Eddication Nooz

A new survey of high school biology teachers reveals that only 28 percent follow established guidelines for teaching evolution – and that 13 percent advocate creationism.

That’s just swell. Apparently there are educated adults who were charmed enough by collecting bugs or watching birds to want to teach life science to students. Only problem is, they themselves apparently didn’t study biology.

But why let this concern us? I’ve recently learned that similar situations exist in other disciplines:

• 18 percent of earth/space science teachers believe the moon is made of green cheese
• 26 percent of chemistry teachers lack proper training in lighting Bunsen burners
• 43 percent of physics teachers do not know the purpose of vectors
• 27 percent of math teachers suspect that Pythagoras stole his theorem
• 14 percent of English teachers cannot quote the i-before-e rule
• 34 percent of Latin teachers don’t know the words to “Gaudeamus Igitur”
• 22 percent of French teachers have never heard of French ticklers
• 19 percent of Spanish teachers believe Cervantes was not born in Spain
• 24 percent of history teachers continue to support the theory that the earth is flat
• 57 percent of civics teachers have lied to get out of jury duty
• 17 percent of music teachers do not know the difference between sharps and flats
• 21 percent of art teachers support finger painting for the secondary curriculum
• 63 percent of shop teachers admit to hitting their thumbs with hammers
• and 92 percent of phys ed teachers believe that students enjoy gym class – the other 8 percent are just sadists

Fundamentally speaking...

I’ve dropped the name Julian Jaynes a couple of times in this blog without observing that his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) was responsible for blowing my mind thirty years ago. Jaynes hypothesized that, due to an anatomical feature of the brain, humans once obeyed voices in their heads that they attributed to “the gods,” and he backs up his theory with a lot of convincing evidence from antiquity.

Without attempting to support or refute that argument here, I’ve come to observe a close correlation between Jaynes’s theory and the way fundamentalists think. I’m referring here not only to Christians who take every word of the Bible as truth; I’m also thinking of political fundamentalists, a.k.a. constitutional originalists, who want to govern the United States as if it were stuck in the late eighteenth century.

A similarity between religious and political fundamentalists can be found in Jaynes’s ideas, and it’s really quite simple: some people would rather defer to a higher authority than think for themselves. They need somebody to tell them what to do. And if voices in their heads aren’t there anymore (but who’s to say they aren’t?), sacred texts will do.

Take for example the Ten Commandments, which stand at the cusp of religion and law. Hebraic tradition has it that Moses went up to the mountain and Jehovah personally dictated the commandments, which ol’ Mose dutifully chiseled into stone. All these centuries later, not only do people still subscribe to those rules but modern lawmakers also seek to enshrine them in public places – all because of their purported provenance. Ancient texts say that the laws came from God, therefore they must have come from God, therefore they are to be forever revered. It’s the next best thing to Yahweh whispering in your ear.

Laws aren’t carved in stone anymore. They have to take into account the times in which they function. Context is everything, and coveting thy neighbor’s ass doesn’t resonate much nowadays (unless of course one replaces “ass” with “42-inch flat-screen TV”). But thanks to Antonin Scalia and his cronies, our Supreme Court often operates from the mind-set that what was good enough for the Framers is good enough for us today.

This isn’t rational judicial thought. It’s nothing but fundamentalism that blindly defers to authority. And as with our forebears who responded to auditory hallucinations they mistook for divine instruction, many people today wouldn’t presume to question authority. It’s just another instance of black-and-white thinking, with shades of gray (or the exercise of gray matter) not welcome.

When I consider the extent to which conservatives – and many if not most of my fellow citizens – take pride in this deferral (which is usually cloaked in the veil of tradition so as to defy challenge), it saddens me to think that thinking for oneself bears such a stigma.

And the irony is, that’s how this country got started.

{snap!}

I think I’ve tipped my hand that I’m a bit of a political junkie. Between exposure to the news media and the blogosphere, it’s hard not to be if you’ve got the least predisposition.

But every so often, something goes {snap!} in my brain and I just can’t take it any more – “it” being the hype, the hypocrisy, the overall histrionics of those we elect to public office. This latest occasion was triggered [sic] by the events in Tucson and the realization not only that no unified call for gun control would come out of it but also that the gun nuts would clamor for even more license to shoot first and ask questions later.

And so the {snap!} resulted in my not bothering to watch Obama’s state-of-the-disunion address or even read reports of it. And I wasn’t surprised to later learn that not one breath of that speech had been spent on our national obsession with firearms.

