Intelligent Design agrees with Scientific Evidence

I am teaching my class about history today and we were discussing the different views of history through the centuries. Before the nineteenth century there was "sacred history" in which people viewed history specifically through the lens of the Bible and church teachings. Sacred history suggests that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Thus dinosaurs, neanderthal man, and humans must somehow fit into this timeline. Creation theory is the only thing that can explain these events in less than six thousand years. Historian Dan Smail claims that although hard sciences have successfully cast off the residue of sacred history....history itself, has not. I would agree with him.

Creation theory dominated the early twentieth century precisely because of its allegiance with a literal interpretation of the Bible and a six thousand year model. But in 1925 the famous Scopes Monkey trial saw atheist lawyer Clarence Darrow get fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan to admit that the Bible could not be interpreted literally. Although Darrow lost the case, creation theory and the six thousand year timeline lost credibility and thus lost legitimacy for the rest of the twentieth century. Science and liberal politicians could easily point to Bryan and the scientific evidence that undisputedly demonstrated that the earth was much older than six thousand years. For a scientific explanation of how old the earth is...with sources click here. This helped push creation doctrine and Christian evangelical influence underground for sometime. Without a legitimate explanation of creationism, Christian evangelical politics also lost significant influence. This has encouraged some to recast the fundamentalist argument; it is shifting from the position that liberalism thwarted fundamentalism and pushed it underground to the idea that fundamentalists voluntarily gave up their position in the public sphere....they withdrew from politics they were not forced from it.

Although evangelicalism began reconstituting itself almost immediately after the Scopes Trial debacle, it would take several decades to regain cultural and political capital. Evangelicals eventually succeeded in doing such through their introduction of intelligent design. Intelligent design claims that the universe is so complex that it had to be designed by a higher power, namely god. But there is no evidence of this and the theory is not falsifiable and thus it is outside the realm of science. Accompanying the doctrine of intelligent design has been the accumulation of cultural capital by evangelicals during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In the minds of many evangelicals, intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that competes with evolutionary theory. Scientists are quick to dismiss intelligent design from public discourse because it fails to the criteria of scientific theory. But I think we should listen to the intelligent design people. We do not have to agree with them, but the scientists should not get so huffy about their assertions.

In essence the doctrine of intelligent design admits that science has been right all along. The doctrine abandons the traditional fundamentalist evangelical idea that the earth is only six thousand years old; it explicitly accepts that the earth is billions of years old. This does not prove or disprove evolution or intelligent design nor should it be such an acrimonious debate; it is rather an opening for dialogue between science and religion. This has not happened for almost a century but religious and scientific people agree on one issue, the earth's age. Intelligent design has moved evangelicals away from the six thousand year model of sacred history. The intelligent design thinkers have done this as a way to counter the debacle in 1925. With this doctrine, they are reclaiming some lost cultural capital. Instead of another Scopes Trial to kill off the doctrine of intelligent design, I think we should have an open dialogue between the two camps and see where it leads us. We just might find out that science and religion have more in common than we once thought. This does not mean that intelligent design should be taught in public schools but it does mean that it should be debated in peer reviewed journals with honest intellectual criticism willing to debate the hegemony of the scientific method and the self-righteousness of evangelicals.

Not So Common Afterall: Marx and Rock and Roll

I was giving a lecture to my class tonight on Marxism. In this part of the country such a lecture does not usually go over well. Of course I have this pathetic need to feel accepted...even by my students....so to get them thinking about class consciousness I play Pulp's _Common People_ (see lyrics below as it is currently my theme song). I think it makes a good point about class consciousness bordering on class conflict. The students liked it, even though they have never heard of Pulp and do not know that a fag in Britain is only a cigarette. Anyway, I'm feeling very cool and hip as some of my students admit in front of the class that Marx isn't so bad and the song was pretty good. I feel 22 all over again. At the end of class my non-traditional student who is well over 55 comes up to tell me how he finds it ironic that Jarvis Cocker (Pulp's lead singer) made so much money off of a song that uses the working class as its protagonist. He then told me how he saw Pulp in concert a few years ago at an outdoor concert in the U.S. So I no longer feel 22 or hip. I then feel like I have to "one-up" him so I quickly let him know that Pulp was in the latest installment of the Harry Potter movie franchise and he looks at me and says, "oh yeah, I know. I saw it last year."

