Charles in Hollywood, or maybe not.

There's a new movie that may eventually come to America. About Charles Darwin. It's only got a handful of votes thus far on imdb but it doesn't look like it's in the District 9/IB category for "best film" talk thus far. And it is probably fair to say it won't be going on to the same levels of acclaim that the producer's previous work (The Last Emperor) did. What is clear from those few votes is that there's a general antipathy coming from Americans. Non-US users had a much higher approval rating on average. And Americans are not likely to have even seen the film in order to approve it or not in the first place. Because it hasn't found a distributor here.

To be fair, the number of votes on imdb is still very small and not yet constituting a statistical significance. I fully expect it will however. Darwin is practically vilified here while he's celebrated abroad, especially of course in England where he comes in still around Shakespeare, IK Brunel, and Churchill as one of the greatest English figures in history (For the record I have no idea why Diana is ahead of Elizabeth I, why Shakespeare isn't ahead of Churchill, why Monty is in there at all, or why Rowling is on the list at all, much less ahead of Tolkien, so don't ask me to explain the British people's adulation)

I had a conversation the other day in an online forum where I described a general feeling of disappointment that can be credited against my fellow Americans regarding their achievements in math or science. Any country where someone like me is in the top percentile of mathematics scores on its standardized tests should be embarrassed. Sure I can memorize credit card numbers, do basic calculations in my head, and have no trouble sorting out the word problems so common to tests. I am not or should not be seen on the level of a possible scientist or mathematician as a result. There's a lot of stories about John von Neumann where he defeated an early computer in computational speed or the "fly puzzle" riddle where he summed the infinite series almost instantaneously. Now he might be in the top .0001 percentile, the equivalent of a mathematical or scientific god. But extrapolating downward, it would seem to imply the top percentile of a country is still a fairly elite group in terms of their logical abilities and raw computational effectiveness. As it so often happens, a stated law of human stupidity in fact, I will underestimate the incompetency of my countrymen until the evidence of their diminished skills are presented. Thus it is that the problem of under-qualified American collegians and graduate students, particularly for math and science, is one of our own making. And one which we should seek to eliminate if we wish to remain competitive in a global economy instead of continuing to bailout our companies or issue them shelter from the difficulty of international competition.

Such a problem as this should be met with embarrassed resolve. Not scorn and derision of the scientific mindset. Anti-intellectualism, with all its accompanying slippery logic, has long had its proponents in America, from William Jennings Bryan to Sarah Palin. But why we stand behind this record so proudly in the face of its "achievements" is beyond my comprehension. It is this anti-intellectualism that places us behind other nation-states in its endeavors and makes the explanation of complex theories and objections to national policy that much more tasking. It gives us instead irrational and baseless fears, things like "he wasn't born in America" despite every accountable shred of evidence to the contrary. It takes significant fears, like the Sputnik launch in the 1950s, or significant accomplishments, like the heady days of the first half of the 20th century and its numerous scientific discoveries, theories, and even celebrities made of the titans of science (Einstein, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Salk), for Americans to again revere these skills and honor the achievements of prominent researchers and theoreticians, like Darwin should be.

This sort of slippery logic then attaches ideas like "social Darwinism" and its resulting violence and mayhem, or the long history of slavery and the attending institutional racism that persists today, or the ideological purges of Stalinism and Maoism and hangs them at the feet of secularist mindsets while seeking to discredit and disabuse people from studying and acknowledging the power of Darwin's arguments even today, refusing even to acknowledge the merits of studying and postulating on the physical and natural world around us is uncalled for and frankly rather counter-productive to defending some basis of personal faith. Faith of any kind in any idea should be openly challenged and tested so it may be tempered with some humility and perhaps some credence, emerging stronger or more enlightened and refined. While untested and uncertain beliefs are usually groundless nonsense as a result.

