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Stanley Mushava
A range of ideas has long revolved in the orbit of three fundamental questions: what is man, what is the essence of life and what constitutes moral conduct?Intellectual notables have converged from different disciplines, across the ages, to submit and to contest answers for these fundamental questions.
While the questions may appear detached from the immediate, material concerns pressing our generation, ideological responses to the problems command significant social application.
Questions such as the value of a human soul, the point at which life begins and ethical grounds for the termination of life, for example, loom pertinent in the trending debate on abortion.
War, likewise, has provoked all sorts of existential arguments especially from the pacifist angle, the principal score being the sacredness of human life.
Often, the rift between conservatism and liberalism in the various ethical schools is incredulity or belief in God.
Counter-attitudes to tradition, notably secularism, relativism, nihilism, materialism, individualism and post-modernism, are diffusing across cultures at a dizzy pace to a point whereby any conservative ethical outlook is becoming naïve at best and reactionary at worst.
Religion has been marked out as the bête noire of modernity and what remains of it in the intellectual arena are certified relics from the past or exceptional, if occasional, new appearances.
It has also become fashionable to tag along as many of yesteryear intellectuals and cultural icons as possible into debates where truth is apparently contested on numbers.
Secularist proponents often foreground notables such as Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Charles Darwin from different stacks of the library as their point spread against religion.
On their part, defenders of faith contest the indiscriminate conscription of atheist poster-boys into the secularist defence counsel, citing confessions contrary to the cherry-picked ones.
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human understanding, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me to support such views,” Einstein, for one, protests in his “Life and Times”.
Even so, Richard Dawkins, is at pains, in the opening chapter of “The God Delusion”, to demonstrate that Einstein was indeed an atheist along with Stephen Hawking, reluctant that supernaturalists should “claim so illustrious a thinker as their own”.
I have been lately drawn to striking contrasts in the moral visions of two existential authorities, the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on one hand and the British polemicist, Dawkins, on the other hand.
Coming from the supernaturalistic and the naturalistic world views respectively, Dostoyevsky and Dawkins represent intellectual polar extremes, the point of departure being their pre-eminence in their relative domains.
Dostoyevsky is described by Virginia Woolf as the most exciting writer apart from Shakespeare, an estimation ratified by his enduring influence across disciplines, while Dawkins is known to sceptical circles as the pope of atheism.
To the former, universally acclaimed masterpieces are attributed, chiefly “Crime and Punishment”, “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Notes from Underground”.
The latter is the polemicist behind “The God Delusion”, an audacious broadside on faith, according to which “one person’s delusion is called insanity while many people’s delusion is called religion”.
Darwin’s Rottweiler brags that if this book works as he intends, religious leaders who open it will be atheists when they close it – no mean feat noting that the book had sold more than two million copies as at 2010, in addition to hundreds of thousands in translation.
Dawkins apparently personifies the rationalism and rigour of secularism. From this presumed vantage point, he prescribes a lot of his ethical deductions for contemporary problems, but not without serious controversy.
Dostoyevsky is fanatically disposed to faith to a point of writing from his Siberian servitude: “Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
It is a marvel, perhaps representative, that Dawkins with his meticulous tabulation of logic, at least before “The God Delusion” which is all froth and no substance, should be so devoid of humanity in his moral prescriptions while Dostoyevsky who appears less rational is a bundle of compassion.
Dawkins’s idea of morality is exclusively grounded in the individual’s entitlement to the pursuit of happiness, whatever the values at stake; a position which has qualified him into a fanatical pro-choice crusader and dog-matist.
Dawkins, in his own words, believes “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles”, perceives the individual’s moral mandate as increasing the sum of happiness.
He drifts from this premise to unsettling endorsements of abortion such as “a (human) foetus less human than an adult pig” and eugenicistic calls to murder babies with Down’s syndrome in the womb because he deems it “immoral” to allow them to live from his perspective of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Dawkins so impenitently dabbles with Nazism and callous eugenics because he starts from the wrong premise on questions pertaining to the origins and nature of man and the essence of life, which in the supernaturalistic world view, can only be explained in terms of an intelligent First Cause with a definite design and purpose for mankind.
To fail here is to bury the truth in overstretched sophistry. Dostoyevsky cautions: “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
In his dissent to Dawkins’ “sum of happiness” justification for eugenics, creationist author Ray Comfort says: “Dawkins wants to ‘increase the sum of happiness’ through murder of the helpless unborn. That’s the usual motive of murder.”
“The killer is made happy once the victim he wanted to kill is dead. Nazi Germany made Hitler happy. The attack on New York made terrorists happy. Rape makes the rapist happy. Human happiness should always be subservient to righteousness,” Comfort says.
Raskolnikov’s dream in the final chapter of “Crime and Punishment” is a fitting indictment on Dawkins and the gloomy depths modernity is generally poised. A memetic bedlam of sorts.
“Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious,” writes Dostoyevsky.
“But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.
“They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify.
“Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite… They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other,” Dostoyevsky relates.
The dream’s denouement is a new dispensation whereby only “a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth” find their way out of the rub ble.
The cataclysmic tragedy prefigured by Dostoyevsky is not altogether a file too mystic to retrieve given the perversion of knowledge, frosting of love, aversion to morals, prevalence of crime and eruption of terror currently sweeping across the world.
It is necessary, once again, to foil laboured sophistry and rediscover the truth in its purity and simplicity pertaining to the fundamental questions, namely, the nature, purpose and moral obligations of mankind.
Online Reporter