Dawkins, Pinker can't avoid critical peer review

 This blog has previously examined the ideas of both Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins because they have been among those with high status in the world of ideas in the last couple of decades. However, their thoughts are wide in reach but limited in value because both are in the thrall of a reductionist view of reality, blinkered by a science that stunts rather than expands our understanding of the world that people experience in fact.

But here I’m not going to deride their atheism, but to point out that in the world of ideas their views generally can be met with a great deal of skepticism. In fact, critics of equally high status can be scathing. One such instance is contained in the book Homo Deus (2018) by Yuval Noah Harari. He ridicules “Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the other champions of the new scientific world views” for holding that each person has free will, and that “individual free choices provide life with meaning”. They are “delusional” in playing a “double-game” pitting the findings of the life sciences - we are merely "an assembly of biochemical algorithims" - against modern liberalism where an individual’s freedom to choose is the central concept. Harari continues:

After dedicating hundreds of erudite pages to deconstructing the self and the freedom of the will, they perform breathtaking intellectual somersaults [my emphasis] that miraculously land them back in the eighteenth century, as if all the amazing discoveries of evolutionary biology and brain science have absolutely no bearing on the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson.  [The writings of these three gave rise to the liberal tradition.] (p307)

Of course, Dawkins and Pinker are no strangers to criticism in the public arena.  Their speeches and writings always attract attention. However, Dawkins is unlikely to have been happy with the 2015 headline “Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?”, in The Guardian to boot.

The point is that these “champions” are just as likely to be challenged over perceived gaps in logic as any other polemicist. Likewise, British academic John Gray was very direct in finding fault with Pinker’s handiwork: “Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war”, once again from The Guardian, which highlighted this:

A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong

Harari’s own work will be examined in a later post. His own views on whether there is any source of “meaning” for each individual is so flawed that it is worth delving into.