Files from the Academic Fringe

A four-part series on Scientism, Creationism, Racism, and Skepticism

Mar 17, 2025

Back in 2012, I was holed up in a secluded Middle Tennessee cottage, living in sin with a Louisiana firecracker. That year I ventured out to attend four symposiums. Each had a deep impact on a personal level.

On down the road—as I prepared to leave a cozy nest in Portland and move to Boston for grad school—I finally polished it all up and published the 4-part synthesis at Disinformation. My intent was to describe the human experience and juggle ideas without judgment.

Much has changed in the years since then—even my mind, to some extent. Although I’m still as stubborn as ever.

Hope you enjoy.

Files from the Academic Fringe

Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 1 – Scientism

Consilence | St. Louis, MO | April 2012

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume

—

Pariahs make for enjoyable company. I’ve always run with the wild-eyed wayfarers who bark and snarl at edge of the herd, often at the risk of being trampled. That includes bespectacled eggheads who think the unthinkable.

Back in 2012, while my neighbors stocked up on beans and bullets—or magic Mayan crystals—I was burning gas and brain cells in search of outlanders who reject consensus reality.

The trip began at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, which hosted the Consilience Conference.

—

It takes nerve to proclaim that nucleotides and neural patterns will answer the ultimate questions in life. Christian fundamentalists attack the notion, as do Muslims, Marxists, and lit professors (each for their own reasons). Despite faint protests by local churches, this disturbing idea was batted back and forth for three days as I sat in my squeaky wooden seat, scribbling notes next to Scientism’s finest minds.

It was April 2012. Spring was in full bloom. The dusty old auditorium was filled with prominent anthropologists and geneticists, ecologists and neurologists, and one stunning engineer. They all sang the same chorus, first intoned by the godfather of evo psych himself, E.O. Wilson:

“[E]volutionary biology encompasses the social sciences and the humanities and thus unifies knowledge about human behavior and culture.”

Everyone sang that chorus in harmony—except one feisty Italian philosopher who beat his drum as he pleased.

I’d only found out about the event at the last minute, and left Nashville some time after 2 AM to arrive just in time for hot coffee and cold muffins. To my surprise, Massimo Pigliucci came and sat down at my table. It was a weird coincidence. More than ten years earlier, this biologist turned philosopher was a central figure in The Rationalists of East Tennessee, which met near Knoxville’s Sunsphere on Sunday mornings. I attended fairly frequently, telling friends I was going to First Atheist Church.

In those days Pigliucci was infamous for his outspoken criticism of Creationists and their Seven Day spiel. He was a wise-cracking Euro who, having tumbled into the trenches of biblical literalism, was unwilling to let fools remain comfortable in their superstitions. Predictably, he pissed off a lot of Southern Baptists.

—

The conference’s honoree, E.O. Wilson, had provoked a much larger firestorm decades earlier. He began his career as an entomologist, obsessed with the ultimate conformist organism: ants. Wilson’s scope was much broader than bugs, however. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which framed human characteristics such as altruism, aggression, and sexual behavior in terms of genetically inherited survival mechanisms. Darwin is in the details.

The academic left was appalled by Wilson’s vision of shaved apes tossing turds around a concrete jungle. As if in defiance of irony, angry mobs of unshaven “progressives” descended on Wilson like a pack of Pan troglodytes, calling the professor a “misogynist” and a “racist” for applying neo-Darwinian principles to unequally endowed human populations.

One heckler even doused him with a pitcher of water at an AAAS conference, about which Wilson bragged, “I believe…I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea.”

Today, Wilson’s contribution to evolutionary theory has gained consensus in many intellectual circles. The popular media have generally embraced evolutionary psychology—albeit with politically correct omissions—as a groovy new way to trip on sex, drugs, and neurological God modules. ‘Cause we’re just, like, apes in an antfarm, man.

E.O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge made him a rock star among scientists who dig Scientism. The manifesto proposes the ultimate synthesis of science and the humanities. Instead of academic turf wars between hostile departments, there should be an orgy of information exchange. Take a guess as to who’ll be hitting it from on top.

The reasoning behind Consilience goes like this:

Math determines physics, which determine chemistry, which determines biology, which determines neurological activity, which determines psychology, which determines religion, art, politics, and all the glories and blunders of human history.

Knowledge is power. If scientists can calculate and manipulate the basic laws of human nature—and with diligence, the rest of the known Universe—why shouldn’t artists and prophets just bend over and let the Devil take the hindmost?

