Fascism and the Cowardly Lion
A somewhat intoxicated law school friend once informed me in confidence that s/he had read The Bell Curve and found its arguments for some genetically related groups of people being more intelligent than others persuasive. To my further surprise, this statement was followed by another that I found very interesting -- that in the end it didn't matter whether such differences existed, because it would be absolutely detrimental to society to acknowledge their existence, regardless. I trust one does not need agree with the first conclusion to find the second worthy of consideration.
Along similar lines, my Church & State textbook points out that William Jennings Bryan is often given excessively short shrift in discussions of the Scopes trial -- yes, he believed in the literal truth of the Bible, but he also objected to the teaching of evolution because he feared that the doctrine of survival of the fittest would lead to oppression of workers, military agression, and scientific racism. Now, whether a fact leads people to disturbing erroneous conclusions--or disturbing, correct conclusions--has no bearing on whether or not it is true, and truth is unspeakably important. More practically, a proper understanding of evolution also has great scientific benefit. But the Scopes trial was in 1927, and the entire world did in fact spend the next twenty years living out Bryan's worst nightmares. The aftermath has shown that we can learn the need to respect each other's human dignity without believing that that dignity arose from direct creation by God, but the lesson came at an immense cost. I can see why Bryan could have worried--and many proponents of creationism still worry--that if we don't believe that we're all created by God, then we weren't all created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, either.
The Law School had some speakers a while back representing both sides of the intelligent design debate. The speaker against, who was involved in the Dover school fight, mercilessly deconstructed the logic of the pro-intelligent design faction, who were clearly bent on inserting whatever catch-phrase necessary to get their unchanged ideology past constitutional hurdles -- but he also presented the origins of the creationism movement as being among people who felt that science as taught was undermining the moral fabric of society. I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I was. I, probably like many people who can't see what the evolution fight is about, tend to imagine the forces of creationism as driven primarily by a fundamentalist intolerance of the idea that the world could be more than six days old -- as, indeed, some people are. But evolution--both in reality and in popular myth--does not stay in a nice science-versus-dogma box the way that the earth's place in the solar system does. It may be annoying for someone to think that their planet is one of many or that they are personally descended from (common ancestors shared with) monkeys, but the real risk is not in people losing their belief that God created them, but their belief that God created everyone else.
As I said before, the truth is the truth is the truth. But if we believe that humanity's moral compass can function just fine with evolution, maybe we should be devoting some energy toward reassuring people on that count, and not just knocking down school board resolutions. Maybe if that seemed less in doubt, the issue might be less of the society-wide point of contention that it seems to be.
Along similar lines, my Church & State textbook points out that William Jennings Bryan is often given excessively short shrift in discussions of the Scopes trial -- yes, he believed in the literal truth of the Bible, but he also objected to the teaching of evolution because he feared that the doctrine of survival of the fittest would lead to oppression of workers, military agression, and scientific racism. Now, whether a fact leads people to disturbing erroneous conclusions--or disturbing, correct conclusions--has no bearing on whether or not it is true, and truth is unspeakably important. More practically, a proper understanding of evolution also has great scientific benefit. But the Scopes trial was in 1927, and the entire world did in fact spend the next twenty years living out Bryan's worst nightmares. The aftermath has shown that we can learn the need to respect each other's human dignity without believing that that dignity arose from direct creation by God, but the lesson came at an immense cost. I can see why Bryan could have worried--and many proponents of creationism still worry--that if we don't believe that we're all created by God, then we weren't all created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, either.
The Law School had some speakers a while back representing both sides of the intelligent design debate. The speaker against, who was involved in the Dover school fight, mercilessly deconstructed the logic of the pro-intelligent design faction, who were clearly bent on inserting whatever catch-phrase necessary to get their unchanged ideology past constitutional hurdles -- but he also presented the origins of the creationism movement as being among people who felt that science as taught was undermining the moral fabric of society. I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I was. I, probably like many people who can't see what the evolution fight is about, tend to imagine the forces of creationism as driven primarily by a fundamentalist intolerance of the idea that the world could be more than six days old -- as, indeed, some people are. But evolution--both in reality and in popular myth--does not stay in a nice science-versus-dogma box the way that the earth's place in the solar system does. It may be annoying for someone to think that their planet is one of many or that they are personally descended from (common ancestors shared with) monkeys, but the real risk is not in people losing their belief that God created them, but their belief that God created everyone else.
As I said before, the truth is the truth is the truth. But if we believe that humanity's moral compass can function just fine with evolution, maybe we should be devoting some energy toward reassuring people on that count, and not just knocking down school board resolutions. Maybe if that seemed less in doubt, the issue might be less of the society-wide point of contention that it seems to be.
posted by fleurdelis28 | 4:49 PM
9 Comments:
fundamentalist intolerance of the idea that the world could be more than six days old
ROTFLOL! I think that most fundamentalists would admit that the world is slightly more than six days old, for six days ago was last Monday. (Yes, I know what you meant.)