I am not an authentic American....but neither is President Bush

Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism challenged the establishment of his day. He was an "American Scholar" who challenged Americans to produce authentic American ideas or else risk the fate of Europeanism which had become to dandy, to formal, and to precocious. Walt Whitman inherited these ideas and pursued them by challenging men to pursue democracy. Men, according to Whitman, should pursue education, literature, and become authentic individuals in a democratic community. Only then, he believed, would America escape the destiny of Europe. Whitman hated English intellectual Mathew Arnold and despised the term "culture" for it had become a way for elitist Europeans to dominate society. Whitman believed in the authentic American individual. Fast forward to the 1940s/1950s when Jack Kerouc and the Beat Generation reinterpreted Whitman to protest the consensus consumerism of the 1950s. Kerouc, Allan Ginsberg, and others rejected the establishment and pursued an authentic American identity through drugs, sex, literature, and rock and roll. The beatniks morphed into the counterculture movement which lost its way in the social turmoil of the late 1960s and died in 1968 on Haight-Ashbury Street in San Francisco, CA.

What is an authentic American? And what contributions can an authentic American make to the global community? I must admit that I thought I was an authentic American but I am not so sure anymore. Living in America for most of my life, I grew up in a midwestern religious family that valued genuiness, hard work, and frugality. It seems to me that these are ideas embroiled in Europeanism. Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant is a European influence, which is why Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Whitman moved away from it. I grew up in a working class family but I admit that i am suffering from embourgeoisiement. I am not happy about this. I am not happy that I have never found my authentic American self. In fact, I never thought I was American...I was just a dude....and the dude abides....until he learns he can consume. I didn't like American girls. They were boring and uninteresting to me. I didn't like them to the point that I began dating only European women. But my love affair with Europe seems to be waning. Maybe because my European friends have been telling me how crap America is. They don't like the nation's politics, culture, or position in the world system. They think that President Bush is the most authentic American that the U.S. can produce. What they fail to realize....and what seems impossible to make them understand is that President Bush is no more an authentic American than they are. (By the way, neither is Bill Clinton. Although the did give a copy of Leaves of Grass to Monica Lewinsky, he didn't do it to spread ideals of an authentic democrat, he did it to get into her....well, you know what happened.) True Whitman would like W's vision of democracy but not his definition of imperialism and the poet would detest the President's intolerance of other cultures and ideas. Emerson would despise the President's simplistic view of the world and Thoreau would not like his cowboy actions that seem void of any reflective thought of nature such as he found at Walden Pond. President Bush does not protest the world system, he drives it and he forces us all to participate in it whether we want to or not. Because I cannot make my European friends realize the inauthenticity of the President at the moment, I have found that I dislike European ideas more and more. The formality, the proper way of doing things, the keeping up appearences. I don't know if I can handle it. Maybe my embourgeoisiement has made me to dandy, to precocious, to formal and I have grown to dislike it. Isn't life more spontaneous, casual, flexible, individual? If you ever meet an authentic American, you will know what I mean. Few exist anymore....but they are very refreshing. They have courage to do their own thing. They are organic intellectuals who are not afraid to challenge the system just like Whitman did even though they will probably have to pay for it much like Thoreau did when he practiced civil disobedience. Whitman challenged the language of gender and laissez-faire capitalism at a time when few others did. No wonder the beatniks appreciated him. I am afraid that I have made a mistake; my search for security by throwing off my working class roots and accepting the consumer appeal of bourgeois sensibilities has made me fear too much. This is the problem with consumerism...it steals our souls from us. I am no longer as courageous as authentic Americans are. But I envy them, oh how I envy them. I want to be them but I have forgotten how they do it and that is why I am not an authentic American.

