Intelligently Designed: The January 2006 Public Forum Anaylsis and Briefs

Resolved: In the United States, public high school science curriculum should include the study of the Theory of Intelligent Design.

In a recent Zogby Poll, when respondents were asked to strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or somewhat disagree to the question: “When Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is taught in school, students should be able to learn about scientific evidence that points to an intelligent design of life.” The results were staggering!!!

Now I know that it could be considered cruel to call 78% of American’s idiots but to call them uninformed is not. The fact is that even Bush’s top science advisor has said, “evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology” and that “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.” (NYT: Bush Remarks Roil Debate Over Teaching of Evolution, Aug. 1st, 2005) And yet 78% of Americans answered that ID ought to be taught in science class. Intelligently Designed??? The real question is how could they be???

2006 January Public Forum Topic

Resolved: In the United States, public high school science curriculum should include the study of the Theory of Intelligent Design.

By Terry Hatch
The George Washington University
Victory Briefs.com
National Debate Champion
2003 Public Forum Debate

Topic Analysis/Overview:

This topic is probably one of the best topics that the NFL has chosen. It is topical, controversial, and there is a litany of evidence and opinions available regarding it. Moreover, this topic allows for several approaches by each team making it possible for the debates to be more educational and varied.

I have only one dispute with this topic and I think that it is something that is going to potentially harm the affirmative. Intelligent Design is only a theory to the religious, it is NOT by any means a scientific theory comparable to that of Evolution. Seeing that the resolution puts intelligent design in the context of science, it must be looked at as such. I will get to that a bit later.

What the affirmative and the negative have to be careful of in this resolution is alienating judges. In very few circumstances is it possible to determine your judges religious preference, or for that matter their political preference. Furthermore, even if you do know their preference in one that may not mean that you can argue the extreme of the topic. For example: a judge is Christian and believes in intelligent design BUT they also are tolerant and understand the difference between their faith in their religion and others faith in science and moreover understand the importance of separation of Church and State.

The important thing is to not be to extreme� that is unless you know without a shadow of doubt that you can win. I know that it is semi-unfair to tag judges as bias individuals, but many are and that is something that has to be dealt with accordingly.

When I say you shouldn’t be extreme, I do not mean do not take a stance. Take a very firm stance but create a distinction between where you stand and where your opponents stand. Without taking a stand and creating a CLEAR distinction you will look like a flip-flopper. Overused, perhaps but it’s the truth. The resolution has a lot of room for creativeness, use that room.

Do not limit your literature search to things that relate only to intelligent design, expand them. One of the best articles that I have read that would create a very unique answer, or even argument for the negative was from the Atlantic Monthly. The article, by Paul Bloom, is titled, “Is God an Accident?” In Bloom’s analysis and research he describes the psychological proclivity that humans have, from early in their life, to believe in the supernatural. He says that this tendency translates into a belief in God and helps explain the widespread practice of religion around the world.

Another article that I was reading on this topic was from Esquire Magazine called “Greetings From Idiot America.” (I know the articles title is quite offensive but what is said is true.) The author Charles Pierce explains that American’s have experienced “the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.” (Esquire 11.1.05) This belief can be demonstrated through a recent Zogby Poll on the topic of intelligent design.

When respondents were asked to strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or somewhat disagree to the question: “When Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is taught in school, students should be able to learn about scientific evidence that points to an intelligent design of life.” The results were staggering!!! I almost fell off the very bar stool I am sitting at, but then I thought about the last two elections and I realized that I shouldn�t be all that surprised, as sad as it is to say� 78% of respondents agreed (combined strongly (53%) and somewhat (25%)) while only 13% disagreed (combined strongly (8%) and somewhat (5%)) with the remaining 9% being unsure� (http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/ZogbyFinalReport.pdf)

Now I know that it could be considered cruel to call 78% of American’s idiots but to call them uninformed is not. Proponents of intelligent design as a scientific theory “display either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of evolutionary science.” (Richard Milner & Vittorio Maestro, senior editors of Natural History: http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html) This semantic manipulation of words to teach “religion” in schools, disguised as science is a deliberate effort to invalidate the “Origins of Species.” The fact is that even Bush’s top science advisor has said, “evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology” and “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.” (Lexis Nexis; NYT: Bush Remarks Roil Debate Over Teaching of Evolution, Aug. 1st, 2005)

