The Decline of Dawkins, continued

John Gray’s withering review of Richard Dawkins’s new autobiography is not just good reading, it’s more evidence that cultural enchanment with Dawkins (and perhaps New Atheism itself) is evaporating. Even in Dawkins’s childhood anecdotes, Gray finds the ingredients for an insufferably arrogant personality:

Loyal servants turn up at several points in Dawkins’s progress through life. When he arrives at Oxford, the porter at Balliol—a college that had demonstrated its intellectual credentials by admitting three members of his family—recalls Dawkins’s father and two uncles but mistakes them for Dawkins’s brothers. This, Dawkins tells us, showed the “timeless view” characteristic of “that loyal and bowler-hatted profession.” He goes on to recount an anecdote about a new recruit to the profession, who recorded in his log-book of his duties how he could hear “rain banging on me bowler hat while I did me rounds.” The tone of indulgent superiority is telling. Dawkins is ready to smile on those he regards as beneath him as long as it is clear who is on top.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

Hm, yup. This isn’t remotely news for Christian thinkers, who have been the butt of Dawkins’s cultish smugness for some time. Putting all the pieces together, it’s obvious to see why Dawkins’s brand of atheism works so well on troll caves like Reddit.

By the way, this was my favorite paragraph:

To the best of my recollection, I have met Dawkins only once and by chance, when we coincided at some meeting in London. It must have been in late 2001, since conversation at dinner centered around the terrorist attacks of September 11. Most of those at the table were concerned with how the West would respond: would it retaliate, and if so how? Dawkins seemed uninterested. What exercised him was that Tony Blair had invited leaders of the main religions in Britain to Downing Street to discuss the situation—but somehow omitted to ask a leader of atheism (presumably Dawkins himself) to join the gathering. There seemed no question in Dawkins’s mind that atheism as he understood it fell into the same category as the world’s faiths.

I guess atheism isn’t religion until power requests the honor of your presence. Let’s see: setting the standard, eviscerating those who disagree, then making yourself the exception–how very fundamentalist.