This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
Ah, I remember the 1970s. Chopper bikes, tangerine cushion covers, hessian up the walls, ABBA on Eurovision and The Tiger Who Came To Tea (check out Sophie’s Mum’s dress sense and you’ll see what I mean).
But one of the highlights was David Attenborough’s magisterial TV series Life On Earth which came out in 1979, the same year as that other life-changing phenomenon, Margaret Thatcher.
Life On Earth was important because it presented unimpeachably magnificent footage of creatures in the wild, many of them seen only rarely (let alone filmed). Attenborough followed this success with a host of similar series such as The Living Planet, The Life of Birds, The Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores, The Trials of Life and others, each and every one a televisual milestone.
Attenborough was (and still is) a broadcaster who commands significant respect. Why? Because he takes a back seat in the proceedings. Ever the kindly and succinct narrator, he lets the remarkable natural phenomena he brings to the screen speak for themselves. Here it is, he seems to say, the amazing diversity of the natural world – against which the opinions of anyone, including himself, count for very little.
It is this self-effacing approach that makes the episodes in which he appears to take part all the more arresting (such as the sequence of him with a family of gorillas, memorably sent up by Not The Nine O’Clock News).
This – his self-effacement – makes it all the more shocking that Attenborough has received hate-mail from Christians (HT Maxine, via FriendFeed). Now, one can well understand why my great friend PZ Myers gets hate mail. One can understand why He Who Must Not Be Named gets hate mail (and were I less restrained than I am, I might actually have written some of it.) After all, these are people who make capital from an aggressive and uncompromising approach to religion, and as these fine gentlemen no doubt realize, if one can’t stand chicken shit, one should keep clear of Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM, Cromer’s first egg-laying rabbit. But David Attenborough?
Writing to David Attenborough to say he’ll rot in hell is to traduce a national institution, rather like masturbating in front of the Queen, or burning scripts of The Archers in public. One can only ask what the senders of such hate-mail expect to achieve by this crassness – they certainly have little idea of how to win friends and influence people. Given my general attitude of tolerance towards (and even participation in) religious activity, you might expect me to sympathize. But I don’t, and such stupidity only hardens my hawkishness towards creationists, causing me to shout post-ironic slogans from the rooftops such as Mit der Dummheit kaempfen die Goetter selbst vergebens (go on, look it up – no, Martin, not you.)
And whatever else it does, it shows that there is simply no reasoning with these people. There’s no point. Creationists are simply the occupational hazards of life, rather like herpes; the depressing frequency with which Gee Minima comes home from school with head lice; sitting in exactly that place on the bus where some oik has parked his used gum; or the fact that no matter how vigorously one shakes it about, a drop of precisely 0.617 microlitres always remains on the end (users of Gilson™ pipettes will know what I mean).
They (creationists, that is) are quite beyond argument, and possibly beyond help. This is why I generally don’t get involved in debates with creationists – the effect is rather like trying to spray someone with a hundredweight of cold porridge in the teeth of a very strong gale (matinee on Wednesday, in the Town Hall if wet).
One likely solution, I think, apart from the porridge, that is, or maybe the gunge that oozes out from underneath my socks crocs compost heap, is to laugh at them. Extremism of any kind loathes being laughed at. That was the point of Umberto Eco’s book The Name Of The Rose (Now A Major Film) – how people who looked at a copy of Aristotle’s Comedies died, the book having been poisoned by a particularly humourless old scrotum of a monk. Yes, maybe that’s the answer: take fundamentalist bigots and kick them where it hurts – in their self-importance.
However, as a casual perusal of Pharyngula will show, humour may be fun – especially for those telling the jokes – but won’t change the minds of those that lack it, or who are unwilling to share in it. The reaction will be, at best, that creationists will strive to adopt an irritatingly High Moral Tone. HWMNBN’s combination of reason with shouting probably won’t work, either – the targets are not amenable to reason, and will probably react to shouting by shouting back, or simply ignoring the assault.
What is to be done? As you’ll expect, I have come up with an alternative strategy, one that will irk Christians especially, because they regard it as one of their USPs, for all that many of them seem to lack it altogether. And that’s this -
Pity
Creationists don’t deserve reasoned argument; they are immune to humour; but they are worthy of our pity. For me, it is unutterably pitiable and pathetic that human beings should seek to turn away from the wonders of nature, let alone their own, uniquely human (and perhaps God-given) gift for asking questions of the Universe, out of nothing more, when you get down to it, than fear. To bathe creationists in pity would, possibly, have the same effect as sprinking salt on slugs – they should be drained of all essential fluids, curl up, and die. Result.
Last updated: Tuesday, 27 Jan 2009 - 14:29 UTC
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Hate mail for Attenborough… what’s next, leaving flaming dog doo on the front porch of Jeff Corwin? It’s funny how most of them claim some moral high ground, but end up acting like the heathens they claim others are. It’s ironic in the same way as pro-lifers bombing abortion clinics. If they were really so superior, they wouldn’t have to stoop to hate mail against wonderful, kind souls.
I like the pity strategy. At least, nothing else seems to work.
Henry, I share much of your sense of
bewildermenthumour about these issues, but I’m left with a question of how much responsibility we have to get out there and spread the Good News. (It’s not even a rhetorical question)Imagine an interested, but uninformed party decides to check the internet for a reasoned discussion of Creationism vs Evolutionary explanations of the origins and diversity of life on earth. If they start by thinking “all that sciencey business is pretty unintelligible, I’ll check out the local church’s website, they seem like a friendly bunch”, they may end up with a horribly biased view of what’s going on.
If we (as promoters/adherents of an evolutionary explanation) take the time to visit websites/blogs devoted to this discussion, and explain cooly and clearly why we think the evolutionary explanation is more useful and complete than a supernatural one for describing origins and diversity, it will certainly reach an interested audience.
