>>>I think we should take the messages of the fundamentalists more seriously. >>>In a fast moving society they represent, I think, the swing of the pendulum. >>>They might be "right" or they might be "wrong" but they deserve to be heard >>>and listened to. >> >> Certainly fundamentalists should be listened to, but there's a limit as to >> how often one should do so or how much respect one should give them when >> they themselves don't offer the same courtesies to you. Misguided is the >> kindest thing one can say of some of views � which they then want to >> inflict on others. > > Frankly I'm angry with all institutionalized religions which hold that > their way is the best way... [ETC]
Indeed, indeed, and yet there is always something to be learned by attending carefully to the *CONTEXT* when conflicts appear in *religious* terms. This is as much true of the north of Ireland as of the Middle East ... as of the USA in the 20th Century. I want to elaborate on (or expand upon) Ray's insightful account of "the Fundamentalist former non-conformists who are now aligned with the conservative political elements ... pushing for government support for (their) religious schools and charities." Ray thinks that "the potential for liberality is much greater in the Fundamentalist groups" than we might suppose. "All you have to do is get to know them and be willing to meet them in the open forum with a reasonable knowledge of their premises... Clinton, Gore, Carter are all Baptists in the old mode..." The story I want to share is set out most succinctly and articulately by Richard C. Lewontin in his critical appreciation of Carl Sagan's *mission* to spread the Word of Science amongst the unbelievers -- a "candle in the dark". Here is Lewontin's story: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I first met Carl Sagan in 1964, when he and I found ourselves in Arkansas on the platform of the Little Rock Auditorium, where we had been dispatched by command of the leading geneticist of the day, Herman M�ller. Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: "Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun." One of our opponents in the debate was a professor of biology from a fundamentalist college in Texas (his father was the president of the college) who had quite deliberately chosen the notoriously evolutionist Department of Zoology of the University of Texas as the source of his Ph.D. He could then assure his students that he had unassailable expert knowledge with which to refute Darwinism. I had serious misgivings about facing an immense audience of creationist fundamentalist Christians in a city made famous by an Arkansas governor who, having detected a resentment of his constituents against federal usurpation, defied the power of Big Government by interposing his own body between the door of the local high school and some black kids who wanted to matriculate. Young scientists, however, do not easily withstand the urgings of Nobel Prize winners, so after several transparently devious attempts to avoid the job, I appeared. We were, in fact, well treated, but despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition. Carl and I then sneaked out the back door of the auditorium and beat it out of town, quite certain that at any moment hooded riders with ropes and flaming crosses would snatch up two atheistic New York Jews who had the chutzpah to engage in public blasphemy. Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent, except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture. The struggle to bring scientific knowledge to the masses has been a preoccupation of Carl Sagan's ever since ... ... [cut] ... The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners. The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (_The Appeal to Reason!_) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. The result was a fundamentalist revolt, the invention of "Creation Science," and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks. In their parochial hubris, intellectuals call the struggle between cultural relativists and traditionalists in the universities and small circulation journals "The Culture Wars." The real war is between the traditional culture of those who think of themselves as powerless and the rationalizing materialism of the modern Leviathan. There are indeed Two Cultures at Cambridge. One is in the Senior Common Room, and the other is in the Porter's Lodge. Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. In doing so, he is faced with a contradiction for which there is no clear resolution. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. On the other hand, given the immense extent, inherent complexity, and counterintuitive nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible for anyone, including non-specialist scientists, to retrace the intellectual paths that lead to scientific conclusions about nature. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand. Anyone who has ever served as an expert witness in a judicial proceeding knows that the court may spend an inordinate time "qualifying" the expert, who, once qualified, gives testimony that is not meant to be a persuasive argument, but an assertion unchallengeable by anyone except another expert. And, indeed, what else are the courts to do? If the judge, attorneys, and jury could reason out the technical issues from fundamentals, there would be no need of experts. What is at stake here is a deep problem in democratic self-governance. In Plato's most modern of Dialogues, the _Gorgias_, there is a struggle between Socrates, with whom we are meant to sympathize, and his opponents, Gorgias and Callicles, over the relative virtues of rhetoric and technical expertise. What Socrates and Gorgias agree on is that the mass of citizens are incompetent to make reasoned decisions on justice and public policy, but that they must be swayed by rhetorical argument or guided by the authority of experts. Gorgias: "I mean [by the art of rhetoric] the ability to convince by means of speech a jury in a court of justice, members of the Council in their Chamber, voters at a meeting of the Assembly, and any other gathering of citizens, whatever it may be." Socrates: "When the citizens hold a meeting to appoint medical officers or shipbuilders or any other professional class of person, surely it won't be the orator who advises them then. Obviously in every such election the choice ought to fall on the most expert." Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power. [END] from: "Billions and Billions of Demons," _New York Review of Books_ (9 January 1997), by Richard Lewontin http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19970109028R review of: _The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark_, by Carl Sagan (Random House) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Lewontin should have (could have) paused to note a dramatic oversight in his sketch. The famous "Monkey Trial" of 1925 (John Thomas Scopes vs. the People of Tennessee) is exactly about who shall be in charge of the school curriculum and, in particular whether we want to be teaching our kids & our neighbor's kids the material contained in the latest up-to-date biology texts from the New York City high school system. The book which Scopes was using -- _A Civic Biology_ (1914) by George Hunter, Head of the Science Division at DeWitt Clinton High School, affiliated with the renowned Columbia University Teachers College -- features a hard-line Darwinian (survivalist) biology side-by-side with (and partly in support of) a muscular Eugenics (which, to say the least of it, is not too kind to the idle & indigent southern white). If we add that (i) Scopes is being pushed as a test case by the American Civil Liberties Union which as recruited Clarence Darrow for the defence, and that (ii) volunterring his services for the prosecution is none other than William Jennings Bryan, populist & popular politician, 4x Democtratic candidate for the Presidency, and you can see that the whole business is wrapped up in exactly the same political and cultural struggle that Lewontin is talking about. On the Scopes trial, there are two FABULOUS sources: (1) Edward J. Larson, _Summer of the Gods_ (1998) -- Pulitzer-prize winning account; and a piece whose web-site is well-worth a visit -- you have to see the illustrations: (2) "Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, the Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate," Journal of American History, 87 (March 2001), pp. 1275-1301 by Constance Areson Clark http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/article.shtml [Here is the 1st paragraph;] According to Joseph Wood Krutch, the most dramatic event at the Scopes trial of 1925 occurred when William Jennings Bryan announced, incredibly, that he was not a mammal. Looking back from the 1960s, Krutch, who had covered the trial for the _Nation_, remembered the moment with amusement. H.L. Mencken, Krutch noted, had made a point of falling noisily from a table, as if to punctuate the absurdity of Bryan's statement.[1] The trial transcript shows that Bryan did not precisely deny his place within the zoological class Mammalia. He did, however, emphatically object to a diagram that located humans among the mammals or, as he put it, in "a little ring ... with lions and tigers and everything that is bad!" [See figure 1.] The diagrammatic balloon that so offended Bryan came from a discussion of evolution in George William Hunter's _Civic Biology_, the textbook assigned to John Thomas Scopes's biology class. Bryan responded viscerally to the image.[2] ... ... o brave new world that has such folks in it! best wishes, Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus]
