Earlier this month, Richard Carrier wrote something of a hit piece on Peter Boghossian. In that piece he said many things that were on point, but one of his claims stood out as particularly unsupportable:
Similarly, in Peter Boghossian’s otherwise useful book A Manual for Creating Atheists, he included a chapter that attacked all feminists as reactionary postmodernist enemies of reason and reality. Notably, at no point in that chapter does Boghossian ever give an example of who he means, or what they actually said, about anything. Had he taken the trouble to research, collect and study actual, real-world examples, he would have written a far better and more accurate chapter on the subject. Instead, he reasoned directly from the abstract, and from his imagination, and never checked it against the particulars of the real world.
In reality, Boghossian did not write an entire chapter attacking all feminists, but rather two paragraphs tightly focused on contemporary academic feminism. Here they are, in their entirety:
I would be remiss if I did not mention the failure of contemporary academic feminism. Feminism is currently married to, or rather cohabitating with, academic leftism. Consequently, feminism has absorbed the same exogenous values that liberalism absorbed. Thus, there has been a tragic, catastrophic, and almost wholesale failure of contemporary academic feminism to speak out against the unbridled, ruthless misogyny of the Taliban, the horrific and wide-scale domestic violence suffered by women in Papua New Guinea, the sexual and physical violence common among Aboriginal women and girls in Australia, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
If one were to abstract feminism from values like tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism as applied to the realm of ideas, etc., what would the results be? Would American feminists be more likely or less likely to criticize the treatment of women in other cultures? The answer is obvious. Feminism’s silence can be understood because it’s been tainted by a litany of invasive values such as multiculturalism and relativism.
That’s 165 words out of 9,071 words in the chapter: less than 2% thereof. While it is true that Boghossian does not provide specific examples of the phenomena that he describes here, that would be far more of an oversight had he gone on about the subject of feminism at any significant length.
I pointed out this discrepancy to Dr. Carrier, here was his reply:
You just described a chapter that attacked all feminists.
He made no qualifiers (he never said “some”). And his attack was even broader than you describe. It was as I described. And it was framed in the context of attacking all liberal academia.
I’ve accurately described the facts.
This sort of obfuscation just makes my head hurt. He never said “some” he actually said which ones in particular. Moreover, what I described were two paragraphs which criticized the conflation of academic feminism with postmodernism. What Rick described was an entire chapter which “attacked all feminists as reactionary postmodernist enemies of reason and reality.” Both of these descriptions could be wrong, but only one of them can be correct.
A wise man once wrote “[Y]ou have to follow rule number one for all critical thought: check the facts. Especially, go directly to the source…” and it remains excellent advice for us all. I commend Boghossian’s book to your reading enjoyment and leave you with the glowing endorsement written by the author of Sense and Goodness Without God:
Excellent application of science, philosophy, and strategy for breaking through ideological and psychological barriers to freethought, all in terms anyone can understandand apply. Delightfully novel and controversial, this is the kind of thing I’ve long wanted and we need more of: bringing practical philosophy to the common man and woman.
