Telegraph produces expected slur: Dawkins makes money from slavery

February 19, 2012 • 5:33 am

Yesterday I reported about Richard Dawkins’s interview with Adam Lusher, a reporter for the Telegraph, and how it looked like Lusher was set to smear him in today’s issue.  The expected has transpired.  If your blood pressure is sufficiently low, read “Slaves at the root of the fortune that created Richard Dawkins’s family estate.”  At least Lusher didn’t report that Dawkins had “slaveholding genes” (Dawkins does mention the issue), but he makes a huge deal about the source of the Dawkins family “estate”:

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.

Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.

Lusher then goes into great and tedious detail about the history of the Dawkins family in Jamaica, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. Oh, and one of Richard’s ancestors also voted against Wilberforce’s parliamentary motion to abolish the slave trade. The piece is tedious, tendentious, and unspeakably stupid.  For in the end, this is what Richard is guilty of:

Richard Dawkins’ sister Sarah Kettlewell, 67, is thought still to live on the estate, which has a farm shop and pedigree cattle. According to Companies House records which list Professor Dawkins as a director, Over Norton Park Limited made a £12,000 profit last year.

[Dawkins] insisted: “The estate is now a very small farm, struggling to make its way, and worth peanuts. The family fortune was frittered away in the 19th Century. Such money as I have is scarcely inherited at all.”

But Lusher still manages to write as if Richard is defensive about it all, including a mention of his “disparaging” the Bible:

In 2010 Richard Dawkins wrote an obituary for his father, describing how John Dawkins had inherited Over Norton Park from a distant cousin and how the estate, in the Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty, had been in the family since the 1720s. He omitted, however, to mention how previous generations made their money.

He quoted Scripture – disparagingly – to insist: “I condemn slavery with the utmost vehemence, but the fact that my remote ancestors may have been involved in it is nothing to do with me.

“One of the most disagreeable verses of the Bible – amid strong competition – says the sins of the father shall be visited on the children until the third or fourth generation.”

Audibly irritated, he added: “You need a genetics lecture. Do you realise that probably only about 1 in 512 of my genes come from Henry Dawkins?

“For goodness sake, William Wilberforce may have been a devout Christian, but slavery is sanctioned throughout the Bible.”

Disparagingly, indeed!  Does Lusher approve of the Bible’s views on slavery and view of inherited guilt. (The offending phrase isn’t a direct quote from the Bible, but probably a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5, where the sin of idolatry is laid on descendants for three to four generations.  Similar words can be found in Euripedes, Horace’s “Odes” and Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”)

Lusher managed to dig up one person who thinks Dawkins should make reparations:

He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.

Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: “There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

“The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships.”

This is, of course, absurd.  All of us, if you dig back far enough, would have ancestors who held ideas considered immoral or oppressive today, for a few hundred years ago nearly everyone believed in God—many in the torture of those who didn’t share their views—the innate inferiority of women and blacks, and so on.  If that’s the worst that Dawkins can be accused of, let Lusher mention that the ancestors of many Germans were Nazis, that the current Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth, and that every Catholic bears the guilt of the Inquisition. And let Lusher not forget the most egregious example of inherited guilt: for millennia the Catholic church held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus.

Lusher can’t resist, in his last paragraph, bringing up Dawkins’s inability to instantly produce the full title of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in a radio debate last week.  This so angered my colleague Matthew Cobb that he inserted his own editorial comments in his email to me (reproduced in bold below):

The revelations come after a difficult few days for the campaigner.

On Tuesday 14 February, some critics [name them!] branded him “an embarrassment to atheism” [where?] after what many listeners [how do you know?] considered a humiliation [the interviewer didn’t think that Dawkins was humiliated!] in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, in which the professor boasted [No he didn’t: he just answered ‘yes’ to a question] he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, then when challenged, dithered and said: “Oh God.” [Jesus H. Christ! He also gave what the interviewer said was ‘a pretty good answer’!  Did Adam Lusher listen to the programme?] 

Matthew’s editorializing is not only on the mark, but shows what a horrible job of journalism Lusher did—and that’s on top of having written a scurrilous, almost libelous piece.  Mr. Lusher, have you no decency at long last?  Must you contribute to turning The Telegraph into The Sun?

I won’t bash Lusher too hard because he’s had a rough time himself: a battle with multiple myeloma and Guillain-Barré syndrome, which he wrote about movingly, but his journalism is execrable.  What is accomplished by taking one person and showing that his ancestors had views that we’d consider immoral today? Every one of us is guilty of the same thing.  But then we’re not the world’s most vocal atheist.