Welcome to Wilson’s world.

Imagine that every dream which bubbles to the surface of human consciousness—every love poem, prophecy, or vivid hallucination—is immediately caught in the web of scientific inquiry. These sacred visions are then picked apart, analyzed, and deposited into the great Database of Approximate Omniscience, for what ultimate use we do not yet know.

Wilson and company made it sound fantastic. During more charming moments, the creaky university auditorium had the feel of an old church. I usually turn to scientists for a sober perspective, but these guys were intoxicating.

During his keynote address, E.O. Wilson claimed that universal wisdom will only be obtained if organized religions give up, or at least “tone down,” their creation myths. Ultimately, the human need for religion—and truth—could now be fulfilled by the scientific worldview, particularly evolutionary narratives.

And the crowd went wild.

—

Between lectures I kept seeing a tiny Mennonite in a big black bonnet weaving through the swarms of coffee-sipping academics. I approached her to ask her opinion, half-expecting the pre-industrial outfit to be a joke. It wasn’t. She was a full-blown Mennonite who’d traveled hundreds of miles to learn more about morality and evolution.

“That trip must have taken forever in a horse-drawn buggy,” I remarked. She laughed. I cracked a few more jokes, mostly at the expense of these godless machine-dwellers.

“Be careful, Joseph,” she said with an ominous smile. “I think thee are a truth-teller. It may get thee into trouble.”

To my surprise, her religious sensibilities weren’t at all threatened by the event’s Scientistic tone. If God is greater than the facts of science, why should He worry about what scientists say? My new friend had caught some dirty looks from the eggheads in attendance, though. I guess nothing riles the nerd herd like orthodox religion.

Every speaker who touched on spirituality seemed to take it for granted that otherworldly experiences are nothing more than a perceptual glitch. Divinity is an illusion; Consilience holds scientific analysis to be the highest authority. It bothered me back then, and it bothers me now. Darwin is a patron saint in my personal cathedral, but some of his totalitarian acolytes make my skin crawl.

—

Massimo Pigliucci had his qualms, too, but for reasons more reasonable than mine. Standing in front of E.O. Wilson’s passionate supporters, Pigliucci hacked into Consilience with his Italian accent and sharp philosophical knives. Allow me to paraphrase:

Consilience rests on the faith that higher orders can be deduced from lower orders, such as predicting future brushstrokes from an artist’s brain waves. But science is limited to the tools of deduction and induction, and powerful as they may be, neither will lead to absolute truth.

Mathematics—the engine of science—is a form of logical deduction. Citing Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Pigliucci argued that there is no internal justification for mathematically derived theories. To deduce facts from a premise, one must assume the premise is true. Take this premise, for example:

All philosophers get off on goading an audience. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher. Therefore Massimo gets off on goading an audience.

To accept the last statement through pure logic, we must first assume that all philosophers are prone to pissing on parades. Logic cannot prove its own premise. Deductive reasoning is a serpent sucking his own tail.

Induction has the advantage of empirical evidence, but according to Hume’s Problem of Induction, this isn’t enough. To draw a conclusion from a collection of facts, one must assume that there are no undiscovered facts which contradict that conclusion, and that previously observed facts will remain the same over time. To extend my example:

Every philosopher we know gets off on goading an audience. We therefore conclude all philosophers get off on goading an audience.

But it’s possible that crowd-pleasing philosophers exist somewhere; or that a contrary philosopher will lose his taste for provocation. We can never be sure we have all the facts. Inductive reasoning is a woman trapped in a frat house who believes that all dudes are bros.

Since science is ultimately grounded in deductive and inductive reasoning, Pigliucci concludes, the scientific method will never arrive at absolute truth despite its obvious power. Certainty is impossible. Therefore Wilson’s ambition to unify all knowledge is futile, or as Massimo put it: “greedy reductionism.”

The crowd hissed and grumbled throughout Pigliucci’s talk. A few challengers quivered with rage during the Q&A. Judging by the the devilish grin on Massimo’s face, I can safely conclude that this philosopher gets off on goading an audience.

—

I enjoyed a few drinks with Pigliucci at the reception, where a surprisingly hot academic kept throwing herself at his… philosophical mind. I left the Consilience Conference reassured of two things.

First, even the most dispassionate intellectuals crave the warm resonance of group consciousness. Whether people gather around a microscope or a Eucharist, the herd instinct always manifests—which is great news for shepherds!

