[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

[Gail Brock]

Dawkins' books popularizing science tend to be based on a reductive science of determinism which undergirds conservative argument, whether he explicitly accepts conservatism or not.  It's not just the evolutionary psychology.  It always bothered me that as the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, he named one of his books "The Selfish Gene".  He's got to know that the majority of the public that hear about the book aren't going to read the book and are going to misunderstand the title as meaning that people have a gene that makes us selfish.  That doesn't contribute to public understanding of science and it doesn't do so in a way that appears to say that science proves the rightwingers are right about human motivation. 

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 Matthias Wasser  on Sun, March 28, 2010 4:14:15 PM wrote:

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:


>
>
> Dawkins is a loyal participant in that most right-wing of intellectual
> projects, the attempted absolution of imperialism for its crimes. In *The
> God Delusion*, he urges his readers to "[i]magine, with John Lennon, a
> world
> with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers ... no Indian partition, no
> Israeli/Palestinian wars ... no Northern Ireland 'troubles.'" Elsewhere in
> his odious little book, he confidently asserts that "[i]n Northern Ireland,
> Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists'
> respectively" and informs us that "without religion, and religiously
> segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The warring
> tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved into each other."
> Trying to pin all the nastiness in the world on a single social force is
> always a fool's errand, but attempting to do so with religions seems to
> take
> one to particularly reactionary, not to mention, ridiculous, places.
>

I still don't think that (or his sympathy for evolutionary psychology) make
him subjectively right-wing, though. Naive, sure.