Nothing changes.

This morning, Crooks and Liars led me to an excerpt from an H.L. Mencken column that he wrote during the Scopes "Monkey" trial in 1925. With "Intelligent Design" gaining momentum in Kansas and Pennsylvania, it seemed particularly relevant. His theory in the article, written 80 years ago, is that it's not so much religion per se that causes the Christian right in America to hate evolution so much, but the rampant anti-intellectualism that fuels the movement.

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law

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.

I've seen first-hand, as a former university professor, that there are some students who feel very uncomfortable at the thought that they will have to discuss homosexuality, evolution, existential philosophy, and feminism. When they told me this, I would tell them that college was a place where your beliefs would be challenged, and that their role was not to pre-judge the subjects that they were exposed to, but rather to understand them thoroughly, and offer a reasoned response when they had digested the information. I know that there are institutions like BYU or Bob Jones University where religion is used to sheild students from ideas, but, in these religious institutions notwitshanding, college is supposed to be a place to learn. ( I attended a Catholic college in the midwest, and had a religion professor who started a class with "So you think Mary was a virgin? I've got some swampland to sell you . . .")

Which leads me back to Mencken's observation--Keep in mind, that he is not calling the poor, or the religious, or a certain racial group "inferior" people. He's reserved that label for those who refuse to learn, and hate the people who know more than them. I think that this is a perfect description for the current crop of religious wingnuts. They've seen that, though they are often complete morally bankrupt failures in life (see Pat Robertson as the cowardly syphillis infected "liquor officer" in his Korean War battalion), they gain tremendous power over others who are thoughtful and intelligent by convincing the "masses" that things are a great deal simpler than they really are. God is in charge--he hates homosexuals, and abortion. He sends hurricanes and terrorists to punish the wicked. Send God's representative some money, and fight the evil-doers. Pray, and there will be no more problems in America.

Some things never change. Mencken was up against William Jennings Bryan--We've got our Pat Robertsons and Jomes Dobsons to deal with. Mencken summed it up brilliantly when he said:

. . .[E]nlightenment, 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 -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history.

Instead of quietly and rationally explaining evolution to these fools, we should be taking every media opportunity to call them willfully ignorant idiots and opportunists. There is no debate here. They are wrong. They are trying to teach in our schools that the world is flat, and 2 + 2 = God. I feel sorry for someone who has no access to education, but I have utter contempt for those who willfully refuse to learn. They are fools of the highest order, and deserve to be ridiculed. Where is our H.L. Mencken today?

--Tin Foil Out