And second, mammalian females tend to admire any wolf who tears into the herd—which is great news for wolves!

Originally published at Disinformation — April 28, 2015

Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? | St. Louis, MO | October 2012

In a humdrum secularist society, religion emerges as the life of the party. Yes, yes, the Crusades and jihads and widows burned alive—all on the bummer list, I know. On the bright side, religious worldviews breathe life into an otherwise inanimate and utterly pointless universe. It’s a good book you never put down. It’s sex before germ theory. It’s rum in a tepid punchbowl.

Weary of dry Darwinians, I decided to pay a visit to the Creationists.

It was October of 2012. I drove out of Nashville past farmland and swamps and into the wooded Kentucky mountains. Bright red leaves swept past me. The trees appeared translucent, shimmering, the blend of orange and green leaves creating strange illusions, as though Creation was decorated for winter’s arrival. A crushed coyote lay dead beside the highway, his paw limp over his sternum, facing the sky, a subtle smile on his snout.

Why have you forsaken me?

Why should I care?

I was out to find signs of intelligence among the proponents of Intelligent Design. Tennessee had just passed the “Monkey Bill” back in spring, which allows public school teachers to present arguments for and against evolution and Darwinism. Fashionable intellectuals were calling the South stupid—but then, they always do. Most “intellectuals” wouldn’t know the difference between evolution and Darwinism if Lamarck were to smack them into the noosphere. (Hint: all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.)

The event’s title struck me as clunky: “Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?” It was held at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO, and co-sponsored by The Discovery Institute—the academic backbone of the Intelligent Design movement.

In order to distance themselves from loud biblical literalists, Discovery Institute fellows strive to avoid specific religious claims. Their arguments are instead directed at perceived weaknesses in neo-Darwinian theory, such as the discontinuous fossil record or the low probability that random mutations could produce viable adaptations.

Their central claim is that certain levels of irreducible complexity are best explained as the result of a Mind rather than known natural processes, as with the bacterial flagellum or DNA itself. A few accept that humans descended from a single microbe through an apelike phase, claiming that evolution is the product of intelligent design. Whose design? Could be aliens, or a supercomputer, or You-Know-Who. Mum’s the word.

This is not a religious conviction, they insist. It’s a hypothesis.

Despite these efforts toward scientific credibility, ID theorists are the laughingstock of academia and punching bags for the general public. And yet they carry on.

The Discovery Institute’s philosophy reads:

Mind, not matter, is the source and crown of creation, the wellspring of human achievement. … In contrast, the contemporary materialistic worldview…of a closing circle of human possibilities on a planet of limited horizons summons instead the deadening ideologies of scarcity, conflict, mutual suspicion and despair.

Ouch. I’ve got the beans if you’ve got the bullets.

—

The symposium was held in a chapel on campus. A local minister commenced the occasion and led us in prayer to sanctify the forthcoming lectures (so much for keeping the Intelligent Designer anonymous). As usual, I kept my eyes open.

You find other members of the Godless Open Eyes Club by looking around as everyone else prays. I was surprised to find only one other member, St. Paul. He was a 26-year-old who’d lost his Christian faith to a New Atheist writer the previous year. It was a lonely time for the guy. Now everyone who meant anything to him was a Christian, with the exception of his father, Reverend Steve, also in attendance. Reverend Steve had recently been pushed out of his ministerial position due to his acceptance of Darwinian evolution. My kind of guys.

The first talks were given by two Discovery Institute fellows, Jay Richards and John West, whose stated goal was to defend “academic freedom.” West put it best:

“If God exists, it is highly unlikely that any one finite person, organization, or idea can adequately explain the fundamentally inexplicable.”

Zen koan, anyone?

John West is part political scientist, part preacher. His lecture reflected the dystopian vision which pits Creationists against the consensus. Many leading scientists deny God’s existence, and their opinions trickle down to the masses. As Richard Dawkins proclaimed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Next comes eugenics and nuclear weapons.

West claims that Darwinism devalues human life, citing George Gaylord Simpson: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

Consider evolutionary psychology. Moral codes are not hard and fast—they evolved through natural selection, relative to various circumstances. E.O. Wilson once wrote: “Ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our own genes to get us to cooperate.”

To loosely paraphrase West: we find brutal survival strategies in the animal kingdom—murder, rape, adultery, infanticide. If these work for our primate cousins, why not for us? Darwin may have been magnanimous, but his magnum opus, subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, opened a wellspring of human cruelty and impolite humor.

