Blasphemy: Donald Trump and Kim Il-Sung

When I was in elementary school, I enjoyed listening to shortwave radio. I could hear some weird stuff. One transmission I heard was the English language service of RNK, Radio North Korea. This was back when the original communist dictator, Kim Il-Sung, grandfather of the current dictator, was in power. The female commentator said that Kim Il-Sung was “a genius of art, a genius of science, a genius of politics, a torch to light the darkened pathways of modern times.” Of course, no human could be all of those things, and all of us outside North Korea knew he was none of these things. I marveled that anyone could believe such statements.

But there are many Americans who believe such things today about Donald Trump.

Trump continues to say things about himself that no human should ever say because they are blasphemy. One website collected fifteen examples of Trump calling himself a genius or saying that he knew more about every aspect of the economy (jobs, banks, etc.) than anyone else. Trump also referred to himself as having “great and unmatched wisdom.”.

Even some Republicans are now beginning to question their blasphemous dedication to and worship of Trump. But I wonder if most Republicans will renounce Christianity and continue to worship Trump.

I have discussed Trump’s numerous blasphemies with others who know a lot about religion and history, and they agree with my assessment.

George Washington Carver: The Convergence of Art and Science

Many people were surprised that George Washington Carver painted flowers as well as studied them scientifically. But to him, art and science were both ways of approaching the truth, and there was no dissonance between them. Here is a scene from Linda O. McMurray’s book, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, page 302:

            [Carver] reached across the table for a tiny green herb. The soil still clung to its threadlike roots.

            “All these years,” the artist continued, looking at the weed in his hand, “I have been doing one thing. The poet Tennyson was working at the same job. This is the way he expresses it:

Flower in the crannied wall

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but it I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is...

            “Tennyson was seeking Truth. That is what the scientist is seeking. That is what the artist is seeking; his writings, his weaving, his music, his pictures are just the expressions of his soul in his search for Truth.

            “My paintings are my soul’s expression of its yearnings and questions in its desire to understand the work of the Great Creator.”

George Washington Carver

You have probably heard of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) as the early-twentieth-century Peanut Man who developed hundreds of commercial products from peanuts, and from other southern United States crops, in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. But these products were probably the least important part of his work, at that time and in his legacy today. He is also remembered as the black man who earned respect from whites who might otherwise have dismissed blacks as an inferior, perhaps uneducable, race. I have recently posted a video about Carver, filmed at his birthplace.

Carver had a brilliant mind for botany and chemistry. He was also a teacher whom his students loved, because he was humble despite his vast knowledge, and he cared individually about each student. He wanted each student to experience scientific discovery for themselves. While most science teachers today take this approach, it was uncommon in Carver’s day.

The fame was as much for his personal story as for his scientific work. He was born into slavery just before the end of the Civil War, then kidnapped. His owner got him back in exchange for a horse. After the war, George’s owner raised him as one of his own children. He struggled for years to get an education from whatever school would allow a black man to learn. He was the only black student at Iowa State University. His mentors there wanted him to stay as a faculty member, but instead he accepted a call from Booker T. Washington to join the Tuskegee faculty.

For much of his career, Carver labored in obscurity. Tuskegee president Booker T. Washington was impatient with Carver’s disorganized approach to college duties. Whenever Carver accomplished more, Booker T. Washington always thought of something more that he ordered Carver to do. At one point, even though Carver spent every waking moment working for the institute, Washington told Carver he needed to repair the bathrooms. Washington’s regimented and disciplined approach to everything conflicted with Carver’s slower and more thoughtful approach.

Then in 1921, Carver testified before the federal House Ways and Means Committee about all the food and industrial products that could be made from peanuts. The committee was interested because World War I had interrupted many imports into the United States, and they wanted to know what “home-grown” products we could have in the event of a future war. Even though these products ended up not being marketed, the committee was very impressed with this humble and brilliant man. From that point, Carver became a celebrity, and his fame spread worldwide.

Once at Tuskegee, Carver showed his ability to produce excellent work with almost no resources. Though he eventually had a lot of glassware for his teaching and research laboratories, he had literally nothing to work with when he first arrived. So, he found a whiskey bottle at the dump. He tied a string around the middle. He cooled the bottle in cold water, then lit the string on fire. The fire made the cold bottle crack in two. The top half was a funnel, the bottom half a beaker.

