School CAN teach creationism

Some nutjobs insist on harming the United States by keeping our children ignorant of science, as the New York Times reports.

The reporter writes that courts "prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design".* He is wrong (or should be). Schools can teach pretty much any topic they want. They can teach reading, writing, mathematics. They can teach band. They can teach arts and crafts. They can teach gym. They can teach civics. They can teach religion. They can teach history. They can teach politics. They can teach creative writing.

Let's compare history and creative writing. A history class teaches what happened in the past. It might begin with a section on the tools and methods of history and discuss some criticisms of mainstream history. And then it will move on to present history. A creative writing class might teach methods of writing and the characteristics of a good story. It might also involve reading a lot of pieces of creative writing and discussing them, or even writing a number of creative pieces and discussing those.

Creationism and science can be analogized to lots of different things. But I'll compare science to history and creationism to creative writing. Schools teach the science we have, not that science we wish we had. Schools can teach the creationism we wish we had, just like they can teach the creative writing we wish we had. Schools can't teach creationism as true, or as science, because it's not. But they can teach it as an example of propaganda, or creative writing, or politics. It can be studied and critiqued. It can even be taught as a historical phenomenon, as could, for example, the publication of 1984. But the contents of 1984 are not historical truth, and the substance of creationism is not science.

Schools can teach just about anything. In the right context.

* I like to put the punctuation outside the quotes because I'm not quoting that punctuation. It's my own.

Am I Getting Better, Or Is He Getting Worse?

Comedy Central's been running The Blue Collar Comedy Tour and all of its offshoots a lot lately. Those offshoots include The Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again (or something like that) and specials with each of the stars of the tour. I actually find a lot of it pretty dang funny. You have to say 'dang', because it's all southern themed humour. I have to add the gratuitous 'u', because I spent a few years in the UK and it just flies off my keyboard.

I'm particularly keen on Ron White, probably because he goes through a full flask of whisky (I leave off the 'e' because I spent some time in Scotland) while he's on stage. I just like that. And there's something about his delivery and his stories that just appeals. One of my favorites punchlines is also the title of his book I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability. It reflects an understanding of reality with which many reproductive rights advocates can identify.

Anyway, the point is, I actually had to mute him the last time I watched him each time he started to speak about his wife or ex-wife (who I believe are the same people). The gender stereotypes that pervaded his banter just rubbed me the wrong way and came off sounding a lot more like hate speech than like humour.

Am I becoming more attuned to how what we allow ourselves to listen to says about who we may allow ourselves to become, or am I just being overly sensitive?

knowledge and evolution -- asymptotitc understandings

It is easy to combine the notions of what is true with the notion of what humans perceive to be true. I believe that they are likely different, and that acknowledging and understanding that difference may help us in our efforts to discover the two related but different truths -- the actual truth and the human truth.

If we look at the natural world, the actual world, there is very little that is a matter of absolutes, as we perceive them. By absolute, I mean something that admits no qualification, at least not within a given context. For example, that 1+1 is the same as 2 is absolutely true (given a specification of what + means, and what mathematical system we're operating in, etc). But, in fact, this absolute truth is not an actual truth, it is a human truth. We have defined 1+1 to be 2. It is an attempt to model the real world phenomenon that if I have a thing, and take another thing, now there are two of them. But if I have one pile of rice, and I dump another pile of rice onto it, I don't actually have two piles of rice -- I have one bigger pileof rice. And although that bigger pile of rice is in some ways equivalent to twice the two earlier piles, there are many ways in which 1+1=1 (for example, the rice is no whiter) or the bigger pile is otherwise not at all the 'sum' of the earlier piles (for example, it is likely neither twice as high nor taking up twice as much of the surface on which it rests).

This does not discomfort or confuse us, at least not most of us. We are fully able to understand that combining two piles into one pile creates a pile with twice as many items, and that that's all we mean. The instances where it doesn't, where the items may react with each other, well that's because of physical and chemical properties of the items involved, and their environment, and the method of combining. We have theories and models and even laws or rules for all of these things. In other words, we understand that in the real world sometimes we have scenarios where combining, two things, even identical things, results not merely in two of those things, but sometimes leaves us only with one of them (for example, observing the lights are out and then observing again that the lights are out doesn't, at some level, mean the lights are doubly out), and sometimes it leaves us with something completely different.

Mathematicians have developed a broad field for modeling and codifying all of our observations. Most humans can't plow much of that field, and many of us probably can't even keep our balance in parts of that field even if we were to have a guide, but the mathematicians who work that patch of the field are able to grow a number of fascinating raw materials, and are able to provide chemists and physicists and biologists the resources to craft wonderful applications. Those scientists, in turn, generate ample amounts of byproduct that fertilize the field, and sometimes even help remove obstacles and thus expose further parts of the field.

