freedom and reason

While students and allies march and rally for stricter gun control in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School massacre in Parkland, Florida, police departments around the country have joined with school districts to push for more armed officers in schools. 

Cops in schools have become an article of faith for law enforcement. Their efforts are being assisted by the National Association of School Resources Officers, which lobbies for more school resource officers (SROs) and touts the occupation as “the fastest-growing area of law enforcement,” as well as the National Rifle Association, which represents the firearm and security companies who stand to profit from increased spending on school safety measures.

A SRO is a sworn law enforcement agent who is empowered to make arrests. SROs are usually armed with handcuffs, a loaded gun, an electroshock device, a tearing agent and an inventory of coercive physical techniques to achieve pain compliance. In many communities. SROs are given a disciplinary function; public schools are outsourcing the moral upbringing of our children to the police department.

Armed officers are not cheap and, in this era of declining resources in public education, SROs and other armed personnel come at the expense of other investments: smaller classes sizes, more teachers with better pay and rewards to develop their craft, more paraprofessionals to assist teachers, expanded tutoring services for students who fall behind, greater access to qualified mentors, more guidance counselors, training in de-escalation, mediation, and crisis intervention, development and implementation of anti-bullying programming, and bridging the distance between educational institutions and their communities.

The phenomenon of the SRO is associated with the appearance of “target hardening” approaches (bars, barriers, fences, hostile planting), surveillance, metal detectors, active-shooter drills and threat assessment training for teachers and administrators.

The vision at work is that of the garrison school, an effect of what political scientist Harold Lasswell calls the “socialization of danger” in his famous 1941 American Journal of Sociology article, “The Garrison State.” By adapting this phrase, I mean to refer to those strategies and effects that pull ordinary residents into the security process by routinizing the threat of extraordinary violence.

Placing cops in schools has failed in its declared goal of protecting students and teachers. In 1975, about 1 percent of schools in the US had an armed police presence. By 1994, pushed by more than two decades of crime wave hysteria, that percentage had increased to 13 percent. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that from 2015-16, 48 percent of schools nationally had a sworn law enforcement officer present at least once a week, and in many of these buildings, police were a daily fixture.

Despite the sharp increase in armed police presence over the years, school shootings continue unabated. These trends are punctuated by high-profile illustrations of failure. Scot Peterson, who spent most of his law enforcement career as an SRO, remained outside Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Fla., while a teenager armed with an AR-15 killed 14 students and 3 teachers. Three months later, a student at Santa Fe High School in southeast Texas, a building with armed officers present, killed eight students and two teachers before surrendering to police. Almost two decades earlier, Columbine High School in Colorado, which saw the killing of 13, had an armed SRO and a security guard at the school. The shooting at Virginia Tech that followed a few years later, in which 32 people were killed, occurred on a campus with six police officers. In these and many other cases, the presence of police officers did not serve as a deterrent, nor did it save lives.

Although police presence in schools does not protect people from mass shooters, its effect is not neutral. The garrisoning of schools is disruptive to learning and community. Minority students are routinely victims of discriminatory over-policing. Although typically subconscious and implicit, racial bias among police officers remains a problem in law enforcement. Once embedded in schools, the police gaze is turned on the children, bringing biases from the outside inside the building. The logic of crime fighting shapes classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds. This is not a safe space for children and young adults.

There are two compounding types of over-policing: Police are more likely to target marginalized students for control and these students are more likely to attend schools with a significant police presence. Crucially, schools primarily made up of students of color are more likely to have police in them irrespective of whether their community is a high crime area. Law enforcement officers, with implicit racial and class biases in tow, bring their prejudices inside the school building.

Cops also bring something else. As Jerome Skolnick found in preparing his 1966 landmark Justice Without Trial, the working personality of the police officer tends toward the authoritarian: defensive, judgmental and suspicious. This character embodies the logic of crime control (over and against justice) and shapes human interactions in the classroom, hallway and playground.

Although public school shootings are statistically rare in the US, the presence of armed officers, as well as target hardening and surveillance, make the school feel like a dangerous place, manufacturing this perception unjustly engenders and deepens feelings of personal insecurity.Active-shooter drills condition fear in students, compromising what should be a relatively stress-free learning environment. Fear finds kids ruminating over how they will survive the unlikely. Additionally, highly realistic active-shooter drills can provoke the same physiological response in children as real emergencies. Kids have trouble learning new skills when anxious, but their bodies learn danger with ease. Further, teachers are pulled into the practice of threat assessment, shifting attention from students as learners to students as threats to personal safety. Meanwhile, those with bad intentions can simply plan around all this.

