Not All Atheists?

A couple of days after I got here, I got into a dustup with my Liberal Artist Friend on Facebook.  He posted a link to this meme, which had been posted on an atheist Facebook page.  The comments there are painful enough.  LAF remarked on his repost:

Religious friends: Why are so many of your co-religionists so stupid and hateful? And why can't they write or spell? This person thinks there are dessert islands! (Sounds great!) He thinks bombs hatch. He doesn't capitalize Jesus (!?!). And weirdly and surprisingly, he's concerned about the safety of "out women." Why, why, why???

Now, the first thing to notice about this is its self-righteous stupidity.  Does my friend really believe that if people stopped being religious, their spelling and punctuation would suddenly, magically improve?  I've known too many atheists who can't spell or punctuate (and theists who can) to take that notion seriously.  What do spelling and punctuation have to do with religion anyway?  As for "stupid and hateful", I've been pointing out the stupidity and hatefulness of many atheists, including prominent ones, for years now, and I don't see any improvement coming.

I don't know why many people have difficulty with technical skills like spelling and punctuation, but those skills are not rational (English spelling? please!), and they're not a sign of moral virtue or even intelligence.  They are class markers, of course, which I suspect is why my friend invoked them.  That speaks badly for him, and for his own ability to think critically or rationally.

The same goes for attitudes towards women.  When challenged by one of my friend's friends, I mentioned the attacks on Rebecca Watson for pointing out sexism among atheist males, most infamously by Richard Dawkins (though I hear he's retracted his earlier statement, however belatedly and gracelessly).  My challenger jeered: was that all I could point to?  Why, it was years ago!  Of course it wasn't all I could point to, and it's still a live issue among atheists, as is sexism among scientists.  Another person, a woman this time, argued that you can't expect atheists to get rid of all their sexism instantly:

Sexism is part of our culture. It began in religion but that does not mean a person can easily remove themselves from that reality just because they do not believe in a god.

And a few men do not represent all atheist men. Just as this idiot does not represent all theists.

"Sexism began in religion" is ambiguous, because you could probably say the same of everything in every culture: art, science, cooking, etc.  So where did religion come from?  This person was talking, as so many atheists do, about religion as if it were some autonomous system distinct from human beings, that imposes its will upon us, instead of something that human beings invented.  Religion is sexist, insofar as it is, because human beings were sexist and created their gods in their own image.  Religion has also been a medium through which people have challenged and tried to delegitimize oppressive structures, for the same reason: I don't like it, so obviously God must not like it either. And you know where that goes.

These countermoves were drearily familiar to me. I get them from Christians and other theists all the time.  Oh, that was a long time ago, it's not a problem anymore.  Oh, that is just a problem now because some have fallen away from true faith, it didn't used to be a problem.  You can't judge all Christians by that person, he or she is not typical at all, he or she isn't really a Christian.  Of course Christians aren't perfect, it takes God a long time to cleanse them of their errors and wash away their sins and corruption, but they're so much better than they'd be without Him.

I don't expect atheists to escape or abandon all problematic errors automatically; I certainly haven't.  That's what I've been saying for years.  In my experience and observation, though, it's mainly atheists who blame every problem on religion and talk about "enlightenment" and "waking up" as though error will simply fall away once you throw out belief in gods.  You will then be rational, free of superstition, a new creation in Not-God.  And while my friend and his friends disavowed any such notions, they still are too cavalier about the work needed to get rid of error in themselves.  That's one reason why their cheerleading for science and jeering at the religious annoys me so much: they're like fundamentalist Christians who bask in the intelligence of a few unrepresentative literati or academics like C. S. Lewis, but don't want to work at educating themselves.  I'm enlightened and rational unlike those stupid religious believers who can't spell, because I honor Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, Stephen Hawking, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson!  But these guys are no more representative of atheists than C. S. Lewis was of fundamentalist Christians.  And you know, I'm not a fan of any of them.  For a long time, and maybe still, the most influential atheist in the US was the "prophetess" (as Mary Midgley mischievously dubbed her) Ayn Rand.

