Stalkin’ Dawkin
Posted on December 12, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Richard Dawkins author of The Selfish Gene and now The God Delusion has been voted Britain’s top intellectual as well as pubishing his new anti-religion book (see above), and getting the dubious honour of TV over-exposure. It’s happening at a time when a fundamental belief in God is regaining old ground. No coincidence then that Dawkins is on our screens purporting to be baffled by people’s continued belief in the myths of religion.
Dawkins’ TV appearances leave a little question mark over his own fundamentalism, a point that needs touching on only to dismiss. Yes he is fanatically, fundamentally anti-religious but that doesn’t make him any less right or wrong.
Dawkins has had a lucky career since his Selfish Gene book, Darwinism began its ride up the ramp to warmed over fame in the early 1990s when intellectual innovation in the social and moral philosophies was just about moribund. After a century of teaching university students the difference between Marxism, bad, and Adam Smith, good, or sometimes the other way round, universities had both expanded in student numbers and found themselves deprived of intellectual flags to wave. Re-enter Charles Darwin at the hugely popular Darwinsim at LSE programme. The weekly Darwin lectures from guests like Dawkins got London swinging again up to the end of the millenium. Now the fuss has died down and Dawkins has moved on to fundamentals.
Dawkins’ early success in Selfish Gene was fortuitous because the book is a flawed collection of arguments. His recent popularity is an accident of the times. Together these events make him the only intelllectual worth listening to on the eastern side of the Atlantic. How sad is this? It means we start arguing about the issue of God’s non-existence (an argument for the school playground) when we really need to be debating the various manifestations of religion, its relationship to corrupt power bases, in addition to its virtues, and the growing sense that scientific understanding has let us down. Why the last?
After four centuries of endeavour science is pretty much bought up by corporate interests in those areas that matter most to us, the public. Medical science is almost universally in doubt evidenced by the fact that the population of every western country now goes in search of alternatives. The application of science to the genetic structure of foodstuffs scares us too but we’re almost impotent to prevent its spread despite the fact that ingesting genetically modified foods or not should continue to be our choice and not rely on the wind and rain. And finally the environment. Damage to our ecosystem is in many people’s minds a consequence of applying science to industrial processes. And they’re not far wrong. The lesson of Dawkinism is it’s a distraction.
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