Instead of controlling guns like every other rational democratic country, communities are asked to model their schools after the garrison, generating profit for weapons and security firms. The majority is asked to compromise its freedom so that a well-organized minority can possess weapons designed for use on people, and the state can respond with extraordinary security measures. However, at its core, the demand for more armed officers in our schools is not merely a symptom of government failure to stand up to the gun lobby; it is the result of a convergence of powerful interests. 

Cops in schools neither makes schools safe nor facilitates education. The socialization of danger fosters a sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a mood on which authoritarianism thrives.

See also:

Police in schools does not make them safer, Green Bay Press Gazette, June 8, 2018

How Garrisoning Schools With Armed Resource Officers Normalizes Authoritarianism, Truthout, June 14, 2018

 

 

Culture provides concepts and methods for interpreting the world and for sharing those interpretations with others in order that others may benefit from interpretations, to develop a shared meaning about things in the world and relationships, and organize projects to improve the human conditions.

There are plainly different cultures, each providing different concepts and methods and interactional rituals. Some cultures allow for free play in developing explanations and understandings of the world. They allow for, and may even privilege, science, for example. Other cultures are rigid, tightly controlling the parameters of knowledge production and transmission. They may put irrational modes of knowing, like religion, in charge of explaining and understanding the world.

Some say that all cultures are equal, that there is no way of determining which are superior and which are inferior. But if we use science to evaluate the efficacy of a culture in terms of the state of health and wellbeing for persons existing under its control, we will see that this is a false claim. If people are poor and unfree, and this is not solely because of external forces, then the culture may not be adequate to human needs and may therefore be fairly judge inferior to other cultures. For example, if a culture teaches people that disease is caused by witches, then those living in this culture will be disadvantaged compared to people whose culture understands that witches are not among factors causing disease.

There is a discourse that holds that identifying superior and inferior culture is a form of racism. Why is it racist to say that a culture is inferior for hampering the development and freedom of people, a conclusion that can be reached using a range of facts, scientific and humanist? For example, we reject patriarchal culture in our own societies in the west on the grounds that it limits the development and freedom of women. How could this become racist applied to other societies? Isn’t the oppression of women wrong everywhere? Is feminism conditional, reigned in by cultural considerations?

Racism is discriminating against people on the basis of their race, a false belief that imagines biological or constitutional differences between groups of people categorized by shared but superficial phenotypic characteristic and ancestry. Ironically, the claim that culture comes from race and that cultures are different because people are biologically different is a hallmark of racist ideology. Culture is not a projection of race. Race doesn’t exist.

Criticism of culture as a social force does not fit the definition of racism. Expanding the definition of racism to encompass cultural differences is the work of conceptual inflation. It is also a political ideology that functions to stifle cultural criticism and arguments concerning the adequacy of cultural forms to human thriving. Unfortunately the demand that cultures (and moral systems) must be taken on their own terms lest one be accused of racism is quite common in the universities and in corporate media.

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are correct to presume we are animals. But they have little to say about who we are as persons. As persons, we operate on basis of meaning and interpretation. This ability is not found in our animal nature, but in our social history and in our cultural development.

The brain may be like a computer in that it processes data; it is a natural machine that organizes inputs from the environment and carries out action (if it has a body). But the computer doesn’t interpret the empirical world. It doesn’t have a mind. Nor are its actions as a robot intentional.

The mind is a real and emergent phenomenon that depends (so far) on brains, but is not reducible to brains any more than the meaning of a video playing on a computer is reducible to the CPU. We don’t know how to make a computer from which a mind will emerge. We don’t know if such a computer is possible. We are not even sure we could know whether we had actually built such a computer.

The application of evolutionary theory to the level of reality that encompasses interpretation and meaning commits a fallacy, a domain level error, by falsely applying a logic induced from observations of the natural domain to a domain that operates on a different logic, the logic that forms the basis of sociology and anthropology, disciplines both dependent upon natural history in an ultimate sense (though not needing to always take account of it), that nonetheless operate according to emergent logic as different from biology as biology is from physics.

We recognize that the emergent level of reality we call the biological domain cannot be reduced to physics. An ecosystem, despite having a physical dimension, is not a physical system. The relations are not governed by the same forces.

