Dawkins et al., “Enlightenment values” and blinding lights

Let me preface this post with the acknowledgement that I do take issue with the way Richard Dawkins uses the phrase “Enlightenment values”, and other “Enemies of Reason” rhetoric.

Which Enlightenment values exactly? Empiricist or rationalist? Everyone seems to forget that philosophically these two camps were at each other’s throats, and that there has been no real closure of this dispute.

Social Darwinism, which contrary to much folk “wisdom”, Dawkins himself opposes*, is a set of Enlightenment values. Darwin rejected social Darwinism on the grounds that if done liberally, it couldn’t work because society wouldn’t mate according to a breeding plan, and if done illiberally, it would infringe upon his values – other Enlightenment values.

Just appealing to “Enlightenment values” alone, tells us little to nothing when there is a wide range of values from the Enlightenment to choose from.

Now that I’ve got that out-of-the-way, I’d like to address a post I’ve just read after seeing a tweet about it courtesy of @thewetmale.

The post is a planned talk by Dan Hind (author of The Threat to Reason) intended to be used at The Institute for Public Policy Research. The thrust of the post is that the concept of “The Enemies of Reason” can be used to blind us to the corruption of Enlightenment thought (said corruption apparently coming from the corporate end of the spectrum if the description of Hind’s book is to be believed).

Broadly, I can’t find much to disagree with in Hind’s conclusion – although this is seemingly a risk whenever a concept of The Enemy is deployed.

Someone has a critical disagreement in their interpretation of a philosophy, then points the finger at their interlocutor and calls them the enemy of the idea. When this happens in a campaign, groups tend to align and polarise.

This can happen irrespective of whether or not the critical disagreement warranted a schism or conflict in the first place. Groups tend towards this kind of dynamic, whether they are intellectual camps or football clubs. If the glare of rhetoric blinds us to the relative insignificance of the disagreement that spawned the conflict in the first place, we’re in trouble, and in as far as this applies to Hind’s argument, I agree.

But what if “The Enemy”, really is an enemy and what does an enemy of The Enlightenment look like anyway?

Despite my reservations about Dawkins’ use of “Enlightenment values” rhetoric, I think Hind makes three colossal mistakes in his treatment of Dawkins, et. el. In addition to rhetoric levelled at new-age woo and the post-modern, Dawkins et al. are taken to task for rhetoric directed at the religious.

“The atheist polemic of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens also distinguishes between the Enlightenment and it external enemies. The faithful are throwbacks to the counter-Enlightenment, they stand outside the Enlightenment and they seek to destroy it.”

(Dan Hind, 2008)

Neither Dawkins, nor Harris, nor Hitchens speak about “the faithful” in terms quite so general. Dawkins and Harris deal with the ideas of a large sub-set of the faithful, and perhaps while not describing their distinctions in entirely unproblematic fashion, they do make distinctions. Hitchens, in God is Not Great, notes numerous exceptions. Further, none of these critiques of religious thought (ideas) or religious institutions, are automatically synonymous with religious adherents (people) being enemies of Enlightenment thought.

I’ve read a lot of Dawkins, and I’m yet to read him say that believing in God makes you an opponent of reason. Dawkins’ argument has been that religious ideas and scientific ideas (and reason in general) are ultimately incompatible – not that people can’t hold mutually exclusive ideas to be true, or that being religious necessarily prevents you from holding down a job as a scientist.

This is Hind’s first mistake – in exaggerating the rhetoric of Dawkins et al., he is generating more of what he calls “the light that blinds”. Dawkins’ rhetoric, if you accept it is “blinding” us to the corruption of the Enlightenment, would be less blinding without Hind’s amplification.

The second error is in exaggerating to what degree the rhetoric is misplaced.

Take creationism. Specifically the case of The Discovery Institute, the motives of whom through the leaking of the Wedge Document, were made explicitly clear as opposed to modernity. You just can’t hang Intelligent Design off of any of The Enlightenment, and it’s because of this kind of incompatibility that it has been used aggressively as the political battering ram that it is.