Before the debate about whether intelligent design ought to be taught in public schools or not, what intelligent design is must first be resolved. Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that “certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection.” (Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture. Questions about Intelligent Design: What is the theory of intelligent design?) Intelligent design is presented as an alternative to purely naturalistic forms of the theory of evolution. Intelligent design deliberately does not try to identify or name the specific agent of creation � it merely states that one (or more) must exist. While intelligent design itself does not name the designer, the personal view of many proponents is that the designer is the Christian god. Whether this was a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from science-teaching has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case. (Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District)

The best recommendations that I can give you are as follows. First, be very clear as to what you are advocating. Being clear, concise, and precise as to what you mean will mean the difference between a very educational round and an unclear one. Second, in being precise you are going to set the ground for the round. I always explain the importance of framing a debate, in this debate, preciseness will help frame the debate. If you are inclusive of some things and exclusionary of others and provide substantiated reasons why that would be the best you will have an easier time in round. Third, READ EVERYTHING!!! Well as much as you POSSIBLY can. If you are well read on this topic you will be able to win so many more rounds. This topic has really fascinating literature. The various number of positions coupled with the vast amount of writings will prove invaluable in being able to address any and every argument thrown at you by another team. Finally, use moderation. I know that my first tendency when debating this topic on the negative would be to invalidate intelligent design, call people idiots, and undermine the other team and their advocacy on a semi-personal level. This isn’t necessarily forbidden but I think that there has to be limits as well as arguments that are all-encompassing as to diminish your opponents ground.

Good Luck!

Background on Creationists/ID-ists/Evolutionists: Punctuality & Gradualists:

A CREATIONIST: A creationist is a person who rejects the theory of evolution and believes instead that the each species on earth was put here by a Divine Being. A Creationist might accept “micro-evolution” (changes in the form of a species over time based on natural selection), but rejects the notion that one species can– over time– become another species.

YOUNG EARTH CREATIONIST: A young earth creationist believes that the earth is nowhere near the 4.6 billion or so years old that most scientists estimate, but is instead closer to 6,000 or so years old, based on the assumption the Genesis contains a complete listing of the generations from Adam and Eve to historical times.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN PROPONENT: An ID proponent rejects the theory of evolution and, more generally, the notion that natural law and chance alone can explain the diversity of life on earth. Instead, the ID proponent argues–often from statistics–that the diversity of life is the result of a purposeful scheme of some higher power (who may or may not be the God of the Bible).

EVOLUTIONIST: An evolutionist accepts the Darwinian argument that natural selection and environmental factors combine to explain the diversity of life we see on earth. An evolutionist may or may not believe that evolution is the way in which a Divine Being has chosen to work in the world. Evolutionists divide into various camps, including PUNCTUALISTS (who believe that evolution usually occurs sporadically, in relatively short bursts, as the result of major environmental change) and GRADUALISTS (who are more inclined to believe that evolution occurs more evenly, over longer periods of time). The PUNCTUALISTS seem now to be winning the argument.

2006 January Public Forum Topic

Resolved: In the United States, public high school science curriculum should include the study of the Theory of Intelligent Design.

Affirmative Brief:

By Terry Hatch
The George Washington University
Victory Briefs.com
National Debate Champion
2003 Public Forum Debate

I briefly mentioned in the introduction/topic analysis that I thought that the word �theory’ is bad for the resolution and thus bad for the affirmative . As I started weeding through articles, biographies, and the like, I have come to the conclusion that the fact that although that might be bad because it isn�t a actual “scientific theory,” the fact that the resolution mandates that it is taught in science class is going to make this resolution even more difficult.

I think that the affirmative needs to find great answers to why Intelligent Design is actually a theory. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is by finding a definition that would fulfill the requirement and delineate between the necessity for a scientific theory to be taught in science and for a theory to be taught in science. The distinction can be based on the idea of a criticism of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Teaching intelligent design (ID) does not have to be a lesson in itself, it can be taught as an opposing school of thought (which is widely accepted against evolution). The second and more compelling answer to the argument that ID is not a theory is to provide justification that there is “evidence” proving that it provides for all of the requirements of a scientific theory.