John West spotlights John Derbyshire on the right wing: “The broad outlook on human nature implied by Darwinian ideas contradicts the notion of human exceptionalism … we are merely another branch on Nature’s tree.” Such thinking led Derbyshire to pen a “racist screed” claiming African Americans are disproportionately dangerous, due to genetics, for which he was ousted from mainstream conservatism.

John West spotlights Peter Singer on the left wing: “[T]he life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” But is Singer actually trying to justify infanticide and bestiality here?

To be fair, Singer later wrote: “[K]illing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.” He also wrote: “[S]ex with animals does not always involve cruelty … occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop.” As a result, Singer’s babysitting career is ruined and no one lets him near their pets.

During the Q&A, a pregnant woman with a thick Missouri accent—who wore a t-shirt supporting Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin (R)—took the microphone from West and delivered a stream-of-consciousness tirade:

“If a theorem is proven it’s a law … Evolutionary biolisists [sic] don’t want a cure … if a cure was found for cancer, AIDS, or MS, then they can’t reduce the population … they just want photos of your baby … Have you ever seen Gattaca?…” On and on. Conspiracy theories are the sigh of the oppressed creature.

Faced with this tinfoil hat monster—which he arguably helped to create—West forced an embarrassed smile and replied, “I think you’ve made some interesting points.”

Next up: How to breath life back into this soulless world.

—

Analytic philosopher Jay Richards took the podium looking like a Christian Ken Doll with supernaturally thick blonde hair. He says a big problem with modern science is that two of Aristotle’s “Four causes” are ignored.

Three centuries before Christ, the pagan Greek taught that phenomena are properly explained by four causes: a material cause, an efficient cause, a formal cause, and a final cause. To take a familiar example, I will use a glass of beer:

The material cause is the substance of the phenomenon: barley malt, water, hops, and yeast.

The efficient cause is the force which brought the phenomenon into being: a brewer steeps and ferments ingredients.

The formal cause is the phenomenon’s structure—its essence: a delicious glass of liquid gold.

The final cause is the purpose toward which a phenomenon moves—its teleological goal: to refresh the masses, loosen their tongues and belt buckles, and give them something to laugh about in the morning.

The same rubric could be applied to butterflies or brain cells, but as Richards explains, neo-Darwinism denies that efficient causes in nature are conscious, and it ignores formal and final causes altogether.

So there is no Creator, no ideal creation, and no purpose. It’s just a glass of beer and it’s half empty. Go cry about it.

Intelligent Design, Richards says, is a revival of formal and final causation in scientific inquiry, making science and faith compatible once again.

I found Richards’s talk to be fascinating, but others were not so sure. During the Q&A, a local scientist demanded to know what Intelligent Design has done to advance the study of colon cancer, or any other medical issue. The pregnant lady yelled “Christ help you!” at the challenger and yammered wildly before she was finally shushed.

Reverend Steve and St. Paul weren’t buying it either. One panel featured geneticist Ann Gauger, who suggested that common markers in Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA didn’t point to an archaic population bottleneck, but perhaps to Adam and Eve. Afterward, a frustrated Reverend Steve stood up in his pew and asked, “Have you ever considered publishing in an actual, legitimate journal?”

The crowd grumbled and hemmed and hawed.

St. Paul invited me to have dinner at his family’s house that night. Although I was discouraged from bringing booze or mentioning atheism, it was a fine time. St. Paul’s gracious mother served a delicious lasagna with squash and a glass of juice. I also met St. Paul’s best friend, a seminarian, who was intensely concerned about St. Paul’s immortal soul. Personally, I was more concerned about a second helping.

—

The next night I found myself drinking at a hotel bar with Discovery Institute staff members. I invited St. Paul to join us, and to my surprise, he brought along a cute Christian girl he’d met at the symposium. She was starstruck by the illustrious company. “Don’t corrupt her,” I warned.

He smiled slyly.

The beers flowed freely, as did the conversation. Let me say something that the Creationists wouldn’t want me to say: despite their well-meaning prevarications, Intelligent Design is not simply a hypothesis for them. Whether correct, incorrect, or incomplete, the theory is an expression of their souls. And in my highest moments, I resonate with their morphogenesis—if you catch my drift.

When atheistic superstars like Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins wax poetic about their personal cosmos, they are celebrated as heroes fighting religious intolerance. Somehow, mass media personalities are portrayed as rebel forces. On the other hand, these obscure Creationists are straining to fit in to that world—they bracket their personal views, argue from the facts, show respect to their opponents—and yet the cynical masses, perhaps shaking off a fundamentalist hangover, pile on and accuse them of perpetuating oppression.

