Oct 24 2005
May I See Your ID?
The creationists’ back-door attempt to sneak their mythology into public education is called Intelligent Design. The issue is on trial as I write in Pennsylvania. The matter has been well covered by a number of publications, including The Onion which, as usual, has fair and balanced reporting. What a lot of the coverage has missed is the racism inherent to Intelligent Design (ID). That’s because the race card is kept hidden by both advocates and enemies of ID. Advocates of ID also try to keep the “G” word out of the discussion, too. But the canny critic sees through the veil. The argument goes like this. ID is racist because it is an argument for the design of complex systems. Some systems, though, are better designed than others. For instance, the Intelligent Designer did a great job engineering certain highly complex molecules. (This is one of the core arguments of ID, that biologically complex molecules must have been designed in toto, as they don’t function unless all the parts are there; this is wrong, but let’s keep going.) But the ID guy (white guy, long beard, you’ve seen him around, I’m sure) did a less than bang-up job on other complex systems. Take the eye (another favorite example of God’s, I mean ID-guy’s, fine work that advocates love to use as an example of a system to complex to have evolved): as one grows older the lens continues to grow while the muscle that shapes the lens (thus keeping the world in focus) does not. The result is poor vision requiring corrective lenses. See where this is going? Of course, most ID advocates do not publicly state that persons of color or gay people are of inferior design. However, readers of the “Wedge Document” are well aware that ID is part of a larger strategy to create a fascist and racially pure planet. The most blatant example of the racism of ID is in a book co-authored by Guillermo Gonzalez called Privileged Planet. The “planet” in question is Earth and the reason it’s “privileged” is because of its position in the galaxy. Gonzalez, an astronomer at Iowa State University, argues the because of Earth’s privileged position in the galaxy “we” have attained the greatest knowledge in the Universe, namely, the laws of physics. The laws of physics are great, I admit, but the privileging of them erases a wide variety of other knowledges on this planet. One of the simplest definitions of racism is “epistemological disenfranchisement”: that is, saying someone else is too stupid to be worth acknowledging as human. By arguing for the laws of physics as the highest form of human knowledge Gonzalez is engaging in epistemological disenfranchisement, i.e., racism. This is so because there are many ways of knowing the world. Physics, and the scientific method in general, is a fine way of knowing, but by no means is it the only one worthy of human endeavor. Indeed, Western epistemology may be far from the best way of knowing the world: “Philosophers such as Sloan (1992), Pearce (1971, 1974), Griffin (1989, 1993), Berman (1981), and Bowers (1993) have analyzed the core metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that provide the foundation of the modern mindset that have led Western societies to the brink of human and environmental disaster. At the root of this worldview is an objectivist position which holds that the subject and object are wholly separate and divorced, that the mind and body are essentially disconnected. Knowledge— or at least all legitimate knowledge — of the outside world is derived from sense experience and cannot come directly from intuition, inspiration, or spiritual insight. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we tend to live in a world of shadows where we substitute our representations of reality for reality itself, a peculiar way of seeing conditioned by the materialistic education provided by modem schooling. Socialization in modern Western society induces the separation of subject and object, and consequently the self is experienced as progressively more disengaged from the world. As a result, the self is isolated and reduced to a mere ghost in the machine” (Porter).
