Sir Richard rides forth to slay another dragon
Richard Dawkins has a new crusade: he has declared war on fantasy — especially works of fantasy for children. Well, that’s not quite fair — he claims a degree of uncertainty: “I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.” But then he goes on to say that “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards” — which is what we do when we let kids read Harry Potter books and that kind of thing — “is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”
He doesn’t know — but boy howdy, does he have suspicions. In fact, he even wonders whether his parents’ carelessness in overseeing his own youthful reading material may have damaged him in some way: “I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”
It strains credulity, does it not, that someone of Dawkins’s education and intelligence could believe that there is no difference between allowing children to read fantasy stories or fairy tales and “bringing [them] up to believe in spells and wizards” — or that children who read stories in which frogs turn into princes could thereby be made skeptical of a science that teaches them that such metamorphoses are impossible. This is astonishingly, Gradgrindingly, literal-minded. Children delight in reading about spells and wizards and frog-princes because they know such things to be impossible — that’s the fun of it. Good grief.
It’s especially noteworthy that Dawkins has precisely the same suspicions of fantasy and fairy tale that many fundamentalist Christians do. I’m reminded of the old Onion headline: Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children. “‘I used to believe in what they taught us at Sunday School,’ said Ashley, conjuring up an ancient spell to summon Cerebus, the three-headed hound of hell. ‘But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies.’” Dawkins will probably be citing this story as evidence in his own indictment of Potter and his ilk.
Long ago, C. S. Lewis wrote, “About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale.” Why? “It is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think that no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me; the school stories did.”
That’s from an essay called “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” and Dawkins should read it before proceeding further in his “research” into this topic. But I don’t think that likely. It seems to be a rule with Dawkins that when he disapproves of something, he makes sure not to read people who know anything about it before making his own pronouncements. Keeps the mind clear, I suppose.
I’ll say here what I said over at The Confabulum – even in heathen, atheistic old Britain, Dawkins is acquiring a growing reputation for being a bit silly and a pain in the backside.
Spot on to note that Dawkins’ attitude is very similar indeed to that of the people who wanted H. Potter banned on religious grounds.
— Anthony · Oct 29, 08:57 PM · #
I don’t agree with the position Dawkins is gesturing toward, but I don’t think you adequately confront it here. You accuse Dawkins of literal-mindedness, but your own reading of his argument is wooden and literal-minded as well. No one could reasonably argue — as you seem to think Dawkins is arguing — that children brought up believing in “spells and wizards” (let alone merely raised on a diet of such stories) will later tend to reject science because it denies that spells and wizards exist. The subtler question is whether the predominance of fantasy and magic in children’s literature — or in the worldview children are encouraged to have more generally, viz. Santa Claus etc. — sustains and encourages them in the kind of magical thinking about the world that Dawkins is against.
It’s important to back up and try to understand Dawkins’ position. For many people — you may be among them, I have been among them at times — the idea of giving up belief in God, in miracles, in a supernatural order of some kind, is not just intellectually unattractive; it’s emotionally painful to contemplate. It drains the world of its color and its inner life. A mechanistic world would be a cold, grey world, where meaning is flattened or nonexistent and the foundations for a sustaining and satisfying human life are stripped away. You don’t have to read too far into Lewis, Chesterton, Waugh et al. to see this viewpoint expressed pretty directly.
Dawkins’ central concern is to dispute this. The rationalized world is still magical to live in, and there is room for the numinous in a world without the supernatural. Humans are made of material forged in the heart of the burning stars. The apparently stable physical world is full of flux, from the orbitals of electrons to chemical equilibria to the vast patterns in the ancient radiation spread across the universe. The world has order (and comprehensible disorder) at a vast range of scales. Sitting on one lonely planet in a universe that is much, much larger than anything a pre-scientific thinker would have contemplated even under the name of the “infinite,” humans can look across space and time and become connected, in a sense — through the infinite tunnel of meaning & reference — to parts of the world vastly distant and different from our own. Every living thing on Earth is literally a cousin — every tree, every bacterium, every head of lettuce. This is weird stuff. One could go on for a long time, and these specific examples are not important — the point is that there is no end of joy and mystery to be found in the merely real.
