[lit-ideas] Re: American public opinion
- From: "Helen Wishart" <hwishart@xxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 14:10:31 -0400
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Andy Amago
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 12:31 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hezbollah is our enemy too
Given that Americans elected Bush based on, among other things, his
effectiveness against terrorism, I'd say most Americans don't know what day
it is. Most Germans supported Hitler too, so public support doesn't
necessarily mean anything. Sometimes it does, but lots of times it's
meaningless.
Another perspective on American public opinion in The New Republic
ANN COULTER AND CHARLES DARWIN.
Coultergeist
by Jerry Coyne
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 07.31.06
?What's far more disturbing than Coulter herself (and she's plenty
disturbing: On the cover photo she has the scariest eyes since Rasputin) is
the fact that Americans are lapping up her latest prose like a pack of
starved cats. The buyers cannot be political opponents who just want to
enjoy her "humor"; like me, those people wouldn't enrich her by a dime. (I
didn't pay for my copy.) Rather, a lot of folks apparently like her
ravings--suggesting that, on some level at least, they must agree with her.
And this means that the hundreds of thousands of Americans who put Coulter
at the top of the best-seller lists see evolution as a national menace.?
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060731
<http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060731&s=coyne073106> &s=coyne073106
H. L. Mencken once responded to a question asked by many of his readers: "If
you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then
why do you live here?" His answer was, "Why do men go to zoos?" Sadly,
Mencken is not here to ogle the newest creature in the American Zoo: the
Bleached Flamingo, otherwise known as Ann Coulter. This beast draws crowds
by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its
unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid. (Wikipedia notes that "a white or
pale flamingo ... is usually unhealthy or suffering from a lack of food.")
The etiolated Coulter issued a piercing squawk this spring with her
now-notorious book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Its thesis,
harebrained even by her standards, is that liberals are an atheistic lot who
have devised a substitute religion, replete with the sacraments of abortion,
feminism, coddling of criminals, and--you guessed it--bestiality. Liberals
also have their god, who, like Coulter's, is bearded and imposing. He is
none other than Charles Darwin. But the left-wing god is malevolent, for
Coulter sees Darwin as the root cause of every ill afflicting our society,
not to mention being responsible for the historical atrocities of Hitler and
Stalin.
The furor caused by her vicious remarks about the 9/11 widows ("I've never
seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.") has distracted people
from the main topic of her book: evolutionary biology, or rather the
pathetic pseudoscientific arguments of its modern fundamentalist challenger,
Intelligent Design (ID). This occupies four of Coulter's eleven chapters.
Enamored of ID, and unable to fathom a scientific reason why biologists
don't buy it, Coulter suggests that scientists are an evil sub-cabal of
atheist liberals, a group so addicted to godlessness that they must hide at
all costs the awful "truth" that evolution didn't happen. She accuses
evolutionists of brainwashing children with phony fossils and made-up
"evidence," turning the kids into "Darwiniacs" stripped of all moral (i.e.,
biblical) grounding and prone to become beasts and genocidal lunatics. To
Coulter, biologists are folks who, when not playing with test tubes or
warping children's minds, encourage people to have sex with dogs. (I am not
making this up.)
Any sane person who starts reading Godless will soon ask, Does Coulter
really believe this stuff? The answer is that it doesn't much matter. What's
far more disturbing than Coulter herself (and she's plenty disturbing: On
the cover photo she has the scariest eyes since Rasputin) is the fact that
Americans are lapping up her latest prose like a pack of starved cats. The
buyers cannot be political opponents who just want to enjoy her "humor";
like me, those people wouldn't enrich her by a dime. (I didn't pay for my
copy.) Rather, a lot of folks apparently like her ravings--suggesting that,
on some level at least, they must agree with her. And this means that the
hundreds of thousands of Americans who put Coulter at the top of the
best-seller lists see evolution as a national menace.
Well, that's hardly news. We've known for years that nearly half of all
Americans believe in the Genesis account of creation, and only about 10
percent want evolution taught in public schools without mentioning ID or
other forms of creationism. But it's worth taking up the cudgels once again,
if only to show that, contrary to Coulter's claim, accepting Darwinism is
not tantamount to endorsing immorality and genocide.
First, one has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her
book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a
resounding No. According to the book's acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored
in the "complex ideas" of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer;
Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own
department's website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a
fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles
creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the
"giants" of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning
biology from this lot is like learning elocution from George W. Bush.
