Motus Mentis

This is all over social media today: Richard Dawkins, one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and author, in 2006, of The God Delusion has now admitted that he likes Christendom, and suddenly sees it as a thing to be promoted and defended. Here’s a clip from the interview that’s getting all the attention:

This is quite something: Richard Dawkins, undoubtedly the world's leading atheist, the author of The God Delusion, comes out as "cultural Christian" and calls for the UK to promote Christianity as opposed to Islam, which he calls "not a decent religion".pic.twitter.com/NuQBh2R3cw…

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 1, 2024

It is impossible not to enjoy a little schadenfreude here; a great many of us haven’t been shouting from the ramparts about this for a very long time now. If you like living in the fine house your ancestors built, then you shouldn’t go around pulling out the bricks and timbers.

This hubris is a constant amongst world-saving intellectuals: they look at the complex systems of the world, and imagine they can just yank out the bits they don’t approve of, or can’t be bothered to understand. And when their simplified model (which, more often than not, they try to impose by force once they’ve been given an atom of power) collapses in ruins, they generally simply walk away, or blame the rest of us for not trying hard enough. (To Dawkins’ credit, he now seems genuinely to begin — just barely — to grasp that he failed to understand how important religion was for the creation and preservation of the culture he took for granted.)

Churchill knew Dawkins’ type well:

Historians have noticed, all down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people which has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle. The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?

What makes Dawkins’ failure to understand the extent of his debt to Christianity particularly piquant is that Curtis Yarvin, the former “Mencius Moldbug” wrote in an influential 2007 essay — one of the ur-documents of neoreaction — that Dawkins, for all his affectation of lofty rationalistic immunity to religious “delusions”, was really just a rebellious twig on a particular branch of a very old Christian tree:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.

The essay (really a series of essays) was called How Dawkins Got Pwned. It’s long, but you really should settle in somewhere comfortable and read it, because at this point Moldbug’s essays, and the rest of the NRx canon, have had such a broad (if subterranean) influence, and understood what was happening so clearly, that they are an important part of our rapidly evolving cultural history.

Meanwhile: Professor Dawkins, you should have stuck to what you did so well. (And he did do it well. Did you know, for example, that Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, invented the idea of the “meme”? The term has now been degraded to refer just to snarky little graphics for poasting online, but the original idea — that little packages of cognitive content can replicate themselves in minds by jumping from host to host, and can compete with other memes in a selection environment in a way that is very much like what genes do — was itself a brilliant meme that has proven his point by its own success.)