For a theory to qualify as scientific it must be:
Consistent (internally and externally)
Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations, see Occam’s Razor)
Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena)
Empirically testable & falsifiable (see Falsifiability)
Based upon multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
Correctable & dynamic (changes are made as new data are discovered)
Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more)
Provisional or tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty)

Meeting these specifications will not be easy, but I assure you that it is possible to find evidence that endorses it as a scientific theory. William Dembski, a leading modern proponent of ID, has called “to see intelligent design flourish as a scientific research program. To do that, I need a new generation of scholars willing to consider this, because the older generation is largely hidebound. So I would like to see textbooks, certainly at the college level and even at the high school level, which reframe introductory biology within a design paradigm.” (Wikipedia; Houston Press, December 14, 2000)

The affirmative HAS TO (at least in my opinion) frame the debate as follows: not teaching ID in schools stifles the market place of ideas and diminishes scientific inquiry. Framing the debate like this is analogous to framing it as Pierce did in his article titled “Idiot America.” It is compelling to believe that without having all competing theories included that students will be missing out on an essential part of the academic experience. Science needs to be likened to literature, or history. If multiple views are not provided, if different (even mutually exclusive) interpretations are excluded, how is it that students are suppose to be educated?

The affirmative needs to be seen as the side that makes science possible in the first place. It is in societies which constrict free thought and inquiry into minority advocated ideas that individual intellectual progression is diminished. For many years it was evolution that was forbidden from being taught. After the Scopes trial in 1925, which effectively overturned the Butler Act (the act forbid that any publicly funded institution from teaching evolutionary philosophy and any theory that contradicts or “denies the story of the divine creation of man.”) the theory of evolution through natural selection became the more standard lesson for science classes, that is to say that the movement away from creationism gained momentum�

In my research I found some pretty interesting ways for the affirmative to attempt to discredit the negatives criticism that Evolution is a “better” more “scientific theory” than is ID. Use this information at your own discretion. I can tell you though that I am going to advocate the article that Scientific America wrote (that incited this response) for the negative for this topic.

The 15 answers to refute evolution are as follows:

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils�creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features� at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels�that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

[ All of these, as well as their justifications came from: http://www.answersingenesis.org/news/scientific_american.asp]

I would not be surprised if many teams argue that intelligent design advocates the teachings of Christianity. While the recent Dover ruling does press this idea, ID is promoted as a “secular” (if you can call it that) theory. ID does not promote any one God and seeing that it does not say that there is a God that created earth, or in this case the inhabitants, the affirmative is going to be able to categorically deny the charge that there is some violation between church and state. It is critical that ID is explained as a theory that says that there is some higher being, or higher entity, not necessarily supernatural, but perhaps more “evolved” that “designed” humans, ect..

Do not let creationist arguments dominate the debate. ID is not creationism, lets make that really, REALLY clear. You will lose a lot of debates if you are framed as a promoting creationism in schools. Moreover, the amount of ground you lose is enormous! You are forced to defend something that the founding fathers saw as dangerous to our democracy.

As a side note: The Separation of Church and State is derived from the 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Although the Separation between Church and State is never verbatim written in the Constitution, it instead has its root in what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “wall between church and state” and is something that Madison said the Constitution must be “guarded” against.

The next thing that needs to be addressed is why the science curriculum? First, when you are arguing that ID is a competing theory to that of Evolution, it would not make any rational sense to teach it in another class. A lot of opponents to ID argue that the theory should be taught in a theology class. The reason is that they advocate teaching it in a theology class is because they see it as an extension of creationism, or as a Kansas professor once derided as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” (http://www.boston.com/
news/nation/washington/articles/2005/08/03/bush_boosts_alternative_evolution_theory)
The second reason why you would teach it in science class is because it is the only subject that would deal with a subject matter such as the origins of life. One last thing that has to deal with that section of the resolution. The resolution stipulates high school science. This is important for several reasons. First, most studies show that faith and belief in God and religion is developed earlier in young children. If you end up reading the article in the Atlantic Monthly “Is God an Accident?” it will explain quite clearly the reason why. The requirement for ID to be taught in HS still allows for the more firm scientific theory to be taught to students earlier on in school, thereby eliminating the risk of religious indoctrination (even though it isn’t religious because it is NOT creationism).

The affirmative definitely has the more challenging task in this round. As you will see a lot of the negative arguments have more room for going negating the resolution while at the same time claiming some, if not more, of the net benefits. The debate over teaching Intelligent Design must be reduced to the status quo of mutual exclusivity in the theory taught (evolution) versus the competing (as well as widely accepted [thereby meeting the semantic definition of the word] theory of intelligent design.

