SJA #21 - 29 October 2018 - The Afterlife, Intersectionality, and Republican Violence

Afterlife
This skeptical topic isn’t in the skeptic’s dictionary, oddly enough. I mean, it’s one of the most popular woo beliefs in the world; why wouldn’t they cover it? A lot of skeptics restrict themselves to “non-religious woo”. Things like obvious pseudoscience, pseudohistory, so-called “alternative medicine”, ghosts, aliens… those are all fair game. Anything that’s “supernatural”, or “ spiritual” or New Age, but not mainstream religion. They do have Christian ultrafundamentalism (or CUF). I haven’t read that yet, but, judging by the name, it’s restricted to the extreme fringes of Christianity.

This fear of discussing popular religion and religious beliefs is common in skeptic movements. They’ll go after ghosthunters and cryptozoologists, chiropractors and homeopaths, but not preachers or prayers. Faith healing is a popular target, faith itself is not.

There’s probably a complex interplay of reasons for this. Among them, I suspect it’s… prudence. Discretion. Rank cowardice. The majority of the public will leave you alone if you’re only attacking the fringes of society, but if you turn your skepticism on the popular beliefs of the majority, they’ll turn their rage on you. So, an instinct for self-preservation will probably drive most skeptical organizations to refrain from attacking religion. It will limit conflict (conflict will of course be unavoidable).

Another major reason, I think, is that a lot of skeptics are going to be religious. That’s inconsistent; if you seek to apply skepticism to your beliefs, then you should end up rejecting religion. However, expecting complete consistency in people’s beliefs is expecting a bit too much. I think it may even be impossible. The human brain isn’t a homogeneous entity, but a collection of regions with different functions, that are interconnected and communicating in various ways. And those regions, having different functions, will often be in conflict. We should expect people not to be consistent in their desires and beliefs.

So all of this is to say that, yes, the afterlife and all associated concepts are fully deserving of skeptical analysis.

What is the afterlife? People believe (or want to believe) that, after a person dies, some “essence” of the person continues to exist in another form. This essence can be more or less coherent, more or less related to the person who died. For example, here in the US, we’re most familiar with the protestant and Catholic Christian belief that a human being has a soul that, after death, will have all of that person’s memories and beliefs, and which will be punished or rewarded for the person’s actions in life.

South Asian beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism can be very similar in their belief in reincarnation. Though Buddhism states that a person is in a constant state of growth and development, always changing, and that this process of change continues after death so that the person at reincarnation is different from the person who died, there is nevertheless a thread of continuity that can be traced from one to the other.

You can also get a New Age belief in spiritual energy that returns to the universe as a whole. When a person is born, they get some portion of this energy that returns after death. It plays on the theme of reincarnation, in that a person can be reborn with spirit energy from someone else, but, like pouring water into the ocean and scooping water back out, you’re simply not going to get all of the same spirit energy from a person who has died.

Note my use of the word “energy” right there. That’s not limited to discussing New Age beliefs. It’s incredibly popular with them, as it’s a cultural movement that arose in the west in the wake of the development of mass media and popular awareness of physics. “Energy” is a term that is vital for understanding physics, chemistry… any kind of physical science. However, it’s also a slippery concept, difficult to understand, and thus is subject to abuse by mystics who want scientistic support for their beliefs.

However, it absolutely is not limited to New Age hippies. Anyone who wants to argue in favor of the soul is perfectly free to adopt the term, and they frequently do. Whether you’re talking to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, it is likely that they’ll at some point say, “Energy is neither created nor destroyed; where does a person’s energy go when they die?”

The first part of that, the statement, is true. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. To the best of our ability to determine, the energy of the universe is constant, it can never be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.

The second part is a lie.

It’s a lie because it assumes that there is some energy that has gone somewhere. It can more charitably be called a fallacy of equivocation, where a term is introduced using one definition, but is then used to make or support an argument under a different definition. “Energy” is introduced into the argument by noting what is clearly true, that people are made of matter and that every process of the human body is driven by chemical energy derived from the food we eat.

However, the equivocation arises when they start talking about a soul or spirit as some form of energy and saying it has gone somewhere. This introduces two new assumptions that have not been granted, but are instead the subject of discussion. The soul, whether physical or supernatural or “some kind of energy” has not been demonstrated to even exist. The other assumption is that some energy was present in the body which is now absent.

