NZ could be ‘new Athens’

Author and militant atheist Richard Dawkins has penned a letter urging New Zealand to welcome foreign intellectuals.

In a post-brexit, post-united States election world, scientists and creative intellectuals would be desperate to escape the ‘‘redneck bigotry’’ of their home countries, Dawkins wrote in a letter published in the Scientific American.

Dawkins said science in Britain and the US would be hit ‘‘extremely hard’’ by the long-term effects of Brexit and a Trump presidency.

‘‘Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilised small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues,’’ he wrote.

He urged Aotearoa to write to Nobel Prize winners, Fields medallists, Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences and more to offer them citizenship Down Under.

‘‘The contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers. You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world.’’

Dawkins said the two largest nations in the English-speaking world had suffered ‘‘catastrophes’’ at the hands of voters he described as ‘‘uneducated and anti-intellectual’’.

In the case of Britain, science would suffer due to, ‘‘the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners’’.

And in the US, Dawkins said the US had just elected an ‘‘unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president’’. - Fairfax NZ