TO BE DEMONSTRABLY SELF-MADE:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BOLLOCKS: Francis Wheen talks to Brendan O'Neill about creationism, McDonald's and the new anti-Enlightenment. (Brendan O'Neill, May 2004, spiked)

Wheen reckons we're living through a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, that revolution in human affairs when reason was elevated over tradition and superstition to become, in the words of one author, 'the arbiter of truth and the foundation of objective knowledge'. 'The Enlightenment brought us out of the dark', says Wheen. 'Now we seem to be heading back in.' In his book he celebrates the Enlightenment's gains - how it led to the 'waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the transformation of historical and scientific study'. The Enlightenment put us centre stage, says Wheen, as the makers of history and destiny. 'Yet now, 200 years later, there are people who believe their Tuesday mornings are determined by the alignment of the planets'.

As a good God-fearin' atheist and some time contributor to the New Humanist magazine, Wheen is especially aghast at the apparent rise of the creationist movement. 'Those people', he says, as a full sentence, to indicate that he doesn't much care for the likes of the Christian fundamentalists who in 2002 took control of a state-funded school in north-east England intending to 'show the superiority' of creationist beliefs in their classes. 'Why don't we have schools that teach children there is a tooth fairy or put Santa Claus Studies on the national curriculum, and be done with it?'

Wheen was most struck by prime minister Tony Blair's response to revelations
of a creationist takeover of a state-run school. When Lib Dem Jenny Tonge asked Blair if he was 'happy to allow the teaching of creationism alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in state schools', the prime minister said: 'In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children.' 'A simple "no" to Tonge's query would have sufficed', says Wheen, 'and perhaps shown that the prime minister of the United Kingdom believes in reason. This is a man whose mantra is "education, education, education". He ought to know

Mr. Wheen's previous book was a biography of Karl Marx--who along with Darwin and Freud (the bearded god-killers) makes up the Trinity of the Age of Reason. The idea that the elevation of free-floating reason above millennia of tradition was a good thing was pretty much interred in the soil of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and chucked in the dumpsters of every abortion clinic around the world. He wonders why there's been a reaction?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2004 1:46 PM