But my point is not the analogy, my point is the cycle, the approximation. Mathematicians and scientists are developing human understanding. In many cases, the rest of humanity blithely accepts that these models run counter to our intuition, although it may be that over time our intuition incorporates these new models. But we are no longer as reluctant to accept models that are counter-intuitive as we were hundred or thousands of years ago -- relativity did not result in Galilean treatment for Einstein, and quantum theory did not have political ramifications for its proponents (so far as I am aware!).

In any case, we accept these developments. And we operate according to them, building computers, designing bridges, flying aircraft, mixing colors, growing food. We operate according to them because they are good enough. But we have always done this -- lived according to the extent that our knowledge was good enough. Pre-historic humanity did not 'need' to know that the earth was not flat, because they didn't travel vast distances and had little need to contemplate the issue. Eighteenth century humans did not need to know about quantum effects because they weren't manipulating material at atomic or subatomic levels. Of course, had they known about such things they might have used such knowledge, but it would be unreasonable to expect them to have it.

This does not mean that actual truth then differed from actual truth now. It's possible that human awareness or contemplation of the earth's roundness caused it to be round, and that our studying of antibiotics caused them to exist and have the properties they have, but I believe that actual truth is independent of human existence. That's not to say it's a static truth and that humans have no effect on it, but we interact with it and live within it -- think of us as fish in the ocean, at least in some ways.

What it means is that human truth evolves as humanity evolves. Whether it's due to the selfish gene, the selfish meme, or the selfish humanity, the point is that our sense of what is true is an approximation of what is absolutely true. It is probably an ever improving approximation, but it is also probably asymptotic at best.

That last point is not necessary, and reflects my belief that the universe is infinite and of such a nature that almost everything we currently consider impossible (i.e., contrary to human intuition and current human truth) exists somewhere (or did exist, or will exist) and in such a way that it does not conflict with current human truth but is revealed to be complementary to them.

For example, early human truth held that the world was flat. This was reinforced by the development of euclidean geometry, which dealt with planes and lines and, basically, farmers' fields. When planning trails, dividing acreage, and laying out buildings, it is perfectly sufficient to model a flat world (although it's a wonder theoretical non-euclidean geometry did not develop in societies that lived in very hilly country, considering the practical work they did on 'spheres'). It's only when we move to an era of global travel and where we consider the larger cosmos from a practical perspective that we realize that the earth is round(ish) and that lines we had long considered parallel will, in fact, converge. And that all lines of equal length must converge.

But locally, on my desk, in my town, even within my state, I have no particular need to make use of non-euclidean geometry. For any small enough subset of this non-euclidean world, euclidean truth is good enough for me. It is in that sense that I think human truth will always evolve and improve -- what we know hold to be universally true will often turn out to be a special case, or an approximation.

The result, of course, is that we have two very different truths. An actual truth that reflects reality in all its diversity, that encompasses all we understand and all we can't, and a human truth that is locally quite elegant but that displays jagged discontinuities and gaps. Without suggesting that actual reality is 'continuous' or 'smooth' in the way that humans thinks of those words, I do want to suggest a model of turning flat pieces of paper into a sphere. With one sheet of paper you get gaps and bends and holes. As you use more and more smaller and smaller pieces of flat paper to approximate the sphere, you get a better approximation. But it's never an actual sphere, not matter how good it is for us. This is the struggle of humanity to make human truth correspond to actual truth.

All of this is to set the ground for why we totally screw up in philosophy by constantly referring to human understanding and human intuition as a check against ethical theories.

can sell it but can't consent to it?

I was reading a 2006 Human Rights Watch report on New York State's juvenile facilities for girls (well, reading would imply a higher level of diligence than I was according it) and one passage caught my eye. It seems that an underage (< 17) girl in New York can’t legally consent to sex but can be convicted of prostitution.

If this is true, it's both ludicrous and fascinating. For starters:

• it implies that girls have sufficient ability to 'intend' to commit commercial sex (prostitution) but not to 'consent' to non-commercial sex. What on earth is the difference between intent to consent and why can a girl do one and not the other?


• it presents customers of the girl with twice the problem: presumably they can be charged with both statutory rape and with patronizing a prostitute


• it presents girls with any number of problems, two of which, off the top of my head, are:
• if she should become pregnant, acquire a disease, encounter abuse, or otherwise need help, a prostitute appears to be exposing herself to criminal charges. A 'normal' girl would presumably get any and all help that New York has on offer.


• she is conceivably in a vulnerable position vis a vis a statutory rapist. Assuming that a girl is raped, it seems that the rapist may use the threat of accusing her of engaging in prostitution to discourage her from reporting the incident
  

Anyway, just a few thoughts. Does anyone know anything about the reality of these scenarios?

