{"id":2545,"date":"2015-03-24T10:27:17","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T10:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/?p=2545"},"modified":"2015-03-24T10:27:17","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T10:27:17","slug":"falling-from-the-shoulders-of-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/?p=2545","title":{"rendered":"Falling from the shoulders of giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Preface by Philipp Adamik<\/em>: In this article, originaly published under the chraming title “Dawkins\u2019 ideas about cultural memes are what lead me to embrace feminism and social justice (So how did he end up being such an asshole?)<\/a>“,<\/em> Diana Crow uses a version of the old aphorism “standing on the shoulders on giants”, which inspired me to the new title.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In 1965 Robert K. Merton<\/a>, the most influencial american sociologist of the 20th century, published a book named “Standing On the Shoulder of Giants. A Shandean Postscript”. In this “masterpiece of intellectual comedy” (Denis Donoghue, New Times Book Review<\/em>) Merton follows the traces of the aphorism from Bernard Of Chartres (112 AD), to Sir Issac Newton (1676), Charles Sanders Peirce (1905) and himself (1965).<\/p>\n

In this book the aphorism is a metapher for the scintific method to consulte books written by important scientists called giants. But what happens if one of these giants, who stands on the shoulders of dwarfs, falls? This is what Diana Crows article shows.<\/p>\n

Dawkins\u2019 ideas about cultural memes are what lead me to embrace feminism and social justice (So how did he end up being such an asshole?) by Diana Crow
\n<\/em><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

“In fact, between his ideas about how units of culture (known as \u201cmemes\u201d) undergo natural selection that enables them to survive in people\u2019s minds and his thoughts about how putting people into categories of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d enables violence, Dawkins has actually provided an intellectual tool kit that can be used to debunk just about any patriarchal trope in three sentences flat.”<\/p>\n

Falling from a giant<\/p>\n

“I know that because using Dawkinsian logic is what got me into feminism and social justice in the first place”.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first read The Selfish Gene<\/em> when I was 14 years old and fell for the idea of memetics hook, line, and sinker.<\/p>\n

*Quick primer for those not familiar with memetics:**<\/strong> In The Selfish Gene<\/em>,\u00a0 Dawkins theorized that we could think about units of cultural thought as behaving like organisms under evolutionary pressure. In order to survive, an idea must be able to reproduce itself and spread into new territories (usually via speech, writing, or song). In order to survive in a new ecosystem (read: \u201cin the mind of someone other than its originator\u201d), a meme must be compatible with the existing ecosystem of ideas in the other person\u2019s head. Creationism and evolution are usually not compatible because they fulfill the same conceptual niche (e.g. They both explain how the world we live in came to be); other memes (e.g. planks in political party platforms) are compatible and can even support each other.<\/p>\n

Like genes, memes are \u201cselfish\u201d. They will exhibit behaviors that allow them to spread and stick in people\u2019s heads. A song you can\u2019t help but sing along to is one example of a successful meme. So is the annoying dub step song that you can\u2019t get out of your head.<\/p>\n

Everybody should know better than to say things like that, but Richard Dawkins really, really, really, really, really should know better.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dawkins\u2019 ideas about cultural memes are what lead me to embrace feminism and social justice (So how did he end up being such an asshole?) by Diana Crow 2014
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Trigger Warning: rape, anti-theism, and appropriation of scientific authority by bigots.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Dawkins confounds me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the one hand, he\u2019s brilliant. On the other hand, he tweets bulls*** like this series of tweets<\/a> where he tries to argue that \u201clogically\u201d \u201cstranger rape\u201d is worse than \u201cdate rape\u201d, but saying that \u201cstranger rape\u201d is worse is not necessarily an endorsement of date rape. <\/a><\/p>\n

Those tweets may not constitute an \u201cendorsement\u201d of date rape, but why the f*** is Dr.\/Prof. Dawkins sitting around in front of his computer trying to rank the awfulness of different types of rape?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He \u201cretracted\u201d his original statement without actually retracting anything by saying \u201cWhat I have learned today is that there are people on Twitter who think in absolutist terms, to an extent I wouldn\u2019t have believed possible\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A massage from Prof. Smith \u00a9 Jorge Cham 2004<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Which makes it even worse. Because the people who were offended by his original tweets were not saying \u201cRape is rape\u201d because they\u2019ve been brainwashed into regurgitating absolutist dogma; they\u2019re saying it because they want to point out that date rape can be incredibly, incredibly traumatizing<\/strong> and that Dr.\/Prof. Dawkins is NOT in a position to say that \u201cstranger rape\u201d is inherently more damaging\/traumatizing\/morally reprehensible.<\/span><\/p>\n