One of Bill Maher’s guests last week was Ronnie Raygun’s old budget director David Stockman, who has either made a sharp turn to the left or, more likely, stood still while the GOP veered even further right. He had the guts to flat-out state that the 2nd Amendment was a product of its era and that today gun ownership is no longer even necessary within the context of its original intent – that of guaranteeing a free militia. Those who defend the right to own guns either tautologically fall back on the right itself, or else claim the need for armed defense against their own government.

The NRA insists that it’s people, not guns, inflicting any harm. Well, guess what? It’ll be people, not guns, responsible for any necessary rebellion against repression that gun nuts feel so determined to stockpile weapons for. Did an armed citizenry force Ben Ali out of Tunisia? Will guns overthrow Mubarak in Egypt? Or is it just a matter of putting enough angry bodies in the streets with rocks and molotov cocktails to make their will known? But as with Rep. Cohen’s ill-advised comparison of Republican untruths to Nazi propaganda, say anything as often as the gun lobby does and everyone will believe it. Meanwhile, 2A supporters who envision themselves manning the barricades are living in fantasyland – or more likely frontierland, complete with coonskin caps.

So what is the real state of our disunion? It’s “situation normal, all fucked up.” I doubt that anything will ever unsnap my bemused outrage over creationists or teabaggers or stupidity in general. But as far as I’m concerned, the political process is beyond hoping for rational results – and beyond getting worked up over.

Either/Or

As I watched the Tucson memorial service, the pagan-tinged invocation by a person of mixed Latino/Yaqui blood made me think “this is going to make Limbaugh, Beck and company apoplectic.” Aren’t we supposed to be a Christian nation?

That got me back to pondering the Right’s black-and-white thinking, and it suggested what might well lie at the root: the whole Christian attitude of exclusivity.

This is essentially a Protestant phenomenon: you’re either saved or you’re not. Roman Catholicism always offered more loopholes in terms of absolution, penance, confession, and intercession, not to mention the whole Purgatory scenario. But for Protestants, you either believe or you’re damned for all eternity. And when you think about this country’s Calvinist and Puritan heritage, that attitude goes hand-in-glove with capitalism. (And let’s not forget the whole racial bit: if you’re not all white, you’re not white at all, so never mind that Obama has an Anglo mother.)

The problem with the Protestant mindset is that it’s totally locked in. You just can’t get a true believer to accept shades of gray. Unfortunately, it extends to our president’s skin, to the evils of socialism and gun control, and to any form of thinking that requires an open mind.

Got Vitriol?

The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords has unleashed a storm of emotion from which I am not exempt. Having lived in Tucson for 29 years, I’m familiar with the scene of the crime, the medical center, and the friendliness of the community. I had helped elect Giffords to her first term.

Tucson always seemed like a pocket of sanity in an otherwise reactionary state. Our Republicans were reasonable, not like the nutjobs up in Mesa. So after I’d moved upstate to Prescott and began reading about teabaggers staging protests in the Old Pueblo and vandalizing the congresswoman’s office, I was a bit startled by the lack of civility.

But I’m just as startled by my own lack of civility in one regard. Because I have to wonder if the victim had been Clarence Thomas or Sarah Palin whether I would have cheered. In that scenario, I might have said to myself, “They had it coming, those who live by the sword (or by an advocacy of blanket gun rights) die by the sword.” It might have seemed like some kind of justice. But then Gabby Giffords supported gun rights, too.

We live in a sick society. Westboro Baptist is sufficient proof. Unfortunately, as long as I’m willing to imagine a gunsight on a wingnut, I’m no less sick than anyone.

Now the Right is coming down hard on Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for suggesting that conservative talk radio/TV bears much of the responsibility for keeping people in a state of agitation and planting suggestions that armed violence is an acceptable means of redress. They insist that Dupnik has unnecessarily politicized the incident. That reaction was to be expected. But it is not defensible.

I continue to believe, as I have stated before in this blog, that the Right is guilty of too much black-and-white thinking. Health care reform equals socialism. Any form of gun control necessarily leads to disarming citizens. If you’re not with us in the war on terror, you’re against us. Now it seems that anyone calling for civility in political discourse wants to curtail freedom of speech.

I’ve tried my best to be amused, but now it’s hard not to be disgusted. And while this tragedy forces me to recognize my own flaws, there’s no question in my mind about who in this sick society is sicker.