Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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.

perhaps the point can be limited to saying that these guys are often not exactly brilliant or even minimally reflective scientists. they're polemicists; another animal entirely. Not that the two ventures aren't often confused. The best place to start with them is really to point out that what they are saying is bad science.

There's good research in neuroscience going on, and there was good stuff at the time he did his shitty research. He didn't do good research, or for long. He did crappy research by the standards of his field, briefly.

This is in sharp contrast to Dawkins, who was widely recognized as a talented and competent leader in his field for a period.

who has won out in the Gould vs Dawkins debates? I never kept up with that.

re: punctuated equilibrium

pinker otoh had a longer career in-field, but he moved very rapidly from the experimental slog into lots of fairly unsubstantiated theory and model-building. this wasn't out of keeping with the field, but it also is a far cry from the 'science' that he promotes.

This is probably a stock observation from me by now but there seems to be this trend of identifying as an objective, empirical, rational sort of person, which crucially doesn't necessarily involve doing actual rigorous experiments - are we talking about the same thing, s.clover?

it's an identification with one form of authority rather than others, which is why relative distance from the actual work of scientific research makes you seem foolish - preening about identifying with a legitimate form of authority the basis of whose legitimacy is, in principle, the doing of scientific research, and the ability to really understand the research done by others which one does not oneself do.

haha i read that fucktheory post, and got into a heavy argument with myself where I was thinking "you know, I think he's strawmanning Pinker, who isn't really claiming Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza et al are actually scientists, so much as much as making the more defensible claim that they were proto-social-scientists whose work is informed by their versions of natural philosophy and early modern science, and as such their model of procedure should be embraced by contemporary academics in the humanities and social sciences. He's got a case that he can argue in terms of the social psychologies of the Scottish enlightenment (Hume, Smith) & the rational political theory of Spinoza & Hobbes (tho' their differing conclusions should tip you off something's up), & the strong ties to maths that the C17th thinkers he namechecks have. Pinker's real problem w/r/t early mod/c18th v now is that he's created a mess between four or five different terms: 'scientific method, mathematics, the humanities, social sciences…' , and his argument relies on blurring the lines between them and hoping that we don't stop to think (omg what if philosophers were into maths, what would that look like oh right formal logic).

Blurred lines.

Then I read the first sentence of the article again "The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists." so never mind he just says stuff.

But when fucktheory says "If Pinker has ever read all of Leviathan, I will eat my fucking copy of the book.", I think he should eat it: Pinker's especially interested in Hobbes, & there's no reason to doubt he's got enough scholarly backbone to get through 800pp of anything.

Can't hate Dawkins too much, he wrote The Selfish Gene, which made me realize that all animals are a variation on the basic theme of being a tube for nutrients to pass through.

... yeah

can't hate him for that

my recurring cronenburgian nightmare is this vision of humanity as scaffolding evolved to carry the worm that connects our mouth to our asshole *shudder*

at least our existence would have a purpose then

Put aside such foolish hopes and live in the moment.

This is a good riposte to the Pinker article IMO
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/the-scientism-of-steven-pinker/?_r=2

Felt this was more incisive
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/08/repudiating-scientism-rather-than-surrendering-to-it/

myers is a total bro

ross douthat is not a bro at all

that's a pretty good take. and this line is quite the understatement: I don’t think evolutionary psychology would hold up at all under the inquisitory scrutiny of Hume.

im curious as to what he's getting at here though: Notice that I don’t use the phrase “ways of knowing” here — I have a rigorous enough expectation of what knowledge represents to reject other claims of knowledge outside of the empirical collection of information.

like, what role do hypothetical and inductive reasoning play in the form of "knowledge" that he's talking about? "the empirical collection of information" is doing quite a lot of work there, and im not sure what all of it is for him.

the problem with this thread premise is that the anti-christ will prob be a great thinker

he was

who has won out in the Gould vs Dawkins debates? I never kept up with that.

― ryan, Thursday, August 8, 2013 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

re: punctuated equilibrium

― ryan, Thursday, August 8, 2013 1:11 PM (Yesterday)

Gould won, P.E. is taught in evolution classes in college as part of the basic theory. He's not alive to defend his legacy unfortunately.

& I really liked that PZ Myers article. I wish I could take one of his classes.

pz myers is occasionally as guilty as dawkins of boorish scientism tbh.

But he at least appears to understand what it looks like.

http://i.imgur.com/MKC1uca.jpg

nagl

You'd think he'd understand at least something about the social background to being a scientist, Jewish history, how living in a society that is unfriendly to you can be a spur to say 'screw you, I'm going to work extremely hard and achieve a lot' ...

Easier to just blame it on religion.