Raw Story reports on a conversation event Dawkins did last month, in which he expressed surprise that there’s such a thing as the Men’s Rights Movement.
During the event on November 21, Kennesaw’s Michael L. Sanseviro asked the outspoken atheist about the contributions of feminism to science. He also asked Dawkin’s opinion of the men’s rights movement.
“Of course feminism has an enormously important role,” he replied. “Feminism, as I understand it, is the political drive towards the equality of women — so that women should not be discriminated against, nobody should be discriminated against on grounds that don’t merit discrimination. So, yes, feminism is enormously important and is a political movement which deserves to be thoroughly well-supported.”
Much to the amusement of the audience, Dawkins expressed confusion about the existence of a “men’s rights movement.”
“I didn’t, I hardly knew — is there a men’s right movement?” he remarked.
This is one reason he should just stop pontificating about feminism. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, so he says bad harmful things, and because he is still madly popular among the atheists and Fans of Science, he does a lot of damage.
On the other hand, after that, he said good things.
Sanseviro then asked Dawkins about same-sex marriage, and whether it violated “the evolution principle.”
“I don’t care what’s against the evolution principle. I’m all for going against the evolution principle,” Dawkins replied.
He warned against turning the survival of the fittest into public policy.
“Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.”
“Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.”
He said the same thing in the eponymous first essay in A Devil’s Chaplain. He starts with Darwin on the cruelty of natural selection:
Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil’s Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.
What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature,
A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste there is no doubt. As I have put it before, the racing elegance of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Clumsy and blundering though the process undoubtedly is, its results are opposite. There is nothing clumsy about a swallow; nothing blundering about a shark. What is clumsy and blundering, by the standards of human drawing boards, is the Darwinian algorithm that led to their evolution. As for cruelty, here is Darwin again, in a letter to Asa Gray of 1860:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
He runs through some examples on each side – hooray for natural selection v natural selection is a bastard – and then says he’s with T H Huxley:
Here is T. H., in his Romanes Lecture in Oxford in 1893, on ‘Evolution and Ethics’:
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on Imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from It, but in combating it.
That is G. C. Williams’s recommendation today, and it is mine. I hear the bleak sermon of the Devil’s Chaplain as a call to arms. As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. My previous books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, extol the inescapable factual correctness of the Devil’s Chaplain (had Darwin decided to extend the list of melancholy adjectives in the Chaplain’s indictment, he would very probably have chosen both ‘selfish’ and ‘blind’). At the same time I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’
Just so.
I’m probably far too cynical, but I totally don’t believe him. If he’s such a “fan” of CHS, for example, he has to have read enough stuff to know where her sympathies lie and how her bread is buttered. For him to be completely ignorant of all of it would take an ego the size of Alaska, an unprecendented ability to stick his fingers in his ears and yell “LALALALA*! I can’t hear you” and much less of an “appetite for wonder” than he claims to have.
*Yes, pun fully intended, K-9.
Reminds me of why he’s popular in the first place. Get him talking about evolution – and things related to evolution – and he can say some really good stuff.
It’s when he goes off his expertise that he really sticks his foot in it.
The ignorance. It burns. I mean of the people who confuse evolution with ethics. I’ve studied evolution my whole academic life, that’s my actual specialty. Evolutionary biologist. Evolution is about survival, not even necessarily of the fittest. If the volcano explodes, it doesn’t matter how well adapted you are to your montane forest. All that matters is that you don’t happen to be in the path of the lava. There’s a major element of randomness to evolution.
When people apply it to social organization, they never mean the *survival* of the fittest. They want a lot more than survival. They mean “all advantages and benefits and everything to me.” They fight like hellcats to prevent any randomness at all from coming into it.
And ethics, on the other hand, are about rules for how humans live together. They’re like the alphabet. We invent it. Ethics have no physical existence outside human beings. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and essential, like alphabets, but it does mean it’s entirely up to us how well they work.
Evolution and ethics aren’t even related concepts, let alone interchangeable.
