Is that your Bible or your foot in your mouth, Mr Blair?

Those who have been following political events in the UK over the last few months will be aware that there is a huge controversy surrounding the UK government's plans for 'educational reform', which it is currently trying to steam-roller through Parliament in the face of mounting protests.

These reforms entail the handing over of large chunks of our school system to religious institutions (mainly the Church of England and the Catholic Church), to create even more 'faith schools' than currently exist (and that's a lot), and the establishment of 'City Academies' funded by businesses and wealthy private individuals (I won't call them philanthropists, unless in sarcastic quotes, because their interest in controlling the education of our children is anything but philanthropic...).

The controversy stems from the fact that, at a time when it seemed the power and influence of organized religion in the UK was in terminal decline (if only...), the churches and various wealthy evangelical Christians have decided that the best way to stop the rot and turn things around for their religion is to gain access to the impressionable and pliable young minds of school children, in the hope that their naive and uncritical acceptance of religious dogma will turn them into the next generation of believers. Their unstated - but blindingly obvious - intention is to use the faith schools and city academies which they run as recruiting grounds for their faiths. Not only this, but there is growing evidence that many of these schools and academies are distorting the national curriculum, infusing it with religious dogma and teaching children to disrespect and disbelieve whole areas of knowledge - particularly scientific knowledge - simply because they contradict those religious dogma.

So we have the insane situation where the UK - an advanced technological nation (and birthplace of the Industrial Revolution), and supposedly the most secular nation on the planet - now has schools which are teaching their pupils that Darwinian Evolution and Big Bang cosmology are wrong, and that the Book of Genesis is right - i.e. that Life, The Universe and Everything was all created on the whim of a Great Sky Fairy called 'God'. And this is supposed to be the 21st century?!

I have contributed volumes of opinion on this matter to discussion forums over the past few months, and will no doubt continue to do so. But I wrote the piece below four years ago, when the scandal first broke about how one of Tony Blair's favourite educational 'philanthropists' was using his privately-run school to teach Creationism in science classes.

Of course, as anyone familiar with our current Prime Minister's style of government by diktat will confirm, Tony Blair is not a man who is easily diverted from his ideological course by such trifling annoyances as public opinion or the advice of experts. And so, four years on, the message of this piece is - sadly - even more relevant and urgent now.

It was written in response to a remark by an ex-colleague of mine ('WD'), posted to a discussion forum on the topic of teaching Creationism in schools. I have reproduced said ex-colleague's remarks below, in order to set the context of my reply.

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WD: I think the point which is most pertinent is the need to main scepticism in the face of anything which lays claim to being absolute truth. Unfortunately, the rise and dominance of empirical science as the normative paradigm has emabled such as the creationists to portay themselves and their beliefs as marginalised and, to a degree, oppressed, and thus, in our relativist secular culture, equally worhty, if not of our respect, at least of our tolerance.

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My response:

I am all for tolerance - no problem with that. And I acknowledge that we live in a 'relativist secular culture' (though not as ‘secular’ as some of us would like…). But this is not an excuse for sloppy thinking, and cannot be used to justify filling the brains of the next generation with superstitious, metaphysical claptrap (e.g. Creationism).

Relativism was all the rage in the 60s and 70s, when many previously-accepted ideas about society, politics, culture and so forth were being questioned by a younger generation keen to challenge the 'tyranny' of their parents' values. Many good things came from this.

Unfortunately, however, relativism soon became such a popular mode of thinking that it was applied indiscriminately, encouraging people to believe that everything (including 'truth') was 'only relative' and therefore open to question. This was thought to be particularly true of 'hard' science, which was singled out as 'Western-centric' (it is not - science is a truly international activity), 'capitalist' (because it drives industries and therefore economies - but so do many other areas of human thought) and ‘de-humanizing’ (because it fails to incorporate or explain subjective human experience - as if it were ever meant to, or claimed that it could).

This rebellion against science and scientific values intensified with the growth of the environmental/ecology movement over the same period. Industry and modern technologies were seen as leading inevitably to pollution, the ravaging of the world's natural resources, the disruption of ecosystems, the degradation of the environment and the 'spiritual impoverishment' of modern life.

Some of these criticisms were, of course, justified. But instead of confining their attacks to politicians and Big Business - at whose feet the blame for all these problems properly lay - they targeted science itself. Their warped logic ran thus: science begets industry and technology, which are ‘bad’, and therefore science is also ‘bad’ - guilt by association. Voila! The relativists now had positive proof that, not only was science Western-centric, capitalist and de-humanizing, it was actually responsible for all the evils of the modern world!

