This is a slightly longer version of the article published on spiked (14.08.07)
After taking on organised religion in The Root of All Evil? in January 2006, distinguished British scientist Professor Richard Dawkins challenged other irrational thought, such as astrologists and clairvoyants, on Channel 4’s The Enemies of Reason last night. Dawkins complaint is that horoscopes in daily newspapers, or mediums seeking to ‘speak to the dead’, are not only ‘misleading the public’ but undermining the very foundations of Enlightenment civilisation. In order to protect the gullible masses, it seems the solution is to expose mystic peddlers as cranks and charlatans and to hoist Dawkins’ books high up in the best sellers list.
Is this professor’s vision of, shall we say, a ‘Brave New World’ the shining path towards true enlightenment? Or in his rush to denounce ‘non-evidence based’ fads and thinking, is he in danger of throwing out a dimension of humanity that can’t solely be reducible to mathematical calculations?
On the surface at least, Dawkins protestations that religion or astrology or palm reading lack any ground in provable fact or reason seems plausible and agreeable enough. Indeed, the spiritualists, mediums and New Age faith healers on the programme last night came across as either deluded or sly hustlers. The transparent gibberish they spouted certainly doesn’t need defending or indulging any further. But they are not a mortal danger to others nor are they ‘wreckers of civilisation’, as Dawkins hysterically suggests. Even worse, not long after Dawkins presented the mystics as being beyond the rational pale, it was only a matter of time before the casual horoscope reader or séance attendee were also branded as contemptible fools, too. In fact, it was Dawkins who came across as shockingly naïve, as well as possessing all the sense of humour of a wooden chair leg.
In tackling astrology, Dawkins adopted the ‘will this be big news for you, sunshine’ tone as if the average TV viewer are complete dunces. His ‘revelation’ that astrology is impossible to prove or that the predictions found in newspapers don’t, like, really have a bearing on your day to day life would only be shocking to a 5 year old. When he conducted a random survey on Londoners, and asked them to outline their sun sign’s ‘characteristics’, the experiment was meant to show how us ‘idiots’ have internalised such rampant mysticism. Wrong. What Dawkins failed to see was how everyone giggled when they said things like, ‘I’m a Leo. I’m meant to spend too much money but possess leadership skills’. In other words, they didn’t take it seriously and laughed at the endearingly daft character ‘traits’. Like most people, many of the respondents also said that horoscopes ‘are a load of nonsense’. The reason why individuals will sometimes say ‘that’s because I’m a typical Scorpio’ is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, one of those throwaway comments that provides recognisable connections with people. Incredibly, the equally banal and harmless saying ‘touch wood for luck’ was cited as evidence by Dawkins that we’ve all gone mad for mysticism. He clearly needs to get out more.
Trouble is even when he does get out more, his reductive approach to humanity means he couldn’t get beyond his rehearsed ‘these people are stupid’ outlook. So at a meeting held by a spiritualist medium, Dawkins approached it as if it was a piece of primitive anthropology. Anyone with a semblance of understanding for human behaviour would understand that séances are often populated by lonely, desperate pensioners seeking connections with this world as much as the ‘next’. The fact they were ‘regulars’ at these sessions suggested the social was indeed more important than the ‘spiritual’. Then again, when you’ve reduced humans to being ‘no better than pigeons’, as Dawkins does when explaining ‘superstitious’ behaviour, it’s perhaps not surprising your starting and end point will be jaundiced to say the least.
It took the engaging illusionist Darren Brown to provide half-decent insights into why people dabble with the hocus pocus. Brown openly says he uses psychology and sleights of hand word play to ‘trick’ people into believing all sorts of things. His punters mostly know this too, and so go along with his tricks to be amused, entertained and baffled. It’s of the same pitch you get on BBC3’s The Real Hustle whereby experienced scammers and tricksters perform confidence tricks on people in bars and hotels. The only difference here is that these TV entertainers wouldn’t use this as evidence that the general public are ‘stupid’ in the way Dawkins does.
Of course, contemporary hi-tech irrationality is definitely a problem in many areas of society. For example, the idea that long-distant air-travel should be banned because of the belief that CO2 emissions = global warming doesn’t stand up to any rational calculations. After all, how would cutting back on air travel make much of a difference when air travel only contributes to about 3% of CO2 emissions? Why not attack the irrationality of the current vetting process, which demands that teachers fill in a fresh Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) form at every place they teach at, even if they only filled in an identical form one a few weeks earlier? Why not investigate the tidal waves of doomsday scenarios that have no basis in reality or science, such as the ‘150 million expected to die from bird flu’ headlines that were common a year ago? After all, these outbursts of irrationality have a potentially more destructive impact on society than a handful of camp astrologers and mediums.
