How We Roll in the “Happysphere”
Just a few days ago I had to school Norm Pattis, the alleged ringleader of what a cabal of blogging assholes like to call the “Happysphere,” a place of their imaginings wherein never is heard a discouraging word, on what Justice is. Today I’m doing it again, setting Norm straight by defending the honor of William Jennings Bryan, a man whom history and today Norm has wrongfully-maligned but who in fact, as Alan Dershowitz has shown, was actually “a great populist who cared deeply about equality and about the downtrodden,” and who was “no simple-minded literalist, and . . . certainly . . . no bigot. . . . Indeed, one of his reasons for becoming so deeply involved in the campaign against evolution was that Darwin’s theories were being used – misused, it turns out – by racists, militarists, and nationalists to further some pretty horrible programs. . . . All in all, a reading of the [Scopes Monkey Trial] transcript shows Bryan doing quite well defending himself, while it is [Clarence] Darrow who comes off quite poorly – in fact, as something of an antireligious cynic. . . . The textbook Scopes wanted to teach was a science text rather than a religious tract, but it was also a bad science text, filled with misapplied Darwinism and racist rubbish.”
But history is written by the survivors, it’s said. The Scopes Monkey Trial was litigated in 1925, and Bryan died five days after it ended. Clarence Darrow lived on until 1938. According to a recent biography: “He visited seers and mediums, and at one point near the end of life Darrow asked his wife to kill herself on his deathbed, because he could not face the crossing alone.”
Somehow I think Norm is tough enough to brook our disagreement with equanimity, even though I’ve intentionally harshed it a little to prove my point.
Compare, on the other hand, Eric Mayer, who seems to think that by publicly fantasizing about being in a knife fight and posting Messages for Wuss Lawyers no one will notice that he blogs like a Wuss.
But Norm might be right about one thing: It’s kind of dumb to blog about bloggers. I’ll try to remember that going forward.
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John. Bryan was a great populist; but he also defended a dumb religious theory.
1Maybe. But it sounds like Darrow was defending a dumb, and dangerously dumb, Darwinism. I can’t find automatic fault with the effort to reconcile the Bible with science (though it’s not something I personally would trouble myself with), to show that it wasn’t necessarily contrary to reason and known facts, which seemed to be the issue in Darrow’s cross-exam of Bryan. Prior to Darwin’s explanation for the origin of things, there wasn’t really any other explanation than the Bible’s, and Darwin’s explanation, at least as presented in the Scopes case, appeared to be seriously wanting. Now, I agree with you that none of the factual assertions in the Bible really matter, not even the assertion that Jesus rose from the dead. But I can understand the reluctance to simply jettison wholesale the Bible’s explanation of things in favor of Darwin’s, on the mere authority of Darwin or even the authority of a purported scientific consensus (I’ve experienced firsthand the fallibility of such a “consensus”), particularly when Darwin was presented as implying total and abject materialism and as nullifying any need for God.
2