Dawkins' Tweet About Islam, Cambridge And Nobel Prizes

Richard Dawkins is a bit of a roller-coaster. I never know whether the next piece of his writing I'm going to read is going to be brilliant, stupid or somewhere in between. This recent tweet of his:

"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."

is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.

But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.

It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.

I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.

The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."

One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.

Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

I was arguing with someone in the HuffPo readers' comments about Sam Harris,who seems to be the English-speaking world's third-most prominent spokesman for atheism currently, behind Richard Dawkinsand Christopher Hitchens.Dawkins is someone I can proudly call a spokesman of a movement to which I belong, even if I don't choose to call that movement "New Atheism." (PS, 23. September 2015: I really should have read some of Dawkins' writing on religion before I wrote that. I had read some of his work on biology and mistakenly assumed that his work on religion must be just as good. Dawkins really should stick to biology; on the subject on religion he's a dingbat just like Hitch and Harris and all the other New Atheists.) (I just call it atheism. No biggie, but the "New" part seems somewhat silly to me.) (PS, 23. September 2015: I now call THEM New Atheists, and am attempting to show that they by no means represent all atheists.) I have referred to Hitchins as a dingbat, and a drunken dingbat, and similar things, but Lordy -- so to speak -- he's so much more impressive than this guy Harris. Harris is on a kick now about something he calls the moral landscape. Which is just utilitarianism. Which was new in the mid-19th century when John Stuart Millwas presenting it for the first time. New, but unimpressive. Easily batted aside several decades later by Nietzsche'sanalysis of morality, or more accurately, of moralities. Nietzsche pointed out that morality is always a subjective thing, and that was pretty much that for utilitarianism. Or so a sensible person could've been forgiven for supposing. But Lordy -- so to speak -- look at Harris go!

I was arguing with someone about Harris. A couple of others were, too, but, it seemed, fewer than with Harris' previous HuffPo article. Perhaps they found it futile quicker than I. Perhaps they are wiser than I. I really should stop this squabbling on the Internet -- I just get all dirty, and the pigs have all of the fun. I and a couple of others were pleading: read Nietzsche. Read Schopenhauer. Read Sartre.This ground has been covered, and much better than Harris is doing it. At one point, as I gradually gave up on the squabble, someone called Schopenhauer an obscurantist. Schopenhauer?! If anyone at all in the Western canon tells it like it smells, it is Arthur Schopenhauer. He is a model of clarity and frankness. I was about to respond in this vein when it occurred to me that it would be far more enjoyable to read some Schopenhauer than to argue with this person about him. So I did. I have the five-volume Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft edition,st w 661 through 665. A German friend of mine, like me not an academic, but like me someone who reads widely and with great involvement things which are probably mostly read by academics, became very upset when he heard that I had this edition. In his opinion it is a very bad edition. I don't know what he's talking about, but I mention his opinion because I respect it.

Someone else who was arguing in my anti-Harris vein pleaded with HuffPo's readers to read Heidegger. It had been a long time since I'd attempted to read Heidegger, but I decided to finally buy my own copy of Sein Und Zeit.Sein und Zeit is considered to be Martin Heidegger's masterpiece, his Hauptwerk, his chef d'ouvre. A recent poll of philosophers as to the most significant works of philosophy published in the twentieth century placed Sein und Zeit second, sandwiched between works of Ludwig Wittgensteinat first and third. I had tried years ago to read this and several others of Heidegger's works, but quickly gave up, utterly bewildered.

This time, to my surprise, I was only a little bewildered, and seemed to understand some of what Heidegger was saying. It probably helps that my Greek is now weak, as opposed to non-existent back then. Also, in the meantime I had read some Adorno,putting the German-reading part of my brain through some serious calisthenics.

I am enjoying reading Heidegger. This is something I really thought I might never say. And I really very rarely say "never" when it comes to my ability to read anything. Anything.

