Total Eclipse of the Arse

So there was a total eclipse this morning. I wonder, I found myself thinking, what Richard Dawkins thinks about this. As luck would have it, he took to Twitter to tell us:

Solar eclipse visible in Medina, Jan 632. If only the true nature of eclipses had been Koranically 'revealed', that would be impressive!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 20, 2015

My immediate thought was that this exhibits the philistinism of the man. Well, my first thought was in fact, "you utter wanker". But the philistinism one was definitely near the top of the list. The point is that the mirror-image fundamentalism with which Dawkins approaches religious texts betrays an incomprehension that people might use language to do anything other than communicate facts, or at least purported facts, about the physical world. There's nothing peculiarly religious to this line of criticism. For much the same reason you wouldn't want to read a critical essay on Middlemarch by Dawkins, and wouldn't bother to turn up to a rap-battle at which he was a contestant. In fact, when you think about the range of human endeavours that must for him be as baffling as the Quaranic text, the title of his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder seems about as apt as that of Mel C's little known memoir An Appetite for Twelve-Tone Serialism.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about left-wing politics, rather than to slag off Richard Dawkins, laudible though that activity always is. There is, I think, a political question along the lines of: what is it about our contemporary society that produces public intellectuals like Dawkins and how do we get rid of it as quickly as possible? But the real action is elsewhere.

Because what's really wrong with Dawkins' tweet is the Islamophobia. Because be in no doubt that is what's going on here. The irrational other, Islam, bays for blood at the gates of Western civilisation, whose only hope is that the beast be tamed by Reason, as dispensed by the likes of Dawkins. So far, so much a standard orientalist trope (I am so tempted to use the word 'meme' here, but I'd feel dirty). But this irrational dark-skinned other is a particularly dangerous one. For Islam, by Dawkins own admission, is a uniquely dangerous inhabitant of the religious zoo. So much so, that he has even flirted with the idea of supporting Christian missionaries in Africa to stem the tide of Islamicisation he, like his sound-alikes at the EDL, sees everywhere. He presumably thinks Islam is the most evil religion in the world, since he declared Catholic Christianity to be only the second most evil a few years back. I myself am devastated by this under-par performance by the home team, and am certainly hoping we can get our hands on Anjem Choudary before this season's transfer window closes. 

Islam, this non-too-subtle line of thought goes, equals irrationality, equals violence. For the slow learners amongst us, Dawkins spelled it out post-9/11:

It [9/11] came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

All of which conveniently lets imperialism, capitalism, and good old-fashioned racism off the hook. In any case the piece is disingenuous: by "religion of the Abrahamic kind", he means first and foremost Islam, as he makes perfectly clear elsewhere, and as his fellow New Atheist Sam Harris emphasises like a racist on speed. The political cash value of this is twofold. First, a bevy of impressionable followers are left with an utterly inadequate understanding of the contours of power in the world. Marx's plea to turn the criticism of heaven into the criticism of earth certainly wouldn't be out of place here. Second, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. (whatever their intentions) provide a secular variant of the clash of civilisations narrative that, in its Pentagon version, is normally littered with evangelical Christian theology. They supply a legitimatory weapon to the occidental warriors in far off lands. It's almost as though, well, they were littering the streets with loaded guns.