Today evolution, tomorrow burning witches.

Anti-intellectualism is nothing new in the United States. From Adlai Stevenson's moniker "Egghead" to countless science fiction stories of mad scientists and ridiculing of the "Ivory Tower," our culture maintains suspicious attitudes toward intellectuals. And why not? Anyone who has seen The Fog of War knows that part of the premise of that movie is that Robert McNamara was an egghead, an efficiency expert who knew how to crunch numbers to achieve goals, even if those numbers were bombs and bodies.

Leftists distrust intellectuals because, as Marx notes, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Or as Gramsci updates it, the intellectual class generally serves to legitimate the worldview of the dominant class. Conservatives distrust intellectuals because intellectuals tend to distrust received norms and values; after all, the nature of inquiry is to ask questions of things as we perceive them. For example, why are the ice caps melting?

Knowledge, it seems, is never free of ideology. "Pure science," unfortunately, simply doesn't exist, because we live in a political world: grants are given to certain projects and others are frozen out. This condition, in my opinion, is inescapable: as leadership shifts, priority shifts. However, it seems to me that we are entering a new dark age of superstition replacing scientific inquiry. It's one thing to disagree on priorities for research funding; it's quite another to reject research based on mystical belief systems.

The Bush administration is famous of course for its attempts to dismantle stem cell research and its rejection of global warming theories. The disturbing aspect to both of these positions is that they're clearly ideologically rather than factually driven. BushCo realizes that most Americans know little of science beyond the transporter room that helped Captain Kirk and his crew have so many planetary explorations. And they've spun the "debates" in scientific fields to play to that ignorance masterfully.

The current debate over evolution is a perfect example. Now in Dover County, PA, the Salem circa 1690 inspired school board has foisted a religious-based "science" directive on the professionally trained science educators of the school district. Nutcases have always found school boards as easy targets for setting their backwards agendas: book banners love to exercise power over school libraries through their positions on school boards. However, these particular nuts have been emboldened by years of a superstitious President, and even before that by decades of grassroots and congressionial rightwing regression, to make bold steps to ratchet up Creationism (often under the cloak of "Intelligent Design" -- a misnomer if ever there were one) as a competing "theory" to evolution.

Bush, who is either truly the idiot king or is playing well to his base, states that schools should teach "both theories." A theory is something you can test. You can't test something that relies on the following method of inquiry (according to a t-shirt I saw some lotus-eater wearing): "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." The National Academy of Sciences presents a more scientific perspective: "While the mechanisms of evolution are still under investigation, scientists universally accept that the cosmos, our planet, and life evolved and continue to evolve."

A key difference between I.D. and science is that an I.D. believer looks at something magnificently complex and says, "man, that's really complex. I can't figure it out, so God must have done it." A scientist looks at something magnificently complex and says, "man, that's really complex. I have a life's work ahead of me to try to figure it out."

The scientist wants to know what makes it tick. The superstitious hack thinks paradoxically that because he doesn't know, he already knows.