The Sydney Morning Herald has published a rather revealing interview with Richard Dawkins: “An arch atheist reveals his poetic soul.” It includes a number of Dawkins’s statements that have elicited controversy—and will continue to do so. As I’m visiting Auschwitz today, I’ll let readers argue about these themselves, but, as always, be temperate and considerate of fellow commenters.
Excerpts from the interview:
He frowns: ”Hmmm, well, yes … I chose not to make this a misery memoir or talk about my feelings too much. I do go into bullying a bit; I wasn’t bullied but I am ashamed of having not stood up to bullies on behalf of others. I wasn’t beaten a great deal but when I was it damn well hurt.” He doesn’t blame the headmaster who inflicted the beatings and had two canes – one more painful for greater crimes. ”They all did it and it’s wrong to judge the past by the standards of today. For example, my childhood was thoroughly racist in a benign, paternalistic sort of way. The Africans were all ‘boys’ – nice and funny but you couldn’t actually trust them to do any sort of competent job.”
. . . Recently Dawkins has been attacked for claiming teaching a child about the fires of hell is worse than child sexual abuse. On Twitter people have said things such as, ”Oh Richard, I’m such a fan of yours but you really have gone too far …” He frowns: ”I just don’t get that. I think the reason is that when people think of sexual abuse they think of a horrendous experience like being raped or buggered violently. But I was talking about things like what happened to me – a master at school stuck his hand down my trousers and had a little fiddle and that was it. It was unpleasant but not the same thing.”
But what about a father persistently going into his daughter’s bedroom for years? ”Oh yes, awful. But there is a spectrum of awfulness and the horror of telling a child about hell is somewhere in the middle: you burn forever, your skin peels off and you grow another so it can burn off again. If you were a child who really believed that, wouldn’t it traumatise you more than having someone stick his hand up your skirt?”
. . .It is seven years since The God Delusion but Dawkins can’t stop writing, lecturing, blogging and tweeting about the iniquities of faith. He comes out at the sound of the bell every time; he rings the bell himself.
”I do, I do. But I get fed up with being treated as though I was a nasty, humourless, negative person. I feel that if people can’t argue with you, the best they can do is criticise you as a person.” But his own attacks are often ad hominem too – he is contemptuous of people who disagree with him. ”I’m contemptuous of their ridiculous beliefs, but not of them as individuals.”
I do think it would be best for Richard to lay off the Twitter. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of writing, both here and in popular magazines, it’s that you should not respond to criticism in all but the most severe cases. In certain quarters even an apology is sufficient to damn you even more severely. And I still see no need to tw- – t except to note that I’ve published yet another piece on this site (this piece, BTW, is number 6003).
I have read Richard’s book, and I had the opposite reaction to that of the interviewer:
In his autobiography he writes entertainingly of family, school, friends and undergraduate days in Oxford; but once he starts postgraduate work, we are plunged into detailed descriptions of research, early forays into computer programming, complete with diagrams, and some fancy linguistics. I enjoyed the book, I tell him, up until he disappeared into the laboratory. It is, in a sense, a book of two halves.
I found the “life history” stories intriguing but not nearly as lively as when Richard writes about science. When he describes his Ph.D. experiments on animal decision-making, the book comes alive. It’s clear that what excites him much more than the recitations of his life story is the history of his scientific work.
I realize that the eyes of many readers will glaze over when they get to the parts about computer programming and chicken experiments, but for me, as a scientist, they show an engagement and joy with ideas that is far more intense than Dawkins’s engagement with other human beings. The book ends with the writing and publication of The Selfish Gene.
h/t: P
You are wise. Twitter can be fun and interesting for those like me of little consequence, but it’s a powerful megaphone for those with vast numbers of followers, and every word is shouted to the world. There are so many who are ready to pounce on every word that someone like you or Richard say. There is no value in engaging with the countless idiots and trolls and those with bad intentions on a medium like Twitter. Only harm can come of it.
Those like Caroline Criado-Perez would surely agree with you.
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Ouch!
It was unfortunate all around, since the banknote picture replaces Darwin’s IIRC. So more people than usual were unhappy with that.
However I don’t think such people were stupid enough to blame the choice of change on the creative act of suggesting new pictures. It is most likely unthinking misogyny.
