Hearing Voices in my Head

I am enjoying the occasional voice of Richard Dawkins in my head.  I should explain.

Several months ago I “read” The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins and by “read” I mean I listened to the audio book.  The book was read by Dawkins himself (and his wife) and that very fact made it all the more understandable and enjoyable.

Authors have the advantage of reading their work exactly as they have written it and consequently every inflection and pause performed focuses the meaning of the words on the page with even more clarity than the words themselves.  Now reading Dawkins’ earlier book The Selfish Gene I’m hearing stretches in which Dawkins is almost reading the words to me. Though it is just a voice in my head the memory of his delivery imparts the special emphasis that only an author can employ. In fact if I find myself swimming through a passages, not particularly picking up their meaning, I’ll go back, channel my inner Dawkins, and read the words again with the clarity humor and nuance they embody because they were written, then spoken as they should be.

Shelving Dystopia for a Balanced Diet

Unintentionally I found  myself engaged in a string of dystopic novels. These, typically science fiction leaning what if scenario, books are appealing because, when done well, they show us something about ourselves and our own assumptions about the world. I’ve previously noted on these pages a quote (whose reference I can’t remember) that, in paraphrase says; good fiction is the great lie that tells us the truth about ourselves. This statement is equally and jarringly true of dystopic science fiction, especially as the line between hero, villain and foil become blurred on the pages and within the greater framework of our reading experience. 

These stories work because they engage the intellectual and entertainment centers of our brains but they cannot sustain us completely. Just as man cannot live on bread alone (from a spiritual, intellectual or nutritional level) it would be malnutritious to consume science fiction without heaping portions of real science literature e onto our literary plates.  

Dystopias have a reputation for controversy, a characteristic they share with some popular science books.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is one of these controversial titles.  However as Dawkins describes in the preface to TSG the book enjoys the rare distinction of having transitioned from early accepted orthodoxy toward a growing cultural controversy.

Today we still live in a time when many Christians would reject a meal like TSG in their literary diet because Dawkins has a reputation for being an evolutionist, an atheist and perhaps worst of all, rude!. However I suspect that many who draw these conclusions haven’t read Dawkins. In the first 7% of his book you will surely confirm that he is an evolutionist, may further support that he is an atheist (which he is) though you may see you have more common ground with his positions than you thought, but I don’t suspect that you will bolster your conclusion that Dawkins is rude.  Instead you will likely realize that he is a thoughtful and skilled educator and, if given the chance, you may even find yourself wanting to follow his evidence further, rather than continuously thinking of reasons to object to it.