I disagree with Dawkins on various things and I sense it’s become uncool to like him in even right-adjacent spaces, but he’s a really underrated writer. I mean sentence to sentence, clarity, span of reference, rather than his ideas per se… as you write he’s a dying breed, which is our loss.
“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.”
Exactly - that’s the take home. It is odd that people who are so clearly intelligent cannot see how different they are from the rest of humanity, by and large. Also worth mentioning that pretty little Oxford (the city and the university) was also built by people who were absurdly religious by today’s standards. Have atheists built anything comparable?
Good point. There are many people - like our Ed - who go: “Middle Ages Dark Ages all rubbish” and ignore Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Chartres etc. Westminster Abbey was built before 1066 FCS!
I nearly cried reading this, Ed. I've waited decades to read an appreciation of Professor Dawkins - one of our all time great Britons - by one who is honestly a believer, secure enough in your faith that you don't sneer, as so many of his religious critics have, at an intellect so cathedral-like in its beauty. Thank you. This is truly beautiful writing about a truly beautiful mind.
Very interesting - thanks. I was very much a Dawkins fan when younger, after reading the Selfish Gene and generally thinking the New Atheism was *obviously* correct and anyone objecting to it was *obviously* just not clever enough to understand the issues properly. Now I think it's all very much more complicated. Dawkins clearly still thinks that (a) religions are false and also (b) societies are better off without them. I wonder how he'd respond to the hypothetical possibility that (a) religions are false, but (b) societies quickly go off the rails without them. Would he cling on to the idea that it's better to stick to the truth, even at the cost of social decline/breakdown? Or would he tolerate some sort of noble lie, just to keep the things he likes (evensong, cricket on the green, etc)?
"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." Do you mean the "gray tribe"
Scott talks a bit about how a pro-science, atheistic, very male coded gray tribe tried to separate from the "blue tribe" but the "gray tribe" and New Atheism kind of failed before splitting.
"yet the rational argument for Christianity as a positive force flounders on the question of whether it is true.. ." I prefer William James' more pragmatic approach in "The Will to Believe" : the truth of an idea should be judged on the basis of its fruits, of the things it makes possible which otherwise could or would probably never have existed.
And in any event, who knows what it feels like to die?
I'm neither attacking yourself nor (God forbid!) William James. But his aphorism which you quote, that truth is a function of a decison's utility, is nonsense. Now I shall sound like Iris Murdoch (I wish!) But were *none* of us to exist, and so no action or outcome (/"fruits") be possible: then It would still be Truth. I'm no Platonist, just a statistican, but isn't that what he was on about? (Words on the internet can sound barbed without intent- I mean no snark, and I share your admiration for James.)
I can't remember James saying that, but from what I do remember, he was talking about pragmatism rather than ontology. And he was possibly thinking about evolution, which can neither be definitively refuted nor definitively proved, but is incredibly fecund.
Thank you for this, Ed. It's been too long since I read Dawkins. I was a New Atheist when it was a thing, despite having gone off Dawkins briefly after 9/11 when I'd bought a few newspapers to try to work out what was going on, and what was going to happen, and Dawkins had a long piece in, I think, The Independent, which I found disappointing, because while he knew a bit about Islam, it was pretty clear that he didn't know enough, or anything about bin Laden really, to justify his essay. (Actually, I found pretty much all the background and opinion pieces disappointing, because nobody seemed to really understand the motivation. But I'd expected something from Dawkins, and didn't get it.)
I think part of the reason New Atheism died (apart from it being a phase or a fashion, and one for people who felt they had to move on every so often anyway) is that some of us, like me, were more clearly Islamophobic if you will, and others preferred the pushing at a greatly weakened Christianity, while pretending it was still strong.
"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." THIS!
Not that it matters, but I seem to remember that Captain Cook used Sauerkraut rather than citrus fruits, and I've found a source which backs me.
