Atheism is maturing, will Dawkins?
All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013
Right on cue, as I was about to publish my post yesterday about my frustrations with the atheist movement, I saw the above tweet by Richard Dawkins. 1 What bothered me about it wasn’t so much the feel of complete obliviousness, but how much like your standard everyday racist Dawkins and his defenders have been sounding. Replace “Muslims” with “black people” and you have the generic template for the propaganda white nationalists have used for decades: their crime rates are higher, education is lower, and the number of Nobel Prizes they have don’t even match a single University.
The defenses for these comments are predictable because I’ve heard this type of thing from Stormfront time and time and again: there’s nothing racist about just stating facts, blanket statements about immigrants I mean hip-hop I mean Islam aren’t racist because immigrants I mean hip-hop I mean Islam isn’t actually a race and if you think so maybe you’re the racist. 2
Something you can convert to is not a race. A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013
Of course, facts do not exist in vacuums and may obviously be racist. If you say that “a young black man is more likely to be a convict than a young white man,” and the next words out of your mouth aren’t “and this reflects poverty, systemic inequality, and a racist legal system” then you are racist. No amount of hiding behind “just stating facts” changes what facts you choose to state, in what context, and in what way.
There was a fantastic article published in the New Statesman this morning by Martin Robbins, 3 and it touches on these issues far better than I can:
When Dawkins talks about ‘Muslim’ Nobel prizes over the years, he is not simply criticising a religion; he is attacking a group of people in a fairly well defined geographical area, associated with a particular set of ethnicities. He contributes to racially-charged discourse through his choice of dubious facts, the exaggerated and inflammatory language he uses to describe them, and the context within which he presents them. In short, he is beginning to sound disturbingly like a member of the far right – many of his tweets wouldn’t look out of place on Stormfront. Whatever the motives behind it, one wonders how much further he can continue down this path before the tide of opinion turns firmly against him.
Dawkins remains a powerful force in atheism for the time being. Increasingly though, his public output resembles that of a man desperately grasping for attention and relevance in a maturing community. A community more interested in the positive expression of humanism and secularism than in watching a rich and privileged man punching down at people denied his opportunities in life. That, ultimately, is the tragedy of Richard Dawkins – a man who knows the definition of everything and the meaning of nothing.
It feels to me that so much of atheism has historically been this type of punching others down, but what’s so frustrating is how self-righteously it’s done. It’d be one thing if people would simply admit that they liked to call people stupid because it made them feel better about themselves, but it’s done under the guise of some lofty and noble secularist project. You can’t reason people out of what they didn’t reason themselves into, right? And mockery is an effective form of persuasion, right? So atheists make their memes, Facebook screencaps, and disparaging comments to put down people who believe something different. Atheists are just doing their part for secularism, all under the auspicious example of Richard Dawkins.
As I said yesterday, atheism is softening, and this strikes me largely as part of a maturation process. But moving forward, it’s worth keeping in mind that progress doesn’t tend to fall in the direction of pettiness. Movements won’t be praised for how often they make blanket statements of “just facts” about broad groups. Maturity recognizes how extremely easy it can be to rationalize our own cruelties and bigotry.
The CFI conference was so inspirational to me, exactly because I saw a movement dedicated to, as Robbins says, “a positive expression of humanism and secularism.” It’s that movement I want to be a part of. I would love to be able to include the passionate advocate for science and evolution I was once so inspired by, but it’s difficult to move forward with someone so retrograde. 4
Vlad Chituc 5 is a Research Associate in a behavioral economics lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He has a pretty dope dog and says pretty dope a lot and is also someone that you can follow on twitter.
Notes:
Which I of course included as an example of how cringeworthy many mainstream atheist voices have become. ↩I’m not kidding Dawkins actually said that in his longer piece today. “If you think Islam is a race, you are a racist yourself.“ ↩And includes the line ‘“Islam isn’t a race,” is the “I’m not racist, but. . .” of the Atheist movement’ which made me so happy I think it freaked out my dog. ↩If you want to read more about the controversy, I suggest you read and Dawkins’s own response, which somehow manages to make things even worse. It’s funny how people only really seem interested in the fine-grained facets of race only after they’ve said something racist. It’s all just a social construct anyway! ↩Has been reading too much David Foster Wallace. ↩