When people try to frame \u201cdate rape\u201d as being less \u201csevere\u201d, it\u2019s because they want to deflect the blame\/guilt onto scapegoat rapists who attack strangers. <\/strong>Because they don\u2019t want privileged young men who force themselves onto women in their lives to be held accountable for the violation.<\/p>\n

So they direct their energy into deploring the depravity of rapists who engage in \u201cstranger rape\u201d while erasing the stories of trauma that come from victims of \u201cdate rape\u201d.\u00a0 All the while ignoring the fact that date rape is a much more common occurrence than stranger rape<\/a>.\u00a0 Yes, date rape is bad,<\/em> these people argue, but it\u2019s not as bad as stranger rape.<\/em><\/p>\n

These people can ignore the trauma of people who have been date raped and deplore the perpetrators of \u201cstranger rape\u201d as much as they want, many people who have been date raped are just as traumatized as those who have been raped by strangers,<\/strong> and to quote a 20th century thinker who\u2019s very near and dear to my heart, \u201cIf something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

That thinker was Richard Dawkins. He was talking about religion, but I think the line works just as well for rape apologism.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the thing about Dawkins that confounds me: It\u2019s not unusual for an old white guy with a lot of clout and socio-economic privilege to say clueless and disrespectful things about feminism and sexual assault on Twitter. But with Dawkins, you\u2019d be hard pressed to find a single insensitive tweet\u00a0 from him that you couldn\u2019t debunk using Dawkins\u2019 own logic.<\/p>\n

In fact, between his ideas about how units of culture (known as \u201cmemes\u201d) undergo natural selection that enables them to survive in people\u2019s minds and his thoughts about how putting people into categories of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d enables violence, Dawkins has actually provided an intellectual tool kit that can be used to debunk just about any patriarchal trope in three sentences flat.<\/p>\n

I know that because using Dawkinsian logic is what got me into feminism and social justice in the first place.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not because I wanted to argue with Dawkins\u2019 patriarchal anti-theistic notions. But because I was so impressed with his \u201ctheory of mimetics\u201d, and his arguments about the harm caused by \u201cdiscontinuous thinking\u201d that embracing social justice activists\u2019 ideas about diversity and feminism seemed inevitable.<\/p>\n

I first read The Selfish Gene<\/em> when I was 14 years old and fell for the idea of memetics hook, line, and sinker.<\/p>\n

**Quick primer for those not familiar with memetics:**
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Diana<\/a>
Diana Crow \u00a9 2014<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In The Selfish Gene<\/em>,\u00a0 Dawkins theorized that we could think about units of cultural thought as behaving like organisms under evolutionary pressure. In order to survive, an idea must be able to reproduce itself and spread into new territories (usually via speech, writing, or song). In order to survive in a new ecosystem (read: \u201cin the mind of someone other than its originator\u201d), a meme must be compatible with the existing ecosystem of ideas in the other person\u2019s head. Creationism and evolution are usually not compatible because they fulfill the same conceptual niche (e.g. They both explain how the world we live in came to be); other memes (e.g. planks in political party platforms) are compatible and can even support each other.<\/p>\n

Like genes, memes are \u201cselfish\u201d. They will exhibit behaviors that allow them to spread and stick in people\u2019s heads. A song you can\u2019t help but sing along to is one example of a successful meme. So is the annoying dub step song that you can\u2019t get out of your head.<\/p>\n

However, Dawkins argues, because humans are the first species (that we know of) to discover evolution, we can be aware of how our genes (and how our memes) drive our behavior in a way that no other species can.<\/strong> That awareness gives us the power of free will. We can\u2019t stop natural selection but we can analyze how it shapes us and use that knowledge to create a society with less exploitation and more altruism.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators,\u201d<\/strong> he wrote.<\/p>\n

That sentence enthralled me.<\/p>\n

And contemplating the \u201cevolutionary pressures\u201d that shape ideas became second nature.<\/p>\n

When I first started learning about white privilege, I immediately thought, \u201cOh! It\u2019s like memetics. Rich white people come from places where they have lots of access to education and no one telling them they\u2019re stupid. So that\u2019s kind of the meme-equivalent of living in a temperate location with lots of water! So their ideas don\u2019t have to adapt to extreme conditions<\/strong>. And then when rich white people encounter other people\u2019s ideas, they don\u2019t realize how much those ideas have to adapt just to survive at the subsistence level. \u201d<\/p>\n

