Scopes 2.0

I recently had a heated discussion with an evangelical Christian about the unfairness of teaching evolution, but not creationism, in the public schools. One of his claims was that evolutionists are now in the same position, and doing the same thing to creationists, as creationists were formerly condemned for doing (especially in such famous cases as the Scopes trial) namely, not letting teachers teach what they think it is right to teach. In other words, now it is the scientists and science teachers who are trying to stifle dissent through political means rather than persuasion by evidence.

Now I think this is troubling to many liberals about the case against "teaching the controversy" (as it is coyly termed by modern creationists). After all, isn't freedom of speech a basic human right? And really, who are we to tell people what they should or should not teach their children?

But I think this criticism rests on misunderstandings of the actual cases where school boards have changed the laws and of the claims of the scientists and their Democratic supporters.

First, most of the legislation (and I'm too tired right now to look up links--maybe tomorrow) that has been passed and challenged in the courts has not just said, say whatever you want, but rather, that you have to teach both sides, or present evolution and the creationist criticisms of evolution. So I take it from the beginning that the creationist isn't (or at least shouldn't be) claiming that the scientists are wrong to say that we should have political control over what is taught in public schools. Rather, they are being inconsistent to their own principles of free inquiry, especially as exemplified in the mythology of their free-thinking heroes.

But this is just wrong. Scientists (and I know some scientists disagree, but this is the view of the major scientific organizations) don't claim that people should be allowed to teach whatever they want. If someone is teaching science, then they should be teaching science properly, which crucially means something like the consensus views of most scientific experts on a particular issue. This is why there will be much more uniformity in most scientific textbooks as compared to the textbooks used in the humanities.

To make this point more clearly, the issue in the Scopes trial was not freedom of speech, (after all, teachers have a public duty to teach well, not just however they wish), but rather that scientific education should be ultimately controlled by scientists rather than by politicians, parents, preachers, amateurs, etc. And that control is what is still being challenged by modern-day creationists such as the members of the Kansas School Board, the Discovery Institute, and others. So it would be misleading for the creationists to cast themselves in the position of John Scopes being forced to teach something they think is wrong as that is not the primary issue.

This criticism relates to another mistake made by creationists. They will often point to the few biology-related scientists who criticize some aspects of evolution, generally without proposing a workable alternative--mainly just Michael Behe--as evidence that their is a real controversy on this issue and so it is in fact the scientists who are calling for change. The Discovery Institute has been particularly bad on this issue, repeatedly making strong claims about how the amount of disagreement means that we should change how we teach biology.

But this is making the same mistake as before, albeit in a slightly more sophisticated form. First of all, scientists as individuals have no more right to try to dictate how we should teach science in public schools. So even Einstein in 1915 has no right to say, hey look, Newton was wrong and so you should stop teaching him. Even though Einstein was correct in his claims, and was able to back them up with strong evidence, in order for that to matter to the public school educators it must first enter into the scientific community and be judged by them. If it becomes part of the prevailing paradigm (or replaces that paradigm), then it can be taught. But notice how it is not Einstein, brilliant as he was that legitimates this process. Rather, it is the community of scientists coming to an agreement that does so. Since the community of scientists has come to an agreement about both the scientific status of the idea of evolution and the irrelevance of the arguments offered by its critics, it would be wrong to teach as a matter of science a non-existent controversy here.

So, to me if we are to have a discussion on this issue we should be honest about the terms of the debate. I know that the idea of science is held in very high regard in U.S. culture and so no one likes to argue against science. However, it seems to me that the real issue remains what it was for the Scopes trial: Who should control science education? Those arguing against the teaching of creationism claim it should be scientists and those arguing for the teaching of creationism believe it should be some other group.

I apologize for the laziness of this post, not including links and switching at whim between normative and descriptive claims, but hopefully my point is somewhat clear.

The "real" elections.

Ever since Michael Jordan left the Bulls, the Western Conference has had a disproportionate amount of the better teams. Unfortunately, this means that the finals are sometimes lopsided and not very exciting. This year was one of the more extreme examples, with the Spurs rolling over the Cavaliers in the Finals. It seems likely as well that 3 or 4 other Western teams wouldn't have had much more trouble. This leads to boring championships, and since championships are where you get the marginal fans interested in the game, this is bad for the NBA.

