That’s a good question

You’ve probably already heard that Bill O’Reilly wrote a ‘history’ book about the Lincoln assassination that contains enough factual errors that it was rejected by the National Parks Service for sale at Ford’s Theater. I say you’ve probably already heard it because the media everywhere is chuckling over the humor of pissing off BillO with the ignominy of it all. Now I loves me some O’Reilly bashing, but Chris Rodda asks a very good question about that.

Why isn’t the media going after all the other right-wing pseudo-history? David Barton still appears on TV fairly regularly, and he’s far worse than O’Reilly. The Texas board of education tried to disappear Thomas Jefferson from history textbooks. Aren’t those more significant phenomena than that one lazy loud TV blowhard tried to pretend to be a serious historian and failed?

A century of concern trolls

This is a letter to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle from 1916. Look, this person is just trying to be helpful to the cause!

“Have to voters of Montana stopped to seriously consider whether there will be gain to them in sending a young woman to congress? Admittedly there will be novelty in such a proceeding; admittedly the state will be talked about for such action on its part, but will the talk be beneficial to Montana or otherwise? Montana has earned something of a name for herself as one of the most progressive of states looking for practical results rater than the sentimental or freakish; and voters should seriously consider whether by casting their votes for Miss Rankin, regardless of how attractive a personality she may have, they would not be giving the state undesirable publicity.

“Have the suffragists of Montana considered whether the sending of a young woman to congress would promote the cause of suffrage? Is it not true that such action on the part of the voters of this state, by unduly advertising the desire for office on the part of women, would seriously retard the suffrage movement in other states?

“Is there any justification for the claim that the women of Montana owe suffrage to Miss Rankin? Is it not true that other women, Mrs. H. L. Sherlock for example, were working for woman suffrage before Miss Rankin was out of her cradle? Did not suffrage come to Montana rather through the example of other states around her, and through the action and votes of men of the state? Miss Rankin undoubtedly had a part, but no more than many other men and women.

“Has Miss Rankin had the life experience that is necessary to make her a useful servant of Montana in the halls of congress? Does she understand the land questions arising in this state, the questions relating to the various irrigation projects, and other matters of practical importance to the state’s development? If Miss Rankin was a young man instead of a young woman – of the same age and experience – would anyone think of sending her to congress? If we are going to send a woman to congress from Montana, would it not be well to send one who has had a woman’s part in life, who has won her place in the state in a woman’s way?”

I liked this bit best: “Is it not true that such action on the part of the voters of this state, by unduly advertising the desire for office on the part of women, would seriously retard the suffrage movement in other states?” Don’t look to eager, ladies, it might hurt the cause if you’re too bold.

The implication that she’s not a real woman who won by following a “woman’s way”, and at the same time questioning whether a woman could actually know anything about the practical, manly issues in Montana is just icing on the cake.

The candidate, by the way, was Jeannette Rankin, who won the election handily and went on to become the first woman elected to the US Congress. She was a dedicated pacifist who voted against our entry in World War II…and she was also a Republican. I don’t think she’d fit in any more.

A feminist embarrassment

I cringed reading this woman’s lament that evolutionary biology is responsible for the oppression of women, starting with Darwin. It’s one long colossal failure of logic.

The argument has some genuinely true facts embedded in it, which then get spun out into a series of false conclusions. It is true that the Victorian gentlemen who formulated and expanded upon the theory of evolution tended to be 19th century chauvinists who made up stories about the inferiority of the feminine mind, and Darwin was right among them. It is also true that there are contemporary biologists who still make up similar stories and engage in blatant retrofitting of the data to rationalize sexism or racism (Satoshi Kanazawa comes to mind as one of the most egregious examples).

But don’t confuse cause and effect! Sexism predated evolutionary theory, and is a product of the wider culture. And creationism, most obviously, is extremely sexist, with its predefined gender roles and gender-based assignment of blame for the entirety of our wicked nature. To single out a late 19th century scientific theory and accuse it of promoting a deplorable cultural attitude that was both present before the theory was discovered, and present to an even greater degree in the individuals who strongly opposed the theory, is ridiculous in the extreme, and embarrassingly stupid.

But I’m not done. The entirety of the edifice of her logic is built on exactly one essay, one attack on evolution, by one guy. And that guy is the rabid squirrel of creationism, Jerry Bergman.

Bergman is so awful, so incompetent, so dishonest, that citing him in any way in support of your position (let alone allowing his lying slander of Darwin be the sole source) instantly discredits anything you might say. It says you have no discernment or capability of critical evaluation of your sources.