I would suggest that religious scientists say “fuck fitting in,” but you know how it is: good Christians just turn the other cheek.

Originally published at Disinformation — April 29, 2015

American Renaissance | Nashville, TN | March 2012

To be honest, the prospect of reporting on a “race realist” conference freaked me out. My imagination ran wild with visions of swastika armbands, backroom blood oaths, job-killing jokes, and wild stories of interracial rape and murder. I became paranoid as the event approached, envisioning neo-Nazis following me home to snuff out the interloper, surrounding my secluded cottage, waving torches, and setting crosses ablaze, and me leveling my .308 bravely (complete with a close-up shot of my tightening iris) to pick them off one by one—but there are too goddamn many of them!

Or maybe someone I know would see me there and be like, “Dude, why are you at a white nationalist meeting?”

It was March 2012. I borrowed a car to conceal my identity. (Super clever, right?) I also had a nom de plume printed on my name tag: Billy Joe Hill—which would show up as “Hill, Billy Joe” on the registry.

As it turned out, the American Renaissance Conference was more surreal than satanic. The event was held at a hotel in Montgomery Bell State Park, not far from my house outside Nashville. The trees were just starting to bud. The parking lot was sparse as I pulled in, and I wondered if it had been called off. Previous American Renaissance events were canceled due to bomb threats or riotous disruption by furious Antifa.

What dangerous idea were these anti-racists attempting to silence?

The AmRen website states:

Of all the fault lines that divide society—language, religion, class, ideology—[race] is the most prominent and divisive. … Attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse. … Progress requires the study of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological. This approach is known as race realism.

The first thing that struck me was how normal the event seemed. Just another academic conference with a bunch of white middle-aged bookworms in a stuffy hotel. Then I turned a corner and saw a tall guy, his head clean-shaven, lift his baby from his wife’s arms and kiss her on the forehead. A small crowd cooed and doted on that alabaster angel and I remembered where I was—a sanctuary for identity politics.

—

The organization’s leader, Jared Taylor, walks a public tight rope between “European American advocate” and “deplorable white supremacist.” As an activist, Taylor decries the collective guilt foisted on white people in academia and mainstream media. He also opposes open borders and multiculturalism as dangerous and unworkable policies. For him, racial homogeneity is a critical step toward social harmony. And what about the Jews? Taylor once quipped: “They look white to me.”

An early American Renaissance issue reads:

[D]ifferent races build different societies that reflect their natures, and…it is entirely normal for whites (or for people of any other race) to want to be the majority race in their own homeland. If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people.

This philosophy is deeply rooted in neo-Darwinian biology as applied to human populations, particularly the competitive exclusion principle. The creation mythos begins with a three-legged race through variation and natural selection, and ends up at an intercontinental medal ceremony combining IQ studies, socioeconomic success, and crime rates. (For whatever reason, penis size is usually ignored, but if you’re curious, there’s always race-specific porn.)

The typical race realist hierarchy, derived from statistical averages, looks like this:

Asians get the Gold: super-smart, barely violent

Europeans get Silver: fairly smart, fairly violent

Africans get Bronze: barely smart, super-violent

Of course, this passes over the nuances—super-duper smart Jews and ultra-violent Arabs and outliers of every kind—but you get the point. Race realists tend to see human worth through scatter plots and bell curves, as if human nature is all about quantity. As if quality is just a function of quantity. As if each of us blend into our respective categories.

Leading me to ask: What orchard keeper would measure each tree’s height without tasting the fruit?

What happens when some are planted in richer soil than others?

Where do you fall on the autistic spectrum?

Mainstream critics refer to the race realist viewpoint as “scientific racism,” or that magic word known to every Creationist: “pseudoscience.” But these critics rarely make a rational counterargument beyond dismissive sound bites—and why should they? Everyone knows racists are the scum of the earth, right? So mainstream pundits and social justice warriors just demonize these guys, turning them into Boogy Men at a Black Mass. Consequently, racism is the new Dungeons & Dragons, attracting misfits and rebels to its forbidden secrets.

So what is your race’s average THAC0?