Ideas in physics can be used metaphorically to describe observations in biology, but they are always metaphors. And the process by which metaphors are generated and used remain explicable only in terms of the mental lives of persons, which, without a social environment where language is present, are not even possible.

Watching the culture of outrage that has unfolded over the last few yeas has made me even more dedicated to the principle of free speech and expression. Progressives are making me more liberal everyday. If they want the loyalty of working people, progressives need to dial back the outrage and focus on things that actually hurt people and stifle the movement for justice and equality, for example capitalism and the two-party system.

As a life-long atheist, I’ve had a lot of insults hurled my way. But I have never wanted those who insult me pay a price for it. I’ve always figured they’re ignoramuses and move on from there. I’ve also long recognized that people have the freedom to voice their opinion, whatever I think of it, without having to pay a price.

I remember in fourth grade classmates telling the teacher on me for words I used. I was scheduled for a paddling for saying “shit” and “ass.” Why did they want to hurt me for words? The teacher could have simply asked me to avoid using those words. I escaped that beating, but I was paddled in the ninth grade for making fun of the principal over the intercom. They were words that didn’t warrant being beaten. I didn’t actually hurt anybody. The principal could have laughed it off. But he was so angry he wanted to hurt me. And he did. A small person beat me for a stunt. I didn’t know the PA in the gymnasium was where he delivered announcements to the entire school. I bent over took my licks all while I looked into the blue eyes of Jesus (it was a Christian school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee).

But as bad as my beating was (four hard licks), Mr. Chaudoin didn’t try to ruin my life. He didn’t kick me out of school. Rosanne Barr was thrown off her own show in May of this year for making a joke on Twitter. The joke was about Obama Administration official Valarie Jarrett and the media said the joke was racist because Jarrett has black ancestry (a lot of us do, I suspect). Rosanne thought Jarrett was Jewish. But it doesn’t matter. Rosanne should not have lost her show over it. She shouldn’t have lost anything over it. They were just words.

Although I have always tried to not let words hurt me, I have not always been successful. But part of my strategy for getting through life was wanting to be better than those who insulted me or caused others to dislike me. If you don’t let people get to you, you possess a certain type of power.

A punch in the face is an objective event with an objective consequence. The causal connection is a physical thing. Like striking billiard balls. An utterance—a joke, for example—is a physical event (air is being moved) but with nonphysical content (an idea). The emotional response is also objective (electricity and chemistry are happening). But there is no physical thing that connects the phenomena. You cannot move billiard balls with words.

Ah, you say, but if billiard balls were sentient, then they might be moved by words. True. But, in that case, they could choose to move in any number of directions—or not move at all. I wouldn’t have control over the billiard balls if they were thinking for themselves, deciding how they were going to feel and respond.

It’s the meaning of words that’s shared. Meaning is negotiated. Meaning is variable. The listener can choose how he is going to let words affect him. He can decide how he will respond. Surely screaming in somebody’s face incessantly carries an unchosen effect. Other animals can be stressed in this way, too. But consider that the insult is somewhere where a person has to go find it, say by joining Twitter and looking up a thread and reading through it. People are looking to be offended. They could shrug off the insult. But they make a choice to find the insult, to be insulted, and make a scene.

There is a famous story about the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson who compiled the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete, Dr. Johnson was congratulated by delegations of admirers and well wishers. Among them was a delegation of the respectable ladies of London. “Dr. Johnson,” they said, “We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.” “Ladies,” he replied, “I congratulate you on trying to find them.” I don’t know if the story is true or apocryphal, but it makes the point.

Moreover, while some people experience hurt feelings by reading something on a Twitter feed, others feel nothing at all—including members of the same community, identity, or status. Some Muslims get upset over cartoons of their prophet and demand the cartoonist be censored and punished. Some Muslims even take matters into their own hands and murder cartoonists—and progressives respond by telling the “Islamophobes” to stop provoking Muslims! Of course, no Muslim is actually harmed by cartoons. Not all Muslims are even offended by them.

How quickly a great number of people read Rosanne’s words who would not otherwise have known about them. If there was offense to be taken, the media made sure to maximize the offense—not unlike the Imams taking the Danish cartoons on the road throughout the Islamic world. And pundits and progressives weren’t just content with letting people know what was tweeted. They told everybody how they were supposed to feel about it. You were supposed to look at this thing one way.

