Caveat emptor

Richard Dawkins notices reality.

How the worm turns.

In a recent interview the famous zoologist Richard Dawkins expressed alarm that his home town in England had changed. Instead of sporting the traditional Easter decorations of his youth they instead celebrated Ramadan.

He expressed regret that the hymns and symbols of his Christian upbringing had somehow disappeared. And he was upset they had been replaced by an alien religion with no connection to England.

Despite his famous atheism, and his determined mockery of all things religious, he did concede when pushed that he was “culturally Christian.” Quite a revelation, and one that may become much more common in the next few years as the many progressive seeds planted over the last few decades bear unexpected fruit.

New atheists

In the last ten or fifteen years Dawkins has been one of the leading lights in the New Atheist movement that included other “rational thinkers” like the late Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. All viewed religious belief as a throwback to more primitive times and something we should jettison in the modern age.

Despite the ire from traditionalists and conservatives, Dawkins was far from the worst. He typically restricted his observations to religion and specifically religious beliefs or faith. Along the way he did acknowledge some of the benefits of Christianity but could not accept the continued existence of religious belief itself.

Dawkins’ mistake was believing he could banish all religion by ridiculing one religion, Christianity. His determined attacks were on faith itself, but he often used Christianity and the bible as the main thrust of this argument. Because British and Western culture is based on Christianity it was an accessible method to pin his ideas on. The biblical stories he relied on to sell his arguments were woven into the fabric of his country, including his Anglican upbringing.

Like many other enthusiastic trashers of British culture Dawkins is learning the tolerance he took for granted came packaged up within Christianity and is not a universal trait.

The replacements are less forgiving. Many are openly agitating in British cities to make the burning of the Koran illegal. Some are insisting this is not enough and they must make any criticism of Islam itself a punishable offence. These requests are being considered in areas with Muslim majorities although have so far failed.

This is just one example, and Dawkins is clearly aware of the direction of travel, hence his guarded comments.

Dawkins is not responsible for mass immigration into the West. His comments just draw attention to the process. But he did play a part in establishing a destructive trend that begins with observation of some ancient tradition and ends in its erasure.

The sequence to erode tradition

This is the typical sequence we have seen in recent times.

• A societal change is promoted that undermines tradition and is backed by a small, powerful minority in the professional classes

• Through continued promotion in the media and academia the change happens

• Social engineers, progressives and anti-traditionalists cheer it on; in time they claim the development was natural, inevitable and a sign of progress that distinguishes us from the primitives; the extent of the artificial promotion, and the suppression and ridicule of opposing views, is downplayed

• During the initial process of challenging some social norm, and especially once victorious, those who wish to preserve tradition are ridiculed; their position is understood as backward or old fashioned, out of sync with the times we now live it

• Over time unforeseen consequences emerge from the initiative; the more self-aware and honest of the initiators express concern about the outcome, although rarely retract their initial arguments

The chief characteristic of these movements is advocating for a policy or societal change without full consideration of all factors. Most reject tradition just for being traditional. Few consider why the tradition emerged in the first place.

Everything from mass immigration to the promotion of homosexuality fall in to this category. No time is spent examining why we once saw fit to restrict or condemn certain behaviours or ideas. Any discussion is rejected out of hand. We have moved on and you must move with the times. Such is progress.

Mental models

While we cannot blame the New Atheists like Dawkins for demographic changes to Britain, what we did witness was their willingness to use ridicule as argument.

Opposition to their ideas was largely dismissed with minimal attempt to engage. Their declarations about the lack of evidence for a God or the flimsy foundations for faith were taken as self-evident. Counterargument could then be framed as challenges to these points and ignored.

This was emotionally appealing to some. Their cultural enemies could be made to look foolish or uneducated, while adherents could maintain the moral high ground by insisting you couldn’t argue with some moron who kept quoting scripture or insisting Jesus was the son of God.

More broadly, those who opposed the New Atheist’s bleak view of religious beliefs were understood as irrational fools living in the past. There was no discussion about the comfort of religion, its social aspects, especially a sense of belonging, and even less on the positive contributions made by Christianity to the West. The whole thing was written off as nonsense and added to a pile of distasteful things we had long since left behind like witch burning and child labour.

It is impossible to ignore the parallels with Ian McGilchrist’s hemispheric theory. Some become entranced with an invented model developed inside their own minds, a product of the left hemisphere of the brain. The model, as a representation of the world, is by necessity a simplification, just as sheet music can represent a great symphony. Some lose sight of this and imagine the model is the world. When they do the responses and solutions they generate inherit the oversimplification of the model itself and fall short of capturing reality.

Religion is more than just the core of the belief system, the mechanics of faith. It has a social aspect, a historical aspect and a cultural aspect. As a result Christianity has been responsible for the greatest of art just as it helped trigger the Crusades.

