State of Protest

I’ve gotten mixed reactions from a satire article I wrote at the end of July,¹ entitled DNA Sculpture is “Vile and Offensive.” Many commenters and bloggers took the article to be actual news of an actual event. I was rather shocked to see that so many people were accepting that parents were “offended” by a DNA sculpture. Is it because I modeled my article as a “news story” (à la The Onion) after the original, where parents were “offended” by abstract nude sculptures? Is it because people who consider themselves skeptical have heard so many stories about prudish religious people that this is merely another drop in the bucket? Or is it because we secretly want this sort of thing to occur so that it stacks up more ammunition in general against religious fundamentalism that constantly tries to impose its puritan “values” upon others?

Other commenters “got it,” but they were few (or at least only a few revealed their insight). What I tried to do was bring attention to the double standards imposed by the religious upon society. But more importantly, I tried to show how even the non-religious or the moderately religious perpetuate those double standards irrationally. In the case of DNA vs nude sculptures, I was comparing abstractions of humans. One is merely a bit smaller in scale than the other, but fundamentally, what we are is what we are. However, there is a long-standing objection to sex-related imagery, however displayed, and it is irrational. The only argument I have heard to support the idea that we should continue to treat human nudity as something objectionable is that it is a cultural phenomenon, and that it cannot just go away. Perhaps, it has been argued, it will slowly fade away along with religion. I don’t really want to wait that long.

I think religion and the puritan objection to nudity go hand in hand. As long as we advocate for and perpetuate the idea that there is something objectionable, something bad about nudity, the religious zealots, who for whatever irrational reason stoke the fires of the concept of obscenity, will be given default authority by our acquiescence. This carries forth to language in the form of free speech and its “exceptions.” Look at how Ireland has shat upon that concept by passing the anti-blasphemy law. It elevates religious belief to something untouchable. It opens a clear path to theocracy when it declares that even the government has no right to object to religion, no matter how insane that religion might be.

These are merely some of the points I have raised in my satire, and I worry that they’ve been lost. I think to myself, why don’t I just write an article, like I usually do, expressing how heinous some activities of religion are. So, I do. And it becomes virtually ignored. I tried what I could to bring attention to the fact that women in Sudan were being beaten and abused by the men of the government for the “obscene” crime of wearing pants. I can’t say that no one read it, but a tiny fraction did compared to the ever-increasing readership of the DNA satire article. This saddens and worries me. I wrote the Sudan article specifically because I wanted to be direct instead of using satire. Do the results indicate that what I should have done was satirized the event? I do not know.

A few bloggers who reposted my DNA article chastised themselves for having believed it. I tried to go to each of their blogs to tell them not to do so. I, myself, as well as thousands of others, have been fooled by a covert satirist by the name of Roger Ebert. He certainly did a number on us, but I am glad he did.

Back in September of 2008, Mr. Ebert wrote an article on his blog. It contained absolutely no reference to it being humor, satire, or parody. And he genuinely frightened a large part of the rational community, even to the point where Mr. Ebert felt compelled to write a statement of clarification (including his own horror that his satire would be believed so readily by the skeptical community).

His original article declared himself a young earther, meaning he believed that the Earth was about 6,000 years old.

Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:

Q. When was the earth created?

A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.

I, like many others, saw his article and was shocked that yet another person I at least somewhat admired (like Ben Stein) had flipped out. I wrote a scathing suggestion that we should be boycotting people like that.

I even did what I thought was at least cursory skeptical homework by researching a bit about Mr. Ebert:

At first, again, I thought this was a joke. This couldn’t be Roger Ebert’s own website! I opened a new browser window, typed in “rogerebert.com” and clicked my way back to the Commentary. Okay, it could be a hack attack, sure, but this time, there’s no Rickroll, and it coincided with Ebert’s Roman Catholicism. Fine. He’s a young-earther.

