Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: April articles show vigorous aesthetics and tired politics

March 24, 2006

April articles show vigorous aesthetics and tired politics

The April issue’s “Of Maus and Supermen” by Robert Levine and Scott Alexander is an exciting read about the ongoing comic-book renaissance of the past 20 years. Like all the best writing in pop-cultural studies, it suggests that the future of art and entertainment belongs to those daring enough to consider art and entertainment more or less interchangeable terms. One generation’s trash very often becomes another generation’s gold. Playboy’s decision to print the piece demonstrates a youthful vitality in its outlook on art in the broadest sense of the word.

In contrast, the same issue’s cluster of articles about evolution versus “intelligent design” seems intellectually stale. Even as it laments the apparent lack of social progress since the Scopes Trial of 1925, it lacks the energy to find truly fresh ways of looking at the controversy. Michael Ruse is horrified that America’s politicians and judges may expose schoolchildren to creationism, which he calls “a moral evil”:
History shows we are not in a simple fight about science but in a greater fight about life philosophies....We must be prepared to counter those who would repress us and impose a theocracy. Although I cannot honestly confess that I have ever felt the urge to end a long day’s work by slipping into something pink and fluffy, the very thought that this might be a moral issue strikes me as ludicrous. To adapt a saying by S. G. Tallentyre, summing up the philosophy of Voltaire, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (p. 133)
Ironically, Ruse’s warning against crude moralism is crudely moralistic. (One need not be religious to fall into this trap; the chapter “The Sanctimonious Animal” in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate explains why.) There is less at stake than he thinks. As he acknowledges in his article, about half the Nobel Prizes in science every year are won by Americans even though more than half of the American population doesn’t accept evolution. This proves that the scientific enterprise can flourish without the universal acceptance of its findings among the citizenry. My neighbor’s belief that God created the universe 6,000 years ago in the course of a week does me no more harm than his propensity to wear pink and fluffy things. Before calling creationism evil, Ruse needs to identify the chain of cause and effect leading from creationism to some kind of tangible harm. Otherwise, he’s committing a guilt-by-association fallacy similar to the claim that pornography causes men to rape.

Science matters somewhat less than Ruse implies in many of our cultural battles. Gay rights, for example, are best justified on the general libertarian principle that sexual activities and domestic arrangements among consenting adults are not appropriate matters for the state to meddle in. As fascinating as it is, the scientific inquiry on the causes of homosexuality has no real power to strengthen or weaken that civic principle, which can be defended only in the language of moral philosophy, not the language of science.

In his zeal to promote the values of the Enlightenment in public schools, Ruse never considers the possibility that separation of school and state could yield many of the same benefits as separation of church and state. When government holds a near-monopoly on early education, wasteful battles over excessively symbolic issues like prayer, sex education, and evolution go on indefinitely. Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a much more creative solution to the problem than anything Playboy’s editors saw fit to print. (Hat tip: Hit & Run.) Come on, guys, you’re falling behind.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:10 PM

  • Blogger Jetting Through Life left this comment at March 27, 2006 6:26 PM  
    Just dropping by to say hello! It's been awhile!!

    XXOO,
    JTL

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