Author: Ophelia Benson

Did you listen to Gene Sparling telling the story of seeing the Ivory Bill? Do, if you haven’t – it’s a real treat. Apart from anything else he’s funny as hell, in a marvelously relaxed leisurely drawling way. I first heard it by accident, I turned the radio on at random and in the middle, so didn’t know what it was at first, some guy talking about being out in the woods and what a remarkable place it was, I wasn’t paying much attention until he started talking about a bird – and then when he said ‘I thought “that’s the biggest pileated woodpecker I’ve ever seen”‘ I was galvanized and began paying very close attention indeed.

And it’s not just a good story, it’s also interesting epistemologically. It’s kind of a black swan story, kind of a story about falsification, and the difficulty or impossibility of being sure of a negative. It’s about the fact we’ve talked about here more than once: the fact that not having found X does not necessarily mean there is no X to find. It could mean that, but it could just mean you haven’t found it. And it can be very very difficult to know which.

Because Sparling wouldn’t let himself think he’d seen what he suspected he’d seen, at first – in fact for quite awhile. Why? Because he didn’t want to be ridiculed as a loony, a Big foot finder, an alien abduction believer. And he thought he couldn’t have seen what he thought he’d seen. But actually, on consideration, the possibility that it was what he thought it might be except that it couldn’t be (because Ivory bills are extinct, he said solemnly, they’ve been extinct my whole life) is really not nearly as far-fetched as either Big foot or alien abductions. And Big foot, in turn, is not as far-fetched as alien abductions. So there’s a scale of far-fetchedness here: 1, 2, 3.

Here’s why the Ivory Bill possibility is not in Big foot territory, at least in my view. 1) It was last seen in the ’40s, which is only six decades ago – not a very long time. 2) There are some swampy hard-to-navigate places in its old range where people wouldn’t have seen it if it had been there. Those two things are enough, really. Not to make it likely that it wasn’t extinct after all, but to make it not absurd. As Sparling was persuaded. The only mention he made of the bird he saw at first was a posting to a message board of his canoe club, where it was his custom to post notes on trips. He said he’d seen a very odd pileated woodpecker, which was very large, and had the black and white colouring on his wings reversed. People in the know would know what that meant – but he didn’t say it in so many words. And that’s all he said and all he intended to say – but another canoe club person emailed him and said ‘Gene, you have to do some research on this, you have a responsibility.’ So he did. And what’s interesting is that the research told him what he hadn’t known: that the bird’s known range included Arkansas, where Sparling had seen his bird; he had thought it didn’t, that the range was in Texas but not Arkansas. Once he learned that, the possibility seemed less outlandish – so he went ahead and risked being seen as a wacko.

But there it is, you see. No one had seen an Ivory Bill since the ’40s – but there were Ivory Bills there, all the same. No one knew there were, but there were nevertheless. That’s how it is.

Yes, truth does matter, but it can be a hard slog sometimes convincing people of that. An American studies teacher offers some illustrations.

O’Brien violates old novelistic standards; his book is both fictional and autobiographical, with the lines between the two left deliberately blurred. My students adored the book and looked at me as if they had just seen a Model-T Ford when I mentioned that a few critics felt that the book was dishonest because it did not distinguish fact from imagination. “It says right on the cover ‘a work of fiction’” noted one student. When I countered that we ourselves we using it to discuss the actual Vietnam War, several students immediately defended the superiority of metaphorical truth because it “makes you think more.” I then asked students who had seen the film The Deer Hunter whether the famed Russian roulette scene was troubling, given that there was no recorded incident of such events taking place in Vietnam. None of them were bothered by this.

Well I’m bothered by the fact that none of them were bothered. I’m not surprised, but I’m bothered. It’s funny, too, because we’re always being told how ‘media-savvy’ the current generation is (we’ve been being told that for several generations now, I think), and how good they are at seeing through the ploys of hidden persuaders. I’ve never believed a word of it, and Weir’s account hints at why. I’ve talked to too many people who are serenely unbothered by falsehoods in historical movies, who say cheerily that movies are movies, they’re not supposed to tell the truth, that’s not their job, their job is to entertain, if a rewriting of history makes the movie more entertaining, then that’s what the moviemakers have to do. Everybody knows it’s just a movie, is usually the clincher. But that’s bullshit, of course. Just because everybody ‘knows it’s just a movie’ doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t also ingest some (or all) of the falisfications and believe them ever after.