Sportswriters are aware of this and respond by calling the Western Conference finals the "real" Finals. That will be the most the most difficult series that the (likely) eventual champion will have to face. And again, this year's match-up between the Suns and Spurs bore this out.

I suspect there is a similar dynamic in this presidential election. The Democrats are coming off of a convincing victory in the 2006 election and Bush, unlike Clinton after the Republican victory in 1994, has not substantively changed the controversial policies or rhetoric that led to this victory. Thus, any Democratic candidate will go into this election as a strong favorite to win--meaning that the "real" election for president will be in the Democratic primaries.

I suspect this is one of the reasons why the primary season has started so much earlier and the candidates are spending so much more money now. You focus most on your toughest opponents, and this election it looks likely that will be the Democratic primary candidate.

But then why are the Republican candidates also doing the same? I think a lot of the attention focused on the Republican candidates is due to spillover, or equal time considerations. Like an arms race, if the Democrats start earlier, the Republicans must as well. Perhaps this is also why the Republican field seems so muddled right now--they just aren't ready for the media onslaught of the primary season.

Of course, there are other reasons as well for the early primary season. Bush and the Republican Senators have fairly clearly shown that they are unwilling to work with the Democratic Party's policy goals. The Democrats justifiably feel that they will just have to wait until Bush is gone to make substantive changes in foreign and domestic policy. Hence, focusing on putting a Democrat in office is the best way for the Democrats to achieve the goals that led to their victory in 2006.

Does the (future) President have religion?

One of the things I find most interesting about the upcoming elections are the choices facing conservative Christians in the Presidential elections. Conservative Christians generally hold that the religious beliefs of prospective political candidates are relevant to their fitness as American leaders. But this puts them in a bit of a pickle in the upcoming election. While the major Democratic candidates are quite vocal about how their Christianity has affected their political commitments, the major Republican candidates are rather less . McCain has always had a distrustful relationship with the Religious Right. Giuliani disagrees with conservative Christians on most social issues and seldom discusses his religious views. And Romney, who has positioned himself as the most conservative candidate is a Mormon--which many, if not most, conservative Christians would place him outside of Christianity altogether.

Some liberals write fairly scornfully of evangelical Christians. I think some evangelical ideas deserve this. And evangelicals have certainly been at least as scornful and vituperative in writing against liberal ideas. But I am not sure that the liberals are very good at understanding or predicting how Christians will react politically. It is occasionally asserted that Republicans engage in dog-whistle politics--where as long as they say the right buzz-words they will get the Christian vote. I don't know if this is true. After all, this would be effective only as a signalling device--a way to show Christian voters that you are one of them. The reason this worked so well with Bush is that he really did convince evangelical Christians that he was one of them--a born-again Christian with the same religious and spiritual concerns they had. Will this work as well for a Republican candidate that cannot identify religiously with the evangelical community? I don't know, but I suspect not. If the Republicans fail to mobilize the evangelical vote again in this election, will the Bush presidency be anomalous? And if so, can the Democratic party peel off some of these voters by presenting strongly religious candidates?

I am doubtful. While I do think that the failure of the Bush presidency will deservedly tarnish and hamper most efforts to mobilize evangelical Christians, I am unconvinced that these voters will switch parties. It is not enough to just be religious. After all, even the Muslims are religious. What is important is that you be of the proper religion. And frankly, liberal politics has overwhelmingly been identified with liberal Christianity amongst the evangelical community. And evangelical Christians has defined itself in opposition to liberal Christianity.

Furthermore, I think many underestimate how well evangelical Christianity meshes with the current policies of the Bush administration. For instance, why are evangelical Christians so fervently in support of the war in Iraq? Shouldn't they, as Christians, be against war a la Jesus's many sayings on humility and forgiveness? Is is just group identification? Or is it that they've believed the (formerly) cunning lies of the Bush administration? An unjustified assumption is that these Christians wouldn't support the war on the basis of their religious beliefs. After all, evangelical Christians are Christian. That is, they believe that God is on their (the U.S.) side. And with God on their side, how can they lose? Only by a lack of faith--i.e. by giving up because the war looks hopeless. And not only Christian, but evangelical. Their ultimate goal is not peace in the Middle East, but a Christian awakening. Of course they will support the overthrow of governments they view as anti-Christian (i.e. not run by Christians). This would be a policy goal vitally important to them in a way that is almost invisible to secular people.

