by Frank Forman
A shortened version of this speech was given before the Mencken Society, Baltimore, MD, on Saturday, 2000-06-24
“THE RACES OF MAN: At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of men, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and Asia.”
That was the last paragraph of the three pages devoted to evolution in a 432 page textbook, called A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems, by George William Hunter, and published by the American Book Company in 1914. It is the book used eleven years later by one John Thomas Scopes in his high school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee. But the sentence about the Caucasian being the highest type of man would, if anything, cause an even greater ruckus today and throughout the entire nation than the idea of evolution caused in a small town in Tennessee 75 years ago.
It is my thesis that Puritanism is just as alive today as in Mr. Mencken’s day. The objects of criticism may have changed, but the urge to police the other man’s thoughts surges on as ever. Members of the Mencken Society had known this all along, of course, but the parallels between then and now struck me anew when rereading the Sage of Baltimore’s dispatches on the Scopes trial so conveniently gathered by Marion Rodgers in The Impossible H.L. Mencken. I am going to review what Mr. Mencken said about Fundamentalists then and give some background on their reaction to Darwinism. Fundamentalism went quiet not long after the trial and did not reemerge until after World War II, indeed until after Roe vs. Wade in 1973 and the ascendance of cultural relativism. I take the title of my talk from a statement by Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University: "The attitude that spawned the creation science movement is the same one that made America a leader in world science: a healthy disrespect for authority." New York: Anchor Books, 1991 Quoted by Debora MacKenzie, “Unnatural Selection,” New Scientist, 2000-04122. Thanks to Leo Elliott for finding this.
Mr. Mencken begins his first dispatch on the Scopes t rial this way: Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone-- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized—but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge. (“Homo Neanderthalensis,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925-06-29)
He continues in the same dispatch: The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex—because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged—and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple—and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.
The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to the ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
Now it is quite true that the upper cerebral cortex is a recent and poorly integrated addition to the mammalian brain and that putting it into action can be quite painful, but this does not explain why teaching the theory of evolution should have excited far greater opposition than the germ theory of disease. In fact, the theory of evolution is not so difficult to understand, once a great genius named Charles Darwin had the insight to combine two key ideas: hereditary variation and natural selection operating upon that variation so as to produce evolutionary changes across generations. These two ideas, variation and selection, are only twice as many as the account given in Genesis, namely that God created the species. On the other hand, the complexities of modern medicine are several orders of magnitude greater than those of the theory of chiropractic, which is much younger than Genesis, dating to 1895 A.D., and based upon the idea that diseases result, not from germs, but from a lack of normal nerve function. “Chiropractic,” in Britannica CD 2000.
I would amend Mr. Mencken’s statements that evolution is too difficult to grasp by the average man, or the average Daytonian, to saying that grasping anything new, complicated or not, is difficult. The fact is, Genesis is familiar and evolution unfamiliar. Evolution was not exactly a brand new theory in 1925, 65 years after The Origin of Species was published in late 1859, but it had not percolated down to the high school level. Recall that only three pages were devoted to the subject in Hunter’s Civic Biology, the most widely used biology textbook in its day.
There were other factors at work, namely urbanization and industrialization, which upset the familiar order of a country that, in many places, was still rural and agricultural, even if the country as a whole had moved from primarily agricultural to industrial shortly after the War between the States. The reaction, then, now, and always, to great changes is to cling ever more tenaciously to one’s familiar belief system. Biblical literalism was not very powerful before urbanization and industrialization hit the country after said War. There was a kind of easygoing generalized Protestantism before these changes hit the country, as they did especially hard in the defeated South. It was then that reactionaries started combing over their Bibles to reinterpret the prophecies in the Books of Daniel and Revelation, and it was then, too, that the search was on for the current whereabouts of the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel. On my first date with my current sweetheart, I delightedly took her to the library at the University of Virginia and showed her a book giving sketches of U.S. Presidents, including Lincoln, with the name of the Lost Tribe each one belonged to. Needless to say, the author gave no documentation at all for his choices.