If all these tv generations are so media savvy, why have they apparently never heard of propaganda? The Triumph of the Will is just a movie too; so what? People tell lies during wars and the lead-up to wars; lies about what the North Vietnamese did or did not do mattered a great deal in the real world; Weir’s students should have been bothered.

I mentioned John Sayles’ use of composite characters in the film Matewan. They had no problem with that, though none could tell me what actually happened during the bloody coal strikes that convulsed West Virginia in the early 1920s. When I probed whether writers or film makers have any responsibility to tell the truth, not a single student felt they did.

Matewan is a good example. There’s a very good book about this whole subject, called Past Imperfect, in which a number of historians and other scholars (Steve Gould for instance) discuss the veracity or lack of it in a number of movies. John Sayles and Eric Foner talk about Matewan – and much as I like Sayles, I think he’s wrong about this and Foner is right. I think movie makers do have a responsibility to tell the truth – partly because movies are so very powerful, and have such searching and longlasting effects on our mental furniture.

My O’Brien class came through when I taught the concept of simulacra, showed them a clip from the film Wag the Dog and then asked them to contemplate why some see disguised fiction as dangerous. (Some made connections to the current war in Iraq, but that’s another story!)

Anybody who doesn’t see disguised fiction as dangerous is mad as a hatter, if you ask me.

La lutte continue, as the saying goes – the struggle continues. Education can be a slow process, and as we’ve seen in the US lately, it can turn around and march smartly backwards. People can make resolute, determined efforts to become more ignorant than their parents, and to make their children more ignorant than they are themselves. People can also make resolute efforts to have it both ways – to live on technology and the safety and comfort it brings, while at the same time scorning the rational ways of thinking that technology depends on. There’s something a little contemptible about that – but so it goes.

James Colbert has been on the frontline of America’s culture wars for 20 years but his hoped-for final victory of reason over faith is not yet in sight. Now an associate biology professor at Iowa State University, he has found since he started teaching that about a third of the students beginning his introductory course are creationists, in many cases with no knowledge of evolution at all.

That’s students at university level, in a country which has laws about mandatory education for all children through the age of sixteen – yet a lot of them manage to slip through with no knowledge of evolution at all. Because education can go backwards.

While trying to tread softly to avoid offending their sensibilities, he has increasingly had to defend his faculty and scholarship against what he sees as a far greater threat – the incursion into science faculties of backers of “intelligent design”, the belief that evolution is so complex that some higher force must be behind it.

That’s a threat? Science faculties being infiltrated by ‘backers’ of unscience? Of nonscience, of antiscience? Gosh, how could that be a threat?

Prof Colbert says most scientists ignored such arguments as coming from a lunatic fringe until August when President George W Bush backed teaching i.d. alongside evolution. Alarmed at what he saw as the growing influence of some i.d. supporters in the science faculty, Prof Colbert drafted a petition condemning “attempts to represent intelligent design as a scientific endeavour”. In response more than 40 Christian faculty and staff members signed a statement calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms and to allow them to discuss intelligent design.

‘Calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms’ – meaning what? Their basic freedom to teach nonsense? Is that a basic freedom, and is it a basic freedom that they have? Does a French teacher have a basic freedom to teach a mixture of Farsi, Tagalog and gibberish and call it ‘French’? Does a history teacher have a basic freedom to teach that Hitler fought the battle of Trafalgar in 1217 and thereby won the freedom of Papua New Guinea? Does an engineering teacher have a basic freedom to teach that precision really isn’t all that important when it comes to bridge building, lighten up a little? Do teachers have a basic freedom to teach any old balderdash to their captive students? I would have thought they didn’t. And then, there is surely a difference between ‘discussing’ intelligent design and claiming that it is a scientific endeavour, and there is also a difference between condemning something and forcibly removing someone’s freedom to do it. In short, the Christian faculty and staff members seem to be resorting to the much too familiar tactic of claiming to be oppressed and repressed and unfairly treated.