Dirty Hippies Wearing PJ's In Mom's Basement Eating Cold Cereal

The world would be minutely better if bloggers refrained from signaling sarcasm by capitalizing the first letter of each word in a phrase. I don't need to see another reference to The Very Serious and Respectable Group of Beltway Living, Cocktail-Downing, And Whatever Other Stereotype We Like To Use To Describe The Media Or Party Establishment to realize that the blogger thinks some of these people claim to to be smart, educated, and eloquent and that she disagrees with this claim.

Scandals everywhere

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the Scooter Libby brouha. It seems he is guilty, which evidently has surprised no one. The commutation of his sentence by the president is also the predicatably squalid conclusion to the whole affair. However, I don't really care much whether Scooter Libby is punished. The purpose of Mr. Libby's proposed punishment would be symbolic, a way of telling the country that even the President and his associates are not above the law.

However, send Mr. Libby to prison for life and I, and I suspect most others, would not be convinced. After all, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Gonzalez have themselves repeatedly argued that the President is, in effect, above the law when dealing with U.S. citizens declared, by the President, as unlawful combatants. I'm supposed to believe a President with this attitude won't also use this ability to protect his political power? Or, as attested by the numerous scandals afflicting the spectacularly misnamed Justice Dept., that Mr. Bush will disapprove of the dishonourable and illegal methods used by Mr. Libby to attack Mr. Wilson? This is just more of the same we've come to expect from this administration.

Nor is this, as some have claimed a case of Mr. Bush threatening the foundations of the "rule of law." Sure, we, the jury, and the judge might think that Mr. Libby deserved to be punished for his crimes, but obviously Mr. Bush (and many members of the media establishment as well) did not. Mr. Bush used the legal powers granted him by the Constitution to make sure that Mr. Libby is not punished. So where is the rule of law being disrupted? I don't see it. After all, if the country believes that this was an abuse of power by the president then we can change the law so that future presidents cannot pardon their own associates.

Update: I am not saying that we should ignore these situations. After all, Scooter did commit a crime and should be tried and punished. The crimes he committed were significant enough to be very embarassing to the administration. However, I'm not convinced at this point this further aspect to the scandal means much. If anyone didn't already realize that the Bush administration encourages the unscrupulous, corrupt, and/or incompetent behavior such as that exhibited by Mr. Libby then they will not be further convinced by this pardon.

Corruption and incompetence are problems that can afflict both parties. And every election, both parties run against the other party on this basis (e.g. see Edwards' populism and the refrain of Republican Congresspeople everywhere that they are for small government and are going to go to Washington and protect their constituents against the bureaucrats, etc.). In other words, no one is for corruption. However, some of the people who are going to run in the next election will support scandalous ideas such as the legalization of torture, the stripping of human rights and civil liberties from even U.S. citizens, and even more unprovoked attacks against nations such as Iran. Whatever your views on homosexuality or abortion, I would hope no one in the U.S. would support those ideas by voting for the candidates representing them.

Where I've been

My long national nightmare of grading is finally over--so I can once again use my use my time constructively in the creation of blog posts.

Anyway, it's Friday night and I'm going to go celebrate

Christians: Are They the Moral Majority?

