Expelled!

[pyat]

The post below was written by athelind. I don't think it needs any additional comment, though for more on Stein's movie, see its Wikipedia entry.


"My daily perusal of BoingBoing exposes me to a wide range of "wonderful things" -- and, occasionally, the horrific as well. On a rare occasion, something I find there will drive me to delight and elation -- and others, to tears of indignant outrage.

This is not an example of the former.

This evening, the monotone maw of Ben Stein, star of stage, screen, and Nixon speechwriting, graced us with the following:

"When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you."

Mr. Stein, I will not attempt a rebuttal. I have no need to do so. Thirty-five years ago, Jacob Bronowski said everything that need be said in his magnum opus, The Ascent of Man, in a scene filmed on the site of those very atrocities you evoke so wryly, as the ashy remains of his own family members and yours flowed through his fingers:

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. This is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashed of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.'

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

Which of us, Mr. Stein, claims to know the Mind of God?"

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Yes!!!

I vividly remember watching the Ascent of Man as a child. Jacob Bronowski was brilliant and humane, Ben Stein is merely a more public example of the sort of moronic blowhards that can be found in a wide variety of uninteresting places on the internet.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

In about fifty years there will be someone else standing in another field breathing in the dead, talking about the need to touch people inexorably draws them too close for anything other than the need for control, or some other arbitrary justification. It's not dogma, or ignorance, or desire for absolute knowledge, or moral relativism, or fear that does this. It's just us. It's what we do.

"The what?"
"The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir."

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ah, the optimism of youth! :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

SOrry, that was flip. Uh, yes, it's what we do, for various reasons, but we might as well work to identify the right part of us that does it.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I have no faith in a localized evil centre of the brain.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

And I don't have faith in, say, a "tornado control room," but I would still hope to have an answer for someone blaming tornadoes on atheist meteorologists. Or... something...

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Well... the metaphor is kind of confusing here; if you were to try to prevent tornadoes with some sort of weather control network or space lasers or something, at some point there would in fact be a 'tornado control room.' And, presumably, that would work better than sacrificing a goat to Boreas.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Or, stated positively, this kind of human entropy is something that's part of our experience; the piles of dead are some nebulous existential constant, whether they're in well-manicured lots tucked beside suburban tracts or concrete bunkers or open pits in the jungle. We are what we do, our effects on the world around us (isn't that that the first article of science, too?) and the charnel house is the one commonality among all creeds and cultures.

[undeadmuse.livejournal.com]

*thinks about "the bowels of Christ"*

*wonders what Christ had to eat lately*

[lovmelovmycats.livejournal.com]

I am a bit agape at the Oliver Cromwell quote.

[paka.livejournal.com]

That's...

I had relatives who died in Auschwitz. I had a relative who was one of the first Americans into the camps because he was a medic. That sort of thing. So this example takes the debate from "eh, rightwing morons don't understand" to personally pissing me off.

As far as I'm concerned the Shoah was a carryover from religious based anti-Semitism. It couldn't have happened without the German religious right's support for the Nazis. As far as I'm concerned these were same sort of religious rightwing assholes and the same sort of rhetoric going on in my country now.

And Ben Stein thinks he has the right to say that it's scientists, and not religious fanatics, who give us things like the Shoah? What a sellout asshole.