Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

pinker is a condescending prick and there are many howlers alternating with real-talk in that piece. and a lot of wishful thinking disguised as common sense. for all his talk of consilience (that's the term that was once floated about to indicate humanities-science crossover) he doesn't really seem to have a good understanding of the humanities disciplines he writes of.

that said, there _are_ folks in the humanities who are weirdly science-phobic, and who also don't really have any idea of what "science" is. humanities scholars who are science-phobic are often the same people who seem to benefit from writing that is deliberately abstruse, allusive, and/or just plain bad--it's this idea that humanities is just about constantly circulating ideas, with no real sense of winnowing out bad ones unless of course they fall on the far side of whatever doctrine or psuedo-political argot you've chosen to adhere to. i encounter these folks, usually once at every conference i go to. but frankly they are nowhere near a majority in most humanities fields and despite some ABD zealots I've met I think the "pox on science" stuff is dying out.

so basically both those folks and pinker can suck it.

but yeah in my own humanities field I think the contributions of cognitive science have been immense, if still pretty inchoate. they don't have very fine-grained explanatory power but they have cleared out, or rendered obsolete, some long-running debates w/ in media/film studies. and there's always new stuff coming out. like everything else you have to watch out for poorly-designed research (it's everywhere) and especially people (call them the malcolm gladwells of the world) who give these modest findings pop-psych glosses and pretend they reveal more than they do (or worse, can over you life tips).

FWIW http://scsmi-online.org/

and speaking of the study of violence, newist issue: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/proj/

as i understand it, Better Angels relies on some of the least-trusted anthropological research out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon

some of the worst charges against him weren't proven, but there's a great deal of sentiment that his research is irreparably flawed.

that said, there _are_ folks in the humanities who are weirdly science-phobic

this is true. there's a weird kind of laziness i've noticed in some fellow humanities grad students--almost a very rigid lack of curiosity. there's little incentive to expose yourself to things in which you might have something to learn (or even something you have a lack of mastery over). this is perhaps simple inertia (you learn one field or paradigm and then just sit in it comfortably the rest of your life) but i think at the same time it's evidence of an anxiety regarding the encroaching dominance of science, just expressed in a horribly defensive way.

@RichardDawkins All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114172/leon-wieseltier-scientism-and-humanities

xpost: at the same time, there's a bizarre presumption by people outside of the humanities that just by virtue of being a literate person you should be able to walk into any humanities classroom or open any recent book and have a clear idea of what's going on right away, without having to work just as hard.

wtf at that Dawkins tweet. Also at least one of the Trinity Cambridge Nobel laureates are from Muslim countries- Amartya Sen is from what is now Bangladesh. FU Dawkins.

It's weird how smoothly dawkins fierce opposition to religion has evolved into more or less open racism.

lol "evolved"

http://fucktheory.tumblr.com/post/57633497486/in-which-steven-pinker-is-a-total-ignoramus-who

for a learned guy dawkins sure is a dedicated troll

https://twitter.com/HansonOHaver/status/365493708734476290

don't forget this one from some time ago

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 18 Apr
English is my native language. My words mean what I intend. If you read them differently because of "social context" that's your problem.

https://twitter.com/musalbas/status/365474292709859329

not even scientists were scientists back then!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

Angry Fuck Theory guy (he has to be a guy right?) OTM x 1000

i'm just waiting for the richard dawkins road rage incident

Is he against people from muslim countries in general or those that identify literally as muslims?

He uses his opposition to Islamic dogma as a smokescreen to disguise his deeper discomfort with non-Western cultures and modes of understanding the world that are unfamiliar to him.

nah he's just a racist

Dawkins has only ever put a thin veneer of seeming objectivity over his ethnocentrism.

x-post: s.clover says it better.

Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I'm begging, as a fan

never having been there, the UK seems to me about the most atheist-friendly places to be, so I'm wondering where this siege mentality comes from.

He uses his opposition to Islamic dogma as a smokescreen to disguise his deeper discomfort with non-Western cultures and modes of understanding the world that are unfamiliar to him.

― Treeship, Thursday, August 8, 2013 12:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Isn't he also as critical towards western Christians? I'm only asking, not arguing for team Dick.

gee what could "Trinity" possibly refer to I wonder

yeah. oftentimes that is a smokescreen for his classist disdain for people who are less educated than he is and his eagerness to ascribe all the problems with contemporary society on the ignorance of the rubes. xp

not to downplay the negative role christian fundamentalism plays in america in promoting ignorant, sometimes prejudiced ideas. but i think the problem is more complicated than just "these people have a terrible metaphysical paradigm and that is the source of their ignorance. they must be Enlightened."