I don’t think Dawkins’ hesitation about fantasy literature is that children who read it will believe in spells and wizards. It’s that children who read it may come to have a worldview in which the emotional resonance of magic, mystery, deep underlying forces in the world, the numinous, the ancient, the vast and complex, the deeply meaningful, and humans’ relationship with all these things are necessarily tied up with the specific sort of magic and medievalism that finds such prominence in children’s literature — or at least tied up with things being other than a rational look at the world suggests that they really are.
I wouldn’t agree with this critique. But it’s hardly the laughable “Harry Potter is bad because children will believe in sorcery” critique that you are railing against.
— Christopher M · Oct 29, 08:58 PM · #
Christopher, if Dawkins’s thought was as sophisticated and nuanced as the account you give, it would be worthy of serious consideration, and would not be quickly and casually refuted. And perhaps if he thinks about these matters more fully he will come to something substantial. But I see no evidence that he has reached such nuance yet, and, having read his shallow, uninformed, and inconsistent treatment of religion, I don’t have much confidence that this new crusade will get there. You are being very charitable, and in general I commend that attitude, but in this case I think you are giving Dawkins considerably more credit than he deserves. If you know of some evidence that his thinking on this subject is indeed more sophisticated, I would want to hear about it.
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 29, 09:06 PM · #
Dawkins is a fundamentalist, Alan, which makes him just as whack as your side.
However, The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene are two of the best books ever written, and have powerfully shaped contemporary scientific thought.
Dawkins and Harris are the more-IQ more-education analog of Dobson and Falwell in the tribe of socio-biologists and evo theory of culture scientists.
I suggest reading Scott Atran and Dan Sperber for the moderate position.
Sure, there is a biological basis for religious belief. But that makes Dawson’s position on educating “believers into thinkers” even more impossible.
Dr. Atran acknowledges that religion is with us to stay….Sir Richard continues to fight furiously against what he sees as indoctrination camps for superstition (growing up in religious families).
Religion is basically good, if it wasn’t a fitness enhancer it would have died out long ago.
;)
— matoko_chan · Oct 29, 09:23 PM · #
Lewis hit it on the head. You tell children stories to teach them lessons. Cherry-picking real stories from reality to demonstrate that certain behaviors yield certain results strikes me as more deceitful than making the stories fantastic to begin with.
Besides, parents have been lying to their children since the dawn of time. Parents in all cultures tell their children about awful penalties for all kinds of behaviors. Someone would need to present some strong evidence that this renders more detriment than benefit, considering its longstanding use and apparent effectiveness.
— bcg · Oct 29, 09:24 PM · #
which makes him just as whack as your side.
Pardon, i meant just as whack as the extremist fringe of your side.
;)
— matoko_chan · Oct 29, 09:26 PM · #
I strongly support this idea. If everyone under the age of 18 is barred from reading fantasy, I’ll face shorter lines for the next Harry Potter movie.
— Justin · Oct 29, 09:30 PM · #
I don’t know who I’d be if I hadn’t had books on fantasy and magic to read as a child. I probably wouldn’t be some worst-case criminal, or something; I’d probably be alright. But I wouldn’t be nearly the same person I am now.
— Freddie · Oct 29, 09:51 PM · #
“Do not ever call a child a Muslim child or a Christian child – that is a form of child abuse because a young child is too young to know what its views are about the cosmos or morality. It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labeling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.”
Does this really sound like a subtle approach to religion? Apart from the animus, it’s fuzzy-heaed – on the materialistic reading of someone like Dawkins, ‘evil’ is as much a fairy tale as anything else.
— fus01 · Oct 29, 10:55 PM · #
Who do you think will convert to a religion first: Dawkins or Hitchens?
— Steve Sailer · Oct 30, 05:28 AM · #
Hitch
;)
— matoko_chan · Oct 30, 03:23 PM · #
Dawkins already has a religion.
He’s a fundamentalist militant atheist.
— matoko_chan · Oct 30, 03:43 PM · #
And no…atheism is not a religion, it is a state of mind.
