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Entries for October 2007

October 31, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-7: The Scopes trial goes national

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Once Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act and the event publicized, things started moving extremely rapidly.

On May 9, 1925 "the county's justices three justices of the peace formally held scopes for action by the August grand jury, in the meantime releasing him without bond" (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 95). In mid-May, the 65-year old William Jennings Bryan, who had been campaigning across the nation against the teaching of evolution, volunteered to appear for the prosecution for free, thus guaranteeing the delighted city leaders that the trial would get the national publicity that the instigators eagerly sought. The local civic leaders, eager to get as many headliners as possible involved, even tried to get famous English author H. G. Wells, a supporter of evolution, to make the case for evolution at the trial. They considered that his distinguished literary presence would lend a certain cachet to the proceedings, but Wells declined to get involved (Larson p. 96).

Fearing that other cities, belatedly realizing the business boom that would result in having a nationally prominent trial, would try to take the trial away from Dayton, the local leaders decided not to wait until August for the trial but to move even more quickly. So the district judge, "acting with the consent of both prosecution and defense, called a special session of the grand jury for May 25 to indict Scopes before any other town could steal the show." (Larson p. 96)

When the eventual lead attorney for the defense Clarence Darrow was initially approached about whether he would defend Scopes, he declined the offer because he had just retired at the age of 68 and was not interested in taking on new cases. But when he heard that Bryan was appearing for the prosecution, the agnostic Darrow changed his mind and offered to appear for Scopes for no fee, relishing the chance to argue, on a national stage, against one of the most visible proponents of religion. This caused some dismay to the ACLU that was underwriting the defense case. They wanted to focus the case on the issue of academic freedom and felt that Darrow's militant agnosticism would alienate otherwise sympathetic potential religious allies. But Scopes chose Darrow to be his lawyer and stuck with him, feeling that an experienced defense lawyer was better than the constitutional lawyers that the ACLU wanted (Larson, p. 102).

Clarence Darrow was the perfect foil for William Jennings Bryan. Darrow was famous for his successful defenses of several high profile criminal cases but he also "delighted in challenging traditional concepts of morality and religion." He called himself an agnostic but was effectively an atheist, in which respect he was very similar to Charles Darwin. According to Darrow's biographer "He regarded Christianity as a 'slave religion,' encouraging acquiescence in injustice, a willingness to make do with the mediocre, and complacency in the face of the intolerable." (Larson, p. 71)

Good intentions underlay Darrow's efforts to undermine popular religious faith. He sincerely believed that the biblical concept of original sin for all and salvation for some through divine grace was, as he described it, "a very dangerous doctrine' – "silly, impossible, and wicked." Darrow once told a group of convicts, "It is not the bad people I fear so much as the good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel – he believes in punishment." During a public debate on religion, he added, "The origin of what we call civilization is not due to religion but to skepticism. . .The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith."
. . .
Darrow readily embraced the antitheistic implications of Darwinism. (Larson, p. 71)

Since both Bryan and Darrow were itching to square off against each other on the grand issue of science and religion, it was almost guaranteed that the trial would extend well beyond issues of free speech. The stage was now set for the 'trial of the century,' which would reverberate and color all future discussions on this topic.

POST SCRIPT: Comedian Lewis Black on Biblical literalism

October 30, 2007

Is Dumbledore gay?

By now everyone is aware of the bombshell dropped into the Harry Potter world by creator J. K. Rowling announcing that she had always envisaged Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore as gay, although she had not made it explicit in the books.

Advocates of gay rights have welcomed Rowling's statement, although some have said that they would have liked to have had this development made clear in the books itself, rather than revealed as an afterword. Those who already saw the books as evil because its magical aspects appeared like witchcraft to them, now have another reason to condemn the books, seeing it as an attempt by the author to 'further the gay agenda.' They fear that by making the most universally admired character in the books gay, young children will become (oh, the horror!) more tolerant of gay people.

But Rowling's announcement raises a different issue that has not received much attention and that is the question of to what extent an author has control of the content of her books after they have been published. In this case, does the fact that Rowling wrote Dumbledore thinking of him as a gay character actually make him so?

When I read the Harry Potter books, the question of Dumbledore's or any other adult person's sexuality rarely crossed my mind. The books are quite innocent in that respect and this is typical for this kind of British boarding school fiction where teachers tend to be portrayed as aloof, asexual figures, with no real life outside the classroom and school. On rare occasions I did idly consider the possibility of whether any romance existed between Dumbledore and Professor Minerva McGonagall that would be revealed at the end. There was nothing in the books to suggest this. It simply seemed like they would make a nice compatible couple, spending a quiet retirement together.

So is Dumbledore gay? One school of thought would argue that if his creator says so, then he must be so. After all, the entire Harry Potter universe is a product solely of her imagination so surely she has the right to determine the nature of each character. But the relationship of the author to her creations is not that simple because another school of thought says that once a book is published, it is no longer 'owned' by the author and the meaning of the books now lies with whatever meaning the reader assigns. While the reader cannot change the text in any way or create new facts, the reader's right to interpretation is on a par with that of the writer.

According to the latter view, since I had never considered the possibility that Dumbledore was gay while reading the books, he is not so, at least to me. Of course, now that this possibility has been raised, a re-reading of the books might cause me to change my mind, seeing in his character things I had not seen before. We all have experienced occasions when a conversation we have had or a film we have seen or a book we have read is suddenly recollected in a dramatic new light because we subsequently received new information. But whether Dumbledore is gay that is something that has to be determined by each reader, not the author.

I recall an author whose novels were sometimes assigned as texts by high school teachers and students would be asked to write essays on what was meant by such and such a passage. The author said that some enterprising students, realizing that he was still around, would track him down and call him to ask what he meant, hoping to get the 'correct' answer to their essay prompt. He would reply that he didn't know any more than they did. He was not trying to dodge the question, he was just expressing the view that once a work is published, the author has relinquished control of the meaning of the work. The same issues arise with the meaning of a painting or a sculpture or a piece of music.

This does not mean that all creators are comfortable relinquishing control of their work. I recall the story of an art museum docent who was horrified to find a visitor painting over a work hanging on the museum wall. Upon arrest and questioning, the 'vandal' turned out to be the original artist who had not been quite satisfied with the work he had sold, and had decided to make some changes.

A colleague and friend of mine Professor Christine Cano wrote a fascinating book called Proust's Deadline (2007) which dealt with the publishing history of Marcel Proust's epic multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time (formerly called Remembrance of Things Past). The volumes were published over the period 1913-1927, the last three edited and published posthumously after his death in 1922. Proust, like Rowling, had never published a novel before and yet ambitiously conceived of the first novel as an epic work whose story needed many volumes (seven in both cases) to tell. But whereas Rowling's story lent itself to being split into episodes and she seemed to have been a highly disciplined writer and mapped out the plotline carefully from the start and stuck to it, Proust had a much harder time of it. He was constantly rewriting, backtracking, changing course, and making revisions.

In 1987, long after Proust's death, one of his original publishers issued a revised version of Proust's novel based on an original manuscript in which Proust seemed, just before his death, to have deleted a huge 250 page chunk out of one of the novels. This posed a dilemma for Proust readers. Which was the 'real' novel: The longer version that had long been considered the canonical one? Or the 1987 abridged version that seemed to represent Proust's 'final' thoughts on his own work? Cano and most Proust scholars think that what was originally published is the final word. Once a work is published, the author's control over the story is over.

In a very minor way, I face the same problem with this blog. Sometimes, just after I have posted an item, I think of a revision that might improve the text. But I somehow feel that it is not quite correct to make the change, even though it is still 'my' work and I am the publisher. Once it has appeared on the internet, to be seen by the world, it no longer seems to belong to me except in the purely technical sense of owning the copyright. The only changes I make to published posts are if I discover a glaring factual error or a typo. I avoid making any substantive changes in meaning.

My discomfort with post-publishing changes may be because I have grown up with the older publishing model, where the appearance of a book was a landmark event simply because of the complex nature of creating a physical object. A bound book in one's hand has a sense of finality. Internet publishing, where changes can be easily made in a few minutes, has created a new dynamic. As it gains ground, it is not clear when any work will be seen as the author's final word.