By the end of his life, Carver was receiving many prizes and worldwide recognition. Meanwhile, in American society, the legal rights for black people were becoming ever more restricted. After an initial period of openness after the Civil War, southern states found ways to prevent blacks from voting, and they ended up with almost no political voice. While Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were widely admired, most white people considered them individual exceptions from their otherwise benighted race.

Max Otto (see previous essay) quoted Russell Lord’s “deeply disturbing” book Behold Our Land. Lord wrote about the soil erosion, which ruined the livelihoods of poor farmers, that was going on “under the eye of a teaching and research staff of considerable distinction; and yet it all was, and is, by them completely ignored. They go right on teaching their geology, their botany, their zoology, their chemistry and physics, their archaeology, their Greek and Latin and English, with no thought or mention of the tragic transformation of the good green country roundabout.” Maybe Lord referred to the major universities, but George Washington Carver was the exact opposite of this disconnected academic lassitude.

Carver never sought fame (though it came to him) or fortune (which he had opportunities to refuse). He lived in a small room on the Tuskegee campus. Books were stacked floor to ceiling in the corner. He had a display case for his crochet work. Rocks and stalactites covered a table, and flowers crowded his window box. His personal space reminds me of my own.

I chose George Washington Carver as my favorite scientist in my recent book. The main reason was not so much because of his scientific research, which was creative but not of the highest quality, as for his motivation. He believed that scientific research at a university should prove directly helpful to the people living around it, and to the world in general. The inspiration of his peanut research (and also research on sweet potatoes and pecans) was to allow poor farmers to produce value-added products, at home, that they could sell for more money than peanuts. He also did research, and taught local farmers, about how to preserve soil fertility, so that they could produce more from each of their acres. This is also one of my main motivations in teaching and research. Like Carver, I am a mediocre scientific researcher, but my heart is in outreach to the wider community, opening their eyes to the wonders and practical benefits of science.

All this, despite the fact that Carver did not really follow what nearly every scientist in his day and today would consider good scientific method. That is the topic of the next essay.

Why I Cheered the Runners

I was about to leave my house and walk to my office one Saturday morning in October. I heard shouts outside and saw runners go down the street. (Not the sidewalk. In Durant, the sidewalks are in dangerous disrepair. So the street was closed by the police for the safety of the runners.) It was a community awareness and fundraising event. I did not know the background story of this event.

I still don’t. I decided that I did not need to know. The most important thing is, in my view, that this event was occurring at all. It was a wonderful example of altruism.

                                     

Altruism is where animals are nice to each other, and they both (or all) benefit from it. It is not necessarily self-sacrifice; it can be mutual benefit. And it is usually enjoyable. We humans not only have the instinct of being nice, but we enjoy it. The runners enjoyed running, their sponsors enjoyed donating money to the community benefit, and everyone enjoyed social interactions with their neighbors.

In Oklahoma, most people aren’t very good at altruism. Many of the Durant, Oklahoma altruists were involved in this event. But at least as many people in Durant are hostile toward altruism. They are hostile to their neighbors. They prefer to throw their garbage into their neighbors’ yards just to prove how hostile they are. (About ten percent of my garbage is what other people throw in my yard.)

So when I see altruism in action, I want to celebrate it. I was unprepared for this event, even though it went right past my front yard. But I stood out in the yard and clapped for the runners, none of whom I actually knew. And they thanked me. I got more “thank you” wishes in a half an hour than I usually get in a month.

Premature Optimism about Science and Religion in America

One of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the creationists.

In recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly believe them.

Instead, what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled “Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two (readable by subscribers only). More are on the way.

Eldredge allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

Philosophers Thinking about Science: Nothing New

Philosophers have been thinking about science for a long time. Some, like Karl Popper, focused their attention on how science should be done. But many others have thought about what the discoveries of science mean for the future of the human species. One of these philosophers was Max C. Otto (1876-1968), who spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin. Chances are that you have never heard of him. I ended up with an old copy of a 1949 book, Science and the Moral Life, which reprinted some of his previous writings. The pages of cheap paper are turning brown and flaking away. I’d better tell you about it now, before it is lost forever.

