I have a lot of books by Richard Dawkins, mostly about evolutionary biology. (My favorite is probably Climbing Mount Improbable.) He also wrote a book about atheism called The God Delusion, which I found… pretty mediocre, frankly.
I say that not because TGD is a bad book, but because there are better books about unbelief, going all the way back to Robert Ingersoll. For that matter, Hank Fox’s Redneck, Blue-Collar Atheist is a better book. It covers all the important ground while being more approachable and a hell of a lot more entertaining. Plus, shorter.
But somewhere along the line Dawkins discovered The Internets, and we learned a side of him that we wish we hadn’t. For most of us, it started on the day he posted his infamous “Dear Muslima” comment on Pharyngula. Which, ignoring the first rule of holes, he still defends. And which then because a cause celebre of various genuinely misogynistic bottom-feeders, which grew exponentially into an internet phenomenon aptly known as the “Slymepit”.
So why would this ever be a problem? Didn’t Richard Dawkins notice the slymepit, disavow them, and apologize for “Dear Muslima”? Well, a little bit. And then he proceeded to screw it up with a bunch of tweets where he thought feminists were too upset about rape culture, because women are not logical like him.
Really. “Go away and learn to think,” he said. Because some rapes are totally worse than others, you shouldn’t complain about the mild ones.
Many people have responded to this discovery by ditching their Dawkins books and basically writing him off as both a biology writer and an atheist avatar. And that’s fine. As I have watched one science dude after another* (both current and posthumous) discovered as sexist jerks, my own approach is this:
If the science dude in question is not living, I have to look at the culture of gender relations of their time. Do they get a “pass”? No. But to require dead people to be ahead of their time is to require the same of yourself. Are you really ahead of your time? I doubt that I am, though I have the good fortune to have friends who create space for me to be more progressive than I once was.
This is not to say that no one deserves a pat on the back for being progressive; every culture has a range of “reactionary to progressive” on which one might position oneself. But as my mother used to say, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.” Or, reaching for a cookie.
We expect physics leaders to be ahead of their time… in physics. Just as we expect civil rights leaders to be ahead of their time in civil rights, and so on. People aren’t potatoes; they got parts to ’em.
NOTES:
- You may not know about any of this; you may only know Dawkins as the slightly snotty English scholar who coined the word “Meme” and who played a big part in the high profile of the stupidly-named “New Atheism”. (It’s just atheism, folks. The only thing “new” about it is that some of us are tired of being quiet about the abuses of religion.)
- This post was inspired by Dana Hunter’s Attention Coyne, Dawkins, and Harris: you are part of the problem.
- …and by PZ Myers’ The Atheist Disillusionment, wherein he confesses that he had been naive about the end of religion improving humans much. And in “Dismayingly Dawkins“, wherein he deconstructs the don’s latest dissemblance, as of November 2014.
- And by A+, the social-justice flavor of atheism. Here’s Why I support A+ on my old, archived blog.
- The Nation: Atheists show their sexist side
- *Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Michael Shermer, Thunderf00t, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, are the ones I’m aware of so far. Not a pretty picture.
- Dawkins didn’t create the Slymepit, but he certainly has fertilized it.
- Avicenna: Dear Dawkins
- Skepchick: The Silencing of Richard Dawkins
georgewiman 