Not So Bright

Long ago, I remember watching some film about human evolution narrated by Richard Leakey Jr. It was interesting, as such films go, but as it went along you got the sense that it explained everything at the cost of leaving everything out — like scientists in a Far Side cartoon analyzing humor.

The crowning moment of the film, for me, was when Leakey stood in front of the gorgeous 20,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France and, with genuine puzzlement in his voice, wondered aloud: "Why did they do this? What was the purpose?"

I had the distinct impression he would have expressed equal bafflement were he standing in the Louvre. There seemed to be a gene missing somewhere. He was a man who knew a great deal about human origins — and yet, however smart he was, there was something about him that was radically out of touch with, well, what it meant to be human. You felt he needed tape on his glasses, a pocket protector, high-water trousers, and D&D dice in his pocket to complete the image he seemed to project with such earnest unconsciousness.

That incident came rushing back to me a few days ago as I read the Vox Popoli blog, which seems to have been one of the first to have posted this hilariously subversive Richard Dawkins rap video spoofing the arrogance of Dawkins and his New Atheist devotees.

Now it frankly never occurred to me that anybody — wherever you come down on the "Intelligent Design vs. New Atheists" quarrel (I think they both have big problems) — could watch that video and not know that it was a satire of Dawkins and the New Atheists. (It is, in fact, transparently the work of viral advertisers for Expelled.) However, I discovered that, thanks to the same sort of bizarre lack of elementary social aptitude that Leakey displayed in the film I saw decades ago, the humor and satire are indeed lost on . . . Richard Dawkins.

I don’t mean that Dawkins got angry about being spoofed. I mean that Dawkins was too thick to figure out if he were being spoofed or not. On his blog, after discovering the video, he pleads for enlightenment from his fellow Brights:

Aside from the intro, I can’t really see any anti-anything in the rap.

Seems rather pro-science to me.

It’s pro science, pro Dick in an irreverent way that would appeal to younger, hipper audiences.

I think there are enough pro-science lyrics in it to think it rests on "our" side. Plus the visuals are quite ironic in many cases. I can understand a little confusion but I put that down to muddled and mangled use of the language (which I believe is normal for this kind of music). On the whole it’s entertaining IMO.

No, not every atheist is a humorless geek out of touch with elementary social skills. John Derbyshire, for instance, gets the joke, though his earnest reader with the pocket protector does not. So do a few of Dawkins’s readers — eventually. But those who make their intellect the focus of their worship (and especially those who make intellect worship an evangelical religion) are more prone than the general population to this sort of social ineptitude.

And it is these people, mind you, who fancy they know how to build a Truly Human Society as the natural moral and intellectual superiors of the majority of the human race whom they derisively dismiss as "faithheads."