I have nothing against young people. They have their uses and their strengths, mostly of a physical nature.
When they are female, they can be nice to look at. When they are male, they can be good at sports, such as tennis or football. Who’d want to spend hours watching octogenarians play sports? And it takes young people to serve as foot soldiers or, alternatively, dodge conscription.
However, when it comes to mature deliberation of serious subjects, the young are too, well, immature. I know you’ll instantly come up with names of thinkers gaining fame when still young, but I bet most of them left their mark in the past, when the average life expectancy was that of today’s Dachshund.
These days, with so many wrinklies burdening the NHS with their stubborn survival, anything worth saying is said by fully grown adults. Add to this the creeping infantilisation of society in general, and you’ll know why today’s 20-year-olds sound like yesterday’s babes in arms. Their vocabulary is bigger, but they use it to couch their coochie-coochie-coo blabbering.
This brings me to James Marriott of The Times. One seldom gets the chance to read so much schoolgirlish enthusiasm dripping, nay gushing, off a newspaper page as in his article on Richard Dawkins.
James’s photograph shows a barely post-pubescent nerd cramming for his GCSE exams, an impression his prose reinforces. He writes like someone eager to please his Mummy who thinks he is oh so clever.
Marriott describes Richard Dawkins as “the great hero of my adolescence”, a stage he has clearly not yet outgrown. Dawkins, according to him, is “the most famous biologist in the world”, which may very well be true. However, I’d be tempted to add that Dawkins owes that fame not to his scientific exploits but to his strident propaganda of atheism.
The occasion for the fawning interview is the 50th anniversary of Dawkins’s bestseller The Selfish Gene, which Marriott describes as “one of the greatest popular science books”. I can’t dispute that ranking since that whole genre isn’t among my favourites. But I have read The Selfish Gene, along with a couple of other books by Dawkins, mainly to find what the hullabaloo was all about.
I remember being struck by the paucity of thought only matched by the fervour of ideology. And Dawkins’s attempts to attack religion were as vulgar as such attempts always are, even when coming from greater men than Dawkins.
It’s not only Marriott who still loves The Selfish Gene, it’s also the author himself: “I’m surprised how little it needs to be changed,” says Dawkins. “It’s rather a bad thing for a scientist to say, you’re supposed to worship falsifiability… Maybe there are sentences… But the main thesis I still stand by.”
The main thesis, as I recall, is that Darwin’s rather slapdash theory married to modern genetics puts paid to the whole fallacy of God. Contrary to what those religious stick-in-the-muds aver, the whole purpose of human life is to pass on one’s genes. That’s it.
The inference is that childless ne’er-do-wells like Beethoven, Brahms, Spinoza or Leibnitz failed to fulfil the purpose of life, whereas Mussolini, who passed his genes on to five children, realised his life’s full potential.
One likes to think that there just may be another purpose to one’s life, something less microbiological and more spiritual. But Dawkins has no truck with matters of the spirit or, God forbid, soul. If something can’t be seen through a microscope, it doesn’t exist, as far as he is concerned.
How about such basic things as mind and thought? Science can’t even define them, much less see them. Marriott was too busy gushing to ask his idol that question. However, had he done so, Dawkins logically would have had to refute himself by saying that mind and thought don’t exist. This, though even such an inanity still qualifies as a thought produced by a mind.
“Dawkins, to put it mildly, dislikes having to humour other people’s illusions,” continues Marriott. “His most famous controversies are about God, who got a memorable drubbing in the multimillion-selling The God Delusion, published in 2006. Since then, more battles have been joined. In the irrational 2020s, a stickler for the strict truth is never going to find himself short of foes. Dawkins is contemptuous of Donald Trump, a ‘conspicuously anti-intellectual philistine thug’.”
The last sentence, true though it may be, strikes me as a non sequitur. But let me see if I get this right. People who believe in God are suffering from illusions, or rather delusions, to use Dawkins’s definition of faith. A professional atheist like him, on the other hand, is “a stickler for strict truth”.
Strict truth is by inference strictly material. Dawkins’s (and, by the sound of it, his illegitimate offspring Marriott’s) truth is circumscribed by matter, which makes it a half-truth at best. But perhaps I’m maligning old Richard. He doesn’t deny the existence of consciousness. Much to Marriott’s effusive applause, he merely finds it in material objects, such as chatbots.
Dawkins “revealed he had engaged the chatbot Claude in a ‘set of conversations, extended over nearly two days, during which I felt I had gained a new friend’.” Dawkins’s first reaction was to say to his new friend: “You may not know you’re conscious but you bloody well are.”
Later, however, he refined that thought: “A better thing to have said would be, ‘What more do you want? What more do you expect?’… The thought he keeps returning to is that AIs are ‘so intuitive and insightful… what more would you want from them to prove that they are human?’.”
This is one of those questions that, if asked, can’t be answered. Not politely at any rate. However, a comment would be called for.
We live in an age of simulacra, ersatz parodies of erstwhile reality. People munch a simulacrum of food while listening to a simulacrum of music or swapping simulacra of thoughts with their likeminded simulacra of friends. Everything subtle and sublime has been reduced to crude counterfeits, something that looks real but isn’t.
This is the overarching modern cult, with Dawkins as one of its shamans. In this cultish atmosphere, a supposed thinker feels justified to opine that a concoction of diodes, semi-conductors, silicon chips and wires is a human being endowed with an “intuitive and insightful” consciousness.
Simulacra reign, whereas reality is relegated to the status of an illusion, or rather delusion. Dawkins is entitled to such views, but one would expect a serious newspaper at least to take him to task. Perhaps a grown-up interviewer could do just that, respectfully but firmly.
Instead The Times sent out a youthful groupie in the throes of orgasmic hero worship. Yet perhaps both Dawkins and Marriott ought to be complimented for their frank self-assessment. Their own intelligence may indeed be artificial, made up of faddish clichés repeated mechanically and endlessly.