What is true of Dawkins--a great inquiring mind--is true of every inquiring mind, regardless of religiosity. But, like all humans, he is liable to be wrong. I look at Dawkins and his like as tragically wrong about Christianity. It has been, overall, good for culture, even when it has been at odds with specific truths. The same cannot be said of many other religions; I include Islam, in spite of their preservation of much scholarship when Catholicism darkened rationality during the so-called Dark Ages, an ill-defined historical period.
There have been many periods during which ignorance has prevailed, usually times when tyranny prevailed, when common folk were prohibited or inhibited from literacy. During those times, when literacy is widespread, the literate tend to become hyper-protective of literacy. Things such as book burning, destruction of libraries, and so forth become more common. I view today's culture among those times. Today's steep decline in education is largely by design, marked by intellectuals' doubt of the ability of of the vast majority to attain 'true' literacy. The general attitude is that education is wasted on most, so dumbing down standards is necessary. Rather than openly admitting that commons people are too stupid to learn, thus raising the possibility of riot by the masses at being told the truth about their stupidity, they are mislead to believe that their 'education' is valid. High school graduation, and increasingly college graduation, is now seen more of a "right" than an achievement. Much that is now "taught" is false as well as worthless. Passing out diplomas has become a of no more value than giving glasses to the blind. The blizzard of social media is merely a false sense of confidence, a veneer cloaking ignorance.
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing" - Pascal. Ed, this is a great appreciation of Dawkins. The "evangelical atheists" always struck me as blind to the limitations of reason in understanding human affairs. As an aside, I sure wish Pinker would get a haircut. His long curly locks give the impression of excessive vanity, which I don't think he really has.
I know the Pascal quote in French, but I'm not going to attempt to spell it out. (My written French is—what's the word?—diabolical.) I thought it translated as "The heart has reasons which (the) reason doesn't understand." Which has all sorts of interpretations such as "there is more than one kind of reason/rationality" or possibly that "human reason is limited, and cannot fathom the depths of God." (I believe something much closer to the first than the second.)
This reminds me that Voltaire said, "there is only one morality, as there is only one geometry." Alas, there is more than one geometry.
As for Pinker, he was born in 1954. Long hair was a thing when he was a student. It's not a sign of vanity. He's like a character in Dickens who wears breeches with stockings when the young folk have all adopted trousers. He's an old man faithful to the fashions of his youth. And good for him. Were he a vain man, he'd have shown up to audience with Dawkins wearing a baseball cap backwards and carrying a skateboard.
Great fan of Dawkins and totally understand how an atheist can be deeply affected by religious music. Remembering his particular love of Bach, and wanting a suitable musical accompaniment while reading your article I asked :
"Hey Siri. Play Ebarme Dich from Bach's St Matthew Passion"
Dawkins exemplifies the flowering of the Anglo mind: deeply curious, literary articulate (though I wish he had read more Dostoevsky and less Jane Austen), polite but aggressive at times, and imbued with the spirit of the European Enlightenment. I wish there were more people like this in the Arab world! On that note, I think that the English education system's apparent inability to "produce" more people like him is a true sign of Anglo civilization's decline!
And in this Eid afternoon, this made me laugh so hard!
“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.”
The political comment you mention in the introduction: Dawkins was responding to an observation by Stephen Rose, who (just after Mrs Thatcher's 1979 election victory) had written:
"When the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power."
Dawkins replied that "One of the dominant messages of The Selfish Gene [...] is that we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale."
In the endnotes to the the 1989 edition, Dawkins again writes that "Critics have occasionally misunderstood The Selfish Gene to be advocating selfishness as a principle by which we should live!" - and it is in this endnote that Dawkins makes clear that he was a Labour voter in the 1970s and an anti-Thatcherite in the 1980s. Looking back at his original Chapter 1 (entitled "Why Are People?"), he writes:
"I must add that the occasional political asides in this chapter make uncomfortable rereading for me in 1989. ‘How many times must this [the need to restrain selfish greed to prevent the destruction of the whole group] have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain?’ (p. 8) makes me sound like a Tory! In 1975, when it was written, a socialist government which I had helped to vote in was battling desperately against 23 per cent inflation, and was obviously concerned about high wage claims. My remark could have been taken from a speech by any Labour minister of the time. Now that Britain has a government of the new right, which has elevated meanness and selfishness to the status of ideology, my words seem to have acquired a kind of nastiness by association, which I regret. It is not that I take back what I said. Selfish short-sightedness still has the undesirable consequences that I mentioned. But nowadays, if one were seeking examples of selfish short-sightedness in Britain, one would not look first at the working class."
"Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture ..." Seriously? Give me a reading list.
Dunno about Dawkins’ ideas about genes (though I do know about genes) but I assume they are in line with the Theory of Evolution. What is important to note - and I am not a fan of organised religion at all - is that evolution is only a theory. Natural Selection: yes. But the idea that dinosaurs can suddenly sprout fully-functional wings for instance is almost risible. Almost all mutations are harmful or even lethal. There are sudden jumps in the fossil record that are almost entirely unexplained. And rather than competition, there is actually huge amounts of co-operation in nature - ants, bees, flocks of birds, packs of dogs and even hominids 🙂
Refreshing among these comments Greg. The majestic mind of Hawkins for the last several years has firmly clamped down and avoided the very real challenge to his evolutionary orthodoxy - the pioneers of current evolutionary biologists have been aware that natural selection explains only part of evolution…something Darwin himself began to suspect shortly before his death.
I thought that was a very fair appraisal of Richard Dawkins and his beliefs.
I was an Atheist during the New Atheist era and for me nothing has changed since then, though nowadays I often read that New Atheism is viewed as sophomoric and discredited. For me this makes little sense since I never really distinguished between Atheism and New Atheism, though the latter was admittedly more confrontational in it's approach to religion. To some silly people, any confrontation is inexcusable, no matter how good the arguments of the side doing the confronting.
Whether religion is good or bad for society was always secondary for me to whether it is true. If it's not true then it barely matters (to me) how beneficial it is. For me, taking an instrumental view of religion by pretending it is true smacks of the self-esteem boosting industry of Californians: hey, why not imagine you are wonderful if it makes you feel good about yourself!
Some people try to claim that religion is like a recipe, which can be neither true nor false, only good or bad, but I think this is sophistry. Religions aren't like recipes since they DO claim to be true, despite their more sophisticated adherents conceding in private that they probably aren't literally true i.e. that the whole thing is a fabrication from beginning to end.
Like Dawkins, I don't really buy the idea that since humans seem destined to believe nonsense then it may as well be religious nonsense, which is generally less harmful than believing in Communism or Progressive Liberalism. Despite not belonging to Richard Dawkins' unusual Oxford set, I find I don't believe in religions. I was brought up on a 1960's housing estate just outside Leicester among other average IQ people who liked football and hated opera but I'm not sure that our secular mini society was any less viable than yesterday's mainly Christian society. Perhaps the societal glue we had then was of a non-religious kind, possibly nationalistic. And presently I'm working in what is possibly the least religious country the world has ever seen, Japan, and I can tell you that things work just fine here and there is no breakdown of morals or standards of behaviour.
Sometimes an aspect of Dawkins' criticism of religion gets lost. I think he has lots of respect for pre-scientific people who believed in gods, and for those today who are raised in, say, the Amazon jungle. It's the sophisticated vicar for whom he reserves his ire. Dawkins can well imagine what it must be like to live as a savage and never to have thought that a world could exist without a creator but what he probably can't imagine is intentionally deceiving himself in order to increase societal glue. Unlike his detractors, I think this does him credit.
From its inception I posted on Dawkins' website until I was driven out by the moderators, who I assumed in those days had the backing of Richard Dawkins himself. Someone would post a comment saying he would defend to his last breath the rights of Muslims to immigrate en masse to the UK, even if this meant they would one day form a majority and would probably vote to throw this gay comment poster off a high building. I would say this was daft. The post would be taken down by the mods without reason. Finally a got sick of writing posts that never saw the light of day and left.
It is policed by a relentless code of manners and behaviour.
Inevitably, since the price of not being religious is being controlled by the Group, instead of by God. Hence not-very-religious societies like Japan and China have always been very conformist ones.
