Great Question: Why Here?

Jon Margolis, writing in the Chicago Tribune, hits the nail on the head with this piece. It's a readable but fundamentally serious discussion of the cultural divides in America, and asks the important question: why does this happen here, of all places? Why would it be the United States, that most progressive of nations, whose Constitution was the flower of the Enlightenment, that rejects science and reason and takes a dive back into the Dark Ages?

He focuses on intelligent design and, of all things, hunting (you'll see), but we have the same issues in the sex-ed quarter, the lines are drawn along the same boundaries.

The problem with this piece is that I couldn't find any good place to cut it off. Usually there's some good stuff, and some junk, and I can condense an article for the blog. But here ... I just have to post the whole thing. I don't think you'll mind.

The flap over intelligent design poses a special quandary for us Americans. Our puzzlement has nothing to do with the merits of the intelligent design argument. There are none.

Instead, the question is: Why us? What is it about the United States that makes us particularly vulnerable to this particular foolishness?

It is largely an American contretemps. There are little flashes of it elsewhere, but they rarely rise to the level plaguing us here in the good old U.S. of A. Embarking on a trip to Europe recently, the head of the pro-intelligent design C.S. Lewis Society half-seriously described his destination as the "the dark continent," anti-Darwinially speaking.

Surely we are not more ignorant than foreigners. Our engineers come up with at least as many gizmos as Europeans, Asians, Canadians and South Americans. Our scientists win more than their share of prizes. Our universities attract the best and brightest from all over the world.

We do seem to be more religious than the Europeans. But there are lots of devout folks over there, and even more in Latin America, from whence come few debates over intelligent design. Besides, for a century or more, millions of devout church/synagogue/mosque-goers have found their faith untroubled by the reality of evolution.

Happily, we have a possible answer to our puzzle, courtesy of Ted Nugent, the clean-living, outspoken singer-guitarist and hunter.

A recent New York Times story described Nugent holding a bloody liver from a freshly killed deer and proclaiming: "Big bangs don't make this. God made that. Things banging don't make livers."

Forget for a moment that his outburst means nothing whatsoever. It's not the content that counts here, but the mood, which is angry and gets angrier as he proceeds: "Biodiversity is mine, environmentalism is mine. It doesn't belong to Pam Anderson."

Aha! An object for the anger, the artificially enhanced TV star who has supported People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal-rights group that opposes hunting. What seems to excite Nugent as much as hunting--maybe more--is antagonism to anti-hunting, not just the individuals and the organizations, but the mind-set.

Nothing else accounts for the anger. After all, there is no visible anti-hunting movement. Still, some hunters become infuriated about the mere existence of anti-hunting sentiment, impotent though it may be.

In their fury, they lash out at what they perceive to be the anti-hunting subcultures, and so they oppose whatever these folks might favor. It's a visceral, tribal distaste for "them": vegetarians, suburbanites who drive hybrid cars and disdain crudeness, New Agers, folk dancers and perhaps worst of all, people who speak French, drink martinis and go to the opera (full disclosure: That's me, but I'm pro-hunting).

Consider that Nugent also doubts that global warming is real. Global warming denial is not quite as unfounded as evolution denial. But it's getting close. The most plausible explanation for it is that some people--with some justification--resent the environmentalists, scientists and others who have been sounding the alarm on climate change.

So it isn't that Americans are more ignorant than others. We're just more tribal. Or maybe it's that we have to choose our own tribes, because we aren't one.

Almost everybody in France is French, and Sweden is chock-full of Swedes. All the French speak the same language, as do all the Swedes, and so did their ancestors going back centuries. Few of them are religious, but they stay away from the same churches, Roman Catholic in France, Lutheran in Sweden. They share both religious background and religious indifference.

Americans lack common ethnicity or religion, and while most of us speak the same language, our grandparents didn't. We get to choose our tribal loyalties and hostilities. Some choose one sociopolitical subculture to join, and others to find objectionable. Whatever the objectionable guys support is to be opposed, and vice versa.

From this perspective, Nugent and his fellow advocates of intelligent design are not really ignorant. Instead, they have made a deliberate decision to embrace ignorance rather than agree with people they find obnoxious.

Those people can, in fact, be obnoxious and sometimes base their own political opinions on their distaste for, well, people who are crude and go hunting.

So it isn't just that Americans are more tribal; we're also more childish. Well, maybe we'll evolve. Everything does, you know. Tribal America defends right to ignore facts

This kind of tribal explanation would explain why facts have been so unimportant in the discussion over our Montgomery County health curriculum. It has never really mattered what the curriculum actually taught, it only mattered that it was evil and undermined good family values -- well, it didn't matter that it didn't really do that, but it was sufficient to be able to say it did. The MCPS curriculum was a territory that was raided by outlying radicals, its ownership to be a symbol of the tribal victory of the Tribe from the Hinterland.

Sorry that didn't work out.