Officially he doesn't like Christians either, but he thinks Islam is 'the greatest for for evil in the world today' IIRC and has sometimes called himself a cultural Christian

force

And you know, I would be willing to work with a 'liberal' who took a strong line against Islam, saw it as worse than all other religions, saw it as a threat, etc ... if, and this is the thing, if they showed a deep understanding of why and how the far right use ideas like that, and made serious efforts to oppose themselves to the far right; if they actually proposed a defined solution to the 'problem' of Islam that was open to critique, rather than just muttering darkly about how something needs to be done.

Then there might actually be an interesting conversation.

But I don't think we're ever going to get that with Dawkins. There would just be the usual dodging of the point. 'I can't be racist because Islam is not a race!' and 'Well, shouldn't the National Front be free to criticise religion in a civilised society?' and 'What about female gential mutilation, you hypocrite?'

I'd imagine he'd counter with, and I've heard it before, that in a different time back when Christians were the most oppressive he would have shifted the same criticism to them too, regardless of any other cultural variables.

xpost

not a specific defense of his tactics, but if you're reasoned and polite, you won't get to shape public opinion and policy quite so much as someone who plays into fear-mongering. i guess a better example would be someone like al gore, whose powerpoint movie actually seemed to shift public opinion on global warming much more than diligent, polite scientific consensus, even though his presentation was apparently thin on substance and rigor. also, bono still gets flack for his advocacy efforts, and his rhetoric is fairly polite so there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive to behave well.

that's sort of an ancient debate between philosophy and rhetoric. i'm not convinced dawkins has a real project he wants to implement though. his political statements seem to literally stop at smug satisfaction at his own intellectual superiority to poor, dispossessed people with relatively unsophisticated ways of understanding the world.

I'd certainly be interested to know what he thinks he's doing, if he genuinely believes that 'Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world', or if he sees making that statement as an exaggeration, but somehow useful.

Well, maybe snark and smugness is a political strategy?

(xp to self) Also, when pumping things up verbally to achieve your purpose, you never quite know if you're going to get the (less extreme) result you actually want, or if you're going to let an undesired and dangerous genie out of the bottle. So if this is in fact a rhetorical strategy of his, I don't think it's too naive to expect someone of Dawkins' professed rationalism to think this through.

i imagine Dawkin's sees himself as a sorta of latter day T.H. Huxley, and that's probably the best context for understanding what he thinks he is doing.

And what I said upthread about a classic-liberal-anti-Islam position that actually offered a solution to the problem it posited - I really mean that.

I generally find myself looking at stuff Dawkins and others (it's a genre) darkly mutter about the nefarious threat posed to civilised Europe and America by the backward Islamic hordes - and thinking, okay, list me a ten point action plan we can think about together.

What are you going to do? Legislate to shut down the mosques? Ban all Islamic dress? Ban pro-Islam literature from libraries and media? Utilise the EU military forces explicitly to take over and secularise the middle east? These are all options, and if Islam were really the greatest force for evil in the world, some of them would actually be sensible and realistic. The UK has banned Catholicism before now, so there's your working model for internal politics.

If I were Zizek I might say that this is 'precisely' where the 'real' political correctness lies: it is not that you are persecuted by other liberals and leftists if you criticise Islam, but, on the contrary, that the critique can never actually come out into the light of day as a defined political and societal project - and it is the critics of Islam themselves who keep this restriction to dark muttering rhetoric in place.

unrelated by sam harris has precisely the problem that pinker does which is that he maybe actually did a little science once in his life, but the science was the modern equivalent of running electricity through frogs and making their legs shake back before we knew what electricity was.

and now he wants to lecture everyone on Science

I thought Sam Harris was a neuroscientist.

"was".

so?

How do you know he is so far behind on the science related to what was once his profession? I don't mean to be the constant devil's advocate (literally in this case- according to some theists) but there are some harsh claims here that seem more motivated by the fact that it is super easy to hate on these dudes.

I'd be happy to hate on them too if the reasons are as clear to me as they are to you.

I know because I read his book and his description of the research in the book.

It was shit research, and he didn't do much, or for long.

Feel free to read his shitty book to confirm.