As expected with such tutors, the Darwinism decried by Coulter is the usual
distorted cardboard cut-out. All she does is parrot the ID line: There are
no transitional fossils; natural selection can't create true novelty; some
features of organisms could not have evolved and therefore must have been
designed by an unspecified supernatural agent. And her "research" method
consists of using quotes taken out of context, scouring biased secondary
sources, and distorting what appears in the scientific literature. Judging
by the shoddy documentation of the evolution section, I'm not convinced that
the rest of the book isn't based on equally shoddy research. At any rate, I
won't belabor the case that Coulter makes for ID, as I've already shown in
TNR that her arguments are completely
<http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050822&s=coyne082205> bogus.
What is especially striking is Coulter's failure to tell us what she really
believes about how the earth's species got here. It's clear that she thinks
God had a direct hand in it, but beyond that we remain unenlightened. IDers
believe in limited amounts of evolution. Does Coulter think that mammals
evolved from reptiles? If not, what are those curious mammal-like reptiles
that appear exactly at the right time in the fossil record? Did humans
evolve from ape-like primates, or did the Designer conjure us into existence
all at once? How did all those annoying fossils get there, in remarkable
evolutionary order?
And, when faced with the real evidence that shows how strongly evolution
trumps ID, she clams up completely. What about the massive fossil evidence
for human evolution--what exactly were those creatures 2 million years ago
that had human-like skeletons but ape-like brains? Did a race of Limbaughs
walk the earth? And why did God--sorry, the Intelligent Designer--give
whales a vestigial pelvis, and the flightless kiwi bird tiny, nonfunctional
wings? Why do we carry around in our DNA useless genes that are functional
in similar species? Did the Designer decide to make the world look as though
life had evolved? What a joker! And the Designer doesn't seem all that
intelligent, either. He must have been asleep at the wheel when he designed
our appendix, back, and prostate gland.
There are none so blind as those who will not see, and Coulter knows that
myopia about evolution is a lucrative game. After all, she is a millionaire,
reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by ignorazzis. I have
never seen anyone enjoy her own inanity so much.
But after ranting for nearly a hundred pages about evolution, Coulter
finally gives away the game on page 277: "God exists whether or not
archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then
God created evolution." Gee. Evolution might be true after all! But she's
just spent a hundred pages telling us it isn't! What gives? As Tennessee
Williams's Big Daddy said, there's a powerful and obnoxious odor of
mendacity in this room.
What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that
she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever
accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative
hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any
God--the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks),
that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like
Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not
susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is
literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His
plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the
Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than
Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith
alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what
Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe
that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.
Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology?
According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual
meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat,
knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter
says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like
doing--screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective
child--Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"
Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't
work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up
their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if
evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it--and
showed that generations of his predecessors were misled--would reach the top
of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would
take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs
lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit.
There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence
for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.
As for biologists' supposed agenda of godlessness--how ridiculous! Yes, a
lot of scientists are atheists, but most have better things to do than
deliberately destroy people's faith. This goes doubly for the many
scientists--roughly a third of them--who are religious. After all, one of
the most vocal (and effective) opponents of ID is Ken Miller of Brown
University, a devout Catholic.
The real reason Coulter goes after evolution is not because it's wrong, but
because she doesn't like it--it doesn't accord with how she thinks the world
should be. That's because she feels, along with many Americans, that
"Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality." What's so
sad--not so much for Coulter as for Americans as a whole--is that this idea
is simply wrong. Darwinism, after all, is just a body of thought about the
origin and change of biological diversity, not a handbook of ethics. (I just
consulted my copy of The Origin of Species, and I swear that there's nothing
in there about abortion or eugenics, much less about shtupping one's
secretary.)
If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on
earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around
biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more
civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the
Bible--or even religion--to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't
follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem;
and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In
fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the
Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below).
Dawkins would never say--as Coulter does--that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look
good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows
enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible
about doing unto others?
The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into
her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of
Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men
responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid
Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying
something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been
done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the
Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the
Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the
partition of India? Religion, of course--or rather, religiously inspired
killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is
that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I
don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If
Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther,
and countless popes.
As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean
that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error:
She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed
by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could
interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start
killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a
statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.
Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit
is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and
famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not
getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than
her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is
rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross
dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed
the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any
of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins
burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much
meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about
evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that
fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing
as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye
know them.
<http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=782&sa=1> Jerry Coyne is a professor
in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.
Other related posts:
