Richard Dawkins: No, Not All Opinions Are Equal—Elitism, Lies, and the Limits of Democracy

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You want expert pilots to fly your planes, top doctors to perform your surgeries, the finest musicians in your orchestra, and for the same reason, you should want experts leading the nation, says Richard Dawkins. There has been a backlash against expert knowledge amid the rising wave of populist politics, but Dawkins doesn't think elitism is the dirty word that people are implying. He contends that not all opinions are equal, and that the leaders of the UK were profoundly misguided in allowing a referendum on Brexit to occur. No average citizen—not even Dawkins himself—was fit to decide on whether to leave a federation of states with so much economic and political importance, and decades of complex history attached to it. And much like the 2016 US presidential election, it was a political movement fueled by misinformation. A representative democracy is one thing, where citizens entrust experts to make national and local decisions, but a referendum democracy seems to Dawkins extremely ill-advised, particularly given that the top Google search in the UK the day after the Brexit vote was 'What is the European Union?'. Dawkins isn't shy: he's an elitist, but a rational one. He affirms he would never want a world where your IQ determines how many votes you get, but he sees the clear benefit of making political decisions based on knowledge rather than emotion or misinformation, deliberate or otherwise. Richard Dawkins' newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.

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RICHARD DAWKINS:

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the author of several of modern science's essential texts, including The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006). Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Dawkins eventually graduated with a degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford, and then earned a masters degree and the doctorate from Oxford University. He has recently left his teaching duties to write and manage his foundation, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, full-time.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Richard Dawkins: Among the reasons that I heard for people wanting to vote for Brexit were, 'Well, it’s nice to have a change,' and, 'Well, I preferred the old blue passport to the European purple passport.' These are the kinds of reasons people were giving for voting for Brexit. The day after the referendum, the most Goggled question in Britain was: What is the European Union?

During the Brexit campaign one of the leading politicians favoring Brexit, Michael Gove, said to the British people, “You are the experts. Don’t trust experts, you are the expert now.” So ordinary people who have absolutely no knowledge of economics or politics or history decided on a 50 percent majority to vote to Britain out of the European market, out of the European community, which was a very, very complicated, detailed, ramified structure that has been built up over decades. And so in one stroke the British people, who had no knowledge, no expertise, were given the opportunity by a reckless David Cameron to vote us out and they did, by a very narrow margin. This cult of everybody being an expert, all opinions being equally valid is, I think, dangerous and most unfortunate. Of course I have been accused of being an elitist because of this. And yes, when you’re about to have an operation you want an elite surgeon to cut you open, you want an elite anesthetist to put you under. When you’re about to fly you want an elite pilot to fly you. When you’re about to leave a federation of states, which has been built up over decades, you want an elite economist or politician or historian to advise you on it. You don’t want to take the view of just any old man in the street or woman in the street.

I pronounce myself profoundly ill-equipped to vote on the referendum about Brexit. I was ill-equipped and so was the vast majority of the British people ill-equipped. In that sense I think that elitist should stop being a dirty word and we should start to respect elites in whatever field we’re talking about. We want elite musicians to play in our...

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