#1/Eric:
I don’t know that you’re cynical. I’m trying to figure out how the hell this could be myself…
That said, I’m going to try to be hopeful, and hope that just maybe, somehow, this is actually true, and that having said this, he’ll take a bit of a look, with critical thinking properly engaged…
… seriously, with all the respect that’s due most of those who take that label, actually looking at what the people who call themselves MRAs are saying seems to me a pretty good way–if by no means a pleasant one–to impress upon you just how prevalent deeply sexist attitudes still are within our culture, how far feminism is from being ‘done’, as some of that very number seem to imagine they can insist with a straight face…
(It’s a bit like how reading holy canon makes atheists, I figure.)
Eric – I don’t know, I think he could have just seen some tweets of Sommers’s without knowing more about her.
Mind you, the tweets were shitty in themselves, so that’s not much of a get-out.
Huh? What, in Richard Dawkins’ mind, are appropriate grounds for discrimination?
Nevermind, I don’t want to know.
@6 toska – I can’t (and won’t) speak for Richard Dawkins, but the people to whom we say, “You may not yell Jesus-fueled anti-gay hate into the faces of mourners at funerals”, and “No, you may NOT approach women who are entering Planned Parenthood Clinics – you may stand behind this line but you may not cross it”, and “No, you may not use the 1st Amendment/free speech argument as a get-out-of-court-free card when you’ve been going around the world inciting hatred of gays and promoting anti-gay legislation in foreign countries”, will all cry “discrimination”. When groups of people or even individuals are told that they may not do this or that that others are allowed to do (in the case of living within 100 yards of a school or playground for convicted child molesters), that qualifies as “discrimination”, but it is the necessary kind. Please feel free to flame away, everybody.
They must feel so betrayed.
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of man-babies cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced.”
@7 Blanche
Not flaming, but perhaps piling on with a little nuance.
I think the issue is in the way the word “discrimination” is used … well … indiscriminately.
It’s one thing to “discriminate” in a bigoted sense — irrationally based upon characteristics over which someone has no control. Such as color of skin or sexual orientation. That kind of “discrimination” can rightly be universally decried.
The “discrimination” you’re speaking of I like to term “evaluation”. You’re evaluating someone’s words and actions, and judging the state of your future interactions with that person based upon their words and actions. It’s not “discrimination” — it’s “evaluation”. You’re under no obligation to give credence to someone who has proven themselves to be a bigot, nor to even give them the time of day. I spend very little of my life worrying about what Glenn Beck has to say on any issue. I have evaluated his speech; and it’s crap.
The difference is that the first is irrational, and that second is rational. But we use the same word to describe both processes.
I must confess, I’m a bit confused. Which bit in particular does he say “bad harmful things”? Or are you talking in general, rather than about his particular quote?
In general.
I appreciate the expressed sentiment but… No. No no no no no no n …Well, you get the point. Dawkins needs to fucking familiarize himself with Peter Kropotkin.* Hell, he probably has access to the original manuscripts of Kropotkin’s arguments with Huxley, which were written and published in England. If not, he can certainly read Mutual Aid and Ethics. He has no excuse, as an evolutionary biologist making comments about the social implications of evolution, for not having familiarized himself with these debates of over a century ago and for spewing this toxic Pinkeresque nonsense. The claim that a good and just human society goes against our evolutionary heritage is false and, in practice, speciesist, sexist, racist, and pro-capitalist.
Gah. Sorry. I think I’m done.
* He also needs to stop using this pseudoscientific caricature of “survival of the fittest.” He should know better.
Frans de Waal also has a few things to say about that.
Our “evolutionary heritage” actually cuts both ways, and it’s true, as Dawkins said here, that what’s natural and what’s right are two different things. But cooperation and empathy aren’t somehow anti-evolution–they’re also evolved traits.
That’s what *I* thought, too! I read somewhere that there are social species than solitary species, but that could be describing how many more individuals are involved in social living scenarios than solitary. Compare the populations of ants to bumblebees, for example. This xkcd diagram illustrates what I’m talking about – notice how overwhelmingly domesticated animals (all of which are social species) + humans (another social species) outweigh wild animals of all kinds. I mean, if we’re going to say that working together is anti-evolution, then why the hell did things turn out to favor the social species to such a pronounced (and dangerous) degree?
Also, what Lady Mondegreen (aka Stacy) says.
I actually kind of believe that the existence of a men’s rights movement caught him off guard, though I have to admit that it’s only because of my limited experience.