Mr. Mencken: The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular. If a text were found in it denouncing the Anti-Evolution law, then the Anti-Evolution law would become infamous overnight. But so far the exegetes who roar and snuffle in town have found no such text. Instead they have found only blazing ratifications and reinforcements of Genesis. Darwin is the devil with seven tails and nine horns. Scopes, though he is disguised by flannel pantaloons and a Beta Theta Pi haircut, is the harlot of Babylon. Darrow is Beelzebub in person and Malone is the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. (“Yearning Mountaineers’ Souls Need Reconversion Nightly, Mencken Finds,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925-07-13)
Now I don’t want to rehearse the arguments for and against evolution here, and neither did Mr. Mencken in his dispatches. To this day, when evolutionists and Creationists debate on college campuses, it is usually the Creationists who win, for the very simple reason that the latter have made it their business to find shortcomings in the evolutionary world view—most notably the near absence of transitional forms in the fossil record, a problem that had concerned Darwin himself—while the evolutionists rely too much on the prestige of science and have not done their homework on Creationist arguments. I invite anyone interested to visit http://talkorigins.org on the Internet. You can find great debating points, such as what happened to all the water after the Great Flood. The oceans contain only one-eighth of the water that would have filled up the Earth to the Himalayas: “And the waters prevailed exceedingly high upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered” (Genesis 7:19, Mr. Mencken’s favorite translation, of course). How did all those animals, including insects, get to the Ark from all the seven continents and fit into* the Ark? What did they eat afterwards? (A latter-day Evangelical book, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, provided calculations that the pairs of mammals, at least, could have fitted into what was a 3.6 million cubic foot Ark. It is striking how forthright contemporary Evangelicals can be in bringing up problems with their own ideas. I first learned about the missing water from this book. I suppose it was the Great Evaporation that took care of the excess water of the Great Flood. The Bible doesn’t speak of such an Evaporation, but neither does it exclude one.)^ Gleason Archer, Jr., A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, Revised Edition. Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 1974. Pages 202-11.
I could go on and state that the greatest evidence for speciation, and not just changes of gene frequencies in a fixed species, which all New Creationists accept, rests in the sheer consistency with which fossil species can be dated, relatively, using geological layers, and absolutely, using measures of radioactive decay. And I could bring up an almost forgotten 1924 paper by G. Udny Yule, one of the great English statisticians, which considered the size distribution of species in a genus and conceived the first birth and death probability process, now known by his name, to generate this skewed size distribution. Yule hypothesized that species split in two at one random rate and become extinct at another. He compared the theory against reality—made a postdiction—and got a good fit. And I could argue why “survival of the fittest” is a potentially false scientific statement and not just a tautology (that which survives survives), whereas Creation Science is not a science at all. I’ll just mention instead that, while the Kansas State Board of Education last year removed evolution from its curriculum “standards,” which are a joke anyhow, it retained a “standard” that students should be able to distinguish a genuine science from a putative one. I’m all in favor of actually teaching Creationism in the schools and then letting students argue among themselves whether Creationism is a science. Getting the kids involved would do far more for their education than empaneling more august bodies to promulgate new “standards.” Education comes from within; it does not come from without. Alas, given Mr. Mencken’s not very high opinion of the average school teacher, it is not very likely that teachers could oversee such an assignment. G. Udny Yule, “A Mathematical Theory of Evolution, Based upon the Conclusions of Dr. J.C. Willis, F.R.S.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, ser. B. 213 (1924): 21-87.
Creationism today is different from that of 75 years ago at the Scopes trial, and its practitioners are not the inferior men Mr. Mencken described above. Urbanization and industrialization have been completed, but what never took place was a substitution for the morality of the Bible of a morality based on evolution. We’ve had one long century—more than that if you include the attacks on Biblical chronology in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830—without a replacement morality. Some attempts were made to derive morals from evolution, notably by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” before Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859. He prefigured Darwin, actually, and held that economic competition was beneficial in the long run by transferring resources from less fit producers to more fit producers. What is little known is that he envisioned the day when such harsh competition would no longer be necessary, but he has been roundly excoriated by socialists and those who call themselves “liberals” as a “Social Darwinist,” a label neither Spencer nor anyone else ever applied to themselves, “Social Darwinism” is an excellent example of a “socially constructed” category.
