Josh cited a pretty good article above on why this happened and it’s not because of discrimination.
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It’s hard for me to overstate just exactly how absurd I find this notion.
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Well, I do see that but in that context the word “rights” doesn’t belong. We do well to separate what we regard as “rights” in the formal sense from conventions and understandings.
I am certainly put ill at ease by some modern “left” orthodoxies. But few of them have the will to dominate, the power to carry out their will, or the desire to do so much harm to others, that similar movements on the religious extremist/creationist side have.
If, as you appear to believe, misogyny and racism are the product of faulty thought, then the best way of getting rid of them is to hire the best thinkers, who will then be capable of figuring out the flaws in misogyny and racism. So you should have no objection to making academic excellence (and teaching ability) the only guideline for hiring; the ideological problem will clean itself up naturally when good as opposed to sloppy thinkers are on the faculty.
Tell me, if you hire a biologist to deal with the problem of oil-slick pollution, who is your best bet, the biologist who waxes eloquent in denouncing shipping companies and capitalism, and is constantly declaring how much he hates them, or the biologist who has the best grasp of microorganisms which might be able to consume the spilled pollutants? I think you should hire the smart biologist rather than the one who shows the most indignation. And that’s how it should be in the humanities and social science, which right now have an incredible shortage of smart people and a surplus of people who do nothing but belch out political indignation in cliches and slogans and “isms”.
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No I don’t think that at all. Brilliant thinkers can be horrible people. Knowing what we know about Richard Feynman today for example no physics department should hire him no matter how brilliant he may be.
I don’t agree. I think that if society carries on in the current fashion, if it doesn’t blow itself up, we will end up with an omnipotent global leftist State rule, like that described in Brave New World. And I think that world will be evil, no matter how comfortable and “fair” and egalitarian it might be.
The vast majority of creationists I know personally do not seek political power for the Church. There are some who do want the Church to control the state, but I see no evidence that they are the majority of creationists. What most creationists want is simply to opt out of compulsory evolution teaching in 9th-grade biology; or at least, if evolution is taught, to allow criticisms to be taught alongside it. And though they publish volumes of anti-evolution material, it is all on the free market, and is forced on no one, and is entirely subsidized by religious believers and book-buyers. I don’t have the slightest fear that any creationist will ever take away even the tiniest smidgen of my civil rights. And even if they wanted to, they would need Constitutional Amendments to do so, and they would never get enough votes. I can mock their reading of the Bible with impunity, I can watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail in any theater, and I can I thumb my nose at them freely, without the slightest fear that they can ever do anything to me in reprisal. What on earth are you worried about?
On the other hand, the secular right-wingers could be a great danger. They would produce a society, not like Brave New World, but like 1984.
Again, a truly conservative thinker would reject both Brave New World and 1984, and would hold out for traditional balance, moderation, freedom of discussion, checks and balances to avoid tyranny, a good education system (preferably using a Great Books model, but there are others), etc. And a truly conservative thinker would be very worried about the way polemically loaded terms like “sexism”, “homophobia” etc. are thrown around; they heat up the atmosphere and thus prepare the way for demagoguery. Calm, analytical discussion, open debate, and a return to a good Classical education are all things that can reduce the temperature and avoid ideological extremes which can only lead to slavery.
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You may be describing one biologist not two. I would say maybe the most knowledgeable person in this situation is the one who recognizes the regulatory and economic deficiencies that cause spills to happen in the first place. Frankly it’s a bit of a silly scenario.
I should add to that.
I think most people actually have no idea what intellectual courage actually is. I’m not the most intellectually courageous person I know – I have colleagues and friends of whom I am in awe on this. But I know what it is to stand up in a room and say your piece, when nobody agrees with you and everyone thinks you ought to die and blow away. I know what it is to be jeered at and pointed at and made fun of, and to have genuinely nasty things said. I know what it is to be falsely tarred by implied association with truly awful people.
And, you know, I know how many like-minded people come to one’s defense when that happens. Don’t need even the fingers on one hand to count 'em. Now, on many of the occasions where that sort of thing happened, I won the dispute. I was in the right, and I knew what I was doing; others were in the wrong and were getting horrid legal advice. But I was often utterly alone, except for a client who was even more highly despised than I was. Even the other lawyers thought I was nuts, and said so, right up until I won, when they’d announce they’d known I was right all along.
I think that people who say that they would die to defend someone’s right to express his opinions would, in most cases, be unwilling to encounter mild embarrassment, much less die. Hyperbolic statements like that impressed me when I was a kid. What people actually DO impresses me today.
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I agree. But Feynman was not a brilliant thinker in the Arts subjects. Scientists are often terrible naifs in moral, political, and other matters, no matter how smart they are at math etc.
Of course, even brilliant thinkers in the Arts subjects can be evil. But if they are forced by colleagues to put their arguments for their conclusions in rational form, their evil conclusions can be defeated. Do you not belief that sexism can be shown to be bad on rational grounds? And if so, why do you fear hiring someone who makes arguments that men and women are fundamentally different? If the arguments don’t hold water, they will be defeated. What are you worried about? Or do you not have any faith in reason, outside of the world of Science?