Now Christianity has declined in modern Britain, the Thought Police have moved in to replace it.
I'm quite happy with conformity as long as it aligns with my ideas of the good and in Japan, it does. In fact the way to buck conformity is to commit crimes and have the manners of a pig so give me conformity any day!
All that apart, I'm never happy about describing things that really aren't religions as religions. Their unofficial code of conduct really isn't a religion but...a code of conduct. And the word 'policing' is rather too strong for what actually happens. I know Japanese people who are rebellious and they aren't thrown into gaols by the police. Instead normies give them a wide berth. I would describe this as policing through stigma, which in my view is an effective and good way to keep anti-social behaviour in check.
I think the decline of the New Atheist movement is partly down to the death of the less likeable but more correct Hitchens brother, and the fact that so many of the worst people made it part of their identity.
I never know what to make of Peter Hitchens. I feel I ought to like him yet he seems determined to become a caricature of himself, like Brian Clough. I feel he sometimes paints himself into a corner and ends up defending positions out of pride. I think my beloved Douglas Murray is sometimes in danger of doing the same thing.
I used to like Christopher Hitchens but lost some respect for him when he shamed some old rabbi in a debate for making a joke about circumcision. What was meant as a throw-away line became a point of attack for Hitchens who continued to berate the poor old bloke. Though I was on Hitchen's side in the argument I thought such tactics mean and nasty.
I find myself struck by Peter Hitchens' integrity. It's becoming more and more clear to me that most people's opinions are formed by trying to reach a balance of sorts between other people's opinions, if not simply copied. Peter Hitchens' eccentricity and heterodoxy comes from his insistence on thinking things through for himself.
I'm afraid I disagree with Neil C—I think Christopher was the less likeable one and also the less correct one. I still greatly enjoyed his book on the Clintons, even if his hatred for WJC led him into the GWB follower camp.
Yes, I think I agree with you about Peter Hitchens' integrity and how he thinks things through for himself and doesn't, like most of us (including me), moderate his opinions to fit in with what he thinks is the norm. Quite often I read people whose opinions I respect in order to know what my own opinion ought to be. That either demonstrates my lack of expertise in the field or a lack of self-confidence in my own opinion, if I even have one. I can't imagine Peter Hitchens ever doing that and that's why I like him.
Yet I would like him more than I do if I didn't think he was often wrong about things; sometimes by degrees and sometimes just plain wrong. That's when his confidence in his own opinion looks more like a vice than a virtue.
I have read a couple of his books. I like the way he writes and generally like the same things he does (old stuff). Yet while reading his autobiography, I think it was, I had to stop reading. His justification for becoming a Christian was so pathetically weak that I suddenly felt deflated. I always secretly hope that someone can convince me that I'm wrong in my atheism but Peter certainly wasn't the man to do it.
More recently I watched him being interviewed by some young bloke and Hitchens got increasingly agitated by a line of questioning he didn't like until finally he started accusing the interviewer of getting him there on false pretenses and insisting he apologise. From where I was sitting I could agree with Hitchens that the interviewer had perhaps pursued one topic too doggedly and should have let it drop, but Hitchens' reaction bordered on the paranoid. Maybe he's been a dissenter from orthodoxy for too long and his patience has worn thin.
Whatever. At some point I decided he was not someone whose mast I would nail my colours to, as I might to say, Ed West's, Konstantin Kisin's, Victor Davis Hanson's, John Derbyshire's, Douglas Murray's or Theodore Dalrymple's. Hitchens seems the very definition of a 'loose cannon': sometimes spectacularly and uniquely right and sometimes stubbornly and dogmatically wrong.
I disagree with Dawkins on various things and I sense it’s become uncool to like him in even right-adjacent spaces, but he’s a really underrated writer. I mean sentence to sentence, clarity, span of reference, rather than his ideas per se… as you write he’s a dying breed, which is our loss.
100%. The Blind Watchmaker is also a great book
“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.”
