Infidels!

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “New Atheism”. It’s profiled fairly well here. Theologically, it’s an argument that dates back at least as far as the Enlightenment: God doesn’t exist, and the only way to understand the world is through pure reason and scientific inquiry. Robespierre would have understood that argument. Darwin certainly would have. What makes it “new” is apparently that one must be as much of a supercilious, evangelizing asshole as possible while promoting it. It’s atheism sold with exactly the same insulting, hectoring rhetoric that James Dobson uses to push Christianity or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad uses to push Islam.

You may have gotten the idea that I don’t much like this movement.

I don’t like it for a number of reasons. First, the aggressive approach called for by people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is not just annoying, it’s polarizing. It posits that there is one absolute Truth in the universe, and that only those who share their views on religion (namely, negative ones) can understand that Truth. Anyone else is delusional, insane, childish, and stupid. It therefore eradicates the “live and let live” middle ground of mutual respect necessary for a pluralistic society, and instead frames the world as a war in which only one side can be victorious. In other words, it encourages religious identity politics. One only has to look at Baghdad or the West Bank to consider how well that situation can turn out.

I do not believe that politicized, prescriptive atheism can win a political battle here in the United States. Not in a country where 80% of the populace believes in God. But I absolutely fear what religious identity politics in this country could unleash. Even the minor prods of feminism and “non-traditional” sexuality have sent some Christians screaming to the ramparts, with our decades of Reagan/Gingrich/Bush policies as a result. Surely this migration would only swell in the face of a frontal assault. What would the impact of politicized atheism be? With pluralism renounced by atheist intellectuals and reactionary Christianity gaining a populist base, where exactly do religious minorities go? Where do free thinkers go? Where do you go if you’re neither an angry atheist nor a Christian fundamentalist? I fear that if Dawkins and Harris pursue their little rationalist jihad, terms like “theocrat” will move out of the realm of left-wing boilerplate and into reality.

But the most hilarious part of this whole movement is the idea that, having given up on the petty rivalries and unsolvable problems of religion, the world will finally bask in the serene absolute truth of Science.

I can understand why Harris might think this, but you would think that an academic bomb-thrower like Dawkins would know better. Dawkins has made a career out of shaking up the scientific establishment with new, controversial ideas. He almost single-handedly created a new paradigm for understanding genetics and evolution in “The Selfish Gene”, and was a proponent of honest sociobiology at a time when most scientists considered the field little more than a refuge for nostalgic colonialists trying to rehabilitate the White Man’s Burden. I am CERTAIN that he knows that the process of science, at least on the scale of an individual’s career, is often as acrimonious, bitter, and, yes, irrational as the inner workings of any obscure cult (including the famous Christian ones that get invited to the White House).

So, will science function as the popular face of this New Atheism? For science’s sake, I sure hope not.

I could (and probably will) write many posts on the politicization of science. Unfortunately, this tendency is not limited to the Bush Administration. Science, in our society, comes with a patina of authority that is very attractive to people who want to bolster their political views. In some ways this is a good thing – when the scientific process is applied accurately and intelligently to controversial theories, it will either destroy them or contribute to our greater understanding of the natural world. But when one is dealing with politically relevant studies there’s always a temptation to draw sweeping conclusions that don’t quite fit the data, gloss over complications or subtleties, and underplay important design weaknesses. Anyone who has read studies of human behavior or society has likely seen these problems with papers – particularly papers that happen to provide backing to a popular political view.

With the New Atheism in charge and proclaiming itself guardian of absolute truth, what happens to the rough and tumble process of scientific inquiry and argument? I don’t mean to imply that science is going to be proving the existence of God, but an ideology with this level of confidence is going to develop its own culture and assumptions about what is “right” or “wrong”. Over time, as with any political culture, these assumptions will become inviolable elements of identity (ask a conservative to critique market economics or a liberal to critique civil liberties for an example of this). Science, acting at its best, simply CAN’T do that. Saying “this must be true” is antithetical to the whole process. You never say that a theory or framework is “true” in science (at least not in good science). Instead, you say: “we believe this to be true based on the data we have at this time”. Scientific findings must always be provisional and open to speculation.

