of the Internet at all. This has two consequences: the collection of trolls and angry folk are made more homogenous, and thus apparently stronger, and likewise, the collection of those who consider themselves “virtuous” is furnished with another example of why they are special, and right – and their homogeneity increases too.

So, one day we’ll end up with half the Internet grunting angrily at each other, while the other half recites passages from Plato. Unless we find some way to arrest this escalation of hostilities, or unless I’m wrong about the trend (and I hope I am). In a future column I hope to explore potential legal remedies for online bullying, such as those currently being considered in New Zealand and elsewhere. But because less regulation is always preferable to more, we should also consider what each of us could or should do, simply in our capacity as members of the Internet community.

First, I’d argue that we can sometimes be accused of placing too little or too much emphasis on history, and not enough on our own conduct. Too little, in the sense of the tweet I quote above where zero effort was made to see if an interpretation is the correct one. And then too much, in the sense that we sometimes expect new entrants to a conversation to know minute and technical historical details of that conversation – and then abuse them when they get a detail wrong. There’s sometimes too little patience for any kind of induction period, and so-called “newbies” need the thickest skins of all.

To remedy this problem, I offer one suggestion: that when a debate gets heated, we should try to remember that no matter what’s come before, we’re constantly at a new decision-point, where we – and only we – are responsible for what we say in response to something we find provocative. Sure, someone else has committed a wrong, and we can be inflamed by that. But essentially juvenile questions of “who started it”, while diverting, seldom help illuminate the question of how it can be ended. In other words, I’m suggesting that we learn (or remember) some manners.

Democracy doesn’t magic us into equality

As submitted to Daily Maverick

When you call for a boycott of Woolworth or SAA it’s not in my name, Solidarity. Not in those terms, where you misinterpret legislation, or at the very least stick your fingers in your ears and stamp your feet when you’re offered alternative interpretations. And not in the indignant tones of a group that wants to claim disadvantage in a country where the 10% of us who are white still seem to control just about everything except for the government.

I get that you are frustrated – judging from the comments on some recent Daily Maverick columns, many white folk are at least frustrated, if not angry. It’s even fair to say that you might have a point, because if it’s true that BBBEE is handicapping business and holding back otherwise qualified white employment candidates while only benefiting black tenderpreneurs, then BBEEE is broken. An unemployed black person might even be quick to agree with you, if it was that obviously broken.

Another way in which you certainly have a point is that we shouldn’t be reserving jobs, or positions at universities, according to race. As I argued last year during the crisis-talks around who was allowed to call themselves “African”, Patrice Motsepe and Anton Rupert have far more in common than Steve Hofmeyr and I do. Both black and white refer to something meaningless, or are shorthand for something else that is deeply meaningful.

That meaningful thing is privilege and power, and whether one has it or not. It is whose numbers you have on your cellphone, and whose you do not. It is how many books you read as a child, and therefore how ready you were for school and maybe university, and it is about whether your parents had time to spend weekends with you instead of go to work – or even sometimes about whether you knew your parents at all. It is about all these things, and many more that I can’t imagine.

That meaningful thing tends to correlate with race. We can perhaps summarise it by using the descriptor of “class”, even though that would need further definition. And no, melanin levels play no direct causal role in assigning you to a class. But they have played an indirect one for centuries, thanks to those of us with a lighter skin using race as a proxy for identifying those who stand ready to be exploited.

Not willing, of course, but ready. Sometimes ready thanks to not knowing any better, or through trusting the wrong people. Eventually, as you all know, the exploitation was codified in law, and it was ensured that the vast majority of our population would have less access to the privileges of good educations, safe neighbourhoods, running water and the like.

Those laws changed one generation ago. So it is true that many entering the job market today grew up in a racially neutral democracy. But very few of those job-seekers have parents who can advise on appropriate water-cooler conversation, or on which tie goes best with that suit, or on what to do when you’re the subject of sexist jokes in the workplace.

1994 – or whatever date you choose to identify the start of freedom – did not constitute an act of magic, despite the exuberant rhetoric we so long to believe in. Disadvantage can at some point in history be considered self-inflicted, or an instance of bad luck that has no systemic cause such as racial prejudice. But we’re not there yet, because it remains unreasonable to question the fact that a white kid – in general – enjoys advantages that a black kid does not.

