Dawkins the Political Ideologue

“Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.”

Interestingly, the author of this quote, published at http://www.toqonline.com
in their February 2010 issue was discussing Schmitt, the ideologue of Nazi biologism.

More interestingly, given the admittedly white nationalist beliefs of the author, this type of biologism is dismissed as “too right-wing, too Nazi, and too philosophically naive".

Dawkins' notion of the genome as the fundamental being, the replicator, with his concordant description of the organiam, whether bacteria or a human vehicle, as simply a vehicle to properly replicate and improve the genome, obviously fits in well with such a definition of biologism.

So we have Mr. Richard Dawkins, too right-wing, too much of a Nazi, and too philosophically naive to appeal to white supremacists.

A book in the 1980's which included contributions by Lewontin among others accused Dawkins of precisely this, as did Stephen J. Gould.

Dawkins so-called rebuttal rests on name-calling, an assumption that his readership won't understand philosophical terms and he can therefore write them off, and the final act of intellectual dishonesty in the rebuttal, in which Dawkins claims “nonsense”, referring to a sentence from the book that he only half quotes. Exactly how half a sentence is supposed to make sense is apparently a question beyond Mr. Dawkins readership. Oddly enough, the sentence is about ontological priority, one of the key concepts that relegates Dawkins' work to the crank ramblings of a politically charged ideologue.

Given Dawkins' hero status among secular humanists, it poses an interesting question: Heidegger claimed that none of the humanisms that had existed to that point "valued human dignity high enough".

Do secular humanists value human dignity lower than white supremacists?