January, 1928 



EVOLUTION 



Page Nine 



Marshaling Ignorance 



By Jesse Lee Bennett 



T^HE intelligent portions of the 

 outside world have been startled 

 by the intensity of feeling displayed 

 by the Fundamentalist forces in 

 America in their fight against "evo- 

 lution." 



How, they have asked, could such 

 a phenomenon develop in a coun- 

 try only one hundred and fifty yeare 

 away from founders nearly all of 

 whom were rationalists; in a coun- 

 try possessing such educational fa- 

 cilities and such perfection of ways 

 of intercommunication as was never 

 before imagined? 



The plans of the men of the revo- 

 lutionary era were clear. They 

 sought absolute separation of church 

 and state, and universal literacy 

 which would prevent the function- 

 ing of the age-old machinery — po- 

 litical or ecclesiastical — for the mar- 

 shaling and exploitation of ignor- 

 ance. 



.ECCLESIASTICISM NOW DOMINATES 



When, in the material realm, the 

 development of the United States 

 had transcended all hopes; when, 

 with six per cent, of the population 

 of the earth, it possessed more than 

 half the gold and such wealth as 

 was never before imagined; when its 

 schools, libraries, newspapers, maga- 

 zines, motion pictures and radio 

 bound the common mind of America 

 together as one unit, the outside 

 world saw the strange phenomenon 

 of ecclesiastical domination of legis- 

 lative bodies. 



What is the explanation of this 

 unexpected development? How has 

 it been possible to marshal and ex- 

 ploit ignorance in a nation possessing 

 universal literacy? 



No answer will be offered here 

 but any satisfactory answer would 

 cast brilliant new light on the whole 

 structure of American life. 



Jefferson predicted that "the peo- 

 ple will lose themselves in the sole 

 faculty of making money." His 

 prophecy has come true. With 

 wealth has come luxury and a totally 

 unjustified sense of enduring and in- 

 alienable national security and su- 

 periority. The concentration of this 

 wealth, moreover, has permitted a 

 centralized oligarchy to control not 



only financial and political power 

 but all the agencies for reaching the 

 common mind. It uses these to ob- 

 scure thought, to standardize, befud- 

 dle and misdirect. 



In the ecclesiastical field it adopts 

 its old tactics of claiming revealed 

 dogmatic religion as the sole guar- 

 dian of security, prosperity, virtue, 

 the home and all the other instinctive 

 and unreasoning human hopes and 

 fears. This new success of eccleei- 

 asticism must make Jefferson, Frank- 

 lin, Washington and Tom Paine turn 

 over in their graves! 



Mr. Mencken once declared that 

 the virulence of the Fundamentalist 

 movement was due not to any ethical 

 or aesthetic repugnance to the theory 

 of evolution — but to the over-com- 

 pensation of an inferiority complex 

 awakened because of inability to 

 understand this theory. 



There is somewhere a grain of 

 soundness in this idea. To under- 

 stand the theory of evolution the 

 mind must first of all be open and 

 it must also have been equipped 

 with some understanding of the basic 

 generalizations underlying each of 

 the natural sciences. 



Closes the Mind 



Ecclesiasticism of course closes 

 the mind and prevents any realistic 

 understanding of scientific generali- 

 zations of any sort. 



Enmity is generally the result of 

 ignorance and fear. The savage kills 

 the stranger basically for the same 

 reason that the ignorant man can 

 be made to regard evolution as an 

 enemy of mother, home and heaven. 

 It is the fear and suspicion of the 

 unknown, of the strange, of some- 

 thing making demands on under- 

 standing not properly equipped. 



If there be any validity to these 

 ideas it must follow that attempts to 

 popularize the theory of evolution 

 are at best only palliative measures; 

 that the basic problem consists in 

 learning how to gain control of the 

 centralized machinery for education 

 and dissemination of facts and ideas 

 so that this machinery can be used 

 to enlighten and not merely to enter- 

 tain and befuddle. 



The huge tribe formed by forty- 



eight united states differs in size, 

 not in kind, from the small tribes all 

 past history has known. The chief 

 and the medicine man have domi- 

 nated such tribes for their own pur- 

 poses. The chiefs and medicine men 

 are beginning to dominate the huge 

 American tribe for their own pur- 

 poses. That large numbers of ig- 

 norant but literate men can be 

 brought to elect legislators sworn to 

 protect Fundamentalism and to pre- 

 vent the teaching of evolution, that 

 vast numbers of literate but ignorant 

 people are obviously incapable of 

 understanding the theory of evolu- 

 tion is but one indication of the suc- 

 cess of these eternal oligarchic as- 

 pirations. 

 Only Hope Lies in Scientists 

 The mere perfecting of devices 

 for reaching the common mind is not 

 enough. The manipulation of these 

 devices must be at least partly con- 

 trolled by scientists. So long as- 

 scientists remain immured and blind 

 to this social responsibility; so long 

 as they fail to assume their proper 

 place in the political realm; so long 

 as they make no conscious and de- 

 liberate attempts to diffuse to the 

 great masses of the people the in- 

 formation of which they are cus- 

 todians, efforts to popularize evo- 

 lution or to spread knowledge of 

 any sort can hope only for minor, 

 and possibly, ever decreasing effec- 

 tiveness. 



The hope of the future lies with 

 the scientist. Will he become an ac- 

 tive instead of a passive force in 

 our common life? Will he indefi- 

 nitely permit the marshaling of ig- 

 norance or will he justify his exist- 

 ence by assuming his proper place 

 as the guide of the modern world? 



ANOTHER TENNESSEE CASE? 



Just as we go to press we learn 

 that J. H. Tate, principal of the 

 Farragut school, ten miles from 

 Knoxville, Tennessee, is under fire 

 because he gave a definition of evolu- 

 tion in one of his classes. 



The case promises to be interest- 

 ing since Tate himself is said to be 

 a fundamentalist, superintendent of 

 the Sunday School and deacon of the 

 Grass Valley Baptist Church. But 

 he seems to be a wee bit open- 

 minded, so the "leading citizens" of 

 that burg are after his scalp. 