67 thoughts on “Telegraph produces expected slur: Dawkins makes money from slavery”

  2. Execrable is a good word to describe the piece. I used to read the Telegraph regularly but sadly the standards to which it has plummeted in recent years is incredible. Neither the Warsi piece nor this one were well written, well thought out and presumably had failed to be edited properly. If I had been presented with either I would hav sent them back to be rewritten. Both were awful trash the likes of which the Telegraph of twenty or thirty years ago would not have considered publishing. Oh, sorry. I’m wrong. There was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s villification of Hillary Clinton on a weekly fact free basis in the Sunday Telegraph many moons ago. Perhaps that was when it went over the cliff to jump the shark.

    A few weeks ago I got a phone call from the Telegraph as I had once foolishly subscribed. Why was I no longer a subsciber? Because your paper is now rubbish, I replied.

  3. One thing is certain: this Adam Lusher certainly has no predisposition whatsoever – genetic or otherwise – for something like intellectual integrity.

  4. It must be a very slow news day to publish such rubbish. I don’t read the Torygraph but I wrongly thought it had reasonably high standards of journalism.

    I had a Portuguese grandmother from Antigua. Perhaps I also have the slave owning gene. At least none of my ancestors worked for the Telegraph!

  5. This is the most grotesque slur against Dawkins. Who among us has a past with ancestors free from every crime?

    My distant ancestor John Alexander owned slaves in North Carolina. Am I obligated to set up a fund to educate people about the evils of slavery, too?

    1. Yes, you, like Dawkins, are guilty of the crime of being born, for which you owe a personal apology and monetary damages to total strangers. That’s how Christian morality works.

      1. “What is accomplished by taking one person and showing that his ancestors had views that we’d consider immoral today? Every one of us is guilty of the same thing.”

        The only thing that we automatically owe anyone for the crimes of our ancestors is to acknowledge that their crimes occurred, but we can also ascribe that to leading a truthful life. In some cases other things may be appropriate, but stuff that happened a long time ago happened a long time ago.

  6. You are a kinder and nobler person than I obviously.

    I don’t see how the fact that someone has been ill in any way ameliorates or excuses them when they try to commit a character assassination on a person who has done nothing worse than publish the results of a poll.

    He is (in my humble and uncharitable opinion) bottom-feeding scum.

    1. Would anyone have excused execrable journalism from Christopher Hitchens on the grounds that he was terminally ill, and in pain? Hitchens himself would have been the last one to condone it.

      We must differentiate — something both Mr. Lusher and his disgraceful editors at The Telegraph have shown themselves incapable of.
      As someone with a debilitating degenerative disease myself, I offer my deepest sympathy to Mr. Lusher, the man, wish him only the best, and may he live to a hundred.
      To Mr. Lusher, the author of a thinly veiled piece of abject gutter journalism, a vulgar gesture.

  7. It is interesting that you raise Mr Lusher’s piece on his ill health, detailing himself as the first £1 million patient. As a disproportionately high beneficiary of a system that, as a whole, derived, and still derives, its wealth from slavery and exploitation of the poor. I wonder if he would have any views on whether the money was well spent or whether it may have been better spent on research into improving the lot of the global population as a whole?

  8. Ahh..yes…collective guilt. I smell hypocrisy here. You are using an argument that conservatives use all the time..”it’s not my (or in the case of Dawkins…his) responsibility.”

    But as soon as the NAACP, native americans or other organization wants reparations or to invoke caucasian guilt….you are right in there with them.

    1. The two are not even remotely the same.

      Affirmative action programs (or whatever name it goes by) are not there to punish or shame “guilty Caucasian descendants”; it’s about redressing current unjust disparities in society that have clearly and explicitly arisen from certain historic events.

      It’s about maximizing the prosperity of an entire society, and in fact, everybody benefits from it.

      Affirmative action programs: they’re not about you.

    2. I congratulate you on excellent use of red herring in form of false analogy. Since you probably believe your own stupid argument, I spell out for you where you go wrong.

      Native americans (and australian arboriginies, and “other organisations”) consist of living people who are at least in part forced against their will to live substandard life due to historical consequences of caucasian invasion, which still has real consequences in the present. Siding with these living people and trying to help them to gain equal social status as the caucasians, who descended from their conquerors, has nothing to do with collective guilt for crimes of the past. It has all to do with continuation of those crimes, and it is something we can influence, something we can change for the better.