Ideally, this conversation shouldn’t be about race. It should be about identifying which South Africans are underprivileged due to some or other injustice, and then providing redress where possible. If we could find a better way of detecting this lack of privilege than race we should use it, or at least open the discussion about using it – affirmative action based on something as meaningless as skin colour does need a sunset clause, or some sort of trigger condition for its demise.

And yes, it is also true that there are poor white folk, some very rich black folk, and therefore easy examples of inefficiencies and injustice you could point to as being caused by affirmative action. But when you do so, you sound like a racist. Because those exceptional cases don’t alter the fact that cultural capital – Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the knowledge, access and other advantages that allow white people, in general, to still enjoy a higher status in society – is not built over a single generation.

So by all means, Solidarity, question whether we should substitute class for race and explain to us how we should do so. Introduce the idea of a sunset clause – it would be improper for you to be accused of racism simply for doing that. As far as I’m concerned, you could even ask whether it’s appropriate for a job to be targeted at a certain race group, if it’s true that doing so would constitute unfair discrimination.

But as I tried to point out in my column on SAA’s cadet scheme, when one race – or one class – is under-represented in certain job categories, it’s pretty easy to guess what race and class they are, and why they are under-represented. And it’s perfectly justifiable to try to find qualified candidates from that group, before expanding your search to include looking for more people of the sort you already have.

We should all hope to one day not need affirmative action of any sort. But if you claim we don’t need it now, simply because no child was born into a South Africa where they were deprived of a vote thanks to their skin colour, you’re really missing the point that you can’t simply vote your way into a better life for all. Securing a better life involves education, employment and a host of other goods – all of which remain easier to access if your skin happens to be pale.

More on civil discourse and Jen McCreight

Every day seems to bring another example of someone trying to outdo the previous day’s example of spleen-venting on the Internet, especially (of late) in the skeptic/atheist/freethought community. One of the consequences of this was the emergence of atheism+, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.  The sentiment behind a+ is easy to understand – over the past few years, seemingly intractable differences of opinion have emerged inside what some like to call (even if the name is perhaps – and sadly – often merely aspirational) the community of reason, most notably around sexism and misogyny. Various examples of sexism and/or misogyny have been endlessly debated, and these debates have included whether the offences were genuine or perceived, how much that even matters, who the guilty parties are and who is on the side of angels.

Many folk, myself included, have felt compelled to pick sides – or have been assigned to a side, whether they feel like they’re on one or not. The assignation is sometimes made easy, as some commentators seem happy to let their hatred shine, whether towards a construction called “Richard Dawkins” or one called “Rebecca Watson” (for simplicity, I’m using the Adam and Eve characters – there are many further examples one could cite). But that ur-story, and all the subsequent ones, contain so much detail and he said/she said components that you’ll almost invariably offend someone if you wade in. My previous call for civility even invoked (a little, to be sure) offence from Stephanie Zvan, so it’s not even safe to say “play nice”.

Nor should it be safe – one can call for others to “play nice” in a way that is counter-productive through being smug, blind to privilege, one-sided and so forth. Most troubling, perhaps, is that you might make that sort of call in ignorance of the fact that you’re one of those causing the problem. And it’s this final point that I want to address here. Everybody – on both sides of the debate, and everywhere in between – should not be permitted to forget this simple principle: no matter what’s come before, you – and only you – are responsible for what you say in response to it.

I left a comment saying essentially that on a blog post titled “Daddy to the Rescue!” The comment was published, and then deleted a few hours later (and there are reports from others of comment deletion on the thread there). For those who don’t know the context of that blog post, it’s this: Jen McCreight posted something amounting to a retirement/resignation letter to her blog. In it, she cites hate mail and so forth, and also reminds us of her chronic depression. She had basically run out of energy or strength to remain active, as despite the support she continued to receive from some, it was too disheartening to be the subject of constant abuse.

