Joseph Sobran
IS DARWINISM FIT TO SURVIVE?
WASHINGTON -- I've been watching the
reaction to the decision of the Kansas state
board of education to make the teaching of
evolution optional in public schools.
The liberal side has been furious to the verge of
hysteria. It attacks the board and the Christian
Right as if they had banned the teaching of
science. But it doesn't address the merits of Darwinism itself; it
merely assumes that Science Has Spoken and that we all have
a duty to submit.
The conservative side has concentrated on the difficulties posed
by the theory: Where is the fossil record of intermediate
species? How can a lower form of life beget a higher one?
How can mutations -- understood as benign birth defects -- be
genetically transmitted, to the point where a line of apes
eventually produces a Mozart?
The liberals seem less interested in teaching kids to think for
themselves than in giving Darwinism a monopoly of authority.
The kids must understand the bottom line: Human life can be
explained in purely materialistic terms.
Our liberal overseers have long since decided that religious
teachings have no place in public education. While Darwinism
is mandatory, religion is not even optional: It's
"unconstitutional."
But in almost every known society, education has meant
initiating the young into the heritage of their ancestors. The Jews
taught their young the story of the Chosen People; Christians
did the same, adding the story of Jesus; the Chinese taught the
wisdom of Confucius; the Greeks and Romans taught the great
myths of Olympus. Education has always meant more than
instilling knowledge; it has also meant cultivating the moral
habits necessary to continue a tradition.
One of the marks of tyranny is its desire to cut the young off
from their ancestors. The tyrant doesn't want his subjects to
judge him by either historical memory or immutable moral
standards; he wants his own word to be law. Modern tyrants
have usually promoted literacy, not because they favor true
education, but because schools can be used to produce the
kind of citizens they want.
This is why the communists in Russia banned and persecuted
Christianity, while rewriting the history books to impart the
lesson that communism was the highest stage of history. The
Chinese communists not only banned Confucius, but adopted
the Roman alphabet so that the young would be unable to read
the ancestral wisdom that was preserved in the old ideograms
-- in effect making the heirs of an ancient civilization illiterate.
The totalitarian state can't tolerate rival sources of authority.
Our "liberal" regime is not so different from the communist
regime. Liberals have generally found much to praise in
communism, meanwhile deriding anti-communism. They share
communism's materialist philosophy, its hostility to religion, and
its ambition to use the state to transform traditional society.
Secularist education is part of the liberal agenda, and Kansas
has given it a bloody nose by stripping the theory of evolution
of its hitherto privileged position in the curriculum.
Christian parents have correctly intuited the hidden agenda
behind so much state education. Their children have been
weaned from Christian culture and taught a godless cosmology
in the guise of biology. Through sex education, in which
aggressive advocacy masquerades as knowledge, the public
schools have also undermined Christian morality. They need
not attack Christianity frontally; they merely have to keep the
young ignorant of their Christian heritage. And they do this very
well.
The battle over evolution and religion is really a battle between
state and parental authority. The obvious way to resolve it is to
cut the state out of education, making all schools private.
Parents who really wanted their kids to absorb the Darwinian
philosophy would be free to have their own schools; Christian
parents would have their own schools too.
What would be different? Obviously the statists would lose
their privileged status and their huge captive audience. They
would be forced to compete on equal terms with people they
prefer to rule as intellectual serfs. It's odd that Darwinians
should be so afraid of competition!
But the state has no business controlling children's minds.
Making education private would be a giant step in keeping with
a great American tradition: decentralizing power.
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