A Random thought on the ADA and disability

I was reading an article that compared social and medical models of disability, advocating for a social model. I have some uninformed instinctive thoughts on the matter.

If we accept things as disabilities that are not medically debilitating (such as being a woman who had an abortion, or being gay, or being black) then in other contexts we risk reinforcing stigmas that we, as progressives and humans, would like to eliminate. I’d personally prefer an approach that required more precise definitions of medical disabilities and a focusing of the scrutiny on the medical establishment.

Perhaps it would be very utilitarian: an addressable disability for the purpose of employment and access is something that prevents you from doing a job, exercising a right, or taking advantage of a service that you are otherwise capable of doing without a change to the fundamental nature of the job, right, or service. The nature of reasonable accommodation would change as technology changes (think of the jobs that a severely dyslexic person could do now, 20 years ago, and 10 years from now) and the assessment of someone as ADA-disabled would not be a stigma-bearing one: it’s an assessment that in a particular context the individual could be fully burden-bearing and benefit-laden but for the nefarious action or lack of action by the denier.

Anyway, I’ve never thought about this before. Which made it perfect for my blog :-)

Jumping Right Into the Project: people first?

Where to start, where to start...? People make societies, and societies make people. Let's start with the very first two people (and then go back to why we shouldn't, but might be okay to do so). Adam and Eve. Imagine their appearance, simultaneous and spontaneous (now I imagine you can guess what's wrong with this presumption: evolutionary theory, even my vague understanding of it, postulates the emergence of humanity as it slowly differentiates itself. Honestly, I'll get there.)

My question is what do they notice about each other. Do they focus on their similarities, which are numerous? Do they focus on their differences, which are similarly vast? There are an infinite number of characteristics upon which they can base their relationship with each other: personality, treatment of animals, hair color, skin tone, height, bodily differences, sound of voice, body odor, leaping ability...

My answer to the first question is that they should notice all of it. That at some level it's both necessary and proper for us to be aware of everything we have in common and everything that differentiates us from each other. Basically, this is because I believe that knowledge is good. In a catalog of assumptions, that would probably be my first. I'm thinking that I should be careful with this, because I don't want to imply that the acquisition of knowledge is necessarily the trumping activity in life and should occupy every waking moment and every dream-filled night. But observing things and storing those observations is, at the very least, not inherently bad.

My next question is how they should use what they know. I think this is closely related to the question of how they should behave, although it has a different emphasis. I'm going to impose some more assumptions, because this is not a discussion in a vacuum, it's a thought exercise on how to get to a 'more ideal' world where I define ideal. I want these two people to be 'good' to each other. I don't want one to subjugate the other. I don't want the two to wander off and live separately. I want productive coexistence. My instinct says the response should be rational: what do we need to live -- food, shelter, babies. What do we want to have: better food, nicer shelter, toys, maybe pets. Well what's the best way to get them: you jump higher, you build better, you have a fabulous aesthetic sense, you have an amazing rapport with the wolves in the hills.

There are probably innumerable flaws in the model, some of which I've assumed away. But it's predicated on a cooperative rational model, where anger and frustration will eventually yield to compromise and progress. Even if the compromised solution is not the best solution if only it were considered, both people recognize that a compromise solution is better than no solution. And there's no forced integration -- if Adam and Eve want their privacy because that's what they like, then maybe the make each other separate houses, or separate rooms. What if one wants privacy and the other doesn't? Well there must be some other area where there interests diverge, and a compromise can be reached.

So I paint a happy picture of two people who don't notice their similarities or differences outside the context of those traits affect the ways in which they can productively cooperate. I like this.

I also think I'm pretty far gone from recreating what actually happened in the past (and that's why I think of this as normative, not descriptive). Humans evolved. And some humans were probably more animal like than others. And there was never a case of just being two people, completely rational and able to make decisions and express complex compromises. And all sorts of other things.

But I'm a dreamer.

The Nature of the Problem

So I'm a law student. And one of the people I sit next to in one class is one of the main bloggers at feministe (Hi Jill). She often says what I'm thinking with an eloquence and vividness that I wish I had. Sometimes, of course, we disagree. But she usually gets me thinking. And one of her recent comments reminded me that "the project" has at least two real problems.

The first is that many of our societal norms are simply sexist. These are obvious things, like the ability of men to walk around topless in situations where women can't. Or the availability of toilet facilities relative to the average amount of time it takes a man or a woman to use said facility. And speaking of toilets and bathrooms: the fact that many more women's rooms have baby-changing facilities than do men's rooms. And then we have things like pay disparities, and society's support for professional athletics, etc etc. This is not meant to be a litany of sexist practices :-)

Then there's the notion, I'll go so far as to call it a fact (but maybe that's open to dispute), that so many of our societal norms are sexist that our society is self-perpetuatingly sexist. Consider a non-sexist meme. By presumption, it's non-sexist, so it's not going to rely on stereotyped differences between men and women. Thus, some would argue, it can't affect the current balance of power between and societal conceits about men and women. On the other hand, the fact that it isn't sexist may reinforce the more general meme that non-sexism is good, and that may lead to change, but on the balance I'm going to say that it's a minor plus in the world.

