More 4 is recycling Richard Dawkins' two-part sales pitch for his book The God Delusion, first broadcast as "The Root of All Evil" by Channel 4 four and a half years ago. The teaser features the ever-smug Dawkins saying that only religion can cause good people to do bad things.
Anyone with the slightest awareness of metaphysics knows that to be an infantile postulate. Furthermore it runs directly contrary to the ideas of kin selection and of reciprocal altruism (doing someone a favour in the expectation of getting one in return) strongly upheld by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
Muslim suicide bombers, the proximate inspiration for The God Delusion, may have a false expectation of reward in the hereafter - but they also believe that they are serving their ethnic group, and have a founded expectation that their families will be honoured because of their self-sacrifice.
American biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould were acutely aware that the internationalist socialism they treasured was incompatible with the views popularised by Dawkins, and took him to task over them in the so-called "Darwin Wars" of the 1980s. They argued, I believe correctly, that biological determinism (known as "Sociobiology" after a book by that name by the entomologist Edward Wilson) was indistinguishable from Social Darwinism, which gave the world Fascism and Nazism.
Lewontin and Gould were not wrong about Dawkins: he strongly favours a sharp reduction in human population, and we all know where that line of reasoning leads.
The most likely explanation for Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty is that he is actually rather simple-minded and cannot see the glaring contradictions between his allegedly scientific argument, and his support of left-wing causes that depend on moral justifications mainly derived from religion.
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Well and then there's Karl Marx who never could quite decide whether he was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet or a scientific sociologist. Fortunately for the latter option, he had Engels handy to fake up his data and statistics, but still ....
ReplyDeleteUund so he had to settle for a comfortably bourgeois life in north London with a comfortably seduceable working class female person serving in his home.
Well, you can't have everything, Dawkins. Or can you?