Here's to a Happy New Year in 2009
December 29th, 2008It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I can’t wait for 2009.
When the ball drops and the calendar changes at one minute after midnight this Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, I’ve got a feeling the world is going to take a dramatic turn in a better direction. I could be wrong, but I say change is good.
If what I’m thinking turns out to come true, 2009 may be the year the human species turns it all around and starts living up to a smarter, more positive destiny. Maybe we can begin to escape the yoke of ignorance and religious dogma once and for all.
For starters, there will be a massive celebration among intellectuals on January 20, the day when George W. Bush boards that presidential helicopter with his dog Barney and leaves the White House lawn forever to head back to that fake ranch in Crawford, Texas.
On the same day, of course, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. He will arrive in Washington, D.C., on a train, after riding a two-year campaign of “hope.” We will be drinking more than one toast to his victory on this New Year’s Eve, full of hope that he will be able to fulfill his promises.
The mainstream, corporate-news media will treat every proposal he offers with a fake skepticism, questioning whether he can really make a difference. But here in Webland, we are going to reserve judgment and keep hope alive.
In addition to coverage of the new world under Obama, we will be spending a good bit of time and space in 2009 celebrating a couple of noteworthy anniversaries.
You will not be able to escape coverage of these events, so you may as well learn about them here first, since few American news organizations have turned the page to these issues, yet.
For the next year, it will be hard to turn on the TV and not see something about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The year 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his myth-shattering book, On the Origin of the Species.
A column in the British newspaper The Guardian has the first story we’ve seen on this yet, and even acknowledges a fact you won’t see reported by any American news organization, since the religious backlash to Darwin is still powerful after 150 years.
According to the British author, it is reported that Darwin “is one of the three great intellectuals of the 19th century who shaped modernity, along with Marx and Freud.”
That would be Karl Marx, the social theorist who is attacked by the ignorant on a daily basis in the U.S. because of his association with socialism, and Sigmund Freud, who pioneered explorations of the mind known as psychoanalysis.
All three of these men had a profound impact on the 20th century, as much for their influence on other thinkers as for the ideas they published themselves. That’s what the uneducated masses and the anti-intellectual news media don’t get.
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| Glynn Wilson |
| I captured the legendary blue mist of the Smoky Mountains on film one day in 2000. This is not just fog. It emanates from the pine trees there and is the reason the Cherokee people called it “the land of the blue mist.” European settlers came up with the translation “the Smoky Mountains.” |
I spent a good deal of time in Tennessee in the late 1990s studying Darwin myself in a science-communications doctoral program, so you can bet we will be following these stories all year with a great deal of relish.
And speaking of Tennessee, the year 2009 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which means, of course, that several camping trips to one of my favorite places on Earth will be in order this year.
According to one of the first stories out on this subject in the Scripps newspaper in Knoxville, the mountains have been home for my ancestors the Cherokee for centuries, and for researchers, “the park is an 810-square-mile laboratory containing more life forms than any other comparable location on Earth.”
Of course there is still a serious question as to whether my home state of Alabama is quite ready to join the rest of the country in this new world, since there are some who are still trying to fight the final battles of the Civil War here.
Even my old friend and the best columnist still working for an Alabama newspaper, Tommy Stevenson, just had to fall for it the other day by putting up a blog post suggesting that the Ten Commandments Judge, Roy Moore, may run for governor in 2010.
OK, we know a majority of the population of Alabama might very well vote for this religious zealot and authoritarian personality, long before they would vote for the black guy, Artur Davis. So if Alabama wants to continue being the laughing stock of the nation, go ahead people. Vote for the dumbass.
If you want to live in the past, keep reading those print editions of newspapers where they still think Karl Rove is a genius and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was guilty.
Meanwhile, we’ll be spending more time this year in another Southern state, Tennessee, camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains and thinking about the accomplishments of Darwin and his predecessors in science. Come along for the ride if you’re interested. There will be amazing photography to go along with the stories, budget willing.
Here’s to hoping you have a happy New Year in 2009.
Comments
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December 30th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Of the three intellectuals cited by the British newspaper, two of them, Marx and Freud, are in my judgment much overrated.
While Marx was on the money with much, but not all, of his analysis of capitalism, he was way off the mark with socialism as the ideal replacement. He did not foresee what would happen to his ideology in the hands of people like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. He did not understand that any mostly-or-totally collectivized economy would always require an authoritarian or totalitarian state to maintain.
And Marx missed the fatal flaw that socialism features, namely the inability to determine the true prices of goods and services. Mises and Hayek, decades later, expertly documented that flaw.