Nearly all of the MRAs I’ve encountered are online. Whenever I end up in a discussion of feminism offline, and manage to bring up the Men’s Rights Movement, the conversation ends up something like this:
Person: Wait. Hold on. What do you mean “men’s rights movement”?
Me: Yeah. There’s a movement out there of men and, unfortunately, some women, who think men are losing rights, so they have to fight to get them back.
Person: That does not sound real. At all.
They then go and look it up, and come back to me with something like this:
Person: So I looked up that men’s rights thing, and holy crap it’s ridiculous. Are you sure this is real and not somebody’s bad idea of a joke?
The people can be men or women, and many times they are not the biggest fans of feminism. A couple times, at least, it’s prompted the ones who really dislike feminism to do a little more research. At least two men who, in our conversations, expressed all but a hatred for feminism, told me, after looking up this MRM thing, that they’re going to do more research on feminism, because if this is what exists in opposition, then feminism must be doing something right after all.
So most people that I’ve interacted with offline, while aware of feminism, seem to be entirely ignorant of the whole MRM, and seem to be, if not outright disgusted by it, at least turned off of it. Often they’ll mention finding A Voice for Men and actually being a bit afraid of what they’ve read on the site.
GamerGate is a more recent discussion, as one of the very few places I hang out in is frequented by a lot of gamers, and a number of them have told me that GamerGate basically made them feminists.
I grant my experience is heavily limited, but people I actually talk to about this stuff don’t know about the MRM, and when they find out, at least a couple of them end up being pushed towards a more favorable view of feminism because of what they read from places like A Voice for Men. And I’ve mentioned in the past how one very good friend of mine sees the MRM as a source of wonderful comedy. He’s a prat, and loves to use MRM arguments as a way of making the whole thing look patently absurd, which it is. So he making fun of MRAs, in his own prattish way.
So I guess, from what I’m seeing, the MRM is definitely not mainstream, and seems to be turning away people who, at first, sound like they might actually like the idea of it.
I feel that I should point out that this acknowledgment on his part is an aspect of a standard rhetorical trick. The supposed rejection of the naturalistic fallacy is just a part of the implicit suggestion that the claims about what’s “natural” are true. The “I don’t think it’s right” portion then carries the implicit message that, right or not, what’s “natural” is to some extent inevitable and justified.
“Of course, I don’t think women should be institutionally excluded from or discriminated against in STEM fields. But men’s greater evolutionary possibility of excelling in these areas does to a great extent explain women’s so-called underrepresentation at the highest levels and will make social engineering efforts to achieve parity difficult if not impossible.”
“Of course, rape is terrible, and should be considered criminal. But men’s natural tendency to sexual aggression and violence explains to a large extent how widespread rape is and probably dooms efforts to eliminate it to failure. It should also be taken into account when assessing men’s responsibility for rape.”
“Of course, we shouldn’t develop economic systems on the basis of evolution, but Man’s proclivity to truck and barter and the survival of the fittest mean that capitalism is the system most attuned to human nature. Attempts to eradicate it, going against evolutionary propensities, are artificial and highly likely to fail.”
And so on…
It’s a rhetorical strategy that naturalizes and implicitly justifies the status quo and proclaims alternatives as difficult and unnatural, all in the name of humanism. I hate that shit.
Oh – and there’s another important aspect: those humans – black, colonized – who are behind on the “anti-Darwinian” path need the tutelage and control of the whites who are further along in order to progress away from their natural savage animality. It’s all so very…convenient.
re: #16
I don’t pretend to know how much destructive human behavior is “natural” and how much is purely conditioned or learned, but whatever the answer turns out to be, we know through common experience that it’s possible for a sane person to override an impulse.
And even if some aggression, selfishness, etc. is rooted in some kind of default “human nature”, that’s still only the starting point. People are capable of suppressing or sublimating their urges, and learning more sophisticated behaviors and thought patterns.
It seems like there is a school of thought that condemns any opinion about human nature other than (a) there is no human nature comparable to the innate tendencies in other animals–everything is 100% social and cultural constructs imposed on a blank slate or (b) humans have instincts but they are entirely nurturing and cooperative ones. All the bad stuff is learned.
I actually hope one of those is true. But it isn’t a moral offense to doubt optimistic theories. One can think or suspect that our species has any number of nasty tendencies (or a volatile mixture of aggressive and cooperative ones being a more common view) and still advocate civilized and progressive values.