I’m sorry to say that the taint of incompetence has now also spread to Loretta Kemsley.

(Also on Sb)

Hitler was a True Christian™

If you tuned in to that local debate on Christian radio, you know that one of the points the Christian fool trotted out was the tired old claim that the Nazis were no true Christians — no True Christian™ would ever commit such horrible acts. It’s an annoyingly feeble and unsupportable argument, but it has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.

This same argument has come up in Faye Flam’s Evolution column for the Philly Inquirer, and has gone on through several articles thanks to that hack from the Discovery Institute, Richard Weikart. It started with an article titled “Severing the link between Darwin and Nazism“, which cited real scholars like Robert Richards and Daniel Gasman to ably refute Weikart’s ridiculous claim that Nazism was inspired by Darwin. The Nazis banned Darwin’s books and rejected the idea that Aryans could have evolved from the lower orders. Weikart’s reply: But Hitler used the word Entwicklung, which translates as “evolution”. It also translates as “development” — Hitler did not use the language as representative of evolution at all.

So Flam got a contribution from a developmental biologist, the most excellent Scott Gilbert, who pointed out that biology and Darwinism were not factors in Hitler’s rise to power: the Lutheran and Catholic churches were. She also gets Keith Thomson, a biologist and museum director, to explain that Darwin did not and would not have approved in any way the Nazi philosophy. Weikart’s reply: but Darwin was a racist! Of course he was — he was a fairly conventional Victorian gentleman who thought the English were the greatest people on the planet. But these biases were not significant factors in his theory, and he struggled to overcome them.

Nazism was not science-based. It was pseudo-scientific religious dogma, tightly tied to the German culture of the time, which was almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran. All you have to do is look at Hitler’s own words to see that, even if he were personally a closet Satanist (I don’t think he was; he was an idiosyncratic Catholic), he tapped into the faith of the German people to achieve his ends. You cannot blame the horrors of the Third Reich on Darwin, who had negligible influence on the great masses of the German Volk, no political pull, and no appeal to the media. If you wanted a lever to shift public opinion on anything in the 1930s, religion was where you applied your force.

I have to give an early plug for my colleague, Michael Lackey (also on the CFI speakers’ bureau, by the way), who will be coming out with a book this Spring on exactly this topic.

His new book project (Modernist God States: A Literary Study of the Theological Origins of Nazi Totalitarianism) is on Hitler and the Nazis. In this book, he opposes one of the dominant interpretations of intellectual and political history, which holds that the West, since the Enlightenment, has been becoming increasingly more secular. Scholars who have adopted this approach claim that Hitler and the Nazis are the logical product of secularization, atheism, and humanism. By stark contrast, Lackey has been trying to demonstrate that secularization has only taken hold in very elite circles, mainly among academics, scholars, and intellectuals. As for the general population, it has actually become increasingly more religious, but in ways that are significantly different from pre-Enlightenment versions of religion. Based on his findings, Lackey argues that the only way to understand Hitler and the Nazis is to take into account the new conceptions of religious subjectivity that started to flourish and dominate among the general population in the early part of the twentieth century. Understanding these new conceptions sheds new and considerable light on Hitler’s and the Nazis’ religious conception of the political.

The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich. New York and London: Continuum, (in press: forthcoming, Spring 2012).

Among the things he has done is to examine thoroughly the popular literature of Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Surprise, surprise, it isn’t singing paeans to Darwin and Science — these are eminently Christian Nazis.

The cover of his book says it all. I think it’s going to be a significant source for squelching these bizarre, ahistorical notions coming out of the Discovery Institute that somehow Nazi Germany was the apotheosis of the godless Darwinian state.

(Also on Sb)

It ought to be up to Americans to decide what is true!

You must watch this episode of the Daily Show — it’s all about science. Lisa Randall is on it plugging her new book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door (she actually doesn’t get to say much about it, but I’ve ordered it for my iPad anyway — I know what I’ll be reading on the plane to New Orleans tomorrow), a good section on the recent confirmation of global warming, and my favorite bit of all, Aasif Mandvi blithely leading a chipper Republican operative to agree with the most egregiously ignorant, anti-science claims.

Mandvi: Why are surgeons the only ones allowed to perform surgeries?
Blithering Republican: Absolutely.
Mandvi: Doesn’t make any sense.
BR: It never makes any sense!
Mandvi: and the only other people who can check whether they’re manipulating…
BR: are other scientists!

It also features Marty Chalfie defending himself against accusations of rape.

(Also on Sb)