Be cognizant of the level of opposition that you are going to get within the scientific community. The job of the affirmative is Orwellian in nature. The 1984 style double-speak (where you are the government denying all truth saying “war is peace”) is going to be an obstacle to master. The affirmative will have to walk the line between pure fact and truth by omission. It is sad, it is difficult but it is something that will make you a better debater. DO NOT get me wrong, I am not saying lie� I am saying choose your words VERY carefully and make sure your arguments are internally consistent. If you do those two things and frame the debate, exclusionary of the negatives claimed benefits, you will have no problems.

Good luck!

2006 January Public Forum Topic

Resolved: In the United States, public high school science curriculum should include the study of the Theory of Intelligent Design.

Negative Brief:

By Terry Hatch
The George Washington University
Victory Briefs.com
National Debate Champion
2003 Public Forum Debate

Flip negative. That’s my brief.

KIDDING!!!

Flipping negative is among the best of recommendations that I can give you. The OVERWHELMING amount of quantitative as well as qualitative evidence lies with the negative. The controversy over not-teaching against “religious” beliefs began as early as Galileo when he question biblical scriptures of Ecclesiastes and Psalms on the arrangement of celestial units in relation to the earth. The debate over evolution being taught in the US reached its pinnacle when the Scopes trial occurred. Ultimately evolution was not banned but true science was suppressed as a result of the religious beliefs of some.

If it were for religion and its public promoters the theory of evolution would probably never have progressed to the degree in which it has. As many political theorists have noted, suppression of science is among the first things done in oppressive, even totalitarian societies. Spreading truth that is outside the control of the government can be dangerous to its stability. Free societies for the most part recognize the importance of scientific progression.

The benefits of allowing science, as opposed to ideas (notice I am not saying theories, take that as a tip and do that same) such as Intelligent Design (ID) ultimately reaps benefits or the entire world. It is because we recognize that species, that cells, evolve that we are able to understand disease and are able to help cure it.

The affirmative is deliberately promoting ideas of creationism (which has been given a refined name of ID). This semantic differentiation is analogous to calling the Estate Tax the “Death Tax” or calling Student Loans a “Welfare Subsidy”– they are the same but sound very different and conjure up very different images. If you say Death Tax, I see an old women having all of her assets taken from her after the tragic death of her husband who was a war veteran. You say estate tax and I see Paris Hilton losing one of her homes on the South of France� There is a big difference. Point it out: ID is creationism with a different name.

Lets talk about the Separation of Church and State issue that is created as a result of promoting creationist policies and then teaching them in schools. Many people will argue that there is no way to prove that this would constitute an infringement upon the Separation nor that it is something that the Federal Government should intervene upon if it were to happen on the local level. There are a couple of answers to this. First, ID is an infringement because public schools receive federal funding for curriculum purposes, teaching anything of specific religious nature is forbidden.

Emerson v. Board of Education (1947) provides that Federal Funds can be distributed to religious schools so long as it is not used for religious instruction as ruled against in McCollum v. Board of Education (1948). The recent Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://www.sciohost.org/ncse/kvd/kitzmiller_decision_20051220.pdf) affirms that “Defendants [Dover School Board] consciously chose to change Dover’s biology curriculum to advance religion (pg. 93).” This statement by the court provides all the evidence you need to prove that there is a violation of church and state.

Everyone should read this Dover court case. I realize that it is about 140 pages long but it is double spaced, so really it is only 70 J . It explains that although the justification may sound reasonable, the ID proponents have intentions full of ulterior motives including “interest to inject religion into the schools” (pg. 94) and “marginalizing” (pg. 124) voices of those who do not feel that ID should be taught. And so the cycle begins, with opposition to something that is clearly constitutionally unsound as well as the suppression of opinions that disagree with the wrongful yet intentional manipulation of a curriculum that had no problems.

Before I conclude and make a couple of recommendations on these arguments I want you all to understand something call “The Lemon Test.” The Lemon Test was established in 1971 in a Supreme Court case over funding non-public schools per the Pennsylvanian 1968 Non-Public Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Lemon Test establishes 3 guidelines, of which I any are violated the legislation is declared unconstitutional. The three guidelines are: 1.) the governments action must have a legitimate secular purpose; 2.) the governments actions must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion; and the governments action must not result in “excessive entanglement” of the government and religion. Reference pg. 90 of the Dover Ruling from the link that I provided and it will show the explicit violations that were perpetrated by the district.

