On “Birtherism”
What is “birtherism”?
The essence of birtherism can be captured by a person’s idiosyncratic belief in any of the following claims:
- Belief that President Obama was born in Kenya, or anywhere outside the United States.
- Belief that his certificate of live birth, which has been authenticated by forgery-experts and officials in Hawaii time and time again, is insufficient proof of his birth in Hawaii.
- Belief that the evidence produced thus far constitutes an inadequate base with which to overturn countervailing considerations, all of which arise from unsubstantiated rumors and are mostly of chain-mail type provenance, and hence are unverifiable, and a fortiori, unverified .
- Belief that the abovementioned counterevidence possesses greater legitimacy than the verifiable and verified evidence offered.
- Belief that Obama’s reported mother is not his real mother.
- Belief, even after the release of his original long-form certificate on April 27, that Obama still isn’t eligible for the presidency.
What’s wrong with birtherism: the queerness of a double standard in permissible patterns of reasoning
It’s true: most tea Partiers, a majority of Republicans, and conservative icons such as Trump, Palin, and Bachmann (the latter two of whom recently demonstrated their preternatural munificence by “taking Obama at his word” that he was born in the U.S.) all claim serious misgivings as to Obama’s citizenship status. This is despite the fact that his birth has repeatedly been confirmed by Hawaii by way of a certificate of live birth, that there has been unequivocal first-hand attestations by the state’s health director of having seen the original long-form certificate (who, let’s not forget, was appointed by a Republican governor), that many people vividly recall Obama in the U.S. at various points of his early childhood and infancy (current Hawaiian governor Neil Abercrombie, who had been friends with Obama’s parents, saw Obama at the University of Hawaii when he was only a few days old), and that there was even a birth announcement posted in a local newspaper just a few days after his delivery. Oh, and the fact that every putative “proof” offered in years past has been carefully refuted.
With all that evidence, evidence that even Jesse Ventura would consider incontrovertible, you have to be a hardcore evidentialist - defined as a person who demands near conclusive evidence before he allows a belief to make a claim on him - to seriously doubt its objective pull. Such persons, you would think, should also register similar reservations when it comes to theism, right? And, yet, what conviction of knowledge do most of these birthers apparently share? - That a very specific god exists, namely, the god of Christian stripe. Since I am not by nature cynical, I will assume that these birthers are all hardcore evidentialists, and came to believe in God in the only way appropriate for them – by having very strong evidence. I will now show that birthers reason improperly when it comes to the issue of Obama’s birth.
Consider the diverging modes of reasoning employed. In the case of Obama’s birth, perhaps due to their anger and frustration, birthers seem to reason in the following bad pattern: I don’t know that the rumors surrounding Obama’s supposed foreign birth aren’t true. This overrides the exceptionally good evidence supporting Obama’s American birth. Therefore I believe he’s not a citizen. This, however, is better reasoning for a hardcore evidentialist: each piece of evidence for Obama’s American birth exhibits high truth-aptness (see first paragraph), and therefore I have better reason, on balance, to not doubt, and hence accept his citizenship, than to believe the opposite, which is based on weak speculations. Presumably, the Christian faithful do not believe in God’s existence by reasoning in the improper pattern, but rather, do so by reasoning in the second pattern. Therefore, unless one counts as good evidence rumors that have not withheld even modest scrutiny, one has sufficient reason to believe that Obama is a citizen.
My message thus reduces to this point: birthers employ a double standard when it comes to questioning Obama’s birth - not just with respect to their Christian beliefs, but with respect to their everyday beliefs and the credentials of their favored politicians. But they should not. This is not entirely their fault. Fox News correspondents and right-wing conspiracy theorists have circulated these sophisms enthusiastically, which therefore gives them an air of credibility. As an aside to you birthers who support Romney: did you know that Mitt Romney, as of today, would not satisfy your extreme citizenship test? And, just in case someone falsely accuses me of having done so, notice that I haven’t said anything to deride or challenge the beliefs of level-headed Christians everywhere, not even birthers, whose beliefs I assumed have been appropriately acquired. Indeed, my article depends on this assumption.
In the immortal words of Plotinus, albeit in an admittedly tendentious variation of them, the theater of reason is played out on a stage in which “the persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some scurrilous clown.” Everyone who is buying into this birther nonsense should take note that he is thereby designating himself as one of Plotinus’ servants and rustic and scurrilous clowns in this farce of a drama. Disabuse yourself.
I have a better suggestion: let’s all drop this nonsense, accept the fact that Obama is just as much an American citizen as any one of us born in the United States is, and focus on the real issues. And God knows we have many.
NB: This is an alternate version of a separate article I posted earlier, one that sought to bring attention to the conflict inherent within Christianity’s combining “easy knowledge” of weakly justified theistic claims with “hard belief” of the strongly justified ordinary claims of their political disputants. On second thought, I felt that I could have emphasized the ridiculousness of Christianity less, but that of birtherism more. It was for educational reasons, after all, that I wrote the initial version. This led me to consider writing a less anti-Christian polemic. The article that arose out of those scruples, viz., this one, is neutral as to whether or not Christians have strong justification for their Christian beliefs, and, yet, on the basis of granting them the benefit of the doubt, demonstrates by parallel reasoning that birtherism is irrational. I think, therefore, that this article is more apt to disabuse birthers who happen to be Christian (which is the majority of them)!