It flushes out some of the sociopaths. But it would be better if those sociopaths flushed themselves. :-/
I’m ambivalent about Dawkins’s use of Twitter. Given the lack of context, explanation and nuance in 140 characters, it is easy for tweets to be misconstrued.
On the other hand, people speaking up and criticising religious privilege in society is a good thing, and Dawkins with 800,000 Twitter followers (and rising fast), achieves this.
It is not really what Twitter is good at. what it IS good at is communicating articles & links & links to ideas. It can also link scientists with interested plebs like me.
The differing reactions between yourself and the SMH interviewer to the dichotomy (asserted ; I’ve not read the book, and it’s unlikely to go on the to-read list because I generally don’t bother with bios. Besides, RD’s biog isn’t finished yet (unless he’s keeping something under his hat in a way that Terry Pratchett isn’t ; I sincerely hope not.) sound like a typical split between an arts-dominated journalist’s mindset, and a scientist’s mindset. In short, totally unsurprising.
Dawkins is going to get into such hot water for suggesting that there might actually be gradations of horror and nastiness in sexual abuse as well as every other part of life. But I’m sure that such analogies will not occur to you as you progress from the culpabilities of the guards at railstations the Sonderkommando and the guards in close supervision of them. Nor do the courts recognise such gradations.
Don’t they? Then why are there many different crimes of sexual abuse with a large range of different sentences?
Errr, sarcasm meter needing a calibration check. Yours or mine?
Well he was ‘mildly’ abused or assaulted when a teacher tried it on when he was eleven, & had to fight off ‘advances’ from other boys at boarding school four times, so he has some understanding of what it means.
I heard a book reviewer say on the radio that Dawkins is treated like a God on his website.
I agree, and think it’s unhealthy and flies in the face of the purpose of the RDFRS.
I’ve criticised him a couple of times on the site for his tone, and once, for fun, after a rather acathing article about E O Wilson’s latest book was posted by him, I asked rhetorically if group selection was back in the frame, only to receive a haymaker of a response; I don’t think he quite got the joke.
He’s treated like a high priest, not a god. It’s still bad but very different from being treated like a god.
The psychology of the masses.
Those are the fan boiz. On the other hand a public person is also ascertained to get a lot of unhealthy criticism as well, from hate boiz.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The trick would lie in the balance.
But mostly public persons create a private sphere, and that is where they can expect some measure of neutral feedback. Oh, success in media and social media is a useful measure too. But not for the purpose of “health”.
I can’t agree with Jerry (see!?) that people should abstain from certain media if it is neutral enough. (Aside from the background fan/hate aspect.) We will get new media, sometimes old media disappears but more rarely, and they all have their uses.
I should add that sites puts some constraints that amplifies a flocking of admirers (or haters), such as group pressure.
But it isn’t unique or avoidable.
[If you tease society apart, I suspect you’ll find all sorts of “unhealthy” aspects.
As in evolution, I guess we simply make do at times, thrive on what seems garbage in other cases, et cetera.]
I chuckled at a tweet from David Silverman that said he reads all the hate and all the love because he thinks it gives him balance; this, to me, suggests he’s already balanced. For me, I’d just read all the love and not believe it then beat myself up with hate I just made up while avoiding the actual hate because I was too exhausted by fictional hate to deal with the actual hate. 🙂
There was an interview in the Observer yesterday
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/15/richard-dawkins-interview-appetite-wonder
And the Sunday Times reviewed the memoir. I am 2/3rds through it.
He hardly mentions a lot of personal things like relationships, & I would have liked more science particularly in relation to the ethologists. Has anyone written a history of the development of biology in the 1960s-90s approximately?
So yes – I agree with Jerry – he obviously is not particularly interested in relationships & people, or not interested enough to be open with his readership – for fear of ‘betraying confidences’. If you are writing an autobiography, surely that is part of what you do – I mean expose your inner self? We hear zero about Marian Stamp until he marries her in Ireland. However, I really am not terribly interested in that – I want to know about the intellectual development, & as RD tells us he is not a diary keeper & often says he has a hazy recollectiopn of something personal (I would be the same), I am guessing that he finds it hard to chart that in himself.
For future biographers how much harder it will be as we live in a age without letters, for emails get deleted…
You could always ask for a collection of your old emails out of the NSA archives.
