“This isn’t a game, you know. People worked hard to get where we are now.”
I was at my booth at the 50th American Atheists Convention in Austin, Texas, dressed in my usual convention gear: an aristocratic purple wig, Liberace-worthy frilled shirt, and brocaded jacket with tails, and doing my usual convention activity: drawing a requested quasi-historical sketch (I believe it was Friedrich Nietzsche and a velociraptor as a pair of crime-fighting detectives). Before me was a man in perhaps his seventies, looking down with a simmering contempt at my cavalier foppishness.
I’d seen that look a lot over the course of the convention, and had to admit somewhat the truth behind it. These were people who took great personal risk identifying themselves as atheists or skeptics during a period in United States history when the slightest whiff of non-conformity could wreck a life. In every way, their steadfast sacrifice and effort made my relatively discrimination-free humanist life possible. I can only imagine how the sight of a flippant clown such as myself in the space they had been painstakingly scratching from rocky earth for half a century must have been off-putting, and all I could offer was a weak, “I know, and however silly I might look, I’m supremely thankful for what people like you have done.”
After that, we had actually a rather nice chat, about where organized non-belief started in the country, and where it was going. Political campaigns, legal efforts, fundraising for lobbying, national organisation – these were the concerns of this man and several of his contemporaries with whom I talked over the three days of the con. After fifty years, they felt the tide of history finally turning with them, and were eager to drive the battle home, to amass as many resources as possible and finally push religion from the world, to fight and argue and fight again.
That intensity of purpose, forged through decades upon decades of adversity, was awesome to behold and easy to understand, though difficult to fully share. Disdain, that specter that haunts every description of atheists in America, hovered always at the edge of these plans for the future – people in ignorance must be compelled through force of intellect and the power of law to finally adopt the correct view of the universe.
That’s a powerful rallying cry, but not a terribly realistic notion about how minds get changed, nor an overly sophisticated reflection upon what humanism has to offer beyond the elusive recompense of accuracy. Fortunately, most of the convention goers were much more moderate and even, here and there, one heard entirely other voices popping up on the convention floor, younger people, a bit overwhelmed, like me, at walking the halls with the honoured veterans of the movement, and a bit scared to speak up about a new path for humanism that their instincts told them held promise.
“There is a place,” they whispered like Tom Joad describing the orange groves of California, “where we can talk freely,” and they proceeded to seduce me with visions of Skepticon, the brain child of Lauren Lane and JT Eberhard. It is a place where, so the rumour went, the focus is often issues of lifestyle and creative expression and their intersection with humanism.
I confess to a certain wariness. The AA Con was certainly not lacking in creativity, and what was more, it was a creativity filtered through a sense of quality control bequeathed to us by generations past, and all but obliterated since with the arrival of the internet. Would a younger-spirited convention devolve into an exercise in blogverse-level narcissism, unchecked by the steady hand of a half-century’s practical experience or the aura of dignity of a carefully guarded intellectual tradition?
Strange thoughts for a purple-haired art fop to be having, perhaps, but they occurred all the same. In spite of the occasional confrontation, I had a marvelous time at AA Con (and will be going again this year), yet curiosity drove me onwards.
I flew to Springfield, Missouri, the home of Skepticon for the past six years, and set up my booth, not at all sure what to expect. Then the attendees arrived, droves of them, excited and expectant, bursting with an intoxicating, unbridled sense of curiosity. They hopped up to my booth (sometimes quite literally) and asked me questions concerning everything BUT atheism:
“What do you think of the new Doctor Who?”
“Is it lame that they gave Twilight Sparkle wings?”
“What’s your favorite book about differential equations?”
“Can you draw me a picture of Bill Nye and a corgi?”
“How was the new Thor movie?”
I was awe-struck at this outpouring of a whole generation motivated not by the desire to conquer, but to LIVE, and live as fully and interestingly as they can, to find passions stemming from their sense of humanity and follow them wherever they might lead. Sometimes, after a half an hour or so of conversation, the talk would swing to humanist ideas, but always from a creative or community-building perspective:
“How do you tell a story that instills a sense of awe at the path humanity has taken?”
“Do you know of any good websites that have science experiments I can do with my kids?”
“I hear that you guys have a Dickens Faire every December in San Francisco, where you just live in history for a weekend, what’s that like?”
These people demonstrate the possibilities of a life lived in the full spirit of humanity, trusting the rest of our issues to sort themselves out. They know instinctually that only when we start building lives that people might actually want to live will humanism present a more than intellectual alternative to religiosity. The Skepticon attendees, with their overflowing nerdism, represent a great hope for a humanism that leads by example rather than argumentative or legal force. They will write novels and sing songs and form anime clubs and wear jaunty bow ties and fezzes and in general act as our pied pipers, drawing along those who want to experience just what it might be like to live with an unencumbered fancy, and boundless awe.
It’s easy to get caught up in the possibilities of this new, lifestyle-and-creation approach to humanism. It’s fun and sexy and lets you taste all the poetry and science and fantasy you want – what worries me is that it’s almost too seductive. There are still lots of things out there that need legal redress (it’s still the case that six states in the US forbid you by law from holding public office if you don’t believe in God), and to carry out those struggles requires a steady grind of devotion that is in no way glamorous or fun or creative, devotion that you find as a matter of course walking through the AA Con but that would be far harder to summon from the likes of, say, me. There is a growing tendency of the new generation of humanists to critique the older for their crotchety absolutism, just as the older generation critiques the newer for its soft Epicureanism, but really both have marvelous things to offer, and this is the one chance that we all have to talk to each other, to understand why we all are the way we are, and what skills need to be taught before the torch is definitively passed.
All of which leads to the conclusion that, if you go to just one humanist convention this year, make it both of them.
