Permanent Reset

Small Reflections on Supposed "Free Thinkers"

Because I consider myself a humanist and something of a skeptic I occasionally pick up a magazine that is supposedly written by humanists and/or skeptics in the hopes of learning something new or, at least, encountering an idea I hadn't previously had reason to consider before.

But every time I try this experiment I'm always met by long screeds from neoliberal conservatives who definitely wish they could be Republicans if it wasn't for that party's pesky attachment to religious fundamentalism, racism, and general bigotry.

And it's always kinda odd to me. You can tell they have this sense of superiority for being "neither on the right or the left" and yet they spend most of their time trying to explain how the left has it wrong in some capacity. There's always a hand wave about how we know the right's bigotry is intolerable and yada yada yada, and then three full pages of what's little more than barely disguised conservative rhetoric in slightly more intellectual language.

And I'm left wondering who's this stuff even for? There's definitely this odd idea in "free thinker" movements where they must feel that they have to be contrarian, but I can't tell why. It's as if being a free thinker, in their mind, necessitates that questions can never really have an answer, and that anyone trying to answer a question in any meaningful way should be considered foolish. They love academia when they can wrench in some stat to try and make a stupid argument that says "see, black people don't have it that bad" and bemoan academia when it comes to proving out things like critical race theory or the usefulness of DEI initiatives.

And it's not that I think being non-religious automatically makes you a leftist. That's blatantly not true. But I can't help but wonder what these conservative values hold for these supposed enlightened thinkers. If academia or general cultural trends pushed towards a Trumpian hell world, would they condemn it simply to be contrary and not out of any pertinent personal, moral belief? Or would they continue to tag along in the back lines with mealy-mouthed condemnations of bigotry while supporting the rest of the enterprise?

I've long said that conservatives outnumber us, in reality. That if they happened to magically drop all the bigotries tomorrow, they'd lose ground in the short term but be an unstoppable monolith in a few decades. Reading these type of articles makes me think that's more true than ever. These people want the hierarchy. They just don't want it to be religious.