What better way is there to ring in the jolly new year of 2007 than by denying the Lord?
The Internets certainly are strange places. Sometimes something will come down the tubes that really gropes your brain with sweet knowledge that there are thoughtful, intelligent, erudite and articulate people out there in the big wide world who have fantastic and exciting thoughts defying the mediocrity of the commonplace. There are heretics out there, and you may even agree with some of them.
Richard Dawkins does that to me. What an amazing man. Amazing, in the sense that he's a wonderful expositor with a real knack for cutting through nonsense and an unwillingness to pull punches or suffer bullshit. And he keeps his temper better than I can. He's a real charmer. Just get a load of him, here on Youtube fielding some questions from kooks. Or you can watch his television special, "The Root of All Evil?", via Google here and here. He catches a lot of flak from certain people for being so outspoken, but I find this to be entirely to his credit.
Fundamentally he's extremely honest.
If you accept that there is a universe out there that exists in some objective sense which is common to all of us...
(...and I'd be very interested in hearing how you can meaningfully interact with other people if you don't...)
If you accept that the processes of rational, scientific enquiry can furnish you with information about this common, objective reality...
(...and, let's be honest, everyone who catches a ball or expects the sun to rise tomorrow does...)
If you accept that dreams are not a reliable source of factual information about the outside world...
Then it's hard to see how you can be anything but an atheist.
We can talk more about that later, if you'd like.
Dawkins published an op-ed in the LA Times just recently, in which he puts forth the idea that, not only was hanging Saddam Hussein barbaric and beneath civilised human beings, but it deprived us of a valuable source of data on how and why evil dictators manage to do the terrible things they do. Dawkins thinks Hussein should have spent his life in prison, and while he was there facing justice we might as well have tried to extract something good from the monster by interviewing him to figure out how it all happened. Which sounds quite reasonable to me. His piece was another of those neat exciting little things coming down the Internet tubes, I thought...Unconventional, but provocatively rational.
But then sometimes the tubes are clogged with other things, things which make you do a full-fledged Wile E. Coyote eye-popping jaw-dropping double-take, when otherwise reasonable people say something less than reasonable. There seems to be rather a lot of this going on in response to Dawkins' op-ed. And it baffles me.
Here for example we have an otherwise charming weblog on palaeoanthropology, the author of which now feels "revulsion" for Dawkins, and says...
Am I overreacting? Dawkins doesn't say that Hussein should have been tortured, or that psy-ops methods should have been applied -- he describes "psychological research" in nothing but the most neutral terms. A charitable interpretation is that he just means that psychologists should be kept talking to Hussein, sort of Hannibal Lecter-like?I say "charitable" because an uncharitable interpretation involves the imagery that foreseeably results from the words "dictator," "prison," and "research" in one paragraph. What Dawkins would envisage in the scope of his "psychological research" is an unanswered and important question.
...Which is so fundamentally, jaw-droppingly wrong I just don't know what to think. It's not a charitable interpretation of Dawkins' op-ed to claim he wanted Hussein interviewed, and maybe given some free-association tests, asked about his mother, MRI-scanned at the most (with Saddam's consent). And it is not "uncharitable" to interpret it as calling for torture or vivisection. It is totally irrational. This "charitable" interpretation is simply the interpretation we would give by default to anyone we didn't suspect of being some kind of nutter. Non-nutters do not advocate torture or vivisection or cruel mind games. That is one of the ways we pick out nutters from non-nutters. Nothing Richard Dawkins has ever said or done should give anyone any grounds for thinking he is a sociopath. He's outspoken and has very strong views, but he is a sane man who is very capable of engaging in discussion even with people with whom he disagrees. The worst you can say about him is that he can be angry and absolutist, but he's never given anyone the slightest cause to think he's in any way amoral. To interpret his words--which I encourage you to read for yourself--"uncharitably" in this way is to do a profound disservice not only to Richard Dawkins, but to the very idea of civil discourse.
I don't think the author of the passage I quoted is in any sense a bad person, and I don't want to start some kind of blog war or offend anyone, but I think something very important is going on here which we ought to pay serious attention to.
It is not possible to carry on civil discourse at all if you're going to accuse people you disagree with of being beyond the pale without a really, really, really good reason. If you really think Richard Dawkins advocates psychological torture, then--and let's be clear about this--you think he is the kind of "revolting" monster who should be shunned by civilised people. This is manifestly not the case, and to say so, even to say that this is an "uncharitable" interpretation one could give to his words, is to succumb to hysteria and scare-mongering. It leads eventually to the sort of hostile, hateful rhetoric one hears from Ann Coulter or Michael Savage or the truly vile eliminationist figures of the far right, where "liberals" and gays and atheists and anyone who dares to disagree is smeared as a villain and a traitor. It sickens the body politic; it is truly a disservice to the common-weal.
I know people like their flamewars on the Internets, but this is just silly.
Posted by aloysius at January 06, 2007 04:59 PM |