Many online fora descend into slagging matches, which don’t help either side in the “debate”, but we probably have to evangelise as much as the opposition. After all, we have a heap of robust scientific evidence on our side to help convince the evolutionary heretics out there.
Attenborough isn’t the only one that gets it from them. Some of them at least go out of their way to dance on the grave of that spawn of Satan … C.S. Lewis. Here, for example:
http://www.blessedquietness.com/journal/homemake/cslewis.htm
Off topic, but d’ya get much gorilla poo that isn’t used?
@Cath ; Yes. All the gorilla poo that isn’t recycled through a golden retriever.
@ David; Christians having a pop at Lewis? The world’s gone mad.
Seconded! Though I’d add t hat for those of us who were lucky enough (<—sarcasm) to be brought up by whole communities of creationists, they are not occupational hazards of life but simply hazards of life full stop.
Reminds me of the logic of the rabid anti-abortionists, who in the US have actually killed health workers in pursuit of their stance. “Er..some mistake surely, Ed?” they might think, if they had any brains.
@ Mike; I’m not convinced that there exist people who are inquisitive but have no formed opinion on the subject that they are willing to change by means of intellectual argument (ok, there may be a few but they’d probably be a very small minority). I’m also a bit leery about evangelizing – to me, proselytization smacks of either patronage or desperation. I think the nest we can do is simply make stuff available and tell people where to find it. That’s what we’ve done with our ‘15 evolutionary gems’ samizdat which you can download for free at the Nature website. Printnout a few, leave them casually on the bus or in the doctors or wherever. You never know, lives might be changed.
I’m learning not to argue with people that start off with ‘my opinion is the only one that really counts, because…’. I second Henry’s pity strategy. It might work – let’s try it.
Henry, in the USA Christians against Lewis is nothing new. If you look at that lady’s site. she names three men who died on the same day, and all of whom have gone to Hell: Aldous Huxlley, for trusting in himself, not God, “and his hybrid Eastern mystic notions”; Lewis, “because he invented a new God, and ended his life as a Taoist”; and … J. F. Kennedy “because he trusted in the Roman Whore.”
And she is far from alone. Now try persuading somebody like that that Intelligent Design may have a few flaws ….
Having messed with IDers at Uncommon Descent, I came to the conclusion that they weren’t persuadable, but that it was worth dealing with them and acting politely because you might persuade the lurkers who have popped in to see what’s happening. It’s the quiet lurkers who aren’t really engaged that we should be targeting (note: most are Christians, so PZed’s strategy of attacking the religious ain’t gonna help).
Alternatively, if you prefer immature mocking, pop over to After the Bar Closes.
As Eco has been dragged into this, the intellectual schemes of IDers seem to be more comparable to Foucault’s Pendulum, for those who have read it (to the end).
@ David: I did look at that web page – anyone who writes
is obviously mad. If Lewis is a tool of Satan, then goodness knows what she thinks of Darwin. What’s more, I don’t think that I’d dare persuade her: me, a Red-Sea Pedestrian, an Proud Of It, probably has horns and a tail as far as she is concerned. Laughing at such people will do no good. Neither will shouting at them. Reason is plainly out of the question. But one can pity them.
@ Bob: I did have a long, friendly and interesting correspondence with Jonathan Witt, an IDer who has repeatedly taken quite a lot of my own words out of context (in my book Deep Time). I wanted to get to the bottom of his thought processes. Well, the deeper I went, the more confused they became, but the main message I got was that the man was frightened – not of evolution in particular, but science in general, and its apparent capacity (in his view, if I understand it) to dehumanize. Something C. S. Lewis would have agreed with, I think. And still pitiable. One question these people do seem to respond to is ’I’m a scientist and I’m human too – what are you so frightened of’?
Henry, the process of that correspondence sounds intriguing! I guess it shows again that we’re on the right track ‘demystifying’ the science thing..
I’m not sure that the conversation changed anyone’s minds, but at least it was a conversation, rather than a string of insults or cheap jokes at someone elses’ expense.
There’s nothing harder than to make something understandable for someone who doesn’t want to understand it in the first place. So I agree that sometimes engaging in debates with creationists feels like a waste of time. What’s important, however, is to prevent that the general public (or even worse, actual policy-makers) comes to perceive both sides of the argument as equally valid (and that’s way too common on these days of exacerbated PC). Our rational arguments should be directed at them instead, while at the same time it would serve as well to avoid as much as we can being seen as arrogant and dismissive of other people’s opinion (that would mean falling squarely into the creationists’ trap)
There’s nothing harder than to make something understandable for someone who doesn’t want to understand it in the first place
Too true. However, I found that engaging in a conversation with a creationist most instructive. I suspect that Jonathan Witt was surprised that I was even willing to do this.
In the end, though, all one can do is present the scientific facts as one sees them, and asking people ‘out there’ to make up their own minds. A mistake, I feel, is to approach the problem aggressively – to proselytize – because that runs the risk of reducing oneself to their level. If the creationists then take one’s words out of context … well, I’ve learned that as much as this is hugely annoying, there isn’t really anything one can do. To demand that they retract their words, or stop doing it, might also be counter-productive in that they can complain that their ‘truth’ is being suppressed, or that scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy.
My conversation with Witt reached an impasse when he asked whether Nature would consider papers written from an ID perspective, or just dismiss them out of hand simply because of that perspective. My reply was that Nature is a scientific journal and judges papers without prejudice except that they should conform to the norms of science, which includes setting out the evidence in as unbiased a way as possible, and not selecting evidence that conforms to a preconceived theory (which is what ID does). But I really don’t think he ‘got’ it.