Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  Before After

  Yes 826 1,205

  No 681 778

  Don’t know 364 Not recorded

  Total 1,871 1,983

  Margin for Yes over No 145 427

  I don’t for a moment think this is wanton plagiarism. Why ever would a distinguished Nobel laureate need to do that? I think it is a genuine case of a failure of memory – or maybe too good a memory for the text itself and a failure to remember its provenance.

  Returning to the London debate, it was run by an outfit called Intelligence Squared, whose practice it is to hold a vote both before and after the debate, to see whether the speeches changed anybody’s mind. In the case of our debate on the motion ‘We’d be better off without religion’, the table below shows how the voting went. I’m not quite sure what to make of the fact that the total votes counted at the end of the debate came to 112 more than those registered at the beginning, and the increment is probably even greater because at the end the Don’t knows weren’t counted. However, it’s gratifying that our side both won the debate absolutely and increased our proportion.

  At dinner after the debate, I sat opposite Roger Scruton, whom I hadn’t met before, and found him quietly charming. We were joined by Martin Amis (among others), and it was lovely to see Martin and Christopher in a witty mock dispute over which one had been the bigger fan of Lalla (who sat between them) in her Doctor Who role.

  I think I was probably the last person to interview Christopher Hitchens formally. I had been invited to guest-edit New Statesman’s Christmas double issue for 2011, and among the pieces I included was an abridged transcript of my own long interview with Christopher. It took place on 7 October 2011 in Houston, Texas, where he was receiving advanced treatment for his cancer. He and his wife had been lent a large and beautiful house while the owners were abroad, and it was there that they entertained me to dinner, together with the charismatic writer and film-maker (who also happens to be Darwin’s great-grandson) Matthew Chapman. Christopher was a wonderful host at table, witty, charming and solicitous, although too ill to eat.

  Before dinner, Christopher and I sat at a garden table and talked, for the benefit of New Statesman. I was so terrified of missing anything he said that I used no fewer than three recording devices. They all worked, and my account of the interview can be read in the e-appendix. Here, I’ll just pick out one brief exchange, because it meant a great deal to me and still consoles me when I occasionally feel beleaguered:

  RD: One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a ‘Catholic child’ or a ‘Muslim child’. I’ve become a bit of a bore about it.

  CH: You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency.

  RD: I will remember that.

  CH: If I was strident, it doesn’t matter – I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You’ve educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out. Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements.’

  He reiterated the point in his final column for Free Inquiry, published posthumously and entitled ‘In defense of Richard Dawkins’.1

  The day after the New Statesman interview, Christopher and I were both at the Texas Freethought Convention where, at the banquet in the evening, I was to present him with the Richard Dawkins Award of the Atheist Alliance of America. This annual award has now been given twelve times,2 starting in 2003 when it went to James Randi, followed in successive years by Ann Druyan, Penn & Teller (joint recipients), Julia Sweeney, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Susan Jacoby, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Steven Pinker and, most recently, Rebecca Goldstein. Christopher was too ill to eat the dinner, and he made his entrance at the end, to a standing ovation which made me feel quite tearful. I then made a speech, after which Christopher mounted the platform to another standing ovation and I presented the award. His acceptance speech was a tour de force, made the more powerful by the poignant fact that his splendid voice was fading, along with his life. It was impromptu, but mine was written, and I reproduce here the opening and closing paragraphs in his memory:3

  Today I am called upon to honour a man whose name will be joined, in the history of our movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume.

  He is a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. And I live in Oxford, his alma mater and mine.

  He is a reader whose breadth of reading is simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word ‘learned’ – except that Christopher is the least stuffy learned person you will ever meet.

  He is a debater, who will kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet he does it with a grace that disarms his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He is emphatically not of the (all too common) school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents may shout and shriek. Indeed they do. But Hitch doesn’t need to shout . . .

  Though not a scientist and with no pretensions in that direction, he understands the importance of science in the advancement of our species and the destruction of religion and superstition: ‘One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion . . .’

  He has inspired and energised and encouraged us. He has us cheering him on almost daily. He’s even begotten a new word – the hitchslap. We don’t just admire his intellect, we admire his pugnacity, his spirit, his refusal to countenance ignoble compromise, his forthrightness, his indomitable spirit, his brutal honesty.

  And in the very way he is looking his illness in the eye, he is embodying one part of the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend their lives in denial of its reality. Hitch is looking it squarely in the eye: not denying it, not giving in to it, but facing up to it squarely and honestly and with a courage that inspires us all.