At a practical everyday level, we don’t help people deal with a world of many and varied people with different attitudes and opinions—i.e., a free, open, and diverse society— by telling them they’re supposed to be outraged by this or that word or phrase or joke. You help people by teaching them not to let other people control their feelings. That’s how to deal with offensive speech in a free society.

Speech is not violence. I’m not saying words don’t have effects. If this were true, I wouldn’t be typing this right now. I’m saying that there are no words that deserve punishment or deprivation. Words do not harm you unless you let them. People have control over their own feelings. If they don’t, they should learn to. People don’t own me with their words unless they cause somebody to punish me for them. Because if I control my feelings, others don’t control me.

Indeed, it’s a lot easier to control my feelings than to control somebody else’s speech. Moreover, if I control my feelings, I will be happier. If people get to speak their minds, they will be freer. And I will get to speak my mind and be freer, too. because what I defend for others I defend for myself. And people won’t lose their jobs, their careers, be ostracized, etc.

Am I saying that we shouldn’t be civil to one another? Of course not. I have no problem with civility. I recommend it in my classes. But we should never require civility. We should never punish somebody for an opinion or a joke. We should never make people pay for speech. Of course, a lot of the attack on Barr was virtue signaling. I get it. People want to tout their antiracism bona fides by piling on. Everybody is took their turn angrily decrying Rosanne Barr.

They did the same thing to Paula Deen. In 2013, I wrote, “Paula Deen is a scapegoat. Scapegoats appear in our society with regularity because, as a nation, we prefer to ritualize and rationalize unjust social relations rather than actually deal with them. We load our racist demons—which continue to exist because we haven’t done the hard work of eliminating racism—onto a single person and send that person packing. Deen now carries the stigma of racist. We can feel good about racism because he have formed it into a person and we can tell ourselves that we are not that person. We do the same thing with class (remember Leona Helmsley?). It’s nothing more than a symbolic purging of collective guilt, and since the conditions that make us guilty are and never can be addressed, we will soon have to symbolically purge again. Who’s next?” Certainly Roseanne Barr.

In the social media age, online outrage is a substitution for civil rights activism. It’s how people feel like they’re making a difference. If they can get somebody fired, then they can pump their fist in the air and congratulate themselves. “Here’s where the racist lives. Give his boss a call and see what he thinks about this!”

I must add that, with Barr in particular, this was at least as much about hitting Trump by proxy than taking out Rosanne. Both Trump and Rosanne are populists. Progressives loath populism.

After every shooting involving a white male, excepting of course Muslims, my newsfeed lights up with memes about how white males are the problem. It’s meant to push back against the perception that people only blame Muslims, who are a majority white in American, for mass shootings. In other words, it’s Islamic apologia.

Just imagine that, after every gang slaying, memes erupted saying black males are the problem. After all, black males are responsible for the greatest number of homicides in America despite being less than six percent of the US population. If I were to come back at every instance of black shooting with a meme about the overrepresentation of blacks in homicide and other violent crimes like robbery, and stamped it with “Black males are the problem,” progressives would cry racism. And the way these memes exclude Muslims from their identification of “white males” even though Muslim terrorists in the United States are for the most part white (yes, Omar Mateen and Nidal Hasan, who killed 62 people between them were white) signals something quite perverse in the progressive worldview.

The problem is straightforward. Muslim terrorists operate on the basis of an ideology. They are part of a definable group with beliefs that move agency. These beliefs are a call to violence. The same is true for neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazis are adherents to a belief system that comes with motives to do violence.

Ideologies are not protected categories. Islam is not analogous to race, even if race is a social construction. “Black male” and “white male” are not ideologies. They are abstractions, specifically demographic categories. As such they don’t have agency. Agency is something possessed by actual persons.

To say white males are the problem is a racist claim just as much as saying that black males are a problem. These statements attribute to all individuals of a racial category motives and actions conducive to violence. I am a white man. What motives and actions conducive to violence can you pin on me? What ideology do I espouse that makes me a danger to people at a mall or a school?

The enthusiasm with which some leftists push this false and racist narrative troubles our nation. It’s not helpful to building solidarity among members of the working class, most of whom are white, solidarity we desperately need in the struggle against capitalism. Is it any wonder that so many whites don’t feel like the left is where they should be? Why would a white man be part of an ideology that centers race and condemns him for his whiteness?