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The problem is the “weaknesses” Creationists want taught aren’t legitimate scientific concerns. They’re virtually 100% misunderstanding, misrepresentations, or outright lies about the actual science. See the Discovery Institute’s recent cartoon video supposedly refuting cetacean evolution for a prime example.
We’re worried about the declining quality of science education in this country and how allowing Creationist science-free dogma into public school science classes will make the problems that much worse.
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What on earth are you talking about. Don’t hire misogynists, racists, or fascists. Not in the arts not in the sciences not in the humanities. Heck, not as baristas or accountants either. What exactly is so difficult about this? You don’t hire a misogynist because they are a brilliant educator and say, “it will be OK, we will reason with them and they won’t be using their authority to garner sexual favors from undergraduates.”
Time to stop reading D’Souza, then, clearly.
The actual creationists, rather than the relatively benign sorts you describe. The ones who have mounted the actual legal challenges, and who now have figured out that they can do so much more damage to science education by creating litigation cover for religious extremist teachers than they can by explicitly making creationism part of a curriculum. They are working, every day, to ruin our children’s chances of getting a good education.
I seldom see those sorts of terms abused, but there are others that are. Calm discussion and open debate are indeed marvelous things, but often what I find, when I look into “social conservative” claims, is that the claimants are mostly just upset that most people no longer agree with them.
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And really? “Often”? Again, you sound just ridiculous at this point.
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Exactly. ID Creationism is not a respected or respectable position. If its proponents wish it to become one, they need to stop with the lies and distortions, and start doing the real work. Even that’s not likely to work, because there’s no “there” there, but if there were something to ID Creationism, “job one” would be to chuck out the entire library of its current “supporting” literature.
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I don’t disagree with anything in your anecdote. But surely the fact that people rarely live up to their stated ideals doesn’t make those ideals any less valid. The point is, would America be a better country if everyone lived up to the ideal, “I may strongly disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it?” I think the answer to that is yes. And of course, as already specified, I am talking about opinions and views about nature, ethics, politics, etc., not misuses of speech such as libel, slander, or shouting Fire in a crowded room where there is no fire.
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I think the answer to that is no. I’m not putting my life on the line so that people can spout absurdities and hateful nonsense.
Do you think it’s OK for organizations like the Discovery Institute to deliberately lie about aspects of the evolutionary sciences to push their religious agenda?
Hyperbole. Almost the entire focus of the creationist challenge to evolution in the schools is one unit in 9th grade biology on evolution. That unit runs about – what – two weeks? three weeks? So even if the creationists got their way on that unit, that would affect approximately one sixth or one-fifth of just one course in biology. And biology is not even all of science education in the high school, let alone all of “a good education” simply. None of the math, physics, or chemistry they will do in the rest of high school will be affected, nor will their English, history, geography, Spanish, civics, etc. And this one alteration would “ruin our children’s chances of getting a good education”? That’s just as rhetorically over the top as much of the creationist talk about how “godless evolution” is destroying our society. How about keeping things in their proper proportions?
If we really want to improve our children’s chances of getting a good education, how about spending a lot more money on trained science teachers in the schools? Are you aware that in many school districts in the country, high school science is taught by people with nowhere near specialist qualifications? When Phys. Ed. or Geography majors are conscripted to teach the Chemistry and Biology courses, etc., you’re not going to get good science education. Biology majors should be teaching Biology courses, Physics majors physics courses, etc. But that only happens in the wealthiest, best-funded school districts. In the poorer districts, teaching appointments are ad hoc, and the students are suffering. This is a far bigger factor in the lousiness of American science education than whether “teaching the controversy over evolution” is done in 9th Grade biology. Three bad weeks in one course is like getting a paper cut, whereas the whole system is suffering from scurvy, rickets, etc. All this fighting over one tiny corner of the science curriculum is missing the forest for a handful of trees.
Bull. The Discovery Institute is all over the country pushing “academic freedom” bills, their thinly disguised attempt to make it legal to teach religiously based Creationism in public schools. The DI also publishes any number of anti-science propaganda books, videos on YouTube, and ID-Creationist seminars every year. It’s a shame honest school districts have to spend real time and real money fighting these attempts to dumb down science education for America’s children.
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Fine, but then be prepared to be shocked when one day none of your friends or allies will put their lives (or even something much less important, like their public image) on the line by defending you, should you claim the right to say something that is unpopular but which you believe in all sincerity to be true. Why should they stick out their necks for you, if you won’t do the same for them?
You’re resting comfortably in the assumption that the current hegemony of the left in social and cultural matters will be eternal. But in human affairs all things change, and one day all American universities, courts, newspapers, etc. may be staffed by extreme right-wingers rather than extreme left-wingers, and if you still hold the same views you are advocating now, you may find yourself “politically incorrect” by the new standards, and you may find people who see no value in defending your right to “spout absurdities and hateful nonsense.” If and when that happens, I hope you remember this conversation, and how you spurned the very ideal which could have protected you.
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