Another day, another Amerikan school district heads back to the Middle Ages. This time it is Grantsburg, in northwestern rural Wisconsin that is going to teach creationism.
The deans of Wisconsin's 43 colleges and hundreds of teachers have sent protests.(1) Yet, this is all something Amerika has done before and it does not seem to change.
MIM investigated to see how much of this is the fault of intellectuals on the "right." We did an exhaustive review of the mentions of "creationism" on nationalreview.com, an important reactionary magazine.
We found both less blame and more than we expected. Apparently no National Review author considers him/herself creationist.
There was even one article that attempted to argue substance against the hundreds of letter writers advocating creationism.(2)
48% of Amerikans believe in creationism.(3) Then they wonder why MIM cannot support majority rule in principle, when only 28% support the theory of evolution. It's clear that for a majority of people they choose on all questions based on what "feels good" emotionally or physically.
Nor was it MIM to mention in the same breath the huge swath of Amerika that likes the sodomy laws. 43% want gay relations illegal and that was too much even for the National Review.(3) By contrast with the Amerikan labor aristocracy, George W. Bush is a moderate. He supports civil unions as of five days before the end of his 2004 campaign.
At the same time while knowing these facts and claiming to support evolution and while opposing sodomy laws, the National Review is also for letting schools teach whatever they want.(4) National Review is for school choice, (funding for private schools) right after mentioning creationism. In other words, it is conceivable to National Review that school choice could lead to at least 48% of schools' opposing evolution and getting a voucher to do that. Then they still wonder why people oppose school choice and even support the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In this context, MIM does have to make the unfortunate call that adults do have dictate to children. In fact, mentally, the creationism question is a terrible blow to MIM's theory in general, because it forces MIM to admit that Amerikans are a majority children mentally. They want to eat at McDonald's because the advertising is fun, not because the food is good for them and they like creationism, because it is comforting. It justifies an authoritarian hand even more than MIM has suggested.
We thought we would find more mentions of Lysenko in the National Review, but we found only two. The more substantial mention refers to a theory that brought about "devolution" of man and which has a parallel in the united $tates "brainwashing" people on gun control.(5)
In all twelve mentions of creationism I found at National Review, not one says that churches are brainwashing people with creationism. In contrast, Lysenko was a plant biologist, not some wacky eugenicist trying to breed a master race of people. There was much more to what Lysenko was saying scientifically in all his papers on plants than there is in creationism.
Had peasants been given "federalism" to decide locally what to learn in school by "school choice," most of the Soviet Union would have chosen Lysenko. The battle with Mendel just was not that developed back then, especially in application. In contrast, Lysenko claimed to be able grow crops better than others. It doesn't take much to figure out that Lysenko would have won a competition for followers, but he would have done it with much more basis than that 48% of Amerikans who oppose the theory of evolution. Under Mao Zedong, we communists were able to incorporate Mendelian genetics without popular backlash. In the united $tates, we are still in the mental Middle Ages, ripening for the Taliban or the Christian Coalition.
Notes:
1. http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/11/06/evolution.schools.ap/index.html
2. http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire043003.asp
3. http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire050803.asp
4. http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg083099.html ;
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-ferrara070202.asp
5. http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel092200.shtml