So they cheerfully set about toppling the pillars of well-established scientific knowledge, and then compounded their idiocy by replacing them with a confused hotch-potch of metaphysical ideas borrowed from spiritual paradigms as disparate as Buddhism, the Tarot, Taoism, Hinduism, astrology, witchcraft, paganism and whatever else took their fancy.

They became a generation of dilettante mystics. They consulted their horoscopes every morning, took up yoga and Tai Chi (nothing wrong with these in themselves - both are excellent forms of exercise - as long as you don’t believe all the mystical hocus-pocus about ‘prana’ and ‘chi’ that usually goes with them), filled their homes with Indian sculptures and ethnic wall-hangings, burned candles and incense, and dropped quotes from their favourite-Eastern-guru-of-the-moment into every conversation. Their reading typically alternated between the Bhagavad Gita (Eastern mysticism) and The Lord Of The Rings (pagan witchcraft) (whereas previous generations might have read science-fiction - it is no coincidence that the popularity of 'fantasy' and 'science-fantasy' ('soft' science-fiction) novels has overtaken that of 'hard' science-fiction in recent decades).

Just as the Romantics had sought to escape from the ugly world created by the Industrial Revolution almost two centuries before, they purged their lifestyles and their thoughts of anything that reminded them of the modern, technological, scientific age in which they lived, and retreated - if only mentally - into an idealized, mythic, pre-scientific world infused with magic, mystery and infinite possibilities. No doubt the drugs helped ease their passage, too...

In the process, they lost the ability to discriminate between objective truth and metaphysical myth, their powers of logic and reasoning atrophied through lack of use, and their thought processes finally became as soft, woolly and unstructured as their clothes.

In short, their brains turned to porridge.

And what happened to all these head-in-the-clouds, mantra-chanting, tree-hugging mystics? They grew up, and had kids (anyone out there born in the 70s?). And then they passed on to their kids all their attitudes (i.e. suspicion and contempt) about anything claiming to be rational, objective and scientific, thereby ensuring that another generation would grow up believing that all knowledge is ‘only relative’, that all science is ‘only a theory’, and that there is no more objective truth in quantum mechanics than in the Qabbalah.

Now, is it surprising that the teaching of science and mathematics is in crisis in our schools and universities, when you consider how the minds of recent generations have been so poisoned by irrational, anti-science propaganda?

Is it surprising that most teenagers are choosing ‘soft’ degree courses like ‘media studies’ and ‘performing arts’, rather than science subjects?

Is it surprising that educational attainment in science subjects continues to decline (in real terms, that is, without the judicious massaging of statistics by the DfES…)? It’s not as if science is getting harder to learn. With the ubiquitous use of computers loaded with scientific and mathematical software, much of the routine ‘drudgery’ has been removed from the subject, and science should now be easier and more pleasurable to learn than ever before.

The fact is that science has been politicized, demonized, misrepresented and misunderstood for so long now that the younger generations think it is either un-cool, irrelevant or simply bad.

As a result, science education is on the defensive in this country, and not only science, but the scientific mindset itself is under threat; the values and techniques of rationality, reason, logic and careful, critical, analytical thinking are in danger of being lost in a chaos of wishy-washy intellectual relativism - precisely the type of relativism which thinks it might actually be a Jolly Good Idea to teach Creationism in our schools!

And what does our esteemed Prime Minister have to say on the subject? He says it is a great idea - it will help promote ‘educational diversity’.

Jeezus wept!

No Tony, what it will do is help promote wishy-washy intellectual relativism!

It is perhaps unsurprising that Tony Blair sees no problem in allowing Creationism to be taught on an equal footing with proper science. His previous profession as a barrister suggests that he may have a mindset that regards eloquence of rhetoric to be as important as actual physical evidence - if not more so - in determining the nature of reality. After all, as frequent miscarriages of justice demonstrate, a barrister will never let the ugly truth get in the way of a beautiful argument! (And I have done Jury Service often enough to have seen this tragic inversion of logic in action...)

And, as a politician, he is even more likely to regard Truth as a malleable and subjective concept at best...

Oh, and let’s not forget he is also a (very publically) practicing Roman Catholic! (Smell a rat? I think so…)

Creationism in our schools? Yeah Tony, great idea. Now please take your foot out of your mouth so I can punch you in it, you idiot!