Merciless
I have an essay in the works for The Valley Advocate on William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's being saved for next week's paper. But it's getting me thinking about my obsession with fundamentalism. Why is it that I'm so fixated on this phenomenon? When pitching the story to my editor, I told him, "I have an idiosyncratic fascination with the Scopes Monkey Trial."
"That's great!" he responded. "Say that in the piece."
But how do I explain it, exactly? I haven't really been able to follow out all the little tangents that have come from it. Bryan is just one thread. The "prairie populist," a fascinating figure. I think my essay must be reminiscent of the book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, because a couple of my colleagues have mentioned it to me. I haven't read the book.
But fundamentalism isn't creationism, exactly. Karen Armstrong, in her book A Battle for God, described the particular strain of American protestant fundamentalism as "pre-millenial dispensationalism." The rapture and all that. It's Calvinist in outlook, I take it. Like the "Auld Lichts" in Scotland.
But the Scottish story, as I understand it, is specifically about the church-state divide. Scottish Presbyterianism had a longstanding feud with Anglicanism and "popery." They got so anti-authoritarian that once there was an established Church of Scotland, they couldn't stop schisming it. It seems to be a whole story of schism and unification, schism and unification. It makes me believe there was no real theological difference, just a pissing match over politics and who gets to pick the bishops.
Bryan said, "Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." And I empathize with that position. Swirling around the intellectual stratosphere at that time were ideas about scientific determinism and naturalism. "Free will is an illusion," it began to be postulated.
Existentialism, as I understand it, reacted to that idea and turned philosophy on its head, arguing that existence precedes essence. "We are," said Sartre, "the sum total of our choices." Nietzsche is blamed for saying "God is Dead." But my reading of the Gay Science is that Nietzsche put these words into the character of a madman, who says "What, after all, are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" For Nietzsche, Christianity was a slave morality. This was a grave challenge, to be sure.
Bryan was not defeated by Nietzsche or Darrow, however. He was defeated by William McKinley and the Republicans. Three times, he was defeated in his quest for the presidency. But the anti-evolution Butler law lived on for four decades after the Scopes Trial. The fact is that government cannot control truth, but it can control the public schools. This should not be used to short-circuit science. But perhaps politics is always a dangerous shorthand for philosophy.
This kind of covers the philosophical side of the Scopes Trial, but it is yet another tangental thread. The monkeys will have to wait.
update: as another aside, the neo-con leaning journal Tech Central Station recently published this essay by Max Borders. More on TCS later.
"That's great!" he responded. "Say that in the piece."
But how do I explain it, exactly? I haven't really been able to follow out all the little tangents that have come from it. Bryan is just one thread. The "prairie populist," a fascinating figure. I think my essay must be reminiscent of the book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, because a couple of my colleagues have mentioned it to me. I haven't read the book.
But fundamentalism isn't creationism, exactly. Karen Armstrong, in her book A Battle for God, described the particular strain of American protestant fundamentalism as "pre-millenial dispensationalism." The rapture and all that. It's Calvinist in outlook, I take it. Like the "Auld Lichts" in Scotland.
But the Scottish story, as I understand it, is specifically about the church-state divide. Scottish Presbyterianism had a longstanding feud with Anglicanism and "popery." They got so anti-authoritarian that once there was an established Church of Scotland, they couldn't stop schisming it. It seems to be a whole story of schism and unification, schism and unification. It makes me believe there was no real theological difference, just a pissing match over politics and who gets to pick the bishops.
Bryan said, "Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." And I empathize with that position. Swirling around the intellectual stratosphere at that time were ideas about scientific determinism and naturalism. "Free will is an illusion," it began to be postulated.
Existentialism, as I understand it, reacted to that idea and turned philosophy on its head, arguing that existence precedes essence. "We are," said Sartre, "the sum total of our choices." Nietzsche is blamed for saying "God is Dead." But my reading of the Gay Science is that Nietzsche put these words into the character of a madman, who says "What, after all, are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" For Nietzsche, Christianity was a slave morality. This was a grave challenge, to be sure.
Bryan was not defeated by Nietzsche or Darrow, however. He was defeated by William McKinley and the Republicans. Three times, he was defeated in his quest for the presidency. But the anti-evolution Butler law lived on for four decades after the Scopes Trial. The fact is that government cannot control truth, but it can control the public schools. This should not be used to short-circuit science. But perhaps politics is always a dangerous shorthand for philosophy.
This kind of covers the philosophical side of the Scopes Trial, but it is yet another tangental thread. The monkeys will have to wait.
update: as another aside, the neo-con leaning journal Tech Central Station recently published this essay by Max Borders. More on TCS later.