A thought on the significance of Richard Dawkins
By Mark Vernon on Sunday, July 11 2010, 13:10 - Religion - Permalink
You only have to visit richarddawkins.net, or watch the adulation he receives from an appreciative audience, or note how his name has become part of contemporary culture, to suspect that his writings and rhetoric are tapping into something profound. But what?
A number of theories do the rounds. It could be that he has released a long suppressed enmity against religion. It could be that he is a new Huxley, completing what the original 'bulldog' began. It could be that he is, as he's described himself, the 'devil's chaplain.' It could be that he is just the poster boy of a brilliant marketing campaign.
But what about this phrase from Jung: 'The gods have become diseases.'
Jung was following Nietzsche here, who also recognised that when gods die, we humans stay pious. But because that piety no longer has an external object, its passion is internalized, as Nietzsche put it - or introjected, as Jung put it. This is a psychic disaster, as the individual becomes a god to him- or herself. All kinds of neuroses and psychoses follow. (Nietzsche was so brilliant that he named and described his own, in the figure of the superman.) The gods, therefore, become diseases - of the mind.
In a peculiar way, is this not precisely what Dawkins has identifed? In perhaps his most well known metaphor, he refers to religion as a virus. Or there's his notion that belief in gods is an evolutionary misfiring, like a cancer. He has, therefore - and I guess unwittingly - diagnosed the condition of our times. This would be why, love him or loathe him, it is impossible to ignore him.
Comments
I once read - and I can't now track down the reference so this could be apocryphal - that when a plant is dying it will have a final burst of seed scattering, the one last gasp of life. That's how I read Dawkins - the last gasp of Modern secularism.
@ Sam:
A wonderful example of "deflection".
As a priest you cannot close your eyes to the ageing of your parish.
Here in Austria the official number of catholics is nearly 70%, but just 8% visit the church regularily. Religion is a mere badge, an ornament at best; it's cultural significance is long gone. You now have to fight turf wars with astrologers, mystics and other snake oil pedlars for the few guilable minds still left.
So you might want to adjust the dying plant metaphor to reality.
Interesting point. I think we need to look at the environment in which Dawkins has had his success. Liberal humanist atheism was expected by its proponents to continue to dominate the West and to be the inevitable destination of all cultures as modernity progressed. This was rock-solid as a conviction among the intellectuals and governing elites of the West after World War 2; and secularisation theory was barely challenged. This began to change after the shock of the Iranian Revolution and then, decisively, after 9/11. The revival of Islam in militant forms was not in the liberal humanist script, and the repugnant nature of 'Islamism' provoked justifiable revulsion and a renewal of militant secularism in response. For Dawkins, the upsurge of Bad Religion in Islam is a sign that all religions are rotten and dangerous. He sees no difference in kind, only in degree, between Rowan Williams and Abu Hamza. His inability, most of the time, to see the vast gulf between Good and Bad Religion, is the great weakness of his work, even if he is right on target when attacking fundamentalisms. So Dawkins represents a shocked reawakening of intellectual atheist humanists, who thought History was inevitably going their way and have been proved mistaken.
Why is Bad Religion back? Because modernity offers much to its winners, but deracinates and shakes up the lives of all who feel themselves to be losers and outsiders. Old gods are sought even more passionately than before, and holy texts are seen not as guides and libraries of wisdom, but as rigid declarations of law.
The final irony is that Bad Religion may bring out the worst in its opponents, a mirror-image fundamentalism. Dawkins's website is full of quasi-religious messages (including a Converts' Corner) and his style can be as extreme and crude as his enemies'. As someone - Nietzsche? - remarked, he who fights dragons must take care not to become a dragon himself.
Hi Mark, I think that you give Dawkins too much credit. Surely someone who is prepared to describe himself , with a straight-face, as a 'bright' is a symptom of the disease "where the individual becomes a god to him- or herself" rather than an insightful diagnostician?
I appreciate the analogue from Nietzsche and Jung here. Still, I notice myself wanting to qualify: Dawkins's fame is not fortuitous; it is the result of fervency in marketing--something you might have hinted at in this post ("the poster boy of a brilliant marketing campaign"...nice line by the way).
