Author: Ophelia Benson

When I have an odd moment, or forty five of them, I listen to archived editions of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. Yesterday I listened to this one from February 10, with Richard Dawkins and Janet Radcliffe Richards, as well as Robert Harvey and, finally extricated from a traffic jam, Andrew Roberts. This is a highly interesting show which touches on a number of issues we are interested in at B and W. Just for one thing, we get to hear Andrew Marr tell Richard Dawkins ‘You’re not a genetic determinist, are you,’ and Dawkins reply that he’s long been plugging that line: that the way we have evolved does not determine the way we have to be. The brain has evolved, he explains, to over-reach what the genes would want if genes could want anything. He cites contraception as the most obvious example of our doing what our genes wouldn’t ‘want’ us to do. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, he elaborates: it can be difficult to wean ourselves off things that have come to us from our Pleistocene past. In reply to a question from Robert Harvey, Dawkins draws a distinction between what Darwinism can tell us about what we ought to do, which is nothing, and where we get our ethical feelings, which is something. Janet Radcliffe Richards adds that a Darwinian understanding of where we get our ethical feelings tells us nothing about which ones we should follow, that’s an entirely separate question, and Dawkins says ‘Exactly’.

So: there you are then: Richard Dawkins is not a genetic determinist. So it’s time for people to stop calling him that.

The discussion then gets into the equally fascinating territory of why panels and committees that are convened to discuss ethical issues such as cloning always include religious figures. It’s not, Dawkins points out, because they’re especially good at reasoning or arguing, it’s not because they’ve earned a place in such discussions, it’s simply because they represent a tradition, and what an odd reason that is for including people. Indeed. There is also some rather painful chat about how weird Americans are, at which I burst into tears and sobbed ‘Not all of us!’ But I can hardly blame anyone for thinking so.

There’s been an interesting convergence lately of worry about passion and its absence, detachment and its dangers, or on the other hand about the intrusiveness and intolerance of passion and engagement. The two stances – passion and dispassion – have been exemplified in two thinkers: Richard Dawkins and Louis Menand.

David Bromwich took Louis Menand to task in the New Republic in January for his lack of a ruling passion or driving enthusiasm, excitement or anger, for being too easily unimpressed, too cool, too responsible and distant.

The idea of a radical break in thought is alien to Menand. The leveling of distinctions also serves as an intellectual labor-saving device. Nothing is very new; nothing, maybe, ever was; nothing matters as much as you think it matters.

Then last week Leon Wieseltier renewed the charge, again in the New Republic. This time the subject was George Orwell, and an essay Menand wrote about him for the New Yorker. Wieseltier is far more indignant than Bromwich (in fact it would be an interesting exercise to set up a Passion-o-Meter for all the participants in this argument).

“We don’t live just by ideas,” he observes in his sedative way, as if anybody believes that we do live just by ideas. Of course, it is precisely because we don’t live just by ideas that we must live also by ideas; but I am getting heavy. Menand sneakily makes Orwell over in his own diffident, perspectivist, mildly anti-intellectual image, so as to relieve us of Orwell’s obligations.

It’s exhilarating to see all these middle-aged or elderly intellectuals speaking up for passion and extremism of opinion. But then we hear from a former Anglican bishop who reviews Richard Dawkins’ new book A Devil’s Chaplain in the Guardian. He makes a very interesting comparison between Dawkins and Darwin, comparing the latter to the polite tactful non-interventionist Anglican (this is an ex-bishop, remember) and Dawkins to the pesky intrusive intolerant Evangelical.

A friend of mine once remarked that he liked Anglicanism, because it didn’t interfere with your religion or politics, whereas Evangelicalism couldn’t leave anyone alone and meddled endlessly in people’s lives. If Darwin was a non-interventionist atheist, Dawkins is a great believer in the pre-emptive strike.

Well possibly, but then again it’s important to remember that Dawkins is a writer and teacher. They are supposed to intervene, that’s their job, that’s the even socially-approved work they do. Teachers are meddlesome and interventionist when they teach pre-literate children to read, too, and innumerate ones to do math, and ignorant ones history and biology and poetry. And a good thing too. Personally I’m with the old geezers speaking up for passion and excitement and commitment. Leave languid tolerance and not caring much to the young, they’re so much better at it.

So, we’re agreed then. Comfort and safety and enjoyment are not what’s needed, not unless one is ill or injured or a refugee from a war zone. We need our gadflies and lecturers and correctors and reformers, our troublers of the peace. We need our evangelists.

The Guardian has a review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, A Devil’s Chaplain, today. The reviewer (who, a correspondent tells me, used to be the bishop of Edinburgh) makes an interesting distinction between Darwin’s ‘classically Anglican’ atheism and the classically Evangelical variety Dawkins goes in for.

A friend of mine once remarked that he liked Anglicanism, because it didn’t interfere with your religion or politics, whereas Evangelicalism couldn’t leave anyone alone and meddled endlessly in people’s lives. If Darwin was a non-interventionist atheist, Dawkins is a great believer in the pre-emptive strike.

Well what else are teachers for? That’s their job, isn’t it, that’s what they do and what they’re supposed to do. Isn’t it? Not leaving people alone and meddling endlessly in the contents of their heads? Surely if one actually cares about politics and religion, ‘interfering with them’, i.e. arguing that there are better versions, is the logical thing to do. But then I’m an Evangelistic type myself, so I would think that.