Science thrives on iconoclasts and independent thinkers – people who pursue wild, radical theories in absolute defiance of the established understanding. We venerate eccentric geniuses like Newton, Einstein, or even Dawkins, precisely because they were willing to challenge everything they were taught about how the natural world “really worked”. Any ideology that demands certainty will recoil in the face of this attitude. Indeed, we’ve seen this happen in the past: both the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution made absolute fealty to Reason a founding ideal, and both later reacted to radical ideas with astonishing brutality. And so, in this brave new world, what happens to the people who complicate things? What happens to the people who do good research that introduces complexities into, say, evolution? What happens to the growing number of people who are skeptical about string theory? What happens to people who provide a more complicated look at global warming? What happens to the researchers who either define or disprove the latest silver bullet theory to explain human behavior (whether it’s violence, sexuality, obesity, or whatever)? With certain ideas central to the political dogma of a ruling party, will science still be able to apply the kind of rational, objective evaluation that is the hallmark of the process? Given the tone of the philosophy’s leading lights, I sincerely doubt it.

Get Moving You Stupid Idiots

It just took me an hour and forty minutes to go 14 miles.

Ok, yeah I know that morning commutes suck all over. And I know that there's always an element of unpredictability. I get that. But there's something wrong when it takes you an hour and forty minutes to get from the North side to the West side.

The cause of my terrible commute this morning? A ladder fell off a truck on Lakeshore Drive. At like 6:45 am. This COMPLETELY KILLED traffic for the next two hours. Granted, an odd event. But unfortunately not unusual. LSD has to be one of the most unreliable major highways in an American city. It seems that almost every morning something weird happens to it that completely freezes traffic. And it's not just localized blocks. Fender benders on North Avenue cause traffic to seize up at Bryn Mawr or Hollywood. It's getting ridiculous. I seem to be getting caught in hour+ commutes nearly every day -- on a route that Google Maps claims should take 20 minutes.

It's gotten so bad that I now have three viable alternative routes. And yet all three were tweaking out today. Lakeshore because of the Ladder of Doom, Ashland for some unexplained reason, and Western because of a broken water main.

The transportation system in this city just seems to be breaking down. And it's not as though public transit is any better. Busses are rarely reliable (thanks to the traffic). The trains WERE a little better, but budget cuts and ballooning ridership have taken their toll. Let alone the fact that, between the Loop fire, snowfall, and Oglivie Center shootings, Chicago hasn't had "normal" train service in months.

Ugh. I know traffic sucks in every major city, but I don't know how much longer I'll be able to put up with this breakdown. Going 9 miles an hour every morning is pretty fucking wearing.

That's the Chicago way...

One of the oddest things about living in Chicago is the incredibly strong ethnic politics. Thanks to its unique history of immigration and social upheaval, Chicago is a really divided, eclectic place. It is “multicultural” in the most literal sense of the word – you’ll cross a certain street and everything around you will change. Skin tones completely shift. English slips away, replaced by languages like Spanish, Korean, Polish, Tagalog, or Urdu. Whole industries only exist in a few corners of the city – santeria, saris, soul food, dim sum. Or, I guess, pet manicurists if you’re in Lincoln Park.

The huge diversity of cultures in this city is amazing, but it’s also unnerving because it’s so divided. You can live in Chicago for years and never see anything but people who look, think, and act like you. You actually have to push yourself across borders – sometimes very real and dangerous borders (depending on who you are) – to experience the full city. In fact, Chicago is still one of the most racially segregated cities in the country.

This is not new. The division is part of the standard experience of living in Chicago, and it’s influenced nearly every point of the city’s history. The two most famous examples of this division in the mythology of the city (although people outside the city may not realize it) are the connected areas of crime and politics.

Politics in this city has always involved jockeying between coalitions of different migrant groups. This city has seen more waves of migrants than probably any other American metropolis. Starting with fur traders, moving on to German/Northern European immigrants, migrants from the East Coast cities, Irish fleeing the potato famine, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Poles, African-Americans fleeing the South, Jews fleeing just about everyone, and continuing to the present day in which immigrants from all over Asia and Latin America settle in the city. Chicago also has one of the largest refugee populations in the country, meaning we have a growing number of East Africans, Iraqis, Afghans, and other ethnic groups developing into important communities as well. Politics in the city has always had to react to this constant cultural flux, and the successful pols have usually won by promising big favors to a few ethnic groups and using ethnic loyalty to rack up big wins.