That line of logic might sound kind of weird to the non-science people reading, but it helped me grasp the concept of privilege relatively quickly.<\/p>\n

Dawkins\u2019 diatribes against discontinuous or categorical thinking <\/a>(where one person sorts other people or things into discrete or \u201cdiscontinuous\u201d categories like man\/woman or high-functioning\/low-functioning or Species A\/Species B\/Species C without realizing that the lines they draw between categories are arbitrary) are pretty powerful and could just as easily be used to dismantle transphobia as they can creationism.<\/p>\n

To me, that is the true Dawkins<\/strong>. Anti-theism is just a sideshow that crowd-pleases cynical teenagers on Reddit.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a>
Richard Dawkins CC-BY-SA 3.0 (2010)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So when I see Richard Dawkins tweeting victim-blaming garbage and trying to use an arbitrarily drawn line between date\/friend and stranger as the basis for judging the validity of victims\u2019 trauma, it bothers me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It really, really, really, really, really bothers me.<\/p>\n

Everybody should know better than to say things like that, but Richard Dawkins really, really, really, really, really should know better.<\/strong> He\u2019s basically the internet King of making parochial arguments go up in smoke by pointing out how arbitrary the labels and value judgements can be. So why does he have such a horrifically grotesque blindspot when it comes to the parochial arguments he makes himself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve spent an afternoon grappling with how I can reconcile the fact that Dawkins is one of the giants whose shoulders I stand on with the fact that he also tweets things that\u00a0 make me want to poke him in the eyeball, and it probably won\u2019t be the last.<\/p>\n

His<\/strong> ideas are deeply embedded in my approach to critiquing social labels, bioethics, and science deniers.<\/strong> I can\u2019t simply shrug it off as \u201cjust another privileged \u2018authority figure\u2019 not knowing what he\u2019s saying\u201d, because he\u2019s not just any random authority figure.\u00a0 He\u2019s THE most influential authority figure in my philosophy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was outrage-Tweeting about Dawkins with a few other people earlier today, and one of them said something about feeling \u201cretroactively dirty\u201d after reading The Selfish Gene<\/em> a long time ago. I refuse to feel that way because I\u2019m a product of privileged Anglo-American secular biology culture and I don\u2019t want to want to feel like I\u2019m being \u201ccontaminated\u201d simply by participating in my own culture.<\/p>\n

Instead, I want to take the ideas that came out of my privileged, biological, largely-atheistic culture and use them to make the world a better place.<\/strong> For me, that means appropriating Dawkins\u2019 ideas and using them to foster social justice initiatives<\/strong> (In memetics terms, retweeting is like helping to spread \u201cidea spores\u201d into the minds of people who might not hear them otherwise. That\u2019s kind of why I punch the retweet button so much.) and yelling at Dawkins when he says stupid, insensitive things.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And also yelling at people who try to write Dawkins off as being \u201cworthless\u201d or \u201cstupid\u201d.<\/strong> He\u2019s definitely not stupid, and maybe he\u2019s worthless as a person but he\u2019s definitely articulated some valuable ideas.<\/strong><\/p>\n

All that yelling over Twitter gets exhausting.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But, at the end of the day, that\u2019s just a first-world problem.<\/p>\n

And if there\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve learned from Richard Dawkins, it\u2019s that even though it might be metabolically costly (read: \u201cexhausting\u201d), being a relentless asshole is the best way to make sure your favorite memes survive.<\/p>\n

tl;dr:<\/strong> Richard Dawkins sent out some awful tweets earlier today. Which got me thinking about how much I both love his early writing and hate his Tweeting.<\/p>\n

2014 Diana Crow<\/em><\/p>\n

This article<\/a> was originaly published on Diana Crows blog<\/a> in 2014.<\/p>\n

The comic “A massage from Prof. Smith” was originally publish here<\/a> on PhD-Comics in 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Preface by Philipp Adamik: In this article, originaly published under the chraming title “Dawkins\u2019 ideas about cultural memes are what lead me to embrace feminism and social justice (So how did he end up being such an asshole?)“, Diana Crow uses a version of the old aphorism “standing on the shoulders on giants”, which inspired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[166,170,184,191,447,483,504,530],"class_list":["post-2545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-authors","category-diana-crow","tag-date-rape","tag-dawkins","tag-diana-crow","tag-digital-realism","tag-phd-comics","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-social-justice","tag-strange-rape"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}