Note (May 19, 2022): The facts in this blog are correct and useful, so I will keep it here. However, I no longer agree with the conclusion. I still believe in regulation of firearms, but I do not think a ban of AR-15 is appropriate or useful. In principle, the Second Amendment, if we agree that it represents a personal right to keep and bear arms, protects the right of AR-15s as much as any other firearm.

Ted Nugent, limited rock musician, NRA board member, and general blowhard, says the Parkland kids don’t know anything about guns, that it’s a lie that semi-automatic weapons were or are ever used in war, and that, if they succeed in restricting guns, the Parkland kids will be responsible for more death and mayhem.

Parkland was the site of a massacre in which a high school student, armed with an assault rifled, murdered and maimed several of his classmates. The United States continues to be out of step with the world when it comes to gun control.

Nugent, like most rightwing gun enthusiasts, misleads the public about guns. He professes expert knowledge of the matter. Of course, whatever knowledge he possesses about guns doesn’t bear on the question of whether certain types of weapons should be banned. These types have no legitimate purpose and controlling them saves lives. But since the right believes expertise makes argument against gun control persuasive, let me set the record straight.

In the mid-1950s, the United States Army asked ArmaLite to develop a version of the AR-10 to replace the M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, which had been used in World War II and the Korean War, as well as the M-14 (semi-/fully- automatic), which was introduced in the late 1950s (becoming standard issue by the early 1960s). The Army wanted a re-scaled and lighter version of the AR-10. The result was the ArmaLite Rifle 15, or AR-15.

ArmaLite sold the design to Colt and Colt manufactured the AR-15 and sold it to the Pentagon. The Air Force started using the AR-15 in 1962. In 1963, with the approval of President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Green Berets made the AR-15 its standard issue rifle. Army airborne units, as well as CIA, soon followed suit. In other words, the AR-15 is a military-style weapon.

That same year, the US Department of Defense rolled out the M-16, which is a modified AR-15. The chief difference between the AR-15 and the M-16 is that the M-16 is selectable to be fully automatic. However, other modifications make the M-16 less reliable and effective than the AR-15 design. For example, the M-16’s increases spin (the barrel twist) which makes the bullet travel a bit faster than the AR-15 but, more importantly, increases its stability when entering the body, a relevant and horrifying difference that I will discuss in a moment.

Ted Nugent says the AR-15 was not used in war. Nugent says that the caliber (.223/.222 Special) is such a feeble round that it is illegal to hunt deer with it. He is right that the gun is not a hunting rifle. Cleanly killing large animals requires higher caliber bullets with greater stability and stopping power and less damage to surrounding tissue. However, the AR-15 is good for killing and maiming large numbers of people. Indeed, it’s even better for this purpose than the M-16 set to semi-automatic, as well as popular handguns.

A bullet from an AR-15 travels approximately 3300 feet per second, about three times the velocity of a Glock (handgun). Its range is more than eight times greater than a Glock. You can easily squeeze off multiple rounds with greater accuracy. When a person is hit with a bullet from, say, a Glock (much larger caliber), the projectile often passes straight through. If no vital organ or artery is hit, then more often than not a person can be saved and recovery is typically complete. A bullet from an AR-15 tumbles, wrecking organs (trauma surgeons describe affected regions as “exploded”). There are physics behind behind wound ballistics. A smaller high-velocity projectile causes more damage than a larger one because lower mass means greater instability when it hits the body. Moreover, because of instability, if the round leaves the body, it’s a danger not only to those directly behind it, but to potentially everybody around it. Because the spin is less than the M-16, the AR-15 is more unstable when it hits the body.

In other words, the AR-15 is so good at killing and maiming—even better than the M-16—because that is what it’s designed to do. It is an offensive weapon designed with wound ballistics explicitly in mind.

Ted Nugent says that the Parkland kids don’t know anything about ballistics. I think they do. Does Nugent? Or is he lying? 

* * *

Why does the NRA want people to have AR-15s and AK-47s in the face of school shootings? Money. Nugent says that the NRA is families. It’s also a lobby for the security and firearms industries. The fact is that school and other mass shootings are an effective marketing tool. It’s free advertising.