  Before his illness, it was as an erudite author and essayist, a sparkling, devastating speaker that this valiant horseman led the charge against the follies and lies of religion. Since his illness he has added another weapon to his armoury and ours – perhaps the most formidable and powerful weapon of all: his very character has become an outstanding and unmistakable symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism, as well as of the worth and dignity of the human being when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion.

  Every day he is demonstrating the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch is in a foxhole, and he is dealing with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he is showing himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

  I was asked to honour Christopher Hitchens today. I need hardly say that he does me the far greater honour, by accepting this award in my name. Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, I give you Christopher Hitchens.

  SIMONYI PROFESSOR

  I ENJOYED tutoring in the early days, and I think I was adequately good at it. The Senior Tutor of New College, in a piece of ingenious statistical research during my time, unearthed the fact that New College biology students were significantly more
likely to win first-class degrees than biology students in the university as a whole. (The same was true of New College mathematics students, but was not clearly shown for any other subject.) Can my teaching take some of the credit for that? I can’t be sure, though few things would give me greater pleasure than to think so.

  In those early days I still had the enthusiasm of youth and I really cared about imparting understanding to my students: not just knowledge but understanding. I enjoy explaining things, and the experience of tutoring perhaps honed in me certain skills in the art of explanation – to students of less as well as more ability – which later helped me in writing my books. But I cannot deny that, by the time I reached my fifties and had clocked up more than six hundred hours of one-on-one tutoring, I had begun to feel a little jaded. I probably wasn’t as good as I should have been, probably not as good as I had been earlier. I was doing my best, but I still had some fifteen years to run until I reached retirement age, and I increasingly wondered whether New College biology tutoring might benefit from new blood. At the same time, I had the positive feeling I might leave the world a better place if I devoted my remaining working life to explaining things to a wider public outside the walls of Oxford. How could I achieve that? I started to think along the following lines.

  My books were best-sellers. Whether or not I was any good as a lecturer to Oxford students, I was in demand as a lecturer around the world. I’d had some experience of television and journalism. Various people made me aware that I had enterprising, entrepreneurial – well, rich – readers, some of whom were enthusiastic enough to be called fans. Oxford, like all universities, was by then heavily involved in fundraising, and it had set up a branch Development Office in New York. It was suggested to me that Oxford’s professional fundraisers, perhaps especially the American office, might do well to go out in search of a benefactor to endow a new Professorship of Public Understanding of Science, with me as the incumbent. With the support of Sir Richard Southwood, Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, whom I knew because he was also the Linacre Professor of Zoology, I attended various planning meetings to discuss the possibility with officials in the Oxford Development Office. They handed the assignment over to their New York branch and I temporarily forgot about it and carried on with my duties.

  The initiative was now with Michael Cunningham of the New York office. I told him that, as a fellow guest at the Connecticut farm of my literary agent John Brockman, I had met Nathan Myhrvold (see page 6 for a later meeting with him in Oxford), who had since become Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer. Michael got in touch with Nathan and arranged a meeting between the three of us in New York. Nathan took on board the idea of finding a benefactor for Oxford’s proposed Chair of Public Understanding of Science, and went away to discuss it with some of his friends at Microsoft. Among these was Charles Simonyi.

  Charles

  Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian American software pioneer. A brilliant software designer, he had been one of that charmed circle that came together at Xerox Parc where the modern personal computer with its ‘WIMP’ interface was conceived. He was recruited to Microsoft as early as 1981, where he advocated the object-oriented programming developed at Xerox Parc, and his own ‘Hungarian Notation’ for programmers, whose ingenuity intrigues me although I haven’t used it myself. He was the supervising architect of the original Microsoft Office software suite. As an early investor in Microsoft, he grew wealthy from the growth of his shares in the company over a long period. Nathan reported to Michael that Charles was tentatively interested in the Oxford idea and wanted to meet me to discuss it.

  So it was that in the spring of 1995 Lalla and I flew to Seattle, where we were joined by Michael Cunningham who came in from New York. Charles put us up in a nice waterfront hotel, and we prepared for the ordeal of the evening: a dinner in a Seattle restaurant for about fifty of Charles’s guests – I say ‘ordeal’ only because it was clearly going to be my ‘audition’ (to quote Lalla’s thespian simile) ‘for the part’. Charles arranged the dinner’s seating plan with great care, including a remove halfway through the evening to an equally carefully crafted second configuration (Oxford colleges occasionally do the same thing, but only at very formal dinners with a dessert course after dinner). I sat on in the same place: all the other guests moved. For the first half I was placed next to Bill Gates. No surprise that he turned out to be highly intelligent and very interesting – but the same seemed to be true of most of the other guests. This became alarmingly evident when Charles called on me to speak, and then to answer questions from anybody in the room. I have fielded questions from university audiences all over the world, including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford, and I declare I’ve never been grilled so penetratingly as by that mostly quite young audience from Seattle and Silicon Valley: high-tech digerati, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, computer pioneers and bio-technologists. Somehow I managed to answer all their questions – even those from one guest who seemed critical to the point of heckling – and I ended the evening feeling it had gone reasonably well.

