This is not Comic-Con: why social issues matter to skepticism

By Robin Marie on July 28, 2011

At TAM 9 a few weeks ago the panel on diversity ended up discussing diversity of issues as much as diversity of members. Specifically, Greta Christina and Jamila Bey argued strongly for an expansion of the issues skepticism takes on: skepticism should not be limited, they said, to the traditional “science and supernatural claims” categories. D.J. Grothe, however, disagreed. While he felt that there was a natural affiliation between skepticism and some social movements – the gay rights movement, for example – he expressed concern that to pursue social issues under the umbrella of the skeptical movement might lead to mission drift, especially since questions about social issues can be particularly divisive, as they are not so clear-cut as claims about the natural world.

As a student of history, it can be easily guessed where I fall in this debate. A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how the study of history feeds atheism, and it seems clear to me that skepticism, in turn, feeds the study of history. The same is true for all social sciences – while I acknowledge a clear difference between the hard sciences and the ‘soft’ ones, all social science ultimately hopes to obtain an understanding of society that reflects reality. While what reality actually is can often be much more difficult to discern in social science than hard science, it is far from impossible.

However, those who are uneasy with this idea of expanding the issues the skeptical movement takes on do have legitimate concerns. First, it is simply harder to find out what is true and what is bunk when we are debating social phenomena. This is largely because any characteristic being studied – let’s say drug use – can operate very differently in different societies, depending on an endless list of other factors such as economic development, cultural traditions, taboos, religious history, and so on. Social science is, in short, messy, very messy. To make matters more complicated, tests cannot be run on particular hypotheses in the same way they can in the hard sciences – you can’t create two identical societies, introduce high quality heroin into one and not the other, and then let them stew for 50 years to see what happens. There are no controls in social science. Of course, there are a slew of techniques the various fields have developed to deal with this, and the books that introduce graduate students of the social sciences with exactly these strategies number in the hundreds. But I think it is fair to say that when forming beliefs about how societies function, we can never be as sure as we can in the hard sciences that we have identified cause and effect correctly.

A good example of this is economics. You would think that of all the social sciences, economics should be the most straightforward, right? Either policies produce certain effects when introduced in certain economies, or they do not. Well, think again – the field is far from homogenous. I remember attending a panel discussion given by several economists back when the recession was still young, and being amazed at the lack of agreement among them. All you need to do to get a feel for how divided some in the discipline are is read Paul Krugman’s blog, where he frequently debates the whole legion of economists that Just Don’t Get It in spite of the evidence.[1] Now, I am not an economist, so I can’t speak at length about why no consensus exists. But suffice to say that it doesn’t, and it seems kind of weird that it doesn’t.

But the most commonly expressed concern about expanding the skeptical movement is that to bring in social issues is to bring in the unruly troll of human passion – because all social questions are ultimately political questions, and most political questions, at their root, are not so much claims about what reality is as what reality should be. And when you start touching on questions that pull and pick at our most cherished values and our personal identities, things tend to get heated. Even more problematic is that if we in the skeptical community take on a social issue and then discover we are seriously divided about it, how do we discern who is actually being skeptical? You saw precisely this phenomenon in the recent Rebecca Watson controversy – some individuals in both camps accused the other side of being bad skeptics, because no one with a rational mind could possibly think Watson had a legitimate point or, that Richard Dawkins isn’t a sexist asshole.[2] Furthermore, because social issues touch on social values, which are not, at their root, subject to empirical verification, many feel the social arena is a completely inappropriate place to take the skeptical movement. However, it seems to me that there is not too much division – Elevatorgate aside – in most of the fundamental values of the skeptical movement. True, some of us are libertarians, and I think that is weird. But nearly all of us believe in freedom of thought, freedom of worship, the rights of the minority and the democratic process. Therefore, if we agree on these broader issues by and large, why not look at issues of policy to see what works, and what doesn’t?[3]

And this is why it would not be damaging to the skeptical movement to expand to social issues: we do not need to start trying to empirically test something like “all men are created equal”; social values are by and large already agreed upon. But we do not even have to agree on social values entirely – all we need to agree on is a stated objective, and then to test whether or not a policy achieves this objective. The prime example at the panel that night was the drug war, and it was a good one – most people, even if they think drugs should be legal, wish to see the destruction of drug addiction reduced. The only question is, has the drug war proved effective at this? Now again, social science can be messy, and you can’t run a closed, controlled experiment. But we can amass a huge amount of data on such a question, and come confidentially to a conclusion about the consequences of particular policy. This seems straightforward enough to me – and I sometimes wonder if the objections to the idea of expanding what the community takes on are not related to fear and resentment: fear of the movement being racked by division, and resentment that the nice, cozy and sometimes apolitical space of the skeptical and atheist movements could be changed by something that not everyone in the community identifies with. Yet nothing great was ever preserved, nor changes successfully staved off, by fear. The bigger and the more relevant the skeptical community becomes, the more it will tackle these larger issues – indeed, the more it will have to, if it is to keep its ethical relevance to the rest of society.

And here is where I really disagree with Grothe. At one point during the panel, he said that while the skeptical movement is certainly an ally of the gay rights movement, he does not think the skeptical movement is ethically obligated to support the gay rights movement. Greta Christina asked incredulously, “why not?!”, speaking for many of us in the audience. For if the skeptical movement is going to be nothing more than a sub-cultural clique, a place where likeminded people get together and share a few laughs and sell products produced for ourselves, we will have the cultural relevance of Comic-Con or Trekkies.[4] But it is not in our nature to do this – we are not merely about debunking Big Foot or explaining to Creationists why they are so, so wrong. We are about explaining to Americans why Creationism in the schools is an ethical injustice to our children’s intellect – we are about explaining to everyone why a reality-based view of the world produces more happiness and flourishing for everyone in it. And historically, this has always been our story – from the great sixteenth and seventeenth century scientists who wrought the Scientific Revolution, to the wit and principles of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, to the concerns for social justice of John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, we have always been about more than simply debunking. So ultimately, we are at the core an ethical movement, and ethical concerns are what drives the energy behind events like The Amazing Meeting. To suggest otherwise would be more than disingenuous – it would be a step backward.

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