A Religious Orgy in Tennessee Read online

  Such legal remedies have interrupted but hardly stopped the flow of news stories that snap us back to visions of the Scopes trial. In August of 1999, the Kansas Board of Education, ignoring the advice of a twenty-seven member advisory board of scientists, voted to adopt new science standards and leave it to local school boards whether or not to teach general Darwinian views, and further to strike knowledge of macroevolution from state assessment tests. Teaching the “Big Bang” theory and reference to the age of the earth were also left to local discretion. Most of the anti-evolution members of the state board were voted out in 2000, and in 2001 the new board reinstated the evolution requirement in the state’s science curriculum.

  In Pennsylvania, a local school board voted in 2004 to institute a requirement for teachers to read a statement about “intelligent design” prior to teaching evolution in high school biology, which led several parents to file suit. That suit, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, was decided in December 2005, with U.S. District Judge John Jones finding the board’s actions unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and further determining that “intelligent design” is creationism and not science. (School board members who were involved in the decision were also voted out of office, subsequently.)

  In 2005, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, went so far as to post a warning about “increasing challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools,” and the inclusion of non-scientifically based “alternatives” in science courses. He noted that educators, according to news reports, were “quietly being urged to avoid teaching about evolution,” even where controversy was not overt. Alberts issued an appeal to those outside the life sciences, fearing that the trend will spread to the earth and physical sciences as well. Mencken, it should be noted, wrote after Bryan’s death that “the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment.”

  “Democracy, in the last analysis, is only a sort of dream,” Mencken wrote in his notebooks (collected in the book Minority Report). “It should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus and Heaven. It is always a mistake to think of it as a reality. It never really exists; it is simply a forlorn hope.” Lucky for us, he kept hoping.

  I

  The Tennessee Circus

  From The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15, 1925

  I

  It is an old and bitter observation that, in armed conflicts, the peacemaker frequently gets the worst of it. The truth of the fact is being demonstrated anew in the case of the Tennessee pedagogue accused of teaching Evolution. No matter what the issue of that great moral cause, it seems to me very unlikely that either of the principal parties will be greatly shaken. The Evolutionists will go on demonstrating, believing in and teaching the mutability of living forms, and the Ku Klux theologians will continue to whoop for Genesis undefiled. But I look for many casualties and much suffering among the optimistic neutrals who strive to compose the controversy—that is, among the gentlemen who believe fondly that modern science and the ancient Hebrew demonology can be reconciled.

  This reconciliation will take place, perhaps, on that bright day when Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler and the Hon. Wayne B. Wheeler meet in a saloon under a Baptist church, and drink Brüderschaft in a mixture of Clos Vougeot and Coca-Cola. But not before. For the two parties, it must be manifest, are at the farthermost poles of difference, and leaning out into space. If one of them is right at all, then the other is wrong altogether. There can be no honest compromise between them. Either Genesis embodies a mathematically accurate statement of what took place during the week of June 3, 4004 BC or Genesis is not actually the Word of God. If the former alternative be accepted, then all of modern science is nonsense; if the latter, then evangelical Christianity is nonsense.

  This fact must be apparent, I believe, to everyone who has given sober and prayerful thought to the controversy. It should be especially apparent to those who now try to talk it away. I have, I confess, a great suspicion of such persons. When they pretend to be scientists it always turns out on inspection that they are only half-scientists—that no fact, however massive, is yet massive enough to keep them off the mourners’ bench. And when they pretend to be Christians they are always full of mental reservations, which is to say, they are full of secret doubts, heresies and hypocrisies.

  II

  When I say Christians, of course, I mean Christians of the sort who accept the Bible as their sole guide to the divine mysteries, and are forced, in consequence, to take it exactly as it stands. There are also, of course, persons of the name who subscribed to arier and more sophisticated cults, each with its scheme for ameliorating the disconcerting improbability of certain parts of Holy Writ. Some of these cults get around the difficulty by denying that any sort of belief whatever, save perhaps in a few obvious fundamentals, is necessary to the Christian way of life—that a Christian is properly judged not by what he believes, but by what he does. And others dispose of the matter by setting up an authority competent to “interpret” the Scriptures, i.e., to determine, officially and finally, what they mean or ought to mean when what they say is obscure or incredible.