Physicist Sean M. Carroll (to more clearly differentiate him from the biologist Sean B. Carroll) once, while discussing this subject, brought up something like a Zen Koan “Where does the flame go when the candle is out?”.

The answer is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t go anywhere. It isn’t a thing and doesn’t do anything.

A candle’s flame, like a human being, is a process and the result of a process. Heat melts the wax, draws it up the candle’s wick, boils it, and ignites it. The burning of the wax releases more heat, which melts more wax. The heat of the burning wax also causes the resulting gases to move outward and upward, away from the source of the heat, while the pressure from the cold air around the candle pushes it inward, producing the characteristic shape of the flame. The heat also strips electrons away from the gases, producing a translucent plasma, which releases light in its efforts to return to a stable, low-energy state. All of this is the candle’s flame.

When you extinguish the candle, you have ended the process. The candle’s flame is no more. The flame itself was an illusion. It was an illusion in the same way that all objects are illusions. Every physical “thing” you see is a collection of atoms and molecules, held together by forces that can be overcome by outside intervention. Every object, no matter how stable, is only temporary. The candle’s flame is exceptional only in that the temporary and conditional nature of its existence is so obvious.
When you extinguish the flame, nothing has gone anywhere. The matter of the candle is still there. The chemical energy stored in the wax is still there. You can easily re-ignite the candle, restart the process. The potential for the flame exists within the candle, the flame is produced by the candle, the flame is not a thing that exists.

You are likewise an illusion. You are a process and the result of a process. The many, many complex processes that produce that process likewise produce the “you” that we all acknowledge. Every cell within you is a city, every organ a nation, you are an ecosystem. When you die, the process stops, the processes stop, the ecosystem is shattered. The matter is still there, the energy is still there, but the illusion of “you” is no longer being sustained.

A candle can be reignited. Sometimes a person can as well. If knowledgeable people with the right equipment can get to the body in time, the process can be restarted. The window for that is very short, because the processes that make up a human being are magnitudes more complex than a candle.

A candle in its entirety can be described in a few words. The process of the candle likewise. The systems that make up a living being cannot. We have dedicated centuries to the study of life and have come to understand much. What we know can fill books, does fill books. What we don’t yet know will fill many more.

One of the things we know is that there is no soul. The energy that would have been used for the process of the human being is still there after the process has stopped. Nothing has gone anywhere. The reason you have only a short window to reignite the person is because the matter and energy will very quickly be used by other processes. By the many organisms that live in your body that do not share your DNA, and that, at best, only incidentally help to keep you alive.

As soon as a person dies, they will begin to transform the matter and energy of that body into matter and energy for their own lives, their own processes. When the process that is a person stops, the flesh immediately becomes food, and starts turning into bacteria shit.

There is no afterlife, because there is no soul. You will not continue to exist after your death except in the memories of those who loved you. You will not be punished, you will not be rewarded. You will not know or experience anything, because there will be no you. Like the candle’s flame, your body’s life will cease, and the illusion will end.

If any of that is upsetting to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. If you demand reward and punishment, you will have to work to create that here and now. If you demand an afterlife, you will have to take copious notes here and now. Here and now is all you have. Here and now is what matters.

Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a concept that is often misunderstood, often deliberately distorted and misused. Since it’s central to the modern struggle for social justice in the US, I think it’d be a good thing for people to understand, generally.

The term originates with Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate, leading scholar of critical race theory, and professor at the UCLA and Columbia schools of law. It appears that she was the first person to use the term in the context of social justice back in 1989, in a paper titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

In the paper, she discussed a legal case brought against General Motors in the mid-70s, suing the company for not hiring black women. The company argued in court, and the courts agreed, that they weren’t racist and they weren’t sexist. Their evidence that they weren’t racist was that they had hired black employees, and their evidence that they weren’t sexist was that they had hired female employees. The problem with theirs and the court’s analysis was that they failed to note that the company had only hired black men and white women.