As with religion, the not-all-atheists approach backfires.  It's true that not all atheists are like Richard Dawkins or Ayn Rand or any other celebrity atheist.  But what are we like?  I'm not sure there are any universals to cling to, and even generalizations are difficult.  Even what would presumably be the core of atheism, the absence of belief in gods, doesn't look the same in all atheists.  There are what I'd call dogmatic atheists, who are certain there are no gods; and there are what the late Antony Flew dubbed Stratonician atheists, who see no reason to believe that gods exist, and who put the burden of argument on theists to come up with (1) some kind of workable definition of what they mean by "god" and (2) good reasons to believe that such entities exist.  I'm in the latter category myself, and though I have numerous disagreements with Flew, his account of atheism has influenced me more than any other.  I've also seen some atheists dismiss Stratonician atheism as not real atheism, and I suspect the dogmatic atheists are more representative of atheism than I am.  Not that I worry about that.

The point is that no matter what you say about atheists or atheism, it won't be true of all of us.  (The same is true of theists, just to hammer the point monotonously home.)  It's okay to generalize, but to do so responsibly you must have reliable information about the group you're talking about, and I'm not sure we do.  It's likely, I suspect, that the less attractive aspects will be more common and so more representative than the more attractive ones -- and who gets to decide what's attractive? -- so it's just safer to remain ignorant of what your movement is actually like.

This is probably one reason why biblical illiteracy is so common among Christians.  I recently had an exchange with someone on Facebook who assured me that hellfire and damnation, sexual repressiveness, faith-healing and exorcism, and end-times preaching were not Jesus' teaching as found in the gospels, they were added by the Church much later.  This is of course false, and revealed my opponent's ignorance of the Bible.

I was bothered, in the post on Dawkins I linked above, when the blogger wrote that Dawkins is "not a good leader for me, but even Jen McCreight, who recently called for new attitudes in atheism, says she likes Dawkins despite his flaws."  And again: "If Dawkins were to learn from criticism the way Cromwell does, then he’d be valuable as a leader.  But I’m not holding my breath for him to check his privilege, because there are much clearer thinkers to pay attention to."  I don't think atheists should have leaders, though of course many other atheists clearly want them.  (Who's more representative?)  I've learned a lot from other atheists, though also from some theists, but I don't regard any of them as a leader.  Once you have a leader, you're going to have authority and a cult of personality, and people will be expected to be loyal and obedient to the leader and to the movement.

It's ironic.  I've been attacked for arguing that it's odd for atheists to treat 'religion,' rather than human beings, as responsible for the bad things we find in religion and culture, and those other atheists accused me of setting myself up as the Authority on atheism and trying to decide what an atheist should or should think.  None of them tried to address rationally what I'd said; they simply declared me a Bad Atheist, perhaps the Bad Atheist.  (When I pointed out problems with their account of some elements of Christianity on another occasion, one of them accused me of being an antigay fundamentalist Christian.  Don't you just love rational critical thinking?) Authority plays an obvious part in most religions, though such authority is often challenged from within in various ways; but like most problematic phenomena, you don't get rid of it simply by disavowing belief in gods or faith in reason.  You don't have faith in reason: you use it, well or badly.  And many avowed rationalists use it badly.

So, for those atheists who want to disavow or excommunicate Dawkins, Harris, or any other celebrity atheist, I must ask the same question I've asked Christians about Christianity: which atheists are representative of the "movement"?  I spent some years listening to Christians' answers and following up on them, always finding their Christian exemplars wanting and being referred to new ones.  I've probably read more on atheism (and on religion for that matter) than most of my fellow atheists have, so I may have an easier time in this area.  I'm not asking for atheists who'd qualify as leaders, as I indicated before; I'm asking who is knowledgeable about the historical and philosophical issues, responsible, and usually rational?  Probably there are no such people, which doesn't discredit atheism; it should be a reminder of our human finiteness, our lack of omniscience, and of how much we have to learn.  That shouldn't really be a stumbling-block for atheists.  Should it?

Determined to Do the Right Thing

I think it was while reading Mary Midgley's Wickedness (no, it's not a how-to book), years ago, that I got into an argument about free will with a student who saw me reading it. He rejected the idea, I forget whether it was on behaviorist or biological-determinist grounds, and it suddenly popped into my head to tell him: Well, I'd like to believe that I don't have free will, but I can't help it -- I was conditioned this way, or maybe it's in my genes. But either way, I have no choice. My friend spluttered at that, and I don't remember where the debate went from there. He might have tried the behaviorist riposte discussed by Noam Chomsky in his important demolition of B. F. Skinner:

Skinner would surely argue that reading the book [Beyond Freedom and Dignity], or perhaps the book itself, is a "reinforcer" in some other sense. He wants us to be persuaded by the book, and, not to our surprise, he refers to persuasion as a form of behavioral control, albeit a weak and ineffective form. Skinner hopes to persuade us to allow greater scope to the behavioral technologists, and apparently believes that reading this book will increase the probability of our behaving in such a way as to permit them greater scope (freedom?). Thus reading the book, he might claim, reinforces this behavior. It will change our behavior with respect to the science of behavior (p. 24).

