Never mind what he did say
And while we’re on the subject of strange readings and stranger arguments, Mark Vernon offers some more of those.
I have sometimes wondered why no enterprising journalist, as far as I know, hasn’t had a dig around in Richard Dawkins’ past in order to find the cause of his revolt against religion. But perhaps there is no need. It is all there in The God Delusion. A little analysis draws attention to three psychoanalytically significant things that stand out in the book. The first, that one can be certain God does not exist. With science, Dawkins has killed him. This, of course, is for Freud an Oedipal slaying of the God/Father.
Except that Dawkins not only doesn’t say ‘that one can be certain God does not exist,’ he says that one can’t. He says that explicitly and at some length. So…what is psychoanalytically significant about Mark Vernon’s misreading, I wonder? No actually I don’t wonder, because I don’t think it is psychoanalytically significant. I think it’s intellectually and as it were politically significant – as yet another example, among a great many, of people – including, bafflingly, atheists – who misread Dawkins in much the same way. Who keep endlessly recycling the same mistakes no matter how many times Dawkins disavows them and quotes what he actually did say in the book.
[I]n the preface Dawkins begins with a reference to his wife (the quote is ‘As a child…’ which is to say that, like the Mother, she is innocent of any actions of the God/Father)…This excessive exercise (twice) in objective assurance (‘a reader other than myself’) from an innocent, consolatory female (his wife) is the maternal figure, and completes the picture in Dawkins’ religio-psychic drama.
That’s a creepily condescending and profoundly silly misreading of the reference to Lalla Ward. That ‘As a child’ is not at all to say that like the Mother etc etc – Vernon makes it sound as if it’s an echo of First Corinthians 13, but it’s just a factual declaration. The full sentence is ‘As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.’ The anecdote is about the fact that she was miserable, her parents never knew, they later asked her why she never told them, she said “But I didn’t know I could.”‘ It’s got nothing to do with evoking innocence or ‘the Mother’ – on the contrary, it’s more to do with the general human condition of helplessness under authority. The ‘I didn’t know I could’ is the key point, and that’s not the point Vernon is giggling over.
And that’s what’s so supremely annoying about this kind of critic – their perpetual refusal to engage with the actual book and its actual arguments, and their insistence on engaging with invented issues of their own manufacture.
There’s an irony there, if they could only see it. The more people churn out silly straw-grasping inaccurate irrelevant retorts, the worse they make their ’cause’ look. They keep adding to the stack of evidence that they simply can’t think properly, or even read carefully. Is that what they want to convey? I wouldn’t think so.
The analysis? Dawkins’ atheism is grounded in a psychological murder of the God/Father…For Dawkins, the Oedipal counter-current manifests itself not in hearing divine voices but in an unquestioning commitment to a new paternal figure/institution, namely modern science (note the element of trust in science that is necessary to make this commitment, since science alone does not disprove God/murder the Father, only makes God’s existence/Father’s survival improbable). Science is Dawkin’s adoptive Father figure now that he has done away with the old one.
Uh huh. Sure. Now let’s ask about the analysis of this goofy exercise of Vernon’s. Let’s note the irony – of the heavy weather he makes of ‘trust’ in science, while at the same time and apparently without noticing it, he trusts the pseudoscience of Freudian psychoanalysis. He patronizes Dawkins for ‘unquestioning’ commitment to a new paternal figure, Daddy Science, while himself trusting unquestioningly in that discredited fraud Daddy Sigmund. Anybody out there got time to do a Jungian analysis of Mark Vernon?
Can we now officially stop taking Mark Vernon to be in any way a serious or respectable thinker and writer? I mean, for cryin’ out loud! A Freudian analysis of Dawkins? WTF?!?
What we have here is a new event for the Twit Olympics: willful misreading of an atheist text – with extra points awarded for specious arguments, cheap rhetoric, and emotive blather. Freud references, counting as all three at once, definitely put Vernon in the running for the gold medal.
(My theory being: If I start treating rampant idiocy as a spectator sport, I’ll find it more entertaining and lest jaw-clenchingly irritating. I’ll let you know how it works out.)
Ohh, I suppose we can, if you really really want to.
But I feel a sort of duty to keep track of these misreadings. I find it really interesting, and indicative of something or other, that there are so many of them and so few of the other kind.
Good luck with the jaw.
What is tragic, really, truly tragic, is that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of educated people out there *who think that this sort of thing is clever*; and not just clever, but culturally significant, valid argumentation….
If our universities didn’t graduate another ‘literary critic’ for twenty years, it would be too soon…
“I have sometimes wondered why no enterprising journalist, as far as I know, hasn’t had a dig around in Richard Dawkins’ past in order to find the cause of his revolt against religion.”
Why, has MV ever wondered, in the first place why an innovative journalist should ‘dig around’ in RD’s past etc…? One would reflect that something like that would be the preserve of a very highly trained person to do – and not that of an enterprising journalist. “Dig around” has a grubby, soiled, dirty halo about it. “Dig around” is precisely what some crime/political journalists’ do when they want to investigate matters of a very seedy /sordid nature. Their aim of course is to root out the causes of revolt against innocent victims.
Good night one and all.
I know…I’ve just been reading someone defending ‘feminist standpoint theory.’ With a straight face.
I can do a Jungian analysis. I love Jung, even if he was clearly insane. However, this would require me to look into who the Hell Mark Vernon actually is.
As a serious feminist, I have a question: What on earth is “feminist standpoint theory”?
No. Wait. On second thought, don’t tell me. The jaw needs a break.
;-)
It is worth reading the comments under Vernon’s essay.
