Book Review: Philip Roth Unbound

The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters

By Jonathan Price

Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times¹ marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air² (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).

All creatures

At a retirement luncheon yesterday, the honoree asked me what I was reading. I said, "Richard Dawkins's Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution."
    He said something about our really needing that, which I took ironically to mean that more evidence isn't necessary, we all know that Darwin's theory is fact.
    But I wondered whether he wasn't perhaps annoyed at Richard Dawkins's atheism, so I went on to say, "I think that Dawkins ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Bertrand Russell [another atheist] received it [in 1950] for his humanitarian writing, and I think Dawkins deserves it for his science writing."
    My colleague seemed at least a little bit impressed by that pronouncement.
    And I wasn't just exaggerating for effect. I've thought for some time, as I've read book after book by Richard Dawkins, that he should be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, his very first book, The Selfish Gene, is often cited for its influence in evolution science. That is, I suppose he could even be considered for the Nobel Prize in Biology.

Anyway, in The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins quotes Monty Python's parody of "All Creatures Great and Small" (I think of the stories of the veterinarian James Herriott, pen name of James Alfred Wight, pictured above), and I relay it here for your enjoyment:

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spikey urchin,
Who made the sharks, He did.

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul, and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

What we might call the Monty Python Objection has been made before to try to counter people who Argue from Design that God made everything. It's all so perfect, you know.

Thought for the evening

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.

– Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Lord Russell was a British philosopher and logician, and an excellent writer. He was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. The quotation is from Russell's 1954 essay, "Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?"