Since I talked a bit about Penn & Teller’s atheiskeptihumanist-style show “Bullshit!” yesterday, I thought this might be appropriate to mention. While I was rambling around the Internet last night, I came upon a short, two-part series that Richard Dawkins did in much the same vein. It’s called “Enemies of Reason,” and features much of the same material that one might find on “Bullshit!” I suppose I should confess that I’m not a tremendous fan of Richard Dawkins’; he’s certainly a great evolutionary biologist, but his philosophical acumen has always struck me as somewhat less certain. Still, he’s been an impressive force for populizing atheism and making it at least acceptable to talk about religion in mixed company, and those are important works.
In any case, as condescending and shrill as Dawkins can sometimes be, he’s miles beyond the outright mockery and antics of Penn & Teller; there’s nothing wrong with antics or mockery per se, but I’ve often been struck, while watching “Bullshit!”, with the wish that Penn & Teller–who are obviously quite intelligent–would engage with the subjects of their episodes a bit more. There’s never any discussion or argument; all the narration and mockery is done via voice-over. As Lord Scarab pointed out in his comment to my last post, that makes for good “preaching to the choir” style entertainment, but doesn’t advance the cause a whole lot. That’s why I was so pleased to find this series by Dawkins.
“Enemies of Reason” seems to be freely available online in two 45 minute chunks. The first episode focuses on the notion of irrationality generally, and features Dawkins interviewing and talking to a variety of religious/spiritual/irrational subjects. The second episode–which should strike viewers in the United States as eerily appropriate–deals specifically with anti-rationality as it pertains to the health care industry; Dawkins talks to various “alternative” medicine practitioners about what they do, organizes a few minor studies, and so on. It’s good stuff. He’s uniformly polite throughout the series (that might be a feature or a bug, depending on your viewpoint), and is never overtly argumentative. The characteristic Dawkins smirk only made one appearance that I noticed, and he really can’t be blamed for it: a woman was earnestly telling him that DNA is a “big deal these days” in human evolution, as we’re just now starting to rediscover the rest of our DNA strands–while most of us today only have two strands (for a double helix), apparently all humans had twelve strands of DNA when we lived in Atlantis. After Atlantis, we “forgot who we were” and (somehow) lost those DNA strands. I would have been smirking too, if I were Dawkins.
That’s not to say that he’s totally non-confrontational, though: on more than one occasion he says something like “I think you’re wrong, and here’s why.” In any case, if you enjoy this sort of thing, it’s a very nice little series. I wish they’d made more of them, as I strongly prefer this style to the somewhat more low-brown style of “Bullshit!”, but I’ll take what I can get. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.
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