Dawkins is no H.G. Wells

(H.G.Wells)

But it seems that Dawkins’ views are even more complicated. Darwinian in science, but hardly anywhere else. Here is one of his recent lectures compressed to the size of a blog entry:


I support Darwin as a scientist I am a passionate antidarwinian as it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. If you try to apply the lessons of Darwinism as social Darwinists did to human society, then you end up with a kind of super-Thatcherism (…) or even Hitler
“The New Republic”, where Wells outlines his Darwinian utopia contains some blood-chilling lines so unpleasant that I find it hard to read them aloud. [But] we have moved away from the mores of our wild ancestors .Contraception is good enough evidence that we move away from our Darwinian principles. That it can be done and the fact that we spend most of our live striving for goals which have nothing to do with propagating ourselves with genes is further evidence that it can be done.”
I would like to live in a sort of society which is not run on Darwinian principles, while fully acknowledging that the brains and bodies that we possess were put there by Darwinian principles in the first place. Theoretically, in future centuries evolution could take a new human-guided turn and you really could plan for evolution.
Source:
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2009/jul/13/in-defense-of-darwin/
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Luck or Fuck

I am trying to understand Richard Dawkins. I have not so much a problem with his evolutionism or atheism (in fact I share the latter). But he seems to swing from one extreme to another.

“The total amount of suffering per year is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease… the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

So our world does not seem a very attractive place to live in. But then he writes

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

If the world is such an unattractive place, such a slough of despond, why should we consider ourselves lucky to be thrown into it? Dawkins’ description of the world is a description of hell. Why should you and I be happy to go to hell rather than remain in a peaceful Nirvana, where even the very concept of suffering does not seem to make sense?

To be or not to have been

Richard Dawkins, the great scientist and author, says that “To live at all is miracle enough”.
He also thinks we are the winners of a certain lottery, despite our end being rather miserable.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born”.

Is he right that living is better than non-living, even if you have never and will never live. He may as well be right, but not before this is thoroughly discussed? After all, the Buddhists and Schopenhauer have pointed out (as if we did not know anyway) that life is intrinsically connected with suffering. Is it better not to have ever lived and not to suffer or be alive and in pain (as one must be sooner or later)? That’s the rub.

Do not worry. However you answer the question, children are still going to be born. Women still want to have children at some point of their lives.

But the question: “to be or not to have ever been” is an entirely practical one. If Dawkins is right, then vegetarians are wrong. Animals may be killed in slaughterhouses, but many of then would not have even been born, if they had not been bred for meat. However cruelly they are butchered, they are still quite lucky. But if Dawkins is wrong and vegetarians are right, then breeding animals for meat not only increases their number, but also the amount of their suffering.