From: bricoleur (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 14:47:23 MDT
"Don't Make Me Come In There!"
J. Wyatt Ehrenfels Chides Prominent Professor Daniel Dennet for Evangelical Atheism
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
http://www.fireflysun.com/book/brights.php
College Park, MD --- A New York Times op-ed piece authored by prominent academic Daniel Dennet was circulated across three American Psychological Association listserves today, including TIPS, the Division 32 (Humanistic Psychology) listserv, and the Division 24 (Theoretical Psychology) listserv. In the article, Dennet calls on the all educated atheists everywhere to embrace their minority status and seek relief in the awareness of the atheist pride group, Brights (see text of circulated post).
While Dennet has been hailed as courageous for coming out in the New York Times, I am inclined to believe he could leave the mace at home when he strays into the conservative Medford, Massachusetts streets for a twilight walk to the local Blockbuster video. Courage? Is it courageous to use your reputation as scientist as a springboard into the broadest theater, the public domain, as a political pundit jabbing at the Republican juggernaut. Of course, I am glossing over the obvious point that his op-ed piece is not one of those long-overdue works of great social import or historical necessity. For those of you who are disposed to view him as the atheist's equivalent of Robin Hood or Martin Luther King, Jr., let me remind you that he lives in a community where atheism is as fashionable a label as Jordache. And as the already long list of professionals and entertainers whose public criticism of the White House and the religious right continues to grow, the likes of Dennet becomes considerably less trailblazing.
If Dennet is anything like those who hold him up as the standard bearer (and that is a big IF; Jung was always fond of saying he was glad he was not a Jungian), then he resents the public immensely for not loving him. Meanwhile, people like me have to hide from people like him. So while he is attempting to expand the pie of his prestige, his handmaidens in the psychological community are emboldened to sanitize their ranks of anything remotely spiritual and phenomenological. In this community, he is preaching to his choir and having a lot of fun rallying his captive audience of likeminded colleagues. Meanwhile, they keep me chained up in the confessional.
Those who consider atheistic communities an exotic natural law world free of illusions and defense mechanisms might be surprised to learn that people like Dennet have their own "God," and all that repressed spirituality ends up elevating other things to the level of supreme principle. This is why I often refer to the Procrustean paradigm within psychology as 'methodolatry' as opposed to 'methodology,' where a paradigm twice as asphyxiating as any Church observe and preach patrician, arbitrary, and superfluous norms with an almost liturgical rhapsody. Our gaping holes in the psychological research literature bear the field's true stigmata. I have already forgiven myself for thinking that this is all in the same vein as Nazi Germany and Communist USSR, where spiritual repression accompanied the deification of the State. There is an alter here and it is not immune from charges of corruption, discrimination, and intimidation.
-- full text available here - http://www.fireflysun.com/book/brights.php
the bricoleur
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