  Of the latter cults the most familiar is the Roman Catholic. It does not reject or neglect the Bible, as the Ku Klux Protestants allege; it simply accepts frankly the obvious fact that the Bible is full of difficulties—or, as the non-believer would say, contradictions and absurdities. To resolve these difficulties it maintains a corps of experts specially gifted and trained, and to their decision, when reached in due form of canon law, it gives a high authority. The first of such experts, in normal times, is the Pope; when he settles a point of doctrine, i.e., of Biblical interpretation, the faithful are bound to give it full credit. If he is in doubt, then he may summon a Council of the Church, i.e., a parliament of all the chief living professors of the divine intent and meaning, and submit the matter to it. Technically, I believe, this council can only advise him; in practice, he usually follows the view of its majority.

  The Anglican, Orthodox Greek and various other churches, including the Presbyterian, follow much the same plan, though with important differences in detail. Its defects are not hard to see. It tends to exalt ecclesiastical authority and to discourage the study of Holy Writ by laymen. But its advantages are just as apparent. For one thing, it puts down amateur theologians, and stills their idiotic controversies. For another thing, it quietly shelves the highly embarrassing questions of the complete and literal accuracy of the Bible. What has not been singled out for necessary belief, and interpreted by authority, is tacitly regarded as not important.

  III

  Out of this plan flows the fact that the Catholics and their allies, in the present storm, are making much better weather of it than the evangelical sects. Their advantage lies in the simple fact that they do not have to decide either for Evolution or against it. Authority has not spoken upon the subject; hence it puts no burden upon conscience, and may be discussed realistically and without prejudice. A certain wariness, of course, is necessary. I say that authority has not spoken; it may, however, speak to-morrow, and so the prudent man remembers his step. But in the meanwhile there is nothing to prevent him examining all the available facts, and even offering arguments in support of them or against them—so long as those arguments are not presented as dogma.

  The result of all this is that the current discussion of the Tennessee buffoonery, in the Catholic and other authoritarian press, is immensely more free and intelligent than it is in the evangelical Protestant press. In such journals as the Conservator, the new Catholic weekly, both sides are set forth, and the varying contentions are subject to frank and untrammeled criticism. Canon de Dorlodot whoops for Evolution; Dr. O’Toole denounces it as nonsense. If the question were the Virgin Birth, or the apostolic succession, or transubstantiation, or even birth control, the two antagonists would be in the same trench, for authority binds them there. Bill on Evolution authority is silen
t, and so they have at each other in the immemorial manner of theologians, with a great kicking up of dust.

  The Conservator itself takes no sides, but argues that Evolution ought to be taught in the schools—not as incontrovertible fact but as a hypothesis accepted by the overwhelming majority of enlightened men. The objections to it, theological and evidential, should be noted, but not represented as unanswerable.

  IV

  Obviously, this is an intelligent attitude. Equally obviously, it is one that the evangelical brethren cannot take without making their position absurd. For weal or for woe, they are committed absolutely to the literal accuracy of the Bible; they base their whole theology upon it. Once they admit, even by inference, that there may be a single error in Genesis, they open the way to an almost complete destruction of that theology. So they are forced to take up the present challenge boldly, and to prepare for a battle to the death. If, when and as they attempt a compromise, they admit defeat.

  Thus there is nothing unnatural in their effort to protect their position by extra-theological means—for example, by calling in the law to put down their opponents. All Christians, when one of their essential dogmas seems to be menaced, turn instinctively to the same device. The whole history of the church, as everyone knows, is a history of schemes to put down heresy by force. Unluckily, those schemes do not work as well as they did in former ages. The heretic, in the course of time, has learned how to protect himself—even how to take the offensive. He refuses to go docilely to the stake. Instead, he yells, struggles, makes a frightful pother, bites his executioner. The church begins to learn that it is usually safest to let him go.

  The Ku Klux Klergy, unfortunately for their cause, have not yet mastered that plain fact. Intellectually, there are still medieval. They believe that the devices which worked in the year 1300 will still work in 1925. As a lifelong opponent of their pretensions I can only report that their fidelity to this belief fills me with agreeable sentiments. I rejoice that they have forced the fighting, and plan to do it in the open. My prediction is that, when the peanut shells are swept up at last and the hot-dog men go home, millions of honest minds in this great republic, hirtheto uncontaminated by the slightest doubt, will have learned to regard parts of Genesis as they now regard the history of Andrew Gump.*

  * Andrew Gump was a lead character in a long running family comic strip.

  II

  Homo Neanderthalensis

  From The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925

  I

  Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone—that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized—though I should not like to be put to giving names—but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

  Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer—that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

  On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man’s possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

  II

  The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders—that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous—by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

  Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob’s hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can’t understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.

  This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive—and a few are enough to carry on.

  III

  The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex—because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels, no man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged—and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple—and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.

  The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, a
nd has one more excuse for hating his betters.

  Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth—a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

  IV

  What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera—a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.

  That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God’s image, one of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.