Richard Dawkins must be pulling our legs.

by K.M.Krebs

In a Tele­graph arti­cle I read (via Arts & Let­ters Daily), Richard Dawkins has made the hoax-like move of announc­ing his plans to step down from his teach­ing posi­tion and write a book “aimed at young­sters in which he will warn them against believ­ing in ‘anti-scientific’  fairy­tales.” Although he admits he hasn’t read ‘Harry Pot­ter’ he is greatly con­cerned that books about spells and wiz­ards can some­how cor­rupt the devel­op­ment of a child’s ratio­nal­ity.  This behav­iour seem almost par­al­lel to the moral panic many fun­da­men­tal­ists had about Harry Pot­ter and makes me won­der if he’s notic­ing he has more in com­mon with his alleged ene­mies than he orig­i­nally thought!

Now, I can under­stand the point of his ear­lier works show­ing the impos­si­bly accu­rate and log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of his inter­pre­ta­tion of Dar­win­ian the­ory against what some con­sider a blood­less and overly-simplified the­ol­ogy (and more here, here and here).  I con­sider him a nec­es­sary cul­tural counter-weight to the ever increas­ing lev­els of fun­da­men­tal­ism at home and through­out the world.  But this announce­ment, which still seems too ridicu­lous to be real, reveals that Mr. Dawkins is so caught up in his zeal for sci­en­tism that he has dei­fied ratio­nal­ism as the only true way and cut off the sub­jec­tive and imag­i­nal world that is the sub­stance of our life.  An essen­tial part of being human is telling sto­ries about the world and our­selves and our dreams — and why should that be lim­ited to what we cur­rently con­sider rational?

Mr. Dawkins’ irra­tional fear and seem­ing need to con­trol what chil­dren read strikes me as bewil­der­ingly intol­er­ant and des­o­late.  I’m will­ing to bet just about every child in every cul­ture grew up read­ing or hear­ing  fairy tales and myths, includ­ing most of the great­est sci­en­tists. Does he dream of a ster­il­ized child­hood where kids only read books that are ratio­nal and sci­en­tif­i­cally accu­rate? (and prob­a­bly have no good pic­tures in them, either!)  Ulti­mately, I don’t see the need to set ratio­nal­ity and imag­i­na­tion against one another with such hyper­bole.  Per­haps he’s just dis­cov­ered that writ­ing a con­tro­ver­sial book make him more money than what he’s get­ting at Oxford?  I can sym­pa­thize far more the guy if it is sim­ple human greed rather than a real con­vic­tion that he must warn chil­dren and their par­ents about the dan­gers of fiction!

…and I’ve just dis­cov­ered a very recent arti­cle by Libby Purves tak­ing him to task on his per­ceived threat of fairy tales.