I like this one from Ric: “Maybe Dawkin’s atheism is grounded in rationality and logic. Or, put another way, your analysis is silly.”
It sums it up, for me.
“I have sometimes wondered why no enterprising journalist, as far as I know, hasn’t had a dig around in Richard Dawkins’ past in order to find the cause of his revolt against religion.”
————————
Isn’t that a double negative? It seems to be against his argument.
This kind of fantasy-Freud ad hominem is particularly common in attacks on gun people, though it was more popular in 1980 than now.
Ridicule him – the moron.
Actually there is one context in which a Freudian approach makes sense. Art created during the brief period when it was believed by some artists might require some background to be properly understood, just as a knowledge of religious symbolism helps in the understanding of art created by religious people. So literary critics will still need to follow this sort of thing when covering the 20th Century. Doesn’t mean they have to believe it of course…
G, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_feminism
Not unreasonable at all.
I don’t know about Jungian analysis, but here’s a simple layman’s analysis.
Mark Vernon is an idiot.
G, so you haven’t read Why Truth Matters then? Tsk. It’s in there. Read a little Sandra Harding some time – if your jaw can stand it.
Actually, I did some N&Cs on Harding while I was working on that bit of WTM – I gave some substantial quotations. I’ll see if I can find those, later.
I’ve let you know many times in many places on B&W; I don’t have time to spell it out yet again. If you want to know, do a little work.
Arrgh! I’d forgotten the label, but I’m very familiar with Sandra Harding’s unsupported blather. When I was much younger and less familiar with the tricksy ways of post-modern manipulation of language to make the ridiculous appear somehow meaningful and relevant, I was somewhat impressed with The Science Question In Feminism – for a few chapters. Then Harding started blathering on about how 1 is inherently phallic and 0 – nothing, the void – symbolic of patriarchy’s negation of women AS IF THAT WERE SOMEHOW RELEVANT TO EPISTEMOLOGY AND SCIENCE… and the essential loony-ness of her whole approach became too obvious for clever word-play to obscure.
Thanks for the wikipedia link, Barry: I actually couldn’t resist finding out what it was and had already looked it up myself and jogged my memory. (So much for my jaw.) It’s interesting how the very content-light wikipedia entry makes it all appear very reasonable: The devil is, as usual, in the details.
There’s at least one Harding gem in B&W’s quotations.
Hmmmmm.
Reading the wikipedia entry. I don’t think it makes it appear all that reasonable.
“Their location as a subordinated group allows women to see and understand the world in ways that are different from and challenging to the existing male-biased conventional wisdom.”
One, does it? And two, “conventional wisdom”? Doesn’t that prejudge the issue just a tad? Since the claim is about knowledge of the world, it’s slightly question-begging to label male knowledge in general as “conventional wisdom.”
“Standpoint feminist theorists attempt to criticise dominant conventional epistemologies in the social and natural sciences, as well as defend the coherence of feminist knowledge.”
“Conventional” again – Sandra Harding does that a lot too: deploys words like “conventional” to make her case for her. I wonder if Harding wrote the wikipedia entry.
It’s not unreasonable as a political view, but the trouble is, Harding and others take it to be applicable to epistemology, and when they do that they talk the most godawful nonsense. It’s embarrassing.
Well, I was more indicating that a casual skim of the wiki would just lead most readers to think something along the lines of “Oh, so it’s just about taking women’s perspectives seriously instead of ignoring them, specifically applied to science. Makes sense…” It’s the surface appearance of reasonableness that I find interesting: There is no mention whatsoever of the very, very problematic conclusions which follow naturally from the assumptions concealed in the broad language you cite. For my part, I would never think to write any explanation of a controversial philosophical position without mentioning the most commonly cited drawbacks and objections – say, unpacking this very loaded and assumption-concealing notion that women have “a different type of knowledge.” (Different content, certainly. But a different TYPE of knowledge? Suddenly we’re treading in the woo-ridden landscape of “different ways of knowing” without having any notion where we turned.) In contrast, this wiki entry just mentions one category of criticism – from post-modernists who offer an even more utterly incoherent perspective on knowledge! WTF?
When you think about it a bit, the notion that the epistemology of science is “conventional” – ordinary, bog-standard, used-by-everyone, just the way things are done, etc. – is so far from reality that it’s almost, but not quite, funny. Poignant, rather. Oh, how I wish ’twere so!
Yeah, that’s a good point. An opportunity for mocking Harding that I missed! ‘Conventional’ where exactly, and how soon can I get there?
That incoherent postmodernist bit is a riot. Critics point out that actually some women may sometimes be privileged – no! really? – so we have to take into account who is privileged when and then we have to balance race, class, sex, eye colour, shoe size, place of birth and then we combine them all into a frrrrghwaggyoppop. It just winds itself up into a froth of incoherence.
I thought the MV post had to be a piss-take until I read the comments. Hey-ho. Glad Jean had the energy to get stuck in.
Yes, the comments provided interesting amplification.
I was reading up a little on Karen Armstrong. I learned that she was once a religious teaching sister belonging to the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. I commit to memory, this order of sisters having an excellent boarding school in St Leonard’s – on – Sea, East Sussex. I stayed in this seaside town for one whole year – which is adjacent to Battle, Hastings. She could have taught in this school! These specific sisters were from my outward experience, kindness wise very poles apart from those belonging to the teaching order of the sisters of Mercy. Cornelia Connolly, the foundress of SHCJ, or otherwise known as Mother Connolly, would have been proud of them as disparate to Mother Catherine MaCauley of the Sisters of Mercy.