The Brights

What have you heard about the brights? According to their website

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

You may be a bright and not even know it. The brights movement is an effort to put a positive spin on atheism (or at least agnosticism), rationalism and science. The movement faces an uphill battle. These things are, unfortunately, not nearly as positively viewed or consistently connected as many people (myself included) would like. There are many who believe in science and reason but their rational world-view and critical faculties aren't applied to their religion. This means scientists who tie themselves in knots trying to explain why science and religion are in fact compatible. The other major stumbling block for the movement is the name. It's supposed to be light, fun, and positive but instead it comes off as somehow more self-congratulatory than Mensa. Who would have the gall to tell someone "I'm a bright."? Another problem facing the would-be leaders of the brights movement is that the people who fit the above description of brights actually constitute a few very distinct groups. There are scientific minds who are interested in finding truth through evidence, there are angry atheist former believers with a chip on their shoulders about God and their childhood, and there are debunkers who orient themselves against flimflammers, con-artists and true believers. These three groups have different constituencies, different attitudes towards the world, and different goals, but they all share the space in this broad tent, at times comfortably, at times less so.
The one thing they all have in common, and also the greatest threat to the brights movement and any similar movement likely to appear, is that they are the kinds of people who don't cotton to joining big groups. They are individualists who have formed their personalities being smart enough to see through the lies that everyone else believes. They are the absolute worst possible people to try to assemble into any kind of cohesive group. And that is the greatest challenge to taking the skeptical/rationalist/naturalist movement to the inevitable next level of organization that all putative movements tend unswervingly toward.

Double-dog Racism

I was just listening to an interview with Michael Shermer, noted skeptic and scholar, about the Michael Richards tailspin. Shermer explained that everyone harbors some racist feelings inside them that are inhibited by society and can be released by alcohol (as in the case of Mel Gibson) or rage (as in Richards' case.) Shermer goes on to reference an ongoing project by Harvard to determine people's "implicit assumptions" about various groups of people. I encourage you to try it for yourself, because knowing what's coming may bias you, but it basically involves sorting pictures of people from different races and different categories of things at the same time. For example, the first test I did was the black/white, good/bad test, in which you sort white and black people's pictures and words with good or bad meanings. It said I moderately associate whites with good traits. Shermer said that this is true of two thirds of whites and half of blacks. That is a truly depressing statistic, that despite our best efforts these associations lurk within us.
Then, since I am married to a Korean and have lived in Korea for four years, I decided to take the Asian/white, American/foreign association test. I'll give you the punchline first. The test says that I slightly associate Asian faces with Americanness, and White faces with foreignness.

What's . . . what?!?

Heres how the test works. You have to sort pictures of white and Asian faces with pictures of American and European monuments. So in fact, I associate Asian faces with American national monuments like the St. Louis Arch and The Statue of Liberty, while I associate The Eiffel Tower, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, and The Tower of London with white faces.

This is highly reminiscent of the famous maze navigating drosophila melanogaster test run years back. Scientist dumps a bunch of Drosophila in a 3d maze, takes the first ones that come out and breeds them. Through the generations he gets the time way down. He's finally created a race of super-smart flies without the use of a teleporter machine and Jeff Goldblum. He sticks the fastest of the fast in a maze alone and it doesn't come out for an eternity. He puts a hundred more flies in the maze and he pops right out. What he had created was not a race of super-smart flies, it was a race of super-antisocial flies who would flee when confined with too many other flies in a maze.
By the way, the only time I ever see or think about The Washington Monument, The White House, Mount Rushmore and The Empire State Building are when they appear in the English books I teach to my (mostly) America-obsessed students, who happen to have Asian faces.