POST SCRIPT: Janeane Garofalo

Watch actress and comedian Janeane Garofalo on a talk show a month before the invasion of Iraq. Notice that she was right about almost everything, unlike the idiotic interviewer. And yet she, and other people who were equally right, are almost never seen or heard from on the mainstream media while those who were wrong about everything (like the interviewer) are still there, this time yelling for war with Iran.

October 29, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-6: The Scopes trial conspiracy

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Although Inherit the Wind, the original play and film based on the events of the Scopes trial, was made as a drama, it would have been more accurate to portray the actual events leading up to and through the trial as a comedy.

Right from the beginning, rather than being a bitter adversarial contest between science and religion, the whole prosecution and trial was staged by the local civic leaders of the sleepy little town of Dayton, Tennessee as mainly a public relations exercise, with both prosecution and defense sides working together to create a show trial and thereby benefit the town by increasing its visibility because of the resulting publicity.

When word got around that the ACLU had issued a press release to the Tennessee newspapers looking for someone willing to test the Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution, Dayton resident George Rappleyea, who personally opposed the anti-evolution law, saw the opportunity to make the sleepy town of Dayton get national headlines and publicity. He felt that this ACLU challenge gave Dayton the chance to hold a trial with well-known figures that would draw the national media and tourists to the city, leading to an economic boom. So he and other enterprising entrepreneurs set about planning to create such a trial. Working with Fred Robinson (a local businessman and also chair of the county school board), the school superintendent (who supported the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of evolution), two city attorneys who agreed to prosecute the case, and a local attorney to handle the defense, they put all the ingredients into place. (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 89-91)

All they needed now was someone to charge with breaking the law. They did not want anyone's life or career to be harmed by being charged in what was essentially a show trial created for publicity. The team looked around for a suitable candidate to accuse and found one in 24-year old John T. Scopes, a general science instructor and part-time football coach. Although he was not the regular biology teacher, he made a good candidate because he was single, not a local, had no ties to the region, no intention of staying permanently in Dayton, and thus had little to lose from the case. This made him preferable to the regular biology teacher, who was married and was also the school principal and thus would have had a lot more at stake.

In the film, Scopes was arrested in his classroom by grim-faced city leaders while teaching his class about evolution, and then flung into jail where he had to stay until the trial. While there, he had to listen to hostile citizens marching around the jail carrying banners and chanting slogans vilifying him, flinging bottles through his cell windows, and seeing himself burned in effigy, while in the evening the clergyman preached fiery sermons condemning him to hell for his evil act of teaching evolution.

In reality, Scopes was a cheerful co-conspirator in the staged trial. The chummy nature of the whole proceeding is illustrated by the fact that all these friendly discussions took place in the local drugstore owned by the school board chair. The prosecutor, who happened to be Scopes' close friend, said he would be willing to prosecute Scopes as long as Scopes didn't mind. (Even during the heat of the trial, the prosecutors and the defendant went for a swim in a pond during a lunch recess.) Scopes was invited to these discussions and asked whether he would be willing to be prosecuted. Scopes believed in evolution and disagreed with the law so he said he was willing to go along. The group then called over the waiting justice of the peace to swear out a warrant for Scopes, and the waiting constable served him the warrant immediately. Rather than being hauled off to jail, Scopes then went off to play tennis while the others set the publicity machine in motion by wiring the state's newspapers with the news that they had charged someone with violating the Butler Act. (Larson, p. 91)

The little secret behind the trial was it was never firmly established that Scopes had even taught evolution at all and thus actually violated the law. He himself could not definitely recall teaching that particular topic. He never took the stand in his defense and thus was not forced to swear under oath on this issue. He and his students also seemed hazy on the entire concept of evolution. But everyone, including Scopes, decided to go along with the idea that he had taught it in order that the trial could take place. Since Scopes had filled in occasionally when the regular biology teacher was absent, and had used the assigned textbook that included a section on human evolution, this was enough for the friendly gang of conspirators to decide that they could reasonably charge him with violating the law. During the later grand jury proceedings, Scopes even had to urge his reluctant students to testify against him and coached them on how to answer in order that the grand jury would have grounds to indict him. (Larson, p. 108)

Thus from the beginning, the normal antagonism that characterizes the two opposing sides in highly charged trials was absent. It was said that the ACLU, eager to have a test case on the freedom of speech in the classroom, even volunteered to pay the expenses of the prosecution, but the offer was declined. The generosity was not all on one side. Anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan had not even wanted a penalty provision inserted in the law since he only wanted to make a point about what should be taught, and did not want to actually harm anyone, financially or otherwise. In fact, Bryan later offered, if Scopes were to be found guilty, to pay the fine himself (unlike in the film, where an outraged Bryan wanted an even stiffer sentence meted out). Everyone fully expected Scopes to be found guilty and even the defense wanted such a verdict so that the case could be appealed to the higher courts and the constitutional issues fully addressed.

The Scopes trial in Dayton was to be merely the first step in a case that was supposed to have much broader implications.

POST SCRIPT: The Chasers ask what should be done about Iraq

In a comment to the previous post, Nicole expressed incredulity that anyone could be oblivious to the infamous history of tattooing people of particular groups for identification purposes. Alas, such people do exist. There are many people out there who not only have no idea of the basic elements of history or current affairs or geography, they also have no empathy at all for people who are not like them, which leads them to say the most outrageous things.

The Chasers regularly exploit this dangerous combination of ignorance and bigotry for humorous purposes.

October 26, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-5: Teaching of evolution as freedom of speech

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

While William Jennings Bryan was warning of the consequences of teaching the 'doctrine' of evolution in public schools while excluding religious doctrine, the other chain of events that led to the collision in the Scopes trial was the publicly expressed concern by the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) regarding what it felt were infringements on academic freedom, with teachers being fired for advocating unpopular views. Following the worldwide rise of Communist ideas that ultimately led to the Russian revolution in 1917, the 'Red Scare' came into force in the US and state legislatures were proposing laws that harassed and called for the dismissal and even arrest of anyone who spoke in favor of "socialism, communism, anarchism, bolshevism, pacifism, the international labor movement." (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 64).

In 1915, the also newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP) had presented its General Declaration of Principles that addressed the issue of academic freedom. It said that those colleges specifically created to promote certain doctrines (for example, private colleges established by religious denominations) need not adhere to academic freedom and were free to have on their faculty only those who subscribed to their doctrines, but those institutions that received public funds "have no moral right to bind the reason or conscience of any professor." (Larson, p. 77)

In 1924, the ACLU issued a statement offering to "defend the right of public school teachers to free speech both inside and outside the classroom, and explicitly adopted AAUP's conception of academic freedom" (Larson, p. 81). In its own descriptions of attempts at stifling free speech, the ACLU broadened the list of topics from those covered by the AAUP, including anti-evolution laws together with laws against other unpopular ideas, and also extending its scope to protect teachers in secondary education as well. It offered to assist in the defense of people in both schools and colleges who were accused in such cases.

The explosive combination of conflicting views was now firmly in place and the fuse was lit when on March 21, 1925 the governor of Tennessee signed into law the Butler Act, which stated that it was:

AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.

Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Section 2. Be it further enacted, That any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act, Shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than One Hundred $ (100.00) Dollars nor more than Five Hundred ($ 500.00) Dollars for each offense. (italics in original)

The ACLU, which had been following the progress of such legislation across the nation, decided to see if the Butler Act could be a test case and published a statement in the Tennessee papers on May 4, 1925 offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under the Act. This set into motion the rapid sequence of events that led to the Scopes trial.

Some enterprising entrepreneurs in Dayton, Tennessee saw in the ACLU's challenge a golden opportunity to put their little town on the national map. By putting on a show trial centered around the highly controversial case of teaching evolution in the public schools, an issue that was being debated nationwide and generating immense passions, they knew they would draw national media attention and bring about economic benefits to their town.

So they quickly set about making sure that the trial took place in their town.

POST SCRIPT: The Chasers quiz

The Chasers decide to ask Americans what should be done to Muslims.

Of course, this kind of 'person in the street' exercise is inherently unfair in that all the producers need to find are a very few people who give idiotic answers, edit out all the people who give reasonable responses, and thus make everyone look stupid. But for some questions, it is really quite shocking to think that even one person would answer the way they do.

