The Peculiarly Lonely Task of Defending Mrs Dawkins

Yep, another day another Twitter drive-by.  I'm not proud of it (I swear!) and normally these days I wouldn't post it here or, well, anywhere.

But here's the thing. Mr Alan 'Bobo' Lynch flung his first filthy tweet here through the bars of his cage right in the middle of another Richard Dawkins brouhaha (Very probably unknowingly: I wouldn't credit the guy with riding any particular zeitgeist, only a garishly-painted collapsing car with twenty of his mates climbing out of it) that one of Dawkins's tweets kicked off.

You can find a good clear summary of the micro-blog skirmish here (You'll find me in the comments wasting people's time as per). In roughest summary it was about RD being sexist/racist or at the very least being perceived to be sexist/racist. To be embarrassingly honest I'm not confident enough to argue it either way. I don't have the noble pugnaciousness of a natural social progressive warrior and neither do I sit around in mens groups sniffing my comrades' armpits and screaming 'Misandry!' at anyone suggesting, y'know, that the world might just,  just, be biased toward men.

(Hopefully, this here post proves I'm not some zombie to every stroke of Richard Dawkins's keyboard either)

So I merely lurked, watching the acid and vim fly from the safety of my cyber-thicket. What I noticed was Alan Lynch's first tweet floating in the top twenty tweets concerning RD at that point in time. 'Mannn...' I thought, 'You are soooo going down, pal,' happy in the knowledge (at least) one of the social justice peeps would dispatch him with suitable humour.

I got on with my life then went back about two hours later to see him burn. Lynch was now in the top thirty; a drop, admittedly, but still (for whatever reason; I don't pretend to grasp how twitter works in its entirety) riding high in the charts. And wholly untouched. Like a bleedin' Ming vase in the Guggenheim in fact. And that's where I leaped in and lowered the tone. Well... someone had to.

B-b-b-but... what happened? Here was a clear-cut misogynist attacking a woman for her physical appearance slap-bang in the middle of a raging debate about whether someone else was being technically misogynist or not. Clearly it would be wrong of me to pick out any individual SJW for such flagrant dereliction of duty because, well, they might not have seen it. But when one considers possibly hundreds of SJWs were engaged with the subject of Dawkins--and Alan Lynch went unchallenged--one can't help but feel short changed, cheated even. That cliche about action in relation to words and all that.

(A part of me, an ugly cynical part, wonders whether if some, SOME, of the people challenging Dawkins moved over Lynch's mindburp and swiftly forgot about it because he was a temporary ally of sorts. Dawkins was the enemy, after all, and anyone who worked toward psychologically destabilizing Dawkins was all for the greater good, no matter their message.

Hey, I said it was an ugly part...)

Personally speaking, it drained the life out of proceedings. Suddenly, what had until recently been a collective of individuals perceptively harrying Dawkins's preconceptions became oddly akin to a chunk of hipsters saying 'Gawwwwd, RD ACTUALLY thinks Doolittle is The Pixies FIRST album!!! #LOL!!!'

It's not a massive #fail (to use a tired internet wit-prosthetic a moment) but it IS a #fail. Such soft-bellied complacency erodes us all and is symptomatic of assuming one always owns the moral high ground. Truth is, no one gets the deeds to any moral high ground. Rather, it has to be earned. And earned daily.

Of Richard Dawkins And His Godawful Tweeting

Put that i-Phone down, Richard!

It's fair to say Richard Dawkins's adventures in Twitter-land have been, for the main, pretty disastrous. He's always been a remarkably clear thinker--anyone reading his books can tell that--but not a compact one. Here's his latest lamentable qwerty-dive:

"Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist."

 Yeah. Not his most nuanced work, let's face it. To me it's more like some hastily scribbled thespian snark in Kenneth Williams' diary ("Hancock doing his stuff in too slow a tempo. He and Sid James' conversation real pleb stuff. Don't care for them at all") than one of the world's foremost explainers.

Self-destructive? Not 'alf! Online atheism, after all, is surrounded by hordes who'll willfully misread its every utterance, as the columns of the UK's press--both self-pleasuring right and de-clawed left--well attest. 'Dawkins Screams All Muslim Journos Should Be Sacked' swiftly became the Web's Tabla Rasa.

