A few days ago I mentioned John Cornwell’s snide article in the Guardian about Richard Dawkins. Of course Cornwell wasn’t just contributing an article at random: he was flogging his new book, “Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to the God Delusion”. Now there’s nothing wrong with doing a little marketing per se, but it was a pretty awful article, replete with the kind of references to Hitler (a good Catholic) and Stalin that Christopher Hitchens skewers so effectlvely in “God Is Not Great”. But from all the reports I’ve seen, Cornwell’s book, with its preposterous title, is much worse.
Taking some time that I’m sure could have been better spent, Dawkins himself has penned a review of the book under the heading ‘Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity’. He points out how Cornwell persistently misquotes passages from “The God Delusion”, and frequently attributes to Dawkins a position that is the exact opposite of what Dawkins had actually advanced. Dawkins initially wondered if this was simply a result of Cornwell responding to what he expected to read, which is a mistake that many reviewers make. It’s sloppy, but it might be an honest mistake. But after a while, prejudice came to seem less likely than outright mendacity:
But if that is irritating, the following is gratuitously offensive. Cornwell is talking about Dostoevsky’s reading of nineteenth century thinkers. He mentions Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Utopian Marxism, and “a set of ideas that you would have applauded – Social Darwinism.” Does Cornwell seriously imagine that I would applaud Social Darwinism? Nobody nowadays applauds Social Darwinism, and I have been especially outspoken in my condemnation of it (see, for example, the title essay that begins A Devil’s Chaplain).
I’ve read “A Devil’s Chaplain” several times, and I have always been struck by the passion with which Dawkins takes on H. G. Wells’ “Social Dawinist” racism.
I prefer to stand up with Julian’s refreshingly belligerent grandfather T.H.Huxley, agree that natural selection is the dominant force in biological evolution unlike Shaw, admit its unpleasantness unlike Julian, and, unlike Wells, fight against it as a human being.
It is hard to imagine that a serious author would have attempted to rebut Dawkins without reading all of his relevant writings. The inescapable conclusion is that Cornwell knew full well that he was completely misrepresenting Dawkins. And the way he repeats the pattern strongly suggests that this is a deliberate strategy.
A lesser man ((A Pivar, for example.)) might view such a sustained barrage of falsehoods as libellous. Personally, I think that Cornwell’s rants simply come across as ridiculous: he’s not worth a millisecond of legal attention. But I suspect that angels aren’t meant to be liars in his mythology: an apology would certainly seem to be in order.