They Eat Their Own - Sat Jan 01, 2022 11:33 PM
The denunciation of Richard Dawkins shows that wokeism has become a new religion
Humanists pride themselves on their rationality yet they won't give the author freedom to ask uncomfortable questions and push boundaries
MICHAEL DEACON
PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER
The Chinese authorities have created an app that will enable citizens to report those who express “mistaken opinions”. Personally, I can’t see why they’ve gone to such trouble. They could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort by simply lifting their ban on Twitter.
After all, that’s what we in the West use it for. If anyone over here tweets a mistaken opinion, we make sure they soon regret it.
The latest in the never-ending list of offenders is Professor Richard Dawkins, author of atheist bible The God Delusion. A couple of weeks ago, he posted a tweet in which he recalled the uproar about Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who in 2015 was vilified for saying she identified as black. He then wrote: “Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”
After the inevitable outrage, Dawkins insisted that he “did not intend to disparage trans people”; he had simply been inviting debate. “I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this,” he wrote. “It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the US now exploiting this issue.”
These words, however, were not enough to satisfy his critics – or even some of his admirers. This week, the American Humanist Association (AHA) announced that it was so appalled by Dawkins’s comments, it was immediately rescinding an award it had given him.
“His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient,” it said. “Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honoured by the AHA.”
For my own part, I do think the Professor’s original tweet was tactless. I’ve no doubt many people were offended. But even so, I find the AHA’s actions somewhat puzzling.
Partly this is because the award of which Professor Dawkins has been stripped is Humanist of the Year 1996. By rescinding it, the AHA is in effect arguing that the Professor’s tweets in 2021 mean that he wasn’t the world’s best humanist in 1996 after all. But that can’t be right, because he hadn’t posted the tweets then – not least because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.
In my view, therefore, the AHA’s action betrays a profound misunderstanding of how time works. Normally, humanists tend to pride themselves on their rationality, so this is an unexpected lapse.
The other thing on which humanists tend to pride themselves, of course, is not being religious. And to me, this makes the AHA’s attitude all the more disconcerting. Because in this instance, they’re behaving as though they’re very religious indeed.
Historically, it’s been the highly religious who make a great public show of denouncing heresy. It’s been the highly religious who condemn any supposed failure to conform to the orthodox beliefs of the day.
Yet look again at that statement from this group of American humanists. The Professor’s “subsequent attempts at clarification”, apparently, “are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity”. As a result, he is “no longer deserving of being honoured”.
Fascinating, isn’t it? So sanctimonious. So pious. So holier-than-thou. No mercy. The heretic must be punished, or at least excommunicated. Maybe the real reason these people haven’t taken to religion is that they’ve never found one strict enough for them.
Then again, maybe they have. Wokeism: the glorious new religion of our time, whose evangelists preach their dogma with a ravening zeal from their social media pulpits, while sinners are furiously decried until they repent.
Dawkins himself doesn’t seem especially bothered by the loss of the AHA’s award. “Thinking to do my duty by deleting the entry, I opened up my CV,” he told a newspaper, “only to discover that there was nothing to delete.”
Of course, he’s quite used to people getting cross with him. Doubtless he can handle it. But, on this particular occasion, I’m just surprised that the AHA joined in with such righteous fervour.
No matter how thoughtless and insensitive the Professor’s tweet might seem, I would have expected a humanist group to respect the freedom to ask uncomfortable questions, the freedom to test the boundaries of socially acceptable thought, the freedom to cause offence.
Without that freedom, after all, there might well be no humanists.
You can read Michael Deacon’s column every Wednesday.
Humanists pride themselves on their rationality yet they won't give the author freedom to ask uncomfortable questions and push boundaries
MICHAEL DEACON
PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER
The Chinese authorities have created an app that will enable citizens to report those who express “mistaken opinions”. Personally, I can’t see why they’ve gone to such trouble. They could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort by simply lifting their ban on Twitter.
After all, that’s what we in the West use it for. If anyone over here tweets a mistaken opinion, we make sure they soon regret it.
The latest in the never-ending list of offenders is Professor Richard Dawkins, author of atheist bible The God Delusion. A couple of weeks ago, he posted a tweet in which he recalled the uproar about Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who in 2015 was vilified for saying she identified as black. He then wrote: “Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”
After the inevitable outrage, Dawkins insisted that he “did not intend to disparage trans people”; he had simply been inviting debate. “I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this,” he wrote. “It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the US now exploiting this issue.”
These words, however, were not enough to satisfy his critics – or even some of his admirers. This week, the American Humanist Association (AHA) announced that it was so appalled by Dawkins’s comments, it was immediately rescinding an award it had given him.
“His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient,” it said. “Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honoured by the AHA.”
For my own part, I do think the Professor’s original tweet was tactless. I’ve no doubt many people were offended. But even so, I find the AHA’s actions somewhat puzzling.
Partly this is because the award of which Professor Dawkins has been stripped is Humanist of the Year 1996. By rescinding it, the AHA is in effect arguing that the Professor’s tweets in 2021 mean that he wasn’t the world’s best humanist in 1996 after all. But that can’t be right, because he hadn’t posted the tweets then – not least because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.
In my view, therefore, the AHA’s action betrays a profound misunderstanding of how time works. Normally, humanists tend to pride themselves on their rationality, so this is an unexpected lapse.
The other thing on which humanists tend to pride themselves, of course, is not being religious. And to me, this makes the AHA’s attitude all the more disconcerting. Because in this instance, they’re behaving as though they’re very religious indeed.
Historically, it’s been the highly religious who make a great public show of denouncing heresy. It’s been the highly religious who condemn any supposed failure to conform to the orthodox beliefs of the day.
Yet look again at that statement from this group of American humanists. The Professor’s “subsequent attempts at clarification”, apparently, “are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity”. As a result, he is “no longer deserving of being honoured”.
Fascinating, isn’t it? So sanctimonious. So pious. So holier-than-thou. No mercy. The heretic must be punished, or at least excommunicated. Maybe the real reason these people haven’t taken to religion is that they’ve never found one strict enough for them.
Then again, maybe they have. Wokeism: the glorious new religion of our time, whose evangelists preach their dogma with a ravening zeal from their social media pulpits, while sinners are furiously decried until they repent.
Dawkins himself doesn’t seem especially bothered by the loss of the AHA’s award. “Thinking to do my duty by deleting the entry, I opened up my CV,” he told a newspaper, “only to discover that there was nothing to delete.”
Of course, he’s quite used to people getting cross with him. Doubtless he can handle it. But, on this particular occasion, I’m just surprised that the AHA joined in with such righteous fervour.
No matter how thoughtless and insensitive the Professor’s tweet might seem, I would have expected a humanist group to respect the freedom to ask uncomfortable questions, the freedom to test the boundaries of socially acceptable thought, the freedom to cause offence.
Without that freedom, after all, there might well be no humanists.
You can read Michael Deacon’s column every Wednesday.