Not so much in common
We are still very divided on some issues, despite what one think tank thinks
After the murder of the MP Jo Cox, her husband Brendan set up the More in Common think tank to push the view that people’s shared opinions outweigh the disagreements. Lately it has applied this attitude to the trans debate, claiming that the “divisive” discussions in Westminster and social media are “out of sync with the public’s approach”.
I have some quibbles with this report. For one, the main question actually shows deep disagreement: 46% of people say trans men are men and trans women are women, while 32% say no.
Even the framing of the questions could be contested. The trans debate has muddied the definition of what men and women are, so it’s not clear what people mean when they answer yes. (It’s easier to guess what people mean when they say no.)
Other questions about when it’s appropriate to allow medical transitioning or whether non-transitioned trans women (intact males) should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms are more divided still. The nearest question that shows a consensus is on whether trans women (biological males) should be able to compete in women’s sports, and even that only gives 57% saying no.
The fair conclusion from the polling is that we are divided on how trans people should be treated, despite More in Common’s spin. Not that the think tank is that bothered what the riff raff think: director Luke Tryl says rights should not be decided by majority opinion. Presumably clever think tanks should sort it out instead.
After death. I remain fascinated by what Sebastian Milbank calls the “afterlife” of New Atheism, an anti-religious movement led by Richard Dawkins back in the noughties. This is partly personal: The God Delusion was the first political book I read. (So you can arguably blame Dawkins for anything you object to here.)
One school of thought has it that the New Atheist or rationalist movement split into wokies and anti-wokies. The former drifted into social justice activism, as demonstrated by the stillborn Atheism Plus movement; the latter gravitated towards a harsher rationalist worldview, sometimes linked to the Intellectual Dark Web, of which New Atheist Sam Harris is a key figure.
This stuff is interesting to me, but I think Milbank and other writers overstate the continuity of these strands of thinking. Religion was already in structural decline in the West when New Atheism started, save in America, and these longer term trends seem to explain more to me than what was ultimately a publishing phenomenon.
As for the movements allegedly descended from New Atheism, which encompass everything from social justice warriors to the alt right, I think wider internet use would have thrown these up even had Dawkins stuck to biology. At best atheism is an unspoken assumption in some Western politics, and as the likes of historian Tom Holland have argued, Christian assumptions seem to undergird woke politics.
Means of reproduction. Nick French argues in Jacobin that there is something suspect about a dating app run for profit. Public or co-operative ownership would allow users to vote on how it works, for example with subscription fees, data collection or the matching algorithm.
The fact is that people can already vote with their wallets, switching from Tinder to Bumble to Hinge to whatever else. Cooperative ownership might excite the socialist passion for meetings, but it’s unclear whether it would sate more primal appetites.
Arguably dating apps’ main problem is that they reflect how relationships have been affected by the emphasis we put on individual choice. As French admits, his reforms “wouldn’t do away with the frustration or disappointment that many people experience on the apps or in dating more generally”. It doesn’t tickle my pickle.