Taking Dawkins to task
by Gadgie, 12 September 2007
Adam Roberts provides a more complex, nuanced review of Richard Dawkins’ much hyped and somewhat simplistic book, The Fascism Delusion.
… Though he accuses Fascism of being an extremism; he flatly refuses to acknowledge the extremist bias of his own non-Fascist position. He is also blind to the obvious truth that his beloved non-Fascists have killed just as many people as have Fascists—more, indeed. Why doesn’t Dawkins focus his polemic on them? The reason is that a peculiar hysterical hostility to the very idea of Fascism blinds him. (He claims for instance that ‘non-Fascists don’t do evil in the name of non-Fascism’, which would be news to all the senior Fascists hanged by the Nuremberg anti-Fascist trials). All ideals – political, transcendent, human, or invented – are capable of being abused. And knowing this, we need to work out what to do about it, rather than lashing out uncritically at Fascism. But Dawkins cannot understand this.
Read it all here (and don’t forget to scan some of the comments - dumb or what?)
Hat tip Will
UPDATE
Read in conjunction with Tristram Hunt on ‘the new atheist orthodoxy‘.
Wednesday 12 September 2007 at 15:05
What a shrill little mooncalf Tristam Hunt comes across as. His histrionic accusations of solipsism on the part of “milquetoast” atheists are bizarre coming from someone writing for The Guardian who presumably shuts the outside world out in favour of the voices in their head. But they are from the current Republican (sigh) playbook.
Wednesday 12 September 2007 at 15:14
Tristram Hunt — how apt a name.
Wednesday 12 September 2007 at 19:53
Tristram Hunt is no scholar of the 18th century (his thesis was on 19th century urban history), and it shows, but the Grauniad has never cared much for historical accuracy.
Hitchens’ proposition that the great achievement of enlightenment thought was to make man (rather than God) the proper study of man is entirely accurate, and the science of man brought forth whole new fields of enquiry in political economy, natural history, and the human sciences. Hitch has no problem with deism (as he indicates with Jefferson and Paine): it is theism that he explicitly attacks, with its concomitant belief in supernatural powers and myths and metaphysical dogma.
The greatest of enlightenment thinkers were sceptics rather than theists: from Bayle to Hume to Kant they radically redefined the proper boundaries of rational enquiry, and correctly distinguished the knowable from the unknowable. ‘Progressive’ theology followed these leads; to claim otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. Indeed, there are plenty of scholars who would certainly not marry Protestant sectarianism with enlightenment: Priestley may have been a pioneering scientist, but his dogmatic Unitarianism placed him at odds with Hume and Gibbon and led him to positions that were distinctly unenlightened, even by Dr Hunt’s standards.