Richard Dawkins and the British genius

Who is this God Person Anyway?

Two of the greatest minds alive, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, were in central London on Tuesday to talk about the future of humanity. Pinker is 70 and sharp as ever, able to explain complex ideas in a manner understandable even to those of us lagging a good 30 or 40 IQ points behind. Dawkins is 84 and has slowed down a bit; he allowed his friend to do most of the talking, although his points were all characteristically sharp and often witty. Conscious that he may not make many more public engagements, I was keen to see him in person.

Dawkins is perhaps the most successful modern populariser of scientific ideas, in particular regarding genes and memes. Peter Watson writes in his newly-published The British Imagination about the importance of the evolutionary biologist, who along with ‘Bowlby, Hodgkin, Crick, Watson’ formed ‘part of a wider general revolution, across the world, extending from biology into psychology.’ Dawkins, Watson notes, helped to spark ‘a resurgence of Darwinian thinking that characterised the last quarter of the twentieth century.’

I remember reading The Selfish Gene as a teenager and the book having a profound influence on the way I saw the world; nothing else explained it all in quite the same way.

As Watson writes: ‘Dawkins’s overriding point is that we must think of the central unit of evolution and natural selection as the gene: the gene, the replicating unit, is “concerned” to see itself survive and thrive, and once we understand this, everything else falls into place: kinship patterns and behaviour in insects, birds, mammals and humans are explained’. Altruism ‘becomes sensible’, even to non-kin.

Dawkins later reflected on whether the ‘Immortal Gene’ might have been a better title, since the phrase was misunderstood and The Selfish Gene wasn’t an argument for selfishness. I seem to recall my scuffed copy containing a foreword in which the author stated that, as a Labour Party supporter, he didn’t want it used to justify Thatcherism.

I always had Dawkins, a resident of North Oxford, as more of a Liberal Democrat. He comes from a particular sub-section of our nation especially blessed with the traits that come up repeatedly in the British Imagination: an openness to foreign cultures, an interest in collecting, eccentricity, a preference for friends and clubs over family, the relentless thirst for knowledge, inquiry and adventure. The dissenter’s horror of the mob.

As Watson’s book illustrates, there was something especially curious about the British mind from the 16^th to the 20^th centuries, a culture from which Dawkins emerged. One thinks of William Jones, who published Greek verse at 15 and a year later, having learned Persian from ‘a Syrian living in London’, translated the lyric poet Hafiz.

Watson writes that, after being made the first president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, Jones held ‘weekly meetings and “original papers”. He brought together botanists, including one who had studied under Linnaeus, and ensured that many plants, and drawings of plants, were sent back to Kew, together with details of insects and other animals, and meteorological accounts of Sumatra and the great rivers of India. Jones researched Indian laws, and Indian medical practices and beliefs, and conveyed Sir William Herschel’s astronomical discoveries to the Brahmans, who were, he reported, “highly delighted”.’

Jones’s great breakthrough was to note the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, so discovering the existence of the Indo-European language group. A political radical, Jones had a reverence and keen interest in Indian culture, and as Watson writes, ‘In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if any­ thing, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the (at least tacit) assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere.’ These were disconcerting ideas, and it took an imaginative and curious individual to delve into them.

This sense of adventure and inquiry was also characteristic of Captain James Cook, who tracked the transit of the sun in 1769 in order to measure its distance from the earth, ‘the first example of global international scientific cooperation’. Most famous for landing in Australia, Cook also practically confirmed the link between scurvy and Vitamin C, overcoming the sailor’s curse by experimenting with sauerkraut (although citrus fruit would become the standard remedy). When he circumnavigated the globe and reached further south than any human in history, not a single crew member died from the illness over the three-year journey. The British Imagination is filled with such characters: this was the spirit of the Anglo, an insatiably curious race of people.

Many of the most inquisitive minds were drawn to the colonies, perhaps selected for openness, but the tropics also provided fertile ground for the field in which the British excelled most of all – the life sciences, or biology. (Chemistry, in contrast, gave full expression to the German Genius).

Dawkins was born in Kenya to an upper-middle-class family who moved back to Oxfordshire after his civil servant father’s wartime service. Raised in the Church of England, young Richard abandoned all faith in his teens and was long unspoken in his atheism. Some even believe that the professor, a friend of Douglas Adams, was the inspiration for Oolon Colluphid in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, author of Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

This is an amusing idea, although unlikely, since Dawkins did not fully assume the title of ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ until the 2000s, and the emergence of the New Atheist movement. The God Delusion, published in 2006, sold three million copies, followed in 2008 by Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great, the two men joining Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris to become known as ‘the four horsemen’ of New Atheism. (Pinker, a less polemical atheist, was not so directly associated with this fab four, although you might say that he was the George Martin of the group).