It is evident that the past decade or two of his existence have been dedicated to writing, speaking, interviewing, and improving his website (should I say 'campaign'?) So, what Dawkins has done for humanism and secular values, really, is--to borrow a metaphor--"turn up the volume mightily." What I mean to say is that his current status and fame is (probably) what he intended all along.
And I do not mean to denigrate Dawkins or his work. One must work long and hard to draw the attention that Dawkins has drawn; and, as you pointed out, one must estimate one's purpose as monumental (e.g. the "devil's chaplain") in order to motivate the passion that Dawkins displays. In this way, Dawkins deserves his status; he works hard for it.
I believe what Dawkins offers his followers is what any cult/religion/ideology offers its followers: identity. Since faith in Marxism has collapsed, there is a definite shortage of identity choices on the market for someone either non-religious or anti-religious. But I fear that the risk of what's going on here is that Dawkins has ended up peddling racism, or at the very least in accidentally presenting atheists as racists, which helps no-one.
Like so many of Dawkins metaphors, the "religion as a virus" is misleading and unfair but contains a grain of truth. Viruses have, in fact, been vital to the development of our species (and many of our predecessors)... we couldn't be what we are without them (no live young, for a start). The same is true of religion. The "selfish gene" metaphor has similar problems, as I've written about often, perhaps most coherently here: http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a...
(Of course, Mary Midgley beat me to the punch here by twenty years, as she always does!)
I'm grateful to Dawkins, though, as prior to his impolite outbursts against religion from 1976 onwards the policy with regards to religion was to simply leave it outside of public discussion. While I don't believe Dawkins has given us much in the way of good discussion of religion, he has removed the tarnish on this subject for debate by being a lightning rod. I would directly cite Dawkins as the reason I began to speak openly (and positively) about religion - if he hadn't annoyed me, I don't know that I would have done so. For this, I'm truly grateful to him, even if, at the same time, he is effectively my nemesis. ;)
Best wishes!
Read:
The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution (2010) by Jonathan Sarfati
http://creation.com/the-greatest-ho...
http://www.rae.org/critanl.html
[snip]
Some questions for Richard Dawkins:
1. In your book, "The Devil's Chaplain", you write to your then
10-year-old daughter: "And next time somebody tells you that something is
true, why not say to them, 'What kind of evidence is there for that?'
What is the best evidence you can cite for vertical evolution
(information-enhancing evolution)? How do you know it's true?
2. Regarding University of Massachussetts professor Lynn Margulis, Michael
Behe writes in "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution" (1996): "At one of her many public talks she asks the molecular
biologists in the audience to name a single, unambiguous example of the
formation of a new species by the accumulation of mutations. Her challenge
goes unmet." (Behe, p. 26).
In the years since Margulis first asked the question, can biologists now
name a single, unambiguous example of the formation of a new species by
the accumulation of mutations? Can you give one example of an evolutionary
process or mechanism which can be seen to create new functional
information at the genetic level? Can you give one reference for any study
that has shown that duplicated genes acquired different functions during
an experiment or series of experiments?
3. Are you able to describe the specific evolutionary process that
accounted for the complex arrangement of inanimate matter into a life form
that grows, metabolizes, reacts to stimuli, and reproduces? (the four
criteria for biological life). If 'yes', what was the process? If 'no',
why can't the process be specifically described?
4. On page one of your book, "The Blind Watchmaker" you write: "Biology is
the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been
designed for a purpose".
a) If living things look designed--if the empirical evidence suggests
purpose--then how do you know they weren't designed?
b) What is your criteria for "apparent" design?
---
Dawkins hasn't called himself "the devil's chaplain" - that's a famous quotation from a letter of Darwin's; Dawkins used it for a book title (and first for the title of one of the articles in the book).
Ophelia - Sorry, I should have used the indefinite article, and aside from the book title - which I can see on my shelf as I write - and the reference, I've heard Dawkins entertainingly toy with the title for himself.