It is the intellectuals who have betrayed us

My personal experience in grad school sucks. My course work was great. I loved the classes, the debates, the stimulation. Ok, the last three classes just repeated the same themes as in all my other classes but it was still pretty good. Then I began preparing for my exams. About a month before I was to take my exams my advisor decided to quit teaching altogether. I can't blame her too much. She didn't like teaching undergrads because she thought they were too stupid. Of course, she should not have been a teacher....but I give her credit for at least figuring it out....eventually. It just sucked that she figured it out a month before she was to examine me. But I figured this was ok because my second examiner had actually been attempting to oust my advisor and poach me. She sent one of her students to recruit me. Initially I resisted, but when my advisor abandoned me, I decided to go over to the other side. What a huge mistake. My new advisor had been plotting to leave for some time but she never let any of her students know about it. She was here about a year before she left for some posh job out in California. Which is cool, i respect quality of life issues and all. But I also hate her because she telephoned all the faculty members personally to tell them she had taken another position but waited a full week later to email me about her decision. Of course I already knew about it several days before she sent her email. The sad thing was that she did this to all of her students. After recruiting them so that she would look good in the eyes of the faculty, she then high-tailed it out of town as soon as she could. I was in the middle of writing my prospectus when this happened. On the one hand I was glad she left because her feedback on my drafts was really pathetic. I got the sense that she really was just placating me. In hindsight, I realized she really was. Anyway, I now have my third advisor in a year-and-a-half and I can't figure out which way is up in all of this.

My point is that the tenured faculty at American universities have sold out the non-tenured, the grad students, and even the undergraduates to secure their own comfy seats in the conservative ivory tower. It is in their immediate interest to do this. But what is happening is the liberal professors are pushing more and more people to the margins of academia by not including them into the ranks of tenured professors at precisely the time that conservative university presidents are trying to shrink the numbers of tenured faculty on their campuses. This is a crisis that cannot long continue. Maybe I'm just jaded. After all this is probably not the typical graduate student experience. I am at a second-tier school, perhaps I am jealous of all the smart people at prestigious research schools. I think I just want to teach students and I naively believed that is what academia was all about. Which kind of makes me a damn fool.

The End of History and the Reassertion of Memory

In 2001, three months before the ill-fated collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the United States executed terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Six years earlier, McVeigh detonated a rental truck full of fertilizer and racing fuel destroying the Edward R. Murrow Federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Five years before he killed 168 innocent people, McVeigh served his country during Operation Desert Storm. An uncomfortable question surrounded McVeigh’s execution in June 2001. How would Americans commemorate McVeigh’s lifeless body? Some war veterans felt obligated to honor his patriotism; for his service in Kuwait, McVeigh earned the right to be buried in a national cemetery, to receive military honors, and for the U.S. government to maintain his grave permanently. Others, including Commander-in-Chief, President William J. Clinton thought McVeigh deserved no such commemoration; he signed an executive order forbidding McVeigh’s body from being buried in a national cemetery.[i] After executing the terrorist, the U.S. federal government used a decoy hearse to smuggle McVeigh’s corpse in a van to a local funeral home in Terre Haute, Indiana where he was cremated. The government then gave the remains to McVeigh’s lawyers who scattered them in an undisclosed location that remained private for the family.[ii] McVeigh’s corpse shrouded in his identity as a patriot and a villain proved too controversial to be memorialized. By cremating his corpse and allowing his lawyers to dispose of his remains in a private location, the U.S. government attempted to control the way people remembered McVeigh.[iii] This was an example of agents of the nation-state attempting to produce Americanness by remembering McVeigh as a terrorist and forgetting his identity as a patriot; this dead body helped define what American identity was and was not. The actions that the federal government took in regards to McVeigh’s corpse was part of a larger cultural and political process; commemoration of dead bodies constructed a memory of American identity in which dead bodies of heroes and “Others” were used to define Americanness.