  The next day we were to spend with Charles, getting to know each other. Lalla and I met him and his friend Angela Siddall, and Charles drove us to one of Seattle’s airfields where we boarded his helicopter, together with a professional pilot who, with Charles under his instruction, flew us north up Puget Sound towards (but not into) Canada. We landed on an island for lunch, and had the rare treat of seeing a Bald Eagle through the restaurant window. On the return journey the dreamlike atmosphere continued as we dodged and danced among the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle. From the airfield Charles drove us back to the hotel, where he had a ten-minute meeting closeted with Michael Cunningham. Charles and Angela then left, and Michael emerged to tell Lalla and me that the deal was done: the Charles Simonyi Professorship of Public Understanding of Science was really going to happen, give or take some details which would be sorted out with Oxford.

  One of the details was that, although Charles had endowed a full professorship, I would have to be appointed, initially, at the same rank as I already was, namely reader. This was because Oxford has a strict rule against benefactions buying promotion for named individuals (a scrupulous and sensible safeguard against rich uncles buying preferment – ‘simony’, as Charles himself later punned on his own name). So I was not initially promoted: I stayed at the rank of reader and actually took a slight cut in salary. A year later I was promoted to professor on merit, my qualifications being scrutinized on the same objective basis as anybody else’s. So I actually became the Simonyi Professor a year after my original appointment as Simonyi Reader. My successors will all be appointed Simonyi Professor from the outset.

  ‘Successors’? Yes, because Charles graciously agreed to endow the professorship in perpetuity. That is to say, instead of giving only enough money to last until I reached retirement age (which was all that the original proposal had dared to suggest), he would donate a capital sum to be invested by Oxford, the annual income from which would pay not only my salary and expenses but those of a series of successors into the indefinite future. That itself was splendidly generous, but Charles added to his magnanimity an imaginative vision which I dare say is quite rare in major benefactors. He wrote what amounted to a far-sighted manifesto to accompany his gift. The gist was that he was looking to the distant future, and therefore he would avowedly not try to specify exactly how the terms of his benefaction should be interpreted in centuries to come. He explicitly eschewed legal red tape, saying, in effect: ‘Future centuries will inevitably be different and we can’t predict how. I trust you, future generations at Oxford, to interpret the spirit of what I am trying to achieve in Public Understanding of Science, in the light of your own times.’ In Charles’s own words, ‘this is where we were in 1995, this was the kernel of agreement between me, between the University, and between Prof. Richard Dawkins, the first occupant of the chair. Deviate from this point if you must, but do it knowingly. Return to it if you
can.’

  Here, in full, is the text of Dr Simonyi’s trusting, and blessedly un-lawyered-up, missive to the future. And if future generations at Oxford betray his trust, may my ghost come back to haunt them. Or, to put the same thought in more practical terms, I hope that printing his manifesto in (what I hope and intend will be) a permanent book will make it very hard for anyone to betray it.

  Là, tout n’est qu’ ordre et beauté

  Luxe, calme, et volupté (Baudelaire)

  Since I am a computer scientist, it seems appropriate that the present description of my intentions to create a chair in ‘Public Understanding of Science’ at Oxford University should be called a ‘program’! Just as a computer program sets the processor on an inexorable future course, shouldn’t this program guide the chair’s Appointing Committee for generations to come? Quite evidently, the metaphor is weak. Administrative affairs being as they are I can only vainly hope that the distinguished committee members will take my comments to heart before deciding on a new appointment. Yet I begrudge by no means the uncertainty and flexibility that is built into the appointment process so that the University can adapt, evolve, and flourish.

  This flexibility can be used for experimentation and exploration of new arrangements but over time it can also result in an accumulating creep or drift in direction that may not even be noticed. The purpose of this program is then to be a fixed navigation point on the sea of possibilities. It says: this is where we were in 1995, this was the kernel of agreement between me, between the University, and between Prof. Richard Dawkins, the first occupant of the chair. Deviate from this point if you must, but do it knowingly. Return to it if you can.