These foregoing arguments provide sufficient ground for the negative to on face reject the resolution and win the round. They are compelling, they are reasonable, and the evidence is by all means on your side. While this is a great argument, I think that it needs to be used in conjunction with other arguments, so long as they are consistent with the ones already presented (if you choose to use them).

The negative also needs to make the teaching of a non-science criticism an issue of academic progress. The affirmative is going to argue the ambiguous market place of ideas and stifling of knowledge but the negative has the ability to really make head way by calling ID and its formal teaching in science class, destructive to the scientific method and the cherished and beneficial research of thousands of years. ID proponents “see the case increasingly as a political battle that threatens to weaken science teaching in a nation whose students already are falling behind.” (Boston Globe)

I have attached at the end of this brief the Esquire article titled “Idiot America,” the one I make mention of in the introduction/topic overview. I would strongly recommend you read it and use it. Rep. Barney Frank (D-NY), in effect expands on Pierce, makes the argument that the politicians of this country, specifically GW Bush, are “proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.” (Boston Globe)

The problem that is arising and needs to be pointed out is that even religious leaders recognize the damage that can result from the teaching of ID. The Archbishop of Vienna wrote in the NYT that the depiction of evolution as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” is not true. (Boston Globe; http://www.boston.com/news/nation/
washington/articles/2005/08/03/bush_boosts_alternative_evolution_theory/)

Lets go on to talking about the ability to inform students of something and the requirement to study something. The Dover ruling requires that students be informed that “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution
including, but not limited to, intelligent design” and that the following statement will be read to High School Students:

“The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students
to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and
eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution
is a part.
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be
tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not
a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no
evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested
explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life
that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of
Pandas and People, is available for students who might
be interested in gaining an understanding of what
Intelligent Design actually involves.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to
keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of
the Origins of Life to individual students and their
families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction
focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency
on Standards-based assessments.”

This requirement provides students with a basis to inquire outside of school but still holds schools to the Constitutional guidelines long ago established. As the negative be sure to point out that you are not hiding anything rather you are following the law which is tantamount to any claim for religious freedom in a publicly funded institution.

Here are a couple of last arguments that I am going to give you, both of which are quite simple. Argue that while ID, if it were legal to teach in school, that it lacks in scientific foundations and therefore ought to be taught in a different class, perhaps in theology. Relegating what proponents of ID call a theory to merely an idea does not give it undue credit. If there is an argument made by the affirmative against that terminology make the answer that it would be the equivalent of the negative calling evolution and natural selection a law of science, which it isn’t. The other thing that you can argue is in reference to the affirmative argument that in High School students are less likely to be indoctrinated in any way. You can spike that and include an argument in your case that not only argues the potential repercussions of teaching ID including: religious persecution/discrimination, the movement to include things such as scientology in the classroom, ect..

One last thing here is a link to the 15 criticisms of creationism by Scientific American. I had copied and pasted them for the opposite side in the affirmative brief but these are laid out more clearly, so here is the link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF

Good Luck!

Here are a bunch of cites for articles that I have read and referenced (in addition to those that I cited within the briefs):

Scientists question use of ID theory in modern high school classrooms, University Wire, November 15, 2005 Tuesday, 1138 words, By Tami Swartz, The Daily Free Press; SOURCE: Boston U., BOSTON

Creation debate revisited; ‘Intelligent design’ proponents receive voice of support from White House, The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario), August 6, 2005 Saturday Final Edition, FAITH; Pg. P8, 1455 words, MIRKO PETRICEVIC

US JUDGE REJECTS INTELLIGENT DESIGN, The Boston Globe, December 21, 2005 Wednesday, THIRD EDITION, NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1, 1232 words, BY NINA J. EASTON, GLOBE STAFF

Poll: Evolution’s not enough, St. Petersburg Times (Florida), December 30, 2005 Friday, 2 Late Tampa Edition, TAMPA & STATE; Pg. 1B, 1341 words, DONNA WINCHESTER; RON MATUS

What’s the Big Deal About Intelligent Design?, The American Spectator, December 2005 - January 2006, In the current showdown between materialists and theists, it’s easy to forget that science itself is a creation of Western Christian thought., 4829 words, Dan Peterson

Show Me the Science, The New York Times, August 28, 2005 Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 4; Column 1; Editorial Desk; Pg. 11, 2469 words, By Daniel C. Dennett. Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of “Freedom Evolves” and “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”, Blue Hill, Me.