October 25, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-4: Bryan's views on religion and evolution

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In order to understand what happened to Bryan during his testimony in the Scopes trial, it is necessary to understand something of Bryan's religious views. In those days, as now, there were splits among religious believers between those who took the Bible as an inerrant literal record of historical events, and those who allowed for some level of interpretive license, whereby some events could be interpreted metaphorically so as not to clash with scientific truths.

In terms of his own religion, Bryan was not as extreme a fundamentalist as today's creationists. By today's standards, he would be considered one of the more sophisticated religious believers, well read and knowledgeable about science, which makes the play and film portrayal of him in Inherit the Wind as a buffoonish dogmatic fundamentalist even more unfair. Although he would have considered himself a fundamentalist, Bryan was not quite as literal in his view of the Bible. He belonged to the 'gap' or 'ruin and reconstruction' school of Christian thought. Such people were not committed to a 6,000 year old Earth but believed that the days of creation described in the book of Genesis were metaphorical and represented 'ages' that could stand for very many years, long enough to be consistent with the geological evidence. This approach "allows for a very old, unspecified age of the universe, in which matter was first created, followed by non-human life and the formation of fossils. This creation process could have involved multiple cataclysms and creations and is flexible enough to accommodate most geologic evidence.' (Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs, Mano Singham, (2000, p. 9). For a fascinating account of the history of creationism and the evolution of that movement's evolving views, see the book The Creationists (1992) by Ronald Numbers.)

Bryan was also willing to go along with a limited form of evolution as long as it kept humans out of the tree of evolved life and made them special creations. But he would not go as far as the modernist theologians of his time who adopted 'theistic evolution', which accepted the idea of common ancestors of apes and humans and saw god's role as somehow guiding the process of evolution, which made it an early form of intelligent design creationism. Bryan believed in the Biblical story of the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the great flood of Noah.

In those early religious arguments against evolution, one finds many themes that are echoed today: the idea that the theory of evolution is 'only a guess', a theory and not a fact, that it lacks evidence in support of it, that an increasing number of scientists disbelieve it, and that it contradicts the Bible.

In an essay titled God and Evolution published in the New York Times, February 26, 1922 (p. 84), Bryan explained clearly what he believed and what were the sources of his objections to the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which life is built. Evolution applied to fish, birds and beasts would not materially affect man's view of his own responsibilities, except as the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis as to these would be used to support a similar hypothesis as applied to man.
. . .
Christianity has nothing to fear from any truth; no fact disturbs the Christian religion or the Christian. It is the unsupported guess that is substituted for science to which opposition is made, and I think the objection is a valid one. (italics in original)

Bryan added that just because some idea like evolution was false did not, by itself, warrant opposition unless it was also harmful. He then placed his finger on why he thought evolution was damaging and in the process summarized accurately the consequences of taking the theory of evolution seriously, showing a much better understanding of the theory's implications than even many of today's evolution supporters.

It entirely changes one's view of life and undermines faith in the Bible. Evolution has no place for the supernatural. . . .Evolution proposes to bring all the processes of nature within the comprehension of man by making it the explanation of everything that is known. . . . .Evolution attempts to solve the mystery of life by suggesting a process of development commencing "in the dawn of time" and continuing uninterrupted until now. . . .If a man accepts Darwinism, or evolution applied to man, and is consistent, he rejects the miracle and the supernatural as impossible. . . If he is consistent, he will go through the Old Testament step by step and cut out all the miracles and all the supernatural. He will then take up the New Testament and cut out all the supernatural – the virgin birth of Christ, His miracles and His resurrection, leaving the Bible a story book without binding authority upon the conscience of man.

Although Bryan's motives in drawing the consequences of evolutionary thinking in such dire terms for Christians may have been to scare them into backing his movement against the teaching of evolution, he is exactly right in his analysis. If one is consistent in applying the theory of evolution, one is forced to reject god's intervention anywhere in the process. Daniel C. Dennett in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) speaks of the theory of natural selection as being like a mythical 'universal acid', so potent and corrosive that once released it cannot be contained or restricted in any way but breaks through all barriers until it reaches into every space. Once you accept the theory of evolution by natural selection as applying in any area of life, there is no way to prevent it being used to explain every aspect of life.

To add force to his argument that the theory of evolution was dangerous for Christian beliefs because it could cause people, especially young people, to doubt the existence of god, Bryan also pointed out how Darwin had started out in life as a religious person and become an agnostic as a result of his work: "If Darwinism could make an agnostic of Darwin, what is its effect likely to be upon students to whom Darwinism is taught at the very age when they are throwing off parental authority and becoming independent? Darwin's guess gives the student an excuse for rejecting the authority of God an excuse that appeals to him more strongly at this age than at any other stage in life."

In that same essay, he dismissed theistic evolutionists and their idea of god as someone who merely created the laws of evolution and then did nothing else. He said that they put "God so far away that He ceases to be a present influence in the life.. . [W]hy should we want to imprison God in an impenetrable past?. . .Why not allow Him to work now?" Thus Bryan saw acceptance of human evolution in any form, theistic or otherwise, as a very slippery slope that led to no good end: "Evolution naturally leads to agnosticism and, if continued, finally to atheism."

But while he disliked evolution for religious reasons and because he felt that it led to abhorrent social policies, those were not his stated reasons for objecting to it being taught in schools. He said he objected because he felt that the theory had not been shown to be true. And if it were not true, then that meant that those who taught it were merely teaching a doctrine, not scientific truth, and he saw no reason why they should have the right to teach in public schools what he considered an atheistic doctrine if religious teaching was not to be allowed.

The crux of his objections to the teaching of evolution was as follows:

The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effect, for truth is truth and must prevail.
. . .
Those who teach Darwinism are undermining the faith of Christians. . .Christians do not object to freedom of speech. . .Christians do not dispute the right of any teacher to be agnostic or atheistic, but Christians do deny the right of agnostics and atheists to use the public schools as a forum for the teaching of their doctrines.

The Bible has in many places been excluded from the schools on the ground that religion should not be taught by those paid by public taxation. If this doctrine is sound, what right have the enemies of religion to teach irreligion in the public schools? If the Bible cannot be taught, why should Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a lie?

That was how one side in the conflict approached the Scopes trial, arguing that teaching evolution in schools while not teaching Biblical theories was giving an unfair advantage to one doctrine over another. It is an argument that has persisted in various forms down to this very day.

Next: How the other side approached the Scopes trial.

POST SCRIPT: Leave it to Dennis

(Thanks to Crooks & Liars.)

October 24, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-3: The role of 'social Darwinism'

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

As far as the legal issues were concerned, the famous 1925 'Scopes monkey trial' did not actually resolve anything and did not even deal with the same weighty constitutional issues that now surround the issue of evolution in the classroom.

The issues involved in the trial arose as a result of the collision of two trains of events, one emerging from the rising unease with the implications of Darwinian thinking for Christian beliefs, and the other with concerns about infringements on the fundamental right of free speech that followed the creation of the Soviet Union following World War I and the 'Red Scare' that followed.

Unease over the implications of the theory of evolution for religious beliefs had been simmering for some time, even since the full implications of Darwin's theory had become recognized. While some people were willing to tolerate the idea of all species other than humans being evolutionarily linked, the idea that human beings were also part of the great tree of evolutionary descent was repugnant to many because it seemed to imply that we were no different from other mammals and thus not in the image of god nor possessors of an immortal soul.

Williams Jennings Bryan was a devoutly religious Christian and also a populist, supporting many progressive causes while championing the underdog and fighting for the rights of the poor against their exploiters. Because of this, he was often referred by the nickname of The Commoner, in addition to the name of The Boy Orator, which he had acquired early in life because of the skill he displayed as a public speaker. He had basically a majoritarian democratic view that held that people, through their collective voice, had the final say in how they were to be governed. As such, he opposed elitist ideas, and he saw evolutionary theory as one such doctrine that was being imposed on people by a scientific elite.

In fact, while one reason he opposed Darwinian thinking was because of his religious beliefs and his fears that the theory left no room for god, another of the sources of his opposition to Darwin's theory were the claims of the so-called 'social Darwinists' like Herbert Spencer, who tried to extend Darwinian natural selection to explain human society and argued that 'survival of the fittest' meant that harsh social conditions were inevitable and maybe even desirable since that would weed out those who were 'unfit', thus improving humanity in the long run. The 'robber barons' of that time, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who had made enormous fortunes at a time of widespread poverty, also took comfort from social Darwinism since it seemed to bestow a seal of approval on them and their actions, suggesting that their success was due to them being exceptionally 'fit' for the world of business and innately gifted at it, and not because of their exploitative business practices. Bryan saw Darwin's ideas as being at the root of that particular evil, saying "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate – the merciless law by which the strong crowd out the weak." (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 39).