Let us overlook the problem, insuperable in his terms, of clarifying the notion of "behavior that gives greater scope to behavioral technologists," and consider the claim that reading the book might reinforce such behavior. Unfortunately, the claim is clearly false, if we use the term "reinforce" with anything like its technical meaning. Recall that reading the book reinforces the desired behavior only if it is a consequence of the behavior. Obviously putting our fate in the hands of behavioral technologists is not behavior that led to (and hence can be reinforced by) our reading Skinner's book. Therefore the claim can be true only if we deprive the term "reinforce" of its technical meaning. Combining these observations, we see that there can be some point to reading the book or to Skinner's having written it only if the thesis of the book is divorced from the "science of behavior" on which it allegedly rests. ...

If persuasion were merely a matter of pointing to reinforcing stimuli and the like, then any persuasive argument would retain its force if its steps were randomly interchanged, or if some of its steps were replaced by arbitrary descriptions of reinforcing stimuli. Of course, this is nonsense. For an argument to be persuasive, at least to a rational person, it must be coherent; its conclusions must follow from its premises. But these notions are entirely beyond the scope of Skinner's science. When he states that "deriving new reasons from old, the process of deduction" merely "depends upon a much longer verbal history" (p. 96), he is indulging in hand-waving of a most pathetic sort. ...

Skinner claims that persuasion is a weak method of control, and he asserts that "changing a mind is condoned by the defenders of freedom and dignity because it is an ineffective way of changing behavior, and the changer of minds can therefore escape from the charge that he is controlling people" (p. 97). Suppose that your doctor gives you a very persuasive argument to the effect that if you continue to smoke, you will die a horrible death from lung cancer. Is it necessarily the case that this argument will be less effective in modifying your behavior than any arrangement of true reinforcers?

In any case, my response effectively ended our discussion, if not the debate. I still think that I put my finger on a crucial contradiction in the determinist position: if I can be persuaded by evidence and reason that I do not have free will, then I have free will after all. If I don't have free will, then it's futile to argue with me about it.

In saying this, I don't mean that I necessarily think I do have free will, because there's so much dispute about what "free will" refers to. Tamler Sommers's A Very Bad Wizard begins with an interview with Galen Strawson, a philosopher and the son of a philosopher, who declares (12-13):

Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense -- responsible period, responsible without any qualification, responsible sans phrase, responsible tout court, absolutely, radically, buck-stoppingly responsible; ultimately responsible, in a word -- and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue. Free will is the thing you have to have if you're going to be responsible in this all-or-nothing way. That's what I mean by free will. That's what I think we haven't got and can't have. I like philosophers -- I love what they do; I love what we do -- but they have made a truly unbelievable hash of all this. They've tried to make the phrase "free will" mean all sorts of different things, and each of them has told us what it really means is what he or she has decided it should mean. But they haven't made the slightest impact on what it really means, or on our old, deep conviction that free will is something we have.

TS: That's true. Biologists, cognitive scientists, neurologists -- they all seem to have an easier time, at least considering the possibility that there's no free will. But philosophers defend the concept against all odds, at the risk of terrible inconsistency with the rest of their views about the world. If it's a fact that there's no free will, why do philosophers have such a hard time accepting it?

GS: ... But to be honest I can't really accept it myself, and not because I'm a philosopher. As a philosopher I think the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty. It's just that I can't really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really? As for the scientists, they may accept it in their white coats, but I'm sure they're just like the rest of us when they're out in the world -- convinced in the reality of radical free will.

Now, this is very odd. It's not true at all that philosophers (a group which includes many theologians) have always rejected the doctrine of free will. On one side you've got those who argue for a more or less radical determinism, the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and election, and they do so not because of scientific evidence but for philosophical, theological reasons. For these people, freedom of the will is an illusion, just as it for Strawson, Skinner, and others. On another side, it's true, there have been philosophers and theologians who've argued for what Strawson calls "radical free will," the doctrine that we have no constraints on our choices at all, and that we are ultimately responsible for our acts, which are radically undetermined and uncaused.

