Monday, August 22, 2005

Au Contraire

I understand the impulse to be contrary: scholarship is often motivated as much by the desire to overturn received wisdom as anything. And the overturning impulse is a close to a rock-star pose as the scholar gets; it's certainly one of the most attention-getting. But it can also be supported by the flimsiest of reasons, as this quote from a NYT article on intelligent design shows:

"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman.

Chapman, director of the Discovery Institute, is conjuring up the image of an emperor wearing no clothes, and with it the spector of censorship and oppressed scholars. But when the quote is applied specifically to the case of intelligent design as a theory of how life evolved, it's pretty silly. ID certainly can and is discussed, particularly because of the efforts of the Discovery Institute. And, as regards to evolution, it is certainly not the only idea that cannot be discussed, or rather is dismissed out of hand, starting perhaps with the idea that Martians embedded intelligence into humans and perhaps not ending with the seemingly self-evident idea that asteroids landing on the earth could affect genes. But these rules only apply in peer-reviewed scientific journals, not to all forms of media or communication (if we can imagine such an ugly word standing for all our talking and writing). One wants to invoke Michel Foucault's reworking of the repressive hypothesis and say that the supposed suppression of ID has resulted in its discursive proliferation.

Of course, there is one place where ID is not officially spoken of and that is in high school classrooms. But this isn't necessarily true, either. It's quite possible that a college or high school biology or geology teacher might take a day to discuss various theories about why and/or evolution to began, and the idea of a designer could be part of the discussion. (1) It's just that students probably shouldn't be tested on it. Questions about ID would probably of two varieties: 1) True or False: Did someone or something design the universe; or 2) What would motivate a Designer to design a Universe? The first, even ID proponents would submit, assumes belief. The second assumes that first question, a speculative one, is correct. Exasperated, a secular teacher might add, 3) Why would a Designer of the Universe need to pester boards of education about science curriculae if it is infinite and perfect?

The real reason not to muddy science education with ID notions is that a theory of intelligent design is not a theory of how evolution works, but a theory about why it works. And education, even at the highest levels, is rarely about why, but usually about how. Asking why nearly always leads to more speculative answers, and when a why question cannot be turned into a series of questions about how, things can get extremely, well, subjective. Intelligent design simply is not a theory about how life evolved, but why it did in a particular way.

There is a tendency, especially when one wants to be a contrarian, to make these equivalence, since they charmingly overstep fastidious boundaries and confirm public notions about the stodginess of educators. But such claims often rely upon ignorance, not simply about the subject, but how academic debates are conducted, and have been conducted for centuries. The best thing that could come out of the ID debate is not some deluded idea that we should "teach the controversy" (2), but that we should teach philosophy and rhetoric in secondary schools. At least that way, students might understand what was being argued about instead of being armed with "contrarian" notions about how evolution and scientific debate work.


(1) Such a Designer needn't be God, understood as a perfect and infinite deity; it could be equally a Martian, a monkey or a machine. As for "intelligence," that is something we attribute to the Designer and need not be a quality of it, nor a concept it would or could understand. After all, if the Designer wasn't perfect and infinite, then Someone (or Something) else could have designed It.

(2) "Teaching the controversy" was, interestingly enough, a slogan put about during the rise of New Historicism in literature studies. It was meant to be a way of retaining some notion of a "canon" of literary works while new works or the very idea of a canon was being discussed. It wasn't a very avante-garde idea, but neither was a rear-guard one. Of course, the enduring quality--or historical relevance--of Moby Dick is not as "falsifiable" as, say, gravity--just try to get an apple not to fall sometime--but neither is its status as absolute drivel. It would take another essay to explain why this is not a problem, but the short reason is that a lot more things have to be taken for granted in order to teach the humanities and we continue to do because we know they work--just not how, exactly.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home