Easy Targets and Lazy Discourse - Thoughts on New Atheism and Charlie Kirk
Shaun YouTube has done his usual thing of bringing some bullshit to my attention and eviscerating it over the course of several hours. He's pretty much the king of this format at this point imo.
The details of the video aren't important here, but the section on Richard Dawkins and Elevatorgate (58:00 to 1:18:00) discusses the way the "New Atheist" movement spearheaded by figures like Dawkins spiralled into reactionary antifeminism through the process of losing arguments to people who actually had something meaningful to say.
He posits that, comfortable and lazy from a career dunking on the most easily disprovable claims imaginable (flat earth, young earth, etc.) they just assumed they could apply the same vibes-based "I already know I'm right" approach to something else they disagreed with - that men in that space routinely made women feel uncomfortable.
I think this is a pretty solid take, and I can't help but draw parallels to the recently much-discussed strategies of former gun enthusiast and right-wing ideologue Charlie Kirk. Kirk would cultivate public "debate" in front of friendly audiences against inexperienced children who lacked his experience in being made to look like dipshits in public and so were easily cowed by his rhetoric and confidence - he didn't need to back up his assertions, he just needed to make them look stupid.
While on paper this seems like a very different strategy than the "Counterpoints to Creationist Dogma" videos that made up 40+% of early 2010s YouTube, for the audience it performs the exact same purpose. To an interested newcomer it frames the host as the confident, knowing, educated pwner and the target as representative of their argument - meek, ill-founded, unable to respond. To the existing audience member it reinforces in-group out-group differences and entertains - their guy wins again!
That the Atheists were using scientific research while Kirk used false, misleading, or misquoted statistics doesn't change the spectacle, and core to that spectacle is the confidence that even if the current target manages to push through and score some points without looking silly, they can always turn to the next person and demolish them with the exact same book of retorts that usually works. In both cases it feels like a cowardly approach to discourse.
This collapsed in the face of the broader feminist movement because, as Shaun points out, it was a decentralised and well-read group of people pointing out obvious and real injustices. Rather than engaging with them as peers they were framed as axiomatically wrong like creationists and in the process this made the descent into reactionary thinking unavoidable. There are central, irrefutable facts at the core of feminist thinking that must be taken seriously if one wants to argue with higher order conclusions and demands without looking like a dipshit.
This is where the parallel struggles a bit for me, I'll admit. I don't know that there's a target Kirk and his peers (I feel like there's some kind of Shapiro/Chaperones joke name for them somewhere, idk) might target on their ideological home turf that has this rational basis to defend it, and it leads me to instead consider a reframing in the other direction.
Was the New Atheist / Skeptic movement itself a regressive wave that just happened to align temporarily with progressive causes? Was its downfall less a shift to the right and more a removal of the veil of respectability it cultivated by going after a more obviously reactionary set of soft targets?
I don't really have an answer. I was a teenager when The God Delusion came out and to be honest I didn't read it - I was enough of a twerp already. I don't have a strong understanding of how it changed the popular consciousness because I wasn't really a part of the one that came before it. I've lived for decades with this assumption that it catapulted atheistic thinking to the forefront, but now I wonder if it just deepened the divide between religious people who cared about such things and the apathetically nontheistic folks who just didn't. If it just created a militantly obnoxious clade of young twerps with a set of easy arguments to have with family members.
Much to ponder!