Christopher Anderson of Male Survivor examines Richard Dawkins’ apology and asserts that Dawkins should have acknowledged that relying on anecdotal evidence to draw conclusions about the experiences of others is sloppy thinking
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Richard Dawkins, the eminent and controversial evolutionary biologist has a long history of sparking outrage. Yet Dawkins’ unwillingness to step back from his recent comments minimizing “mild pedophilia” have given him a new level of notoriety, one that shows his character to be uncomfortably similar to that of many of the figures he has famously attacked in public.
In a recent interview, Dawkins (not for the first time) speaks about his experience being touched inappropriately by a schoolteacher during his youth. The experience, by his admission is not one that he felt led to significant distress in his life. However, instead of stopping there, he chooses to venture forth with his characteristic bravura and make sweeping statements about the ways society overreacts to milder forms of abuse:
“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today….
Had he stopped here, it might have been a poorly framed, but not especially egregious statement. However, sweeping aside reams of research that indicate that even what he would consider “mild touching up” can lead to significant long term trauma for some victims, Dawkins chooses to arrogantly dismiss society’s attempts to come to grips with staggeringly large levels of sexual abuse:
“But the other point is that because the most notorious cases of paedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label ‘paedophilia’ to the same things when they’re just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all paedophiles into the same bracket.”
After fielding an extraordinary amount of public backlash, Dawkins then took to his website to clarify and issue a sort of “apology”:
“Now, given the terrible, persistent and recurrent traumas suffered by other people when abused as children, week after week, year after year, what should I have said about my own thirty seconds of nastiness back in the 1950s? Should I have lied and said it was the worst thing that ever happened to me? Should I have mendaciously sought the sympathy due to a victim who had truly been damaged for the rest of his life? Should I have named the offending teacher and called down posthumous disgrace upon his head?”
What Dawkins should have done was to step back and to acknowledge that relying on anecdotal evidence to draw conclusions about the experiences of others is sloppy thinking. What he should have done was to recognize that, as smart as he is, he is not an expert in the field of child development, the neurobiology of trauma and perhaps agreed to defer to those with expertise in those topics. Instead, what Dawkins chose to do was mount his pulpit a second time and lash out at those who had serious and valid criticism of his statements.
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The fact that he has a very loud megaphone with which he can opine to the masses makes his views potentially very harmful. There are millions of people who allow their intellectual perspective to be shaped by Dawkins, either because they agree or disagree with him. To say that he encourages people to think for themselves does not release him from the ethical responsibility incumbent upon a figure of his stature to consider the consequences of his action.
He was not being asked to lie, nor to loudly declaim that what he suffered was the worst thing that happened in his life. Setting up his counter-argument that way was both disingenuous and beneath a person of his education and erudition. Further, it mischaracterizes the position of many advocates, who take issue with the things that he has said on multiple occasions that have served to send a message that sexual abuse is not as significant issue an issue as other kinds of abuse.
The outrage that has been directed at Dawkins is not entirely based on the culture’s reflective distaste for sexual abuse. It’s also a backlash against him for his arrogant insensitivity on this issue (and others in the past). He has placed himself on a pretty high pedestal, raised higher by the piles of honorary degrees, prizes and awards heaped about his feet. Perhaps one needs a certain degree of intellectual arrogance and self-righteous certainty to blaze a trail, but that doesn’t justify making statements that fly in the face of established research and can, and in all likelihood will, be used to justify, excuse, and condone abusive behavior.
Riding high on all the wealth, influence, and fame that he has earned by attacking the hypocrisy of religion, he is blind to the truth that he himself has become a pope of the new science. The man has become subsumed by the mantra, the actor become the role. And just as is the case with anyone who cloaks himself in the air of infallibility, his reputation and persona have become more important than the truth.
It’s unlikely that he will acknowledge the crushing irony that he has become. It’s even less likely that he will be willing to recognize that he has become a force for the promulgation of a harmful ideology. The rigid orthodoxy he now preaches is converting the unwashed masses of his world to a way of being that is less empathic. And by all appearances he is too trapped in the need to guard his reputation to be capable of acknowledging that some of those who disagree with him may have access to a truth that he has lost sight of, or perhaps never held in view.
All it would takes to mitigate the harm he has done would be to acknowledge that he might be wrong. Sadly, these acts of contrition come from men, never from their gods.
AP Photo
My son “looks” like the proverbial bad guy, dreads down to the middle of his back, rough and tough big guy and has women approaching him all the time. He’s had a few relationships that were going well UNTIL they got to the point where SHE wanted to have sex and HE believes in waiting until marriage. So long Charlie! Literally because his name is Charlie. All is well until these womwn find out he’s not a player …, pretty sad.
That was posted to the wrong article …sorry about that.