+1 Their service is exceptional! Comprehensive coverage, always running in the background without slowing down your computer one iota, and a fraction of the price of Carbonite. ;D
Good idea! 🙂
I can agree with “rather personal”, and while it is part of what makes Dawkins ticking I missed the essential aspect of his science.
I’ll have to read the book for that. (Which means the interview worked, I guess.)
You won’t really get that from the book, or at least I find that to be thin in the book sadly.
The majority of responses from the public, including antagonists and acolytes of Dawkins, to Dawkins’ tweets are largely feed by fear and not reason. It is as if canons would fire upon the homes of the infantry of tweeters and commenters who do not condemn such remarks. But it has always been the case that what when private thoughts turn public, there is often an abandonment of reason for admonishment and rancor.
Another reason to not use or at least walk around the block before using social media:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/
Emotions tend to run internet dialogues.
I’m not a big fan of biographies either, but since the second part of RD’s bio concentrates on his work, I’ll gladly “suffer” the biographical bits.
As for the Tw**ter (correct spelling?), I’ve been using it on and off, but I’m just a minor user, as @stevezara said. Anyway, when you’re a pretty verbose person, it’s very difficult to put your thoughts in 140 characters and often you can get lost in what it’s really you want to say. And Prof. Dawkins is verbose (not a bad trait, mind you!), so maybe tw–ting is just not for him? Better write a longer post, reveal all the nuances that escape a “wire”.
I am not a fan of biographies either – autobiographies are worse. Best to wait until the life is over for the former.
If you are interested in the science, I would suggest that you read the Bill Hamilton biography by Segerstrale http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/21/natures-oracle-ullica-segerstrale-review
Note that the Guardian review of Segerstrale finds some deficiencies in covering the science, and recommends (also) reading M. Kohn’s ‘A Reason for Everything’ which seems more like what Dominic was asking for at comment 4. (A couple more titles on my to-read list.)
Some of the comments on the review page are a bit psychotic…
Read that & it IS good. Still only halfway or two thirds through the Hamilton biog… thanks for the review link.
I mean comment… sorry!
late sub.
Dawkins got a lot of criticism for not self-righteously lambasting his boyhood headmaster for feeling him up. It seems that moral policing is an opportunity for people to establish their credentials as members of the Club of Correct Consciousness. But for many the dial is turned up to full sensitivity all the time. Many of those critics seem to be unable to make distinctions. There is a hair-trigger between being decent and being a molesting rapist, evidently, and no place for varying degrees of human weakness in between.
What I saw reported in various places was the false claim that Dawkin’s actually condoned pedophilia because he failed to loudly denounce what happened long ago. This is totally absurd. It seems some would entirely reject all the learning of the Greeks because of their pederasty. The idea that some kind of absolute standard of today condemns every past generation who failed to live up to that standard of correctness reminds me of the mindless excess of the Chinese cultural revolution.
This quote from Dawkins:
is indicative of the same compassion he shows for the touchy headmaster. Certainly he isn’t condoning a bad behavior, an indulgence in sexual gratification that takes advantage of power and authority, because he makes an allowance for a human being being a product of their times, their culture, their upbringing. I think in a sexually repressive culture, where the sexes are segregated, it’s probably not that hard for a person to persuade themselves that sex and affection are identical. I guess this happens to people in sexually permissive contexts as well, but it’s easier for people to communicate and get things straightened out when the subject is not taboo.
There was, sometime last year, a bit of bother over whether Thomas Jefferson deserves to be demoted as a founding father worthy of honor and respect because he failed to free his slaves, and was thus an unapologetic racist. It seems there are lots of people willing to loundly denounce Jefferson as a racist, and they are absolutely convinced that if they were alive then and in Jefferson’s shoes they themselves no doubt would have freed their slaves.
This just seems like a failure to understand human nature, and is also possibly an attempt at self-aggrandizement by looking for excuses to attack and denigrate others.
Yes.
From the few examples I have seen, Richard Dawkins is actually quite a good poet.
If Richard said something completely uncontroversial, there are enough wilful misunderstanderers to turn it into something bad.
People can argue over levels of bad, but he gave his OPINION, comparing these things are subjective, and in this area nuance is lost.