 Andrew Brown inevitably stuck his conk in, while this time around even faux-eccentric MP Tom Watson gleaned another self-aggrandizing freebie with 'You're a gratuitously unpleasant man'. He'd never felt safe enough to say that to Murdoch, even.

The sad part, at least to me, was that the tweet forever tarnished one of Dawkins's best moments. In a debate for Al Jazeera, he asks Mehdi Hassan (whose journalism I generally admire, I hasten to add) if he believes Muhammad flew up to heaven on a Horse. Hassan replies yes. Not as a metaphor--rich as the tale of Buraq is with that--but literally.

Watch this clip. Watch it and forget whatever preconceptions about RD you may have. There's no red-faced secular-nazi-pope Strawkins here; just calm, reasoned inquiry into the privileged indolence of religious literalism. 'Why up?' is a bloody good question. 'Yes, let's' is very funny. Hassan knows he's being enfiladed here because he's an intelligent guy, but that same intelligence is reduced to spinning about in a tight shell of religious upbringing. It's as plain as day.

Dawkins has posted an apology for the crudity of his tweet up on his site, explaining what he meant to say. It's an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff however, for the media won't have the nuance or objectivity to print or link to it. It's doesn't fit the narrative. I just hope Dawkins learns to use Twitter as a means to link to longer pieces because, as things stand, theists and faitheists--like Christ with his loaves--can stretch 140 characters into a heckuva feast.

Speaking as a non-believer it's his irresponsibility that depresses me most. He should know by now that a million arsewits lie in the cyber-heather, ready to pounce at his slightest gob-wrong. They intend to make him an irrelevancy.

It's funny. People talk about the pigheadedness of atheism but no one speaks of how atheism's critics subconsciously will it to be pigheaded. The mere act of being an atheist puts peoples' noses out of joint. They've loved ones who've passed away and it's understandable they want those loved ones' to still exist somewhere, somewhere where they will meet again. But daily, with each new scientific insight (the scale of the universe compared to us, the increasingly explicable chemical emergence of DNA etc), that very human need is increasingly weighed upon. Few, if any, like to be reminded.

Laugh if you like, but I'm one of that silent chunk of non-believers who wish people would just accept them as openly atheist and leave it at that (OK, so I rant about religions extremes but so do many theists). But in social situations it never works out like that. It's assumed I am angry.

Once I'm 'outed' someone will get irritable and pick and prod. Eventually, dammit, I bite: I like a debate as much as the next pub boor. Things heat up and almost always it becomes an unpleasant experience. My opponents mouths will be sneering and laughing, but their eyes...

...their eyes dammit, have this pleading look (You'll see it in Mehdi Hassan's in the above vid. The body language is archetypal too). An atheist among believers becomes a sort of totemic death's head, a raven mocked by jays. It's no longer a debate, because you've become the death of a parent, a dear friend or, ultimately, themselves. Seeing this, my mouth keeps up the bravado but my heart loses resolve. My heart--sap that it is--wants only to reassure my friends, tell them I'm sorry and that everything will be fine.

As below so above. The media plays upon these fears, fear equaling click-bait, and a minor industry has emerged of columnists who'll soothe the reader's brow by dismissing atheism with intelligent-sounding sentences. 'What these atheists don't understand about faith...', 'It's a sort of religion, with Dawkins its fundamentalist pope...' etc. You know the drill.

In such an atmosphere, whether your non-belief is strident or conciliatory, you have to accept there's something like a -20% modifier to any statement you make being understood, let alone accepted. On Twitter it is something more like 40% (If this blog's anything to go by men are particularly susceptible to its inherent traps, with anger, privilege and--in my own case--swagger being clumsy y-chromosome hooves.).

Any self-aware atheist--which I once took Richard Dawkins to be--would do well to remain wary of that. Every utterance should be checked over for clarity, for leaks of comprehension. In fact it's a responsibility. The other side never have to, of course, so it's not a fair fight. But it never has been.