Yet we live in a society that minimizes male child abuse all the time and in some cases even flaunt it. In my years of counseling, I’ve encountered several underage clients who have in fact been abused by adult age women but see themselves as not being abused but instead wear their early sexual encounters as a badge. A perfect example of this is Albert Roundtree Jnr from South Florida has released a YouTube video for his first single Booty Pop, which features the little boy singing lines like ‘I can make your booty pop’ while two women’s bikini-clad bottoms… Read more »
Christopher, thanks for the timely and important article. I agree with everything you said in your nuanced response to what Dawkins said, though I think you were being generous in describing Dawkin’s “apology.” Like so many people in our society, regardless of their expertise or platform, they often minimize sexual abuse or its impact on people’s lives. It reminds me of people who say things like, “I was whipped by my father when I was a kid and I turned out just fine.” As someone who was “minimally abused” when I was a child, I spent a lot of my… Read more »
I’m sorry, but no: this is the second article I’ve read about this here, and both times the author has leapt to a logically fallacious assumption about the quotes they offer. I agree with assman. Perhaps it might be true that the experts are correct, and the harm of mild sexual abuse is, on average, more significant than Dawkins has assessed. So what. Doesn’t make his argument wrong. He is, in his own opinion, proof that it can be virtually insignificant. And if we are willing to step back from our agenda driven thought pattern, we might ask ourselves if… Read more »
I’m sorry, but I really feel that I have to say this. Please (and this goes for everyone else on this thread) do not refer to some forms of sexual abuse as “mild” or “relatively minor.” If Richard Dawkins wants to refer to his experiences with those words, well I guess he has the right to do that, but I don’t think anyone has the right to dismiss another’s experience as being “mild” or “relatively minor.” On a hypothetical scale of violence being punched in the face may be “mild” or “relatively minor” compared to being shot with a gun,… Read more »
Hear Hear. There is no objectively “minor” sexual assault. One person may categorize it that way, but it’s only up to the survivor to determine that. Beyond that, there is no “sexual intercourse” as we think of it between adults and children. There is only rape. I know someone will say “romeo and juliet exceptons!” YES of course, *true* Romeo and Juliet cases can be an exception. But we all know what I’m talking about. You can survive a sexual assault and have a perfectly happy life. That’s true. And we need to give survivors that hope – but the… Read more »
“Beyond that, there is no “sexual intercourse” as we think of it between adults and children. ”
What do you define as adult? Biologically humans are adults right after puberty. That means 13 year olds are adults.
I feel I want to defend Dawkins here. He hasn’t said that the teacher’s actions were normal, acceptable or permissible, he’s merely said that in perspective and in terms of the effects upon himself they were minor. It seems Dawkins is getting backlash for being honest and forgiving, and that the media are trying to trip him up here. In an alternative universe he might have publicly claimed he was permanently traumatized, and you know that if he had done so the Christian Right would have used his trauma as a way of invalidating his opinions on religion – “well… Read more »
Hello Joseph, I think you may have missed Christopher’s main argument here. As I see it, Christopher is not arguing that there is something wrong with Dawkins expressing his feelings about his own experiences. He’s arguing that in taking those feelings and using them as a way to minimize the damage done to children by sexual abuse Dawkins has committed a gross ethical lapse, a lapse that is compounded by the fact that Dawkins is such an important public figure. Dawkins choice of words is quite instructive, “But the other point is that because the most notorious cases of paedophilia… Read more »
“No one can tell Dawkins how he should feel about his own life experiences, but when he obfuscates the reality of sexual abuse and minimizes the harm it can cause, people should call him on it.” If Dawkins is guilty of minimizing, I think our society is guilty of maximizing harm. I think its better to minimize rather than maximize. Its not good to think of yourself as a victim. All we have done is to create a culture of victimhood and there is nothing good about that. Dawkins great sin is to criticize the culture of victimhood. There is… Read more »
“Its not good to think of yourself as a victim. All we have done is to create a culture of victimhood and there is nothing good about that. Dawkins great sin is to criticize the culture of victimhood.” Well I’d agree that our society has a “culture of victimhood” I’d just argue that the people claiming that culture tend to be people who are not really victims, like people who commit sexual abuse against children and their public minimizers-of-guilt like Richard Dawkins. The survivors of sexual abuse are unfortunately all too ignored in our society. As to your second point… Read more »
I think by “rape” here he meant sexual intercourse as opposed to sexual harassment which is what he received. I’m assuming he was very much a child when this happened, and not an adolescent. Yes it’s sexual abuse but it’s at the mild end – it wasn’t an ongoing abuse, we don’t have the exact details but it may be the genitals weren’t involved. So I think there is a sense in which Dawkins can describe his own experiences as being mild sexual abuse in the spectrum of possible types of sexual abuse. You also say “using them as a… Read more »