—

Given this climate of condemnation and suspicion, most attendees thought I was a spy for the Southern Poverty Law Center. I might as well have infiltrated the Nation of Islam, I stuck out so sorely. So I was upfront about my intentions: I’m not a white separatist, but plan to write about the lectures fairly, which I did. Yeah, I could have described them as “The New Face of Hate” or something trite like that. Sensationalism makes for a steady paycheck. But I’d say they’re more like Mormons: basically harmless in small groups, but I wouldn’t want to live in a state run by them.

Like I say, it was a strange weekend. I heard a hunchbacked Jewish dwarf in a hyper-phenotypic toupée lament the inferior genetics of Arabs and Africans. He then joked that Hitler was correct to claim there is a master race—it was the one he tried to exterminate!

A four-time House of Representatives candidate gave me a copy of his bizarre pamphlet entitled Favored Races. The first chapter is about God:

We in the Eugenic movement are not interested in competing against Adolph Hitler or Karl Marx … We are interested in competing with Jesus Christ and Buddha for the destiny of man. … Evolutionary ethics is an entirely new understanding of man and his relationship to the universe. …
Could it be that God is not something that was, but rather something that is to be? … As the most powerful organizing and directing force in the universe, man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to comprehend and control its own destiny.

During one Q&A, a full-blood Comanche got up and announced that the white man had won the war, that noble warriors admit defeat honorably, and Native American tribes ought to incorporate and sell their tribal identities to the highest bidder. “Can you imagine owning your own Indian tribe?”

I ate barbecue with a pudgy college kid who went on to found a White Student Union, under the slogan “Not Racist, not violent, just no longer silent.” This would prompt his classmates to shame him, harass him, and spit in his pasty face. But he would also be featured in Salon and Vice, and for a Springer second, he’d be a star.

As we broke for coffee, a dark-skinned Cuban guy explained to me that Cubans are “the Jews of the Caribbean,” hopping from one island to the next, taking over. He was quick to distinguish his people from Mexicans, though—you know, “those short, squatty brown people.” I gazed down at him in amazement.

—

Every race tends to self-segregate, and unless moral reproach is spread around equally, I see no reason to condemn whites for sticking with their own kind. As an individualist and explorer, I see no reason to join them, either. Some are born to keep it close to home, others are born to mix it up—it’s as if we are wired to be this way.

Besides, flesh is only the surface of the soul. In a cosmopolitan environment, affinity and enmity shift along numerous borders, such as religion, language, and individual personalities. Race is just a piece of that puzzle, one which becomes increasingly irrelevant as cultural bridges are crossed. Allow me to illustrate with a thought experiment:

There are four men.

Two are black, two are white.

They go to a lunch counter together. No one speaks. Who will sit beside who?

I bet my left pinky they pair off by race.

Now, if it turns out one white guy speaks French and the other English, and the same goes for the two black guys, what happens?

I bet my left pinky (still got it) they switch seats to have meaningful conversations.

When it comes time to say the blessing, however, the black Englishman and white Frenchman are Christian, and the white Englishman and black Frenchman are Muslim.

Who will get whose back when the fighting begins?

You guessed it.

—

The conference’s capstone lecture was delivered by an anti-Islamic Frenchman. His haunted hazel eyes were flecked with odd shards of blue and green. The Cuban guy was swilling beers and talking loud as hell during the presentation, making fun of the Frenchman’s accent. After a while, an old man at the next table scolded the drunk Cuban for being disruptive. The Cuban turned on the feeble bastard and snapped, “Open your ears! You got a problem? You wanna go?!”

As soon as the Frenchman finished his talk, the Cuban stormed the podium. He closed in on the Frenchman and hammered him with the Jewish Question—some sinister business about Rothschilds and Bilderbergers. What about the Jews?!

Jared Taylor stood with his chin high and a bemused “here we go again” look on his face.

I couldn’t make out the Frenchman’s response. For one thing, his accent itself was like a foreign language. There was also this Stormfront moderator at my table who, after a few glasses of Scotch, had decided I was “like a son” to him. He growled in my ear, “I don’t trust da fuckin’ Jews.” As the Frenchman tried to defend himself—and the Jews, too, I think—dis New Joisey neo-Nazi filled me in on da Hebrews’ devious plan.

Say what you will about Jared Taylor, he’s got one thing right. Multiculturalism is a madhouse.

Originally published at Disinformation — April 30, 2015

CSICon | Nashville, TN | October 2012

It’s hard to believe that scientific skeptics would be anything less than ethical. Aren’t they the good guys in our secular society, sniffing out bullshit and putting age-old wives’ tales to rest? Or is that just a myth?