At the same time, another group of followers of Darwin saw in social evolution something that could be controlled by man, and toward beneficial ends, unlike biological evolution. These were the forerunners of today’s self-styled “liberals” and what Cynthia Eagle Russett, in her wonderful book, Darwin in America, calls Reform Darwinists, a category that originated with her. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865-1912. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.”^ That was Roosevelt II and a good statement of Reform Darwinism. What our Sage had already observed is that with reforms come reformers, who are very difficult to get rid of after the effects of the reform wear off or even if the reforms are counterproductive from the start. Reformers do not frankly admit their failure. Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in a review of David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Times Literary Supplement, 2000-03-10.
I don’t think the Sage of Baltimore ever commented upon the G.I. Bill that enabled millions of returning World War II veterans to become first-generation college students. This had prodigious consequences for American life, but the odd fact is that the Federal government spends several times that amount today, in constant dollars, with the net effect of only increasing the total number of college graduates, both of genuine colleges and dumbed-down colleges, by perhaps three percent. Even programs that do work lose their effectiveness. Part of what drives the New Creationists is a healthy disrespect for the authorities that run programs that don’t work, no longer work, or work perversely. Whole nations can groan under the strain of accumulating pressure groups, as the late Mancur Olson argued in The Rise and Decline of Nations, and so can whole civilizations, as Carroll Quigley argued in The Evolution of Civilizations. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1961; reprinted Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1979).
The ever-expanding residue of Reform Darwinism in the form of futile and perverse government programs is not alone going to drive people back to a Bronze Age god and specifically to Genesis and its 25th verse, “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and God saw that it was good.” It is not inefficient government alone that led John Whitcomb, in The Genesis Flood (Morris, 1961), to say that the second law of thermodynamics started operating only with Adam’s sin in Eden, or other Creationists to speak of “a genealogical table which begins in the mud, has a monkey in the middle and an infidel at the tail.”^ cited, without attribution, in Debora MacKenzie, op. cit.
I can’t resist an opposing quotation from the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1925: “Perhaps if there is any other being entitled to share Mr. Bryan’s satisfaction at this Tennessee legislature it is the monkey. Surely if the human race is accurately represented by that portion of it in the Tennessee house of representatives, the monkey has a right to rejoice that the human race is no kin to the monkey race.” “Darwinism Done For,” Louisville Courier-Journal, as reprinted in Chattanooga Times, 1925.2.1. My source is the best book to date on the trial, Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Larson gave a splendid talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier this year, called “75 Years or Forever? The AAAS and the Scopes Trial.” He is Professor of History and Law at the University of Georgia, near enough to Dayton for us to hope he will journey to Dayton this Summer for the 75th anniversary of the trial and that members of the Mencken Society making the trek will be able to meet him.
What has happened is that, to a large extent, the old Christian morality has been replaced by amoralism, while a new morality based on evolution is still in the works. It is hard to see what this new morality will look like, though it will have much in common with the older morality. After all, moralities, like everything else, are subject to Darwinian selection. This is very true of older moralities that have stood the test of time. What Mr. Mencken called the platitudes of the Book of Proverbs set to sonorous tones contained a lot of wisdom, the most famous perhaps being “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (13:24). Our institutions are notorious for sparing the rod.
Now it is impossible to live without some sort of code of conduct, even an unworkable one, but periods of moral change, change from an old workable code to a new code that eventually works even better, can very much look like times of utter moral decay. This was true when the old code of hunters gave way to the new code of farmers (the Old Testament has been treated as primarily a record of this), when the old code of chivalry was replaced with a newer code that represented the capitalist virtues, and when the old aristocratic code of honor was replaced, much to the Sage’s lament, with the new code of democracy. Our day has witnessed the replacement of the productive, capitalist virtues with the bureaucratic virtues, such as “cover your ass,” if I may be pardoned the expression. These virtues worked not too badly during the Machine Age of large organizations, mass production, and interchangeable products and workers. Egalitarian norms fitted right in to a world of interchangeable workers, much to the delight of an education lobby that could expand without limits in the attempt, futile as Mr. Mencken well realized, of ensuring equal educational, and eventually economic, outcomes. Spare the rod, Johnny isn’t to blame for not reading; his society is.
