Oxford University Press has just released a 30th-anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’s most famous work: The Selfish Gene. The author’s new introduction, recently excerpted in the Times of London, reminds us of a truth that Dawkins has demonstrated many times before. No, not the supposed truth that all order in nature is due to the work of a “blind watchmaker,” to quote the title of one of Dawkins’s other celebrated popularizations of evolutionary theory. Rather, it reminds us of the truth that, while Richard Dawkins may be an excellent scientist, he is a very poor public intellectual. This is no small criticism, since he seems to devote as much time and energy to the latter role as to the former.
The scientist is concerned above all with the truth, with simply seeing things as they are, regardless of any other interests or concerns. The job of the public intellectual is not so simple. As an intellectual, he is certainly concerned with the truth as it is discovered by his intellect. Yet he is also concerned with the public things, that is, with the common good, and therefore with the well-being and needs of his fellow citizens. And while the truth is assuredly not in principle hostile to human well-being, neither is every truth unproblematically consistent with human well-being in every instance.
Dawkins, however, appears to be utterly indifferent to the spiritual and emotional difficulties that his writings cause for many of his readers. He mentions one reader for whom The Selfish Gene initiated a “personal crisis.” Its apparent debunking of any higher purpose in nature caused this person “a series of bouts of depression” lasting over a decade. In another case, a teacher wrote to reprimand Dawkins for his book’s effect on a young student who was driven to tears after concluding that The Selfish Gene teaches that life is “empty and purposeless.”
What is Dawkins’s response to those for whom his popularization of evolution causes so much pain? Essentially it is this: “Keep a stiff upper lip.” If “something is true,” he responds, “no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.” No doubt this is correct. But we might with as much propriety ask Dawkins: “If something is painful, does its truth justify inflicting it on people who find it disturbing?” Let us grant — only, to be sure, for the sake of argument — that Dawkins’s Darwinian explanation of Life, the Universe, and Everything is true. Does this in itself justify his strident shoving of it into our public discourse, knowing full well the emotional distress it will cause the spiritually sensitive?
Truth is precious, but the goodness of revealing it obviously depends on what its bearing will be on a number of other precious things, including the well-being of the people whom it might harm. Consider the following hypothetical. If Dawkins’s best friend were on his death-bed, fondly and gratefully recalling his years with his already departed wife, would Dawkins, if he possessed the truth of the matter, blurt out that, contrary to the friend’s false impression, the wife had been all along a well-known adulteress?
Dawkins contends that the meaningfulness of life need not depend on any notions of the ultimate purpose of the cosmos. He would probably assert that those who seek such cosmic justifications for the things they love are suffering a form of false consciousness imposed by the cultural influence of Biblical religion. Whatever the origins of such transcendent aspirations, however, it is an undeniable fact that countless human beings really do experience the meaningfulness of their lives as somehow bound up with their conviction that the universe possesses ultimate meaning. Dawkins’s ruthless indifference to them makes a tangled web of many of his fellow human beings’ most cherished sentiments and beliefs.
Dawkins’s problems do not end here, however. The responsible public intellectual, as I suggested above, is concerned with both the truth and its consequences. While he does not let a heedless zeal for the truth automatically compel him to its reckless popularization, neither does let his concern for others blind him to the truth and its value. Yet, an important part of his respect for truth is his recognition of the limits of his own knowledge, a sober sense that not all of his convictions are truths properly so-called — that is, propositions capable of confirmation by reason.
Here, again, Dawkins fails, dogmatically asserting as truth things that his science cannot confirm, things that science properly understood does not even claim to address. “Presumably,” he opines, “there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the universe.” On the basis of what evidence does Dawkins ground this momentous presumption? As a result of what scientific reasoning does he make this grandiose claim about the nature of all things? He has no such basis, and there is none available to him. It is true that pre-modern science sought to explain the purposefulness of the cosmos, while modern science has abandoned that project in favor of what is perhaps easier and more immediately useful: figuring out how nature works and how it can be manipulated. Nevertheless, it is clear that science’s turning away from questions of ultimate meaning is not equivalent to a denial of their importance, nor to a denial that they can be answered, let alone a claim to have answered them. Sober scientists — those who respect the limits of their method and avoid amateur philosophic extrapolations from it — understand this.
If it is not science that leads Dawkins to deny the purposefulness of the universe, then what is it? The answer to this question will be obvious to anyone familiar with his usual public pronouncements. Dawkins’s denial of the meaningfulness of the cosmos arises not from any evidence that science reveals to him, but instead from a simple dogmatic hostility to those who see purpose in the universe itself, or, put more simply, an animus against religion. Consider, for example, a recent interview in which he claims never to have met an intelligent religious believer who came to belief apart from childhood indoctrination, and that he cannot think of a single good thing that religion has contributed to the world.
These are not the opinions of a moderate and reasonable man, and his doctrinaire disdain for religion is equally on display in his new introduction. Those tempted to despair by his soulless and godless account of the universe, Dawkins advises, should seek meaning in the good things of ordinary life. “Our lives are ruled,” he notes, not by the meaning of the universe itself but by “all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.” Do “any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos,” he asks. His answer: “Of course we don’t; not if we are sane.” There you have Dawkins’s perspective in a nutshell: on the one hand, his account of things; on the other hand, madness. He is undeterred in this judgment by the fact that the views he regards as insane are held by countless millions of his fellow beings and have shaped the human story for millennia. It would be difficult to invent a more perfect caricature of the intellectually intolerant ideologue.
There are many words one might choose to describe the competent and useful public intellectual. Unfortunately for Dawkins, irresponsible and irrational are not among them.
–Carson Holloway is the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author of The Right Darwin: Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0199291152
