Is Dumbledore gay?

By now everyone is aware of the bombshell dropped into the Harry Potter world by creator J. K. Rowling announcing that she had always envisaged Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore as gay, although she had not made it explicit in the books.

Advocates of gay rights have welcomed Rowling’s statement, although some have said that they would have liked to have had this development made clear in the books itself, rather than revealed as an afterword. Those who already saw the books as evil because its magical aspects appeared like witchcraft to them, now have another reason to condemn the books, seeing it as an attempt by the author to ‘further the gay agenda.’ They fear that by making the most universally admired character in the books gay, young children will become (oh, the horror!) more tolerant of gay people.
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From Scopes to Dover-6: The Scopes trial conspiracy

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Although Inherit the Wind, the original play and film based on the events of the Scopes trial, was made as a drama, it would have been more accurate to portray the actual events leading up to and through the trial as a comedy.

Right from the beginning, rather than being a bitter adversarial contest between science and religion, the whole prosecution and trial was staged by the local civic leaders of the sleepy little town of Dayton, Tennessee as mainly a public relations exercise, with both prosecution and defense sides working together to create a show trial and thereby benefit the town by increasing its visibility because of the resulting publicity.

When word got around that the ACLU had issued a press release to the Tennessee newspapers looking for someone willing to test the Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution, Dayton resident George Rappleyea, who personally opposed the anti-evolution law, saw the opportunity to make the sleepy town of Dayton get national headlines and publicity. He felt that this ACLU challenge gave Dayton the chance to hold a trial with well-known figures that would draw the national media and tourists to the city, leading to an economic boom. So he and other enterprising entrepreneurs set about planning to create such a trial. Working with Fred Robinson (a local businessman and also chair of the county school board), the school superintendent (who supported the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of evolution), two city attorneys who agreed to prosecute the case, and a local attorney to handle the defense, they put all the ingredients into place. (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 89-91)

All they needed now was someone to charge with breaking the law. They did not want anyone’s life or career to be harmed by being charged in what was essentially a show trial created for publicity. The team looked around for a suitable candidate to accuse and found one in 24-year old John T. Scopes, a general science instructor and part-time football coach. Although he was not the regular biology teacher, he made a good candidate because he was single, not a local, had no ties to the region, no intention of staying permanently in Dayton, and thus had little to lose from the case. This made him preferable to the regular biology teacher, who was married and was also the school principal and thus would have had a lot more at stake.

In the film, Scopes was arrested in his classroom by grim-faced city leaders while teaching his class about evolution, and then flung into jail where he had to stay until the trial. While there, he had to listen to hostile citizens marching around the jail carrying banners and chanting slogans vilifying him, flinging bottles through his cell windows, and seeing himself burned in effigy, while in the evening the clergyman preached fiery sermons condemning him to hell for his evil act of teaching evolution.

In reality, Scopes was a cheerful co-conspirator in the staged trial. The chummy nature of the whole proceeding is illustrated by the fact that all these friendly discussions took place in the local drugstore owned by the school board chair. The prosecutor, who happened to be Scopes’ close friend, said he would be willing to prosecute Scopes as long as Scopes didn’t mind. (Even during the heat of the trial, the prosecutors and the defendant went for a swim in a pond during a lunch recess.) Scopes was invited to these discussions and asked whether he would be willing to be prosecuted. Scopes believed in evolution and disagreed with the law so he said he was willing to go along. The group then called over the waiting justice of the peace to swear out a warrant for Scopes, and the waiting constable served him the warrant immediately. Rather than being hauled off to jail, Scopes then went off to play tennis while the others set the publicity machine in motion by wiring the state’s newspapers with the news that they had charged someone with violating the Butler Act. (Larson, p. 91)

The little secret behind the trial was it was never firmly established that Scopes had even taught evolution at all and thus actually violated the law. He himself could not definitely recall teaching that particular topic. He never took the stand in his defense and thus was not forced to swear under oath on this issue. He and his students also seemed hazy on the entire concept of evolution. But everyone, including Scopes, decided to go along with the idea that he had taught it in order that the trial could take place. Since Scopes had filled in occasionally when the regular biology teacher was absent, and had used the assigned textbook that included a section on human evolution, this was enough for the friendly gang of conspirators to decide that they could reasonably charge him with violating the law. During the later grand jury proceedings, Scopes even had to urge his reluctant students to testify against him and coached them on how to answer in order that the grand jury would have grounds to indict him. (Larson, p. 108)

