Dawkins named world’s top thinker

No, it’s not Peter Hitchens or Terry Eagleton.  Nor is it Glenn Greenwald, R. Joseph Hoffmann, or any of the critics of New Atheism who fancy themselves far more sophisticated and, perhaps, influential than the New Atheists.  (We’ve all heard the hounds baying about the declining relevance and clout of all those “militant” athiests.)

No, according to a Prospect Magazine poll, the world’s top thinker, the person who was most intellectually influential over the last 12 months, was—Richard Dawkins.  And #3 was another vociferous atheist, Steven Pinker. In the #8 spot we find another godless person: Peter Higgs.

Here are the top ten, chosen by Prospect readers from a list of 65 people created by an elite panel from the U.S. and U.K. (links go to descriptions of the braniacs as well as the other 55 candidates):

1. Richard Dawkins
2. Ashraf Ghani
3. Steven Pinker
4. Ali Allawi
5. Paul Krugman
6. Slavoj Žižek
7. Amartya Sen
8. Peter Higgs
9. Mohamed ElBaradei
10.Daniel Kahneman

Other atheists known to me in the top 20 are Steven Weinberg (#11) and Oliver Sacks (#13).  That makes at least 25% atheists, twice the proportion of nonbelievers in the world as a whole. Maybe we should resurrect the term “brights.” (Only kidding!)

Prospect‘s analysis goes further:

Among the new entries at the top are Peter Higgs—whose inclusion is a sign of public excitement about the discoveries emerging from the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, Cern—and Slavoj Žižek, whose critique of global capitalism has gained more urgency in the wake of the financial crisis. The appearance of Steven Pinker and Daniel Kahneman, authors of two of the most successful recent “ideas books,” further demonstrates the public appetite for serious, in-depth thinking in the age of the TED talk. The inclusion of Ashraf Ghani, Ali Allawi and Mohamed ElBaradei—from Afghanistan, Iraq and Egypt, respectively—reflects the importance of their work on fostering democracies across the Muslim world in the wake of foreign interventions and the Arab Spring.. .

As always, the absences are as revealing as the familiar names at the top. The failure of environmental thinkers to win many votes may be a sign of the faltering energy of the green movement. Despite the presence of climate scientists lower down the list, the movement seems to lack successors to influential public intellectuals such as Rachel Carson and James Lovelock. Serious thinkers about the internet and technology are also conspicuous by their absence. The highest-placed representative of Silicon Valley is the entrepreneur Elon Musk, but beyond journalist-critics such as Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, technology still awaits its heavyweight public intellectuals (see Thomas Meaney, £).

Most striking of all is the lack of women at the top of this year’s list. The highest-placed woman in this year’s poll, at number 15, is Arundhati Roy, who has become a prominent left-wing critic of inequalities and injustice in modern India since the publication of her novel The God of Small Things over a decade ago.

The Guardian Books section has its own analysis, including speculations about the lack of women:

To qualify for this year’s world thinkers rankings, it was not enough to have written a seminal book, inspired an intellectual movement or won a Nobel prize several years ago (hence the absence from the 65-strong long list of ageing titans such as Noam Chomsky or Edward O Wilson); the selectors’ remit ruthlessly insisted on “influence over the past 12 months” and “significance to the year’s biggest questions”.

This requirement may have been a factor in the top 10 being all-male (presumably a source of frustration to the five women on the selection panel, including Prospect’s editor Bronwen Maddox), with longlistees such as Hilary Mantel, Martha Nussbaum and Sheryl Sandberg not making it through to the elite of the elite, and the likes of Germaine Greer and Naomi Klein not even making it into the 65. But it may also, of course, simply reflect the gender make-up of the monthly’s readership.

Political engagement was clearly enough for the Middle Eastern trio to meet the criterion of current influence, and others among the cerebral galacticos have been in the news too. The Higgs boson was identified at Cern in July and confirmed there last month, making him an odds-on favourite for a Nobel. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow became a worldwide bestseller last year. Krugman, a New York Times columnist as well as a Princeton don, has been the leading critic of “the austerity delusion”. Pinker might well have made the chart anyway, but probably owes his high position to his switch from his specialist field of psycholinguistics to history in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

As for Dawkins, the continuation of wars of religion and terrorist atrocities informed by it means his atheist crusade remains relevant to the year’s biggest questions, despite the end of the Bible-bashing, war-mongering Bush era in which he first raised his banner – this week his 670,000 Twitter followers could find him (between musings about socks) rejoicing in France’s legalisation of gay marriage, ridiculing a journalist’s Muslim beliefs, and retweeting a story that the older Boston bomber “was angry that the world pictured Islam as a violent religion”. On Monday, no doubt manfully resisting efforts to deify or idolise him, the world No 1 will attend the premiere in Toronto of a documentary about his roadshow (with Lawrence Krauss) promoting science and reason.

Don’t ask me to defend the list, for I haven’t heard of half the candidates! Nor can I vouch for the sapience of Prospect readers. But I do count Richard and Steve as friends, and can testify that they clearly deserve their positions. It’s humbling and an honor to know them—and really good for my education!