      Whereas Dawkins cannot change the past. None of us can. And comparing willingness to change present injustices with character assassination because of inability to change injustices of the past is, diplomatically said, intelectually problematic.

      3. Yeah..yeah..if it were Gingrich being hammered in this fashion instead of Dawkins..you would be salivating in pleasure.

        1. Fascinating. Now you are adding the poisoning the well fallacy to the mix. You really are a marvelous troll specimen.

          Again, let me spell out for you where you go wrong. You are not adressing the argument(s) at hand, you only make assumptions about your opponents without supporting them with factual evidence and/or logical argument. Making this irrelevant post of yours in such inflamatory manner you expect the topic to get diverted into endless off topic and pointless emotional debates about your unfalsifiable claim.

  9. If this is the level that Dawkins’ opponents must stoop to in order to discredit him, I say he can claim victory. And if anyone thinks that these disgusting smear tactics are going to make those of us who aren’t already committed to defending religion at all costs any less hostile to it, they better think again…

  10. How pathetic!

    Simply don’t buy or read the pitiable rag.

    I would like to see someone who has the time do the research on Lusher’s (hm, what word games could we play with a name like that)ancestry and see if it would be published by the subject rag.

    Of course, such things are usually only published about “notable” people, and Lusher appears to be many things other than notable.

  11. Equally nasty piece by Camilla Long on the front of the Sunday Times News Review full of snide remarks – anyone who has online access send it to Jerry.

  12. You guys are taking this way to seriously and responding like it actually has some sort of validity. It is nothing but tabloid bullshit. The more you/we pay attention to/feed it, the worse it will get. Shameless article writers don’t care what sort of attention they get as long as it’s attention. Let go of your corporate white guilt, you didn’t do it. Screw reparations. If all the wealth of the entire Earth was paid out in “reparations” to the descendants of people who have been wronged in some way in history, we might each get enough to buy an order of french fries at McDonalds. Oh, and don’t purchase these papers. That feeds it also. Onward through the fog.

    2. “But then we’re not the world’s most vocal atheist.” Exactly. Look for future articles on how Dawkins doesn’t recycle, etc.

    1. My grandfather was chased out of Fargo, North Dakota by the KKK.

      I think you owe me some money.

          3. Usually the Norwegians get together and run the Swedes out of town, and vice versa. This whole KKK thing is news to me.

  14. Clearly Richard has become much more than a scientist now: he’s a political figure as well. And in politics there are no limits on the mud-slinging and lies. As a current case in point witness the character assasination going on in the Republican primaries (between Republicans!). On TV one commercial touting a candidate as the second coming of JC will be followed by another from which one can only draw the conclusion that the same candidate should be in prison for life.

  15. “I won’t bash Lusher too hard because he’s had a rough time himself: a battle with multiple myeloma and Guillain-Barré syndrome”

    This is actually pretty impressive – you hear so many tales of people undergoing such traumatic, life-changing experiences and resolving to make every moment count should they be lucky and strong enough to survive. To do so, and then go back to such tawdry shit-flinging is quite something.

  16. I imagine much of the collective wealth of the Western world can be traced back in some way to slavery, the dispossession of the native peoples of the Americas and Australia, and just general colonialism and exploitation of non-Europeans. What, if anything, we should do about that sordid history I wouldn’t know — but lambasting some random modern person over their ancestors is stupidity squared.

    “….’cuz someone’s great-great-great-grandad
    was someone’s great-great-great-grandaddy’s slave…”
    — Ben Folds

  17. Agree to Dr. Droid. This kind of attack just proves that Dawkins is seen as more than just a scientist.

    Richard should be proud.
    I called him St.Dawkins not for nothing …

    1. I hope he has a thick skin and is up to the battle. His success has reached such proportions that he now threatens the grip of the relgious establishment on British politics. They will attack him in every way possible; if you call him “strident” and “militant” often enough there are many people, who know nothing about him, who will assume it must be true.

  19. You know, I sometimes worry about Richard, a little. It must be really hard to be constantly under scurrilous attack in the most public of spheres. Fighting the press itself isn’t easy, especially when public supporters are outnumbered (although I suspect popular support is strong).

  20. I won’t bash Lusher too hard because he’s had a rough time himself: a battle with multiple myeloma and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

    Couldn’t disagree more. This man has thus spurned two chances to be a decent human being. He can go to hell.

  22. At the moment in Britain, there is a level of disgust at the way reporters and certain newspapers have been behaving in light of the phone/email tapping scandals.

    You’d think they would have the decency to actually change their behaviour.