Thus from the beginning, the normal antagonism that characterizes the two opposing sides in highly charged trials was absent. It was said that the ACLU, eager to have a test case on the freedom of speech in the classroom, even volunteered to pay the expenses of the prosecution, but the offer was declined. The generosity was not all on one side. Anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan had not even wanted a penalty provision inserted in the law since he only wanted to make a point about what should be taught, and did not want to actually harm anyone, financially or otherwise. In fact, Bryan later offered, if Scopes were to be found guilty, to pay the fine himself (unlike in the film, where an outraged Bryan wanted an even stiffer sentence meted out). Everyone fully expected Scopes to be found guilty and even the defense wanted such a verdict so that the case could be appealed to the higher courts and the constitutional issues fully addressed.

The Scopes trial in Dayton was to be merely the first step in a case that was supposed to have much broader implications.

POST SCRIPT: The Chasers ask what should be done about Iraq

In a comment to the previous post, Nicole expressed incredulity that anyone could be oblivious to the infamous history of tattooing people of particular groups for identification purposes. Alas, such people do exist. There are many people out there who not only have no idea of the basic elements of history or current affairs or geography, they also have no empathy at all for people who are not like them, which leads them to say the most outrageous things.

The Chasers regularly exploit this dangerous combination of ignorance and bigotry for humorous purposes.

From Scopes to Dover-4: Bryan’s views on religion and evolution

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In order to understand what happened to Bryan during his testimony in the Scopes trial, it is necessary to understand something of Bryan’s religious views. In those days, as now, there were splits among religious believers between those who took the Bible as an inerrant literal record of historical events, and those who allowed for some level of interpretive license, whereby some events could be interpreted metaphorically so as not to clash with scientific truths.
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From Scopes to Dover-3: The role of ‘social Darwinism’

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

As far as the legal issues were concerned, the famous 1925 ‘Scopes monkey trial’ did not actually resolve anything and did not even deal with the same weighty constitutional issues that now surround the issue of evolution in the classroom.

The issues involved in the trial arose as a result of the collision of two trains of events, one emerging from the rising unease with the implications of Darwinian thinking for Christian beliefs, and the other with concerns about infringements on the fundamental right of free speech that followed the creation of the Soviet Union following World War I and the ‘Red Scare’ that followed.

Unease over the implications of the theory of evolution for religious beliefs had been simmering for some time, even since the full implications of Darwin’s theory had become recognized. While some people were willing to tolerate the idea of all species other than humans being evolutionarily linked, the idea that human beings were also part of the great tree of evolutionary descent was repugnant to many because it seemed to imply that we were no different from other mammals and thus not in the image of god nor possessors of an immortal soul.

Williams Jennings Bryan was a devoutly religious Christian and also a populist, supporting many progressive causes while championing the underdog and fighting for the rights of the poor against their exploiters. Because of this, he was often referred by the nickname of The Commoner, in addition to the name of The Boy Orator, which he had acquired early in life because of the skill he displayed as a public speaker. He had basically a majoritarian democratic view that held that people, through their collective voice, had the final say in how they were to be governed. As such, he opposed elitist ideas, and he saw evolutionary theory as one such doctrine that was being imposed on people by a scientific elite.

In fact, while one reason he opposed Darwinian thinking was because of his religious beliefs and his fears that the theory left no room for god, another of the sources of his opposition to Darwin’s theory were the claims of the so-called ‘social Darwinists’ like Herbert Spencer, who tried to extend Darwinian natural selection to explain human society and argued that ‘survival of the fittest’ meant that harsh social conditions were inevitable and maybe even desirable since that would weed out those who were ‘unfit’, thus improving humanity in the long run. The ‘robber barons’ of that time, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who had made enormous fortunes at a time of widespread poverty, also took comfort from social Darwinism since it seemed to bestow a seal of approval on them and their actions, suggesting that their success was due to them being exceptionally ‘fit’ for the world of business and innately gifted at it, and not because of their exploitative business practices. Bryan saw Darwin’s ideas as being at the root of that particular evil, saying “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate – the merciless law by which the strong crowd out the weak.” (Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson, 1997, p. 39).