One dimension to this is the details of who is right and wrong in these debates on misogyny and related matters. Another is the playground question of “who started it”. Quite another is the question of what any skeptic/atheist/freethinker thinks can ever be served by insulting others instead of trying to demonstrating their error(s). Causing gratuitous harm is something we criticise (some of) the religious for, remember – why are we doing it to each other? I realise that many of you have tried to reason with those you consider to be your opponents, and have only ended up resorting to insult when reason failed. That’s understandable, even if regrettable (well, I certainly regret it when I do it).

It’s the last question, of insult (in Jen McCreight’s case, sustained) and the effects it has on people that led her father to post the following:

People who call her whore, cunt, bitch, etc. need to learn some civility.  Some parents forgot to teach their children how to disagree without being disagreeable.

The Internet has allowed a lot of people to express their thoughts.  But, it has also allowed anonymous people to publish pure hate and filth without any accountability.  If someone has enough balls to call my daughter a slut to her face I would quickly introduce them to some accountability – a quick fist to the mouth.

What we need in our society is a multitude of free thought, not a multitude of foul mouths.

Yes, in the tinder-box climate we’re talking about, it was a mistake to threaten a “fist to the mouth”. But as for the rest, it seems uncontroversial to me that you can disagree without being disagreeable, that the anonymity of the Internet has lowered our standards of civility, and that it would be (was/is) abusive to call Jen McCreight “whore, cunt, bitch etc.”. But some people seem to think that the problem is something else entirely, namely “Wooly Bumblebee” and some of her commentators. Ms Bumblebee thinks that Mike McCreight’s call for people to stop abusing his daughter

has to be the most pathetic thing I have yet to see. A grown woman being rescued by her daddy. It’s a fucking joke, and speaks volumes as to why she can’t handle the slightest little bump in the road. She is completely incapable of functioning as an adult. I rather pity her, and that is not a good thing.

Congratulations daddy dearest, and thank you for proving once and for all how completely incapable your little Jen really is.aricatured misogynist . folk seem through whether that matters including

Really? The “most pathetic thing I have yet to see”? We should surely insert some qualifiers there, like “on the Internet”, but even then the claim seems rather hyperbolic. Yes, Mike is Jen McCreight’s father. And that does provide part (a large part, no doubt) of the explanation for why he felt compelled to intervene. But to discount an intervention because of it’s source – without considering its content – is a simple instance of ad hominem argument. Mike McCreight has unique insight into Jen McCreight’s response to the bullying she’s reported, and it’s no doubt hurtful to him also. In a case like this, the principle of charity could lead us to say something like “Mike McCreight is hurting too, seeing as he cares for his daughter – we’ll suppress our juvenile instinct to accuse her of rushing off to Daddy for protection”.

She didn’t do that in any case – he blogged without her knowledge. Also, accusing someone of running to their parent for protection isn’t persuasive in itself – even if it does speak to immaturity (which would need more work to justify), immaturity on the part of the person that you are bullying doesn’t make your bullying virtuous. Your bullying is never virtuous – bullying is not the sort of thing that admits to virtue, under any circumstances.

No matter how you assign blame for past actions, or what your character judgements are in relation to all the players in this soap opera, we should all remember to include ourselves in those character judgements also, and try to be objective when thinking of our roles in causing or facilitating harm to others. In this instance, Ms Bumblebee has no defence – in the knowledge that Jen McCreight has been jeered off the stage, and had a long-standing depression triggered, she doesn’t take the option of silence (never mind sympathy). Instead, she broadens the net of victims to members of Jen’s family (and of course carries on with ridiculing Jen while doing so). That’s all “on her”, as the Americans like to say, no matter what sins you think Jen might have committed in the past.

Related, but worthy of a separate post at some point, Ron Lindsay’s (good) post from yesterday on “Divisiveness within the secular movement“.

Attention, white people in South Africa!

The dulcet tones of Steve Hofmeyr seem to have convinced some of you that there is some sort of impending genocide, and that it’s going to be played out using airline pilots and “cashiers of colour” at Woolworths (that’s your preferred polite phrasing, isn’t it?). And in the pressure-chamber of the shouting we love to do in each others’ general direction, especially on the Internet, Woolworths and SAA are now “racist” for trying to give previously disadvantaged folk a head start in the employment queue.