Judge Will ‘Rule as I See Fit’ in Closely Watched Intelligent Design Case, Religion News Service, November 23, 2005 Wednesday 10:42 AM Eastern Time, DOMESTIC, 974 words, By BILL SULON; Bill Sulon writes for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., HARRISBURG, Pa.

The Nation; Judge Says ‘Intelligent Design’ Is Not Science; He calls a school board’s effort to teach it as an alternative to evolution unconstitutional., Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2005 Wednesday, Home Edition, MAIN NEWS; National Desk; Part A; Pg. 1, 1725 words, Henry Weinstein, Times Staff Writer

Keep “design’ out of school, judge rules; It’s religion, he says, and doesn’t belong in science classes. He has harsh words for Dover Area board members., Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), December 21, 2005 Wednesday, SEVENTH EDITION, NATIONAL; Pg. A1, 1337 words, By Christina Gostomski Of The Morning Call, HARRISBURG

Academics debate intelligent design, First Amendment, Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania), November 2, 2005, Wednesday, DOMESTIC NEWS, K3606, 1099 words, By Paul Nussbaum

Pennsylvania ruling against ID significant to Kansas debate, The Associated Press State & Local Wire, December 23, 2005, Friday, BC cycle, State and Regional, 850 words, By JOHN HANNA, Associated Press Writer, TOPEKA, Kan.

The Darwinist inquisition against intelligent design, University Wire, December 22, 2005 Thursday, COLUMN, 1278 words, By Steven Lackner, The Commentator; SOURCE: Yeshiva U., NEW YORK

Expert Witness Sees Evidence In Nature for Intelligent Design, The New York Times, October 18, 2005 Tuesday, Late Edition - Final, Section A; Column 5; National Desk; Pg. 16, 676 words, By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, HARRISBURG, Pa., Oct. 17

UNDOING DARWIN, Columbia Journalism Review, September 2005 / /, October 2005, ARTICLES; Pg. 30, 5543 words, BY CHRIS MOONEY AND MATTHEW C. NISBET; Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed Magazine and author of The Republican War on Science (www.waronscience.com), due out this month from Basic Books. Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Ohio State University, where his research focuses on the intersections between science, the media, and politics.

SCIENCE OR DEMOCRACY? ; Most voters favor ‘intelligent design,’ but should polls govern education?, Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), October 14, 2005 Friday, Home Final Edition, 1327 words, Dennis M. Mahoney, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Intelligent design duels Darwin in ‘Scopes II’, Chicago Tribune, September 27, 2005, Tuesday, TB-INTELLIGENT-DESIGN-20050927, 1212 words, By Lisa anderson