  23. If I was a subscriber, I’d cancel. Second thought, if I was a subscriber I’d probably be too stupid to do that.

  24. This is so ridiculous that it’s hard to be outraged by it. I feel embarrassed for the Telegraph newspaper–what a way to tarnish any credibility of being a serious journalistic medium.

    I am also rather heartened that opponents of Dawkins have so little that is reasonable or useful to say that they stoop to this kind of nonsense.

  25. I don’t understand why not knowing the full title of the Origin of Species is a comparable to not knowing which is the first of the gospels. In the latter case, Christians have sworn by the bible as the word of God and say they live their lives by it. On the other hand, biologists acknowledge the contribution that Darwin made but have progressed far beyond the initial start and while many have read the book, no one swears by it or claims it is infallible.

    If anything, by not knowing the title by heart, Dawkins is illustrating an important point about the difference between science and religious faith. Of course the reporters can’t see this, being blinded by their desire to smear him.

    1. The question they were asked was a multiple-choice question (What is the first book of the New Testament?)! And only one of the choices was even a gospel!!! Two of the choices were well-known books of the Old Testament (one was Genesis!) and the only other New Testament choice was Acts of the Apostles (which obviously couldn’t be before any of the gospels).

      Only a real idiot could claim to be a Christian and still get this question wrong.

  26. Whereas corporate enslavement of the masses by purchasing seats for puppet legislators and using them to downgrade education, generation after generation, has been fought over many decades by Dr. Dawkins, who, himself, is not known to have ever owned or benefitted from the ownership of any slave in his lifetime, I hereby declare all references suggesting Dr. Dawkin’s guilt as a slave-owner as being nothing more than licensious misrepresentation, liable, slander, character assassination, and the machinations of more corporate puppets attempting to lure the masses toward ignorance and away from a strong education.

    1. And, may public backlash against such vile perpetrators and traitors lead not only to their personal downfall but to a general awakening of the masses, in a reverse Streisand effect, to benefit Dr. Dawkin’s educational efforts.

  27. Would it be appropriate to remind readers that Charles Darwin was an opponent of slavery and the slave trade? The Wedgewood family was also an opponent of slavery. Darwin was married to a member of the Wedgewood family.

  28. My great-grandmother’s family came from Virginia where they might have grown tobacco and might have owned slaves. I have no primary documentation, but it’s likely. Therefore, I am possibly a descendent of a slave owner.

    Furthermore, according to my DNA analysis, my ancestors came out of France and Spain about 35,000 years ago and may have been, quite possibly, guilty of painting graffiti on cave walls. Do I owe France an apology?

    OK, I’m down with that.

    Je suis désolé que mes ancêtres peint sur votre mur de la caverne.

  29. I was going to comment here but as I’m from Liverpool and a lot of the city’s earlier wealth was from the slave trade my opinion is now invalid, sigh.

    Most people mistake insults for ad hominens but this article (the Telegraph one that is) is one long ad hominen.

  32. Thank you for all the support and good humour. Just a tiny factual point. Lusher says the Dawkins “estate” is 400 acres. Far from being an “estate” it is actually a 210 acre farm, of which only 180 acres are usable farmland. And it has no farm shop, by the way.

    But what’s factual inaccuracy in the face of such rampant stupidity?

    Richard

    1. 210 acre farm + 180 acres of usable farmland = 390 acres.
      By Lusher’s exquisite logic, that tallies.
      Unfortunately, the same logic is guiding George Osborne’s economic policies.

  33. My Grandmother’s grandfather was a Captain in the 5th Missouri Cavalry and fought in the Battle of Nashville and Battle of Franklin. He didn’t own slaves, but he was still a Confederate traitor…

    Does that mean I have to vote Republican, fly ol’ Dixie and eat lard? Because I don’t think so…

    And I sure as hell don’t have to accept responsibility for something one of my ancestors did a hundred years before I was born…

  34. It was my impression that in England, libel laws are rather stricter than they are in the US.

    Given Lusher’s malice and reckless disregard for the truth in these allegations, would not Dawkins have cause of action against him?

  35. In Australia, we would call this an attempted ‘media beat up’. Thanks for keeping us informed on the attempted smear.

  37. As far as I’m concerned Dawkins already has contributed to stomping out slavery on a routine basis by speaking against the teachings of the bible.

  38. If Lusher is leaving out the part where he asks Dawkins if he’s inherited a “slavery” gene, then why did he include Dawkin’s /response to that question/?

    The whole story is unethical journalism, but re-arranging the quotes in such a way seems to go even further!

Comments are closed.