NONBELIEVERS' NEWFANGLED NOM DE GUERRE DIMWITTED

Saturday, February 7, 2004

What do people call themselves if they aren't religious? Many things, in fact, with slight distinctions of meaning; atheists, agnostics, nonbelievers, skeptics, freethinkers, secular humanists. Not a really positive term among them (except when said people are talking to each other).

And then there are words that other people use about them, which are even less positive: heretics, infidels, irreligious, unbelievers, godless.

Certain persons of this description, having decided they won't get proper respect until they get a better name, and taking as their model the adoption of the term "gay" for homosexual, have decided to call themselves "brights."

That's dim.

If asked "What's a bright?" a bright would reply, according to Richard Dawkins, "A person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview." Dawkins' essay is available at www.edge.org, along with one by Daniel Dennett; scroll down to July 23, 2003. Or go to www.the-brights.com if you want to sign up.

I'm fine with the definition, which fits me. I want nothing to do with the effort to establish the term, which could hardly be better calibrated to make people think even less well of the people who choose to use it.

"I'm a bright" and (unspoken), "You're a dim."

A colleague who is more of a historian than I points out that this technique has been known to work. When we talk about "the Enlightenment" we are in effect accepting the judgment of those who named it that their foes were "the unenlightened." But it still seems to me there is a considerable downside risk to pushing the "bright" meme.

I have been, at different times in my life, on both sides of this question. Starting in college, for nearly 30 years, I was a regular churchgoer (and choir member) and though I didn't give the matter much thought, I supposed myself to be a believer. But eventually it dawned on me that I didn't believe in anything else supernatural, and that there was no good reason to make an exception for religion. So I became more and more uncomfortable, not with the choir part -- church music is a performance, and no one assumes performers believe what their lines require them to sing or to say -- but with prayers, and most especially with creeds. When I arrived at a point where I could no longer truthfully say, "I believe . . ." I stopped going to church.

That did not, however, cause me to start thinking that believers are necessarily less smart than nonbelievers, which is a difficult position to take when the congregation you're most familiar with is full of college professors. And I don't think my son suffered a loss in IQ when he decided several months ago to start attending Quaker meeting.

Yet Dawkins and Dennett (whose other work I admire) manage to come across as both arrogant and unfairly put upon. "Our deepest convictions," Dennett writes, "are increasingly dismissed, belittled and condemned by those in power," by which he means politicians.

Yet the kind of people who would call themselves brights are no slouches when it comes to belittling.

In all the years I went to church I do not recall anyone condemning those who did not share their beliefs (pitying, maybe; I get e-mail like that, though I understand the writers mean well). But it's virtually impossible to attend an event appealing primarily to skeptics without hearing someone dismiss religious people, especially evangelical Christians, with sneering contempt. "Fundies," I've often heard them say, apparently unaware someone present might reasonably take offense.

Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, told readers of the magazine's online newsletter -- most of them, probably, sympathetic to his views -- about his decision to join the bright movement, and said that to his astonishment he received hundreds of e-mails "the vast majority of which were emphatically negative about the term" (there's a link to his paper on www.the-brights.com, mentioned above). When he asked for comments, a few were positive, but most were scathing.

One said it sounds "sort of hippie-dippie, brain dead. And just like 'child-free' in the '70s, it sounds smug." Another, "I find the fact that a number of you have decided to label People Like Me 'The Brights' to be embarrassing." And a third said the name was "almost pitifully self-aggrandizing to the point where it calls into question -- in my mind -- your basic common sense."

Drop it ASAP, they said. And these are the people who agree with the brights.

I hate it when people I mostly agree with make themselves look like idiots. Count me out.