“Do whatever comes natural” is not the message of any morally serious philosophy. Treating others as equals and renouncing violence are good ideas whatever evolutionary baggage we may or may not be carrying around.
You also don’t pretend to examine the anthropological, sociological, historical, cross-cultural, neuroscientific evidence in forming your beliefs. Nor do you pretend to understand that there isn’t a division between “natural” and “learned” given that we, amongst other species, have evolved to develop and learn in families and cultures.
You’ve now assumed, and presented as something “we” “know” through “common experience” that the following categories exist: sane/insane, natural impulse/control. You appear to believe that natural impulses are irrational, violent, and aggressive, controlled by the sane, rational, and civilized. “Nature” is the source of (apparently negative) impulses, overridden by (I’m guessing some selection of) human cultures. For some reason. Can’t imagine what that might be. Funny how those ideas align with white/male/human supremacism.
Even if? That appears to be your own assumption.
.
It’s not a starting point. It’s your assumption, which, shockingly, coincides with the capitalist and supremacist status quo.
Yes, yes, savage urges vs. civilization. It’s all very original and scientific (Freudian drive theory is a nice touch – I’d be happy to explain where Marcuse and other instinct theorists went wrong, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow*). Do you understand that I don’t share your assumptions? Do you understand that my previous posts address these sorts of ideological claims? Do you understand that they are ideological claims?
It seems like that to you, because you refuse to see your statements as ideology.
Read this. Read these. Read Kropotkin. If you don’t wish to, then be aware that you’re talking out of your ass and that you’re unclear about the concepts “bad stuff,” “instincts,” “human nature,” “learned,” human,” “animal,” “culture,” “innate,” “social,”…
Thank you, Ed, for providing an example of what I’m talking about. And now I’m out – I have a resolution not to comment while drunk and I’m right on the border.
P.S. It is a moral offense to believe bullshit. I really do want you to question the assumptions you’ve brought to this discussion, particularly about animalistic/aggressive/selfish/irrational/natural impulses vs. civilized/controlled/caring/reasoned/cultural determinations. Just try it. Stop and consider why these presumptions have such currency generally and why they appeal to you. Open yourself up to the intellectual and moral possibilities abandoning them might make available.
Good night everyone, and thanks, Ophelia!
Dawkins hasn’t been exposed to the ‘Men’s Rights Movement’ enough to grasp how crazy they are. Of course, there IS no real movement for ‘rights’ because such a movement would attempt to compliment OTHER concerns for ‘rights.’ What we have out there is a Men’s Resentment Movement.
It is remarkable, the extent to which MRAs and PUAs invoke ‘evo-psych’ rationales for ridiculous sexism. I don’t know why they don’t do the same for racism…well, actually I do: nobody is naive enough to buy such horseshit in that venue. Almost nobody.
Human culture, including sexual/gender culture, is NOT explicable in terms of natural selection. Our evolving history has put us in a place where bonding, community, learning, and co-operative effort are the norm.
Oh, hell! My first sentence should have ended with a question mark. How can Dawkins make so many foolish statements around gender and sex issues WITHOUT noticing these trolls?
A long time ago there was The National Lampoon.
and look, someone else remembers this cartoon
http://www.mundoblaineo.org/blogpress/2012/05/24/did-anyone-actually-see-the-candidate-eat-the-rat/
Does Dawkins not have People Keeping Him?
SC(Salty Current) OM
You’re right that “nature vs. nurture” isn’t neatly divisible since humans are extremely social beings who do virtually everything in the context of communities. It’s easy to either oversimplify or write a ten page essay to get one small point across when commenting on complex, non-linear phenomena.
My own social and political views are actually considered ultra-left in the US and would probably be left-leaning in any of the so-called democracies. I’m for massively increased human rights and anti-discrimination laws, educational spending, and public infrastructure projects. This includes guaranteed access to food, shelter and healthcare.
I’ll certainly give some thought to how my mildly pessimistic (provisional) views on human nature could be wrong. Hopefully they are. If a situation turns out to be better than I originally suspected my usual reaction is to be relieved. Coincidentally, I got a book by Kropotkin the other day, so since you recommended him I’ll put it at the top of my non-fiction reading list.