But my previous sentence contained a falsity, in that we’re not talking about “previously disadvantaged” people at all. We’re talking about currently disadvantaged people, in that it will take more than just a generation of people being able to vote to result in equality of a substantive sort – the sort that gives you the same sort of choices as someone who grew up, and whose grandparents grew up, on top of the social heap. I’ll say more about this in next week’s Daily Maverick column.

Here, just a short note to say that much of the opposition to affirmative action rests on a false dichotomy. It is of course wrong to ‘blame’ white people (except for some, of course – I’m happy to blame PW Botha, FW de Klerk, etc.) for continuing inequality premised on race. It’s wrong to set out to make white folk, in general, ashamed of being white. But those are very different to recognising that there are still significant inherent privileges to being white, and (as a white person) not getting defensive when those are pointed out. In other words, it’s not as simple as option A) everything is equal and hunky-dory or B) we have reverse-racism. We do have racial discrimination, yes, any many people (including many whites, like me) think it entirely justified.

At some point it will (hopefully) no longer be justified, and it’s certainly a worry that politicians won’t have the courage to recognise when that point arrives. But we’re not there yet. And yes, it should be legitimate to ask questions about how we are going about the process of trying to get to socio-economic equality. We can debate the manner in which affirmative action is implemented (class versus race, for example), and we can debate sunset clauses. But when we do so, it can’t be in the self-righteous and indignant tones of someone who denies that your position on the social and economic heap is still strongly correlated with the arbitrary characteristic of your skin colour. When you speak like that, denying this reality, you sound like a racist – and you probably are one, whether or not you know it.

(And by the way, that’s not clever.)

SAA and justified racial discrimination

As submitted to Daily Maverick

As much as I’d eventually like to live in a world where the most meritorious person is employed or admitted to university, it’s perhaps impossible to ever get there. Factors other than merit will always influence selection, some of which are within our control and some of which are not. Because of the ones that are not, a fundamentalist rather than pragmatic insistence on merit cannot help but reinforce existing advantages – and disadvantages – resulting from various historical prejudices.

Why it’s impossible and not simply difficult is because a selection is always being made from the candidates who make themselves available. And that pool is determined by who has knowledge of the opportunity in question, the means to respond to the job advertisement or placement opportunity, and of course sufficient competency to be considered. You’re choosing from that pool, and the best person for the job might never know the job exists, never mind be in a position to apply for it.

However, some of the factors influencing the composition of that pool are morally less significant than others. It’s not your job (as a potential employer) to address a cultural stereotype dictating that nurses should be female, because that stereotype isn’t premised on generations of prejudice against male nurses. Instead, it’s likely to be premised on prejudice in favour of male doctors, whereby one leaves the (lesser) job to the (less capable) sex, and also on gender stereotypes around women being more caring than men, and thus, better nurses.

Those prejudices and stereotypes will continue to diminish over time, though it might always be the case that certain groups of people, however defined, will prefer one sort of activity or employment over another. But if you care about getting the best people to work for you or fill your classrooms, you have to be concerned about obvious, and substantial, skews in the applicant pool.

This is precisely why affirmative action is sometimes merited. Where generations of prejudice have made it the case that certain sectors of the population don’t consider certain options viable – or worse, have been systematically deprived of opportunities to exploit those options – we shouldn’t fool ourselves that we’re hiring on merit. At best, we’re hiring the most meritorious amongst the pool of the most privileged. Those actually most meritorious, given sufficient opportunity, might not be part of your selection pool at all.

Some of the reaction to South African Airways’ (SAA) decision to restrict its cadet programme to black and/or female South Africans seemed to come from the fundamentalist school of meritocracy. The trade union Solidarity have always struck me as race-baiting ambulance-chasers, always first on the scene to complain about some perceived slight to a usually white victim. So it was little surprise to see them launching a public campaign against SAA.

But then we also had the Democratic Alliance (DA), whose spokeswoman on public enterprises, Natasha Michael, remarked that selecting on grounds of gender and race “is to take our reconciliation project backwards”. The Freedom Front Plus were also upset, saying that “this action [is] one of the most glaring examples of blatant racial discrimination by any government institution to date”.