For my 2 penn’orth, both are bad, but like most things it is the effect that says which is worst – physical pain will go (relatively) quickly, it is the emotional scars that last and can be more damaging
I actually like reading biographies that are more personal. I like to figure out how people behave and what motivates them. I always try to figure people out and predict their behaviour. That way you can maintain distance and a nurse all your intimacy issues. 🙂
Richard could tweet “It’s a lovely warm day” and he would get responses such as, “Lovely warm day? I read that, went outside in my shorts and almost froze to death. It’s 10 below zero…you atheist bastard”. Such is his life.
Once certain people get your number, you can do no right. This is expected from the nastier of the religious folks, but from people who are fellow atheists? Yes, it happens to him. I fear those folks have a self aggrandizing agenda.
I’ve seen Richard get tepid at times as we all do. But he’s generally willing to discuss, argue the point and concede if he’s shown to be wrong. It’s not his fault that people can’t make coherent factual arguments to counter his statements. BTW, “This is how I feel”, doesn’t count.
What bothers me about Richard’s comments is this
“…it’s wrong to judge the past by the standards of today.”
I call bullshit. Slavery was always bad even if people in the past were too ignorant to know it. Diddling children has always been bad as well, no matter what the prevailing view at the time. Does that mean the Inquisition was OK because we can’t judge it by modern standards? This is unfortunately same sort of reasoning that Bible-thumpers use to justify the barbarism in their holy book (despite the fact that none of it actually happened). Richard is stepping deeply into the realm of relativism. If he’s going to go that route, then he has no business criticizing Muslim cultures. They, after all – just like those in the past who diddled little children, owned slaves, etc. – are simply ignorant about the harm their treatment of others is doing. It’s a bad argument on Richard’s part.
He also seems to be engaging in minimizing the effects of sexual abuse on others. If it genuinely did not cause him any lasting harm, that’s great, but to extrapolate based on his own experience the following is thoughtless, unempathetic, and betrays a great deal of ignorance about what sexual childhood abuse can do to an individual, especially if the abuser was one the child was dependent on and a role model:
“But what about a father persistently going into his daughter’s bedroom for years? ”Oh yes, awful. But there is a spectrum of awfulness and the horror of telling a child about hell is somewhere in the middle: you burn forever, your skin peels off and you grow another so it can burn off again. If you were a child who really believed that, wouldn’t it traumatise you more than having someone stick his hand up your skirt?””
No, the idea of hell would likely not be as traumatizing. For one thing, hell is something that happens later, after you die (so they say) whereas the sexual abuse is happening in the hear and now. It’s more real than hell and it tends to make the child feel ashamed and guilty about the abuse because they blame themselves (and their abusers often blame the victims as well, as do their parents and the court system). Richard’s situation was different because he could talk to several of his peers who had received the same treatment. However, if Richard found out that he was the only one who was molested, he’d likely to have been harmed by it. I agree that teaching children about hell is child abuse, but stating that such teachings are worse than sexual abuse is naive at best. Perhaps Richard should consult with someone in the field of mental health before he makes such ignorant and offensive (offensive especially to those who’ve suffered the kind of abuse he’s downplaying) statements. He should not make blanket proclamations on a subject that is well outside his specialty (mental health) any more than a psychiatrist or psychologist should make proclamations about evolution and its mechanisms.
Suggesting that someone needs to consult a mental health professional before commenting on their own experience strikes me as just a bit preposterous.
I’d add that it is equally preposterous to suggest that morality and what we consider acceptable and unacceptable don’t evolve over time.
I think Richard has said, or implied that this was wrong (the groping). You use slavery as an example, let’s instead use spanking. I remember in the 1950’s, seeing kids get spanked. People just nodded their heads and said, “Now there is a well-disciplined child”. Excessive spanking brought criticism, it seemed as if there was some unwritten line not to cross (although I remember reporting to a teacher that my friend had bruises from head to toe from a parent inflicted beating, the teacher did nothing. Today he’d lose his job. Times changed.). So if it’s wrong now, your words, it was wrong then. Should I take Grandpa out back and give him “what’s for” for spanking me as a child? The ignorant old fool…
There’s too much in your post to respond to here, it really should have been a blog post elsewhere (so I’ll just do one more). The PAD (people against Dawkins) are saying that having your ass groped once can be just as traumatizing as being brutally raped. You have to listen to the victim. But our society doesn’t see it that way. Police and courts have hierarchies of trauma, as it should be. If your that traumatized by an ass-grab, then you have some deep issues and society is not going to give the grabber 20 years because you can’t get over it.
