Left Flank

Christopher Caldwell has a fascinating twist on the evolution debate.

The point of intelligent design is to take science down a peg. To warn enthusiasts that they risk «discrediting science itself» is a bit dense. For them, evolution is a potent symbol of the way «scientific materialism» leaves people feeling demeaned, disenfranchised, stripped of prerogatives and less free. This feeling is not groundless. Dostoyevsky and Marx said similar things. The scientific world-view poses challenges to religion only in the course of posing challenges to a whole lot besides. To take one obvious example: fewer offices permit smoking today, but it is a stretch to call this a choice. In the US, at least, there was little democratic participation in the decision. There was scientific research and then there were mandates from health boards and courts. Maybe these mandates were «all to the good». That does not make them democratic.

The anti-evolution activists in America's small towns are wrong on the science - but wrong in a way that is of absolutely no consequence to them unless they choose a career in horse-breeding or molecular biochemistry. Their feelings of disenfranchisement, on the other hand, are real and consequential. Experts control an ever larger share of decisions about where roads can be built, what people can ingest, what can be taught and whether the decisions of democratic bodies pass constitutional muster. Like so much else in US public life, the battle over evolution is a class conflict disguised as a religious or moral conflict. It is comforting to look at the fight over evolution as one that pits the educated against the ignorant. It is that. But it is also a fight that pits technocrats against democrats.

Yet, isn't this just a conflation of both the economic determinism and culture war memes? I think the problem does have more to do with bad teaching.

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