Exactly - that’s the take home. It is odd that people who are so clearly intelligent cannot see how different they are from the rest of humanity, by and large. Also worth mentioning that pretty little Oxford (the city and the university) was also built by people who were absurdly religious by today’s standards. Have atheists built anything comparable?
Good point. There are many people - like our Ed - who go: “Middle Ages Dark Ages all rubbish” and ignore Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Chartres etc. Westminster Abbey was built before 1066 FCS!
I nearly cried reading this, Ed. I've waited decades to read an appreciation of Professor Dawkins - one of our all time great Britons - by one who is honestly a believer, secure enough in your faith that you don't sneer, as so many of his religious critics have, at an intellect so cathedral-like in its beauty. Thank you. This is truly beautiful writing about a truly beautiful mind.
Very interesting - thanks. I was very much a Dawkins fan when younger, after reading the Selfish Gene and generally thinking the New Atheism was *obviously* correct and anyone objecting to it was *obviously* just not clever enough to understand the issues properly. Now I think it's all very much more complicated. Dawkins clearly still thinks that (a) religions are false and also (b) societies are better off without them. I wonder how he'd respond to the hypothetical possibility that (a) religions are false, but (b) societies quickly go off the rails without them. Would he cling on to the idea that it's better to stick to the truth, even at the cost of social decline/breakdown? Or would he tolerate some sort of noble lie, just to keep the things he likes (evensong, cricket on the green, etc)?
"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." Do you mean the "gray tribe"
Scott talks a bit about how a pro-science, atheistic, very male coded gray tribe tried to separate from the "blue tribe" but the "gray tribe" and New Atheism kind of failed before splitting.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
"yet the rational argument for Christianity as a positive force flounders on the question of whether it is true.. ." I prefer William James' more pragmatic approach in "The Will to Believe" : the truth of an idea should be judged on the basis of its fruits, of the things it makes possible which otherwise could or would probably never have existed.
And in any event, who knows what it feels like to die?
Pascal's wager seems like a pretty sensible way to view the issue, but I understand it's unsatisfying to many
I'm neither attacking yourself nor (God forbid!) William James. But his aphorism which you quote, that truth is a function of a decison's utility, is nonsense. Now I shall sound like Iris Murdoch (I wish!) But were *none* of us to exist, and so no action or outcome (/"fruits") be possible: then It would still be Truth. I'm no Platonist, just a statistican, but isn't that what he was on about? (Words on the internet can sound barbed without intent- I mean no snark, and I share your admiration for James.)
I can't remember James saying that, but from what I do remember, he was talking about pragmatism rather than ontology. And he was possibly thinking about evolution, which can neither be definitively refuted nor definitively proved, but is incredibly fecund.
Thank you for this, Ed. It's been too long since I read Dawkins. I was a New Atheist when it was a thing, despite having gone off Dawkins briefly after 9/11 when I'd bought a few newspapers to try to work out what was going on, and what was going to happen, and Dawkins had a long piece in, I think, The Independent, which I found disappointing, because while he knew a bit about Islam, it was pretty clear that he didn't know enough, or anything about bin Laden really, to justify his essay. (Actually, I found pretty much all the background and opinion pieces disappointing, because nobody seemed to really understand the motivation. But I'd expected something from Dawkins, and didn't get it.)
I think part of the reason New Atheism died (apart from it being a phase or a fashion, and one for people who felt they had to move on every so often anyway) is that some of us, like me, were more clearly Islamophobic if you will, and others preferred the pushing at a greatly weakened Christianity, while pretending it was still strong.
"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." THIS!
Not that it matters, but I seem to remember that Captain Cook used Sauerkraut rather than citrus fruits, and I've found a source which backs me.
https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2018/06/sauerkraut-sugar-and-salt-pork-the-diet-on-board-cooks-resolution.html
Oh yes good point - and I should have known that as I wrote about it reviewing Will Storr's The Status Game
The New Atheism happened in the Noughties at a time of great optimism and prosperity.
Both of which have collapsed since, taking the New Atheism with them.
There are no atheists with sub-prime mortgages.