However, Militant Fundamentalist Atheism, as practiced by Sir Richard, is a religion.
It has a guild, a liturgy, a clergy, a dogma, proselytization, etc.
— matoko_chan · Oct 30, 04:07 PM · #
Clowns to the left of me, and so forth.
Since Christopher M (above) makes by far the most considered case for Dawkins’ new crusade, let me respond to that.
1. I’d like to ground my argument with MacIntyre’s essay on Epistemological Crisis (mostly because its central psychological claim has been empirically confirmed). To wit:
Crisis happens when one’s apperception is intellectualized as such, either as “failed” or as a part of a set. As MacIntyre points out, this kind of meta-awareness — and disassociation — follows an acquaintance with diversity.
2. Now imagine you’re a child, reading fantasy. You start with Lewis, then Rowling, then Tolkein, then maybe Robert Jordan. Very quickly you discover that you are reading about different worlds, with different histories and different rules. Your parents are Christian, or Baha’i, and your real world, socially-enforced norms do not reference nor depend on these magical worlds. You go to school, and your school mates are reading other things. They, too, seem to think independently of your fantasy realms. Some of them don’t even know who Hermione Granger is!
You grow up. In school, your State-required courses introduce more narratives of explanation: the world-historical and the scientific. You take math, and physics, and chemistry, and biology. You develop a whole new lexicon with which to describe your world.
Do you see where this goes?
The fact is, fantasy has nothing to do with the child’s attraction to — his “emotional resonance with” — animism and mystery. Instead, fantasy feeds off of this emotional resonance, depends on it for its own generic survival. In other words, fantasy doesn’t have an “insidious effect on rationality”; the human brain has an insidious effect on rationality. That’s just the way it is, the way we work, the way we perceive and negotiate our world. It’s one of our childhood heuristics, which thankfully can be tempered by maturity.
As for the larger worry about worldview, we should be wary of judgments based on gross oversimplification. Best just to ask those adults who did read fantasy as children, and see what they think. I think you’ll find they are no less rational, in their muddling through, than Dawkins, and Dennett, and the other Brights.
Note: I am a existential positivist (I know!)
— JA · Oct 30, 05:05 PM · #
Dawkin’s belittling of the story of a frog turning into a prince caught my eye.
A “frog turning into a prince” is in microcosm a description of evolutionary history. What’s Dawkins’ problem with that? Some fundamentalists actually use that image to deride evolution, but I think fairy tales prepped some people to reconsider whether biological species have a static or a dynamic nature.
Dawkins focuses on the “insidious” effects of fairytales without bothering to consider their benefits. This is a priori thinking at its worst.
His attacks on imagination are bad for both artistic and scientific advancement. “What if our model’s problems spring from the fact that the universe is really weird and unexpected?” is a question that often precedes great scientific leaps.
— Kevin Jones · Oct 30, 05:22 PM · #
One more thing. Dennett channels MacIntyre when he calls for a State-mandated World Religion curriculum for 5-12 graders. He wants to water down religious certitude by making it visible in all its various contexts (his own words).
— JA · Oct 30, 05:49 PM · #
It seems obvious from Dawkins’s comment worrying about the fairy-tale’s “insidious effect on rationality”, that he is in fact concerned about something like what Christopher M describes, even if he’s never able to articulate it that well.
In G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, he attributes his embrace of Christian faith in large portion to the insidious teachings of fairy tales. For C.S. Lewis, it was Greek and Norse mythology that primed his imagination to accept Christianity. So I think Dawkins’s position is a perfectly reasonable one for an atheist and I oppose it mainly because I believe fairy tales are right and atheists are wrong.
— Michael Straight · Nov 4, 08:20 PM · #
Maybe Prof. Dawkins has a point. After all, he still believes that the frog turned into a prince (only, it took millions of years).
At least he has solidified his stance on evil.
He told “byFaith Magazine”,
“What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.”
But now we see that he draws the line, somewhere, as Freddie quoted above from “The Telegraph”,
“It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue.”
Apparently, Prof. Dawkins fails to note that this is more of, if not exclusively, a cultural statement and not a religious one.
— Mariano · Nov 8, 03:35 PM · #