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NOTE: I have a less angry and more nuanced piece on Michel Foucault coming up, which I should have posted first, really, which will be a critique of the "bad" postmodernism most university students are well acquainted with by now, before I write a much heartier piece that's personal, that's heartfelt, a defense of religion that hopefully will explain where my head's been and why Christians should hate injustice and love the arts and that will announce my return to the guns-blazing evangelical orthodoxy I left behind two years ago.
But I saw this video by Dawkins and it left my blood boiling. Enjoy.
Murray James Morrison
May 2008
OF RICHARD DAWKINS AND THE APES
This is easily the most ridiculous thing I've seen this week. It's the sort of argument that makes all atheists look stupid by association, like when the wacky televangelists say things that make no sense and make all Christians look bad, in reverse. Is Richard Dawkins a smart guy? Of course he is. Are we the evolutionary descendants of ancient apes? Sure. But gosh, I mean... gosh.
This is not a rant against animal preservation. As it happens, I think that animal preservation is awesome. (This past March, in China, I held a baby panda in my arms; it was so furry, and so cute, that it made me a believer for life. Really.) Instead, this is a rant against the absurdity of Dawkins' plea for animal preservation in light of his outspoken commitment to atheism. If you've been paying close attention, as many in this country have, you've learned that religious belief is a kind of delusion. Worse than that, it's preposterous—flying in the face of logic and historical fact—and it’s dangerous—responsible for some of the greatest atrocities ever committed on the planet. Well, glad that's over with. Since Dawkins has "scientifically" removed God from the picture, upon what basis does he urge us to care for our gorilla brethren? Let’s watch and find out.
First off: "Human beings are not just like great apes... We are African apes... remarkably close cousins of gorillas and chimpanzees." Here Dawkins suggests that we've downplayed our similarities to other living primates. We are more than simply "like" these other creatures. We are these creatures. We set ourselves apart from the apes, but at the end of day, we're animals, just like they are. Ok. So far, so good.
The argument comes off the tracks pretty quickly. "We’re immensely conscious of the dangers of racism, and sexism," he says. Hold on. The dangers of racism and sexism? What about these two things is dangerous? Traditionally, the Western societies that fought racism and sexism did so on biblical grounds, or on abstract notions of inviolable human rights, on the basis of the intrinsic value of each and every individual, etc. Racism was found dangerous precisely because it was an insult to our humanity. For Christians, it was a repudiation of the biblical fact that every human being—white, black, Hispanic, Japanese—was made in the image of God. For deists and agnostics, it was a violation of fundamental rights that were due every human person regardless of race, ethnicity, or creed. But wait a second. "Humanity," it's been said, is a designation of species, not of category difference. We are all just animals. And if this is so, it's hard to see why racism and sexism are dangerous at all, except in an instinctual, self-preservation sort of way. Think about our extended family, the animal kingdom. There you'll find the most incredible acts of inhumanity: Murder, infanticide, passion killing, polygamy, incest, genocide, rape. Animals are violent, vicious, and sexist in the extreme. Male Bottlenose Dolphins coerce females into sex. Wolves live in social hierarchies, where the alpha male commands the greatest access to food and territory, and maintains dominance through constant aggression. In too many species to mention, the female is all but forced into being the primary caregiver. Even our close cousin, the gorilla, regularly kills the infants of any unsuccessful male that challenges it.
What's my point in saying this? The point is, that if we are just apes, as Dawkins claims, the very idea of "speciesism" is ridiculous. The idea of speciesism presupposes what most of us know intuitively—that human beings have a moral obligation to respect living things. Yet this is ridiculous given a naturalistic worldview, because moral obligation is foreign to nature, just as it's foreign to evolution, to selfish genes, blind watchmakers, and the rest of it. On earth, morality is exclusively a human endeavor. It's something we do—us humans, I mean. It has no place in the kingdom of animals. Examples of this could be multiplied ad infinitum. With respect to the lion, the gazelle is concerned of speciesism only in the sense that it is afraid of becoming lion dinner. Abandoning a disabled child is the depths of human wickedness; for the beasts, of course, it's only natural.