You raise an interesting issue. Perhaps the W.J. Bryan approach can really be detrimental to society, in that if we sweep the truth of evolution under the rug, it may discourage racism for the moment, but as soon as the truth comes out (as it eventually will: qushta qa'ei, shiqra la qa'ei), people could run out and act in abominable ways, for they have no framework in which to understand evolution.
On the other hand, if we deal with the truth and teach it, we can find ways of teaching it that can combat teachings such as the Nazi Theory of Races.
(BTW, wasn't the Scopes trial in 1925, not 1927?)
You raise an interesting issue. Perhaps the W.J. Bryan approach can really be detrimental to society, in that if we sweep the truth of evolution under the rug, it may discourage racism for the moment, but as soon as the truth comes out (as it eventually will: qushta qa'ei, shiqra la qa'ei), people could run out and act in abominable ways, for they have no framework in which to understand evolution.
That was actually sort of the opposite of my point. You're right that people who are given truth without context can read scary things into it, but people in the 1920s were doing that anyway, not least the thoroughly educated. Bryan, in objecting to the teaching of evolution, apparently pointed to a lot of scientific racism embedded in the textbooks that were currently teaching it (I've seen at least one example myself, in an 1896 popular-knowledge guide that seems to have derived all its information from very respectable sources, and which explained how evolution had atrophied the brains of the races that lived in places where muscle was needed more than thought). A lot of official people were going around sterilizing people considered to be unfit to reproduce, and trying to prevent undesirable people from marrying -- this is where many if not most of the current marriage-license laws arose, requiring people to be vetted by the state before they could marry. There were scientists at the turn of the century studying Jews' feet to try to show that they were genetically divergent from everyone else, and other scientists classifying developmental disorders under the names of "inferior" races, on the theory that an infant in the womb underwent all stages of evolution, and some got stuck at the earlier stages represented by the non-European races (the only one that persisted into modern memory was "the Mongolian idiocy," now thankfully renamed "Down's Syndrome). To my knowledge Hitler's only novel contribution was the notion that methodically killing otherwise productive citizens was an acceptable way of getting them out of the gene pool, and he didn't come to these conclusions by being raised a creationist in Tennessee.
Scientific racism was also not ever eliminated by fighting bad science with good science; what killed it was the horrific appeal to consequences of WWII. I'm not entirely sure it's ever been conclusively disproven--though its specific conclusions have, and given what we now understand about genetic diversity within or between races, any evidence it did summon would probably be pretty wimpy--but it has become an unacceptable matter for speculation among a large swath of the public, to the extent that many intelligent people would refuse to even contemplate it, even for the sake of argument. It hasn't been quashed by religion, but it has been quashed, because nobody wants to go there.
The main lesson learned from the 30s and 40s was not that science needs context, it was that scientific conclusions applied in such a way as to dehumanize fellow human beings can lead to total disaster, and it doesn't matter if they're right. Would it have made a difference if scientific racism were right about anything? Would that have made it okay? The problem is not that the science was wrong (which it was), it was that the conclusions drawn from it were totally creepy.
Obviously, I'm not saying that we shouldn't teach evolution, and religion has had more than its own share of totally creepy conclusions. But I do wonder if maybe we should give more attention to the reasons why people who have reservations about it have those reservations, rather than just dismissing them as undifferentiated fundie lunatics.
"apparently pointed to a lot of scientific racism embedded in the textbooks that were currently teaching it "
The very textbook at issue in the Scopes trial, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology, was a rascist and eugenicist screed
I have a very vague memory of the single chapter of the Bell Curve that I read in school. It's entirely possible that there is some merit to some of its arguments. There were multiple problems with the chapter I read, most of which I don't remember. The one issue I do remember is that they equate IQ with intelligence, regardless of the fact that the two cannot quite be equated. For that matter, studies* have shown that the IQ test, as with other standardized tests with which we are familiar, has embedded racism in it.
I don't know whether or not the studies came out before the Bell Curve.
Embedded racism, or embedded bias?
The very textbook at issue in the Scopes trial, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology, was a rascist and eugenicist screed
That does lend a different sort of angle to a law prohibiting its teaching (though people who hold the same positions today have a little bit more explaining to do).
My FIL was recently telling me how the psychology world had a paper written by two very well-known liberals decrying the 'everyone is the same' mantra. They argued that it does nobody any good to pretend that people are all exactly the same - everyone has their own inherent skills. That doesn't mean people are better than one another; merely different.
Maybe the central issue is a need to separate "the same" from "equal", in both directions.
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