The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Eagleton and Dawkins

Like a good old Roman bloodbath, there's something spectacular in seeing the seasoned intellectual warriors Terry Eagleton and Richard Dawkins, respectively the United Kingdom's best-known literary theorist and scientist, scrapping in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion, Eagleton accuses him of being "theologically illiterate," of producing a "vulgar caricature of religious faith," of "lunging, flailing, mispunching." Anyone who thinks academia is dull, dispassionate and impersonal should think again.

Not having read The God Delusion, I can only comment from the sidelines on this debate, and on Eagleton's review in particular. Eagleton has spent the last forty years exposing the materialist ideology that underlies culture, and so it is surprising that he does not really ask why Dawkins has felt the need to publish the book in the first place. If as Eagleton says "professional atheists" are "the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood," why would Dawkins jump into the melee so unprepared?

In A.S. Byatt's (yes, her again!) Virgin in the Garden quadrilogy, a grumpy, atheist English teacher, Bill Potter, sermonises to his family about the contradictory and placatory myth-making of Christianity. He is enraged and alienated when his daughter marries a clergyman in the second book. But he is equally angry in the fourth when he discovers that his grandchildren are not taught the Bible at school. How, he blusters, can one expect to understand and appreciate Paradise Lost without first knowing Genesis. This is the curious position most atheistic or agnostic literary intellectuals find themselves in. Unable or unwilling to believe in God, we read "in the beginning was the Word" quite literally, for without the Word our culture of literary words would not have assumed the wonderfully multiple shape it has.

Eagleton, a Catholic, points this out to Dawkins. But Dawkins knows and appreciates his literary canon as well (I remember his wonderful readings from Keats at the lecture I attended last year), and he too cannot have failed to notice the centrality of Christianity to it. Even if he adopts the uncompromisingly atheistic position of Bill Potter, he should, like him, surely see the significance of faith. That he apparently does not acknowledge this in his new book suggests that he is fighting so wildly because he has been backed into such a tight corner, and is unable to give an inch of ground.

The majority of Eagleton's essay is a corrective explanation of what Christianity is actually about (in this, he slyly slips his voice, so it is hard to recognise whether he is simply retelling the story as history, or making a statement of personal faith). He concerns himself by studying how religious belief might be alien to science, but he is too brief in his consideration of the reciprocal relationship of how science might be alien to religion, from which Dawkins' argument springs. When he does glance at Dawkins' motives, Eagleton says that The God Delusion arises from "a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste." But when Robert Hooke, perhaps the greatest of the early English empiricists, looked down his new microscrope at the eye of the common fly, he did not see himself as reducing the mystery of God's creation but elevating it, seeing in the thousand elements that constitute the eye the range of minute interventions of God in the natural world. Even after Darwin, there is surely (as Darwin writes in that glorious closing paragraph of The Origin of Species), a greater grandeur in the view of life as continuously evolving under elegantly simple laws, whether these have their origin in a volcanic vent or a being beyond the stars. No, there is no reason why common sense empiricism should lead automatically to a divide from religion.

And, as Eagleton notes, Dawkin's rigid empirical principles apparently desert him as he fails to ask why so many millions of people do hold a genuine belief in God. Even if belief has its foundations in the neurological structures of the brain, as a mechanism for survival, it is definitively in the world, as well as, so believers say, transcendent from it. Why does Dawkins deny even this? There must be another, deeper reason why Dawkins has written this book, at this moment, with such paradoxical ferocity, other than the old "two cultures" schism. From my personal experience, I see something of where Dawkins is coming from. For an agnostic like myself, in spite of my Bill Potter-like appreciation of religion as a textual artefact, I now feel under pressure to reject theology entirely. In the light of conflict in the Middle-East, knowing the brutality of Catholicism in allowing AIDs and dogma to spread in Africa in equal measure, in my fear of the grip evangelicals are exerting on objective knowledge, I cannot help but want to react, as Dawkins has done, by taking a swipe at the systematic whole, even if it means destroying the parts I appreciate for their literary import.

Although F.R. Leavis would disagree with me on this one, literary criticism has less potential than science to improve the world. It is neither literature nor religion which will develop drugs for AIDs (although neither of these things developed the weapons used in the Middle East either). Dawkins, then, must be feeling the heat of religion even more than I do. As he commented to Edge, the "tactically, politically savvy" thing to do would be to occupy the middle of the road between religion and science. His failure to do this has ensured that he has

come in for a lot of criticism from some of my scientific colleagues because...they feel that I'm rocking the boat and, as it were, giving aid and comfort to the creationists. And I think in a way they might have a point because I have heard that some creationists love to quote people like me because it lends weight to their claim that if you are an evolutionist that means that you have to be an atheist.