It is striking how much of the arguments posited by the various New Atheists entirely ignored much of this and focused only on the perceived stupidity of the faithful who, we were told, believed things for which there could be no evidence. How stupid those church-going dopes must be.

This is what internal models do. They strip the system of complexity so it is pleasingly simple to understand. The solutions then are artificially simplified and therefore wrong as they cannot cope with reality and all its complexity.

Thoughtful objections become easy to reject while appearing decisive. Dawkins and other atheists characterized their detractors as irrational. Their simple model of religious belief lacked complexity, but sounded convincing enough to the educated classes who by then had long since abandoned the religion of their youth.

But reality always intrudes no matter how convincing the model in the left hemisphere.

Dawkins’ rational, enlightened atheist paradise has not materialized. What is emerging instead is an Islamic caliphate with no other established religion or tradition to oppose it. Many fewer people in Britain can now point to their church, their cultural symbols and their environment and tell intruders we already have our beliefs and our societal structures, go elsewhere to practice your own or adopt ours if you wish to remain here.

It is the nervousness created by this void we sense in Dawkins’ recent comments. His awareness too little of his confident youth remains, and at least some of that foundation was Christianity. Thanks to this erosion the churches that are everywhere in Britain are now being purchased by Muslims funded by overseas governments which they gleefully convert into Mosques.

This is not restricted to religion. We see a comparable dynamic with other causes disfiguring the West.

Fellow travellers

We can witness a similar process of dismissal with major causes based on simplistic faulty models appealing to the would-be rationalists among us.

Radical feminists readily welcomed transgenderism. To them it was another pillar of the patriarchy to demolish, reinforced by men objecting to it.

Now female sports are being destroyed. In time how many corporations will fulfil their quotas with trans women? The world the radfems imagined exists only inside their heads. The actual world outside their heads is quite different and subject to the rules of reality.

Gay support groups echoed these stupidities. Some in their group aggressively championed uncontrolled immigration. They too saw their enemies as conservative homophobes who must be destroyed at any cost and whose measured concerns about undocumented aliens were written off as racism. No human is illegal. Like Dawkins they are now learning those conservatives may not be keen on Pride parades but nor are they murdering homosexuals.

Britain’s Muslim population, repeatedly championed by gay campaigners even now, overwhelmingly wish homosexuality to be criminalized. Note, this is not the criminalization of homosexual acts or homosexuality promoted to children, but being gay itself is to be made a criminal act.

And yet plenty of gays still bristle at the very idea of immigration restrictions and associate it with fascism or authoritarianism while their own place in society becomes ever more tenuous.

A decidedly bleak example emerged during the covid era. Some of those most insistent on extreme measures such as mandatory vaccinations or punishment for naysayers are now dead, their lives prematurely terminated because of their poor understanding of the complexities of viruses, immunology and public health policy.

Their simplistic model included trusting governments and medical institutions and most lethal of all, listening to corporate media.

Like the New Atheists, at the time many were taken in. The media moved as one. They had fancy graphics. All the handsome talking heads reinforced the severity of the situation. And as we now know most of it was fiction. There was no real pandemic. Much of it was hype. It was known in 2020 the average age of death from Covid was above the average age at death without it; Covid made you live slightly longer. But that little slice of reality didn’t fit in the model, so it was excluded.

And that is the real reflection of today, the exclusion of anything that doesn’t fit. Increasingly that is ever more unpleasant side effects of visions, ideas and policies most of us reject because we inhabit reality and not the simplified model our betters hold in their superior minds.

The sin of noticing

We must remember Dawkins is just noticing, a great sin in today’s post-Christian world. He noticed because reality intruded. His expected enlightened atheistic rational religion-free world does not exist. What does exist is a world increasingly dominated by alien belief systems incompatible with Western nations, beliefs that evolved in a different place with different people facing different issues. And what they have brought with them is an inflexibility to combat the tolerance people like Dawkins thought he could take for granted.

That said, Dawkins didn’t just notice, he talked. He is influential among the chattering classes who drive the insanities destroying our nations. He has sway.

It is worth looking beyond the superficial aspects to embrace this positive observation. Some good could come from this after all. It could be a glimmer of hope that reality is finally diluting the visions of the progressives in our midst, that their models are finally being forced to be revised when they make contact with reality.

While it seems unlikely the chattering classes are about to relinquish climate and gay rainbowness any time soon, their promotion of multiculturalism is taking a battering as Dawkins is demonstrating.

In the wake of the conflict in Gaza some Muslims made a point of praying within the hallowed grounds of Westminster Cathedral in London. It did the rounds on social media although the corporate media steered clear.

Plenty watched the videos and the contempt they had for the traditions of the country that had given them a comfortable, safe home. Dawkins’ expected tolerance and openness was nowhere in sight. He has witnessed some of that very close to his own home and it has given him pause to consider what it may mean for our shared future. Perhaps his comments will encourage others of his ilk to follow suit.