{"id":8770,"date":"2013-09-25T14:27:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T14:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=8770"},"modified":"2013-09-25T14:27:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T14:27:42","slug":"placing-richard-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/placing-richard-dawkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Placing Richard Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Dawkins has a new book out this week, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0Naturally he’s been out talking about it, and commentators have been talking<\/a> about him<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Glancing through this stuff, I am struck as always by how precisely I can “place” a fellow Englishman. \u00a0Dawkins is straight out of the upper-middle-middle-class suburban south of England. \u00a0(Yes, yes, I know he was born in Nairobi and raised on a farm. \u00a0Makes no difference.) \u00a0His second-drawer boys’ boarding school education, his enthusiasm for the Oxford tutorial system and sentimental fondness for the Anglican Church (really<\/a>), his insouciance<\/a> towards the milder forms of pederasty, his ornery impatience with metaphysical flapdoodle, . . . \u00a0I know<\/em> this guy, in some way that I don’t know anyone that isn’t English (although I think I might get a good part of the way there with an Irishman, Welshman, or Scot), and in a way that nobody not<\/em> English can know him.<\/p>\n

I certainly can’t “place” Americans that well, although now well into my fourth decade of residence in this country. \u00a0Yet this is a “cousin” nation<\/a>, with a lot of cultural overlap.<\/p>\n

The usual questions:<\/p>\n