SAA have subsequently changed their minds, and now permit anyone to apply for the cadet programme. It’s important to note that SAA never intended to only hire black or female pilots – their existing recruitment and hiring strategies were not being altered in any way. The cadet programme, closed since 2006, was being re-launched in a context where 85% of SAA’s pilots are white men – in a country where white men amount to less than 5% of the population. If you’re looking for the best pilots, it makes little sense to only look in a pool that small – and if you’ve got reason to think that the other 95% need an incentive to consider becoming a pilot, a subsidised cadet scheme seems a good start.

Sure, SAA could have handled it better, by indicating that they would give preference to black and female applications (rather than simply reject white male applications immediately on submission, as was the case on the scheme’s launch). Now, they claim to have done away with any form of quota, although it’s more likely to be the case that they will continue to prioritise certain applications, only out of sight.

If one pays a little attention to the reaction of the (almost exclusively white) commentators on the initial reports regarding the cadet programme, it’s clear that merit was the last thing on most of the complainant’s minds. Unbridled racism is the order of the day, where it is assumed that white pilots are certain to be more competent, and that Solidarity (and the DA, of course) has saved us all from falling out of the sky.

Some are still calling for boycotts of SAA. The Dutch non-attached member of the European Parliament, Lucas Hartong, wants SAA’s landing rights revoked in Europe as punishment for even considering quotas in their cadet programme. For those who don’t know who Hartong is, he’s the man who says things like: “the ANC should rather concentrate on hunting down and prosecuting the black-racist radicals who are murdering the Boer farmers on their own land in the so-called ‘farm-murders’”.

Just the sort of man you can trust to offer informed comment on matters of social justice and racial equality, then. The problem is that this is what opposition to redress – even of this quite innocuous sort – looks like to many South Africans, and this is the sort of reaction it inspires. And sorry, friends in certain sectors of politics, but it’s also what the DA can sometimes look like, when it forgets that even if merit is the most important thing, finding it might mean looking in places you hadn’t looked in before – like the other 95% of the population.

South Africa: Why do you make me hate you?

Originally published in Daily Maverick

On August 1, when Ferial Haffajee delivered the TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, I found it difficult to share the curiously optimistic tone of much of her presentation. Her talk was ostensibly on Zuma’s Spear – in my mind, one of the more depressing moments in a thoroughly unpleasant year for anyone who hopes for the Rainbow Nation rhetoric to one day mean something concrete or worthwhile.

The talk opened with pictures of medal winners at the London Olympics, and also contained various other examples of South Africans doing things that could also make one proud, assuming of course that “being South African” means anything to you. And why should it? Because when we get to the end of year news roundups, there will be far more there to make you angry than to make you proud.

Textbooks in Limpopo were dumped. Children are being taught under trees while government officials tie up deals for R2bn presidential business jets. As you know, I could go on – we all could, such is the plethora of bad-news stories us South Africans know all too well. And then, last week, dozens of striking miners were shot and killed by police at Marikana.

The temporary balm of an Olympic gold medal or three is meaningless now, just as that Rugby World Cup victory 1995 became meaningless, and just as those queues around polling stations in 1994 have become meaningless in light of a government who shows little evidence of any concern for anything but their own status.

But the first democratic elections at least retained meaning for a few years. By the time we got to the World Cup victory, meaning was perhaps preserved for a few months. Now, we’re down to weeks or even days before a nation-building event like the success of our Olympians is overshadowed by something far more representative of our nation than sporting excellence is.

Or maybe more representative than any sort of excellence, excepting perhaps excelling at things like hate, misunderstanding, selfishness and short-term thinking. The South Africa in which we’re ranked first in test cricket is not the one that most South Africans live in, nor a source of inspiration to someone who feels lucky to earn R5000 per month.

Perversely, it’s no doubt true for many that they would consider themselves lucky to earn even that small amount, and to be able to send half of it on to family even more desperate than they are. I remember a line from a Charles Bukowski reading – “one learns survival by surviving”. And such is the strength of this instinct to survive – and the cultural programming of considering it a good in itself to be alive, regardless of circumstance – that people keep on doing it, even though the life in question is probably never going to become more worth living.