By treating McVeigh’s body as a site of forgetting and keeping that site secretive, the meaning of McVeigh’s actions could slide into obscurity and become meaningless. This response by the Federal Government’s was an attempt to make what Historian John Bodnar has described as official memory.[iv] It was official in that it was conceived and practiced by state-sponsored officials who sought to cultivate a specific meaning/ destruction of meaning in forgetting McVeigh. But the Federal Government relied on its authority at a time in American history when official memory was being challenged by what Bodnar has described as vernacular memory. The spirit of the renewed spontaneous vernacular memory was exhibited in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the practice of Descansos or roadside memorials marking the place where a loved one died in an automobile accident. It also described the commemoration of Princess Diana’s death (which significantly critiqued the Royal Family’s attempt at constructing official memory by attempting to deny Diana a state funeral), and the outpouring of sympathy for victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing, and later, the World Trade Center disaster. Recent resurgence of vernacular memory has even impacted spaces where official memory once dominated as evidenced in 2006 when Arlington National Cemetery relaxed the rules of burial and allowed people to place spontaneously non-sanctioned memorabilia next to the graves of their lost loved ones. Official memory that had dominated since the 1930s was being challenged by the reassertion of vernacular memory where people left flowers, cards, gifts, and other memorabilia in makeshift locations such as streets or in front of buildings. The people have reasserted their ability to remember and commemorate and often used it as a scathing critique of the politics of official memory.

Why have people begun to reassert their ability to remember after so many years of relying on official memory? The horrific act in Oklahoma City marked a traumatic moment in American history; it also marked the moment that Americans began to remember. Bodnar describes much of twentieth-century America as being dominated by official memory and suppressing vernacular memory.[v] With the exception of a few instances during the 1960s and 1970s when students were protesting Vietnam and the lack of civil rights, official memory dominated since the enlargement of the federal government in the 1930s and significantly influenced the way Americans, and much of the world, remembered the New Deal, the Second World War, and the Cold War. The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signifying to the West the impending collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War brought a critique to official memory. In November 1989 Berliners began spontaneously commemorating the death of East Berlin by taking sledge hammers to the wall that had so thoroughly penetrated the official memory of a divided city, a divided Europe, and a divided World System; the end of the Cold War was the moment that Berliners began to remember and the moment vernacular memory came back to life.

Americans witnessed the unfathomable events in Berlin in 1989 but did not really begin to practice vernacular memory until the Oklahoma City Bombing; McVeigh became the catalyst for reasserting vernacular memory. For Timothy McVeigh the destruction of a federal building served to announce the underground’s seething contempt for American domestic policy toward its citizens. McVeigh delivered the bomb on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster in Waco, Texas and, in a sense, attempted to commemorate the horror of that unfortunate event but also attempted to challenge the official recollection that justified the Federal Government’s response to David Koresh’s cult. McVeigh challenged official memory of Waco with the violent destruction of the Murrow building and the killing of innocent people just as, McVeigh claimed, the federal government had done to the Branch Davidians. This marked a violent rejection of official memory and the reassertion of vernacular memory; it was the moment that broke the hegemony that official memory had held in the United States since the implementation of the New Deal. McVeigh challenged official memory and so did the people of Oklahoma City who spontaneously commemorated the death of innocent people with makeshift memorials as no official space seemed appropriate. What does the resurgence of vernacular memory mean for the legacy of Timothy McVeigh? Does this mean that the Clinton administration’s attempt at turning the body of Timothy McVeigh into a site of forgetting will empower those who seek to commemorate his actions despite the absence of a memorial—thus making McVeigh a potential hero in the future and giving him the last word? Did this violent challenge of official memory weaken the nation-state’s ability to produce national identity? Or have the initial spontaneous makeshift memorials and the later construction of the Oklahoma City Memorial, commemorating the 168 victims of the attack with 168 chairs symbolizing the victims’ absent presence, succeeded in muting the memory of McVeigh by utilizing vernacular memory to echo historian Nikolai Voukav’s maxim that “one forgets not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences.”[vi]

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[i] Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20.

[ii] “National Briefing: Midwest: Indiana: Decoy Hearse Used After Execution” New York Times, 13 June 2001.

[iii] Maria Todorova, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire” The Journal of Modern History 78 (June 2006): 377-411. Todorova used the term lieu d’oubli to describe a site of forgetting. She uses this term in the context of Pierre Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire.

[iv] John Bodnar, Remaking America Public Memory, Commemoration, and patriotism in the Twentieth Century (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)..

[v] John Bodnar, Remaking America.

[vi] Nikolai Voukov, “The Destruction of Georgi Dimitrov’s Mausoleum in Sofia: The ‘Incoincidence’ between Memory and Its Referents,” in Places of Memory ed. Augustin Ioan, special issue of Octogon (Bucharest, 2003), quoted in Maria Todovora, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov,” 411.