Undergirding the Machine Age morality of large bureaucracies, mass production, and interchangeable parts and workers, is Reform Darwinism, a kind of half-hearted Darwinism, just strong enough to displace whatever wisdom in Christianity stood the test of time, but insufficient to move all the way into a new Darwinian age.
There’s hope for a new understanding of man and society, which is now getting under way in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It is being fiercely resisted by latter-day, entrenched Reform Darwinists, as the following quotation shows:
It is a sacrosanct shibboleth of twentieth-century social science, which must not be allowed to be disturbed by evidence or argument, that human behaviour is derived from culture and not from instinct. Those of us who have written books in recent years arguing otherwise, as part of the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, are firmly patronized and told to close our minds again. It is a pure coincidence, we are told, that human females, like other female mammals, find babies more interesting than males do; a pure coincidence that human males, like other male mammals, are more aggressive than females; a pure coincidence that human beings, like other gregarious primates, divide easily and arbitrarily into groups which then behave antagonistically towards each other. That we have the same number of teeth in our mouths as a chimpanzee is common descent. But that we have the same differentiation of behaviour between the sexes is an amazing coincidence. Our behaviour, we are told, was a separate act of cultural creation, entirely different from that of chimpanzees. Human hardware may now be recognized as a continuation of animal hardware; but the software is newly invented by ‘culture.’
This is, of course, modern Darwinism’s fiercest battleground. The defenders of human exceptionalism no longer derive their arguments from the Bible but from Marx, Freud, Margaret Mead or some unfathomable French deconstructionist. They usually try to brand the evolutionary psychologists as reactionaries—it was a common twentieth-century trick to accuse your intellectual opponent of your own faults.—Matt Ridley, “From the Bottom Up,” Times Literary Supplement, 2000-01-28.
These exciting developments are very much under way, but until they are much better understood and applied, those who object to the manifest unfitness of Machine Age morality for a service economy (which overtook manufacturing in 1957) and even more so for a full Information Age economy, are trying to reject all of Darwinism, not just Reform Darwinism with its entrenched interest groups. These men and women do indeed have a “healthy disrespect for authority,” and they constitute the New Creationists. It’s that simple. Practically every time I talk to a Creationist and tell him that he couldn’t care fiddle about Genesis 1:25 but greatly cares about the lack of morals in his society, I get silent agreement. The New Creationist is not what Mr. Mencken characterized as the resentful rural inferior railing against the city folk but comes instead, demographically and educationally, from all over the place, as surveys have repeatedly shown.
In closing, let me recommend a new book that offers the best attempt yet at deriving morality from evolution, by Larry Arnhart, professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, though he should be at Harvard, were not that university under the nearly total control of the Reform Darwinists. The book is entitled Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). He ropes in three of the non- Christian greats, Aristotle, David Hume, and Charles Darwin, and shows how their separate systems of morals are all highly compatible.
The last word, as always, goes to the Sage of Baltimore. In reviewing his dispatches from Dayton, so nicely gathered by Miss Rodgers, I could not help but think that Mr. Mencken was right about this being first, last, and forever a Puritan country. As I read this quote, just substitute the shibboleths of the Machine Age for the religious beliefs of Dayton and imagine that you are not there but on a politically correct college campus:
Life down here in the Cumberland mountains realizes almost perfectly the ideal of those righteous and devoted men, Dr. Howard A. Kelly, the Rev. Dr. W.W. Davis, the Hon. Richard H. Edmonds and the Hon. Henry S. Dulaney. That is to say, evangelical Christianity is one hundred per cent triumphant. There is, of course, a certain subterranean heresy, but it is so cowed that it is almost inarticulate, and at its worst it would pass for the strictest orthodoxy in such Sodoms of infidelity as Baltimore. It may seem fabulous, but it is a sober fact that a sound Episcopalian or even a Northern Methodist would be regarded as virtually an atheist in Dayton. Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing and another that, but both agree unreservedly that the text itself is impeccable, and neither in the midst of the most violent disputations would venture to accuse the other of doubt. (“Mencken Likens Trial to a Religious Orgy, with the Defendant as Beelzebub,” The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925-07-11)
Some things never change.