Bryan was a humane and peace-loving man, who even resigned in 1915 from his position as Secretary of State in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson when it looked like Wilson was taking the country into World War I. That war gave Bryan yet another reason to oppose Darwinism because he was strongly influenced by some books written at that time that argued that the war was due to Darwinian principles at work among nations.

Another factor at play in the popular opposition to Darwinism was the rise of eugenics and its suggestion that the human race, just like livestock, could be improved by selective breeding, such as by segregating those people who were seen as ‘defective’ and preventing them from having children. Many viewed this as an abominable practice and those opposed to evolution saw this as a direct consequence of Darwinian thinking applied to humans, and dangerously close to playing god. Their linking of Darwinian evolutionary theory with eugenics was buttressed by the fact that one of the founders of this new field (and the person who coined the term) was the British polymath Francis Galton, who happened to be Darwin’s cousin and one of the earliest supporters of Darwin’s theory.

Bryan was opposed to the excesses of both capitalism and militarism and also rejected social engineering at the expense of the poor. He saw Darwinian thinking as the source of all those evils and thus as a pernicious idea that should be defeated and definitely not taught to students in public schools.

Next: Bryan’s views on religion and evolution.

POST SCRIPT: How to get into any nightclub

Do you have trouble getting into selective bars or nightclubs? The guys from The Chasers tell you the secret of getting in that works every time. Well, almost.

From Scopes to Dover-2: How the Scopes myths originated

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

From the beginning the Scopes trial captured the popular imagination as symbolizing the conflict between science and religion, on a par with the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican views. But just as the myths about the Copernican revolution have supplanted the actual history, so have the myths about the Scopes trial obscured the more fascinating real account. (See here and the links therein for my posts on the Copernican myths. The December 2007 issue of Physics Today will also carry an article by me on this topic.)
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From Scopes to Dover-1: Overview

I have always been interested in the law, especially constitutional law. And given my interest in the subject of evolution, I was intrigued by how the teaching of that subject has been, at least in the US, the focus of so many court cases, involving various subtle shades of meaning and interpretation of the US constitution. This week begins a fairly long series of posts that attempts to clarify this issue, although the series will be interrupted from time to time with posts on other topics.

It is almost impossible to think of the evolution-religion controversy (or the larger science-religion issue) in America without immediately thinking of the famous ‘Scopes monkey trial’ of 1925, where a high school teacher John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in the state of Tennessee. That event has become a touchstone, framing the issue in a way that is hard to shake off.
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Soaps and Soap

For a very brief time in my life, about one week actually, I got hooked on daytime TV soap operas.

It happened in December of 1978. I had received a phone call that my father had died suddenly of a heart attack back in Sri Lanka. I was in graduate school in the US, far away from my family, and thus away from the kinds of support networks and rituals that help one get through such times of grief. I could not concentrate on my studies or reading or other things to distract my mind so turned for solace to watching TV all day, as so many do in such situations when seeking escapism through mindless activity.

In those pre-internet and early cable days, your TV choices were largely limited to just the three networks CBS, NBC, and ABC and during the day all three served up a diet of talk shows, game shows, and soap operas. Although I wasn’t at all interested at first, quite soon I was quite absorbed in the various stories that made up the soaps. For those not familiar with the genre, these daytime soap operas involve multiple intersecting story lines involving quite a large cast of characters of usually middle class or rich people, with a few low-lifes thrown in to spice things up. The tales involve love, jealousy, intrigue, adultery, murder, larceny, backstabbing, lying, cheating, and other strong human characteristics.

These programs can be quite addictive and develop faithful followings as can be seen from the longevity of soaps like Days of Our Lives, All My Children, The Young and the Restless and As the World Turns, all of which have lasted over three decades.

Although I stopped watching after a week, these shows gave me a greater appreciation for the riotously funny weekly prime-time sitcom Soap, which was a parody of the daytime soaps, and ran for four seasons during the years 1977-1981.