Apparently these debunkers have a dark side. It was just before Halloween 2012. While swirling around the clickbait vortex, I stumbled across a scathing allegation. According to “The Skepchick,” numerous men in the “skeptic community” were bombarding their female colleagues with sexist cracks and crass sexual harassment—and with Richard Dawkins’s tacit approval.

Were these disbelieving libertines trying to open the public’s eyes, or reenact Eyes Wide Shut? I had my doubts. About everything.

Could it be that the same dudes who obsessively hunt down ghosts, gods, psychics, spoon-benders, miracle cures, conspiracy theories, and flying saucers—for the sole purpose of showing how stupid other people are—also act like arrogant assholes to women? I mean, seriously, think critically for a minute. What’s the probability?

By sheer coincidence (no juju), I discovered that CSICon—a shaky alliance of CSI (formerly CSICOP), CFI, and CfSH (can we all get along?)—were holding their annual Skepticism convention out by the Nashville airport. The Skepchick who authored that damning harassment article was slated to speak about these “jerks.” So I woke at dawn, slurped down my coffee, and drove out into the fog, determined to get to the bottom of this. Maybe I would witness a few Pyrrhonian pervotrons in action.

In another stroke of good fortune (no juju), Eugenie Scott, a highly decorated meme sniper in the New Atheist Army, would be there to attack Tennessee’s “Monkey Bill.” Finally, a chance to ask her opinions on Creationism, “scientific racism,” and the Eternal Void. I was ready to make a day of it.

—

I paid at the door, grabbed a conference program, and headed straight for the sliced pineapple. Man, I love breakfast buffets. On the back of the four-page program I found a 712-word “Policy on Hostile Conduct/Harassment at Conferences”—possibly the longest of its kind. It has been said that “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Well, apparently not.

Prohibitions include, but are not limited to, “sexual harassment…unwelcome sexual attention, stalking, and physical contact such as pinching, grabbing, or groping.” How often do you find “No Dogs Allowed” posted where decent people keep their animals in check?

The breakfast conversation soon turned to feminism. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but social psychologist Carol Tavris was sitting at our table. Her gorgeous grin floored me immediately, as did her shocking views on human diversity. Raised in a “feminist, atheist household,” Tavris was refreshingly open to the notion that men and women display average differences in various measurable traits.

Twenty minutes later Tavris was onstage for the Gender Issues and Science panel, responding to Dick Lippa’s provocative question: “Should We Be Skeptical about the ‘Gender Similarities Hypothesis?’” To heavily paraphrase: Lippa argued that average gender differences are rooted in biology, which might explain contrasts in career choices (such as who likes to work with people and who likes to tinker with equipment), aggressive behavior (think sugar and spice, slime and snails), and perception (one notices key details, the other sees the big picture). Turns out, evolution plays favorites.

Carol opened by saying, “In the spirit of female compassion…and conciliation, I agree with everything Richard just said.” As the laughter subsided, she launched into her counterargument. “[E]ither/or thinking is not going to advance us anywhere.” While some see the overlaps in bell curves, others focus on differences—but both perspectives are important.

“Women wear shoes they can’t walk in…but men wear Levi’s jeans with the waist size published on the outside. No woman I know would ever wear that!”

Addressing innate rational abilities versus an inclination toward feelings, Tavris pointed out that Taiwanese and Japanese girls outscore American boys in math. Furthermore, Greek, Italian, and Jewish men tend to be exceedingly emotional. Near the end, Tavris joked that “the whole planet is becoming Sweden.”

During the Q&A, a single father suggested the best advice to give one’s daughter: “Enjoy the differences that matter and ignore the rest.”

—

The inimitable Eugenie Scott was next to speak. I don’t know if it was her humor, or her forceful arguments, or just that disarming smile, but I fell hopelessly in love with her. What can I say? I’m a sucker for short bangs.

Dr. Scott is the foremost advocate for maintaining evolutionary orthodoxy in American classrooms. She laid into Creationists with eloquence and passion, at one point saying, “I’m a fundamentalist when it comes to free speech…I believe people should be allowed to say whatever stupid thing they want to.” Just not in a publicly funded biology class.

It was difficult to approach Eugenie after her talk—she was surrounded by fawning suitors like Scarlet O’Hara wearing a single-button blazer. I finally elbowed my way through, but being completely twitterpated, all I could think of was, “What, uh… annoys you the most about Creationists?”