Further, I'm not sure that "almost all human beings" think of free will as Strawson's "radical free will", at least not consistently. Sometimes they do, though they may well have gotten that conception from philosophers. But they're also willing to qualify both freedom and responsibility when it's expedient to do so. "The Devil made me do it." "Here I stand, I can do no other." "The woman tempted me, and I did eat." "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." They may be wrong in specific cases, but I think most people are aware that freedom and responsibility are not always complete. Total consistency has been derided, but it's not something that human beings are in any great danger of succumbing to.

As it happens, though, I went to the library after I read the interview with Strawson, and checked out Antony Flew's The Presumption of Atheism (Pemberton, 1976), to reread his essays on Pascal's Wager and agnosticism. But it also contained a big discussion of the Free-Will Defense of God's goodness, which holds that there is evil in the world because God gave human beings free will. Flew criticizes what he calls "libertarian" free will, which roughly corresponds to Strawson's "radical" variety, pointing out that from the theistic point of view it contradicts the doctrine that God is the first cause of all things: if our choices are uncaused, then God is no longer the cause of everything. More seriously, libertarian free will is at odds with the fact that our choices are rooted in our biological bodies and our not-fully conscious psychology -- our choices are not fully unpredictable, whether to ourselves or to others. Hard-core determinism, on the other hand, glosses over the fact that we often can do something other than we do, and it is highly unlikely that all our choices (whom we marry, what religion we belong to, when we go to the bathroom) are totally determined in advance. Flew argues for a third alternative, which he calls "compatibilism" (that some freedom of will and choice is compatible with our physical nature), and shows that this alternative has been the standard view in Western philosophy and theology. He also argues that theistic compatibilism means that God is ultimately responsible for our moral choices. He debated this issue over many years, notably with the Christian philosopher John Hick, and I'm not sure it was ever settled, but then few longstanding philosophical debates are.

Strawson hews to a rather ambivalent compatibilism, though he seems not to realize it. He seems to think that a radical determinism is the truth of the human condition, but can't bring himself to believe it though he also recognizes the inadequacy of radical or libertarian free will. Still, he clearly believes that we have some conscious control over our actions and our states of mind, since he says that "perhaps it's not quite inevitable for human beings" (24) to be trapped in the illusion of free will and Deep Moral Responsiblility" (DMR): it might be possible, through years of hard disciplined work, to "live the fact" of our lack of freedom, "though actually one can get quite a ways by ordinary secular reflection" (25). But this takes us back to the contradiction I originally noticed: Strawson can't eliminate the terminology of choice and freedom from his discourse -- he still believes that we should believe we are not free, even if we can't.

Strawson offers a thought experiment in which you go to a bakery with only ten dollars to buy a ten-dollar birthday cake that you need immediately, and you encounter either an Oxfam canvasser or a starving beggar. "You may be convinced that determinism is true. You may believe that in five -- two -- minutes' time you will be able to look back on the situation you are now in and say truly, 'It was determined that I should do that.' But even if you do fervently believe this, I still don't think it's going to touch the feeling of DMR that you have right now as you stand there. And although the Oxfam box example is a particularly dramatic one, choices of this general sort are not rare. They occur regularly in our everyday lives" (24).

I don't think you have to believe in Deep Moral Responsibility to believe that some kind of moral responsibility is involved in Strawson's dilemma. Call it Shallow Moral Responsibility. You don't have to believe that God cares, or the Universe cares, or that Mother Nature cares if children starve in Lower Slobbovia. But you do, or you don't. Of course, you can also argue that giving your ten dollars to Oxfam won't change much; you can argue that giving your ten dollars to a hungry beggar is of little moment since the beggar will be hungry again tomorrow. You can also argue that feeding a hungry person today is more important -- or not -- than giving someone a birthday cake. (Is it for you? Your partner? Your young child? All these affect the dispute.) But these arguments still assume that there are choices to be made. And while you may not be Deeply Morally Responsible, you are still responsible in the Shallow everyday sense for the decision you finally make -- who else is, after all? (A lot of determinists fall prey to a radical dualism in their attempts to save their doctrine -- you didn't make the decision, your genes did, or Evolution, or your conditioning: there's a Homunculus in your pineal gland, driving you like a car or a kid with a joystick.) And I don't see any evidence or argument in Strawson's discussion here, any reason to believe that the outcome of his experiment is determined in advance. It seems to be at best a declaration of faith, not a statement of fact.