A politician visiting Marikana can’t say things like this, of course. And while I realise that there’s standard diplomatic formulations for cases like there, I’d also like to think that a presidential spokesperson won’t take the opportunity to remind us of how busy and important Zuma is, in telling us he’s deigned to cut a trip short because he “is concerned about the violent nature of the protest” and is “sympathetic to calls for a commission of inquiry”. Just get there, preferably before the rabble-rousers like Malema do.

And perhaps, advise your ministers to exercise caution when speaking to the media. After all, it’s not ideal to hear the Minister of Mineral Resource, Susan Shabangu, observing that these deaths are “unfortunate for the [mining] industry”, especially in light of platinum prices.  Or better yet, consider appointing ministers who don’t need to be given advice like this in the first instance.

Besides anger and sadness, another reasonable reaction to a tragedy is perhaps to ask this question: when should South Africans begin entertaining the possibility that we have an illegitimate government? Not because they can magically fix poverty, but because some in government seem intent on breaking the things that could, like education. Education – one of the things that can help angry miners learn that it’s not true that a Sangoma can make you bulletproof.

And when they do break these things, they always keep their jobs, just as they do when they steal public money – so long as they support the right ANC faction, of course. So no, I can’t share the optimistic tone of Ferial Haffajee’s lecture. Today, I could say that I hate this country. In fact, I hate it enough to stay and to try to help break it, hopefully so that we can then start to rebuild it into something worth being proud of.

Jerm’s cartoon, reproduced below with his permission, was one of the motivating factors in writing this column.

Errol Naidoo, allegedly a Christian, on Marikana

Presented without comment, from his latest newsletter:

There has been much hand wringing and recrimination about the Marikana Massacre. But when human life is diminished in the womb, that callousness will find its way into the national psyche.

It is a tragedy that the Church of Christ has not developed a sustainable and coherent strategy to expose the grisly consequences of the culture of death – advanced by pro-death activists.

I have written a feature article about the Demographic Winter in the latest issue of Joy magazine. The culture of death is slowly killing off the human family in Western civilisation.

Abortion-on-demand – driven by radical feminist activists – and the homosexual agenda, lie at the heart of the culture of death. These anti-family groups are responsible for population decline.

[Edit]Contrary to expectations, there are people out there who are willing to say that Naidoo “has a point“, and that I quoted him out of context. Here’s the full newsletter, so you can judge for yourselves.[/edit]

Atheism + some mission-creep and potential confusion

So, the battle lines are now being drawn – at least according to some. Yesterday, Richard Carrier posted this:

In the meantime, I call everyone now to pick sides (not in comments here, but publicly, via Facebook or other social media): are you with us, or with them; are you now a part of the Atheism+ movement, or are you going to stick with Atheism Less? Then at least we’ll know who to work with. And who to avoid.

There’s much more to his post, and much of it is very good, very thoughtful and not at all disagreeable to me. So I’d encourage you to read it, and not to read this post as a rejection of what Carrier said. But I do want to reject his conclusion, and try to explain why it’s important that we all should reject it. The reason for this rejection is not simply the logical fallacy it seems to contain – namely asking us to embrace a false dichotomy – but more because it’s premature to ask for us to choose between poorly-defined (and potentially undefinable) alternatives.

But first, a backwards step, seeing as many of you might not know what I’m talking about. On August 18, Jen McCreight published a post that called for a new wave of atheism. Three posts since that one have sought to define what Atheism+ is (or should be), and have repeatedly emphasised the communitarian aspect of this definitional process – we are all encouraged to chip in with our ideas and suggestions. There’s plenty to love about all those posts, and I heartily endorse the sentiment of Atheism+.

