Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s still cold in Chicago, but promises to get into the mid-60s this week—until the rains come on Friday and persist for several days. Fortunately, I’ll be in Vancouver then, where the weekend weather promises to be sunny and warm, in the mid 70s. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the animals are preparing for important activities:
Cyrus: We do not have a moment to lose.
Hili: Yes, we have to take a nap immediately.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Nie mamy chwili do stracenia.
Hili: Tak, musimy się natychmiast przespać.
But the circumstances are even more exculpating than him just reading an inappropriate poem to students. As The Daily Beast reports, he was more or less blindsided by it:
It was the kind of moment teachers covet. An Advanced Placement English class focusing on poetry, and a student brings in a poem that caught his eye, hoping to discuss in the waning moments of the period how the poet uses language in his work.
The teacher, David Olio, a 19-year veteran of the South Windsor School District and winner of Connecticut’s highest award for teaching excellence, didn’t know the poem in question, but he took a look and walked the students through it in the remaining time.
The poem the student discovered and brought in was “Please Master,” an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: “Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.”
Clearly, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” this wasn’t. But the students were 17- and 18-year-olds, some of whom were taking the AP course in conjunction with the University of Connecticut and receiving college credit.
One day after the class, Olio was placed on indefinite, unpaid leave by the district. Seventy-two hours later, the district began termination proceedings against him. Three weeks after that, he agreed to resign.
If you read the Daily Beast or the CNN accounts, you’ll see that this incident has severely divided the town, with many taking Olio’s side. I am one of them. Perhaps he made a misstep reading the poem, which after all is pretty graphic, and for that he was admonished for upsetting his students. The school superintendent, for instance wrote him this:
“It was irresponsible for you to present this poem to children under your charge,” she wrote. “Some of your students are minors, and you gave neither the students nor their parents any choice whether they wished to be subjected to the sexual and violent content of this poem. Moreover, some students reported being emotionally upset by having to hear this poem.”
And I can see their point of view. Had I been him, I would have either warned students (but maybe he didn’t get the chance, for he was simply presented with the poem), or asked them to read it on their own, letting them know it was graphic. Yet one can defend the poem, too, as a sort of metaphor:
In the series of poems written around the time of “Please Master,” Ginsberg was trying to explore every aspect of the human experience—intellectual, egotistical, spiritual, and sexual, no matter how messy or unpleasant. Like Walt Whitman, he was attempting to catalogue every aspect of the self, “even those we normally hide from ourselves in order to feel better and flatter ourselves and to make ourselves feel like important people,” said Steve Silberman, a San Francisco-based writer who was a student, teaching assistant, and friend of Ginsberg’s for 25 years.
“Allen thought that by bringing material into poetry that were previously considered unpoetic, he enlarged the poetic occupation,” Silberman said.
Read literally, the poem is about Ginsberg, presumably, describing his sexual abjection before a lover, in this case usually considered to be Neal Cassidy, a bisexual sometime lover of Ginsberg’s and the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But there are other readings. Silberman puts the piece in the long tradition of religious poetry that crosses all faiths and which involves a submission to a figure who represents the divine. It can be read, too, as a metaphor for a society that represses and marginalizes those who engage in the kind of acts described.
Well, maybe. Regardless, it’s just dumb to fire an award-winning teacher for reading a poem that one of his students gave him—a poem that he only just saw and didn’t have time to review. At best, he could have been reprimanded. But I worry that his incipient firing will keep other teachers from reading “challenging” poems to students. Given the nature of students these days, in fact, I don’t think this poem would shock many of them. Have a look for yourself and weigh in below.
The round of books and articles connected with Faith versus Fact continues, and I’ll highlight some reviews later as they come in. I recognize that readers may not want to look at all this book-related stuff, as some of it is repetitive, but I’m putting the links here for those who wish to know what is posted.
A while back, National Geographic kindly interviewed me for their “Book Talk” section, and has just posted my Q&A in an article called “In age of science, is religion ‘harmful superstition’?” I was grateful to appear in its pages, as this is not traditionally the kind of thing that National Geographic handles. But remember when you read it that it is the unedited transcript of a phone conversation, which explains why my answers aren’t in perfect prose. (Of course, they would have been were I Steve Pinker!) Here’s a bit of the Q&A (I’ve asked them to correct the spelling of T. S. Eliot):
Do you have a spiritual life? If so, what does it look like?
Spiritual is an amorphous term. I study evolution and every day I read something that strikes me as amazingly wonderful. If you call that spiritual, then, yeah, I’m spiritual. Richard Dawkins says the same thing. Spirituality can run the gamut from amazement at nature to a feeling that there’s something beyond the material universe.
But I don’t like the use of the word “spiritual” unless you define it clearly. I am spiritual in the sense that I have this awe and wonder before nature. I love James Joyce and T.S. Elliott, I’m moved by Dylan Thomas. It doesn’t have anything to do with God. It has to do with a commonality of feeling prompted by nature and the arts. So I prefer to use the word humanist rather than spiritual. The minute you say you’re spiritual, people automatically start thinking you’re religious.
*******
And Stephen Knight, aka “Godless Spellchecker,” had an hourlong conversation with me about the book—but also about other stuff, notably the idea of “trigger warnings,” whose discussion is at the end of the podcast.
Godless Spellchecker’s website is here; you may remember this blogger and podcaster as one of the people who exposed C. J. Werleman as a serial plagiarist (see here and here)—a fine piece of detective work.
Reader Chris sent me this graphic, which has apparently just been shared over 800,000 times on Facebook:
Now imagine the word “Christian” replaced by “scientist”. Such a person would be ridiculed as being close-minded and impervious to reason. Is refusal to examine counterevidence really something to be proud of?
