“Oh, the cleverness of me” is, of course, a quotation from that exemplar of immature arrogance, Peter Pan, who really can’t quite cope with emotions, and endlessly defers the complexity of growing up. It struck me looking at this extraordinary piece in the (London) Times, that it’s remarkably appropriate as a summary of so much Dawkins.
We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, unpremeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.
That is an extraordinary facile argument. As David Brooks noted in the New York Times:
On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.
This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
I do not expect Dawkins to use the language of “sin” in noting the complexity. I would expect any intelligent analyst however, to note something of the moral complexity of a global capitalist economy that almost guarantees that earthquakes in some parts of the world will be major human disasters, while tectonic shifts of similar magnitudes elsewhere will cause little more than higher insurance premiums.
The tsunami of 2004, which is the next item on Dawkins shopping list of disasters that disprove the existence of God, might similarly have caused much less loss of life if an international approach to early warning systems hadn’t been too expensive an investment for a relatively poor part of the world.
These are not payback for human sin in the sense that Dawkins or Robertson (surely mirror images of a modernity that only deals in facts and mechanisms) mean it. But the extent of the devastation caused by these natural events is a fairly evident effect of that easy selfishness of all of us who in part at least enjoy our lives at the expense of a system that doesn’t think the poor of distant countries are a significant moral problem. The huge death toll of Haiti is not a punishment for their sins, but it’s certainly in part a consequence of ours.
However, the language of sin to Dawkins is an aunt sally to be shot down, not a challenge to his or my moral complacency and complicity in the system that does us both very well. He refers to the heartlessness of Pat Robertson, but again, they are mirror images of each other’s rigid attachment to a blind faith in their own rightness.
Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for “sin” — or suffering as “atonement” for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology.
That is Dawkins’ astonishingly silly conclusion. Don’t get angry about suffering. Don’t weep for the sufferers. Don’t offer compassion. Just damn them all. Anything else is in Dawkins’ clear-sighted vision a betrayal of the subject on which he is so expert: Christian theology. So, no compassion unless it’s advertising the idea that “atheists can be nice too.” Atheist apparently have to help Haitians not out of compassion, but out of the desire to establish the morality of atheists. If you’re a Christian and show compassion, however, you will just make Dawkins very angry, because you are betraying what he insists is the real heart of your faith.
The mockery of George Pitcher is probably one of the better responses to such arrogance. The moral and political blindness Dawkins shows to the economic and human systems that makes natural disasters into tragedies of such magnitude is at the heart of much of Eagleton’s critique, even more so than the fatuous simplicity of Dawkins’ “theology” in which, he seems to think, Noah’s ark actually happened.
The man has become a caricature of himself, whose every utterance is reducible to “Oh, the cleverness of me”.
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That was easy, wasn’t it? Such a bird brain, Dawkins. He of all people should understand the metaphor.
But Dawkins sums up a certain way of looking things that is common enough among a class of people with the “right” education. He is their mouthpiece. He is their megaphone. He is not going to go away any time soon, I suspect.
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