Rocks of Ages (14 page)

But such humor served only as balance for the serious and poignant moments of the trial—none so moving
as the dignity of committed teachers who testified that they could not practice their profession honorably if the law were upheld. One teacher pointed to a passage in his chemistry text that attributed great age to fossil fuels. Since the Arkansas act specifically included “a relatively recent age of the earth” among the definitions of creation science requiring “balanced treatment,” this passage would have to be changed. The teacher claimed that he did not know how to make such an alteration. Why not? retorted the assistant attorney general in his cross-examination. You only need to insert a simple sentence: “Some scientists, however, believe that fossil fuels are relatively young.” Then, in the most impressive statement of the entire trial, the teacher responded: I could, he argued, insert such a sentence in mechanical compliance with the act. But I cannot, as a conscientious teacher, do so. For “balanced treatment” must mean “equal dignity,” and I would therefore have to justify the insertion. And this I cannot do, for I have heard no valid arguments that would support such a position.

Another teacher spoke of similar dilemmas in providing balanced treatment in a conscientious rather than a mechanical way. What then, he was asked, would he do if the law were upheld? He looked up and said, in a calm and dignified voice: It would be my tendency not to comply. I am not a revolutionary or a martyr, but
I have responsibilities to my students, and I cannot forgo them.

And now, led back by this serious note, I realize that I have been a bit too sanguine during this little trip down memory lane. Yes, we won a narrow and specific victory after sixty years of contention: creationists can no longer hope to realize their aims by official legislation. But these well-funded and committed zealots will not therefore surrender. Instead they have changed their tactics, often to effective strategies that cannot be legally curtailed. They continue to pressure textbook publishers for deletion or weakening of chapters about evolution. (But we can also fight back—and have done so effectively in several parts of the country—by urging school boards to reject textbooks that lack adequate coverage of this most fundamental topic in the biological sciences.) They agitate before local school boards, or run their own candidates in elections that rarely inspire large turnouts, and can therefore be controlled by committed minorities who know their own voters and get them to the polls. (But scientists are also parents, and “all politics is local,” as my own former congressman from Cambridge, MA, used to say.)

Above all—in an effective tactic far more difficult to combat because it works so insidiously and invisibly—they can simply agitate in vociferous and even mildly threatening ways. Most of us, including most teachers,
are not particularly courageous, and do not choose to become martyrs. Who wants trouble? If little Billy tells his parents that I’m teaching evolution, and they then cause a predictable and enormous public fuss (particularly in parts of America where creationism is strong and indigenous) … well, then, what happens to me, my family, and my job? So maybe I just won’t teach evolution this year. What the hell. Who needs such a mess?

Which leads me to reiterate an obvious and final point: We misidentify the protagonists of this battle in the worst possible way when we depict evolution versus creationism as a major skirmish in a general war between science and religion. Almost all scientists and almost all religious leaders have joined forces
on the same side
—against the creationists. And the chief theme of this book provides the common currency of agreement—NOMA, and the call for respectful and supportive dialogue between two distinct magisteria, each inhabiting a major mansion of human life, and each operating best by shoring up its own home while admiring the other guy’s domicile and enjoying a warm friendship filled with illuminating visits and discussions.

Creationists do not represent the magisterium of religion. They zealously promote a particular theological doctrine—an intellectually marginal and demographically
minority view of religion that they long to impose upon the entire world. And the teachers of Arkansas represent far more than “science.” They stand for toleration, professional competence, freedom of inquiry, and support for the Constitution of the United States—a worthy set of goals shared by the vast majority of professional scientists and theologians in modern America. The enemy is not religion but dogmatism and intolerance, a tradition as old as humankind, and impossible to extinguish without eternal vigilance, which is, as a famous epigram proclaims, the price of liberty. We may laugh at a marginal movement like young-earth creationism, but only at our peril—for history features the principle that risible stalking horses, if unchecked at the starting gate, often grow into powerful champions of darkness. Let us give the last word to Clarence Darrow, who stated in his summation at the Scopes trial in 1925:

The usual, and heroic, version of evolution versus creation in twentieth-century America stops here, with a chronicle of legal success, some dire warnings about the need for future diligence, and a reaffirmation of intellectual principles. But I must go on, for an important chapter from the other side, a tale rarely told and little known, demands attention in a book dedicated to the principle of NOMA.

The usual view of William Jennings Bryan
³
—three-time loser as a presidential candidate, and preeminent windbag as an orator—provides an easy target for our ridicule, particularly for those of us who represent what might be called “the Northeastern intellectual establishment,” and have never fathomed the very different traditions of Midwestern populism, as represented by Bryan, also known as “The Great Commoner.” Just consider the unsparing ridicule of H. L. Mencken, who observed Bryan in action at the Scopes trial and wrote:

Mencken’s harsh judgment underscores a striking paradox. Bryan spent most of his career as a courageous reformer, not as an addlepated Yahoo. How, then, could
this man, America’s greatest populist, become, late in life, her arch reactionary?

