Dear Readers,
Many of my readers will have heard of Professor Richard Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist born in 1941, who made his name in 1976 with his book 'The Selfish Gene'. Professor Dawkins was born and raised for the first eight years of his life in Kenya, when it was still a British colony. Interested in science but brought up with a Church of England (Protestant) culture, Professor Dawkins was something of a believer until deciding in his teenage years that Darwin's Theory of Evolution provided a more feasible explanation.
Years later, he returned to England with his family, studying primarily in Oxford, and eventually graduating from university in 1966. Lecturing in California and Oxford, he made his name with books on evolution such as 'The Selfish Gene' and pro-atheism publications such as 'The God Delusion' of 2006.
Sadly, Professor Dawkins had a stroke in 2016, but fortunately it wasn't fatal.
Personally, I was never a fan of Richard Dawkins. I liked some of the things he said - certainly some of his ideological opponents were just downright deranged - but generally I always found him to be rambling, pompous, snobbish, and with the charm and warmth of a blobfish in an ISIS costume (something lost on his more sycophantic then-teenage fans). Besides, I always found Stephen Hawking carried a much more interesting and convincing philosophy on atheism than Dawkins ever did, but that's another story.
Unfortunately, Professor Dawkins, has the occasional habit of saying things that aren't merely misinterpreted by moral hysterics, but are genuinely weird and actually quite disturbing. I'll start off with his quotes that he made on Eugenics in 2020.
"If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?"
I'll just let that sink in.
"I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons."
Because my parents getting me to do piano lessons with my neighbour didn't involve the cruelty of literal extermination of human beings considered "inferior".
"Intelligently designed morality would have no problem with negative eugenics,"
Pretty sure that's what they all say.
Perhaps because of the above point I made.
"Just because Hitler wanted to do something is not in itself an argument against it.
Except perhaps that we're not talking about the Nazi anti-smoking adverts or animal rights laws, we're talking about things like forced sterilisation and culling.
(Though you know I personally despise the "woke" crowd for their appalling treatment of male abuse victims and still do not condone their ham-fisted faux morality, in this case I actually agree with their reason behind disliking what Dawkins has to say here.)
This could all have something to do with the fact that Dawkins was brought up in a colonial farm in Kenya - then a British colony - in the 1940s. European colonialism made widespread use of the idea of eugenics, the modern version being conceived by half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton. Of course, this is open to interpretation, and it may be simply that Dawkins has taken his views on Eugenics from a distortion of the theory of evolution through his study of the latter subject.
In 2014, Professor Dawkins took another morally dodgy step on twitter in his response to a woman who admitted that she would have a "real ethical dilemma" if pregnant with a down syndrome child. This was Dawkins' response.
"Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."
(Ironically providing an unintentional argument AGAINST abortion.)
When people started asking questions, this was his response.
"I can't help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand."
"If your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down's baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child's own welfare."
I'm pretty sure a lot of Down's Syndrome people would have something to say in response to that.
"Those who took offence because they know and love a person with Down's Syndrome, and who thought I was saying that their loved one had no right to exist, I have sympathy for this emotional point, but it is an emotional one, not a logical one. It is one of a common family of errors, one that frequently arises in the abortion debate."
That sort of argument may be the case for a scientist wearing a shirt with scantily-clad women on, college students wearing dreadlocks or Chinese dresses, but this is a different kettle of fish entirely.
This isn't an argument for or against abortion, but Professor Dawkins unwittingly provides quite the ammunition for the "pro-life" side of the argument.
Some might think I'm a "snowflake" or a hypocrite for objecting to points of view. That is not the case. I'm not pointlessly losing my shit over trivial ideas, nor am I demanding a grovelling apology or for Professor Dawkins to be forcibly silenced, but pointing out that the "Professor" has said some things in the past that can potentially encourage and cause actual harm to others.
However, these quotes are here really to just set the scene, and aren't the relevant quotes that I'm focusing on. Rather they're here to highlight that this is a man who carries some rather dodgy points of view, to say the least, but now I'm going to focus on ones that, in the context of the purpose behind my blogging, are downright outrageous and actually quite damaging.
When Dawkins wrote 'The God Delusion' I decided to eventually take a look, and though I thought that there were some interesting points to be made, and
Here is one of the quotes I read in the book:
"All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience)."
Bravo, Professor Dawkins. Being touched without consent is an "embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience". Would you care to tell that to the individuals I encountered during my therapy sessions waiting for their turn? Would you tell that to people silently staring at the walls or in one case, a woman who was crying bitterly into her hands? For me, my own experiences happened in 2001. I had a breakdown about them in 2014, 13 years later.
It doesn't end there though. Here's more.
"I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today."
To be honest, it's nothing new to see abuse victims like Professor Dawkins rationalise and underplay their experiences, I'm not going to hold that to him. It's up to him to interpret what happened to him personally. What I really take issue with is the suggestion - based on a quote from a single woman - that religion is more damaging than paedophilia.
I may be an atheist and a skeptic myself, but I'm not so far gone that I'll kiss the ground that Professor Dawkins walks on like so many of his online followers do (or used to, particularly in the late 2000s). Sexual assault of children is a devastating crime on society, and it is 100% an insult to compare general religious teaching (which varies from place to place) with child molestation and downplay the pain of the latter. It's an insult to the victims of child sexual assault, it downplays their (our) pain that is much more devastating than religious teaching and indoctrination, and it's a grossly irresponsible thing to say.
Dawkins came under fire for this in 2013 and rightly so. The Atlantic rightly referred to his words as https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/richard-dawkins-defends-mild-pedophilia-again-and-again/311230/
Once again, I'm not engaging in "cancel culture", in fact I think that if Professor Dawkins says things like this, he should be allowed to do so (especially to "give him enough rope to hang himself" as the saying goes), but I am entirely at liberty to criticise him for what he says here. And I am at liberty to say that I find him a deeply creepy and morally bogus man who makes my skin crawl. He shows contempt for people with disabilities, and he shows contempt for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
This isn't just about Richard Dawkins, though. Even eight years on we see the same dismissive attitudes towards abuse victims. We see the innocent with lives ruined and their abusers given a free pass for various reasons. We see victims like Alex Skeel still accused of being the real abuser, of female abuse victims blamed for wearing "revealing clothing". (My own therapist told me he spoke to a woman who was raped as a schoolgirl, and her attacker blamed her for wearing a school uniform to which my therapist said "But you were a schoolgirl. What else were you supposed to wear?")
In comparison, religious indoctrination in a free society can be actually quite easy to escape (though sadly this is not guaranteed). Sexual assault however, is a much tougher battle to fight.
Let's not forget that.
Sincerely,
The Invisible Man
(A) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/richard-dawkins-defends-mild-pedophilia-again-and-again/311230/
(AA) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-apologises-downs-syndrome-tweet
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