What is true of Dawkins--a great inquiring mind--is true of every inquiring mind, regardless of religiosity. But, like all humans, he is liable to be wrong. I look at Dawkins and his like as tragically wrong about Christianity. It has been, overall, good for culture, even when it has been at odds with specific truths. The same cannot be said of many other religions; I include Islam, in spite of their preservation of much scholarship when Catholicism darkened rationality during the so-called Dark Ages, an ill-defined historical period.
There have been many periods during which ignorance has prevailed, usually times when tyranny prevailed, when common folk were prohibited or inhibited from literacy. During those times, when literacy is widespread, the literate tend to become hyper-protective of literacy. Things such as book burning, destruction of libraries, and so forth become more common. I view today's culture among those times. Today's steep decline in education is largely by design, marked by intellectuals' doubt of the ability of of the vast majority to attain 'true' literacy. The general attitude is that education is wasted on most, so dumbing down standards is necessary. Rather than openly admitting that commons people are too stupid to learn, thus raising the possibility of riot by the masses at being told the truth about their stupidity, they are mislead to believe that their 'education' is valid. High school graduation, and increasingly college graduation, is now seen more of a "right" than an achievement. Much that is now "taught" is false as well as worthless. Passing out diplomas has become a of no more value than giving glasses to the blind. The blizzard of social media is merely a false sense of confidence, a veneer cloaking ignorance.
Catholicism has almost never darkened rationality. Illiteracy was caused by poverty.
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing" - Pascal. Ed, this is a great appreciation of Dawkins. The "evangelical atheists" always struck me as blind to the limitations of reason in understanding human affairs. As an aside, I sure wish Pinker would get a haircut. His long curly locks give the impression of excessive vanity, which I don't think he really has.
I know the Pascal quote in French, but I'm not going to attempt to spell it out. (My written French is—what's the word?—diabolical.) I thought it translated as "The heart has reasons which (the) reason doesn't understand." Which has all sorts of interpretations such as "there is more than one kind of reason/rationality" or possibly that "human reason is limited, and cannot fathom the depths of God." (I believe something much closer to the first than the second.)
This reminds me that Voltaire said, "there is only one morality, as there is only one geometry." Alas, there is more than one geometry.
As for Pinker, he was born in 1954. Long hair was a thing when he was a student. It's not a sign of vanity. He's like a character in Dickens who wears breeches with stockings when the young folk have all adopted trousers. He's an old man faithful to the fashions of his youth. And good for him. Were he a vain man, he'd have shown up to audience with Dawkins wearing a baseball cap backwards and carrying a skateboard.
Great fan of Dawkins and totally understand how an atheist can be deeply affected by religious music. Remembering his particular love of Bach, and wanting a suitable musical accompaniment while reading your article I asked :
"Hey Siri. Play Ebarme Dich from Bach's St Matthew Passion"
...Pause...
"OK. Now playing..Hank Williams"
I can see why Siri made the mistake. Kind of similar.
Dawkins exemplifies the flowering of the Anglo mind: deeply curious, literary articulate (though I wish he had read more Dostoevsky and less Jane Austen), polite but aggressive at times, and imbued with the spirit of the European Enlightenment. I wish there were more people like this in the Arab world! On that note, I think that the English education system's apparent inability to "produce" more people like him is a true sign of Anglo civilization's decline!
And in this Eid afternoon, this made me laugh so hard!
“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.”
The political comment you mention in the introduction: Dawkins was responding to an observation by Stephen Rose, who (just after Mrs Thatcher's 1979 election victory) had written:
"When the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power."
Dawkins replied that "One of the dominant messages of The Selfish Gene [...] is that we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale."