Scientific determinists also, I've noticed, exhibit a certain self-congratulatory glee and puffed-up moral superiority about their ability to grasp our fundamental mechanical natures. At the very least, this is incompatible with their determinism, since they clearly assume they might have done otherwise, but were too smart and realistic to join the ignorant many in their cowardly refusal to face Facts.

This doesn't prove that we are free after all, of course; the dilemma in whose toils Strawson groans might be an illusion. But I don't think so, provided we recall that I am not talking about libertarian / radical free will or Deep Moral Responsibility. I don't believe that our actions are completely determined, and that even though we haven't begun to understand how, we do make some choices. (One obstacle to understanding would be the deterministic structure of scientific explanation, which leaves no room for choice. For a while around 1990, following Roger Penrose's suggestion in The Emperor's New Mind, some people were actually arguing that "free will" might be due to quantum indeterminacy, but that didn't work either.)

There's more to say on this subject, but it can wait for my next subject from A Very Bad Wizard, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Meanwhile the cord to the power supply for my laptop just broke, so I'll probably have to work with public computers for a few days until I can get a replacement. As my aunt said when she ran over the kids with the car, "If it's not one thing, it's another!"

The Race Is Not to the Swift

I have a lot of respect for the philosopher Antony Flew when he deals with religion. Not only God and Philosophy (1966) but The Presumption of Atheism (1976) and his contributions to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (co-edited with Alasdair MacIntyre, 1955) have helped me immensely in sorting out my own thoughts about religion.

When he deals with contemporary social issues, though, he doesn't do so well. I have never gotten past the opening pages of The Politics of Procrustes (1981), and I suppose I'd better try harder. I've been thinking again recently about race and racism, thanks partly to a small kerfuffle in a friend's comments on Facebook, incited further by the fuss over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the online controversies it inspired. Then I happened on this 1994 article (PDF format) by Flew, "How NOT to Eliminate Discrimination":

Judged by the stated intentions of those who guided its passage through the Congress the introduction of the 1964 Act was a spectacular and immediate success. The barriers excluding blacks from supposedly public accommodations tumbled overnight, while all forms of open and systematic anti-black discrimination in employment seem to have been effectively abolished soon after [118].

This seems to me a remarkably naive position for a sophisticated philosopher to take. Flew evidently believes that simply passing a law against something thereby eradicates it "overnight," knocking down barriers that have been deeply entrenched in the society for a century. This is implausible on its face; Flew would not suppose, I hope, that passing laws against theft immediately eliminates either theft itself or greed and need, the motives behind the crime. (I do believe Flew thinks that the "barriers excluding blacks" were purely and solely legal. They were extensively extra-legal too; Jim Crow laws were just the tip of the iceberg.) As far as discrimination is concerned, compared to theft or assault it is very easy to get around the spirit of the Civil Rights Act simply by observing its letter, by not specifying race in employment advertisements or telling applicants that they were rejected because of their skin color. This has been very effective; it's virtually impossible to prove discrimination if it's not overt and explicit. As Fred L. Pincus wrote in Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myths (Lynne Rienner, 2003, page 140):

These same racial differences in the incidence of discrimination can also be found in a variety of "testing" studies of employment and housing. A black/white or Hispanic/white matched pair applies for the same job or attempts to rent the same apartment. Since the pair has comparable (fictitious) backgrounds, similar speaking styles, and wears similar clothing, any differential treatment can be attributed to race. All of these studies find substantial discrimination against people of color in favor of the white applicants ...

Here Pincus cites Marc Bendick Jr., Charles W. Jackson, and Victor A. Reinoso, "Measuring Employment Discrimination Through Controlled Experiment", Review of Black Political Economy 28 (1) (summer): 24-48. That racial discrimination, usually tacit, is still a potent factor in American society has been shown by many measures, and Pincus's book is a good, short introduction to the problem.

Flew continues:

But this success did not satisfy either the unofficial civil rights movement or the bureaucracy set up to supervise enforcement. The movement extended its ambitions beyond the elimination of merely negative discrimination against blacks, while the activities of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) have gone far to confirm the universal validity of Hastie's Law: "For all societies the amount of perceived racism varies directly with the number of those in that society generously paid and prominently positioned to discover racism." Hastie's Law thus constitutes a particular application of the wider sociological truth that, whenever a substantial bureaucracy owes its existence to a perceived problem, that problem rarely if ever goes away. Never ask the barber whether you need a haircut [118-119].

