I have a love-hate relationship with Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I often find his pretensions to philosophy ill-informed and annoying. I mean, he openly professed ignorance of epistemology, after writing a book on what was, in fact, epistemology (The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True). His attacks on religion are too often trite and undergraduate-level stuff.
On the other hand, I admire him for at least being consistent — and willing to equally offend the self-righteously woke. Even at the risk of his own cancellation.
The Left have been falling out of love with Dawkins at roughly the same rate as the rise of Woke, which should surprise no one.
Of course, it shouldn’t. Because wokeism is an anti-science dogma that would make an old school Inquisitor laugh with scorn. Its corrosive effect is so thorough that it causes even supposed scientists to fawn on the most ridiculous stone age fairy tales as “equal to Western science”. If science is a candle in the dark, the wokeists are hell-bent on snuffing it.
By the time the Guardian ran the headline, Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? the free-fall of reality in Western Civilisation had already begun. He is fighting the same species of demon that plagued the mind and work of Charles Darwin, except that Darwin had the advantage of civilisation at the dawn of higher knowledge – a species that was clawing and scratching for answers. Dawkins is trapped in the suffocating thrall of an anti-science, witch-burning mob whose thatch is laid down by international corporations and soaked in the oil of unelected bureaucracies.
At least Dawkins isn’t succumbing to the woke mind virus quietly, unlike Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is an example of a man who speared himself with the now infamous line: ‘Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement – I would not have cared.’
I was never particularly convinced that Harris was the Great Thinker that so many neckbearded atheists claimed him to be. Watching him prove it beyond doubt, though, is another thing entirely.
And far too symptomatic of the barbarous times we find ourselves in.
For a man who has said he would ‘like to leave the world a better place’, Dawkins finds himself trying to recognise the world as it is today. He is not alone. A few minutes spent with the youth on TikTok is enough to make anyone seriously re-evaluate the survival prospects of the West. These kids are not ‘like, the smartest generation ever’ (which they should be, given their unprecedented access to information), they are a confused nightmare festering in a hyper-socialised environment where ‘identity’ has become a sort of currency instead of achievement.
Evolution is not perfect, and it has certainly gone down a dead end with identity politics.
The war against Dawkins started in earnest when the American Humanist Association withdrew its Humanist of the Year award a full quarter of a century after it was given.
What was it that so triggered the porch atheists?
Was it Dawkins stating — correctly — that Maori creation myths aren’t “science”, no matter what a morbidly obese, glorified lab tech, with an adolescent attention-seeking streak as lurid as her hair, might say?
Or was it Dawkins taking the arguments of gender theorists to their ridiculous logical conclusion, when he pointed out that 100% white Rachel Dolezal could as perfectly reasonably “identify” as “black”, as a male could “identify” as a woman?
Or indeed, Dawkins denying that men could “transition” to being women?
Was it Dawkins pointing out that Islam doesn’t tend to foster scientific achievement?
Trick question: it was all of the above.
Possibly because gender theory is the ruling anti-reason ideology of the Western Establishment at present, it was the tranny stuff that really got the wokeists’ knickers in a twist so tight they threatened to cut off circulation to their balls.
Even more than the “Listener Seven” witch-hunt, transgenderism is an existential threat to not just Western civilisation, but its very foundations of reason and liberty.
The adults in the room need to sort this conversation out right now, because the next generation has no love or interest in reasoned discussion. How many speakers are hounded out of universities by kids screaming into megaphones or wailing hysterically? Watch the average student rally and notice the utter lack of intellectual discipline amid the swearing, abuse, and threats of physical assault […]
Like the ‘Great Leap Forward’, we are watching the mass purging of reality.
Spectator Australia
It’s less like the Great Leap Forward, although the mass starvation of that calamity was precipitated by anti-science Marxist dogma more than the Cultural Revolution. We are witnessing the wholesale vandalism of centuries of intellectual and cultural achievement by gangs of ignorant, violent children.