Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn (pronounced, no doubt, just like it’s spelled) points to an article by Daniel Dennett in which he refuses to let a bad idea die:
In July, 2003, I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “The Bright Stuff”, where I drew attention to a budding movement among atheists intent on copying an idea from the homosexuals’ excellent campaign: the hijacking of a perfectly good word with an established meaning, gay, and putting it to use with a new meaning, as a consciousness-raiser.
Articles like this make me question whether Dennett ever talks to any actual humans.
Dennett does acknowledge some problems, but his proposed solution doesn’t seem like much of an improvement:
The term “bright” was chosen by two brights in Sacramento — Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell — who thought we freethinkers (atheists, agnostics, et al — needed a fresh name. In the aftermath of my op-ed piece, I’ve read quite a few articles and thousands of messages about the term “bright.”
Most people who bother writing don’t like the term — including many brights (as I persist in calling them). It’s rude, disrespectful, antagonizing, they say. In other words, it’s just like “gay” (hey, you heteros, how do you like the implication that you’re glum and gloomy?).
I am still not convinced that it was a mistake to go with bright. These things take time. Had Geisert and Futrell chosen some bland, mealymouthed term most would have forgotten it by now. The “in your face” quality of the term is, in my opinion, a piquant, but mild, antidote to the prevailing practice of hyper-deference paid to religions but to no other institution in the country. And I have reminded those who find the term objectionable that just as the antonym of gay isn’t glum, but straight — another happy word — they are free to choose a peppy antonym for bright. I recommend super, since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural.
Yes, it’s all about branding. The mind boggles.
This is similar to the problem I’ve talked about before with people railing against religion: there’s a huge disconnect between the way that religious people think, and the way that atheists think that religious people think. Dennett’s pushing of “bright” is in the same vein, and really creates an impression that he’s working from some sort of mathematical model of how human beings behave, without consulting any of us.
Look, “bright” doesn’t fail because it lacks a palatable opposite. It fails because the first reaction of people hearing it is “Wow, that’s dorky.” This is true even of the people it might apply to. I don’t know exactly what makes a term succeed or fail, but this one was a failure from the very first appearance, as you could tell from the howls of derision around the Internet.
Happily, “in your face quality” or not, it went away pretty quickly. Most people had forgotten about it (at least, I had, until this article crossed my path). And that was a good thing.
Pairing “bright” with “super” and coming back for a second try is just sad. Dennett comes off sort of like a junior high Trekkie who thinks the cool kids will accept him once he finishes dubbing The OC in Klingon. It’s tone-deaf in a way that suggests he just doesn’t understand people at all.
And let me just say that I’m kind of insulted by the analogy to “gay.” In particular, the description of this little linguistic adventure as
copying an idea from the homosexuals’ excellent campaign: the hijacking of a perfectly good word with an established meaning, gay, and putting it to use with a new meaning
is downright offensive. Does he really think that there was a meeting of the Secret Homosexual Cabal somewhere that carefully picked “gay” as their chosen name, as a deliberate matter of positive branding? I’m not gay, but I’m offended by that.
First of all, this is off in Rick Santorum sort of territory, with some nebulous group setting the Homosexual Agenda (Protocols of the Elders of Stonewall?). More importantly, though, the word “gay” already had a long history of referring to licentiousness before it was “hijacked” (in Dennett’s term) in the 60’s and 70’s.
(Note, too, that even today you’re as likely to hear “gay” used dismissively (“Dude, that’s totally gay.”) as you are to hear it used as a positive term. Words are slippery that way.)
But the biggest problem with equating “bright” with “gay” is that it trivializes the achievements of the gay rights movement. Homosexuality was illegal, even in Western countries (see “Turing, Alan”) until quite recently, and even today, the legal status of homosexuals is short of full equality. Gays are legally forbidden to marry in most of the US, and there are parts of the country that still punish sex offenses more harshly when the people involved have the same sex.
The legal rights of atheists are in much better shape than those of gay people right now, and that’s after nigh on forty years of active campaigning for equality. Attempting to draw a parallel between the current state of atheism and the situation of homosexuals at the time when they started to “hijack” the word “gay” is incredibly offensive. And the implication that re-branding themselves as “gay” was the crucial step in the fight for equal right goes past “offensive” and into “idiotic.”
(I suppose there might be a valid lesson to be drawn from the analogy, but it’s not that careful branding is the role to societal acceptance. The useful point is probably that attempts to re-work a group’s image work best when they draw on terms that are already in use. If people who watch Pat Robertson were in the habit of dismissively referring to atheists as “brights,” then you could usefully co-opt the term, and get it to stick (see also “Mormon”). I don’t think that self-labelling is going to take off, though, particularly not when the chosen label gets such a poor reaction from even the people you would like to adopt it.)
This whole business annoys me in exactly the same way that the “fans are slans” strain of SF fandom does. The idea that all militant atheism needs in order to win wider acceptance is a catchy name is the result of thought processes that suggest near-total ignorance of how most people think and act and form societies. And that, in turn, points to the real reason why Dennett et al. aren’t more widely accepted.