political theater
14 - 07/25 /17:34
July 1925 Tennessee schoolteacher John Thomas Scopes was put on trial for violating the state’s Butler Act, which decreed it illegal to teach evolution in any state-funded school. 100 years ago Tennessee law prohibited teachers from denying the biblical account of Creation. Our modern approach to education is to prohibit teachers from teaching the Bible’s Creation story.
Adapted from an article by David Mamet.
Scopes, like Rosa Parks three decades later, volunteered to stand as the defendant in a case designed to test the law. Scopes was found guilty and fined, the fine subsequently rescinded. Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in 1967.
Adapted from an article by David Mamet.
Scopes, like Rosa Parks three decades later, volunteered to stand as the defendant in a case designed to test the law. Scopes was found guilty and fined, the fine subsequently rescinded. Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in 1967.
Scopes’ lawyer was Clarence Darrow, paid for by the ACLU. The state was represented by William Jennings Bryan, two time former presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
The Scopes trial was fictionalized and memorialized by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee in their 1955 play, Inherit the Wind. In the 1960 film version, Darrow, the most famous American attorney of his day, was portrayed by Spencer Tracy in the greatest performance of his career.
Both play and movie were intended as ripostes to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Well and good. But wisdom is greater than sympathy. A political drama is as much a misuse of the theatrical stage as the religion-vs.-science debate is a misuse of a court of law.
The more tragic conclusion of Inherit the Wind would have been to explore Darrow’s error. Religious myth and evolutionary science are not mutually exclusive, unless the existence of one necessitates the denial of the other.
Inherit the Wind was a play. A myth. A myth is the dramatization of conflicting ideas personified in characters. Inherit the Wind presented the conflict between reason and religion as a zero-sum contest.
Religion is a metaphysical concept. It can’t be observed as part of the physical world. But a little reflection must suggest that reason is equally metaphysical. Where does reason exist? Only in the human mind. And the human mind can be inaccurate, uninformed, depraved or terribly wrong.
Every generation since the Enlightenment seeks to “follow the science.” Subsequent generations discover some science to be pseudo-science and absurd—occasionally savage. Some of what reasonable beings accept as incontrovertible verdicts, future generations regard as unreasonable.
What of justice? The ACLU champions fairness—a metaphysical concept—over the equally elusive decency. It may have been fair to defend a 1978 march of neo-Nazis in a community of Holocaust survivors. It was not decent.
Two factors potentially mitigate the horrors wrought by our corruptible human feelings and our equally defective reason. One is religion, which warns us that humanity is imperfect. The other is law, which attempts to mechanically codify religious intuition.
There will always be unresolved tension between justice and fairness, between reason and folly.
The hero of Inherit the Wind is Clarence Darrow. But at the play’s end, he’s learned nothing. And, so, neither has his audience. Theater-goers exit with their perspectives validated rather than their thinking challenged. ~
Blessings,
Dan Nygaard