Jonahan Witt, at ID the Future, posts a wonderful and witty interview with David Belinski (also Google here).
Oh, my gosh - Mr. Berlinski is an incredible interviewee!
Re: Richard Dawkins:
An interesting case, very louche - fascinating and repellant. Fascinating because like Noam Chomsky he has the strange power effortlessly to command attention. Just possibly both men are descended from a line of simian carnival barkers, great apes who adventitiously found employment at a circus. I really should look at this more closely. Repellent because Dawkins is that depressingly familiar figure - the intellectual fanatic. What is it that he has said? "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)". Substitute 'Allah' for 'evolution,' and these words might have been uttered by some fanatical Mullah just itching to get busy with a little head-chopping. If he ever gets tired of Oxford, Dawkins could probably find a home at Finsbury Park.
On Darwinism and ideological systems:
Marxism is an ideological system, or was, and Darwinism is like Marxism. Darwinism, I must stress, the sibilant distinguishing the man from his message. By itself, Darwin's theory of random variation and natural selection would simply be a hopelessly premature 19th century thought experiment, vastly less important than Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, which was completed at roughly the same time.
On literary evolution (??!! -- I know, I know):
Why must literature be understood in any terms beyond the literary? Just recently someone named David Barash - an evolutionary psychologist, it goes without saying - published a book together with his wife called Madame Bovary's Ovaries. Her ovaries? Look, set aside the appalling vulgarity of the book and its title, its almost unfathomable literary and intellectual crudeness. To talk about Madame Bovary's ovaries is a little like looking at one of Rembrandt's late self-portraits of his face and wondering whether the man suffered from bunions. What we know of the man is right there on the canvass. Nothing else. To imagine that somehow there is a real woman to be found in Flaubert's nacreous masterpiece is to regard art the way an infant or a primitive regards art.
Of course, these are just tiny snippets - please do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. It's very rare that an interview is as educational and entertaining as this one! (And, it's only the first part - can't wait for the second!)
And thank YOU for pointing to this! You're right: it is both educational and entertaining. In a word: fun.
Posted by: David | March 08, 2006 at 07:57 PM