In the endnotes to the the 1989 edition, Dawkins again writes that "Critics have occasionally misunderstood The Selfish Gene to be advocating selfishness as a principle by which we should live!" - and it is in this endnote that Dawkins makes clear that he was a Labour voter in the 1970s and an anti-Thatcherite in the 1980s. Looking back at his original Chapter 1 (entitled "Why Are People?"), he writes:
"I must add that the occasional political asides in this chapter make uncomfortable rereading for me in 1989. ‘How many times must this [the need to restrain selfish greed to prevent the destruction of the whole group] have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain?’ (p. 8) makes me sound like a Tory! In 1975, when it was written, a socialist government which I had helped to vote in was battling desperately against 23 per cent inflation, and was obviously concerned about high wage claims. My remark could have been taken from a speech by any Labour minister of the time. Now that Britain has a government of the new right, which has elevated meanness and selfishness to the status of ideology, my words seem to have acquired a kind of nastiness by association, which I regret. It is not that I take back what I said. Selfish short-sightedness still has the undesirable consequences that I mentioned. But nowadays, if one were seeking examples of selfish short-sightedness in Britain, one would not look first at the working class."
"Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture ..." Seriously? Give me a reading list.
Dunno about Dawkins’ ideas about genes (though I do know about genes) but I assume they are in line with the Theory of Evolution. What is important to note - and I am not a fan of organised religion at all - is that evolution is only a theory. Natural Selection: yes. But the idea that dinosaurs can suddenly sprout fully-functional wings for instance is almost risible. Almost all mutations are harmful or even lethal. There are sudden jumps in the fossil record that are almost entirely unexplained. And rather than competition, there is actually huge amounts of co-operation in nature - ants, bees, flocks of birds, packs of dogs and even hominids 🙂
Refreshing among these comments Greg. The majestic mind of Hawkins for the last several years has firmly clamped down and avoided the very real challenge to his evolutionary orthodoxy - the pioneers of current evolutionary biologists have been aware that natural selection explains only part of evolution…something Darwin himself began to suspect shortly before his death.
I thought that was a very fair appraisal of Richard Dawkins and his beliefs.
I was an Atheist during the New Atheist era and for me nothing has changed since then, though nowadays I often read that New Atheism is viewed as sophomoric and discredited. For me this makes little sense since I never really distinguished between Atheism and New Atheism, though the latter was admittedly more confrontational in it's approach to religion. To some silly people, any confrontation is inexcusable, no matter how good the arguments of the side doing the confronting.
Whether religion is good or bad for society was always secondary for me to whether it is true. If it's not true then it barely matters (to me) how beneficial it is. For me, taking an instrumental view of religion by pretending it is true smacks of the self-esteem boosting industry of Californians: hey, why not imagine you are wonderful if it makes you feel good about yourself!
Some people try to claim that religion is like a recipe, which can be neither true nor false, only good or bad, but I think this is sophistry. Religions aren't like recipes since they DO claim to be true, despite their more sophisticated adherents conceding in private that they probably aren't literally true i.e. that the whole thing is a fabrication from beginning to end.
Like Dawkins, I don't really buy the idea that since humans seem destined to believe nonsense then it may as well be religious nonsense, which is generally less harmful than believing in Communism or Progressive Liberalism. Despite not belonging to Richard Dawkins' unusual Oxford set, I find I don't believe in religions. I was brought up on a 1960's housing estate just outside Leicester among other average IQ people who liked football and hated opera but I'm not sure that our secular mini society was any less viable than yesterday's mainly Christian society. Perhaps the societal glue we had then was of a non-religious kind, possibly nationalistic. And presently I'm working in what is possibly the least religious country the world has ever seen, Japan, and I can tell you that things work just fine here and there is no breakdown of morals or standards of behaviour.
Sometimes an aspect of Dawkins' criticism of religion gets lost. I think he has lots of respect for pre-scientific people who believed in gods, and for those today who are raised in, say, the Amazon jungle. It's the sophisticated vicar for whom he reserves his ire. Dawkins can well imagine what it must be like to live as a savage and never to have thought that a world could exist without a creator but what he probably can't imagine is intentionally deceiving himself in order to increase societal glue. Unlike his detractors, I think this does him credit.
From its inception I posted on Dawkins' website until I was driven out by the moderators, who I assumed in those days had the backing of Richard Dawkins himself. Someone would post a comment saying he would defend to his last breath the rights of Muslims to immigrate en masse to the UK, even if this meant they would one day form a majority and would probably vote to throw this gay comment poster off a high building. I would say this was daft. The post would be taken down by the mods without reason. Finally a got sick of writing posts that never saw the light of day and left.