To be fair to Dawkins, though, the second part of Enemies of Reason (broadcast next week) does attack the impact of alternative medicines, quack remedies and the irrational MMR vaccine panic. He is entirely correct to point out that a lack of direct evidence on whether MMR jabs causes autism in children has been entirely destructive, with the re-emergence of measles in the first time in decades. In this area at least, Dawkins is on solid ground – and more of it. But where he is deeply problematic is on his understanding on the relationship between science and society. As a humanist rationalist, I’d welcome the development of scientific enquiry to advance our understanding of the natural world and improve the quality of our lives in the process. Indeed, Dawkins is almost inspiring when he reels off the triumphs of scientific discoveries and achievements over the pat 300 year. But he’s on somewhat shakier territory when he boils social progress down to such narrow, technical innovations.
Science alone wasn’t responsible for generating more free-time for humans in modern times; that was through the expansion of the productive forces and the greater capacity to develop more life-sustaining resources in less time. Dawkins, however, only conceptualises science as acting alone and outside of wider social developments. This is why he also ignores how human-centred political thought helped throw off the shackles of mysticism and tradition and enabled scientific enquiry to flourish. To put social progress down to diligent scientists alone reveals an outlook notably disengaged from the workings of society. Unfortunately, Dawkins isn’t the only one today to fall into this blinkered trap.
The recent attack on humanities A-level subjects English literature, history and sociology follows the logical trajectory of attacking religious belief. Behind the banal name-calling that these subjects are ‘easier than physics and maths’ (as if such disciplines can be compared like-by-like), lies a hostility towards the non-instrumental enquiry of understanding human existence, our relationship to each other and to society. Previously, such issues were considered to be the cornerstone not only of a humanist education, but central to public and political life, too. To re-cast such important areas as lightweight endeavours are not only breathtakingly philistine, it ultimately suggests humans have no real purpose in life. This is why Dawkins can calmly and seriously assert that ‘humans are no better than pigeons’. He sees both merely as biologically reflexive creatures prone to ‘irrational’ behaviour. No doubt Dawkins and the anti-literature scientists would cite imaginative storytelling as ‘irrational’ (‘those characters don’t exist!), when in fact the towering figures of literature, whether Proust or Dostoyevsky, have used fiction to shed dazzling insights into the human condition. Some things, such as love, sexual infatuation, mortality, beauty, existential angst, can’t be measured by a set of scales or a measuring tape.
Perhaps the real irony of Dawkins diatribe is not that his brand of thinking is under threat, but whose time has come. After all, why would anyone give this charisma-free professor such prime-time slots? It certainly can’t be for his presenting skills. Last night’s programme wasn’t the celebration of science as such, but the elevation of scientism, the idea that ‘evidence-based calculations’ becomes the organising principle for human society. In fact, it already has. The routine use of ‘carbon footprint’ calculations in everyday life use ‘scientism’ to lend bogus authority to the climate change doom mongers. Smoking and drinking bans are often justified on the ‘calculated cost’ they supposedly incur on the National Health Service (NHS). The education system is now only judged on ‘cost effective’ criteria based on student attendance, retention and pass rate. Far from being a lone maverick, Dawkins strong emphasis on ‘evidence based calculations’ on human activity dove-tails entirely with the political class’ narrow managerialism. While his ‘tut-tut ting’ on ‘irrational’ activities such as gambling, dowsing and séances has a whiff of New Labour’s ‘stop this nonsense’ behavioural politics about it, too.
Alongside all this, there’s a bigger and more pervasive problem with Dawkin’s lab-coated hectoring – it’s profoundly conservative. Denying the importance of meaning and purpose to human action, our consciousness of the world and our relationship to it, leads to ‘naturalising’ the human subject as merely biological rather than social in character. Elsewhere his emphasis on ‘evidence based calculations’ is also both a recipe for sliding scale presentism and a bulwark against visions for a better, future orientated society. After all, if you can’t ‘calculate’ or ‘prove’ that a different way of organising society will be concretely better, surely it’s irrational to believe otherwise?
The apparent ‘Enemies of Reason’, then, are not so much cranky mystics offering cut price tarot card readings, but the more powerful peddlers of doomsday scenarios and health panics with minimal foundations in fact. If Dawkins had concentrated his unblinking gaze more on this area, then he would have been onto something good. But championing scientism as a model for society rather than science as a tool for humanity means he ends up contributing to the dead hand of instrumentalism, philistinism and presentism. Unlike scientific pioneers of The Enlightenment, unfortunately nobody is really going to benefit from that.
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