The Austrian economists also showed why, at the roots, socialism, communism and fascism are variants of the same ideology. William Shirer, in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” illustrates that with a report about how, returning from Moscow after the agreement was made between Stalin and Hilter to divvy up Poland, top Nazis commented how much “at home” they felt hanging out with top Communists in the Kremlin. Indeed.
While Freud’s techniques of psychological evaluation have been shown to be valid, many of his conclusions have since been demonstrated to be simplistic, based rather largely in the Victorian mores prevalent in late 19th century and early 20th century Europe and America. Conditions he considered “illnesses” are today considered socially acceptable lifestyles.
Of the three, only Darwin remains relatively unshaken. Considering the state of scientific technology in 19th century, Darwin’s observations and conclusions are nothing short of genius. If anything, all subsequent scientific investigation has demonstrated Darwin was right on the money, even even though he lacked the extensive knowledge we have today of geologic history, fossils and DNA. Mistakes he made because of that can be easily forgiven.
Were someone to ask me to nominate the three greatest intellectuals of the last 150 years, Darwin would be one of them, but neither Marx or Freud would make my list. Darwin hit on the truth. Marx and Freud, although searching, did not, and can arguably be faulted with helping create much human misery during the ensuing 15 decades.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am
This demonstrates the fragmentation of knowledge and the specialization of thought of the past 150 years.
Your knowledge is limited by your reading list as much as the British reporter is limited by his. (Forget the Bush-Rove reading list being passed around in the news now).
I’m no expert on all of it either, but the point is, Freud and Marx influenced academic thought about as much as Darwin or Newton or even Einstein, though the latter three practiced in the hard sciences, while Marx and Feud were social scientists. If you were to spend some time in a communications, sociology or psychology department at a research university, for example, you would encounter Marx and Feud more than Darwin.
There is one field that literally draws from the modern descendants of Darwin and Freud, and that field is called evolutionary psychology. There was no study of psychology to speak of before Freud. Now there is an entire field of study that draws from them both.
No one in Alabama knows anything about any of this, because none of the colleges or universities in Alabama have an evolutionary psychology program. Sociology is almost non-existent other than the basic intro survey courses here.
This is quite odd, considering that one of the top scientists in the world who knows more about Darwin than anyone alive just happens to be from Alabama. His name is E.O. Wilson, and we’ve featured enough about him on this Website over the past four years to give people a basic introduction to his work. We will be talking about it more in the year ahead.
As for Marx, while you are more knowledgeable than the average Auburn engineer blogger on the subject, you are mistaking his political pronouncements with his social, theoretical work. As I indicated, it is this work that has influenced academic researchers in all kinds of disciplines and why he is always on the list of the most influential thinkers.
The knee-jerk reaction to his name in American capitalist politics and journalism is as offensive to intellectuals as the reaction from the Christian Right to Darwin’s early work on the theory of natural selection.
How long can ignorance be bliss? Until all the ice melts and were are all under water?
The point is the early thought from Marx, Freud and Darwin were as important as the early work by Newton and Einstein. We wouldn’t know what we know today without them.
For our purposes today, E.O. Wilson’s work is far more important, as is the Human Genome Project in a way, for that matter. But none of that would have occurred without Darwin.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
And arguably, Mises and Hayek and their disciples were, at least in part, prompted to their work by folks like Marx and his disciples, so your point is well taken. You are also right that Freud essentially created the field of psychology.
My point was about ultimate results. Both Freud and Marx were world class theoreticians and intellectual pioneers, no argument about that.
Marx failed to foresee that his theories, implemented by sociopathic political opportunists such as Lenin and Stain, would cause millions of innocent deaths and untold suffering for hundreds of millions more. As brilliant as he was, his failure to consider, or perhaps even recognize, that potential consequence disqualifies him from any list of the truly great.
And as for Freud: inventor of the field of psychology he may have been, but his own myopia in confusing zeitgeist mores with mental health also spelled suffering for many people.
Because of the ultimate results from their work, both Marx and Freud fail what I would call a rational standard of greatness, despite the groundbreaking nature of their seminal work.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
It’s The Guardian’s list, and the one I always heard about in the social sciences. I will be talking more about Darwin throughout the year. It’s his birthday : )
Maybe a visit to Dayton, Tennessee is in order, as well as the Smoky Mountains, eh?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Wonder if there’s a monument of some there to the Scopes trial? And if so, which side of the case is celebrated.
Dayton would be a great place to put up a statue of Charles Darwin. Likely we could raise funding for that worldwide.