On a few occasions I’ve praised Dawkin’s God Delusion and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Why? I don’t think these texts are particularly sophisticated. I don’t think they make very new or interesting arguments. I don’t think all of their arguments are even that plausible. Certainly they aren’t the sorts of texts that I would cite or take seriously in an article I would write for an academic journal. Most importantly, I don’t think these arguments are going to persuade any of the devoutly religious. So why do these books interest me? These books interest me in their status as “public books”. That is, they are addressed to a general, non-academic reader or are designed for mass consumption. Since they have been published they have generated discussion on a number of popular television news and radio programs and have been the subject of numerous newspaper articles. The important point here has to do with how these books relate to a certain context in American politics. These books have occured in a media environment that has been saturated by Christianity, where values discussions are constantly pitched in terms of religion, and where atheism is so absent (in news reporting) that it isn’t even discussed premised on the assumption that atheists just don’t exist in the United States. As a rhetorical event and fact (an enunciation that took place and inscribed itself in the media system), these books are thus interesting in that they challenge this assumption and introduce a new creature into the social space: The Atheist. Atheists now, perhaps, come to be recognized as a population that must be counted and recognized as having a say in public debates about policy. A believer finds that they must respond to this position in these debates, whereas before the existence of atheists in the United States didn’t differ markedly from that of biological organisms such as ourselves and infrared light, i.e., they were invisible. All response also entails concession and compromise at the rhetorical level. As such, the simple appearance of something like this– whether one agrees with it or not –shifts the nature of the entire debate and what is rhetorically obvious in subsequent discussions. Time will tell whether the growing voice of atheists has this effect on public debates or whether the hundreds of thousands of agonistics and atheists in the United States will continue to be voiceless and invisible in how public discussions or molded and framed. No one is going to persuade the likes of Pat Robertson and his followers. What can be done is a shift in the very assumptions underlying the populace in such a way that it is increasingly difficult for such positions to even be heard or recognized as anything but fringe or lunatic positions. That is, positions can also be taken off the table and delegitimated. No one worships Greek gods anymore, perhaps organized religion as we know it today will someday disappear as well. This is why I’m always emphasizing the ethics of repetition and why it’s so important to repeat. It’s not simply a good argument that matters. Every rhetorician knows this. Rather, it’s important to repeat and repeat and repeat again until things are so ingrained in the unconscious of the population that they seem obvious. At one point, a person was on the fringe if they advocated mechanism (in physics) and heliocentrism in astronomy. Now everyone takes these things as being self-evident and assumes them as a part of the furniture of their universe. Even the religious who fought these things believe them today. This was through constant repetition or a saturation of the social space much like cane toads came to saturate the ecosystem in Australia...larvalsubjects said this on April 28th, 2007 at 12:07 am (edit)
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