However, Dawkins continues

I'm concerned with what's true. For me the evolution/creation war is really just a battle. It's a skirmish in a larger war between supernaturalism and naturalism, and I don't think that I'm prepared to compromise on what I think is true in order to win a tactical battle in a skirmish in what I see as a larger war.

I do not agree with Dawkins' tactics. As with all wars, it generates martyrs rather than winning hearts and minds. Like all bad strategies (military or intellectual) it lacks a plan for exit by which one can give ground, gracefully, when the war is at last being won. But the thing that most interests me is that Dawkins knows this. The God Delusion does not spring, as Eagleton suggests it does, primarily from an ignorance of religion but from a fear of it, an anxiety that is fully self-conscious. The God Delusion may not tread lightly in the centre ground of the debate, but it certainly helps to show how extensively that debate has become polarised. The war promises to be long and brutal. At least the punches between Eagleton and Dawkins are going to be confined to the the letters pages of the LRB, and not the back alleys of Baghdad or the classrooms of our schools.

The Dangers of Photography

There is an organic farm near where we live, and its stars are the herd of highland cows, who look disarmingly cute with their shaggy, orange fringes. However, appearances can be deceptive. Wanting to get a particular shot (to be posted in the photoblog in a couple of days), I invaded their field, whilst they are still about 20 metres distant. Inquisitive, however, they began to wander towards me, and I became aware of the size of their horns, a feature that outweighed my delight in their beauty. As they began to run, I leaped over the fence. Panting, I turned and realised that I had left my camera bag over the other side of the fence, where it was being licked to a soppy black by the rough tongue of this fellow.



Luckily, with a gentle pat on its nose, I was able to apologise for having entered their territory unannounced, and he then backed off and allowed me to retrieve my gear.

Should I Advertise God?

I am waiting for the new version of Blogger to come out of Beta, at which point I will be able to tag and organise my posts into their particular subjects, such as the postgraduate diary, the art reviews and current affairs. I will also create a category for those posts concerned with the perversion of science, which I have long worried about and am now starting to worry, figuratively through my writing about and against it, like an intellectual dog. Such posts include my one on "Dawkins' Dilemma" and "They Call it Science."

Christian religious fundamentalism is second on the list of global issues I fear when I wake in the morning, behind global warming (which, frankly, dwarfs anything else). One welcome, regular reader of this blog noted that he enjoys it because "sooner or later most sites just turn into political name calling rants - not very productive. Therefore, I enjoy the literary aspect of your blog." Unfortunately, the manipulations of scientific facts for ideological purposes, which are are most blatantly manifested in the Intelligent Design movement, are the one "political" issue I cannot leave alone. I am reading Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker at the moment, and I give a little cheer every time he demolishes the arguments from faith which utterly and hilariously misinterpret the scientific data and the academic consensus.

So I will (must) continue to post on these issues as and when I feel like it. But this leaves me with a dilemma. In the right-hand sidebar of this blog you will notice the Irrepressible.Info box, promoting freedom of speech (a freedom which, living in the democratic UK, I happily exercise in my posts). In the left-hand sidebar are the Google Adwords which cover the annual costs of my web hosting. But when you read any of my posts about Darwinism, about two thirds of the ad space is given over to promotions of Intelligent Design, Creationism, and the "Dawkins Demolition Industry."

The Google Adwords system allows me to filter out those adverts I don't want displayed, and I already use this to cut out sites which promise to write essays for students; a clear conflict of interest, I have no qualms about censoring these adverts. But should I do the same for the religious adverts which contradict my attitude towards science? Should my political principles over this one, vital, issue outweigh my democratic belief - which I assert through endorsing the Irrepressible.Info campaign - that everyone has a right to freedom of speech? Or, as I argued in my essay on the Islamic cartoons controversy, since the right to freedom of speech is not absolute, but must be weighed against moral principles, am I justified in taking what I see as a moral stance against those who try to pervert our empiricist culture?

Potter and Possession: Googling A.S. Byatt

One of the nice additional features provided by Google Toolbar is that as you type your search, it provides a drop down list which predicts your search requirements based on the number of pages available. The method produces some eclectic results. Type in "b," for instance, and there on the list appear "BBC" and "baby names," "Britney Spears" and "bank of America." I am sure there's material for one of those trendy "found" poems here.