Before the Cleveland Elementary School massacre in Stockton, California (January 17, 1989), most people didn’t know these weapons were available. The shooter in that case used an AK-47, sparking a sharp jump in sales for that weapon. But the awareness of the availability of the AK-47 alerted consumers to the availability of the AR-15. The sales of the AR-15 also experienced a sharp jump. With every mass shooting, AR-15 sales spike. 

There was a break in this pattern: the 1994 assault weapons ban, which banned some semi-automatic rifles (as well as certain high-capacity magazines). However, Congress did not renew the ban when expired in 2004. Leading expert on mass shootings, Grant Duwe, who defines the phenomenon as any incident in which four or more victims are killed with a gun within a 24-hour period at a public location in the absence of other criminal activity (drug deals, gang killing, and robberies), familicide, and collective violence and military conflict. He documents that the number of people shot and killed has increased since the expiration of the ban. Louis Klarevas (UM-Boston) examined incidents involving six or more killed and found the following: 1984-1994: 19 incidents; 1994-2004: 12; 2004-2014: 34. That’s a 183% increase in the decade after the ban expired. (So much for debunking Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla.)

* * *

Most concepts and definitions are contestable. However, there is a strategy in avoiding hard truths by problematizing some thing that reasonable people all know to be solid into vapor. Without a basic consensus on what a thing is, no rational discussion is possible. Before Congress allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, the law defined this type of weapon according to a broad consensus among experts: “In general, assault weapons are semiautomatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition that were designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use.” 

The truth is that the AR-15 is essentially the domestic version of the M-16. These are semiautomatic firearms with large magazines of ammunition designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use. The difference between the AR-15 and the M-16 is that the latter is selectable between semi-automatic and fully-automatic. But this is not the difference that makes the former not an assault weapon. The point is what the weapon is designed to do—that is, what its purpose is. This is what the law spelled out. It continues to be a useful distinction and, given that the AR-15 and other assault-style weapons are the weapons of choice among mass shooters, because the weapons does what it was designed to do, that definition should govern the government’s response to the sale, distribution, and use of these weapons.

Four of the five deadliest mass public shootings in U.S. history have occurred in the last five years: the 2017 attack at a music festival in Las Vegas (58 dead); at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 (49); at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (27); and at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas (26). The weapon used in each case was an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle. It’s time to ban the sale and possession of these weapons.

The United Nations Genera Assembly in A/RES/43/150 75th plenary meeting 8 December 1988, in laying out “[m]easures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities and all other forms of totalitarian ideologies and practices based on apartheid, racial discrimination and racism, and the systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” contains a statement that “calls upon all Governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence.”

Our educational system is failing in this task. While many schools teach about the Holocaust, they do not honestly present the reasons why the Holocaust and other acts of fascist and totalitarian action occur or what can be done to prevent them (other statements in the resolution quoted in part above detail the program). Failure to present the reasons for genocide is worse that failing to dwell on one or another genocide. Focusing exclusively on the effect makes particular episodes peculiar and forgettable. Slavery fades from memory when exploitation and oppression are rationalized or ignored. We have to explain the cause and identify those who contribute to it.

The reason why educators fail the world on this matter is timidity. It is a fact that much fascist and neofascist thought draws upon religious ideologies, criticism of which draw the ire of religious fundamentalists. Parents and partisans are quick to stifle teachers who approach speaking truth to power, (hypocritically) arguing that value neutrality and nonpartisanship are values to be asserted over history and social studies that accurately identify the sources of authoritarianism. There is a fear of calling things as they are: religious ideologies are cruel, hateful, and lethal. Until people are prepared to tell the truth about things, the risk that history repeats itself remains great.

In my university course Freedom and Social Control, I read the UN directive cited above and then proceed to tell the truth about authoritarian and totalitarians ideologies and political and legal systems, including theocratic arrangements, such as Islamic states, which are essentially fascist (and I’m not using “essentialist” here as a hedge, but in its actual meaning). I see it as my duty as a member of a global society that must stand for democracy over against autocracy to teach this. Many of my students don’t know about these things. I understand why. Those of us who know better have to step up our game.

I wish to make two points about my antitheism and then reflect upon the matter. First, in addition to criticizing belief in impossible things as its own problem, my antitheism primarily concerns the problem of exclusive and oppressive ideology, especially those religious doctrines that put so-called “divine law”—which is, in fact, man-made or natural law either seeking false legitimacy by appealing to a fiction or estranged from its actual origins. Systems based on such doctrines are intrinsically totalitarian, as they are the product of the cleric who pretends to divine the wishes of an imaginary entity—that is revelation—over against law developed through considered reason and self-correcting method. Defending freedom and reason from such tyranny is necessary work for anybody who truly believes in democracy, human rights, and social justice—and the individual in which these universal values and needs inhere.