The religion of the Japanese is Japan.
It is policed by a relentless code of manners and behaviour.
Inevitably, since the price of not being religious is being controlled by the Group, instead of by God. Hence not-very-religious societies like Japan and China have always been very conformist ones.
Now Christianity has declined in modern Britain, the Thought Police have moved in to replace it.
I'm quite happy with conformity as long as it aligns with my ideas of the good and in Japan, it does. In fact the way to buck conformity is to commit crimes and have the manners of a pig so give me conformity any day!
All that apart, I'm never happy about describing things that really aren't religions as religions. Their unofficial code of conduct really isn't a religion but...a code of conduct. And the word 'policing' is rather too strong for what actually happens. I know Japanese people who are rebellious and they aren't thrown into gaols by the police. Instead normies give them a wide berth. I would describe this as policing through stigma, which in my view is an effective and good way to keep anti-social behaviour in check.
I think the decline of the New Atheist movement is partly down to the death of the less likeable but more correct Hitchens brother, and the fact that so many of the worst people made it part of their identity.
I never know what to make of Peter Hitchens. I feel I ought to like him yet he seems determined to become a caricature of himself, like Brian Clough. I feel he sometimes paints himself into a corner and ends up defending positions out of pride. I think my beloved Douglas Murray is sometimes in danger of doing the same thing.
I used to like Christopher Hitchens but lost some respect for him when he shamed some old rabbi in a debate for making a joke about circumcision. What was meant as a throw-away line became a point of attack for Hitchens who continued to berate the poor old bloke. Though I was on Hitchen's side in the argument I thought such tactics mean and nasty.
I find myself struck by Peter Hitchens' integrity. It's becoming more and more clear to me that most people's opinions are formed by trying to reach a balance of sorts between other people's opinions, if not simply copied. Peter Hitchens' eccentricity and heterodoxy comes from his insistence on thinking things through for himself.
I'm afraid I disagree with Neil C—I think Christopher was the less likeable one and also the less correct one. I still greatly enjoyed his book on the Clintons, even if his hatred for WJC led him into the GWB follower camp.
Yes, I think I agree with you about Peter Hitchens' integrity and how he thinks things through for himself and doesn't, like most of us (including me), moderate his opinions to fit in with what he thinks is the norm. Quite often I read people whose opinions I respect in order to know what my own opinion ought to be. That either demonstrates my lack of expertise in the field or a lack of self-confidence in my own opinion, if I even have one. I can't imagine Peter Hitchens ever doing that and that's why I like him.
Yet I would like him more than I do if I didn't think he was often wrong about things; sometimes by degrees and sometimes just plain wrong. That's when his confidence in his own opinion looks more like a vice than a virtue.
I have read a couple of his books. I like the way he writes and generally like the same things he does (old stuff). Yet while reading his autobiography, I think it was, I had to stop reading. His justification for becoming a Christian was so pathetically weak that I suddenly felt deflated. I always secretly hope that someone can convince me that I'm wrong in my atheism but Peter certainly wasn't the man to do it.
More recently I watched him being interviewed by some young bloke and Hitchens got increasingly agitated by a line of questioning he didn't like until finally he started accusing the interviewer of getting him there on false pretenses and insisting he apologise. From where I was sitting I could agree with Hitchens that the interviewer had perhaps pursued one topic too doggedly and should have let it drop, but Hitchens' reaction bordered on the paranoid. Maybe he's been a dissenter from orthodoxy for too long and his patience has worn thin.
Whatever. At some point I decided he was not someone whose mast I would nail my colours to, as I might to say, Ed West's, Konstantin Kisin's, Victor Davis Hanson's, John Derbyshire's, Douglas Murray's or Theodore Dalrymple's. Hitchens seems the very definition of a 'loose cannon': sometimes spectacularly and uniquely right and sometimes stubbornly and dogmatically wrong.