But – we keep endlessly circling back to this – education is education. It’s not education if it traffics in falsehoods, it’s something else. Educators don’t have a ‘basic freedom’ to teach any old fool thing they feel like teaching. They have academic freedom, yes, but it’s not infinite or absolute – it doesn’t cover outright raving. Once a teacher starts dribbling and talking to phantoms, the issue of freedom is overtaken by the issue of competence. Or at least it should be.

There’s an intense discussion going on at Panda’s Thumb, on a thread of PZ’s that links to the comments by Dawkins and Dennett here – and now a new comment by Paul Kurtz. It’s that ‘should we shut up about religion or not?’ question. No we certainly should not, is my view, you will be calmly unamazed to hear. I tried to say it there only to be told I wasn’t allowed to comment. Because – what? I’ve been banned? I don’t think so, I think it must be a kink of some sort. Anyway I thought I wouldn’t waste my comment, so I’ll put it here. (At least I’m allowed to, here. It’s my Monopoly game and I can put ten hotels on Boardwalk if I want to.)

Well, another way of adding up the score is to point out how much deference to religion and religious beliefs there has been in US public discourse in the past few decades, and then noticing where that has gotten us. The expression ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ leaps to mind. The more atheists and rationalists and defenders of the Enlightenment defer and bow and keep silent about religion, the more aggressive and truculent and self-pitying religious believers seem to get. Why is that? Could it be, say, a sense of entitlement? If so, could it be time to give up on that approach and get real?

That seems to me to be how it is. We’re always hearing that forthright atheism will frighten a lot of people off, and maybe it will, but what has the opposite done? It seems to me it’s given a hell of a lot of people the idea that there is just no such thing as enough respect for and deference to ‘faith’. If no deference is ever enough (short of actual conversion and joining the godpesterers, and I won’t do it, I won’t I won’t I won’t) then why not give it up and tell what we take to be the truth? At least that way, we get to tell the truth, instead of doing all this creepy smirking tiptoeing around and apologizing for not believing fairy tales.

So good luck to PZ. I’d stand shoulder to shoulder with you, but silly old PT won’t let me.

It’s time this kind of story got more attention than putative alienated [male] yoofs.

…a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values. For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology…In the crowded immigrant suburbs ringing Paris, the scene of recent riots mostly led by young Muslim men, high school teachers say girls are the most motivated students because they have the most to gain.

Which is probably part of why they’re not the ones out setting fire to buses with people on them. Another part may be that many of the aggrieved yoofs setting the fires are the very people the studious girls want to escape.

In interviews in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, young women repeated this belief like a mantra: studying offers an escape from the oppressive housing projects, from controlling young Muslim radicals and from strict social codes enforced by fathers and brothers.

Escape from controlling male relatives, basically.

At the Islamic University of Rotterdam, a small group of theology students, most of them speaking Dutch but all tightly veiled, chatted after classes about the need to end the social segregation of men and women. “In class, we sit anywhere we choose,” said a student who gave her name only as Aisha. “In the mosques, we don’t want to sit in separate or hidden spaces.”

And maybe eventually they’ll also be able to escape that tight veiling – which is, of course, simply a portable social segregation of men and women, a portable separate and hidden space.

As educated Muslim women assert themselves, they appear to be forging a strand of Euro-Islam, a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe.

Best of all would be not to have to worry about reconciling the principles laid out in the Koran, but a hybrid Euro-Islam is much better than a non-hybrid.

Women are also often at the forefront of liberal tendencies among Muslims, publishing critiques and studies about the obstacles and abuses women face. In Germany, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer, and Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born sociologist, have recently published books that have been read widely on the oppression of Muslim girls by their own families…As Muslim women take advantage of democracy and civil liberties in Europe, the question remains whether the impact of an educated minority will be continually blunted by the arrival of often poorly educated young brides from North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East. And as Europe rethinks its faltering integration policies, the place of Muslim women is a new target of scrutiny. Critics, including immigrants themselves, argue that in the name of respecting other cultures, Europeans have allowed the oppression of Muslim women in their midst.

Just so. That ice floe is beginning to break up, but slowly.