Richard Dawkins' New Documentary: Why Ask Why?

Richard Dawkins is back, and this time he brought a camera crew.

In a new BBC documentary (YouTube), thunderingly titled "The Enemies of Reason," Dawkins shifts his target from pulpits and pews to new age healers and their crystal-clad customers.

Writes the Times Online,

Dawkins is horrified that 25% of the British public has some belief in astrology – more than in any one established religion – and that more newspaper column inches are devoted to horoscopes than to science. Leaning back on a sofa in the faded gothic splendour of Oxford’s 14th century New College he sighs with something approaching despair: “It belittles our universe. To have astrologers demeaning astronomy by tapping into the spine-tingling wonder of the universe is . . .” he struggles briefly for a word, then finds one and pronounces it with a keen awareness of the irony: “Sacrilegious!"

Dawkins wields his sword of truth with gleeful abandon, chopping up the claims of astrologers and dowsers and psychics and homeopaths.

“I don’t enjoy dashing people’s lifetime careers, but if their careers are based on claims that are simply wrong . . .” he lets the sentence tail off, implying a good dashing is what they deserve.

But he doesn't concern himself very much with why these belief systems flourish in a modern, ostensibly secular world. That's a difficult, important, highly relevant question -- and one that Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens and other secular standard bearers don't bother to ask.

As Roger Scruton observes in the Prospect, Hitchens and company are recycling arguments made 200 years ago. The former's latest book, he writes,

... takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and
Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation.
The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be. [...]

Out of that quest for discovery, driven not by intellectually infantile sandcastle-kicking but an actual desire to understand about the human experience, emerged a rich intellectual tradition: Hegel, Nietzsche,
Wagner, Durkheim, Freud, Bataille and the lesser-known Rene Girard.

It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away.
For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed?

Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew
Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran—al-rahmân al-rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands—such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son
Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honour—a theme that has been explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like Dawkins and
Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard.
Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together.
The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality:
religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.

Girard's ideas, writes Scruton, were an inversion of Nietzsche's. The latter saw Christianity's origins in the inwardly-directed resentment of slaves towards their masters. Later on, Max Scheler argued that the
Christian ethics of agape and forgiveness were ways of overcoming resentment, not expressing it.

But in both cases, a nuanced analysis of religion led to examination of that fundamental human characteristic, resentment -- a characteristic that swelled to monstrous proportions during the 20th century genocides of Hitler and Lenin and Mao and Pol Pot, all of which were decidedly secular, and more recently during wars in Eastern Europe and Central America and assorted parts of Africa.

Studying religion in a sophisticated way could help us understand the human dynamics underlying such tragedies. It was a task worthy of many of the 20th century's greatest intellects, and could also be worthy of
Dawkins. Too bad he's wasting his time making dowsers cry.

The Sacred and the Human [Prospect]

The Gullible Age [Times Online]

The Enemies of Reason [BBC] [YouTube]

Related Wired coverage: Hanging out with Dawkins, Dennet and -- gasp! -- folks who believe in God here.