But this meme is going to have to survive in a hostile environment. Power structures are made by the powerful to protect themselves, and we live in a structure that's gotten pretty sophisticated over thousands of years. Think of spousal abuse, or domestic violence, or whatever you want to call it. In the 1700's, and who knows how much earlier, husbands had the right to discipline their wives. To beat them, basically. Over the course of the next two hundred years, we slowly developed norms against that, and it's generally considered deplorable to beat your wife.

But.

Statistics show that battery laws are enforced more often and more vigorously against immigrants, minorities, and economically less well off people. The people that aren't in power. Police and prosecutors exhibit a lot of hesitation to make public crimes out of 'domestic violence'. Husbands can win the sympathy of judges and juries with stories of how the wife cheated on them, or how they simply didn't trust her, or how it was actually a fit of rage and not a coldly calculating power play. Women receive relatively little support from police, are often unsuccessful in citing a history of abuse or philandering by a husband, and generally have a much tougher row to hoe if they, god forbid, should take action to stop the abuse.

This is just one illustrative example. Yes, the meme that spousal abuse is bad has taken hold. But along with it have come memes that enable us to rationalize that abuse, to blame the victim, and to compartmentalize the problem of abuse as one that is confined to 'others'.

So that's the problem we have to deal with -- the fact that society is filled with sexist memes, and the fact that society seems to have an immune system that defends an overall sexist tendency. Another way of saying this is that there's an inertia behind power, a momentum. There may be some friction slowing down that momentum, but those with power tend to stay in power.

How can we make this different?

An Apology and a Plea from a White Satiated Man in a Black Hungry Woman's World

I'm white. I'm a man. I'm male (I definitely cry at sappy and not-so-sappy movies, and can get fairly emotional, so maybe I have some female aspects -- something to blog about later because I'm not sure about 'gender' and how it works). I'd call myself upper middle class because I own my apartment, but I think I have way too much debt to be upper class. Given that I'm incurring more debt and that my career path a public interest attorney does not lead to wealth and luxury, my hold on 'upper middle' may be a tenuous one. Of course, on a global perspective I'm incredibly well off.

On the other hand, I'm Jewish. And I have experience some antisemitism. But at least in America, antisemitism doesn't seem to often manifest itself in professional or economic discrimination.

All of this is to say that I don't have a gut feel for a lot of the implications of racism and sexism and classism. Even though I might be academically attuned to it, and even though I may have some aptitude or instinct for spotting it (perhaps most often after I've committed it), I don't have an inherent or societized sensitivity to it. Of course, I don't think this disqualifies me from theorizing about all sorts of discrimination and the way society works, but I'm curious about how it influences my perspective (I often wish that there was some way we could experiment with humans -- create identical universes, except we'd just change one thing about one person and see what happened).

Also, I'm ignorant of the deep history of a lot of the movements that I support and align myself with. So while I consider myself a feminist, and I oppose racism, and support the GLBT 'agenda', I'm not a scholar of those movements. If I offend, if I use a term of art inaccurately, or if I belabor an issue that's already been addressed, please let me know. I'm want to learn, and I want to help.

Ideal World: Starting My Thoughts

In my head I call it a post-feminist world. But that's probably already a term of art, so I'll need something else. It's also not nearly as broad as what I imagine, which is a world where organizations like the NAACP, NOW, and Lambda Legal Defense and Education are no longer needed, at least not in their current incarnations. It's a world where society, in its broadest sense, does not explicitly or implicitly discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, wealth, race, etc. It's a nirvana, basically.

But only 'a', not 'the'. And I've only described it in the most vague of terms, and only in the negative. I'm not really sure where to start describing what such a world might look like, and I'm afraid I may just delve right in and make many false starts. I welcome feedback and contributions from others, and I'm pleading for references and pointers to people and pieces that may have already done the heavy lifting in this thought exercise.

Over the next few posts I'll lay out some assumptions and thoughts about people and society, and see what develops as I write. I may also contemplate the question of how we could get to such a society from the one we have today, or if such a society is even possible or stable once attained. In a more realistic sense, and perhaps in common with other thinkers in this area, I may occasionally look at today's world and ruminate on ways it could be made 'better' and what 'better' means.

So that's my little project. I welcome your help and your comments. Or I'll just express myself and know that I've done it :-)