But this should surprise no one that Americans have sought en masse to cower behind their beliefs rather than to examine them, even merely to humanize their opponents and discourse with them agreeably without agreement. It is exactly the mindset of a person who is motivated by a belief rather than a question. They will seek to discredit other beliefs, like ideologies which compete for power and influence by associating them with tremendous human failings. People look at fascism in the 1930s and sometimes seem confused as to how the first group of people who were rounded up and imprisoned or shot and tortured were communists. Or how Catholics and Baptists, two religions with almost exactly the same set of beliefs, or Shi'a and Sunni for that matter, and again are confused as to how these are not cooperative organs seeking to further their shared goals and instead are often seen historically locked in mortal and even violent conflicts. But when you are motivated by a belief, it is central to denigrate and destroy any other competing belief. Especially beliefs which are not so far removed. These beliefs in particular become a heresy to the cause. When instead there is a question, people examine these opposing structures and can discard them in an intellectual process. This is the precise manner of scientific discovery and theory. It applies equally well to the process of political theory, though often without so rigorous a data set in reference as a scientist studying the physical world rather than the social could amass in support.

Yet as we see now with shrill claims of "socialists!" coming from a political party whose most recent innovations were effectively socialist policies (expansion of medicare, educational reforms) rather than market reforms and whose basic ideology is so indistinct by international politics from its opposition as to regard it as fundamentally the same, the phenomenon is not limited to oppressing Darwinian evolution or even insisting on the absolute infallibility of spiritual texts, or the interminable claims for strict Constitutionalism as a sort of Bible of our own making, as the basis for national dissension.

This most blatant denial of examination and thoughtful reflection is not limited to Republicans nor the present time scale. In fact it's practically impossible to escape it in American history and misrepresentation of ideology and theory is center stage, Act I of any of our political campaigns. The Adams-Jefferson campaign famously contained lower-level supporters claiming that Jefferson was plotting to turn churches into brothels while Adams was claimed to be a budding monarchist tyrant, for example. But the current and public embrace of vigorously opposing anything which might be construed as expertise, competence, and intellect should be appalling to anyone. If people don't like Darwin or view his research as somehow controversial (it isn't), they don't have to attend a fictional account centering around his life and, not even centering greatly around his work. I doubt very much that a Hollywood-type production is the best means to try to fight the distorted "debate" we have been having over evolutionary theory in this country. And it's not like they tried to do it by the looks of the reviews. Instead they seemed to have been examining his life work from the context of his life, a subject which might be uniquely interesting to anybody regardless of their religious persuasions or fundamental disagreements with scientific investigation into the processes that delight us in the form of our current presence on this planet. Whatever one's religious, philosophical, or spiritual insistence personally, it seems clear that we are here now. We may as well try to make sense of the things going on around us. Including other people that some, or unfortunately in the case of Darwin many, find hold disagreeable notions to our own.

Updated: It appears the blowback to the story itself framing the problems finding a distributor are largely viewed as an attempt to stir up controversy and that the distribution issue is one of not having a large enough outlet to satisfy the producers (Hurt Locker for instance was outstanding but had to make due with independent theaters for the most part, it's possible the producers feel this is a big enough movie it needs a bigger audience) might be a valid point. But measured against that, there didn't appear to be a problem finding a distributor elsewhere. This was instead an American problem.

I saw one comparison stating that if this was a movie about Immanuel Kant we'd probably see a similar lack of interest. I myself would probably put Kant and Darwin in the same breath in terms of their influence on history and the paths of human thought and discovery, but there is not any really serious public controversy and demagoguery surrounding Kant and his notions on ethics and reason that I am aware of. We do not for example have public electoral battles over teaching Kantian categorical imperatives to school children in the way that the theory of evolution has had to contend with. Put in the lineage of scientists, rather than just impressive philosophy, Darwin is in the same breath as people like Einstein, Galileo, or Newton. I am not aware of any major controversies surrounding Newtonian physics, the heliocentric solar system and astronomy in general, or the theory of relativity. These are largely accepted without difficulty among people of all walks of life and faith (or at least, the difficulty is more in line with the basic comprehension of science rather than a reliance on scriptural truth and rejecting rigorous intellectual and scientific examination of the world). Darwin is almost universally revered among the scientific and academic community in this country and almost universally vilified outside it. A movie attaching humanity to him, however fictitious, would be in my mind useful for us to have. For whatever reason the debate that theologians from various religious institutions have long since put aside regarding conflicts between scripture and evolutionary theory have not resulted in a strong scale debate among the followers of those theologies. It is a debate we need to have so as to appropriately define the role of science and whatever role it is that spirituality should or would retain, particularly in our public discourse, if not privately as well. It simply does not seem appropriate to discard evidence, expertise, and examination as a lifestyle choice in the modern world in the manner that we as a nation have grown so comfortable to doing.