Martin Kettle at the Guardian Unlimited has a great piece on the polarization of the US: the proponents of Science/rationalism versus the Intelligent Design folks who’re getting increasingly powerful. And he begins the piece with an account of the Darwin exhibition in New York, which he says is “a defiant gesture against US biblical literalism.”

It isn’t very often that a mere visit to an exhibition counts as a political act, but that’s certainly how it feels these days as you mount the steps of the American Museum of Natural History, overlooking Central Park. Admittedly, there wasn’t a protester in sight when I visited this week, and staff have not yet faced picket lines or hate mail. This is, after all, New York City not Salt Lake City. But organisers of the museum’s terrific new exhibition on the life and work of Charles Darwin acknowledge that theirs is an explicit gesture of defiance towards an anti-scientific Christian fundamentalism that is again running fast and deep in contemporary America. [.] Reflect on this. Only one out of four Americans believes life on earth today has evolved through natural selection. Three-quarters of Americans, in other words, still do not accept what Darwin established 150 years ago. Just under half of all Americans believe the natural world was created in its present form by God in six days as described in Genesis. They believe, incredibly, that the earth is only a few thousand years old.

And is it any surprise to trace the current President’s role in fuelling the “unintelligent design” theory so it gets wider currency via the school education route?

The notion that the scientists had won the argument in America after the reaction to the Scopes trial 80 years ago, when a Tennessee teacher was convicted of breaching a state ban on the teaching of evolution, has faced many reality checks in recent years. School boards and education authorities in several parts of America have mounted a series of anti-evolution challenges. These have often come under the guise of putting “intelligent design” - the conceit that the complexity of the natural world can only be explained by the intercession of a supreme being - on a par with evolutionary theory. This claim, advanced on spurious grounds of fairness to different theories, is utterly without any scientific validity, yet a Pennsylvania court will rule on the matter early in the new year. [..] When he was running for president in 1999, George Bush gave the idea his blessing in an interview, saying that he favoured the teaching of “different schools of thought” and adding: “I mean, after all, religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism … I believe God did create the world. And I think we’re finding out more and more and more as to how it actually happened.” Bush has avoided the issue since then, but the anti-evolution campaign has plenty of momentum of its own now.

(Link mine)

And then a very pertinent observation:

Since 9/11 you often hear the argument that the liberal western world must study and learn more about Islam in order to better comprehend the fundamentalist Muslim mind. Maybe so. But you do not often hear people advocating similar inquisitiveness about the fundamentalist Christian mind. Perhaps that too ought to change, especially if we want to understand an America in which religious feeling is growing, not shrinking, and in which the outriders are becoming more audacious intellectually and politically by the day.

The fundamentalist Christian mind was responsibile for large scale massacres of native American Indians at the hands of barbarians, prompted by the calling of the True Faith, at the behest of the priesthood. And today, it is busy harvesting souls in the so-called third world, India included. Englightenment helped Europe solve the problem of Christian fundamentalism but is so far clueless in combating Islamic fundamentalism as the recent French riots indicate. However, America today is confronted with the selfsame Christian fundamentalism coupled with its Islamic counterpart; to be fair, the latter hasn’t reached alarming proportions. It might if the current policy of denial and appeasement persists.

The point, as Martin says, is, “America is a divided country not a homogeneous one.” And more directly, questions its place and role as the “vanguard of the modern world:”

We live in a world dominated by the United States. The US claims and asserts military and economic -and moral - primacy in that world. And yet, not least in the estimation of many of its people, the US is not like the rest of the world. In their eyes, it is a special place whose specialness is part, and even proof, of a divine purpose. It is but a small step from there to say that divine claims should take precedence over science, and rhetoric over reason. Is America a nation in the vanguard of the modern world? Or is it also a nation in revolt against the modern world? One thing is clear: America will not resolve this dilemma until it is more honest and courageous with itself about science and religion than many Americans are today.

Clap clap clap.