One of the most interesting things about the book was its cover. That perennial symbol of science, the chemistry flask, is divided in two. One half has roaring predators, representing the violent animal ancestry of mankind. The other half shows a 1940’s family looking into the brightness of the future: A tall man, his slightly shorter wife behind him, and the two kids, so so blond, the brother slightly older than the sister. It is clear that science, and the philosophy that unveils it to our understanding, is the key to future happiness. Something that looks like a heart is flying away to the upper right.

This book follows in the tradition of other popular works of philosophy, such as Philosophy Made Simple: Everyone has a philosophy. You might as well think about your philosophy, because if you don’t, you might end up with a bad one. Like Philosophy Made Simple, Otto wrote in clear and powerful sentences.

Otto begins by asserting that human nature today is not what it was in our bestial ancestors: “Man is what he is, not what he was.” Evolutionary scientists today dispute this, pointing out that beasts are not always “bestial.” But, regardless, we all agree that humans have some degree of control over how we think and act—over the development of our human nature. But Otto does have a point: “Man is capable of doing and suffering in a way that his animal brother is not. He is tortured by fears and lured by hopes to which the ape is stranger. No ape brews the venom of human hatred nor does he transform passion into love. Apes speak no language, accumulate no tradition, never see the tragic or the funny side of things.” Modern scientists may dispute these last assertions, but not much.

Otto continued. To Francis Bacon, all science had to have a practical purpose. “The idea in Bacon’s mind was simple and clear. It was to domesticate the untamed forces of nature as wild horses had been domesticated; to put them into harness, hitch them to the human enterprise, invite mankind to climb in and ride away to wealth, health, and felicity.” That is why science had to be brutally honest: “It is designed to lay bare the truth, no matter what it hurts, whom it hurts, or how it hurts.”

Many people have said (I was probably one of them, somewhere back in my flotsam of publications) that all roads of sincere inquiry lead to the same place, which some people call God. Otto said, regarding this, “I say frankly that this seems to me plain hocus-pocus...How would it sound if you put it this way? No one can tell where your road leads to; no one can tell where my road leads to; which proves that they both lead to the same place. You and I are fellow travelers who refuse to stop anywhere but in the city the whereabouts of which are unknown. Hence our slogan must be... “Step on the gas!”

In order to let science lead us into a better future, Otto claimed, we have to let go of traditional religion. In 1943, he wrote that religious forces are taking advantage of our confusion. “The springtime of our church religion dates back many hundreds of years. The thirteenth century was its summer. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the bronze and the yellow of autumn. From 1859 on [he just assumed his readers knew this was when Origin of Species was published] the oaks joined in the pageant, and industrialized science was the cold November rain.” Religion, Otto claimed decades earlier than John Shelby Spong, must change or die. Religion has no more facts to give us; only science can do this. We cannot go back to not knowing what we know now, back to the simple faith of the past. For religion and science to coexist, Otto said, religion must become pure feeling, without doctrinal assertions.

Max Otto, emerging from the crisis of World War I and observing that of World War II, dared to hope that science would lead to a new world in which our old, destructive ways of thinking would be extinct. How wrong he was! He wrote, “Pure tribal spirit has been outgrown, and the trend of human emotions is away from it; so distinctly away from it that the outstanding temper of our day may be said to be the audacious hope [my emphasis] of re-creating the world in the interest of all mankind.” He wrote those words in 1924. How disturbed he would be to see the ethnic selfishness that now rules our thinking, especially by those who hate the memory of Barack Obama, one of whose book titles (The Audacity of Hope) looks like it emerged directly from Otto’s quote!

Alas, in contrast to Max Otto’s assertions, we will be animals forever and we have to learn to make the best of it.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

We Can Only Hope History Does Not Always Repeat Itself

On June 30, 1934, Rudolf Hess said, “One man remains above all criticism, and that is the Führer. This is because everyone senses and knows: He is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in a surrender to the Führer.”

All you have to do is substitute “Trump” for Führer, and remove the reference to National Socialism, and you have the very sentiments of Trump’s followers today in 2019. Not, of course, of most Americans, or even most Republicans, but of Trump’s true believers who may be willing to do for Him what the Nazis were willing to do for the Führer. Remember that the Nazis had the same human nature as the rest of us.