New Atheism was fashionable, forming an identity glue for what Scott Alexander called the ‘blue tribe’ – secular, liberal university-educated urbanites with a strong sense of in-group.

The timing of this movement was not coincidental: the five years previous to the publication of Dawkins’s book had seen 9/11, large-scale terror attacks in Madrid and London, and the Danish cartoon controversy. Political Islam appeared genuinely threatening and ascendent, while New Atheism’s Christian targets were weak and fading into irrelevance; even American churchgoing was already in sharp decline, while Christianity was impotent in Europe. Maybe it was psychologically easier for people to blame all religions for the world’s problems than to admit that one particular faith made them nervous about getting on the Tube.

Dawkins was always outspoken, deliberately unsparing towards the feelings of believers, but he attacked religion with a rabid sense of fun. There was something of that now sadly extinct Anglo subspecies, the eccentric Oxford professor, in the way he used to read his hate mail on YouTube. Even when I worked for the Catholic Herald, at the peak of the New Atheism wars, we had a soft spot for Dawkins.

There was also something reassuringly English about his particular loathing of Catholicism. As Curtis Yarvin put it, Professor Dawkins is not just an atheist but a Protestant atheist, a ‘Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist…’ Dawkins’s view of Catholicism as a sinister force for superstition and priestcraft was recognisable in a long line of English Protestant thought. Indeed, even the sense of wonder he finds in nature descends from the 19^th century Anglo-Dutch theological movement of Rev Bernard ter Haar.

Dawkins sees in the beauty of the earth sciences wonder enough without bronze age myths to explain them, but his vision of science is also as a form of enlightenment, a hope for the human race. It is often a beautiful vision, and in The God Delusion, he described the principles of the scientific method in surprisingly moving terms:

‘I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal – unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.’

It’s a worthy ideal, and indeed most people still cling to theories long after they’re proven wrong, journalists being the worst offenders. Ideological fervour and irrationality are part of human nature, a tendency illustrated by what happened to New Atheism as it evolved into an arm of the social justice movement in the 2010s.

From now on, lived experience triumphed over enlightenment rationality, and the new politics quite overtly echoed the traits and rituals found in religions, from feasts and solemnities to feet-washing. The new mood of politics among a secularised younger generation of progressives was one of policing boundaries. It was, and is, primarily concerned with ‘justice’ over truth, and saw them as analogous (as the two terms are in many languages).

Defending the vulnerable, the preachers of the Great Awokening were unforgiving and vicious to those who transgressed their moral code and contradicted their worldview. Woke progressivism is not an ideological movement in which anyone says ‘my dear fellow, I wish to thank you’ for pointing out an error. It was also a worldview entirely dependent on comforting lies about human biology, with the blank slate written into its DNA; indeed, woke progressivism would collapse without this leap of faith.

This new mood placed Dawkins increasingly at odds with the Blue Tribe, a clash of temperaments exacerbated by the confrontational nature of its main forum, old Twitter, where Dawkins was not afraid to court controversy.

‘Lost an argument? Don’t worry, just accuse your opponent of being old, white and privileged. That’s the ticket,’ as he once tweeted.

At their peak his tweets were amusing and eccentric, illustrating a schoolboy’s sense of humour; perhaps the most celebrated was ‘Saw a down-and-out in Seattle last night. His sign said not “I need food” or “I need a job” but “I need a fat bitch”. What could this mean?’

But like another hero of the blue tribe, JK Rowling, Dawkins became a hate figure to former fans who saw him as betraying the revolution. Central to progressivism is a view of the world based on power dynamics, one in which minorities are in need of protection from the out-group and, whatever the realities of their culture, default allies of the Blue Tribe.

This post-Christian valorisation of weakness extends to protecting the feelings of far-group religious believers, and so Islamophobia joined racism and homophobia among the deadly sins. To Dawkins, this was simply nonsense, and it was dishonest and cowardly for atheists to attack religion in the abstract but not one religion in particular - especially when it was clearly the most threatening to liberal values.

Once upon a time, I recall Dawkins referring to Catholicism as ‘the world’s second most evil religion’, which we regarded with pride at the Herald, and though the obvious follow-up question was not asked, there was little doubt which faith occupied the top spot in his worldview. Twitter was to make it obvious.

‘Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism.’ That upset a few people, as did his suggestion to ‘always put Islamic “scholar” in quotes, to avoid insulting true scholars. True scholars have read more than one book.’ On another occasion, he pointed out that ‘Of COURSE most Muslims are peaceful. But if someone’s killed for what they drew or said or wrote, you KNOW the religion of the killers’.

