and you have a nice day too
Tuesday 24 June 2008 | 13 cookies in the jar
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
—Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
13 cookies in the jar
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I actually really like Dawkins. Maybe it’s the nihilist in me, but there’s something comforting in that pitiless indifference. And also, because there is no design, no reason and ultimately no meaning to life, I am that much MORE amazed that I am able to connect with another spirit many hundreds of miles away through clicking on a keyboard….it’s even more amazing to me that these molecules arranged in such a wondrous way as to create my son, my husband, our dog, our house, etc., etc.
Life is suffering, but you already know that, grasshopper. :)
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
—Stephen Crane
Dawkins has been called Darwin’s Rottweiler for good reason. He is defending science from pseudo-religious mystification. Similarly, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) was intended as a scientific counterblast to Eurocentrism, explaining European global conquest in terms of geography, technology, and epidemiology rather than racist fantasies. But science is not history, so Diamond said nothing concerning the role of cognition in the process. Precisely here historical materialism leaves naturalism behind: human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Genes and parasites and wild predators do not choose between alternatives. Human beings do.
Dawkins is an interesting guy. I think he’s actually God. But he needs more confidence in his work.
To my embarrassement, I’ve had a longtime crush on Professor Dawkins; he’s even more delightfully pitiless in person, as if himself an indifferent natural disaster. I obviously read too much Nietzsche in my twenties.
Then, too, as the Republican once noted, reductivism has all the appeal of a dry heave.
Then, further, however much you fight it, you usually feel better after retching.
Go Team Nihilism!
Rah Rah Rah!
If Richard Dawkins is so smart, why is he such a terrible baseball player? The guy couldn’t turn a routine 4-6-9 double-play to save his life. Meanwhile, my ex-roommate who failed biology hit for the cycle last night.
Count me amongst the not-impressed crowd.
How do you know he’s a terrible baseball player? Maybe he’s just indifferent.
Your vituperative Wall-to-Wall exchanges with our rhetorical colleague continue to make Facebook visits worthwhile, by the way. I think this last one was my favorite:
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to write louder. It’s hard to hear you through the deafening irrelevance of your chosen discipline.”
Does science need to be defended from “pseudo-religious mystification”? I suppose some feel (sometimes passionately) that it does. In fact, I’d say that it’s long been established that materialism and meaning need not have a single word with each other. The co-existence of apparently mutually exclusive constructs is not only possible, but highly desirable. Both/and is a bit tough for fundamentalists and ideologues of all persuasions, but is quite possibly a greater truth than either/or (as unsustainable as this messy situation may be for the puny human analytic mind).
Fundamentalists of all persuasions are incapable of uttering the sentence, “I don’t know.” In allowing ourselves to be seduced by gurus of any stripe we decide to kiss our mysterious asses goodbye.
Clearly, Dawkins is as much of a fundy as Pat Robertson. I find his blindness to this simple fact to be amusing. You know, like listening to a 14-year-old who has just discovered the profundities of Ayn Rand.
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Editor: Ah, but Mr. Dawkins has pre-prepared his confutatio!
“No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may ‘believe,’ in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.”
[from “How dare you call me a fundamentalist,” The Times Online]
Ironically, Dawkins’ fundamentalism (to the extent that fundamentalist is the right word) is reflected in this very quotation. It is his insistence that he arrives at his own beliefs from an ideologically-neutral position of objectivity, informed only by the clarity of empirical evidence. And that others do not.
Even more ironically, it is precisely this perspective that makes him useless in the infield and a useless situational pinch hitter.
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Editor: Briamond, you win the commenting prize for today. I just don’t know what the prize is. An autographed-by-Dawkins baseball?
Okay, maybe I’ll throw out the word fundamentalist. It’s loaded, and I, alas, am not. Loaded, I mean. In whatever sense.
Dawkins knows and is right about what he knows. That’s solitary confinement, really. He makes me want to write a screenplay about a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist who has a sudden spiritual epiphany and becomes one of the greatest shortstops in Phillies history.
As long as we’re flogging lousy baseball players, don’t forget J-P. Sartre’s admonition that not to choose is also a choice.
My blessing’s on the editor for emending the text.
Hey, didn’t I write “emend”ing? As in, to correct a text? Sheesh! This online stuff is red in tooth & claw.
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Ed: No, the editor is red in tooth and claw. As well as a great big bonehead. I’m repairing my “edit” immediately. Yours contritely, ever admiringly, a huge fan of your TOFFEE, &c.