Over time, it became clear that one of the biggest favors City Hall could hand out was protection. If you were in charge of the city, you could depend on the police – not only to protect you, but also to make sure your competitors knew their place. But with the unreliability of the police force, people started forming their own organizations to keep themselves safe and secure. This was the force behind the Chicago street gang.

UIC Professor John Hagedorn’s awesome Gangresearch.net website has an amazing history of Chicago gangs, which documents the rise of both the minority gangs which tend to dominate the headlines and the white ethnic gangs who formed much of the city’s current political landscape. (Desi aside: check out his article comparing Mumbai’s gangland culture to Chicago’s). One of his most interesting points is that much of Chicago’s political history can be told in terms of a struggle between rival ethnic gangs.

Different groups have prevailed at different times. But it’s amazing how much of Chicago politics from that period has remained constant throughout time. The same neighborhoods that sent white gangs to rip through Chicago’s ghetto in 1919 were ready to riot again when King came to town, and were the driving force behind the Council Wars under Harold Washington. Most of these residents decamped to the suburbs after it was clear Chicago’s intense segregation was finally dissipating, but their racial politics still influence the region. The North Shore reformers who once rallied for Prohibition now support bans on foie gras and smoking. The ghetto is still the ghetto – at best, the end of high-rise segregated housing just returns it to the pre-Great Society status quo. The Catholic immigrant neighborhoods southwest of the Loop are now filled with Latinos rather than Poles, Bohemians, and Slavs, but they are as "Catholic" and "immigrant" as ever. Richard M. Daley presides over a kinder, gentler machine, with vassals on the South and West sides providing more pigment, but everyone is still expected to bow their heads towards Bridgeport five times a day.

And the police? Well, they’re obviously doing much better than they were in the 20s and 30s. I truly believe that most Chicago cops are honest, hardworking people being asked to do a very difficult job. But assholes like this don’t help:

When Cruz asked what he’d done, the man said, “You’re illegal—that’s why you don’t have anything.” Cruz would later learn that the two men were actually Chicago police officers and that a city ordinance bans police and other city employees from asking about a person’s immigration status.

Cruz says the second man, who never identified himself, handcuffed him, put him in the car, and drove to the 17th District police station at 4650 N. Pulaski. As they got out of the car, Cruz says, the man told him, “Because of illegals like you we have to pay more for everything. I have to pay more for insurance. That’s why we’re taking as much as we can from you.”

Cruz’s girlfriend, Jessica Monzalvo, who’d come out of the house in the meantime, watched the car drive to the police station just a few blocks away. She walked there and called his 19-year-old brother, Juan Cruz. Juan, a political science major at Northeastern, went to the police station and called the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, a community organization he and Ernesto volunteer with. He told the group’s executive director, Jenny Arwade, he didn’t know why Ernesto had been taken to the police station, since the men who took him away had been wearing border patrol hats. Arwade called immigration lawyers and was told that immigration agents had started using police stations as temporary holding facilities. (APNC staff made it clear they wouldn’t talk to me for this story unless I promised not to ask Cruz whether he’s in the U.S. legally or not; they said it wasn’t relevant.) About 40 minutes after arriving at the station Ernesto was given tickets for driving without a license and without insurance, then told where he could find his bike. After paying a fine he retrieved it from a nearby lot.

Cruz had found out that the two men were plainclothes police officers, not immigration agents, and he let Arwade know. Early that evening she and an APNC board member, Diane Limas, went to the police station. Limas says the officer at the desk knew which officers had detained Cruz, telling her they were two tactical officers with the police department.

The two women asked to meet with a supervisor, and Limas says the man they talked to told them that officers are always trading caps with people from other law enforcement agencies. Border patrol caps aren’t hard to get—Arwade later found one on eBay. She and Limas also asked to speak to the district commander, Charles Dulay, and he called the APNC office later that evening. Limas says he told her the officers had made some inappropriate statements and it wouldn’t happen again. “He was very understanding,” she says. “He was basically apologizing and hoping we would drop the issue.” (When I tried to reach Dulay an officer at the station referred me to police news affairs. In early October spokesperson Monique Bond told me the department had opened an internal investigation and as a consequence she couldn’t comment or release the names of the officers. Several calls to her for updates weren’t returned.)

These cops parents or (at least) grandparents would almost certainly be considered "illegal aliens" if their cases were looked at under today's standards. But the elements of this event -- the abuse of power, exploitation of legal fears, and appropriation of power -- are elements of a classic shakedown. Capone's police couldn't have done better.