The basic story of Soap was that of the intersecting lives of two families, the Tates and the Campbells, where the two mothers Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell were sisters. The best way to describe Soap is as daytime soap opera on steroids. Where the daytime soaps stories proceeded excruciatingly slowly, with long pregnant pauses in the dialogue, lengthy meaningful looks, and dragged-out plot developments, Soap went at break-neck speed with plot twists occurring in rapid-fire succession. All the standard complex plotlines of the daytime soaps were present and then made even more extreme in Soap by adding outlandish things like UFOs, alien abductions, demon-possessions, guerillas, gangsters, blackmail, kidnappings, exorcisms, brainwashing by a religious cult (led by the Reverend Sun whose followers were called “the Sunnies”!) and so on. Storylines that would be sufficient for a full season on the regular soaps were crammed into just a few episodes of Soap. This breathless pace was compressed into weekly half-hour programs, each episode beginning in classic soap style with a voice-over announcer saying what had happened in previous episodes, and ending with a dramatic cliff-hanger, followed by the announcer hyping up the suspense for the episodes to come.

What really made Soap one of the funniest TV programs was clever writing coupled with one of the best ensemble casts ever put together, easily triumphing over those of the more-heralded Seinfeld or Friends casts. Katherine Helmond as the ditzy Jessica (whom men found irresistible) and Cathryn Damon as Mary were the anchors that held the two families (and the show) together as increasingly bizarre things happened all around them. Some of the funniest scenes were when the two were sitting around a kitchen table, each trying to bring the other up-to-date on the latest bizarre happenings in their families and, in a perverse way, competing to top each other’s stories.

Richard Mulligan as Bert Campbell (Mary’s working class husband) was superb in his physical comedy, his body and face seemingly made of rubber, responding spasmodically to his nervous energy. Billy Crystal (a newcomer then) appeared as Jodie (Mary’s son) in what may be the first portrayal of a gay person on TV that got laughs out of being gay while remaining a sympathetic character and avoiding becoming a caricature. Robert Guillaume as Benson, the sardonic back-talking butler for the rich Tates, was another actor who managed to take what might have become a stereotypical role (black servant of a rich white family) and infuse it with dignity and humor. In fact Crystal and Guillaume were perhaps the most sensible (or at least the least eccentric) of the entire Tate-Campbell menagerie.

Perhaps the most eccentric character was Bert’s son Chuck who always went around with his ventriloquist dummy Bob. Chuck acted like Bob was a real person and would hold conversations with him while Bob would insult everyone and leer at women. The humor arose because other members of the family also sometimes ended up treating Bob as a real person and speak and argue and get angry with him, while not holding Chuck responsible for Bob’s words. (It is an interesting thing to speculate as to what you would do if someone you knew acted like Chuck did. In order to spare his feelings, wouldn’t you also treat his dummy like a real person, even if you felt ridiculous doing so?) In one such scene, Chuck plans to go out on a date leaving Bob behind but Bob harangues him until Chuck agrees to take him along. When they both finally leave, Mary asks Bert (who have both been watching this) whether they shouldn’t get professional help for Chuck, to which Bert replies, “Chuck doesn’t need professional help, he should just learn to discipline Bob more.”

The reason for these fond reminiscences is that I just discovered that these old programs are now available on DVD and I have been watching them again. There is always a danger in doing these kinds of trips down nostalgia lane because one’s memories of old books, films and TV programs often make them seem better than they actually were. I was a little fearful that Soap would disappoint were but it passed the test handily. It is still laugh-out-loud funny.

The added bonus to watching on DVD is the absence of commercials. I also noticed how the opening and closing credits were more leisurely than they are now, allowing one to actually read the names of the actors and crew without distracting sidebar promos for other shows. The running time of each half-hour episode then was also 24 minutes and 30 seconds. I suspect that nowadays this has been reduced to allow for more commercial breaks.

There were other good TV comedies at that time, like M*A*S*H and Newhart, but I would not seek out DVDs of them the way I did with Soap.

Soap was a comedy classic and if you get the chance you should see it. And make sure you watch it in sequence.

POST SCRIPT: Class politics

Here’s another provocative clip from the 1998 film Bulworth (strong language advisory).

Language and Evolution

I have always been fascinated by language. This is somewhat ironic since I have a really hard time learning a new language and almost did not make it into college in Sri Lanka because of extreme difficulty in passing the 10th-grade language requirement in my own mother tongue of Tamil! (How that happened is a long and not very interesting story.)

But language fascinates me. How words are used, their origins, how sentences are structured, are all things that I enjoy thinking and reading about. I like playing with words, and enjoy puns, cryptic crosswords, and other forms of wordplay.