48 of America’s 50 states have laws allowing children who attend public school to do so without being vaccinated—if they have religious reasons. In 20 of those states, you can also avoid vaccination if your exemption is based on philosophical reasons. Every other kid, save those with medical exemptions—compromised immune systems and the like—must be vaccinated, and for good reason. We know what happens when vaccinations aren’t required, and we’re starting to see those epidemics.
The two states that don’t allow either philosophical or religious exemptions from vaccination are, surprisingly, West Virginia and Mississippi. California is poised to join these two, as its state senate just approved a no-exemption bill by a huge margin (medical exemptions will of course still be allowed).
Vermont has just joined the Rationality Crowd, but they didn’t go whole hog. As reported in a New Yorker piece, “Vermont says No to the anti-vaccine movement”, by Michael Specter, Vermont has eliminated philosophical exemptions (but also recently mandated trigger warnings for GMO foods):
Just a year after Vermont became the first state to require labels for products made with genetically modified organisms, Governor Peter Shumlin on Thursday signed an equally controversial but very different kind of legislation: the state has now become the first to remove philosophical exemptions from its vaccination law.
The two issues are both emotional and highly contested. But Vermont’s decisions could hardly be less alike: the G.M.O. bill, which has enormous popular support, has been widely criticized by scientists—largely because no credible evidence exists suggesting that G.M.O.s are dangerous. The vaccine law, however, opposed by many people, is the strongest possible endorsement of the data that shows that vaccines are the world’s most effective public-health tool.
There was serious opposition to the bill by Vermont legislators, one of whom said this:
“There is something deep in the core of my being,’’ Representative Warren Kitzmiller, of Montpelier, said during the debate over the philosophical objection. “And it simply will not allow me to vote to remove a parent’s right to make this serious decision on what is in the best interest of their child.”
Parent’s “right”? What right is that? (I’m always dubious when talk of “rights” comes up, since bald assertion of a “right” is designed to quash debate.) Do you have a “right” to allow your child to become infected, and then go to school and infect others (vaccinations don’t always work), perhaps starting an epidemic? What “right” does a parent have to take away protection of not only their child’s well being, but that of other children? Do parents also have a “right” to refuse scientific medical care for their sick children because of their religious belief? (43 of our 50 states also confer some kind of civil and criminal immunity on parents who do that.)
The fact is that privileging unevidenced belief over medicine is not in the best interests of any child, and should be legislatively curtailed, whether that belief be based on religion or “philosophy”. (And really, what kind of “philosophy” mandates refusing immunizations for your child?)
Yet there’s another fly in the ointment. Vermont has eliminated philosophical exemptions, but not religious ones. That’s a general trend, for although 48 states allow religious exemptions from immunization, only 19 allow the same for philosophy.) In fact, here’s what Vermont governor Peter Shumlin said about the bill that he signed:
“Vaccines work and parents should get their kids vaccinated. I know there are strong feelings on both sides of this issue. I wish the legislation passed three years ago had worked to sufficiently increase vaccination rates. However we’re not where we need to be to protect our kids from dangerous diseases, and I hope this legislation will have the effect of increasing vaccination rates.”
But the same argument—vaccines work and protect children and society at large—holds for for religion. Although the majority of Vermont exemptions were based on philosophy (Vermont is the least religious state in America), there is no substantive difference, at least relevant to exemptions from shots, between religion and philosophy. Both are deeply held personal beliefs, and both mandate a code of conduct. The only difference is that in America religion includes, along with a philosophy, belief in a god, and often is based more strongly on faith and dogma than on reason. But why should that make one set of beliefs more worthy of respect than the other? After all, philosophy is based on reason far more than is religion, which most people hold simply because they were indoctrinated into faith by their parents.
The reason religious exemptions remain is that Americans have a strong—and unwarranted—respect for faith and belief in gods—a respect that, for reasons I don’t understand, exceeds that for other deeply held philosophical beliefs. It’s time to stop seeing faith as some kind of virtue, and recognize it for what it really is: beliefs that are not based on evidence, and for that reason deserve no “respect.”
Sadly, the New Yorker, which has always been infected with the Respect For Faith virus, doesn’t say a word about religious exemptions. Referring to Warren Kitzmiller’s statement that philosophical exemptions remove parents’ “rights,” Specter sees that as “reasonable” and refuses to proffer his own opinion:
That [philosophical objection to vaccination] is a reasonable position, and many people hold it. According to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, only sixty-eight per cent of Americans believe that childhood vaccinations should be required. Among younger parents, the percentage who object is even higher.
Data and science are obviously not the only issues that matter in this debate. But it’s hard to see how all rights can be equal: if parents want their children to remain unprotected from vaccinations, perhaps they should have that right. But should those children then be allowed near other students, in public places like playgrounds, or anywhere else where they could infect people with weakened immune systems? By removing the philosophical objection, at least one state has begun to say no.
In fact, data and science are dispositive in this debate, as the legislature of Vermont has recognized. I wonder if Specter thinks that parents should be allowed to refuse medical care (antibiotics, insulin, and so on) from children on religious grounds, as many religionists, like Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, do? After all, those children usually don’t pose a danger to anyone else. It’s telling that a magazine widely seen as the voice of liberalism is so afraid to criticize superstition, especially when it endangers children.
It’s an all-bird day today. First we have a series of shorebird photos by reader Damon Williford, who gives this information:
Attached are photos of some of the many shorebirds that migrate through southern Texas in April and May on their way northern breeding grounds. The exception of the Tricolored Heron and Laughing Gull which breed here, as does the Blue-winged Teal during wet years. This was the first time I’ve ever observed Wilson’s Phalaropes following a duck. I’m guessing they were gobbling up whatever invertebrates the teal stirred up. One of the great things about living in South Texas is that its on the verge of the Neotropics.