Bryan was a humane and peace-loving man, who even resigned in 1915 from his position as Secretary of State in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson when it looked like Wilson was taking the country into World War I. That war gave Bryan yet another reason to oppose Darwinism because he was strongly influenced by some books written at that time that argued that the war was due to Darwinian principles at work among nations.

Another factor at play in the popular opposition to Darwinism was the rise of eugenics and its suggestion that the human race, just like livestock, could be improved by selective breeding, such as by segregating those people who were seen as 'defective' and preventing them from having children. Many viewed this as an abominable practice and those opposed to evolution saw this as a direct consequence of Darwinian thinking applied to humans, and dangerously close to playing god. Their linking of Darwinian evolutionary theory with eugenics was buttressed by the fact that one of the founders of this new field (and the person who coined the term) was the British polymath Francis Galton, who happened to be Darwin's cousin and one of the earliest supporters of Darwin's theory.

Bryan was opposed to the excesses of both capitalism and militarism and also rejected social engineering at the expense of the poor. He saw Darwinian thinking as the source of all those evils and thus as a pernicious idea that should be defeated and definitely not taught to students in public schools.

Next: Bryan's views on religion and evolution.

POST SCRIPT: How to get into any nightclub

Do you have trouble getting into selective bars or nightclubs? The guys from The Chasers tell you the secret of getting in that works every time. Well, almost.

October 23, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-2: How the Scopes myths originated

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

From the beginning the Scopes trial captured the popular imagination as symbolizing the conflict between science and religion, on a par with the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican views. But just as the myths about the Copernican revolution have supplanted the actual history, so have the myths about the Scopes trial obscured the more fascinating real account. (See here and the links therein for my posts on the Copernican myths. The December 2007 issue of Physics Today will also carry an article by me on this topic.)

The 1925 Scopes "Trial of the Century" became shrouded in myth and the stuff of legend from the very beginning. How could it not be so when the subject matter of the case aroused strong passions nationwide, when the two main protagonists William Jennings Bryan (for the prosecution) and Clarence Darrow (for the defense) were flamboyant and high-profile characters, and when the national media and commentators (especially the acerbic H. L. Mencken) covered the trial? From the beginning, the spectacle overshadowed the facts.

After 1955, public perceptions of what happened at the trial and its implications were distorted even more by the long-running Broadway play Inherit the Wind, later made into a hit 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March. The play's authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were not really seeking to produce a docudrama of the trial itself. They fictionalized the events of the Scopes trial in order to make it into a vehicle to warn of the dangers of McCarthyist blacklisting that was going on in their own time, using the religion and science conflict of the trial as a proxy for the fight to retain freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The writers of the play did not claim that it was an accurate history of the trial and even tried to distance themselves from that charge by changing the names and places and the dates of the people and events, adding new characters, and tweaking some details such as introducing a love interest for Scopes. But the thin veil they drew over the real trial was ignored. Despite their intention of using the Scopes trial for purely allegorical purposes, their portrayal was too close to reality and has become the foundation of the modern folklore surrounding the Scopes trial, forever confusing people as to what really happened and what did not.

Largely because of the film and play, the trial is now recalled as an epic clash between the forces of narrow religious dogma and obscurantism (represented by famed orator and three-time Democratic candidate for president William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution) and the forces of science, progress, enlightenment, and secularism (represented by famed trial attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense). In the fictionalized legal contest, in a vivid scene towards the end which has left the most lasting impression, Darrow (called Henry Drummond in the play and film) puts Bryan (now called Matthew Harrison Brady) on the witness stand and with a withering cross-examination shows the foolishness of holding on to literal Biblical beliefs in the face of science, reducing Bryan to a mass of babbling and blubbering incoherence, making him a laughing stock in the courtroom and nationwide. Bryan soon after collapses and dies on the courtroom floor.

While the real trial did end with Darrow putting Bryan on the stand, what happened during the questioning was more complex, and Bryan died peacefully in his sleep five days after the trial. As is often the case with great epic myths though, when looked at closely the actual events behind them are often less sharply drawn than the legend, but fascinating nonetheless.

In order to get behind the myths and see how the Scopes trial came about, we have to note that Darwin's theory was first proposed in 1859 and had been taught in American schools for some time before the Scopes trial. So why, in 1925, did the little town of Dayton, Tennessee suddenly become the focal point for the 'trial of the century'?

That will be the topic of the next post.

POST SCRIPT: Campus Freethought Alliance at Case

Case has started its own Campus Freethought Alliance (of which I am the advisor) and its next meeting will be on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 7:30pm in Thwing Atrium. They have two guest speakers, philosophy professor Patricia Princehouse (who I think will speak about her own area of expertise which is evolution) and geology professor James van Orman who will talk about the science of radiometric dating. The meeting is open to all interested people.

The CFA is dedicated to "promoting and defending reason, science and freedom of inquiry in education, and to the enhancement of freethought, skepticism, secularism, humanism, philosophical naturalism, rationalism, and atheism on college and high school campuses throughout North America and around the world."

These campus groups are affiliated with the nationwide Center for Inquiry.

October 21, 2007

From Scopes to Dover-1: Overview

I have always been interested in the law, especially constitutional law. And given my interest in the subject of evolution, I was intrigued by how the teaching of that subject has been, at least in the US, the focus of so many court cases, involving various subtle shades of meaning and interpretation of the US constitution. This week begins a fairly long series of posts that attempts to clarify this issue, although the series will be interrupted from time to time with posts on other topics.

It is almost impossible to think of the evolution-religion controversy (or the larger science-religion issue) in America without immediately thinking of the famous 'Scopes monkey trial' of 1925, where a high school teacher John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in the state of Tennessee. That event has become a touchstone, framing the issue in a way that is hard to shake off.

In some ways this is odd because that case played only a very minor role legally, setting no legal precedent. I recently read two books God v. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law by Marci A. Hamilton (2005) and Separation of Church and State by Philip Hamburger (2002) that dealt solely with the relationship between church and state and neither even mentioned the Scopes case. Yet, because of a curious confluence of factors, the shadow of the Scopes trial has hovered over all subsequent public discussions of the teaching of evolution in schools in a way that is completely disproportional to the actual legal significance of the case.

Because the legal questions surrounding the teaching of evolution in public schools are a fascinating subject in their own right, it is easy to forget that the real underlying questions extend beyond mere legalities and raise fundamental, difficult, and yet unanswered, questions about the relationship of individuals to their government in a democratic society. In this case the question is: Who gets to determine what should be taught in public schools? Should it be the community which funds the schools, through their elected representatives to schools boards and state and national legislatures? Should it be the subject matter experts in the disciplines being taught? Should it be professional educators like teachers, principals, and professors in schools of education?

If one takes the view that since it is the community that pays for the schools through their taxes, that they should be the ones who determine the curriculum, then how far is one willing to take that idea? Is the 'community' defined purely by the local community that is directly served by those schools or should the larger groupings in which it is embedded, such as state and national governments, also have a say? What if a local school board is dominated by members of one religious sect that seeks to teach its own version of religion-based science or history to all students in the school, overriding any and all minority views? What if the local school board wants to teach something that is flatly rejected by the community of experts in that field of study, such as that the Earth is 6,000 years old? What if they want to teach a version of history that is rejected by professional historians but inculcates in their students their sense of racial or regional pride? Should local bodies be allowed to do that?

In other words, should we adopt a majoritarian point of view and say that local communities absolutely do have the right to determine what should be taught and that the only recourse of the minority is to try and obtain redress through the ballot box?

On the other hand, if we dislike that approach, do we really want to adopt a purely technocratic attitude that says that local communities should abdicate their right to determine what their children should be taught and delegate it to content experts? Isn't there a danger that in doing so we are creating an elitist technocracy that could, in the long run, undermine the democratic ideal?

