Thought leadering again
Meanwhile Dawkins is still at it, generously calling people stupid on the basis of nothing in particular. I forget if I mentioned that he did that in the onstage interview he did at CFI’s conference in June. He referred to someone or some group as an idiot or idiots. I flinched, I scowled, I wished he would stop doing that. But he hasn’t.
Today it was a girl of 16 – one who did a colossally wrong and bad thing, but stupidity isn’t the only explanation for teenagers who do colossally wrong and bad things.
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins 14 hours ago
If a girl as manifestly stupid as this gets good grades at school, is it time we examined our grading system?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/schoolgirl-fully-radicalised-by-isis-propaganda-must-be-taken-away-from-deceitful-parents-judge-rules-10466815.html
She’s 16. People of that age have bad judgement. Their brains haven’t fully developed yet, and won’t until they’re 25. That doesn’t mean they’re “stupid” and it doesn’t mean they can’t be academically brilliant. Lots of people on Twitter tried to explain that to Dawkins, but he wasn’t having it.
The judge in the Independent article knows better:
B was one of a number of intelligent young girls within the London borough of Tower Hamlets who had “seduced by the belief that travelling to Syria to become what are known as jihadi brides is a somewhat romantic and honourable path for them and their families,” Mr Justice Hayden said. The reality on the ground “holds only exploitation, degradation and death”, he said. “In other words, these children with whose future I have been concerned have been at risk of really serious harm, and as such the state is properly obligated to protect them.”
There was no reason to believe B would not achieve her ambition of becoming a doctor after achieving outstanding GCSE results, he said. But only a “safe and neutral environment” free from the “powerful and pernicious influences” of jihadi propaganda could now protect the teenager’s well-being.
It’s not that the grading system is broken, it’s that it doesn’t measure the mental faculties it takes to be unimpressed by IS.
I’m sure Dawkins knows Maajid Nawaz. Does he think Maajid is stupid? Surely not. You do the math.
He said a follow-up thing later that’s just wrong on the facts in addition to lacking insight.
@Egoch You seriously think @Ayaan, at 16, would have run away to become a “Jihadi bride”?
Well she did go through a Muslim Brotherhood phase, so yes, I think that’s entirely possible.
Go away and learn how to
oh never mind.
Re: Dawkins
If a person as manifestly stupid as this can write best-selling books, what does it say about the book-buying public?
He’s obviously a bright guy, but says lots of ridiculous things without the excuse of being 16 years old. And when he’s called on it he just doubles down. Sounds a lot like a certain clown running for president.
Bless his stoney little heart. Always so helpful.
Hah. Dawkins is the poster child for the “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” meme. And yes, Richard, I used your own word to ridicule you just now.
:-)
I must say (not for the first time) that you are an exemplary exponent of the tenth commandment.
16 year olds are full of thoughts of how the world SHOULD be, which makes them easily drawn into rather questionable religious thinking. Which is *extremely dangerous* in cases like this.
Yeah, well – another irritating an unproductive tweet of Dawkins. I guess no one is surprised.
Still, “stoney little heart” (a phrase from one of the comments above) wouldn’t be a description of my choice. I see him rather as one of those who *do* care – and who get angry, reckless and even ruthless exactly because of that. I see him as a representative of the whole “we are sooo right and we are sooo furious!” approach, with all the dangers and the pitfalls nicely illustrated.
I wish it was the whole story. But it isn’t. For example, it’s also about her family. From the Independent paper:
I suspect that the brains of her parents *are* fully developed. Doesn’t make much of a difference, does it?
In this context, I can’t help thinking of writers and intellectuals, seduced by stalinism in my country – the phenomenon of brilliant, creative, intelligent people, with brains fully developed, becoming ardent supporters of the political system which “holds only exploitation, degradation and death” (‘The Captive Mind’ by Miłosz contains a description of a handful of chosen cases.)
Ah, but now I know at last the simple solution: these people just shouldn’t have received good grades at school!
Silentbob @ 4 – awwww – what a recursively nice thing to say.
Having read ‘Infidel’ fairly recently, I think one of the points Ali was striving to make was that she WAS completely indoctrinated, first by Brotherhood influence, and later by even more deranged Wahhabism.
It isn’t the grading that should be blamed. Perhaps the avoidance of the duty of care that secular education in modern societies requires. Giving unearned ‘respect’ to every sub-group and ‘community leader’ means that children are left open to the most pernicious indoctrination so long as it is masked by religion.
I seem to remember that, when Dawkins was at QED in Manchester, he was talking about how he had used to be quite taken by Teilhard de Chardin – this lasted until he read Medwar’s response during his undergrad years. That is to say, until he was somewhere between 18 and 21, Dawkins himself was fairly open to religious thinking.
Does that mean that, by his own standards, he was stupid?
Maybe his response would run like this: that there’s a world of difference between de Chardin’s homilies and becoming a jihadi. Maybe a clever person could be taken in by gentle Jesuits in a way that they would never be by mad Mullahs.
Maybe. But Dawkins was from a financially secure, fairly liberal, cosmopolitan background. Had he been the same bright kid that he was in a different household, can he be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t have been much more vulnerable to radicalisation? I doubt it.
Even if you allow that would-be jihadis are stupid, it’s possible that that’s simply because they’re stupefied; that they’re bright kids, too, but bright kids whose intellect isn’t given the space to grow; that they’re bright kids who grow up to hate the West because… well, because they’re bright but missing out. I can see how that might piss people off and lead them to accept all kinds of options. If you’ve been brought up to see only one alternative to the world in which you live, and there is something wrong with that world, then the one alternative is the one you’ll take.
From another household, that kid might just become a goth for a few years instead, or go for a gap year to volunteer at a Kenyan orphanage, or reconcile yourself to the world because it’s not as straightforward as all that after all, or become a bit goddy in a kum-ba-ya sort of a way, or drink cheap cider in the park, or write bad poetry… well, one or more of any number of things that disorientated teenagers do.
Or maybe Dawkins is just special.
Gee, you mean Richard Dawkins refused to accept the notion that academic success is the be-all, end-all of intelligence? I’m shocked.
What always strikes me hard with these all too frequent Dawkins comments is the extreme lack of empathy he projects.
Would Dawkins also call Francis Collins stupid? Collins has some ideas that are poorly thought out (I saw DNA, and realized there must be a god), but one thing he is not is stupid. And some of my most intelligent students believe some totally wrong things, like vaccines cause autism. I probably believe some stupid things, but can’t expound on that as I do not know what they are. I would hope that once I realized they were stupid I’d quit believing them, but we can never be sure about that, right?
And Dawkins is a good example of how an extremely intelligent, well educated person can in fact say and do some very stupid things.