Yes, no or maybe, is The Discovery Institute and enemy of The Enlightenment? I’m going to go with “yes”.

As broad as the political, cultural and scientific though arising out of The Enlightenment is, The Discovery Institute is positioned against all that is common amongst them. And similarity between the end products of Enlightenment thought, and the conclusions of creationists, is coincidental.

In light of the aims and deeds of The Discovery Institute, Hind’s claim that “The Enlightenment is not a city under siege”, isn’t even remotely convincing.

Hind would like us to see the corruption of Enlightenment values inherent in the Bush doctrine. I don’t disagree.

But to claim that drawing attention to the woo of alternative medicine is somehow a pesky distraction, is dangerously wrong. When alternative medicine enables a campaign that has and continues to kill more than 300,000 innocent people, it’s not so trivial. Sure, Iraq has killed more people, but does criticising the un-reasoned path to the woo that kills hundreds of thousands that incompatible with criticising a political doctrines that lead to war.

The same I think is true of the role of religion in the promotion of illiberal policies in Africa – Uganda’s draconian anti-gay legislation and Rwanda’s intended take up of the same kind of law. This has been politically motivated by religious organisations from the US. Is it unfair or incorrect to call these campaigners “Enemies of Reason”?

The corporations aren’t responsible for these other corruptions, and even if to some extent they distract from viewing corporate corruptions of enlightenment, is that really so great a price to pay? What gives religions and practitioners of woo this free pass? What makes corporations so bad that we have to pay attention to their antics at the expense of paying attention to anyone else? What is so bad about corporations and so minuscule about campaigns that exterminate the HIV positive and seek to lock up gays, that the latter is merely a distraction from the former?

And if it isn’t obvious enough already, Hind has an axe to grind and his closing rhetoric seems rather revealing.

“The struggle of our times is not between light and darkness. It is rather the struggle between illumination on the one hand and dazzlement on the other – the struggle between the use of rational methods to enlarge the province of human understanding, and the use of those same methods to manipulate and confuse in the service of tyrannical power. It is the light of the human spirit against the interrogator’s lamp.”

(Dan Hind, 2008)

This is his third, and I think most crucial mistake. Fresh from accusing Dawkins et al. of blinding rhetoric, Hind launches into blinding, polarising rhetoric of his own. Ask yourself, how is “in the service of tyrannical power” meaningfully different from “The Enemy of freedom”? How is Hind’s dichotomy between the light of the human spirit and the interrogator’s lamp, that different from “you are with us, or against us?”

In his defence against The Threat to Reason posed by the body corporate and other Others, Hind is deploying essentially the same rhetoric that he accuses others of using. Hind seems blinded by the glare of his own interrogator’s lamp.

Indeed, how else could you describe his comparison between Dawkins’ rhetoric of reason levelled against “the faithful”, and the Bush rhetoric that duped Americans into believing Iraq had a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s not a fair comparison, and in light of a lot of misinformation peddled about Dawkins and his criticisms of religion, potentially quite misleading. Very misleading.

If you aren’t familiar with Dawkins’ position on the Iraq war, read Hind’s blog post. Then read Dawkins’ article written on the eve of the Iraq War, where he says…

“Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam’s savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans see it as revenge for 9/11.  This is not only bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice, given that nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Center, right?  So let’s go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? Right. And Iraqis are Muslims, right? Right. That does it.”

(Richard Dawkins, 2003)

It’s hardly reactionary, is it? And given that Hind raises the topic of the motivation for the Iraq war, it seems conspicuous by its absence. Maybe he didn’t see it for the glare of his own lamp.

~ Bruce

* Indeed, in part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin, Dawkins argues the merit of taxation and the welfare state, stating that it’s moral to pay taxes.

Update: Yes I know some of the values I’ve called “Enlightenment” values originate in the mid-19th century, and conventionally speaking the Enlightenment ends with Immanuel Kant – I think the waters were already muddied before I got here! We’re talking broadly about modernity here.