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Dawkins and Down Syndrome, It May not be what You think

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Dawkins and Down Syndrome, It May not be what You think

 

Nathaniel Bates

 

                I have enjoyed the debates involving Richard Dawkins, but I knew this day was coming.  When asked about whether a baby with Down Syndrome should be born, Dawkins advised that it should be aborted.  This was certainly an ominous statement when most Down Syndrome pregnancies are ended.   I once suspected that Richard Dawkins was a crypto-eugenicist and hidden Social Darwinist.  However, his statement that Darwin is a terrible way to organize society and that we should learn about Darwinian evolution to avoid a Darwinian society rings true with me.  I cannot deny the logic in that statement.  It is a statement that appeals to the rationalism in all of us, the hope that progress is a possibility in human society even if Nature abhors teleology.  Dawkins has satisfied me that he believes that human rationality can overcome Darwinian blindness.  How it is that Nature never transcends the selfish gene but humans can becomes a logical next question, as I am unaware of what his answer might be.  What I can say is that I had newly found respect for Dawkins when he not only disclaimed Social Darwinism but called the Christian Right on the carpet for hypocritically embracing it in human society while denying Darwinism in Nature.  He is one of the few thinkers to have done so outside of the Christian left.

                The “aborting of Down Syndrome” comment landed on the field of scientific social media like a ton of nickel-iron meteors.  Whether those meteors seeded life or not, they certainly seeded controversy.  Undoubtedly, controversy will evolve new lines of discussion or disgust through meme selection.  I do not know why Dawkins would embrace such a callous lack of appreciation for how his words would come across, but I will try to understand them without engaging in either a Gouldian left or Christian Fundamentalist claim that he somehow MUST be a Social Darwinist even though he claims not to be.  I have to take him at his word, and yet I must also grapple with the morally disgraceful position he has put forward in a frighteningly casual manner.

                Taking Dawkins at his word that he is not a Social Darwinist or a devotee of the less market oriented cousin philosophy, eugenics, I must look deeper than the usual discourse if I am to understand how he would come to the conclusion that he has.  Dawkins represents a class orientation every bit as much as a white male orientation.  When traditional upper class Anglo-Saxons speak of being rational as opposed to being emotional, as Dawkins did in his exchange, they often refer to putting aside one’s biologically based empathy in favor of a kind of cold logic that serves the political or economic system.  It is often a weapon used against women, though political correctness now demands that this gender bias be obscured.  The claim that Dawkins made of being a “liberal” or “socialist” could be understood in a traditionally English context; that these words do not denote radicalism as they would in the United States or the Continent but as a more rational way for capitalism to function.  English socialism has generally been a tame and conservative affair when promoted by the upper classes.

                As Paul LeFargue pointed out, the number one philosophy that the bourgeois promoted when they took over the machinery of power in western societies is a philosophy also shared with moralistic conservative “socialists” like Dawkins and with moralistic revolutionary Marxists.  It is the ideology of work.  To be more precise, it is the ideology that people exist for the sake of the work that they do for the sake of the ruling class in the system.  Humans become economic agents who must work long hours even when technology has rendered such work unnecessary.  This view formed a large part of the economic ideology of the Reformation, and of modern conservative Evangelical defenders of capitalism.  Yet, Catholic Monarchists and traditionalists held to it also.  Enlightenment rationalists like Locke and Jefferson also held to this idea.  Even radicals like Marx never questioned it.  When LaFargue, modern radicals like Bob Black, and fringe libertarians like Robert Anton Wilson have called for the abolition of work, they made the radical step of demanding an end to the economic model of humanity.  Life then exists to be lived and not for the sake of economic abstractions.  The precious little attention their calls have been given suggest the deep fear that their arguments engender among the press and academic establishment.

                There have been many symbols in Anglo-Saxon consciousness for a “Gone to Croatan”-like rejection of the dominant ideology of work.  Many have been explored by cultural historians and maverick authors like James Koehnline, but there is one that is less understood.  If one searches our stereotypes of children with disabilities, one sees that they exist outside of the constructed bourgeois ideology of work every bit as much as other groups who have been admired and feared for doing the same.  Children with disabilities do not need to produce and consume to love and to be loved.  A child with a disability can focus on a game of sports and have an experience that is deeply pleasurable without having to work or consume.  In their own way, people with disabilities become unconscious symbols of resistance against the dominant ideology of work and consumption.  When movies such as “Mercury Rising” focus on children with autism who hack in to computers, they are tapping in to a symbol of resistance even though it is largely unconscious.  Autism becomes symbolic the ability of focus for the sake of focus and not focus for the sake of profit. 

                I do not think that Dawkins believes that people with disabilities will pollute the gene pool.  I also take him at his word that he thinks it is “immoral” to bring such children in to the world.  Remember that “immoral” to people with a work and consumption orientation means anything that violates that orientation.  A child who finds joy in a ball simply violates the proper order of things for bourgeois ideology.  When Lockean early Americans looked at hunter-gatherers are wasting the land by not farming it, they were acting on the idea that one must improve the land just as Dawkins is acting on the assumption that someone who is not working is not “improving” the world.  A world in the verge of economic destruction has had enough of such improvement.  The world has been “improved” enough.

                A work oriented view of humanity is a deeply embedded idea.  Christian Fundamentalists might attack Dawkins for the plank in his eye, but they fail to attack the mote in their own eye that blinds them to the logic of the market system their movement was engineered to defend.  I find Dawkins a refreshingly iconoclastic thinker and have enjoyed his debates, but as I said before, I knew this day was coming.  New Atheists attack religion to no end but unlike their predecessors they are tame when it comes to capitalism and the state.  As Paul LaFargue pointed out, religious and secular devotees of productive labor become very similar in the long run.  Dawkins is not an a-moralist to my mind.  I take him at his word that his is a moralist and not an a-moralist.  He is actually an insufferable moralist, of the type that would rather see death than see joy that is not paid for.  His audience is iconoclastic for an eighteenth century audience.  For them to earn my respect, they need to become iconoclasts in the twenty-first century sense.  That I would actually look forward to but do not expect it.

 

(Also check out Nathaniel’s short story Gödel Loop )

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