AND OF COURSE MY FAVORITE ARTICLE ON THIS TOPIC� FROM THE NOVEMBER EDITION OF EQUIRE: Greetings From Idiot America
by Charles P. Pierce, as originally published in Esquire Magazine, 11/1/05
There is some undeniable art - you might even say design - in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron-a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.
At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It’s hot as hell this morning. They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress — small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.
Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, here they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.
Which is wearing a saddle. It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy Western saddle.
This is very much a show dinosaur. The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become “charter members” of the museum.
“Dinosaurs,” Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, “always get the kids interested.” AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest. (Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from inking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham’s literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)
“We,” Ham exclaims to the assembled, “are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” And everybody cheers. Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to eliminate the “discrimination” long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit. This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from Adam’s fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay marriage. He talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers again.
Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This, too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example, one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of taking a nap. Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining peacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis. This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you’re willing to stretch Job’s description of a “behemoth” to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah’s Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as though she’s doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film? After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.” If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can’t Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?
These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn’t so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money. Dinosaurs with saddles? Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark?
Welcome to your new Eden.
Welcome to Idiot America.
LET’S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we’ll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically-elected president of Venezuela.
The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that “an embryo is a person… We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth.” Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.
And, finally, in August, the cover of Time — for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment — clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: “Does God have a place in science class?”
Fights over creationism — and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered — roil up school districts across the country.
The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up: “We’ve been attacked,” he says, “by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”
And there it is. Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It’s not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete. The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it “common sense.” The president’s former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the “yuck factor.” The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
It’s a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, “faith-based,” a cheap huckster’s phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine.
It’s a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.
After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it’s a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.
Hofstadter saw this one coming. “Intellect is pitted against feeling,” he wrote, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical.”
The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the “intelligent design” movement contained this remarkable sentence: “They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.”
A “politically savvy challenge to evolution” is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket.
It doesn’t matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn’t matter how many votes your candidate got, he’s not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page. Of The New York Times.
Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live , in which Larry asked the following question: “All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”
And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist’s words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ’s Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and, therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but his Gut’s the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.
This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our founding documents.
After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas — or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in Europe, “Christian thought… often gave irrationality the status of a universal ‘truth’ to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of natural laws.”
In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to intellectual experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free. They devised the best country ever in which to be completely around the bend. It’s just that making a respectable living out of it used to be harder work.
THEY CALL IT THE INFINITE CORRIDOR, which is the kind of joke you tell when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can get lost there.
One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice it to say that Hodges’s data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth gambol together. Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research from encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least in how the Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in land, in guns, in power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover, part of Hodges’s duties at MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen about making careers in science for themselves.
“Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray intellectually,” Hodges says. “I guess to a certain extent that’s our fault, because scientists don’t do a good enough job communicating with people who are nonscientists — that it’s not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another.”
Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.
“My earliest memory,” Hodges recalls, “is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering — particularly science, at that time — people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it’s like there’s no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.
“It’s more than a general dumbing down of America — the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It’s like you’re happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it’s like this abdication of intellectual responsibility — that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them.”
The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples, were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping everything from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, they assumed that their posterity would feel much the same as they did; in 1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of a national university, James Madison called for the development of “a nursery of enlightened preceptors.”
It is a long way from that to the moment on February18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the incumbent Administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson’s observatory and Franklin’s kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation’s science classes. “Both sides ought to be properly taught,” said the president, “so people can understand what the debate is about.”
The “debate,” of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot America — where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they believe it.
If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there’s a “debate” over the veryexistence of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the “debate” quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil companies.
The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson’s disease.
“Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my work,” Hodges says, “if you tell them that you’re from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it’s a big deal. If I go to India and tell them I’m from MIT, it’s a big deal. In Thailand, it’s a big deal. If I go to Iowa, they could give a rat’s ass. And that’s a weird thing, that we’re moving in that direction as a nation.”
Hence, Bush was not talking about science — not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified — or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn’t talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh’s theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.
“The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a premium on communication skills,” explains Hodges. “It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it’s important to them, and they are hugely effective at it.”
It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you’ve spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it’s not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.
If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar. (It wasn’t always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)
It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.
“You don’t need to be credible on television,” explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. “You don’t need to be authoritative. You don’t need to be informed. You don’t need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors. “There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people’s fears and saying to them, ‘This is what you should be scared of, and here’s whose fault it is,’ ” Olbermann says. “And that’s what they get — two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, ‘Damn right, it’s those liberals’ fault.’ Or, ‘It’s those — what’s the word for it? — college graduates’ fault.’ ”
The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle.
Fact is what sells. Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad.
Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court. Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O’Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically — loofahs? falafels? — and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture.
Just don’t be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained. Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion, and because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust of scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of politicians is.
Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity’s knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book. His views on the subject are more well known than those of the people doing the actual research. The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the subject of the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to be, well, minimal. He spent the summer promoting a book in which he propounded theories on the subject that were progressively loopier.
“For some parents,” he writes, “the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home.” He goes on later to compare a woman’s right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he’s welcome in the mainstream, at least until either he’s defeated for reelection or his book doesn’t sell.
“Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success,” Olbermann says. We’re all in the bar now, where everybody’s an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy asshole picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.
ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike — in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the organization’s signature as well as he’d recognize his own.
Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him — people who didn’t know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat — wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He left the government.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn’t do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering,” Clarke recalls. “Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested. “That’s the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn’t analysis. It’s the important issues where we really need analysis.
“In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11] — they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions — was that we didn’t have time for emotion that day.”
Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success — against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore — was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly. So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in which it would go to war.
Remember the beginning, when it was purely the Gut — a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic p

Popularity: 25%

test

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 4:14 am and is filed under Public Forum Debate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.