Second, there is a view that criticism of such theism must keep its aim on the idea system and leave alone those who advance or embrace this idea system. But this is a rather odd requirement, since, if nobody were advancing or embracing a given form of theism, then confrontation with its ideas would take a different form, namely the scholarly study of and popular interest in ancient mythology for which no significant number of contemporary devotees exist, for example Norse, Greek, or Egyptian mythology. Zeus is not the problem that Jesus is because very few people believe in Zeus while billions believe in Jesus. However, if, for example, Norse mythology and its ritual practices and social attitudes were to make a comeback (and there is some concern that it may), the problem we would be facing would not merely be myths and rituals, but people who were advancing and embracing terrible ideas. Vikings are fascinating historical subjects, to be sure. But the prospect that Vikings would be about, behaving in the ways Vikings behave, is a rather frightening one. We have the pleasure of romanticizing them because we don’t have to deal with them.

Consider fascism. Fascism is a detestable ideology, one that has all the characteristics of the most exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines. In fact, as I have shown in my writings, fascism is a quasi-religious doctrine, which incorporates reactionary Catholic and Protestant ideas. We are, rightly, eager to engage in criticism of fascism as a set of ideas and practices, albeit often, and wrongly, downplaying its religious features. At best, the Ku Klux Klan are “bad Christians.” But the sometimes anemic approach to identifying the religious dimension of reactionary ideologies is made up for by an eagerness to criticize those who advance and embrace fascist ideas. To be sure, those of us who are committed to free speech and expression and open society protect the right of persons to be fascists (I have sharply criticized those who confront fascists with violence), but we also don’t worry about being called “bigots” or “racists” for criticizing—even protesting—persons who advance or embrace fascist ideas and practices.

It is only because the religious species of ideology has been given a privilege in society that other forms of exclusive, hateful, and oppressive ideologies do not enjoy that the public not only doesn’t grasp the necessity of opposing religion with the same vigor and in the same way as we oppose fascism and other pernicious ideologies, but finds something untoward about vigorous antitheism.

This double standard is an accident of history. Religious identity was lumped with other categories of civil rights at a time when secular consciousness was still underdeveloped. Liberals were right to marginalize religion vis-a-vis secular institutions, but they allowed the concept of religious liberty to be conflated with freedom of conscience, and liberalism’s negative conception of freedom warped the understanding of freedom to religious doctrine and institutions (seen, for example, in the failure to tax churches). Religion, unlike other hateful ideologies, was cast as universal, essential, and necessary.

And so an oppressive system became confused with an oppressed category. The homophobe became the victim in the struggle against homophobia. The sexist became the victim in the struggle against misogyny. Corporal punishment was a justified as a moral practice. Moreover, ruling elites continue to find religion advantageous to controlling mass thought and behavior, taking advantage of a deep-seated and long-standing anti-democratic development, a barrier to enlightenment, a political and moral weapon primed to undercut individualism and secular control over cultural, political, and economic systems.

Anticipating what, for some, will be subterfuge, and, for many, a persistent habit of bad thinking, countering oppressive ideologies and their advocates and devotees has nothing to do with oppressing those who wish to organize their lives around absurd and self-harming and self-limiting ideas. With reason, we strive to educate them in this regard, but we should not actively move to control them. One is free to believe in and express belief in impossible things. As Thomas Jefferson noted, government can’t reach opinion. However, extending freedom and human rights to every individual does mean confronting the harm the religious cause others by banning or restricting behaviors (such as circumcision, family and community relations, forms of education, treatment of animals, and so forth), as well as preventing political and legal attempts to undermine the secular forms of government and law that the West has established. Antitheism does not require barring entry to or expelling persons belonging to religious (or other pernicious ideological) persuasions. But it does seek integration and assimilation of all persons into Western understandings of freedom, rights, and justice.