All this background is to explain why I recommend an excellent book The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, who used to be a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley but is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In the book he discusses the complexity of language and points out that the evolution of language is very similar to that of biological life. He suggests that there was originally just one spoken, very primitive, language and as the people who spoke it fanned out across the globe, the various languages evolved as separated communities formed. And in the process the languages became more complex and sophisticated, and evolved intricate features in their vocabulary and grammar that now seem to have little functional purpose, in a manner very analogous to biological systems.

The precise origin of spoken language is hard to pin down. McWhorter argues that it probably arose with the evolution of the ability to form complex sounds and roughly synchronous with the arrival of homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago. Others have suggested a more recent date for the origins of language, about 12,000-15,000 years ago, but pinning this date down precisely is next to impossible given that spoken language leaves no traces. What we do know is that written language began about 5,000 years ago

McWhorter points out that purely spoken languages evolve and change very rapidly, resulting in an extremely rapid proliferation of language leaving us with the 6,000 or so languages that we have now. It was the origin of writing, and more importantly mass printing, that slowed down the evolution of language since now the fixed words on paper acted as a brake on further changes.

He also makes an important point that the distinction between standard and dialect forms of languages have no hierarchical value and is also a post-printing phenomenon. In other words, when we hear people (say) in rural Appalachia or in the poorer sectors of inner cities speak in an English that is different from that spoken by middle class, college-educated people, it is not the case that they are speaking a debased form of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ English. He argues that dialects are all there is or ever was, because language was always mainly a local phenomenon. There are no good or bad dialects, there are just dialects.

We can, if we wish, bundle together a set of dialects that share a lot in common and call it a language (like English or French or Swahili) but no single strand in the bundle can justifiably lay any intrinsic claim to be the standard. What we identify as standard language arose due to factors such as politics and power. Standard English now is that dialect which was spoken in the politically influential areas near London. Since that area was then the hub of printing and copying, that version of language appeared in the written form more often than other forms and somewhere in the 1400s became seen as the standard. The same thing happened with standard French, which happened to be the dialect spoken in the Paris areas.

McWhorter points out that, like biological organisms, languages can and do go extinct in that people stop speaking them and they disappear or, in some cases like Latin, only appear in fossilized form. In fact, most of the world’s languages that existed have already gone extinct, as is the case with biological species. He says that rapid globalization is making many languages disappear even more rapidly because as people become bi-lingual or multi-lingual, and as a few languages emerge as the preferred language of commerce, there is less chance of children learning the less-privileged language as their native tongue. This loss in the transmission of language to children as their primary language is the first stage leading to eventual extinction. He points out that currently 96 percent of the world’s population speaks at least one of just twenty languages, in addition to their indigenous language. These languages are Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portugese, Japanese, German, French, Punjabi, Javanese, Bihari, Italian, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Vietnamese and thus these are the languages most likely to survive extinction. It is noteworthy that the population of India is so large and diverse that seven of these languages originated there, and two others (English and Arabic) are also used extensively in that country.

He also points out that languages are never ‘pure’ and that this situation is the norm. Languages cross-fertilize with other languages to form language stews, so that language chauvinists who try to preserve some pure and original form of their language are engaged in a futile task. For example, of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, more than 99 percent were originally obtained from other languages. However, the remaining few that originated in Old English, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, from turn out to be 62 percent of the words that are used most.

McWhorter is a very good writer, able to really bring the subject to life by drawing on everyday matters and popular culture. He has a breezy and humorous style and provides lots of very interesting bits of trivia that, while amusing, are also very instructive of the points he wishes to make. Regarding the ability of language to change and evolve new words, for example, he explains how the word ‘nickname’ came about. It started out as an ‘ekename’ because in old English, the word ‘eke’ meant also, so that an ‘ekename’ meant an ‘also name’ which makes sense. Over time, though, ‘an ekename’ changed to ‘a nekename’ and eventually to ‘a nickname.’ He gives many interesting examples of this sort.

Those who know more than one language well will likely appreciate his book even more than me. It is a book that is great fun to read and I can strongly recommend to anyone who loves words and language.

POST SCRIPT: Whipping up war frenzy

Jon Stewart show how it is done.

Harry Potter and the supernatural

The release of each new Harry Potter book or film bring out of the woodwork those religious people who are disturbed by them and decide they need to spam everyone and try to make money from it as well.

I received a spam email following the release of Deathly Hallows that recycled old warnings about the subversive nature of the books and asking me to buy a video to help combat the Potter menace. It said:
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