Me Prefer Living in Cave

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anti-intellectualism, Benjamin Franklin, Christianity, evolution, founding fathers, fundamentalism, science, scientific method, Steven Waldman, Susan Jacoby, Thomas Jefferson

Frankly, I must admit that I have trouble understanding the American penchant for being suspicious of science. One would think just the opposite.

As recipient of most of the world’s greatest advances in all aspects of scientific endeavor you would think we would hold it in higher esteem. After all, the rest of the world at one time at least, came here to learn and then copy our discoveries and technological advances.

This came to mind yesterday as I was watching something or other, and the interviewee remarked that rather than worshipping sports heroes and actresses, we should be toasting our scientists who continue to pursue advances in science which ultimately bring us such delights as Iphones, computers, electric cars, and cures for disease. I have to agree, yet what he asks is not likely to happen.

A year or so ago, I reviewed Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason. In it, she details the anti-intellectualism that has been part of this country for many years. It did not of course start out that way, for we were blessed with great intellectual minds in Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and a number of our other Founding Fathers.

In part she argues, that we left scientific pursuits aside for a bit, as we forged a new nation, and then got it up and running. We allowed, for the time being, scientific research to remain a European “thing.” Later on, came the Second Great Awakening, and the resultant or continuing fundamentalist bent to our religious heritage continued. This looked down upon science as a secular danger which was undermining proper and older interpretations of scripture.

It probably was of no great help that in the early 20th century, with the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory, some intellectuals from our powerhouse eastern schools decided that social concerns could be laid at the foot of evolution, and that we could systematically study and test out social theories in much the same way that we could study the interior design of an atom of carbon.

While America did a fine job of teaching the reading, writing, and cyphering skills necessary to modern consumer economics, it also molded young minds to be both patriotic and “good citizens.” The latter meant voting and not committing crimes against the public good. Beyond that, it failed, and failed big time. As the world became more and more complicated and as knowledge exploded in every direction, schools remained mired in the basics.

Soon, the average person, who felt well educated through his high school studies, was unable to understand much of what was going on in the arena of science. And inability to understand, I think, breeds suspicion. And then, as I said, scientific discovery began to give the appearance of negating long held religious notions.

Today the religious right continues to assail us with “facts” that our founding fathers were “Christian” and that they bedrocked the federal government on “Judeo-Christian” principles. And frankly, that is not too far from true. In reading and reviewing Steven Waldman’s acclaimed book,  Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, we do in fact learn that most of our leaders of the time were believers. This is of course natural, since most people were.

However, that does not go nearly far enough. They were also intellectuals for the most part, and most had been well educated. Furthermore, they were men of the Enlightenment, a time when secular explanations were replacing primitive religious ideas for explaining more and more of the natural world. Two in particular were, in some sense, scientists themselves. Franklin and Jefferson were both tinkerers and both invented a number of things during their lives.

As to religion, we discovered that the very act of living in “church states” before the revolution, taught some leaders of the dangers of maintaining a religious state alongside a political one. Those experiences convinced them that there needed to be a clear demarcation between the secular and the spiritual plane. Monroe wrote about this extensively, and it was he who pushed hardest to separate church from state.

This all leads to the weirdness whereby fundamentalists hang onto the Founding members of our country when it comes to their Christian origins, and somehow forget that these same men were both intellectuals and sometimes scientists themselves.

It all leads to the real weirdness whereby fundamentalists decry the “Satanic” origins of some science (any and all that they interpret to conflict with their biblical beliefs), all the while enjoying to the max all kinds of science that enhances their lives.

Science is good when it produces cars, electricity, telephones, computers, tv’s, radios, airplanes, cures for disease, cheaper food, microwaves, vacuum cleaners,  and so forth. It is somehow bad when it produces evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, geology, astronomy, and a host of other discoveries that they see as divorced not only from their personal lives, but in some conflict with the bible.

 Of course, many of these discoveries do indeed transcend both sides. Many of the advances in medicine today are the result of genetic advances. The genome project and other such work lends itself to new approaches in medicine, while at the same time lending major support to evolutionary themes. Somehow the fundies ignore this fact.

Humans have, it seems, a great capacity for compartmentalizing. We are good at ignoring conflicts. We can hold disparate ideas in our minds at the same time. We are masters at not investigating our own conclusions to take then to their logical end. We avoid again and again that we are talking out of both sides of our mouths.

Scientists, with their rigorous peer-reviewed manner, do a good deal to keep us honest. And perhaps that’s the real rub. We don’t like being reminded that we can exist quite happily in dissonance, believing diametrically opposing things at the same time. While science is not a thing to be worshipped for itself, it provides us, so far at least, with the best way of discovering truth through its methodology.

Science is the culmination of our curiosity, our “fix it” mentality, and our integrity. The latter may not be a noble addition so much as a recognition that if we don’t do science with a certain amount of honesty and integrity, then we are apt to find ourselves falling out of the sky in our newly created air machine.

We should be idolizing those men and women who spend their lives seeking to know. It is upon their shoulders that we all climb up the ladder of advancement as a species. Until we come upon a better way of doing “civilization” like it or not, science will be the way. Or, frankly, we won’t be climbing upward, at all, but falling into a new “dark age” of subsisting in the world. 

***reviews of the two books noted above can be located under “book reviews” in the categories section of the sidebar.