Some non-believers have been promoting the use of the label "Bright" to describe atheists who adopt a naturalistic outlook on life. This has annoyed some -- including some atheists -- because it sounds arrogant. Many supporters of the "Bright" label insist that it isn't meant to imply anything inherently positive about non-believers or anything inherently negative about believers; others, however, seem to revel in the implication that theists are "dim."
It seems to me that people who truly wanted a neutral term would have picked a neutral word that wouldn't bring along problematic connotations. Ask anyone involved in marketing and they'll tell you how important it is to carefully choose your words -- even the sounds of the words, lest people be driven away unconsciously. I can't really believe that "bright" was chosen naively. I think that it was chosen because of the implications of intelligence and cleverness -- those who use it simply can't be unaware of this.
The idea that the label was intended to communicate positive connotations about members is reinforced by the fact that defenders try to associate it with positive qualities, not simply a neutral state of being. If "Bright" simply remained the absence of supernatural beliefs, it would go nowhere. "Brights" as a movement could never be limited to naturalism and naturalism alone because there is just not enough there. They have promote many other things: freedom, tolerance, compassion, skepticism, science, progressivism, and so on.
Being a "Bright" must, over time, come to include such positive qualities -- if not officially, then by default because naturalists who don't believe in those things will feel excluded from the movement and won't feel that "Bright" really applies to them, even if the official definition does. Adding such things could create a basis for a social and political movement around which people can form an identity. Then again, that's something we already have: secular humanism, and it has an established philosophy behind it.
Atheists want to form some sort of "identity" and some think that the term "Bright" will let them achieve that. The concept of "Bright" is too broad to achieve that, however. Just as there is no identity that can join all people who have supernatural beliefs, there is no identity that can join all people who lack supernatural beliefs. There is no social program that can be drawn from it, no political program, no ethical program, no leisure activities -- nothing at all.
Saying "she doesn't believe in anything supernatural" tells you almost nothing about a person. No necessary conclusions can be drawn from that particular bit of information -- likely conclusions, perhaps, but no necessary ones. Identity and unity need to be based on much, much more than the absence of supernatural beliefs. Thus the "Bright" label suffers from many flaws: it creates an unnecessary air of arrogance, encompasses too little to create much of a movement or identity, and will ultimately have to be expanded to the point where it looks the same as a category we already have. So what's the point?
No comments:
Post a Comment