Such tricky questions were less likely to arise in the past in the US when the communities involved were smaller, more homogeneous, less sensitive to the needs of minorities, and where the primary purpose of public (or 'common') schools was seen primarily as religious education. Indeed in the early days of Western science, even the scientific communities believed in the divine revelation of nature as taught in the Bible and could not envisage any contradiction between the two. The role of scientists and other scholars was seen to be to explain how god had done what he had said he had done in the infallible religious texts.

But starting with Copernicus and Galileo, that role for science became harder to sustain, and it was inevitable that scientists would, at least tacitly if not overtly. cut their ties with religion and start pursuing lines of inquiry that did not seek or require consistency with religious doctrines. The tremendous success of science that followed the Enlightenment validated this approach and it then became seen as the task of theologians to try and modify their beliefs about god to make them consistent with rapid advances in scientific knowledge. This caused a split within the religious community between those who adopted a 'modernist' approach and those who adopted a 'fundamentalist' approach. Both agreed that scientific truths and religious truths had to be consistent. But modernists argued that in any apparent conflict that arose between scientific truths and religious truths, it is religious truth that must undergo reinterpretation to re-achieve consistency, while the fundamentalists feared that such reinterpretations would destroy the credibility of the Bible by making it seem less than infallible. The fundamentalists wanted to draw lines in the sand beyond which they were not willing to compromise their beliefs. If science crossed those lines, they were unwilling to move the lines as the modernist theologians tended to do but fought to try and force science to return behind the lines.

Where those lines were drawn depended on the individual and there were many such lines at play: the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, the origin of new species, the common ancestor of humans and apes, the creation of the soul, and so on.

It was the theory of evolution that seemed, at least in the US, to be a kind Maginot line for many religious believers, the line that they would defend at all costs. As a result, this arena is where the high profile science-religion battles have been fought, starting with the Scopes trial.

In this series of posts, we examine the history of the legal battles over the teaching of evolution in schools (which itself is embedded in the broader question of the role of religion in schools), starting with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ending with the 2005 trial in Dover, PA. As we see how the various cases were decided, the creation of various constitutional precedents, the evolution of legal reasoning, and the setting of the parameters of the decision making process, it is good to bear in mind that all these issues revolve around that single fundamental question: Who gets to decide what is taught in public schools?

POST SCRIPT: Interview on Machines Like Us

The indefatigable Norm Nason, the man behind the wonderful website Machines Like Us which serves as a gateway to the latest scientific developments, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL), conducted an interview with me where we explored some of my views and their origins.

You can read the interview here.

October 19, 2007

Soaps and Soap

For a very brief time in my life, about one week actually, I got hooked on daytime TV soap operas.

It happened in December of 1978. I had received a phone call that my father had died suddenly of a heart attack back in Sri Lanka. I was in graduate school in the US, far away from my family, and thus away from the kinds of support networks and rituals that help one get through such times of grief. I could not concentrate on my studies or reading or other things to distract my mind so turned for solace to watching TV all day, as so many do in such situations when seeking escapism through mindless activity.

In those pre-internet and early cable days, your TV choices were largely limited to just the three networks CBS, NBC, and ABC and during the day all three served up a diet of talk shows, game shows, and soap operas. Although I wasn't at all interested at first, quite soon I was quite absorbed in the various stories that made up the soaps. For those not familiar with the genre, these daytime soap operas involve multiple intersecting story lines involving quite a large cast of characters of usually middle class or rich people, with a few low-lifes thrown in to spice things up. The tales involve love, jealousy, intrigue, adultery, murder, larceny, backstabbing, lying, cheating, and other strong human characteristics.

These programs can be quite addictive and develop faithful followings as can be seen from the longevity of soaps like Days of Our Lives, All My Children, The Young and the Restless and As the World Turns, all of which have lasted over three decades.

Although I stopped watching after a week, these shows gave me a greater appreciation for the riotously funny weekly prime-time sitcom Soap, which was a parody of the daytime soaps, and ran for four seasons during the years 1977-1981.

The basic story of Soap was that of the intersecting lives of two families, the Tates and the Campbells, where the two mothers Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell were sisters. The best way to describe Soap is as daytime soap opera on steroids. Where the daytime soaps stories proceeded excruciatingly slowly, with long pregnant pauses in the dialogue, lengthy meaningful looks, and dragged-out plot developments, Soap went at break-neck speed with plot twists occurring in rapid-fire succession. All the standard complex plotlines of the daytime soaps were present and then made even more extreme in Soap by adding outlandish things like UFOs, alien abductions, demon-possessions, guerillas, gangsters, blackmail, kidnappings, exorcisms, brainwashing by a religious cult (led by the Reverend Sun whose followers were called "the Sunnies"!) and so on. Storylines that would be sufficient for a full season on the regular soaps were crammed into just a few episodes of Soap. This breathless pace was compressed into weekly half-hour programs, each episode beginning in classic soap style with a voice-over announcer saying what had happened in previous episodes, and ending with a dramatic cliff-hanger, followed by the announcer hyping up the suspense for the episodes to come.

What really made Soap one of the funniest TV programs was clever writing coupled with one of the best ensemble casts ever put together, easily triumphing over those of the more-heralded Seinfeld or Friends casts. Katherine Helmond as the ditzy Jessica (whom men found irresistible) and Cathryn Damon as Mary were the anchors that held the two families (and the show) together as increasingly bizarre things happened all around them. Some of the funniest scenes were when the two were sitting around a kitchen table, each trying to bring the other up-to-date on the latest bizarre happenings in their families and, in a perverse way, competing to top each other's stories.

Richard Mulligan as Bert Campbell (Mary's working class husband) was superb in his physical comedy, his body and face seemingly made of rubber, responding spasmodically to his nervous energy. Billy Crystal (a newcomer then) appeared as Jodie (Mary's son) in what may be the first portrayal of a gay person on TV that got laughs out of being gay while remaining a sympathetic character and avoiding becoming a caricature. Robert Guillaume as Benson, the sardonic back-talking butler for the rich Tates, was another actor who managed to take what might have become a stereotypical role (black servant of a rich white family) and infuse it with dignity and humor. In fact Crystal and Guillaume were perhaps the most sensible (or at least the least eccentric) of the entire Tate-Campbell menagerie.

Perhaps the most eccentric character was Bert's son Chuck who always went around with his ventriloquist dummy Bob. Chuck acted like Bob was a real person and would hold conversations with him while Bob would insult everyone and leer at women. The humor arose because other members of the family also sometimes ended up treating Bob as a real person and speak and argue and get angry with him, while not holding Chuck responsible for Bob's words. (It is an interesting thing to speculate as to what you would do if someone you knew acted like Chuck did. In order to spare his feelings, wouldn't you also treat his dummy like a real person, even if you felt ridiculous doing so?) In one such scene, Chuck plans to go out on a date leaving Bob behind but Bob harangues him until Chuck agrees to take him along. When they both finally leave, Mary asks Bert (who have both been watching this) whether they shouldn’t get professional help for Chuck, to which Bert replies, "Chuck doesn't need professional help, he should just learn to discipline Bob more."

The reason for these fond reminiscences is that I just discovered that these old programs are now available on DVD and I have been watching them again. There is always a danger in doing these kinds of trips down nostalgia lane because one's memories of old books, films and TV programs often make them seem better than they actually were. I was a little fearful that Soap would disappoint were but it passed the test handily. It is still laugh-out-loud funny.

The added bonus to watching on DVD is the absence of commercials. I also noticed how the opening and closing credits were more leisurely than they are now, allowing one to actually read the names of the actors and crew without distracting sidebar promos for other shows. The running time of each half-hour episode then was also 24 minutes and 30 seconds. I suspect that nowadays this has been reduced to allow for more commercial breaks.

There were other good TV comedies at that time, like M*A*S*H and Newhart, but I would not seek out DVDs of them the way I did with Soap.

Soap was a comedy classic and if you get the chance you should see it. And make sure you watch it in sequence.

POST SCRIPT: Class politics

Here's another provocative clip from the 1998 film Bulworth (strong language advisory).

October 18, 2007

Language and Evolution

I have always been fascinated by language. This is somewhat ironic since I have a really hard time learning a new language and almost did not make it into college in Sri Lanka because of extreme difficulty in passing the 10th-grade language requirement in my own mother tongue of Tamil! (How that happened is a long and not very interesting story.)

