The clowns of reason, II
Looking for art in science
Is a peculiar aspiration,
For there is little wonder
Once Man denies Creation.
And his reduction to mere numbers
O'er the passing of the years,
Leaves us with naught but the aesthetics
Of damned chess-club engineers.
Unlike Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins possesses a formidable mind. And unlike the ploddingly hapless Harris, Dawkins is an engaging, even charming writer. It is impossible to dislike anyone so utterly sound on the poisonousness of post-modernism, still less one who harbors such a genuine appreciation for beauty and the literary arts.
Richard Dawkins, in short, has a soul, even if he would be the last to credit it.
What he does not possess, strangely enough, is a firm grasp of the very Reason he champions. It is a great irony that the world's foremost spokesman for secular science, a method founded upon the primacy of empirical evidence, should totally disregard mountains of evidence in favor of mystical pronouncements about ontological possibilities.
In "Unweaving the Rainbow", Dawkins writes:
Keats, too, complained that Newton had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it. By more general implication, science is poetry's killjoy, dry and cold, cheerless, overbearing and lacking in everything that a young Romantic might desire. To proclaim the opposite is one purpose of this book, and I shall here limit myself to the untestable speculation that Keats, like Yeats, might have been an even better poet if he had gone to science for some of his inspiration.
This speculation is as improbable as it as untestable, given the ample evidence that science is simply not capable of providing the inspiration for passable poetry, much less great art. Forget Irish astronomical telescopes and D.H Lawrence's hummingbirds, what could be more profoundly poetic than the dystopian prospect of Man's suicidal annihilation by the deadly fruits of his mind? And yet, in six decades of the Atomic Age, the only memorable pronouncement is J. Robert Oppenheimer's invocation of the Bhagavad Gita!
While one can envision Byronesque epics dedicated to the tortile beauties of the DNA helix and dolorous quatrains lamenting the darker aspects of apoptosis, it would require Oscar Wilde's proverbial heart of stone to do so with a straight face.
At Richard Dawkins' core is a band geek who is unable to accept the reality that marching tubas will never impress the girls. For all its passionate and detailed explanations of water droplets and whole new kinds of suns, "Unweaving the Rainbow" ultimately amounts to little more than an unconvincing and repetitive refrain: "This one time, at band camp ..." Still, Dawkins' belief in the artistic possibilities of science is rather sweet. It is, as I believe I have read somewhere, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
If Dawkins' failure to assemble empirical evidence in support of his belief in science-inspired art is harmless enough, the same is not true for his making the same mistake in postulating civilized behavior and morality without a basis in traditional "superstitions". In a 2003 article in the Guardian entitled "Bin Laden's Victory", Dawkins wrote:
Like sin and like terror (Bush's favourite target before the Iraq distraction) Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.
But substituting "nasty" for "evil" explains nothing, it solves nothing and in this context, the substitution is wholly meaningless. Dawkins states that evil is not a force to be opposed but does not bother to explain what nastiness is nor why it should be opposed either, even though he recommends the modification of Western institutions, constitutions and electoral systems specifically in order to oppose it.
In his latest book, "The God Delusion", Dawkins commits the very error he lambasts in clinging to the common atheist delusion of religion being a primary cause of war in the face of the vast quantities of evidence recorded to the contrary. If religion was an integral element of warfare, one would think that Sun Tzu, Caesar, Vegetius, Machiavelli or Clausewitz would have noticed and commented upon it. And the professor's strange comment that nations "whose infantrymen act on their own initiative rather than following orders will tend to lose wars" will be met with no little amusement by those familiar with USMC war fighting doctrine.
The Marine Corps' style of warfare requires intelligent leaders with a penchant for boldness and initiative down to the lowest levels.
- MCDP1: Warfighting, the United States Marine Corps
It is the combination of his anti-empirical approach with an inability to perceive the obvious consequences of his assertions that leaves Dawkins in the position of a tone-deaf singer who cannot hear how out of tune he is. He confesses his surprise at how often he is asked why he bothers to get up in the mornings; clearly his readers understand the logical implications of his ideas much better than their author.
Richard Dawkins is an interesting and thought-provoking writer and I am informed that he is an excellent evolutionary biologist. As historian, logician and philosopher, however, he makes for a most amusing clown at Reason's court.