Dawkins says, "Today, we live in a speciesist world. We automatically... without even thinking about it... assume that there's one law for Homo sapiens, and one law for the rest of the animal kingdom." Well, yeah. Could it be otherwise? Look and see. Genetic resemblances to monkeys notwithstanding, we are moral, emotional, thoughtful, resourceful, and social in ways that other animals are just barely, or not at all. Setting aside the religions of the world that Dawkins hates so much (and religion, incidentally, is a uniquely human undertaking), the fact that I can respond to Dawkins through language; the fact that people can read what I write on computers designed and manufactured and sold to them by other people; that they can contemplate my argument and talk about it with their friends and either agree or disagree freely; and the fact that peacocks and rhinos can do none of these things, and never have—these facts demonstrate the incomparability of the human experience. We are much more than apes. The phenomena of human experience should embarrass Dawkins for suggesting otherwise.
Suppose for a moment, though, that Dawkins is right. Suppose we are under the same laws as the rest of the animal kingdom, massive empirical evidence to the contrary (which suggests, given their constant rejoinders of "be rational," "believe the evidence," and "prove it," that some atheists believe in miracles, too). So suppose we are under the same laws as the beasts. We instantly have three huge problems, which amount to the same dilemma, namely: Why should we give two licks about the gorilla? The laws of nature do not demand that animals relent from speciesism in their affairs with other animals. We saw examples of this above. Animals are often vicious to other species, closely related or not. Furthermore, many animals are vicious within their species, within their own family, even. All of this is perfectly natural. It’s par for the course in the animal kingdom, written deep into the law that Dawkins chides us humans for rejecting. The second problem involves a claim Dawkins makes later. He says that animals that can suffer, think, reason, and suffer emotion "deserve and must have a greater moral consideration from us." It's hard to see how this can be so, if we are under the same laws as the rest of the animal kingdom. Here in the West we love our dogs; it's true. We believe our pets can feel pain and joy, and studies suggest there is something to this. Yet the laws of nature show no special regard for dogs. In the wild, outside of our comfortable, air-conditioned homes, away from veterinary shots and flea collars, Purina Puppy Chow and squeaky toys; in the wild, dogs are treated with no "greater moral consideration" than any other creature. Neither are apes shown this consideration, despite a relatively high animal intelligence; nor are dolphins, despite being more culturally advanced than other animals. And by the way, are animals any more or less considerate toward us because of our ability to suffer, think, reason, and feel emotion? Is the momma bear whose cub we kick in the face any more merciful to us because we balance our check books and can feel love and jealously? If we are animals, let’s operate under the same moral laws as we find throughout the animal kingdom, which is to say, none at all. Which brings me to the third huge problem, the biggest of the three. According to Dawkins, we assume "automatically," "without question," "without even thinking about it," that we are under a different law than the animals. Well, for some of us it's not automatic—we're conscious and adamant about it. The problem here is that Dawkins is guilty of the same crime. He maintains this human law/animal law distinction, while arguing against it, without realizing it. Dawkins' video calls for restraint, for equality, for compassion toward our simian friends. Except that restraint, equality, and compassion are not animal values, at least not in the sense he proposes here. If these values are not animal, what are they? In the first place, I would say divine—but I hope everyone would agree that they're human. Do we see this? The animal kingdom, whose law we're supposedly under, does not exhibit the restraint, equality, and compassion Dawkins calls for here. It's only on the presumption that humanity is set apart from the apes, that Dawkins can claim that we're the same as the apes, and conclude that we must protect them. He drives a wedge between two things, to bring those two things together. Which goes to show that Dawkins knows the truth despite himself.
This hurts him pretty bad. Let me drive the point home with two quotes from the video:
1) "What I'm saying is that it's a matter of the merest accident that the intermediates happen to be extinct. That's the only thing that enables us to erect this great fence around Homo sapiens."
2) "This is fundamentally a moral and ethical argument. It is as a human being that I make the case for saving the gorilla."
This is painful to watch. Dawkins obliterates the uniqueness of humanity, ridiculing those who hold to it, while simultaneously relying on that same uniqueness to make his point. It doesn't help one iota that he's moved outside of science with that second statement. For how does a product of "the merest accident" make moral arguments at all? Moral argumentation presupposes an ethical underpinning to the cosmos, an underpinning that Dawkinsatheistic worldview can’t provide. God is the stuff of fairy tales, your existence is a cosmic accident, and here are some ethical demands on your conscience—as though Dawkins' foundation could even begin to account for his moral conclusions. "It is as a human being that I make the case for saving the gorilla." Dude, given your view of humanity, that doesn’t mean much.
