- Re: #FrontRowLate Pullman on Dawkins Archived Message
Posted by Gerard
on February 9, 2019, 11:26 am
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"The probability of a frog turning into a prince is small. So small, in fact, that Richard Dawkins recently spoke out against the story and others like it, asserting that we promote supernaturalism by telling these unlikely tales to our children. We shouldn’t continue regaling our kids with these “pernicious” narratives, he says, but rather encourage in them a spirit of “scepticism”. It was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement and he may have been misquoted, though he has made similar comments in the past. But the whole notion of banning fairy tales smacks of an austere, quasi-fundamentalist worldview. This is partly because Dawkins is taking an absurdly literalist view of stories. Even my seven year old, still a devout believer in Santa Claus, doesn’t think croakers are likely to metamorphose into crown princes just because his Ladybird Book says so. And that doesn’t spoil his enjoyment of such stories in the slightest, because of their metaphorical dimension. As children’s author Lauren Child told Radio 4’s Today programme, one moral of The Frog Prince is that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” and that ugly beings often seem beautiful once you get to know them. Accordingly, Disney’s 2009 adaptation The Princess and the Frog turned it into a predictably moralising but far from radical fable about race and racism. Yet you shouldn’t judge this fairy tale by its cover either: it also has a darker meaning about puberty and a dread of the onset of female sexuality. The American confessional poet Anne Sexton explores this in her poem The Frog Prince: Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father’s genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green. Far from encouraging supernatural beliefs, then, the tale encourages us to make sense of this world: superficial appearances are less important than underlying characteristics, and girls (and boys) will over time come to terms with their own desire (and sometimes absence thereof). The comedian and film-maker Chris Morris once compared New Atheist author Martin Amis to Abu Hamza because both “make [their] nonsense stand up with mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran”. Similarly, fellow atheist Dawkins’s attack on The Frog Prince reminds me that one of the charges against the controversial, beleaguered al-Madinah free school in Derby is that it “banned fairy tales”. The exhortation to stop recounting certain narratives is the same, even if the reasoning behind it comes from opposite extremes. Just as religious dogmatism caused some Muslims to support the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie and to burn his novel The Satanic Verses, now we have a secular fundamentalist inveighing against a tale and saying it should be suppressed." http://theconversation.com/the-princess-and-the-priest-dawkinss-attack-on-fairytales-27661 Even taking an atheistic Humanist viewpoint Dawkin's attack on fairy tales is surely reductionist nonsense that exemplifies the hand-in-glove nature of the technocratic paradigm and the impoverishing of the psychological narrative. It is surely no coincidence that psychiatry (esp. as it is practised in the public sector -if one can afford private psychotherapy all well and good but as an investment by the PtB in the populace in general it is seen as an economic threat, more I would posit because the upshot of decent psychotherapy is to produce balanced individuals capable of thinking for themselves who may may independent choices about their own use of certain drug-protocols and even choice of governance!-), has concentrated an behavioural cognitive therapies and neurolinguistic programming to the detriment of the psychotherapeutic model. Fairy tales are allegorical, the beings one encounters in them are manifestations of our unconscious and subconscious drives, regardless of whether one believes that such are manifest independent entities one must surely give credence to what they reveal about the human condition, if such tales had no veracity they would not have persisted in their appeal throughout the generations. Revisionist "Year Zeroism" is common amongst those who proselytise for the belief that all can known (esp. by them), about our universe and the human condition, the tendency now-days is always to claim to have the final answer (or "solution"), to any problem, the notion that discovery is a journey whose primary resource is the sharing of that journey (toward a goal that cannot be known -death-), is beyond the ken of such "denial-mongers" for they would rather preen and posture because they are scared of peeking around their blinkers. "Denial-mongers" seek the company of others who rail against those of imagination who refuse the conformist chalice. Reductionists of all kinds crave the mutual reinforcement of their own denial offered by fearful the crowd. |
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