If “you’re” that traumatized…
I think you’ve misinterpreted the meaning of “…it’s wrong to judge the past by the standards of today.”
This certainly can’t be saying that the values of yesterday are morally equivalent to the values of the day. Surely it can’t mean “slavery isn’t so bad, and maybe we should consider a revival.”
I think what it means is that we should not regard the human beings of the past with scorn and derision because they could not perceive morality in the way we do. Of course we should use our own values to determine what is right today. Of course we can criticize the bad things done in the past (so obvious it doesn’t need to be said), but we can also at the same time try to understand how people saw it then, and what the conditions were that led to behaviors we consider to be brutal and abusive.
I think the intent is to say something beyond the obvious, that of course we can judge past values as wrong, but we should not regard the people who lived those values with hatred, anger, blame, and moral outrage, but rather we should try to understand that if any of us were born then, unless we were very exceptional, we’d be more likely to see things as people then did, rather than as we now do.
The same goes for the future. It is hard for us now to see which things that are commonplace today that will be regarded as barbarous by future generations. An obvious candidate would be our methods of processing animals for food. But other aspects of our laws, or perhaps our means of allocating resources and assigning labor, may be looked at as counter-productive, callous, and cruel. And there may be other things so taken for granted now that we can’t even imagine how they may be viewed in 200 years.
Regarding the argument, which I’ve seen elsewhere, that he is extrapolating his own experience to others in a careless fashion, keep in mind that he lived in a boarding school with lots of other boys. Certainly he was in a position to talk to other boys and observe how it affected them. I think also if you read Hitch-22 you get a sense of a vaguely homoerotic culture pervading the elite British public school system. I think that the psychological trauma of such an event might differ depending on the cultural ambiance. For example in a school where a group of boys might think a circle jerk is normal because, hey we live together, we’re incredibly horny, we have little privacy, and there are no girls around, so duh, it would affect you much less than if you were in an American High School where even the slightest hint of homoerotic tendency, even if imagined in the mind of some pathetic homophobic asshole, would be ruthlessly punished and bullied by a bunch of muscle-headed jocks. The terror would come more from being bullied and socially ostracized than from the actual experience of being momentarily touched by another boy or man in a culture where such behavior is not violently attacked. How, for example, do you judge Bonobos? Do they disgust you? I hope not, actually.
In other words, Richard is probably in a pretty good position to know how the other boys in his school were affected, and those not attending such schools at that time are not.
I do think it would be best for Richard to lay off the Twitter. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of writing, both here and in popular magazines, it’s that you should not respond to criticism in all but the most severe cases. In certain quarters even an apology is sufficient to damn you even more severely.
Sam Harris has gotten there. Barbara Drescher has gotten there. I think Hitchens was born there.
And I think you’re right that Dawkins should get there. The people who spend all their time manufacturing rage over what Dawkins says will always find something for which to criticize him.
If Dawkins walked on water, they’d complain he was attacking the less-abled who couldn’t. If he cured cancer, they’d complain he didn’t cure AIDS. ANd so on and so on and so on.
If people who manufacture rage will always find something…then they’ll find something whether Richard tweets or not. If Richard wants to tweet (and a lot of his tweets are informative and useful), then to heck with these naysayers and wannabes, I say tweet away and damn the torpedoes.
You are incorrect, Jeff Johnson. Prof. Dawkins was lambasted for assuming that because he easily got over what happened to him, it would be the same for everyone else; and for assuming that there’s some kind of one-to-one correspondence between the severity, frequency, duration, etc. of abuse and its effects on the victim. Neither one of his assumptions is true. His fault is telling other people what they should feel about their sexual assaults, and his “apology” only repeated the assumptions.
You are putting words into Dawkins mouth. Exactly where are Dawkins words that were, as you claim, “telling other people what they should feel about their sexual assaults”. How do you divine that Dawkins thought it was the “same for everyone else”? You are just parroting the most negative possible spin on what Dawkins was saying. There is no reasonable way to look at the entire context of his remarks with a fair mind and reach the conclusion that he told people who are traumatized by sexual assault that they should not feel that way. Try to provide some literal quotes you feel back up your assertions.
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Wow. A very unkind charicatire of Richard Dawkins here…
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*caricature
D’oh, link fail.