Progressives wanted to view his contempt for Islam as Right-wing outgroup hostility, because that was the only framework in which they saw the world – you either committed to opposing ‘hate’ in all forms, or you were in the Red Tribe. That was their creed, and they lacked the imagination to see things any differently. I even recalled comment pieces questioning whether New Atheism is ‘Islamophobic’. Er yes, obviously.

Certainly the Red Tribe cheered this development, amusing as it is to see opponents fight and violate their taboos - helped by the fact that Dawkins’ tweets were effortlessly funny.

‘Are you a woman bored with life in UK? Start a new life in our Caliphate as a SLAVE. If you change your mind, you can have a free beheading.’

On another occasion, he lamented that ‘Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste.’

Yet claims of ‘Islamophobia’ only worked within the progressive framework; if you think that all religions are wrong, and harmful, and you prize free speech, scientific freedom and gender equality, then obviously you should despise Islam. I personally think that many communists are good people and I’m sometimes able to separate the beliefs from the person, but I think the faith itself is wrong and evil, and I certainly don’t want it promoted in schools. I don’t feel this way about Islam, and share Christopher Caldwell’s view that it is a ‘magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture’. But I’m not an evangelical atheist.

On one occasion Dawkins attracted particular scorn for pointing out that ‘All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.’

I remember at the time one columnist opining that ‘only people like Dawkins’ would be interested in that fact, and it struck me how incuriosity is now so highly prized as a virtue. What, one wonders, happened to the thirst for inquiry, the interest in the world, the willingness to counter dangerous and disconcerting new ideas?

Dawkins’ views could certainly be uncomfortable and offensive. There was also the eugenics controversy, which illustrated the difficulty of honest debate in a society in which most people aren’t rational. As Tom Chivers observed , many have difficulty understanding the difference between what is possible and what is right.

My problem with the New Atheist movement was not the question of whether they were right scientifically or theologically, but the belief that the decline of religion would improve society; as if the human desire for irrational beliefs, dogma and intolerance would disappear from the genome.

I am of the quite pessimistic view that human society cannot live without religion of some sort; its effect on the social glue (religio means ‘to bind’) is too huge to ignore or synthesise. Since the start of the century, the decline in American religion has coincided with both a rise in anxiety-related disorders and the radicalisation of politics, developing clear cult-like tendencies on both Left and Right.

A new generation seemed especially susceptible to memes, the most notable being transgenderism. This now became such a sacred idea that ’Skeptics’ groups even cancelled talks because of speakers sceptical about the claim that a man can become a woman. Dawkins, inevitably, also denied this new dogma, calling the statement that ‘trans woman is a woman… a distortion of language and a distortion of science’. The American Humanist Association retracted his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award as a result.

Dawkins hasn’t changed his views of religion, and at Tuesday’s talk he expressed his hope that it might die out in the future; Pinker was less sure, pointing to the much higher fertility of religious groups.

In 2023, when his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion to Christianity, Dawkins wrote an open letter mocking the very idea of a cultural Christian. ‘I might add that Christianity has been the inspiration for some of the greatest art, architecture and music the world has ever known,’ he wrote: ‘But so what? I once got into trouble for extolling the beauty of Winchester Cathedral bells by comparison with the “aggressive-sounding” yell of “Allahu Akhbar” (the last thing you hear before the bomb goes off, or before your head rolls away from your body). I might agree (I think I do, although certainly not in its earlier history) that Christianity is morally superior to Islam.’

This has always been his view, and it is not inconsistent with the worldview of a very Protestant atheist; after all, one can despise religion and still believe that some are worse than others. Dawkins has never denied that he is deeply influenced by Anglicanism, and as far back as 2007 called himself a ‘cultural Christian’. In 2013, in an interview with Douglas Murray, he talked of his ‘Anglican nostalgia, especially when you look at the competition’.

‘I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition, for its benign tolerance,’ he told Murray: ‘I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do… I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.’

Asked whether a post-Christian world would lead to moral anarchy of the sort warned about by Jonathan Sacks, Dawkins replied: ‘I don’t think I buy that really. I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford, it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem and it is extremely civilised.’

The counter-argument is obvious, that Dawkins’s Oxford circle is unusual, the people there selected for traits rare in the outside world. Without the binding power of religion, which makes our unusually social primate species able to co-operate in very large groups, it is certainly harder to foster or maintain civilisation.

Dawkins’ love of the Anglican inheritance has often been presented as a gotcha, yet the rational argument for Christianity as a positive force flounders on the question of whether it is true; its cultural inheritance may be beautiful, but for Dawkins none of that is as important as the search for the truth. It is what makes us human.

One might disagree with his view of religion, yet still admire his sense of curiosity, wonder and imagination, not to mention humour, the qualities that once drove a nation’s boundless exploration across the globe. For all that, Professor Dawkins remains among the greatest living Englishmen.