The Contrarian Raven

May 6, 2007

The Three Stooges

For most of my life I have thought of the Middle Ages as a period so remote in time, so different from today’s world, that there is no way to grasp the everyday life of its people, even though we can admire its arts and attempt to understand its history. My viewpoint began to change a decade ago when my late wife and I spent three-and-a-half weeks trekking around the Anapurnas in Nepal. The remote villages were inaccessible except by a walk of several days or on horseback, electricity and running water were absent, most of the people lived by subsistence farming and by keeping such animals as goats, water buffalo, cattle or yaks. It struck me that the day-to-day experiences of the people of these villages had more in common with mediaeval life of Europe or Asia than with life in most modern nations.

So even today there are people living on Earth whose living conditions are essentially mediaeval. Perhaps it should not surprise us that there are still people around whose world-view is rooted in mediaeval times. It is fair to say that the mindset of the most conservative Islamists, especially the followers of Usama bin Ladin and his ilk, belongs in the middle ages. All ultra-conservatives, Muslim or otherwise, long for an unattainable goal, the restoration of a past that never was.

It seems natural enough that American conservatives would wish to return to one or another version of an imagined past. However, until three days ago it had never occurred to me that there are serious Republican presidential candidates whose ideal world seems to lie in mediaeval times (I exaggerate slightly, but not by much). A few nights ago I made the unwise choice to watch a rerun of the 10-candidate “debate” (after all, the election is only eighteen months away). At one point the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they did not believe in evolution; three of them did so.

The three stooges are Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo, according to a front-page article in the New York Times (May 5, 2007—byline Patricia Cohen). This article is primarily concerned with internal conservative disputes about whether Darwinism has a place in the “intellectual” underpinnings of American conservatism. I am not sure how evolution comes in (I assume that conservatives don’t regard themselves as throwbacks to australopithecus). I guess the point is that some of them regard “social Darwinism” as a “scientific” underpinning of their political philosophy—that a law of nature is that the fittest rise to the top of the socio-economic heap and vote Republican, the least fit stay at the bottom and either live on welfare or work but ought to be deported.

In any case, it makes no more sense to inquire whether a presidential candidate (or anyone else) believes in the truth of evolution than to inquire whether he believes that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Both propositions are true regardless of anyone’s individual belief. Fortunately, none of these three stooges is likely to advance far in the Presidential campaign.

Epilogue: June 23, 2007

As my wise old mother-in-law would say, “It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Apparently Huckabee and Tancredo have not added much comment beyond raising their hands in the debate. Brownback, on the other hand, felt the need to refine or elaborate or clarify (or something) his position on evolution and published an op-ed piece in the May 31 New York Times (my God, that paper will print anything these days), entitled “What I think about Evolution”. Rhetorically it is a fair-to-middlin’ campaign document, but its intellectual content is lightweight (and in places downright incorrect), not at all the sort of essay that you would expect to have legs. However, it did have the salutary effect of inspiring a sort of rebuttal (actually an eloquent and well-thought-out essay) by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Coyne’s essay, entitled “Don’t Know Much Biology”, deconstructs Brownback’s op-ed piece point by point, and argues convincingly that Brownback’s position amounts to “nothing less than a rejection of the whole institution of science.”

The moral of all this, according to the Kansas observer Mousie Cat (who probably didn’t know my wise old mother-in-law), is “He shoulda quit while he was behind.”