But language fascinates me. How words are used, their origins, how sentences are structured, are all things that I enjoy thinking and reading about. I like playing with words, and enjoy puns, cryptic crosswords, and other forms of wordplay.

All this background is to explain why I recommend an excellent book The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, who used to be a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley but is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In the book he discusses the complexity of language and points out that the evolution of language is very similar to that of biological life. He suggests that there was originally just one spoken, very primitive, language and as the people who spoke it fanned out across the globe, the various languages evolved as separated communities formed. And in the process the languages became more complex and sophisticated, and evolved intricate features in their vocabulary and grammar that now seem to have little functional purpose, in a manner very analogous to biological systems.

The precise origin of spoken language is hard to pin down. McWhorter argues that it probably arose with the evolution of the ability to form complex sounds and roughly synchronous with the arrival of homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago. Others have suggested a more recent date for the origins of language, about 12,000-15,000 years ago, but pinning this date down precisely is next to impossible given that spoken language leaves no traces. What we do know is that written language began about 5,000 years ago

McWhorter points out that purely spoken languages evolve and change very rapidly, resulting in an extremely rapid proliferation of language leaving us with the 6,000 or so languages that we have now. It was the origin of writing, and more importantly mass printing, that slowed down the evolution of language since now the fixed words on paper acted as a brake on further changes.

He also makes an important point that the distinction between standard and dialect forms of languages have no hierarchical value and is also a post-printing phenomenon. In other words, when we hear people (say) in rural Appalachia or in the poorer sectors of inner cities speak in an English that is different from that spoken by middle class, college-educated people, it is not the case that they are speaking a debased form of 'correct' or 'standard' English. He argues that dialects are all there is or ever was, because language was always mainly a local phenomenon. There are no good or bad dialects, there are just dialects.

We can, if we wish, bundle together a set of dialects that share a lot in common and call it a language (like English or French or Swahili) but no single strand in the bundle can justifiably lay any intrinsic claim to be the standard. What we identify as standard language arose due to factors such as politics and power. Standard English now is that dialect which was spoken in the politically influential areas near London. Since that area was then the hub of printing and copying, that version of language appeared in the written form more often than other forms and somewhere in the 1400s became seen as the standard. The same thing happened with standard French, which happened to be the dialect spoken in the Paris areas.

McWhorter points out that, like biological organisms, languages can and do go extinct in that people stop speaking them and they disappear or, in some cases like Latin, only appear in fossilized form. In fact, most of the world's languages that existed have already gone extinct, as is the case with biological species. He says that rapid globalization is making many languages disappear even more rapidly because as people become bi-lingual or multi-lingual, and as a few languages emerge as the preferred language of commerce, there is less chance of children learning the less-privileged language as their native tongue. This loss in the transmission of language to children as their primary language is the first stage leading to eventual extinction. He points out that currently 96 percent of the world's population speaks at least one of just twenty languages, in addition to their indigenous language. These languages are Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portugese, Japanese, German, French, Punjabi, Javanese, Bihari, Italian, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Vietnamese and thus these are the languages most likely to survive extinction. It is noteworthy that the population of India is so large and diverse that seven of these languages originated there, and two others (English and Arabic) are also used extensively in that country.

He also points out that languages are never 'pure' and that this situation is the norm. Languages cross-fertilize with other languages to form language stews, so that language chauvinists who try to preserve some pure and original form of their language are engaged in a futile task. For example, of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, more than 99 percent were originally obtained from other languages. However, the remaining few that originated in Old English, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, from turn out to be 62 percent of the words that are used most.

McWhorter is a very good writer, able to really bring the subject to life by drawing on everyday matters and popular culture. He has a breezy and humorous style and provides lots of very interesting bits of trivia that, while amusing, are also very instructive of the points he wishes to make. Regarding the ability of language to change and evolve new words, for example, he explains how the word 'nickname' came about. It started out as an 'ekename' because in old English, the word 'eke' meant also, so that an 'ekename' meant an 'also name' which makes sense. Over time, though, 'an ekename' changed to 'a nekename' and eventually to 'a nickname.' He gives many interesting examples of this sort.

Those who know more than one language well will likely appreciate his book even more than me. It is a book that is great fun to read and I can strongly recommend to anyone who loves words and language.

POST SCRIPT: Whipping up war frenzy

Jon Stewart show how it is done.

October 17, 2007

Film shorts

There are some things that really annoy me when watching a film (or play).

The most annoying are when people act idiotically, not at all the way that normal people would. I described one such annoying plot device case earlier when I pleaded for no more daft women!

Another example is the absurd miscommunication device, where one person misunderstands the actions or motives of another person and because of this, endless complications ensue. This occurs in two versions. In one the person trying to explain some very important thing that would clarify everything has, for some reason, only a limited time to do so and either babbles incoherently or digresses so much or is so unclear that the other person goes off with the wrong impression. In the other, one person is trying to explain but the listener is so impatient or exasperated or in such a snit that she (I have noticed that it is usually a woman who does this) refuses to listen, either walking away or banging down the phone.

In both cases, a few moments of calm speaking and listening would have cleared up everything satisfactorily, but this does not happen because of these people's irritating mannerisms. My question is: Do real people ever behave like this? Have any of you ever been in such a situation? I cannot conceive of not even listening when someone is trying to explain something to me, especially if it is important. I may not agree with what is said but I cannot imagine slamming the phone down or otherwise closing the door on such communications before that person can even begin to speak.

Another plot device that annoys me is when people jump to idiotic conclusions. Although I like Shakespeare in general, two plays that really bug me are among those that are considered his greatest, Othello and King Lear. Whenever I read Othello, I always think that the title character acted like an idiot. How could he not see that Desdemona was a wonderful and faithful wife and that there must be something wrong in what Iago was implying? Why didn't he ask her a few simple questions that would have cleared up everything? I understand that Shakespeare was trying to show that jealousy can overcome love and reason and even sanity, but this just wasn't plausible. Sorry, Will, we need a rewrite.

Lear also strikes me as an idiot, so easily misled by flattery that he makes a series of disastrous decisions that lead to death and misery all round. What is amazing was that the three main people he misunderstood were his own daughters, people whose characters he would have been able to observe over many years. And yet, on the basis of a few statements, he dumps the nicest and most loyal daughter in favor of the two schemers. Was he some kind of absent father that he had no sense of the characters of his own children?

Jurassic Park has to be one of the most absurd films ever made. I don't mean the central scientific concept of someone finding a way to recreate dinosaurs from their DNA trapped in amber. That part if fine. Writers and filmmakers have to be allowed to be able to stretch the bounds of reality so that they can create a workable premise. And the special effects with dinosaurs were very well done. What really annoyed me about that film was how the characters behaved, completely at odds with any normal person's behavior.

For example, what does the person who has made an amazing, Nobel-prize winning quality scientific discovery by creating dinosaurs do? Announce in a press conference his spectacular result? No, he decides to build a dinosaur theme park in secret!. And despite hundreds of scientists and technicians and construction workers going in and out of the facility being built, it remains a secret. But that's not all. The owner then sends his fond niece and nephew on an unprotected train ride through the region where the deadly animals roam and sure enough, they get terrorized by the some vicious specimens. Wait, there's more! After making their escape and managing to get some rest by sleeping in a treetop, the children wake up to find a dinosaur at their head level looking at them. After their previous night's experience, you would think they would freak out. Instead, they calmly pat it on the head, somehow knowing that these particular animals are friendly. I cannot begin to list all the other things about Jurassic Park that really annoyed me.

And while I am on the topic of annoying things in films, I hate it when the credits continue well into the films. You get absorbed in the story and then they still break into it with more credits. One of the nice things about very old films is that they open with the credits, get them done in about thirty seconds, and then get on with the story.

Then there are actors who simply annoy me simply by their very presence. I cannot really explain why. Off the top of my head, here are a few: Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, the later John Wayne when he stopped being an actor and became merely a macho symbol, Nicholas Cage, Renee Zellweger, and Tom Cruise. Seeing such people in the cast is enough to make me try and avoid the film.

There are other actors who I think are over-rated such as Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Scarlett Johansson. (I think I am in a distinct minority on this one!)

But there are also actors whom I like, whose names on the credits are enough to make me seriously consider watching a film even if I don't know much else about it: Burt Lancaster, Alec Guinness, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Peter Sellers, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Susan Sarandon, Cary Grant, John Cusack, Peter O'Toole, Michael Caine, Tom Hanks, Catherine Keener, Gregory Peck, Julie Christie, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Paul Newman, Peter Sellers, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Charlotte Rampling, Kevin Spacey, and Kevin Bacon.

All these lists are off the top of my head and I am sure I can add to them as other names strike me.

Those who like political films should see the excellent Warren Beatty film Bulworth (1998). The main plotline is far-fetched and the best parts of the film are the scenes about the underside of the political process, the powerful role of money, and how politicians pander to their various target audiences. Here's a nice clip from it.

Another good political film I saw recently was the fascinating documentary Street Fight (2005). Made by first-time filmmaker Marshall Curry, it tells the story of 32-year old Cory Booker's attempt in 2002 to unseat four-term incumbent Sharpe James as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. It is raw, bare-knuckle, down and dirty, street-level politics, with the 66-year old incumbent using all the power of the city against his young challenger. As a city council member, Booker had tried to tackle the serious issues of city hall corruption, crime, and drugs and in the process angered many powerful people who were benefiting from those things.

While the filmmaker's sympathies are clearly with Booker, James does not help his cause by deliberately shutting him out and very roughly too. If you see the film on DVD, make sure you watch the extra interview with the director as he discusses what happened in the years following that election.

The influential The Black Commentator website has strongly criticized Booker, arguing that he is completely in the pockets of rich, right-wing, white, power brokers who are pushing school vouchers and seeking to co-opt the next generation of black leadership to serve their needs. Whatever the merits of that charge, watch out for the name Cory Booker in national politics. I think we are going to hear a lot about him in the next 5-10 years.

October 16, 2007

Harry Potter and the supernatural

The release of each new Harry Potter book or film bring out of the woodwork those religious people who are disturbed by them and decide they need to spam everyone and try to make money from it as well.

I received a spam email following the release of Deathly Hallows that recycled old warnings about the subversive nature of the books and asking me to buy a video to help combat the Potter menace. It said:

Through Harry's world of sorcery [children] are learning the occultic tools -- occult visualization and soulish mind power, wands, brooms, spells and curses.

In this video, you will see how completely occult is the world of Harry Potter. After reading the Harry Potter books, millions of children will demand to see Warner Bros. new movie, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

Christian parents have faced a similar problem for years with the teaching of evolution in their public schools. They have responded by teaching their children that they cannot believe everything they are taught in school. Now, with the Harry Potter books on sorcery becoming part of public school curriculum, parents need to know enough about it to also teach their children that the spell-casting and other activities of Harry Potter are also forbidden territory. This video will help.

I have touched on this topic before and I said I that those religious people who objected to the Harry Potter books on the grounds that they seemed to promote witchcraft had it all wrong. The reasons for their objections should have been that the wizarding community seemed to be all atheists. The magic in the books does not involve any kind of spiritualism. Instead it seems to follow a prescribed set of rules and students learned about spells the way craftsmen learn the skills of a trade, by learning recipes and prescriptions and carefully choreographed series of actions. It is more like technology than dealing with the spiritual world.

What is notable about the books is the lack of any formal religion or religious practices, Satanic or otherwise. There are no ritualized practices of any kind. Since Christmas falls during the school year, its presence is acknowledged but it is clearly purely a Muggle phenomenon that happens in the background. As far as the wizarding community is concerned, Christmas only involves exchanging presents. I cannot recall any person in the books praying for anything or to anyone or invoking god, even when they were in the most dire straits and facing immense dangers and even death. Although some wizards were 'godparents' of others, these seemed to be just formal titles without any religious significance.

But there were many mentions of the afterlife and communications with people who were dead. As I have said before, the idea of an afterlife where our loved ones exist and whom we can hope to make contact with again is a much more appealing prospect than a god and one can see why it has such a strong hold on people's imaginations. It also makes for good drama. J. K. Rowling's mother, of whom the author speaks fondly, died while she was writing her first book in the series and Rowling mentions her regret that she did not know about the books. The strong themes of people being able to communicate with the dead under limited circumstances may have been a reflection of her own sense of loss for her mother's companionship.

The absence of god and the devil and other supernatural entities may reflect Rowling's own religious perspective but may also be due to the concrete needs of fantasy writers. I am not in general a fan of the fantasy genre but as commenter Shruti pointed out in response to a previous post, it seems that such writers have good reasons for keeping gods out of the picture. It is hard to mix fantasy used in novels with the even greater fantasy that is god.

In regular fiction, one can have characters who experience all kinds of problems because even deeply religious people are used to the fact that god does not intervene in everyday life, even though they continue to believe he can. So they don't ask why god did not step in (say) to stop some evil or save a major character from dying.

But when you are dealing with the world of magic, you have chipped away at the wall that separates the real world from the magical and then it is hard to explain why god is not playing an active role in the events. If wizards can use spells, then why isn't god the biggest, baddest wizard out there? Where is god while the forces of good and evil are battling each other on the fields of Hogwarts? It is much easier for the novelist to keep god out of the picture altogether. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there did not seem to be a god either, though I only saw the films and have not read the books. Perhaps those who are more familiar with the fantasy genre can help me out here and say if there are any fantasy writers who have a role for god in their books.

Whatever the reason, the absence of any forms of religion or religious observances in the Harry Potter books is quite striking. It would be an interesting study to see what influence these books have had on children's views of god, religion, and spirituality in general.

POST SCRIPT: Left brained or right brained?

I am not much of a fan of things that seem to provide quickie answers to complex questions but this one is fun. It shows a silhouette of a twirling dancer and whether you see her as turning clockwise or counterclockwise (looking from the top presumably) supposedly determines which of your brain hemispheres is dominant.

Curiously, when I first looked at it, she seemed to be going clockwise for a very brief moment but then suddenly switched to counter-clockwise. I could never recapture that original perception.

October 15, 2007

In praise of parodies

I like comedies. And within that genre of films, I particularly like parodies. The best ones are those that are based on clichés of particular genres or specific stories that are well known, since a successful parody depends crucially on the ability of the audience to immediately recognize allusions to the original

A parody idea is not hard to come up with. What is hard is to be able to sustain the conceit over the length of a film. Even in the written form, short article parodies are difficult (I know because I have tried and failed miserably) and only a skilled writer can pull it off. I often come across attempts at parodies that seemed to have started out as a single good idea but the writer could not sustain the conceit and it soon becomes painful to read. The ability to maintain a light tough and not to belabor the point is a skill that only a few seem to be able to master. Stephen Leacock and S. J. Perelman are two writers who were good at it. As a very young boy I read Perelman's Somewhere a Roscoe, a parody of the hard-boiled detective story, and I was hooked for life.

So here are some of my favorite film parodies. If you haven't seen any of them, you should check them out.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is a parody classic of Camelot. There are so many good scenes in it that it is hard to choose, so I went with the killer rabbit.

Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) is a superb parody of life in the time of Jesus. Here is one of the funniest scenes in it.

And since you can never have too much of Monty Python, here is another one from that same film.

Mel Brooks is undoubtedly the master of the film parody and has produced some of its finest examples. Brooks has the ability to insert a parody of one genre into a parody of another. In Robin Hood, Men in Tights (1993), one of the funniest scenes is where comedian Dom de Luise does a dead-on parody of the Marlon Brando role in The Godfather. Unfortunately, the only clip I could find of it was in German, so here is a different scene involving the title song.

In Spaceballs (1987), Mel Brooks took on the mighty Star Wars franchise.

In Blazing Saddles (1974), Brooks turned his attention to the western and showed his ability to use anachronisms to good comedy effect.

And of course, the monster horror film genre was ripe for Brooks' plucking with Young Frankenstein (1974).

Woody Allen scored a direct hit on the epic Russian psychological novel style of writers like Dostoyevsky with his wonderful Love and Death (1975), which to my mind is his best film.

A little-known but funny parody that I heard about just a month or so ago is Zorro, the Gay Blade (1981), in which George Hamilton stars as both Don Diego (the canonical Zorro) and Bunny Wigglesworth, his twin brother who was sent to England as a child and returns home just in time to substitute for his injured twin. Bunny has, shall we say, a more discerning taste in clothes than his brother and disdains the simple black outfits that he favors. In this scene, Ron Leibman playing the despotic Alcalde, starts hearing reports of Bunny/Zorro's exploits.

I had not thought of George Hamilton as a comedic actor, or even much of an actor at all and was pleasantly surprised at his ability to pull off camp comedy. I knew him as merely the famed possessor of the most perfect year-round tan, which made him a surprise choice to star as a creature of the night, the vampire Dracula in the parody Love at First Bite (1979), which was unfortunately rather uneven in quality.

I have not as yet come across good parodies of the James Bond series. Austin Powers seemed strained to me, too annoyingly caricatured, and I only watched the first one. The original Casino Royale (1967) brought together a whole series of famous actors and was a disaster. Even Peter Sellers and Woody Allen could not salvage a truly ghastly script. The only reason to watch this film is to see a colossal train wreck of a film, and the immense waste of talent.

Another genre that I have not seen a good parody of is the gangster film. It seems like The Godfather series needs a parody of its own, more than just a brief scene in Robin Hood, Men in Tights

Any suggestions for good parodies that I might have missed?

October 12, 2007

The case against religion

In the previous post. I argued that more education did not necessarily lead to less religion and that if one thought that its net effect on humanity was negative, one needed to more actively campaign against it. But others disagree. Even those who accept that religion has done some truly evil things might argue that the good that it does compensates (at least partially) and merits preserving it. The mere fact that it is false, it might be claimed, should not be sufficient to cause us to undermine it. They could point to children believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, that these are examples of false but benign beliefs. What is to be gained by destroying such innocent illusions?

But the reason that beliefs in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy are benign is because children are deliberately weaned away from such beliefs before they reach adolescence. If we did not deliberately do so, who knows what might happen? We might end up having wars with armies of the followers of Santa Claus battling with those of the Tooth Fairy. Having adults who are capable of causing great harm believing in magical false things is usually not benign. We are unfortunately all too aware of the truth of Voltaire's assertion "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".

In a comment to a previous post, Corbin Covault argued that even though religion may be a human construct, it can still serve important functions that merit preserving it. He draws a comparison with government:

One could argue that both [religions and governments] are human social constructions. Both manifest in institutions which may give some great sources of benefit to societies and individuals, but both have also been great sources of destruction and oppression. Would it be fair to say that the argument that the "militant atheist" makes that the world would be better off without _all_ religions analogous to the argument that the anarchist would make that the world would be better off without any governments?

I think that we will all agree that religion can be the source of many good things and of many bad things. We will undoubtedly disagree on whether the net result is positive or negative. But the key question is not how the balance sheet between good and evil comes out for any particular institution, but whether that institution is the only one that provides those benefits, so that we have no choice but to also tolerate the evils that accompany it. With religion, I have argued before that every benefit claimed for it can be provide by other existing sources. If we get rid of religion, while we will lose both the good and the bad, my point was that we can regain every good thing lost using other means and institutions, so in the end we need only lose the bad things caused by religion.

The question then becomes whether we can say the same thing for government. If the answer is yes, then we should undoubtedly get rid of government but currently it seems like the answer is no. We know that there always exists a tension between the existence of governments and individual liberty. But we strike a deal, accepting the restrictions on personal liberty as the price we pay for peace and the benefits of community living. We struggle to define the proper balance between freedom and order. Although we currently seem to need some institutions of government, we are not committed to any one form. We are free to change them if they prove to be evil. We tend to deplore dictatorships and admire democracies and no particular government has any claim to divine sanction. There may come a time when people feel that no government at all is better.

A similar good-evil comparison can be made for science. Science has given us great benefits but has also been responsible for some terrible evils. No scientist can avoid the fact that we are, to some extent, complicit in the many evils done in its name.

My own physics research involved studying what happens when a high-energy photon strikes a nucleus and produces a short-lived sub-nuclear particle called a pi-meson. There is no obvious link between this and any weapons system, but that is deceiving. The whole field of study in which it is embedded, nuclear physics, is an integral part of weapons research. It is not inconceivable that someone else will come along in the future and find that my small and seemingly innocent contribution to the field is important in developing a component of a deadly weapons system. If it happens, I cannot claim complete innocence. Although I may have not intended my work to serve evil ends, the fact that it has the potential to do so is inescapable. No scientist can ever have clean hands.

While it is impossible for scientists to have a perfectly clear conscience, scientists are usually able to figure out rationalizations to justify their actions because the immediate goals of scientific research are usually to benefit humanity. Even those scientists who deliberately choose to work on things that are clearly destructive (the development of agents for biological and chemical warfare or more powerful bombs) usually can find some reason to square their consciences, by appealing to in-group/out-group thinking ("The enemies of my country/race/religion may also be developing these weapons and so I am doing this in self-defense and to protect humanity against a greater evil.").

This was the kind of thinking of many scientists who worked on the Manhattan project during World War II that resulted in the creation of the atomic bomb. There is no reason to think that they were any more evil than anyone else. In fact, I have met and spoken with Hans Bethe, the Nobel Prize winning physicist (for his work explaining the energy production in stars) who was the leader of the theory group on the project and instrumental in guiding and shepherding the many brilliant scientists who worked under him. Bethe struck me as a kind and gentle man, who after the war worked for peace and disarmament. Einstein was the same. Although they both advocated for the development of a nuclear weapons program prior to the war, and their own groundbreaking research was the basis for nuclear weapons, they were also consistently a voice for peace. And there is reason to think that the scientists working on the opposing German nuclear weapons program, led by another Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, were doing so for the same reasons.

It is possible for society to decide to make a judgment that science is too dangerous to continue and to shut it down almost completely. If governments refuse to provide funding for research and for agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, modern science as we know it would cease to exist, because we could no longer maintain a professional class of scientists. Of course, the spirit of scientific inquiry will remain and there will be amateur scientists whose thirst for knowledge will drive them along. But we have to remember that the emergence of the professional scientist, someone paid primarily to do research, is a relatively new invention. In England, such people only came into being around 1850, with Charles Darwin's friends and colleagues Jacob Hooker and T. H. Huxley being two of the earliest. Darwin himself belonged to the earlier tradition of the amateur scientist who was independently wealthy enough to indulge what was essentially a hobby, or who had a job (clergyman or professor) that allowed them sufficient freedom and time to do so.

But in shutting down professional science, people would be aware that they would also be shutting themselves off from almost all the enormous benefits that science provides. And this is where the difference with religion arises. Although it can be argued that science and religion provide both benefits and evils, when it comes to science there is nothing else that we know that can be substituted to provide those benefits. We cannot keep the baby while throwing out the bathwater, so we make a Faustian bargain.

But in the case of religion, there is no benefit claimed by religion that cannot be provided by other institutions. The only real reason to continue supporting the idea of god is that it is true. Since there is no convincing empirical evidence at all in support of that proposition, religion becomes dispensable.

POST SCRIPT: Tortured logic

The Daily Show discusses the damage done to language by the 'war on terror'.

October 11, 2007

The effect of education on religion

Voltaire was stinging in his criticisms of religion in general and Christianity in particular. He provided his own definition of a Christian as follows: "A good-natured, simple fellow; a true lamb of the fold, who, in the innocence of his heart, persuades himself that he firmly believes unbelievable things that his priests have told him to believe, especially those he cannot even imagine. Consequently, he is convinced that three x's make fifteen, that God was made man, that he was hanged and rose to life again, that priests cannot lie, and that all who do not believe in priests will be damned without remission."

Voltaire was being sarcastic when he made the statement that Christians are necessarily 'good-natured' because elsewhere he makes clear that he knows that religious people are capable of incredible evil. But he may have genuinely thought that one had to be simple (in the sense of naïve) to believe in god because he viewed the whole concept of god as requiring one to believe preposterous things. As he said: "The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it."

And to reiterate his view that to adopt religion involved the abandonment of reason, he said: "The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning." (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), taken from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations.)

The authors of the current crop of atheist books have attacked religion head-on by showing how untenable the claims of religion are, and how antithetical to rational thought. I have argued before that there are no mitigating benefits for religion that cannot be obtained from other sources. Since people should have the right to believe anything they want, the practical question becomes: What is the best way of making the unappealing aspects of religion better known so that more people will voluntarily relinquish it?

Since the liberal