In her discussion, Crenshaw stated that the experiences of black women cannot be understood simply as the experience of blackness and the experience of femaleness. That is to say, they are not just black in a white world and women in a man’s world. They experience racism, and they experience sexism, and they experience the world as black women. The combination of blackness and womanness creates new situations, new obstacles for them to navigate, experiences that neither black men nor white women will ever face.

For example, women have always been sexualized and treated as objects and black people have always been hypersexualized and treated as objects. However, black women experience the combination of these objectifications in a fashion that is different, sometimes horrifyingly so, from black men and white women.

The hypersexualization and objectification of black men has, since the 1600s, positioned them as an imminent threat, as violent beasts always one wrong move away from breaking free and injuring white people, specifically white women. The racist propaganda of black men as violent rapists is thus a century older than even the United States. It was used to justify slavery and to fight against abolition, and the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the War on Drugs.

The objectification of white women sees them as objects, as property to be transferred from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. They are thus subject to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault as a normal part of their everyday lives. Some men are simply convinced that women are available for all of those things at all times, and that they have no right to object because they’re not fully human.

Black women meanwhile are subject to the objectification of black people as being hypersexual and naturally violent and to the objectification of women as being always available for the sexual use of men, particularly of white men. Because of the white supremacist belief that black people always want sex, it was simply a fact of law that black women could not be raped. The courts believed that black women always wanted sex, and that saying no was just playing, and fighting back was just their natural violence.

Whereas if a white woman accused a black man of rape it was automatically believed and the man immediately murdered, a black woman accusing a black man of rape was greeted with a shrug because they were both believed to be violent animals, and she really wanted it anyway. Her accusation of rape was transformed in white eyes as just another expression of black violence.

And if her rapist was white? Fighting back probably wasn’t even an option. A white man could kill her and walk away with the public having no doubt that he had done so. Women, in the face of present violent assault, always face the difficulty of knowing that fighting back could get them killed and not fighting back means their later claim of rape won’t be believed. Black women face the certainty that both options are dialed up to 11 because of racial stereotypes.

Thus the world a black woman interacts with is racialized in a way white women don’t experience and sexualized in a way black men don’t experience. Racism alters the misogyny they face, and misogyny alters the racism they face. Neither one can be studied in isolation.

All of this is to say that the world is a complicated place, and culture creates a difficult interaction of different forms of oppression and bigotry. A disabled black woman’s experience of oppression simply cannot be compared to the experiences of a gay white woman.

Which brings us to the myth of the oppression olympics. Right wing douches love to claim that you can only participate in a discussion about oppression if you are yourself oppressed in some way (thus straight white men are ignored… and oppressed!!), and the more oppressed you are, the more social justice cachet you have. According to assholes like Paul Joseph Watson and Ben Shapiro, the god of social justice is a gay black muslim jew native american left-handed red-headed immigrant transwoman victim of rape in a wheelchair.

Nope.

Oppression olympics was first brought up by Social Justice Warriors, noting the importance of not trying to rank oppression. My suffering isn’t greater or less than yours, it’s different. Trying to compare oppression, to compete over who has it worse would only be a distraction from the end goal of trying to end suffering and oppression.

It’s not that white men have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, the problem is that they don’t have the lived experience of most forms of oppression. They don’t have the native understanding of racism or sexism. Straight people don’t live every day with homophobia, nor cis people with transphobia, nor abled people with ablism.

A straight white man can indeed have knowledge of and insight into the oppression experienced by queer folk or black folk or women, but it’s something that has to come with study and effort on his part, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be actively demonstrated, not assumed. And even the most knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated ally can put their foot in their mouth, talk over someone, or take offense where it’s neither intended, needed, nor helpful. When you’re talking about oppression you don’t experience, you’re always going to be speaking in a foreign language, and there’s always going to be mistakes and misunderstandings… and a lot of disingenuous assholes take advantage of that to abuse oppressed people.

Trolls and abusers abound, and any oppressed person who takes an active role in the fight against it suffers from those assholes constantly. Anyone who’s on the privileged side of multiple axes will always, necessarily, be viewed with some suspicion, because there are just so damned many neonazis, sealions, and Fox News dipshits of every stripe just aching derail every conversation and attack decent social justice warriors.

Anywho, that’s oppression and that’s why you need to be calm and respectful in a conversation that isn’t about you. Also, don’t make the conversation about you.