As I'm sure most people are aware, Jerry Falwell died last week. I only ever knew him as a famous Christian "spokesman" who said some things that people found embarrassing. That, and as the popularizer of the term "Moral Majority." Phil Nugent points out that this term seems oddly inconsistent with the Southern Baptist culture of Falwell, and with slight differences related to their more individualistic and anti-authoritarian attitude also inconsistent with the normal Evangelical culture of the Northwest. He says:

Having grown up in the rural Southern Baptist culture that Falwell came to represent, and having grown up in it during the last few years before it became fully owned and operated by the Republican Party, I've always believed that there was no way anyone who was really of that culture could have come up with the term "Moral Majority." When I was a child, our preachers and Sunday school teachers (and our teachers plain and simple, because in what I suppose was a violation of law, the teachers in my third and fourth grade classes used to lead us in prayer and Biblical-related discussions, for all the good that it did in my case) didn't tell us we were a part of any majority. Quite the opposite; it was always made clear that only a tiny fraction of the people on Earth at any given time would finally prove good enough to make it to Heaven and see God's smiling-Santa face.

I think this illustrates a couple of the oddities of the religious right's political involvement. Christianity has a long history of seeing itself as the "hidden city," as a separate society within society. This derives from the division between the world of spirit and flesh and goes back all the way to Jesus telling the Pharisees to give to Caesar what is his and to God what is God's. Since this is partially understood in terms of moral and spiritual purity, there is always this sense that the world of flesh--of which the state is a, perhaps the most, powerful manifestation is trying to distract and pull us away from true Christianity. This attitude seems to me to encourage a permanent notion of Christianity as the minority view. It doesn't matter what people say, or even what they do. What is fundamentally of importance is your relationship to God. Since this limits you to solely trusting the few people you know personally, or those who know and engage in the essentially religious (and hence exclusionary) markers of this relationship, there is always a limit on the size of the group that will qualify.

But yet, the Christian right is politically mobilized, and politically mobilized as Christians. They constitute one of the most vocal blocs of one of our major parties. What is the political justification provided for trying to make religious ideas binding on people? Here it became necessary to bring in the idea that actually Christianity constitutes in fact a political as well as religious majority. In other words, it is a re-making of religious ideas over into political and moral ideas. But this seems to provoke a serious tension in how we are meant to treat religion.

Take abortion. Why do Christians try so hard to make it illegal? After all, they know that non-Christians are evil and do evil things. So why are they attempting to prevent them from doing this one? Or, in the popular pro-choice refrain, if they don't want abortion, don't have one. Why should they be worried about the morality of those outside their religious communities? In other words, why is this a legal/political rather than a religious issue for religious people?

It seems to me that the simplest answer is that American Christians have largely adopted forms of reasoning more characteristic of Enlightenment liberalism than strictly fundamentalist ideas warrant. Liberalism characteristically tries to universalize their moral principles and so must treat all humans as essentially equal and indistinguishable. But if we are to treat all humans equally, it seems that we (roughly) must treat all religious beliefs as also being equal as the major religions on offer are not universalizable across all people (Liberal Christianity, which was an attempt to sketch out a picture of this universalized religion, is what led to the rise of fundamentalism).

So to argue against abortion, religious people must step outside their religion and use liberal reasoning against it. And I think the rhetoric is consistent with this claim. After all, according to those against abortion a morally significant human life begins at conception and so a properly universal liberal moral reasoning would include their rights as well. Hence the popularity of the "right to life" as an argument against abortion.

But the concept of a right to life is a creation of Enlightenment liberalism. It is not really to be found in the Bible. For instance, the image of the "vengeful God" of the Old Testament is a result of the passages where God commands the Israelite leaders to kill another nation--sometimes absolutely--even those we would normally consider innocent, such as the woman (non-combatants), children, and even their livestock. In fact, in a startling turn-about, King Saul loses the blessing of God because he decides to spare some of the innocent Amalekites. And as for the New Testament--what little political thought is contained there says nothing about protecting the rights of innocents. It is striking in light of the contemporary political scene that as far as we can tell neither Jesus, nor his immediate disciples felt it was necessary to try to effect social change through political means. In fact, while Jesus had much to say about the society he lived in, his invective was primarily reserved for the religious leadership of his own religion--a very different attitude from that of contemporary Christians.

These are difficult questions. Many early Christians, and some of the more libertarian type Christians I knew growing up had the view that Christians should not be involved in government or politics at all--but rather should keep themselves separate from the dirty doings of the world. Other seem to think that religion and politics are both good and necessary things, but should be kept as separate as possible. Others, and this is more characteristic of the religious right, try to combine the two. I am not sure that they are very successful.