[Previous: Why I lost faith in New Atheism]

I haven’t thought about Richard Dawkins in a while, but he’s still around. At the age of 83, he’s going on a lecture tour that’s being advertised as his farewell bow. Ross Andersen, writing for the Atlantic, attended one of these talks.

It really is a tragedy what Dawkins has become. Those of us who once looked up to him, including me, admired him for his earnest desire to bring the spirit of scientific wonder to the masses. It was his first passion in life, and that was always obvious when he was speaking about it. I had the impression that his atheist advocacy wasn’t separate from that, but came from the same wellspring of wanting everyone to know the true nature of reality. Next to the power of real understanding, the tall tales of religion are shoddy counterfeits.

The attendees at the talk (though lacking a certain diversity) still reflect some of that spirit:

The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

However, the evening immediately took an ugly turn. The introduction, from a member of Atheists for Liberty – a hard-right organization – gave a hint of what was to unfold:

Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty, told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition. Klein’s opening remarks, to that point, could have described Dawkins of 20-odd years ago, when he was first going on the attack against religion’s “profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.” But then things took a turn. Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed.” He sounded a lot like J. D. Vance.

Regrettably, this wasn’t a case of an overstepping host seizing the pulpit to preach his own weird ideas. Dawkins himself has embraced this worldview, to his detriment:

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

But… sex is a continuum. That’s not political correctness or woke culture gone mad. That’s science!

Sexual reproduction evolved from precursor species that were asexual, and nature doesn’t do binary, saltationary jumps from one state to another. Evolution works through gradual transitions and slow accumulations of complexity.

If you think sex is a straightforward binary, then how do you explain the many species that are hermaphroditic, producing both male and female gametes? What about the species that change sex in response to life cycles or environmental cues?

Even if you confine the discussion to human beings, there are people whose bodies defy simplistic notions of a gender binary. There are people with chimeric sex chromosomes, ambiguous genitalia, and bodies that don’t match what a genetic scan “should” lead one to expect. Dawkins, who’s a biologist, has no excuse for not knowing any of this.

Richard Dawkins, of all people, has done the same thing creationists are so often guilty of. He started with an ideological premise – in his case, that transgender and non-binary people shouldn’t exist – and allowed that belief to dictate his factual conclusions. Certainly, you can make philosophical arguments about what makes a person male or female, or debate how we should allocate rights based on sex or gender. But there should be no room for denying the facts of nature to support a political preference.

The saddest part of this is that, even while echoing the language and the preoccupations of right-wing culture warriors, Dawkins doesn’t seem to understand why they cheer him:

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics.

This is the only thing Andersen has to say about this video call – no further detail, no direct quotes – and his article suffered from the omission. I wish we could’ve heard more details from that call. Why does Dawkins think he’s getting support from right-wingers?

Does he have any idea? Even a wild guess? Or is he just writing it off as a mystery he has no desire to speculate about?

When it comes to culture-war issues like this, Dawkins isn’t just on the same side as the right; he’s on the same side as the religious right. You’d think that he, of all people, would have noticed the stark incongruity of this.

Obviously, I don’t choose my opinions based on the company it puts me in. But if I found that my allies on one issue were people I vehemently disagreed with about almost everything else… at the very least, I’d want to do some serious reflection to figure out why that was. Dawkins seems remarkably incurious about it.

Andersen suggests that Dawkins built his reputation on defending evolution against creationist attacks. Now that that’s no longer a burning culture-war issue, he doesn’t know what to do with himself and he’s casting about for another target worthy of his attention:

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational.

I think this misses the mark. At best, it’s only a partial explanation.

Rather, Dawkins possesses an all-too-human flaw: he can dish it out but can’t take it. He delights in skewering other people’s sacred cows, but when it’s his own cherished assumptions under attack, he lashes out with the same knee-jerk defensiveness he so often encounters from religious believers. (Remember when I wrote an article in the Guardian offering some criticisms of Dawkins, and he flew into a rage and accused me of wanting to stamp out all dissent with my verbal jackboots?)

Like I said, Dawkins built his persona on scientific skepticism, on willingness to question what everyone “knows” to be true. In The God Delusion, he wrote: “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.”

Now he’s abandoned that principle entirely. It’s almost a cliche: the scientist who made great achievements in his youth, but ossified into stubborn crankery in his old age, resisting any new ideas he wasn’t personally responsible for.

When confronted with sex and gender issues or social-justice controversies that he had no personal experience with, his own principles should have led him to be gracious, considerate and open-minded. Instead, he entrenched himself, exactly like the fundamentalists he deplores. He concluded that he was right and everyone else was wrong and that he had nothing left to learn. It’s small-minded, mean behavior, unworthy of a true scientist. It’s a grand shame that, at the twilight of his career, he’s made this his last act and the way he wants to be remembered.