For it was Bryan who, just one year beyond the minimum age of thirty-five, won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 with his populist rallying cry for abolition of the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan who ran twice more, and lost in noble campaigns for reform, particularly for Philippine independence and against American imperialism. Bryan, the pacifist who resigned as Wilson’s secretary of state because he sought a more rigid neutrality in the First World War. Bryan who stood at the forefront of most progressive victories in his time: women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the graduated income tax (no one loves it, but can you think of a fairer way?). How could this man have then joined forces with the cult of biblical literalism in an effort to purge religion of all liberality, and to stifle the same free thought that he had advocated in so many other contexts?

This paradox still intrudes upon us because Bryan forged a living legacy (as the preceding section documented), not merely an issue lost in the mists of history. For without Bryan, there never would have been anti-evolution laws, never a Scopes trial, never a resurgence
in our day, and never a Supreme Court decision. Every one of Bryan’s progressive triumphs would have occurred without him. He fought mightily and helped powerfully; nevertheless, women would be voting today and we would be paying income tax if he had never been born. But the legislative attempt to curb evolution was his baby, and he pursued it with all his legendary demoniac fury. No one else in the ill-organized fundamentalist movement had the inclination, and surely no one else had the legal skill or political clout.

This apparent paradox of shifting allegiance forms a recurring theme in literature about Bryan. His biography in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, for example, holds that the Scopes trial “proved to be inconsistent with many progressive causes he had championed for so long.”

Two major resolutions have been proposed. The first, clearly the majority view, holds that Bryan’s last battle was, indeed, inconsistent with all the populist campaigning that had gone before. Who ever said that a man must maintain an unchanging ideology throughout adulthood; and what tale of human psychology could be more familiar than the transition from Young Turk to Old Fart? Most biographies treat the Scopes trial as an inconsistent embarrassment, a sad and unsettling end. The title to the last chapter of almost every book about Bryan features the word “retreat” or “decline.”

The minority view, gaining ground in recent biographies and clearly correct in my judgment, holds that Bryan never transformed or retreated, and that he viewed his last battle against evolution as an extension of the populist thinking that had inspired his life’s work. But how can a move to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools be deemed progressive, and how did Bryan link his previous efforts to this new strategy?

Bryan’s attitude to evolution rested upon a threefold error. First, he made the common mistake of confusing the fact of evolution with the Darwinian explanation of its mechanism. He then misinterpreted natural selection as a martial theory of survival by battle and destruction of enemies. Finally, he fell into the logical error of arguing that Darwinism implied the moral virtuousness of such deathly struggle. The first two errors may count as simple misunderstandings of a theory within the magisterium of science. But the crucial third error, the source of Bryan’s emotional and political commitment, represents his confusion of scientific with moral truth—a basic violation of NOMA, and the foundation of almost all our unnecessary strife over evolution and ethics. Bryan wrote in the
Prince of Peace
(1904):

In 1906, Bryan told the sociologist E. A. Ross that “such a conception of man’s origin would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth.” He persisted in this uneasiness until World War I, when two events galvanized him into frenzied action. First, he learned that the martial view of Darwinism had been invoked by most German intellectuals and military leaders as a justification for war and future domination. Second, he feared the growth of skepticism at home particularly as a source of moral weakness in the face of German militarism.

Bryan united these new fears with all his previous doubts into a campaign against evolution in the classroom. We may question the quality of his argument, but we cannot deny that his passion on this subject arose from his lifelong zeal for progressive causes. Consider the three principal foci of his campaign, and their links to his populist past:

1. For peace and compassion against militarism and murder. “I learned,” Bryan wrote, “that it was Darwinism that was at the basis of that damnable doctrine that might makes right that had spread over Germany.”

2. For fairness and justice toward farmers and workers and against exploitation for monopoly and profit. Darwinism, Bryan argued, had convinced so many entrepreneurs about the virtue of personal gain that government now had to protect the weak and poor from an explosion of anti-Christian moral decay: “In the United States,” he wrote,

3. For the rule of majority opinion against imposing elites. Christian belief still enjoyed widespread majority support in America, but college education was eroding a consensus that had once ensured compassion
within democracy. Bryan cited studies showing that only 15 percent of college male freshmen harbored doubts about God, but that 40 percent of graduates had become skeptics. Darwinism, and its immoral principle of domination by a selfish elite, had fueled this skepticism. Bryan railed against this insidious undermining of morality by a minority of intellectuals, and he vowed to fight fire with fire. If they worked through the classroom, he would respond in kind and ban their doctrine from the public schools. The majority of Americans did not accept human evolution, and had a democratic right to proscribe its teaching.