Flew evidently bases his claims on a book he cites in the article's opening paragraphs, Richard Epstein's Forbidden Grounds: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard, 1992). Epstein, Flew says, had previously "thought that the [Civil Rights Act of 1964] was long overdue, that the patterns and practices of discrimination that existed in the South and around the United States were apt targets of legislative correction," but recanted, and decided that "the entire apparatus of the anti-discrimination laws in Title VII should be repealed insofar as it applies to private employers -- at least those who operate in ordinary competitive markets without legal protection against the entry of new rivals" (Epstein, 9).

Here, however, Flew appears to take an entirely different tack. Like Epstein, he opposes anti-discrimination laws on principle, on the ground that they interfere with the freedom of "private employers" and, presumably, landlords and educators, "in ordinary competitive markets". This is just a bit odd, given Flew's belief that the 1964 Act was spectacularly and immediately successful in eradicating racial discrimination. You would almost think that he objected not to the 1964 Act but only to its later use "beyond the elimination of merely negative discrimination against blacks", meaning affirmative action and "'racial quotas'" (124). Flew apparently believes that racial discrimination will fade away of itself as private employers discover that non-discriminatory competitors are snapping up the qualified blacks, to the prejudiced employers' disadvantage. "So wherever, absent Jim Crow laws or other forcible racist interventions, firms are operating 'in ordinary competitive markets without legal protection against the entry of new rivals' they will have a strong self-interest in eschewing occupationally irrelevant grounds of discrimination not only in their hiring and firing but also in their buying and selling and in all other business dealings" (120).

I think one key to the apparent contradiction can be found in Flew's jaunty attempts at humor (or perhaps attempts at jaunty humor): the "unofficial civil rights movement" (he'd prefer an official one, run by the state?), racism as a "perceived problem" rather than a real one, "supposedly public accommodations," and the digs at "bureaucracy" and the perhaps apocryphal "Hastie's Law" (I can't find any other reference to it with Google). Flew apparently believes that only official discrimination enshrined in law is a problem, perhaps because it interferes with the right of white employers in Mississippi to hire blacks if they wish, which he might even believe they wished to do before 1964 but were prevented from doing only by Jim Crow laws. And he thinks racial discrimination is a fiction perpetuated solely by blacks in civil rights organizations and government bureaucrats paid to find racists under every bed. It doesn't occur to him that ordinary black Americans might also be "prominently positioned to discover racism", simply by virtue of being its targets.

I'd love to ask Flew if he feels about university professors in publicly funded universities as he does about other government bureaucrats. Do they seek job security by finding perceived problems to publish about? I also wonder if he feels the same way about American whites who complain that they are being discriminated against because of their race, that white men especially can't get hired any more because all the jobs are going to blacks.

As part of his research Fred Pincus interviewed a number of whites who believed that American affirmative action programs had resulted in discrimination against whites, especially white males.

Sam, a 33-year-old white air conditioning mechanic, said: "Today you have far more discrimination against whites with all these programs and, of course, them getting the benefit of the doubt the minute they cry racism compared to when we do. No one listens when we say anything, the laws favor them today. There's no such thing as equality. To me, it's a one-sided issue" [7-8].

Pincus assembles a large amount of evidence, from job statistics to EEOC handling of discrimination claims to court cases involving racial or sexual discrimination, which shows that these claims are false. White men still dominate most fields of work in the US, so they are still getting hired in large numbers, disproportionately compared to their numbers in the general population. (Pincus gives detailed figures on page 9 through 18.) This holds true even when differences in educational attainment are taken into account.

Further, the laws governing affirmative action in employment require employers to consider the qualifications of applicants for jobs or promotions. Pincus details these complex laws in chapter 2 of Reverse Discrimination. This requirement applies even when an employer has been so blatantly discriminatory that voluntary procedures for compliance have failed, and a court imposes a quota. "Quota" is a popular buzzword among opponents of affirmative action, but imposed quotas are relatively rare, a last resort when other measures have failed.

Even under quotas, employers are not forced to hire unqualified people. Generally, the employer has some criteria by which a prospective employee can be considered "qualified," such as an educational credential, a minimum level of experience. Employees who do not meet these criteria cannot be considered for the position. All those who do meet the criteria are seen as eligible to carry out the duties of the position [27].