“My annoyance is irrelevant,” she snapped. “Public understanding of science is more important. [Creationists] are actively trying to change the way we do science by eliminating methodological naturalism. …” Then she smiled at me. “Frankly, I find hardcore atheists to be more annoying.”

And with that, she left me for other admirers. So much for my questions about scientific racism and the Eternal Void. Fortunately, I ran into the irascible science blogger PZ Meyers (no juju). First, I asked if the dogma of human equality is a form of liberal Creationism.

“The thing is, there is no significant statistical difference between populations by race or sex. We find pervasive cultural differences and not biological ones.”

“What motivates you more,” I continued, “a love of truth or the hatred of lies?”

“That’s a tough one. … Objectively…a love of the truth. That’s why I chose science as a career. But I have a lot more fun hating lies. One is my life’s work and the other is my hobby.”

Moving on to the ultimate question, I asked if he ever gets bummed out by the Big Zero which subtracts all sentient beings from the equation.

“Not in the slightest,” he replied cheerily. “Every human has died or will die. We find purpose in what we do.”

As coffee breaks transitioned to a long night of whiskey, I asked skeptic after skeptic if they believed in God or the afterlife, total deadpan. Some laughed and some looked confused, but all responded with an emphatic, “No!” Then I would ask them if the idea of being erased at death evokes a sense of emptiness and futility. Does the Eternal Void ever get you down?

Each and every free thinker—with one exception—responded with an “I live in the here and now” rationalization. “My legacy will survive me” and all that.

I’d turn the screws, reminding them of the universe’s inevitable heat death (or collapse.) When every footprint behind you disappears, I would say, it will be like you never took the first step. And in nearly every case, it was as if they’d never considered the Eternal Void seriously.

“What was it like before you were born?” one asked me.

“Extremely boring.”

—

The sun went down on autumn leaves. I hopped aboard CSICon’s “Downtown Honky Tonk Bus Trip,” which dropped us off on Broadway. As we filed out onto the street, I saw Eugenie gawking on the corner, the neon signs reflected in her glasses.

“Where are we going?” she asked her entourage. They just stood there dumbly or searched their iPhones in vain. Emboldened, I stepped up and informed her that Jack’s Bar-B-Que has the tenderest ribs in this part of town. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You’re a local? Well then, I’m following you!”

I offered my elbow and gave her the grand tour of downtown Music City. And no matter where Eugenie Scott went, there were twenty attendees panting on her heels. I’ve never encountered a group of people more easy to lead around than that flock of incredulous skeptics.

I fed them pulled pork sandwiches. I pointed out the tackiest bars. On the steps of the Ryman Theater, I gave an impromptu oration on how this one-time church became country music’s sacred temple. Eugenie insisted I get in the group picture. “Okay, okay,” I said, “but I still believe in God.” I led them into Printer’s Alley for shots of Jack Daniel’s.

“You know it’s funny,” I told Eugenie, “the Discovery Institute guys would drink these atheists under the table.”

“Why would I ruin my brain with alcohol?” a crabby old sycophant interrupted, rattling his ice water, trying to get her majesty’s attention. “You only get one of them.”

Back at the hotel, we enjoyed a midnight magic show, complete with rope tricks and a lovely assistant in a skimpy dress. The performance concluded with a séance. Every year CFI members (or is it CSI?) attempt to contact the ghost of Harry Houdini, who was himself a famous debunker. They also offer a $50,000 reward for any proof that ghosts exist. Harry didn’t show. Later on I told the wizened stage magicians that I would happily kill myself and come back to claim the prize.

“In that case,” one replied, “we’ll double the amount!”

“Say, does the Eternal Void ever freak you out?”

Winding down, I ordered one last whiskey. A young attendee was sitting down the bar from me, stirring her cocktail, chatting with very mature fellow beside her. The guy shook his head and asked, “So it’s just my type? You don’t like older men?”

“I would never cheat,” she said and looked straight forward. “It just wouldn’t feel right.”

“But that is so much of the excitement for me, to act in secret…”

—

The best response to my questions about God and the afterlife came from a CFI director. Her relaxed demeanor spoke of steady curiosity and a clear conscience. Of course, she didn’t believe in God or the next world, but when I pressed on the issue of the Big Zero, her eyes filled with tears.

“That’s the saddest thought I could ever imagine,” she confided, because it would forever separate her from her partner of seventeen years. With her voice quivering, she whispered, “She is everything to me.”

I asked this professional skeptic if she believed in True Love.

You wouldn’t believe her answer if I told you.

Originally published at Disinformation — May 1, 2015