This last point is key, and it's a clue as to why atheist philosophers who applaud Dawkins' work on science should (and do in fact) find his work on religion so painfully bad. For all of Dawkins' rhetoric, for his brilliant mind and his substantial contributions to genetics, his philosophical views are naïve and uncritical in the extreme. He says, "It's very hard to make a purely scientific case. The only case I can make is an emotional case, and what’s wrong with that? We are emotional beings." Oh, I see. Like the gorillas? Is this how we animals should argue now? (I note, in passing, that when Christians appeal to emotion it's puerile; when atheists so appeal it's a recognition of the heterogeneity of human nature—whatever that is.)
It gets worse. The gaping hole in atheism—one of its gaping holes—is that it can't account for the existence of morality. There are analyses given, of course; these are sociological, psychological, and genetic explanations of human morality in practice. And atheism extends itself, sure, with a modified utilitarianism, and with various evolutionary accounts of how we got so moral anyway. Other atheists still have taken their skepticism seriously, and jumped straight into relativism and egoism, which is (pardon the pun) a different animal entirely. What is lost, in all of this, is the all-important notion of ethical imperative. We've lost our everyday use of the word "should." This "should," the reflexive human "what we ought-to-do," is greater, in an ultimate sense, than social conventions, than biological preprogramming and preference satisfaction, etc. We know, in spite of what anyone tells us, that the Holocaust was wrong. It was not a minor hiccup in our progress as a species. As we correctly say, it was an atrocity, and the blood of those killed cries out for our moral condemnation. So when we say that the Holocaust was wrong, we mean "wrong" in the strongest, most nuclear sense of wrongness. And we all know this, from Joe Sunday in church down to Heinrich Himmler and the most convinced anti-Semite in Palestine. The question remains: can we make sense of this wrongness? This is a question of worldviews. Dawkins has a rough time, as an atheist, explaining why humans who are really animals should protect other animals, since it's after all the human thing to do. His problem is worse than that. Given his atheism, he can't explain why he should take care of his own family even; his third wife, let's say, and his daughter Juliet. As seen on TV, Dawkins sermonizes, tautologically, on the wrongness of teaching fairy tales to children. (Which seems a tad pedestrian and unimaginative, unless Dawkins means teach fairy tales as if they happened for real, in which case I heartily agree with him, except that Christians don't do this, except maybe in the case of Santa Claus. Ahem.) Dawkins says further that religion tout court is a form of child abuse. Ok. But so what? We could challenge Dawkins' view of child abuse, and we certainly could challenge his views on religion. Forgetting that, though, let's say there is no God; we now agree that Christ was never a third of the Holy Trinity, since the Holy Trinity never existed in the first place, and maybe Christ didn't either. So we agree that teaching kids about Jesus is teaching lies. What's wrong with that? I mean, given atheism, what's wrong with lying to children? Or raping or killing children, as some animals do? I'm not asking about the social consequences, or the effect of said actions on the development of the species. I'm asking what makes it wrong, and more than that, what makes anything wrong. The correct answer is anathema to men like Dawkins. It's something many children know, because we teach it to them in Sunday school. What he calls a fairy tale, we teach our kids as truth, as the ultimate nature of things, as the very stitching of the fabric of the cosmos. The answer is so infantile, so ridiculous, so simple, and yet it's true. Lying is wrong because God says so.
Without doing away with polemics entirely, let me conclude with what appears to be divine irony. Ironically, the strongest argument for animal preservation can made on Christian grounds. This is because of the biblical balance, lost in practice today, but found under no other worldview, that humanity is both master and steward over all of creation. The earth has been given to us and we were called to subdue it; but, before we mine the shit out of the planet, let's remember the God we'll answer to at Judgment Day. The old saying goes: with great privilege comes great responsibility. This is the Christian noblesse oblige. We have been made in the image of God; therefore, being noble, let us act with nobility. Of which we have biblical precedent. Consider Adam's naming of the Edenic beasts. Consider Noah's preservation of the earth's creatures from certain death at the Flood. Consider Balaam and his donkey. And consider that quirky law, repeated twice in the Old Testament, that Israelites refrain from boiling a young goat in its mother's milk.
"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."
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