"Just a Theory"
The third installment of Bernard-Henri Lévy's journey through America, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville," has appeared in The Atlantic. One passage is particularly arresting. Having been flown over the Grand Canyon by a smart young helicopter pilot who professes to believe that Darwinism is "just a theory," M Lévy writes of the "Intelligent Design" malignancy:
On the contrary, it accepts Darwinism, or in any case pretends to accept it - but only while asserting the right, the mere right, to oppose its "hypotheses" with the contrary hypotheses, placed on the same level and equal in worth, of "scientific creationism." The invention of scientific creationism - the elevation to the rank of "science of what is patently superstition and imposture - can only be called inspired.
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that's the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that's the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that's the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and thought; that's the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American Right in years.
How about ever.
Merci, M Lévy: you've caused me to see in a flash that the fundamental proposition of creationism and/or intelligent design theory is that science as we know it - as it has developed as a discipline since the middle of the seventeenth century; the science that put Americans on the moon - is "just a theory." This is also the right's judgment of critical thinking itself - "just a theory." Operatives such as Karl Rove (not that he has any peers) understand that many Americans are too harried by circumstances to bother with abstract truths and falsehoods. They don't want to grapple with documentary evidence of immaterial things like "responsibility" or "history." We all like to hear good news; the suckers on the right have been assured that what they don't want to hear is "just a theory."
