George Bush threw a big bone to rightwing Christian fundamentalists this week when he told a press conference that the 'theory' of 'intelligent design' (something out there, most likely a supreme spirit, call him Tom, Dick, Jehovah or Allah, made the material universe) should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in schools.
The fundamentalists praised him, his science advisor said that the natural sciences had nothing to worry about, and so it went, eighty years after Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan went toe to toe at Dayton, Tennessee, in the trial of John Scopes, a biology teacher, accused of violating a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution.
Although Scopes was convicted, the trial became a symbol among non-fundamentalists in the U.S. and the world of superstition at war with science, dogmatism using the police power to cow reason. In urban areas it also became a national joke. Darrow, long the country’s leading civil liberties and labor lawyer led a team of lawyers sent by the then six year old American Civil Liberties Union (founded by progressives and socialists as a response to the Red Scare of 1919) to defend Scopes. Bryan, evangelical protestant, three time Democratic presidential candidate, and a politician associated with a watered down version of anti-monopoly populism, was the guest prosecutor in the case, which rapidly became both a political show trial and a media circus. Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, as reported by journalist H.L. Mencken, particularly, became for millions the most vivid example of the cleavages and contradictions in U.S. society that permitted rightwing Republicans to rule the country.
A year before, Bryan had spoken at the Democratic convention against a resolution condemning the then very powerful KKK on the grounds that it would undermine Democratic Party unity in the presidential campaign against the Republicans (Coolidge and the Republicans won anyway). Now he was destroying, for the urban working class at least, whatever was left of his positive reputation by prosecuting Scopes.
When I went to high school in the late 1950s and early 1960s, teachers taught us that the case was a kind of last stand of backward rural elements against 'the modern world,' against the automobiles, the movie theaters, and the new way of life emanating from the electrified cities into the country side. Fundamentalism was a comical footnote to history. No one would or could today (meaning 1960) challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution.
To do so would be like challenging Galileo’s 'theory' that the earth revolved around the sun, which the Catholic Church in the 17th century forced him to recant under threat of death because it conflicted with their theology, in Darwin’s time.
Even when the reactionary forces in Europe after 1815 sought to stamp out every vestige of the Enlightenment and the French revolution and compel complete subservience to clerical and aristocratic authority, they did not seek to impose in France and the German states the view that the earth revolved around the sun, however they actively resisted evolutionary theory in science. They did seek to limit secular education and oppose even basic literary for the masses of people, realizing perhaps that depriving people of the basic intellectual tools necessary for critical thought was the best way to maintain 'faith based' societies. If they used a slogan like 'no child left behind,' they would mean in the churches and in the fields.
Since most people are literate and have in principle the right to vote, Bush proclaims himself an 'education President' and defends 'intelligent design' as a 'theory' for students to choose as they choose from various goods in any market. Bush assumes that his fundamentalist followers, for whom the 'marketplace of ideas' is reduced to a biblical monopoly, will draw more closely to him and everyone else won’t care, except those he can dismiss as liberals and 'secular humanists.'
How can Bush be fought on the issue? Let’s pretend that Karl Rove was advising the anti-Bush forces on. What would he likely suggest? Divide Bush’s 'faith based' followers by demanding that Darwin’s theory of evolution be taught in bible classes and all parochial and fundamentalist Christian schools, Jewish Yeshivas, Muslim Schools, etc. Redesign 'intelligent design' to contend that the Great Spirit was both female and that the material universe has been re-incarnated many times, and that the Great Spirit sent a daughter to earth to sacrifice and die for humanity. What pandemonium that would create on the religious right.
Then fight Bush among his fellow more secular Republicans by citing the obvious connections with William Jennings Bryan, who during his long career advocated government ownership of the railroads, opposed U.S. imperialism in the Philippines (after the fact) and attacked Wall Street and the Gold Standard with the words: 'you shall not impress upon the brown of labor, this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of Gold.' Argue that perhaps Bush is a secret populist, whose born again religiosity hides a secret political agenda to bring down Wall Street and the whole system of monopoly capitalism by associating it with wars of conquest for oil, tax giveaways for the rich, and corporate looting.
Can it be that the man who champions the destruction of the Capital Gains tax and the Inheritance tax agrees secretly with William Jennings Bryan that 'the farmer is as much a businessman as the man who places his bet on the stock exchange.' From Swift Boat Ads to Willie Horton ads, those are tried and true methods in contemporary U.S. politics.
Guilt by association was and is the classic tactic of the right and ultra-right, from the Federalist champions of the Alien and Sedition Acts over 200 hundred years ago accusing Thomas Jefferson of being an agent of the Godless French Revolution to HUAC and Joe McCarthy et al accusing Communists of being both agents of and spies for the even more Godless Russian revolution. If John Birch Society members could argue that Eisenhower was a Communist forty-five years ago, it might be possible to convince some of his supporters that Bush is a secret Christian socialist, or even worse, in McCarthyite language, someone secretly follows an old Democrat, William Jennings Bryan.
To end on a serious note, Bush’s statement is not only absurd but also sinister. His administration has not only sought to distort and/or simply stop important scientific work on a variety of questions ranging from global warming to stem cell research, questions that relate directly to the protection of environment and human life. It has also sought philosophically and practically to undermine the separation of church and state, a cornerstone of the American Revolution and Constitution and a foundation on which modern representative governments, both capitalist and socialist, have stood since the 18th century.
Teaching both 'intelligent design' and evolution is not like teaching the political economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx alongside each other, or the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud with the sociological theories of Max Weber, for example. All broad based theories which use scientific method, rationalist and empiricist methods, grow and develop dialectically through dynamic interaction, negation and synthesis, within themselves and with each other. Religion may develop institutionally, and its theological stories may change over time, but it does not and cannot develop as science does, since it is based on things that can never be proven but which science, in terms of creation, can disprove.
This is particularly true of the 'intelligent design theory' that Bush puts forward. Unlike social gospel Christianity and contemporary Roman Catholic Liberation Theology, which are applications of selected values and aspirations drawn from theology to improving the material life of the masses of people today, fundamentalists seek to control the conduct of the masses by making them believe literally that their lives are simply an introduction to a greater after life, if they believe and obey, and some hellish one (or for others some bad re-incarnation) if they don’t.
'Intelligent Design' is simply another way to market right-wing fundamentalism and attempt to push science out of the market.
Along with its general anti-environmental policies, the Bush administration and rightwing media generally produce a great deal of intellectual 'pollution' which functions like the air pollution of the 1950s, when people drove cars with unleaded gasoline and, in my neighborhood at least, breathed in coal dust every day without realizing how bad it was. If the pollution gets worse and worse and isn’t challenged (as it wasn’t in the U.S until the 1960s) people accept it as normal, cough a lot and eventually get sicker and sicker. The same is true with the Bush administration’s and mass media’s attacks on both science and the separation of Church and State. The more the intellectual pollution permeates the society, the less healthy the Bill of Rights and all civil rights and liberties become.
--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