I look back upon it now, and I am disappointed with my earlier self. I did not really go far enough in my skepticism, but I did take him at his word, or what appeared to be his word. The last thing I would have thought was it was classic, biting satire from a true artist. As I suggested, I was by far not the only one he fooled. The comments and other articles filling up the internet about Mr. Ebert’s madness were indicative.

Then Mr. Ebert blew my mind.

He wrote another article, entitled “This is the dawning of the Age of Credulity.”

Some days ago I posted an article headlined, “Creationism: Your questions answered.” It was a Q&A that accurately reflected Creationist beliefs. It inspired a firestorm on the web, with hundreds, even thousands of comments on blogs devoted to evolution and science. More than 600 comments on the delightful FARK.com alone. Many of the comments I’ve seen believe I have converted to Creationism. Others conclude I have lost my mind because of age and illness. There is a widespread conviction that the site was hacked. Lane Brown’s blog for New York magazine flatly states I gave “two thumbs down to evolution.” On every one of the blogs, there are a few perceptive comments gently suggesting the article might have been satirical….

But the purpose of this blog entry is not to discuss politics (a subject banned from the blog). Nor is it to discuss Creationism versus the theory of evolution (that way lurks an endless loop). It is to discuss the gradual decay of our sense of irony and instinct for satire, and our growing credulity.….

The adventure with the Creationism article has been enlightening, and a little depressing. I expected better from evolutionists. Thank goodness for my readers like Anna, Mike S., Mark Dottavio, Martin Wagner, John McFerrin, and Robert of Taiwan. They could see the quotation marks.

A postscript and confession. As I said, everyone has blind spots. Many of my supporters cited Poe’s Law, which I was unfamiliar with.

(bold mine, italics in original)

I am not, though, too disappointed with my reaction:

So, the scoreboard for Roger Ebert looks a bit confusing. +10 for decent movie reviews, -10 for wacky Creationist rhetoric (without even a hint of invisible quotation marks visible to anyone but six of his loyal readers?), -10 for insulting the rest of us for not “getting it”, +10 for admitting that maybe we had a pretty good reason for not “getting it” (via our dutiful nod to Poe’s Law), and perhaps +5 for taking the time to explain his reasoning in a lengthy and descriptive journal entry. So, Mr. Ebert, I leave you with +5. And I probably won’t boycott you, since I think your intentions were ultimately good.²

One thumb up, one thumb kinda sideways, unsure of where to point.

I wonder others would rate me.

I was fooled by a sly satirist prior to Mr. Ebert’s deftly written creationist rhetoric when I came upon “AntiSpore,” a blog I thought to be an incredibly realistic rendering of anti-truth puritan Christian fundamentalism. Of course, I wrote about it, as did many others, and was, of course, surprised to find that I had been fooled. That incident in mind when Mr. Ebert emerged as a satirist not only helped calibrate my bullshit detector, but it also showed me that there are people out there who use satire as a multipurpose tool — showing how utterly idiotic something is, plus testing the scope and range of skepticism and credulity. I have the writer of AntiSpore and Roger Ebert to thank for my education in a realm in which I thought I was somewhat familiar.

I realized then, and continue to increase that realization, that pundits, books, blogs, even newspapers cannot be trusted to tell the complete, unspun truth. Everything is potentially false or satire, and we can never put our skepticism to rest. I can say that now, because I got spanked when mine was napping.

1. What is the purpose of satire? Does satire work? Why do I bother with it? Do people who read my blog understand that I occasionally use satire when I think it will bring up an important point or distinction? If my readers generally don’t get it, is it because I’m doing it wrong, or because the satire is too believable (or perhaps unbelievable)? [<]
2. If you’ve ever read any of my satires, you’ll notice that every single one of them is either tagged as satire or is in the satire category, as well as a link to the original source that I mean to parody or distinguish. In addition, I often add references to “Poe,” or drop other significant hints that those articles are not true in and of themselves. I believe I go up to the point of just declaring at the beginning of each article that it’s satire. And yet, people still think it’s real. What’s that say? [<]

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Activism, Atheism, Government, Religion, Satire, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.