Actually quite a mild person
Steven Shapin reviews the second installment of Richard Dawkins’s memoirs in the Guardian.
I get a sense that he’s not wholly admiring.
The enemies Dawkins has made are, in the main, the enemies he anticipated. As an atheist, he is a vigorous critic of the creationists, their religious fellow-travellers, the postmodernists, relativists and assorted “enemies of reason”. And as a participant in the scientific cage-fighting that is modern evolutionary theory, Dawkins has one of the sharpest tongues in modern culture.
Yes, but also as a participant in various other kinds of cage-fighting, especially the kind conducted via Twitter. In that avocation he’s made some enemies he didn’t anticipate, such as fellow atheists, scientists, humanists and the like who think he should stop bringing out the heavy artillery for every minor exchange. I also doubt that he anticipated having quite so many feminist women who think he’s a mean bully.
As has been said of the traditional English gentleman, Dawkins has never been unintentionally rude; and his snarling is unremitting. Writing in the Observer some years ago, Robin McKie described him as “the Dirty Harry of science”, and a Spectator review defined what it means to be “Dawkinised”: “Not just to be dressed down or duffed up, it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste.”
Which, after awhile, loses its charm.
Commentators disagree about whether there is a mismatch between the public rage and what Dawkins is like when he is not, so to speak, “miked up”. But he tells us a bit about himself here and elsewhere, and what he sees when he looks in the mirror is the face of a man who is considerate, pleasant and even tolerant: “I’ve never been the sort of firebrand that I’ve been made out to be. I’m actually quite a mild person.”
Pause to laugh. Pause to laugh some more. That’s truly funny. He does seem to believe it, but he’s just wrong. A guy who is constantly calling people idiots is not actually quite a mild person.
Maybe he’s confused by his own voice. His voice seems mild…but the content does not. Maybe he thinks that if you’re not screaming and purple in the face, then you’re actually quite a mild person – but if he does, he’s very naïve. Verbal aggression in a mild voice is nothing new.
He thinks of himself as driven not by fulminating hostility to religion – that’s actually incidental, he insists – but by enchantment with scientific rationality and the beauty of knowledge. He wants us all to share in the certainty that scientific reason offers. Why would anyone choose religious hocus-pocus over that? Of course, spades ought to be called spades, and opponents of evolution must be either “ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked”. But there has never been anything personal in his opposition to religion or to scientific error. It’s no crime to be stupid; you’re just in need of Dawkinsian correction: read the books; see the light.
That might have worked if he had never discovered Twitter. But he did discover Twitter, and on Twitter his rudeness is very personal, and it’s there for all the world to see.
It’s to Dawkins’s credit here that he gives a little space to a fellow science populariser, the American physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, making an impromptu suggestion that Dawkins might be more effective in selling his scientific wares if he did some market research. “You are professor of the public understanding of science,” Tyson said, “not professor of delivering truth to the public, and these are two different exercises. Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here’s the facts, you are either an idiot or you’re not.’ It’s ‘Here’s the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.’ And I worry that your methods, and how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective.” Dawkins reports that he “gratefully accepted the rebuke”, but there’s no evidence here that he recognised its wisdom.
And there’s a great deal of evidence elsewhere that he did not recognize its wisdom at all.
The privileged can defend their privileges while remaining calmly disdainful of the people demanding equality. Sadly, I encountered his variations on “Why won’t feminists just focus on other cultures and not kick up all the fussing and fretting about harassment, rape culture, and equality in our own? It’s not like we make you wear burqas” before reading anything by him on science, so now I am completely uninterested in what he has to say about stuff he’s supposed to be good at talking about.
I remember that Tyson/Dawkins exchange. Dawkins’ comeback was to deflect into a humorous anecdote.
Unsurprisingly, you watch it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxff0k_TEzI (2:29)
Or perhaps he just disagreed with it on balance. Intelligent people of good will can sometimes see the same thing very differently. Surely recent events around here have made that abundantly clear. Or should we assume all disagreement is in bad conscience?
True. I in fact disagreed with Tyson’s criticism the first time I saw it, which was several years ago. (I don’t remember exactly when.) I’m embarrassed at that now. Yes, people of good will can sometimes see the same thing very differently, but…
…when the thing you’re seeing very differently is personal rudeness…well you’re probably wrong if you’re cheering for Team Personal Rudeness.
Mind you, I didn’t realize how personally rude Dawkins can be then. It took Twitter to make that clear. I thought I was defending his rudeness about religion as opposed to rudeness to people.
I think basic decent behavior to people isn’t something that people of good will can differ over, sort of by definition. People of good will think basic decent behavior to people is a requirement – because of the good will, you see.
It’s hard for me to evaluate Tyson’s point. The clip linked above just starts with Tyson, but he’s referring back to what was apparently a presentation by Dawkins earlier in the session. So, unlike a lot of such “rebukes” (such as Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be A Dick” speech), it was making a reference to specific remarks. But without knowing what the remarks were, it’s hard to say how justified the critique is. I mean, “sometimes you can be kind of a jerk” (paraphrasing) is a criticism that can be applied to everyone — including Tyson himself — so Dawkins really didn’t have much choice but to handle it as he did.
Tyson makes a good point that, if you want to promote public understanding of science, you have to do more than just provide the facts and chastise people for not accepting them, you need to deal with the existing mindset and find a way to bring them to a place where they can accept the facts. But I think Dawkins is actually reasonably good at this, at least in his books. The Blind Watchmaker is all about acknowledging people’s intuitive sense that “gosh, this all LOOKS designed,” and showing how natural selection can produce that illusion. Unweaving the Rainbow is all about accepting people’s desire for beauty and mystery and showing how science is compatible with those needs.
Maybe that’s just another example of how Dawkins is better when he has time to re-write and revise and express himself carefully, as opposed to off-the-cuff remarks on Twitter. Maybe it’s a testament to his book editors. Maybe it’s that he’s changed over time — his more recent books are a little more barbed.
@ 5 Screechy Monkey
If you’re interested, the entire conference is still available on-line. Dawkins’ presentation, to which Tyson was responding, is here.
Incidentally, that video begins with a presentation by Mahzarin Banaji that is fucking awesome! Seriously, she made such a convincing demonstration of subconscious sexist biases, it had an indelible effect on me. I very highly recommend it, if you can spare the time to watch.