What is that sentiment? As the name implies, it’s atheism, plus a focus on other things. To quote McCreight’s second post in the series:

We are…
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

That’s a good list, as I’d imagine that most readers of this blog would agree. But we wouldn’t necessarily agree on how to care, support or protest those things. We wouldn’t even agree on how to define the things we’re supposed to care about, protest or support. We’d agree about being decent people, in other words, but not necessarily agree on how to do that. And while reaching agreement on how to do that might be an important task, it’s not clear that it’s atheism’s task. To put it more clearly, I’m not sure that all of those (and other) worthy goals can best be accomplished under the banner of “atheism”. Especially not on Carrier’s terms, because – as someone who cares about social justice, for example, I’ll be damned if I’ll let him tell me that I can’t collaborate with a Methodist (not an A+ person, so someone “to avoid”) to address some issue of gender discrimination in a community.

Carrier might of course simply be indulging in a little hyperbole, which is understandable given the battle-ground I recently alluded to. I doubt that he’d have a problem with my collaborating with a Methodist – he’s rather asking us to take a stand against people who are unsympathetic to those goals. Certainly, at least those people described by Jean Kazez as

people who are seized by a desire to attack women when there’s the least hint of a question about male behavior at blogs and conferences. The notion of codes being imposed on their behavior sends them into a rage. These are the people whose existence you have to find surprising … and very disturbing. At the very least, they’re seriously lacking in empathy. Some of them even seem to feel an awful lot of hatred. I don’t know how numerous they are, but too numerous–and their ranks seem to be growing too.

But others also, like the “subtle trolls” I spoke about in my previous post on this topic area. And, those who enable or support the people Kazez describes above, or those who don’t denounce them. There’s a range of people who could be included in those who should be ostracised. But the problem is that it’s not always easy to identify them. One commenter on Stephanie Zvan’s site seems convinced that I’m one of the enemy camp, and I’m of course certain that I’m not. How will these decisions be made? A tribunal, or a democratic vote perhaps? And how does one repent after being exiled, and who gets to do the forgiving?

That’s somewhat facetious, I know. But the terms that this debate is quickly taking on lends itself to that. People are working towards what will quickly become an orthodoxy, and it’s going to happen too rapidly to be carefully thought out. Or, it’s simply going to be forgotten in a few months, as Notung argues here. As mentioned above, I’d have to agree with the 3rd point he makes – that it’s unclear exactly which issues should follow the ‘plus’. As for then deciding how to define those issues, I don’t think we can be complacent or confident (as some commenters at McCreight’s posts seem) about how difficult that might prove to be.

For social justice projects or strategy, we’d need to agree on an economic policy. As polarised as this issue is in an election year in the US, just after/during a global financial meltdown, while #Occupy rhetoric is still fresh in our minds… what chance is there of agreement on this? If we’re going to include a concern for the environment, can we simply throw climate sceptics out of our “circle of trust”, or do they get a chance to make their arguments? For feminism, what about people like me, who support it only as a contingent, necessary evil, because I hope to one day live in a world where race, gender, sex and so forth make absolutely no difference, so am loath to emphasise any such features, even in the short term?

My concern, in short, is that if we’re going to reach agreement on any of these issues, we might only get there through ruling certain question as out of bounds – perhaps even bullying them off the table, a phrase I think I owe to Jean Kazez. And if we’re forced to choose sides, a consequence might well be that all we succeed in doing is to institutionalise the current disagreements in the freethought community, rather than to get closer to solving them. In the meanwhile, there are groups already in existence that support those “plus” goals, or at least most of them, and who can probably be persuaded to support a larger list if a case was made.

I think, for example, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, or the Council for Secular Humanism. They’ve been working hard for quite some time on a closely overlapping set of goals to those of the “Atheism +” movement. The question I’d urge the A+ supporters to consider is whether they’re not reinventing the wheel to some extent here, and also making life significantly more difficult for organisations like these – who often already struggle for support and funding. Just the sort of organisations, then, which could do with the ideas, energy and insight of all those who are currently enthusiastically talking about starting something new.

South African religiosity in decline? Not likely.

Previously published in the Daily Maverick

Wanting to believe something to be true has no effect on whether it is, or becomes true. We all know this, at least in the abstract (except for Rhonda Byrne and her readers). Nevertheless, in the race to be the first to compress some insight or factoid into a 140 character tweet or a provocative headline, confirmation bias can take over. Instead of suspending judgement until we know all the facts, we sometimes ignore our doubts and regard incomplete, misleading or even false information as persuasive.