I wrote down the name of every author mentioned by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. There are several dozen of them. He included the first initals of some authors who in the meantime -- Sein und Zeit was first published in 1927 -- have become famous enough that they are usually referred to just by their last names, as are Aristotle and Heidegger. For instance, Heidegger made repeated reference to W. Dilthey and K. Jaspers, who these days are usually referred to as Diltheyand Jaspers.On the other hand, Heidegger referred to a scholastic, Suarez, and his work, the disputationes metaphysicae, and I had to look this Suarez up in order to learn that Francisco Suárez was meant, who lived from 1548 to 1617, and that during Suárez' time scholasticism experienced a resurgence. Yikes! I had had no idea.

Most often named are Platoand Aristotle.Named, and quoted in Greek, quotations which Heidegger does not always translate. Heidegger says the question of the nature of being has essentially been dropped since classical Greece. That the concept of being is at once the most universal and the most mysterious. That's within the first couple of pages. I can't tell you much more right now. My mind is reeling, but in a rather pleasant way.

Heidegger was involved with the Nazis. But it seems pretty clear that he saw his relationship to the Nazis as similar to a lion tamer's to his lions, that he did not believe in them or their ideals, but was trying to manipulate them, as opposed to simply emigrating or surrendering his academic post to a party member.

Pretty clear. Not absolutely crystal-clear. After World War II Hannah Arendtspoke up for him, but Karl Jaspers spoke against him. Paul Celanmet with him. I don't have a last word here.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part I, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

About 15 billion years ago, something very small and heavy, containing everything in the universe of which we know, exploded and became very big and hot and gassy. Gravity occurred somehow, or had already been there, or is an aspect or manifestion of the universe being curved, I don't know. Anyhow, hot gas eventually settled into balls, and one of these hot gas balls is our sun, and the Earth was a gas ball orbiting the Sun, and it cooled to the point where it became partly solid, and the Moon started orbiting the earth by mistake, it seems, because generally moons are much smaller proportion to their planets. See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, and Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, or better yet, ask an actual scientist for tips for further reading.

Water appeared, then single-celled organisms. These eventually became more complex and differentiated into plants and animals. Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life tells us when certain species appeared, all of which are ancestors of us humans, hence the book's title. Did you know we're descended from lungfish? They were around 417 million years ago!

Yeah, I'm pretty clueless about such things. I refer you to Dawkins and Darwin, The Origin Of Species.

Darwin referred to the "struggle for existence. The geologist McCandles in William Gaddis' novel Carpenter's Gothic, presumably speaking for the author, complained about people having to struggle against the stupidity of other people, and speculated that it had been thus for quite a while: he imagined the brightest of out hominid ancestors two million years ago in Africa, banging away with rudimentary stone tools and trying to get something done despite the interference of idiots.

Art seems to have pre-dated urban life. Human life so far seems to have included at least 30,000 Years of Art; whether there actually were, by 10,000 B.C., huge stone temples and substantial towns such as those depicted in Roland Emmerich's film, I don't know. I'm picturing nothing much more than huts and cabins at that point, but what do I know?

I know that by 7,000 or 6,000 BC there were cities in Mesopotamia like Ur. (I don't know whether the name of the Mesopotamian city is only coincidentally the same as the German prefix or whether there's more to it than that.) Within a couple of thousand years after that, there were fairly complex civilizations with big towns in Mesopotamia and also in Egypt.

After 3,100 BC the record becomes much more detailed, because by then people had started writing. Probably in Mesopotamia first, in Sumeria, followed closely by Egypt. In both areas writing began as hieroglyphics, picture-writing, but in Mesopotamia it quickly became more abstract. Egypt became a very monolithic single state, Mesopotamia was filled with competing political entities, rising and falling over and over: among these were the Babylonians in the early second millenium BC, the Assyrians in the late second and early first millenia, and in the mid-first millenium, the neo-Babylonians and, pushing into Mesopotamia from the east where they held much more territory still, the Persians.

End of Part I of the Condensed Version