Richard Dawkins Keeps Shrinking: As his career wraps up, a man of big ideas takes on ever smaller targets

This is a fascinating personal essay based on the writer’s experience at one of the events on Richard Dawkins’ “Final Bow” lecture tour. It’s in The Atlantic; the link below is a gift link that probably expires at some point.

Here are some interesting excerpts, offered without comment.

There were flashes of Dawkins in his prime. At one point, he slipped into a fluid five-minute riff on the “extended phenotype.” The basic idea—original to him—is that an organism’s genome will determine more than just its body makeup and behavior. It may also shape inanimate objects, as in the case of a bird and its nest, or other organisms, as with a parasite and its host. Considered in a certain light, a human’s phenotype could include not just the layer of technology that we have wrapped around our planet, but also the space probes that we have flung beyond the solar system’s borders. It’s a grand thought.

The final (to me, sad) paragraph:

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations. After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.

Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed”…
When Klein kicked off the event at the Warner Theatre with a warning about the spread of cultural Marxism, Dawkins’s fans cheered him on, loudly…
The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.”

That’s unfortunate and concerning. It reminds me of how the ‘Fifth Horseman’ of New Atheism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, announced herself as a Christian last year not because of any belief in God but because of an imagined onslaught against “the West” that had to be fought with “Judeo-Christian” values. I wonder why some New Atheist types are so prone to accept reactionary beliefs, that would be an interesting psychological phenomenon to study.

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Please elucidate.

I don’t think it’s true of all New Atheists, of course, or probably even most. It’s just an anecdotal thing I’ve noticed of some New Atheists, that there’s a subset of them that seems to be prone to accepting reactionary views (such as transphobia). I find that surprising because those views are usually associated with religious fundamentalism, the very thing that New Atheists were supposed to be combating.

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Re: transphobia, my experience is that when that accusation is launched against religious fundamentalists it is usually true, but that when launched against atheists it is rarely true. People have a tendency to react badly to gender-critical feminism – hence the over-the-top reaction to Germaine Greer, among others – and accuse its adherents, who are generally tolerant but skeptical, of transphobia.

I have, however, been disturbed by actual instances of reactionary views on the part of some people associated with “New Atheism.” While I am not much of a fan of the “-phobia” style of naming prejudices, I do find some of the things said about Islam quite awful.

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I’m especially concerned with the fact that the revived “cultural Marxism/Bolshevism” conspiracy was apparently promulgated at this Dawkins lecture.

You aren’t the first to notice this. On average atheists may tend to be liberal and accepting of social change, but there are no guiding principles except not-religion, and that isn’t much to go on. On one extreme are those whose behavior very much resemble religious fundamentalism; the methods of argument they make against religion is similar to the arguments fundamentalists make about science and evolution.

There is worse. Back when I was running the big G+ atheism community we had some that could not tolerate our female moderators. Misogyny on parade. They were also terribly put out that one of our mods could have an open and friendly discussion with a Deist (also female). These folks split off to form their own group, but their antagonism never ceased.

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I’m not sure I’m familiar with that particular notion. I do think that there are socially popular ideas that are destructive, and that some of those have a way of taking root on the left, but tend to think that there isn’t a grand theme to them. There’s just a certain amount of the madness of crowds involved. When one attributes it to an overarching ideology, that may sometimes be right but is often wrong.

So, for example: a good friend of mine has spent her entire career in legal aid for the poor in a major American city. Instead of taking her Ivy League degree and superb grades and federal clerkship and cashing in at a tort litigation firm where she probably would by now have made tens of millions of dollars, she took a modest salary. She did important, ground-breaking work both in litigation and in legislative advocacy that has changed the lives of countless people for the better; and those countless people are disproportionately likely to be members of racial and ethnic groups that have been traditionally discriminated against.

Well, the notion began to take hold among her staff that white people need to shut up and listen to black people, no matter what the merits of the point under discussion might be. They started up a reading group, reading and discussing some very odd ideas. They concluded that things like expecting people to spell words correctly, use good grammar, and show up to work on time were, to put it bluntly, racist. And if she had anything to say about that, even saying it was basically out of order. Pointing to her work in the aid of disadvantaged people, and pointing out how important it is for people in legal practice to be at work on time and spell things correctly led to accusations of her having a “white savior complex.”

She’s brilliant. Her work has been not merely excellent, but noteworthy and far-reaching. She’s given up all manner of earthly riches for this life. And she takes all of this bullshit in stride, still does the important work, and deals with whatever logistical and social difficulties these things cause her, without a lot of complaint. But I can hardly think that these sorts of ideas are anything but destructive, and I can hardly think that they encourage other talented people to put their shoulders to the wheel and take massive pay cuts in order to remedy societal injustice, when those who do are liable to be considered basically just a milder version of the cause of those problems themselves.

Honestly, when she told me this stuff it shocked me. I had heard strange tales of this sort from Fox News and the like, but always distrusted the source too much to take them seriously. Having this sort of story come from someone like her shook me up in a big way.

This stuff gets over-simplified too much, and there’s too much nattering about how “wokeism” is causing problems. I’m not a fan of that line of discussion, in part because definitions of what “woke” mean vary from person to person, and usually encompass both things I think are praiseworthy and things I think are not.

So while I wouldn’t call these things anything like “cultural Marxism” or “Bolshevism,” terms which I think are quite bizarre and have very little to do with the issues, I suspect that those vague and capacious terms do probably encompass some things which people ought, indeed, to complain about. But it might be good to complain about them in more measured tones, and with more nuance, than is often done.

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Yeah, the thing about misogyny is that it is often invisible to its practitioners, who just get angry as all hell, and feel they’re being treated very unfairly, when it is pointed out.

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