Iain Sinclair once said (actually, he said it right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZw4Ym5U28) that television simply isn't suited any more to the documentary format. There's simply not enough space for the material that needs to be included in any in-depth discussion. Before I get irate e-mails about my use of spatial metaphors to discuss television ("SIR - Is it not the case that television is a temporal phenomenon..."), consider the fact that an hour's documentary really boils down to a script of about sixty pages, double spaced, and which includes all kinds of visual and effect cues scattered among the actual intellectual content. How much can you actually cram into an hour's documentary, once you've dealt with all the slow-mo, speeded up footage of people walking across a bridge on the Thames, and zeitgeisty blasts of Coldplay?
(A brief pseudo-digression (pseudo because I haven't really got to the main subject of this week's doughnut, although you've probably already guessed that it's the final episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin): in the clip mentioned above, Sinclair mentions how a documentary on J. G. Ballard failed to engage with the man's work in any depth, and reduced the contributions of those such as Sinclair to snippets barely totalling a fistful of minutes. And yet... Ballard's reputation has always baffled me, especially the regard in which he's held by far better writers, such as Will Self and Sinclair himself. I can see how his earlier work might have shaped the development of science fiction, but his most recent novels have been banal doodles around the themes of modern society and violence, the kind of thing Chuck Palahnuik did with Fight Club, although Palahnuik clearly didn't feel the need to keep writing the same novel. If you're a J. G. Ballard and having trouble writing your next novel, why not try this one? Make your protagonist a white professional male, who leads a relatively dull life until some kind of explosion/terrorist attack/murder/general outburst of violence at a local industrial estate/airport/shopping centre involves him/his wife/partner/ex-partner. During the investigation into the mayhem, your protagonist gets deeper into a cabal of middle class types whose lives have become so affluently boring that they only feel alive through acts of violence. End with moral ambivalence aplenty, the hero almost seduced by this argument, ooh, perhaps the spectre of violence lurks within us all and our Starbucks lattes. Das End.
There. I've said it.)
Anyway, the shortcomings of television as a documentary medium had a big parade this week, with the third instalment of Richard Dawkins' series The Genius of Charles Darwin. I criticised the last episodes for a lack of historical context, which at least wasn't as much of a problem this week, since Dawkins decided he was going to ditch the content (except for a brief interlude on Darwin's own religious crises) and go after religious types instead. As such, there wasn't a great deal to complain about, since it's always fun to see the man tussling with 'science' teachers who honestly believe the Earth is about six thousand years old, or creationists who keep repeating that all they want to do is 'open up the debate,' as if the will to argument were on a par with actual evidence or theoretical credibility (how far, I wonder, would I get if I wanted to 'open up the debate' that Shrewsbury is a myth perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher, who lives in my foot?). But, fun as it is to goad people who believe that the eye is perfect while peering through lenses an inch thick, it didn't deserve nearly an entire episode of a series purporting to be about Darwin himself. The fact that such goading went on for far too long was clear from the editing of the discussion with three school teachers about the responsibilities of teaching science and challenging religion; while Dawkins went on about kicking religion in the 'nads, the teachers began exchanging slightly worried glances of the kind they might bandy about if confronted by a drunk at a bus station, with the result that he began to lose a bit of ground with the viewers. The programme nearly lost it altogether when Dawkins faced the camera and declared resoundingly that "If you're a relativist, you're a massive dickhead" (well, not quite like that, but almost). What, any kind of relativism? Dawkins certainly has a good case to make, but not when he ditches nuance in favour of grandstanding, and there was too much of that over the course of three episodes apparently about Darwin.
Similarly, the effort to cover so many angles (that is, to fit in a smattering of nutbars as well; covering the angels, perhaps) meant that the curse of the television documentary struck again, inasmuch as everybody got two minutes. That's OK when you're talking to a man who believes god is better than scientists at explaining the origin of the universe because scientists weren't there (and, worse still, wears a 'hilarious' t-shirt proving god's existence through equations denoting science) because more than two minutes and you'd be pummelling the screen in outrage, but what is the point of driving all the way to visit Daniel Dennett for a brief conversation which really only retreads Darwin's "There is grandeur in this view of life?" (which Dawkins quoted in the first episode anyway)? And who else thought that the meeting with Rowan Williams was poorly served by being condensed into a couple of minutes betwixt adverts for hair conditioner? This surely deserved its own programme (if only because they'd managed to book Williams in the first place), ideally on Christmas Day in an attempt to liven up Channel 4's otherwise leaden anti-yule scheduling. Instead, we got Dawkins being annoyed by a metaphor, further conversation on which would have been fascinating, if we hadn't been obliged to leap into the car and drive to Dan's house afterwards.
Ultimately, then, The Genius of Charles Darwin was a disappointment, primarily because Dawkins couldn't keep his mind on Darwin and kept wandering off to poke at religious types. Of course, the critique of religion is right there in evolution, but Dawkins seems content to live up to his reputation as megaatheist (somehow I think hyphenating that term would dilute it). Ironically, in doing so he's rapidly leaving behind his work in science, by getting fixated on telling us what isn't there, instead of what is and thus letting the absences speak for themselves. As speech theorist ("say what you see") Roy Walker once said, it's good but it's not right.
Friday 22 August 2008
Thursday 14 August 2008
Dawkins' Doughnuts
So, part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin. Last week I bemoaned the lack of historical depth to Richard Dawkins' account of evolutionary theory. Did things get better this week? Well... not really.
Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.
And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.
There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.
Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?
Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.
And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.
There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.
Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?
Wednesday 6 August 2008
Finally, some Darwin; or, What Would Terry Eagleton Do?
Hello all. Apologies for the two-month hiatus, but these last two months have been somewhat busy. Off to the US for much of June, various conference dates (as keen readers will already know) in July, and now a relocation. Yes, as of 8th August, the Doughnuts are moving from the terrorist's medium sized city of choice, Exeter, and up to Newcastle. In the meantime, however, I'm sad to report a muffin retraction. You'll remember a few months ago how I congratulated the Continental Airlines ground staff at Gatwick for their service in getting me good seats, with the cry of 'muffins all round'? Unfortunately, Continental's response on my return to the UK at the end of June was to act with such incompetence across two continents (starting with ineptitude and hungoverness at Oklahoma City, going on with massive inconvenience at Houston, and ending with startling rudeness at Gatwick) that I doubt there will ever be muffins for Continental again.
Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).
Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.
I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"
Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).
Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.
I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"
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