Scientific literacy is the biggest loser here, because in the struggle to make sense of things, we forget that our beliefs become better justified through surviving our attempts at falsifying them – not when we confirm them, or think that we’ve done so thanks to unreliable information. A trivial example of this can be found in many of the 330 (at the time of writing) comments to the News24 article describing the results of a recent survey on religious belief.

According to the article, the Win-Gallup International Religiosity and Atheism Index found that the percentage of South African people who consider themselves religious has dropped from 83% in 2005 to 64% in 2012. Now, all the local media houses that covered this simply reproduced the South African Press Association (Sapa) newsfeed, so there isn’t a science journalist or editor that I can call to ask why nobody did any rudimentary fact-checking before reproducing this and other claims.

Because spending merely a couple of minutes on the survey data (pdf) reveals that – by contrast to the claim offered on page six that “in each country a national probability sample of around 1000 men and women” were surveyed, the country-by-country breakdown on page 15 tells us that only 200 South Africans were surveyed.

Assuming that this sample was a representative one, the margin of error now becomes something closer to 7% rather than the 3-5% claimed by Win-Gallup. And if a similarly low number of South Africans were surveyed in 2005 (that data is not publicly available), a pessimistic reading of the data results in a shift from 76% to 73% in the number of people who consider themselves religious.

Alternatively, if the sample was drawn entirely from a certain Province or biased in some other fashion, the results from 200 interviews become virtually meaningless. Unfortunately, although the MD of the Gauteng-based Topline Research Solutions (who are listed as having conducted the survey work in South Africa) responded to my email enquiry, he referred questions regarding the sampling methodology to Gallup’s “Group Head for Opinion Research” – based in Pakistan.

Emails to the other two Topline staffers listed on the Gallup poll bounced with a “user unknown” error – even though one of the two is still listed as being the Sales and Marketing Manager on their website. Make of this what you will, but I can’t say that I’m left feeling confident that the South African sample exists at all, never mind being representative.

There are other reasons to immediately be suspicious of this data. The 2001 census counted 79.77% of South Africans as being Christian, never mind the more general “religious”. The 2011 census data won’t provide any update on this percentage, seeing as the question on religion was dropped, but a drop from 84% (all except the non-religious and “undetermined” in the 2001 census) to 64% seems highly implausible, judging by the frequency with which religious sentiments are uttered and endorsed in popular discussion.

Implausible doesn’t mean untrue, of course – it might well be that the numbers have shifted as described in the survey. But if they have, South Africa would be less religious than the United Kingdom is, at least according to their 2011 census which had the non-religious accounting for 33% of their population. And if you believe that we’re more godless than the UK, your name is probably Errol Naidoo.

Then, the language of the (single) question in the Win-Gallup poll doesn’t allow for quality data. Respondents were asked the following question: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?”

“Religious person” is somewhat ambiguous, as it could imply something formal, whether or not the responded attends a place of worship. If I were one of those New Ager-types who thought I had a personal relationship with something ineffable, whether god or angel, I might say that I’m not religious, while any sane onlooker would assert that I most certainly am. Being “religious” is a label of identity, and is chosen or rejected for a range of idiosyncratic reasons, making this question very difficult to answer or interpret.

Likewise, I’m not even sure that I’d call myself a “convinced atheist”, because while the existence of god(s) might well be the thing that I doubt most, if being “convinced” requires being certain, I’d have to tick the “not a religious person” box. And again, all who know me would most likely have predicted a different selection.

A finer-grained account of what being “religious” means to those who describe themselves as such is a different matter, because it can inform strategy whether you’re on the religious or the non-religious side of the debate. The data from the Win-Gallup poll, on the other hand, simply feeds into our confirmation bias. It allows for the religious to lament and the irreligious to gloat, neither for any good or principled reason.

And speaking of principle and good reason, a concluding note on those non-existent science journalists: we might never again see such a job description, except for the few who still survive at a handful of newspapers. But this isn’t an excuse to simply recycle wire copy, whether you’re a newspaper or a member of the public. The fact that experts are no longer doing the filtering for us means we need to pay more attention – not simply become more gullible.