This morning, I start to type in "A.S. Byatt" (searching for a bibliography). As might be expected, at the top of the predictive list, with 38,000 results, is "A.S. Byatt possession." But fourth on the list, and only just behind with 25,000 results, is "A.S. Byatt Harry Potter." Intrigued, and unsure of what can lie behind these results, I divert from my original intention and click on this option. Suddenly, I am plunged into the furious and bitter debate that surrounded an essay, provocatively entitled "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult" (full text available here), which Byatt contributed to the New York Times in 2003.

Byatt likes the "secondary world" Rowling has created, which is "made up of intelligently patchworked decorative motifs from all sorts of children's literature." Whether her comment that "derivative narrative cliches work with children" is a compliment, or a backhanded barb, it is hard to be sure. What is certain, however, is that Byatt disdains the phenomenon's adult readers:

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

Wow! How to alienate several million readers in one blow. Certainly Charles Tayor was not amused. He countered with an essay in Salon entitled "A.S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile." Since I am writing on A.S. Byatt I feel I must take sides in the debate and, out of loyalty to a writer whom I admire greatly, I suppose I ought to defend her. Whilst the communicants of the Harry Potter cult riled against Byatt's assault on their cherised priestess, I think in her essay Byatt was attacking not so much Rowling's work itself on aesthetic principles, but rather was condemning the state of the culture that accomodates it with the false kind of passion soap operas are so skilled at inculcating:

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

I totally agree that reading Harry Potter is the literary equivalent of comfort eating: you know you can devour it all in one go, and you know it is going to leave you satisfied. But Taylor is quite right to point out that Byatt avoids discussing the increasing darkness of the books later in the series, when this comfort food gets harder to swallow:

Rowling has conceived of the seven-book cycle as tracing Harry's growth from childhood to late adolescence. And as the books have gone on, the dangers he faces have not only increased but, as happens with age, become less easy to shrug off, inflicting physical and psychological wounds that are not so quick to heal.

Not having read these later books, I am not in a position to judge whether Rowling is able to plot the intricate paradoxes of sexuality that twine the adolescent mind as well as she plots a game of quidditch. But given that she has managed to keep her growing audience captivated - and buying - it is surely true that her later works offer not only the simple reassurances of escapism but also a more emotionally affective portrayal of human (magic) reality.

And if Byatt really is railing against the television culture, of which Rowling is a manifestation rather than a cure (unlike Byatt's own favourite Georgette Heyer), can the books really be so bad? Byatt is right that nowhere does Rowling's writing come close to giving us "the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's 'magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'" But there was a time when a television culture would hardly think to pick up a book at all, let alone a Keats or, for that matter, a novel like Possession, with its complex embedded poems and knowing literary references. It is surely apt that when The Observer asked 100 British literary luminaries to name the greatest work of British fiction of the last 25 years, both Possession and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appeared on the list. The former may have been the most academically-minded, "literary" book to have won the Booker Prize in that period; the latter is probably responsible for getting more people into literature in the first place than any other single work.

It is ironic, then, that when you Google A.S. Byatt you are almost as likely to turn up Harry Potter as her great novel. And more fierce critics of A.S. Byatt might well have liked the option that appears fourth on the Googel Toolbar list: "A.S. Byatt baglady." "Baglady" is the actually the title of one of her short stories, but it is impossible to erase the vision of Byatt standing on the steps of a university wielding a conservative handbag against all popular movements, not unlike that other empowered Conservative with her dark accessory, Margaret Thatcher.

Postgraduate Diary: Teeching English

I remember being horrified by the amount of red pen scrawled across the first university essay I handed in, correcting basic grammar and sentence construction. If the technicalities of my writing were not up to scratch when I started university, I could blame my teachers and (probably more significant) a flimsy A-level system which allowed me to score high marks without being able to write grammatical English. Seeing red, both literally and figuratively, I was shocked into action, and I am happy to say that by the end of my first year my essays were being commented on more for their content than for their syntax.

Having taught last year, and having hovered and plunged my red pen above and into numerous essays, regular as a sewing needle stiching the holes in English usage, I was clearly not alone in being unable to construct an essay without splitting my infinitives or, worse, leaving a comma hanging mid-sentence when there should have been a full stop. I only hope my red pen electrified my first year students into corrective action, as it did to me.

With term now underway, in a couple of weeks I can expect to meet my new tutorial groups. So it is by a happy coincidence that our local, parochial Parish News dropped through our letterbox the other day, with the following helpful advice that I can give to my students when I first meet them:

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

You know you have an English degree when you are confident in telling your Word grammar checker that those squiggly-underlined sentences really are perfectly constructed, and that contrary to the spelling advice you really are practising (not practicing) good English in your essays.