Articles of faith

Robert Macfarlane

A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN by Richard Dawkins Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0297829734

Richard Dawkins loves fighting. More precisely, he loves winning. To be Dawkinsed, as this selection from his essays of the past 25 years makes painfully clear, is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste. Those who incur this treatment have one thing in common: all are enemies of truth, Dawkins-style. Which is to say, all are enemies of science, In the current volume, his targets include postmodernists, bishops, religious leaders of other denominations (or 'cloth-heads', as he mollifyingly calls them), faith healers and New Ageists. Arch-rationalists will love these essays: others will find them by turns brilliant, boorish and idiotic.

Dawkins hasn't always been like this, of course. For years he was known not as a polemicist but as a populariser. He rose to fame as the most adroit PR-man biology has ever had: a writer whose richly metaphoric prose dramatised genetics and evolution for a gigantic lay audience. A zoologist by training, his public reputation was secured more or less overnight in 1976 by the appearance of The Selfish Gene, the book which was acclaimed as having made Darwinism accessible, and having revealed altruism in nature for what it was: a parallax error, an anthropomorphic trick of the light. Genes. Dawkins explained, should be thought of as intelligent items of digital data whose sole aim was to replicate themselves successfully. The organisms they inhabited were merely 'hosts' to these genes. What looked like altruism, he argued, would always in fact be a disguised form of genetic self-interest.

There followed five more books on evolutionary themes, snappily titled and on the whole snappily written. And then, in the 1990s, Dawkins began to flex his muscles outside the domain of evolution. He started to appear with increasing frequency in public forums as science's chief bully-boy, always ready to sock it to pseuds, and in particular to give religion (or 'irrational superstition', as he calls it) a thorough working-over. In the broadsheets, on radio, television and in live debate, Dawkins became a well-known, welt-manicured and ferocious disputer: a militant with the looks of a matinee idol.

Every polemicist has the hero he wants to be. Christopher Hitchens wants to be George Orwell. Gore Vidal wants to be Oscar Wilde, Harold Bloom wants to be Samuel Johnson, George Bush wants, for some reason, to be his father. If he couldn't be Richard Dawkins (someone he clearly admires a great deal), then Richard Dawkins would certainly want to be Thomas Henry Huxley, grandpere of the Huxley clan and frequent point of reference and reverence in Dawkins' writings.

Huxley, who became known in his day as 'Darwin's Bulldog', was evolution's 19thcentury enforcer. His most notorious 15 seconds came during his 1860 debate in Oxford with Bishop 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce (himself no mean orator), over the implications for humanity of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Opinions differ as to who vanquished whom that day, but it is fairly well accepted that Huxley said something to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop. Like Huxley, Dawkins is a scientist who has shouldered the burden of fighting science's corner. And like Huxley, he revels in 'belligerence', in battle, and in rapping out memorably provocative one-liners.

It would seem, however, that Dawkins now doesn't want to be known solely as an attack-scientist. For the stated aim of the volume under review — worshipfully edited by Latha Menon — is to demonstrate 'Richard's' multi-facetedness. We will be shown, Menon's foreword promises us, 'a gentler, more contemplative side' to 'Richard'. The book will provide us, indeed, with what we have all been agog for: 'a unique and personal portrait of Richard'.

Certainly, there are several different types of writing on display here. The first essays in the volume present Dawkins in big-game-hunter mode, out after the elephants and lions on the intellectual savannah (postmodernists, bishops, creationists). In later essays, he appears more like the cock-eyed squire, wiping out rabbits, peasants and other local vermin (astrologers, crystal-gazers, paranormalists) who have strayed onto his turf with blasts from his rhetorical blunderbuss. Then, in the latter half of the book — just in case we thought he was all sound and fury — we are cordially introduced to Relaxed Richard: father, friend and man among men. This section consists of some dilute Sunday-paper travel writing, mostly about Africa; an 'open letter' from Dawkins to his daughter, warning her in Sophie's World tones of the perils of faith and the virtues of empiricism; and two superb elegies. for Douglas Adams and the biologist W. D. Hamilton.

Dawkins has often been admired for his prose style. In these essays, he appears as a stylist in the sense that Toni and Guy are stylists: always with an eye to the photoshoot or the snapshot. In particular, he does a natty line in wisecracks (on relativism, for instance: 'There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.' Or on Stephen Jay Gould; 'he is never ashamed of his immodesty'.) Over the long haul of many of these essays, however. Dawkins comes across less as a writer than a ranter. Too many of them have the sudsy reek of the soap-box about them: too many pull cheap rhetorical tricks and substitute bluster for accuracy.

Take, for instance, Dawkins on what he calls 'Postmodernism', an intellectual 'philosophy' which he apparently 'skewers' in several of the essays here. The capital 'P' is enough to put one on guard, suggesting as it does that 'Postmodernism' is a singular intellectual entity. True enough, Dawkins is not interested in teasing out any of the complexities or varieties of postmodernism, or indeed its affinities with his own thought (his deconstruction of religion as a 'narrative' or 'story', for example). He prefers to dismiss it with sound-bite bitchiness. Thus 'cultural relativism' is 'fashionable nonsense', and 'Postmodernism' is 'metatwaddle. or 'low-grade intellectual poodling' (Feminism', too, comes in for a couple of nasty and brutish sideswipes).

A similar crudeness of thought characterises the multiple attacks on religion reprinted here, By far the least likable of these is an article entitled 'Time to Stand Up', which was 'written in the immediate aftermath' of 9/11. Many writers will now be embarrassed by what they declared during those shocked days, and shouldn't necessarily be held to account (Martin Amis's repugnantly preening description of how the planes 'sharked' and then 'smeared' into the towers springs to mind). But Dawkins has reprinted this essay, and as such it demands consideration.

'It is time to stop pussyfooting around. Time to get angry,' the article begins,

It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms. 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilisations'. Religions is the word you need.

And so Dawkins bangs on, ever so usefully and constructively nominating 'Religion' as the sole cause of 9/11. This is, of course, a reductio so coarse and pointless as to be embarrassing: no less broad-brush in its approach than an 18"-roller. What is distinctive about this essay is not its contrarianism but its crudeness: 9/11 was due to a conspiracy and coincidence of innumerable ideological factors, each with their own complex genealogy. Blaming 'religion' helps neither to unpick the causes of that day, nor to predict its future repercussions.

The problem with many of these essays — and with Dawkins as polemicist in general — is that in its aggression and unfaltering stridency, his hatred of 'non

science' is itself a form of fundamentalism. His jeremiads against religion are guilty of the very crimes they denounce, and the qualities of science (its 'wonder', and its 'excitement') which he uses to browbeat unbelievers are themselves unexamined articles of faith.

There are some unmistakably accomplished essays here, admirable in their coolness and their logic. At its best, Dawkins's prose is invigorating stuff, offering a welcome jag of intravenous rationalism. At its worst, however, it can appear as mindless intellectual thuggery. The finest polemicists are smilers with knives, slipping blades between the ribs of their enemies. Too often in this volume, Dawkins comes across as science's hired muscle: the bruiser in the bad suit with the baseball bat, stepping forward to administer a messy and unnecessary quietus.