Reading Richard Dawkins is both an invigorating and a depressing experience. The pieces selected by his editor for this collection include articles, lectures, reflections, reviews, polemics, forwards, tributes, and eulogies, and give a good impression of both the man and his mind.
The foremost impression is of a man pugnaciously loyal to (his concept of) the truth and with little time for those who think differently. His prose is clear, energetic and concrete. His metaphors and analogies are, as one expects from him, both helpful and insightful, and although he has none of the human warmth of his now deceased peer, Stephen Jay Gould, he makes up for this with his vitality and commitment. Disagree with him as one might, reading him is still an enjoyable experience.
There is, however, much to disagree with in this collection. His loathing of feminists, post-moderns, alternative medicine practitioners, mediums, spiritualists, lawyers, and, of course, anyone who professes any religious belief is palpable. The fact that none of these groups conforms to his view of rational behaviour clearly infuriates him and somewhat ironically, as many reviewers have noted, often leaves him sounding exactly like the people he most despises: an intolerant, fundamentalist fanatic.
He has a particular penchant for destroying straw men. It is easy to hate lawyers if the only impression of them one admits is of vultures feeding off the carcass of other people’s misfortunes. It is easy to rubbish feminism if your idea of a feminist is someone who describes Newton’s Principia as a ‘rape manual’. And, of course, it is easy to dismiss religion if your typical Christian doctrine is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and your a priori position is that God doesn’t exist and religion causes nothing but harm.
Post-moderns get this kind of treatment in a review (‘Postmodernism Disrobed’) of Intellectual Impostures, a book which describes how a nonsensical, pseudo-scientific, jargon-ridden paper was accepted by a well-recognised French intellectual journal, only to be gleefully exposed by its authors. By revelling in the humiliation of the worst excesses of French intellectual postmodernism, the entirety of postmodern thinking is apparently discredited. (Dawkins incidentally avoids mentioning the case of Dr Hendrik Schon, a well-respected, young German physicist whose papers on nanoelectronics were widely published and lauded, and which earned him a scientific ‘Breakthrough of the Year’ award in 2001, and a Nobel prize nomination, only to be later revealed as being based on massively falsified data. Even the glorious, rational citadel of science is pregnable, it seems.)
Dawkins' own rationality is not quite as unimpeachable as he would like us to think. He mentions on several occasions that the majority of religious believers have parents who are the also religious believers, the inference being that having faithful parents invalidates your own faith because you have simply and thoughtlessly inherited their tradition. Quite apart from the sweeping, unprovable nature of this conjecture, the implication (that most non-religious people have non-religious parents) seems to escape him.
The book ends with an appeal to his young daughter (‘A Prayer for my Daughter’) not to believe people (which means religious people) unless they can prove what they say. Yet the collection is peppered with assertions about things being ‘uplifting’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘interesting’, unprovable assertions if there were ever any. Such epithets also have a smell about them of a man who wants to have his cake and eat it. How the universe can be ‘meaningless’ and ‘uplifting’ is something many of Dawkins' readers have yet to fathom.
The low point in the collection is a nasty essay which uses September 11th as an opportunity to spit venom at religion in all its forms (distinctions between fundamentalist Islam, mainstream Islam and other religions are deliberately ignored). The piece leaves the reader with the impression of a man desperately lashing out at any target within reach. Northern Ireland is Christianity’s fault. Hitler’s anti-Semitism “owed a lot to his never-renounced Roman Catholicism.” “The divisive force of religion [is implicated in] most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today.” So crude is his analysis one can’t help but pity the crippling effect of hatred on a good mind.
The book isn’t just a fatwa against his personal demons, however. The pieces which confine themselves to science are crisp and engaging, and the more personal pieces show a humanity not often evident in his writing (although they leave one with the sneaking suspicion that they were placed after his anti-religious rants to show that Dawkins a decent chap after all and not simply possessed by hatred). Overall, if you like reading Richard Dawkins, you’ll enjoy A Devil’s Chaplain. If you don’t, there are plenty of other things you should spend your £16.99 on.
A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (2003)
This review first appeared in Third Way.