There is a widespread belief, especially among whites, that quotas are common nationwide. However, it is getting more and more difficult for hiring and promotion quotas to meet the test of constitutionality. A variety of court decisions has resulted in a set of "strict scrutiny" criteria that must be met. First, there must be a "compelling state interest" to justify a quota. This is usually interpreted as combating intentional race or gender discrimination when no other policy is likely to work. Second, the quota system must be "narrowly tailored," which is generally interpreted as not "unduly trammeling" on the rights of white males. The consent decree cannot require that 100% of new hires be minorities because this would make it impossible for white males. In fact, the quota proportions must have some connection to the availability pool. In addition, the quota system cannot be in effect indefinitely; for instance, it may be in effect until the percentage of minority or female employees reaches a percentage equivalent to the availability pool.

In fact, court-appointed quotas are few and far between. Reskin ([The Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment, Washington DC, American Sociological Association,] 1998) says that there were only 51 court-approved quotas in effect in the early 1980s. It is generally illegal for an employer to voluntarily adopt a quota hiring system without obtaining court approval. Courts impose quotas only when there is a long history of explicit discrimination and the employer fails to take corrective action [28].

To repeat: white males are still being hired and promoted in disproportionate numbers in the US. They now face more competition from women and minority men than they did before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but they still have the advantage. Pincus surveys court cases involving claims of racial discrimination by both blacks and whites, and concludes, "Everyone, regardless of their race or sex, has a difficult time proving claims of discrimination because the laws are very exacting" [137]. Sometimes white men win, which shows that in fact their complaints are listened to, and women and black people usually lose, which shows that they don't always "get the benefit of the doubt the minute they cry racism" or sexism. "There is no evidence that blacks are more successful than men in sex discrimination suits, although women are somewhat more successful than men in discrimination suits. Those who argue that the legal system is stacked against white men are simply wrong" [138].

Yet I still encounter the claim (and Pincus quotes some examples) that white men are being "punished" when jobs they want are given to women or black men. (Well, white men are "prominently positioned to discover racism.") Often this is accompanied by the claim that they are being punished for what white people did a hundred years ago, and that neither they nor their ancestors owned slaves. Racism, for these people, is a thing of the past. They do not, as far as I've been able to tell, think that black men or white women are being "punished" when jobs they want are given to white men. This seems to be the closest many whites can come to admitting that they think white men are entitled to entitled to jobs simply by virtue of being white men, and that no women or black men are qualified for the jobs white men want. (When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, I was mildly surprised by how many white people claimed that Morrison had won solely because she was a black woman. The people I talked to generally hadn't read her work, but they took for granted she couldn't be good enough to win such a prize, or maybe any prize.)

Pincus quotes an article in which Pat Buchanan wrote: "A liberal elite is salving its social conscience by robbing America's white middle class of its birthright and handing it over to minorities, who just happen to vote for Democrats." Pincus comments, "It is not clear how the majority of white, middle-class Americans have 'birthright' to be admitted to Harvard, but feeling that they were 'robbed' of something would certainly make some of them angry" (51). Maybe if they voted for Democrats, they could get their "birthright" back.

Relatively few whites, it seems, will tell a pollster that they consider blacks inherently inferior -- that would be tacky, low-class -- but a good many more than will say so assume black inferiority, and that belief leaks out when they talk about racial discrimination in America. Antony Flew looks down on Jim Crow laws, but can't seem to get his fine mind around the idea that discrimination can take extra-legal, covert forms on a far wider scale even after legal discrimination has been overturned.

One final point: I've talked to a few white men, and heard of more, who say they were told by personnel staff that the jobs they'd applied for could only be given to blacks, that white men were not being hired. At first I dismissed these claims as folklore (especially the guy who claimed he was told that only unqualified blacks could be hired), but it turns out that people have in fact been told this. Why the personnel staff would tell such a lie I don't know. According to Pincus, some employers misunderstand how affirmative action is supposed to work, and impose quotas of their own; but this is illegal, and white males have won redress in the courts for it (see Pincus, page 122, for examples). I suspect some white personnel staff feel angry at having to hire minorities at all, and misrepresent company policy to disappointed white applicants; or maybe they do so in a "Don't blame me, I'm just following orders" way to someone they've had to turn down for whatever reason. Ironically, then, it does happen that some people are still being told explicitly that they were turned down because of their race -- but they seem mostly to be whites, and this is usually as false as the claim that blacks are not being turned down because of their race.