Unfortunately, there is a movement on the left, decades old now, that works at cross-purposes with the enlightenment project to liberate human beings from oppressive thoughts, practices, and relations. It is based on the postmodern notion, represented in deep multiculturalism and notions of cultural and moral relativism, that all cultures are equal in terms of their capacity to meet the universal needs of human beings and should therefore not merely be tolerated, but embraced and allowed to shape the West. This notion often comes with a self-loathing of Western values that often suggests and sometimes asserts that Western culture is evil, racist, and colonialist, and therefore wrong to defend its institutions and practices from those seek to reorganize the West along non-Western lines – that is, raising theocratic ideals, values, and practices above secular and democratic ones. This movement tells the West that it is as undeserving of its values as those who do not presently enjoy them.

One can see this tendency in Michel Foucault’s celebration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—not a revolution at all, but a conservative and reactionary countermovement that reversed secular progress and forced Iranians back under the veil of ignorance. It was here that the term “Islamophobia” was invented, used by the all male clerical “authority” to psychologically batter women who did not want to return to the chador. The anti-humanist Foucault confused a patriarchal, antigay, and atavistic assault on human freedom and progress with a “movement from below.” But I am being too charitable. After all, Foucault writes, “It [the Islamic Revolution] impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” As if human beings need a spiritual dimension in the rational and compassionate governance of their affairs. Although he attempts to hide his enthusiasm for tyranny, chalking up his interests to an academic fascination with “political will,” the Nietszchean element running through left French philosophy (and previously in German national socialism), pining for heroes against the forces of science and secularism, and full of self-hatred for their own contributions to humanity, pokes through. The “will” here is not so much political in any liberating sense, but rather the will to power. The nihilist rejects the possibility that human beings can design an egalitarian and democratic system from individuals, and dreams instead of supermen and the irrational. The spiritual dimension in politics. This is the mark of totalitarian thinking. This is what Walter Benjamin warned us about.

Multiculturalism, by tolerating the subordination of the individual to irrational ideologies that absorb, redirect, and drain cognitive, emotional, and moral energy, is an elite strategy designed, or at least functioning in effect to undermine class solidarity, weaken democratic possibility, and blunt human being.

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1)

This is Paul. What he is telling us has him explicitly performing the same role as Muhammad in hallucinating Gabriel and Joseph Smith hallucinating Moroni. Jesus Christ is a supernatural being which Paul “experiences” through revelation, i.e. hallucination (let’s assume he’s not just lying).

Jesus is not a terrestrial figure. He is an other worldly being who appeared to Paul in a dream. He is, like Gabriel and Moroni, an angel-like being, a manifestation of supernatural personality.

Later, in order to gain greater legitimacy for the Christian cult (competition was fierce), Jesus was written into history (euhemerized), and a local history was invented around him. As a “real person” appearing before numerous “real witnesses”–none of whom wrote anything down nor can be verified as having even existed–and imagining an earthly setting (apart from all the things we know are impossible, such as raising the dead), the myth makers sought to manufacture the illusion of real world events among a superstitious population.

This is what is presented in the Gospels. They are obvious works of fiction. Christmas time is an opportunity to tell the truth about Jesus. There is no evidence that Jesus was a real person, and all the evidence we do have points to Jesus being a myth. And certainly the things he is said to have done–the miracles, for example–are false. People do not levitate without advanced technology based on science. And since there is zero evidence of supernatural power, and no logical necessity for its existence, even if we were to assume Jesus were an historical figure, we would have to admit, in addition to knowing nothing about him, that any appeal to his supernatural character is irrational.

And this is just as well, because the message of the Gospels is not the way forward if we believe in justice for real people in the present world.

“Now we command you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.” (2 Thessalonians 3)

Yes, open to interpretation. And that’s the problem. People who advocate social justice should really stop appealing to the Bible. Do I think people who can work should work? Yes, in a system where they receive the value of the labors, where they do not labor under the illusion of the promise of eternal life, or in order to give the church money, but instead labor alongside their brothers and sisters in the here-and-now and on the promise of social provision on the basis of need—guaranteed and not dependent on the whim of charity. As long as illusion prevails—as long as people prefer painkillers to changing structures—we’re stuck.

I don’t agree that Jesus was a social justice advocate. He doesn’t advocate for overthrowing unjust social structures. Instead, he threatens people who don’t believe him with Hell and Hell’s angels (argumentum ad baculum—fitting for the son of the god of the Bible). He tells people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He tricked people with conjurer tricks. He told the poor, sick, and downtrodden that their reward was not of this earth but of the life hereafter—as long as they worshipped his father. Those are the words of a charlatan., not a social justice advocate.