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Science and Culture, and a Tale of Two Cities

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New York Times columnist David Brooks is getting to be more and more interesting. In a column on Tuesday ("The Cost of Relativism") he acknowledged that his writing of late has been increasingly focused on spiritual and moral matters. In the article, he worries about evidence of a pervasive relativism that is wreaking havoc on a segment of the culture identifiable by several key social markers, including their chaotic family and sexual lives.

This segment, he observes, mostly never made it past high school. Their college-educated counterparts enjoy, again for the most part, a much more orderly existence. It’s not a college degree, per se, that gives the other half a leg up. Brooks doesn’t say exactly this, but no doubt the kind of self-discipline needed to get that far as a student is also what makes it more likely that these folks live more productive lives. College is just an outward sign of that.

David Brooks hopes for a moral revival, "up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once." He doesn’t say from what source that is supposed to arise.

I bring this up not only to recommend his column, but because the subject bears on our concerns here. How so?

Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture is called that for a good reason. Revealing the nexus between science and culture — that there exists no "firewall" (in John West’s apt expression) between the two — is one of our central insights. If life arose and evolved through no design whatsoever but only by a meaningless, thoroughly materialist process of chaos and winnowing (mutation/selection), then humanity bears no special seal of dignity, no divine image. A human being under Darwinism is just another animal. It’s a notion bound to deeply influence a culture that embraces it.

David Brooks is very good at citing studies and statistics. He reads a lot. Sometimes, though, it helps to get out in the street.

We are located in downtown Seattle, which can be a scary place. You’re surprised? You think of Seattle as home to Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing, the Seahawks football franchise — symbols of an orderly, disciplined business culture. Those are all enterprises outside the downtown core which, more than any other city I’ve lived in, is a magnet for dysfunctional lives of exactly the kind that David Brooks writes about. I reviewed this social reality yesterday after work, when I took a slightly longer route through the streets to the underground bus tunnel.

Instead of going directly to our nearest tunnel entrance at Pioneer Square, I walked north in the direction of the Nordstrom flagship store. This is no skid row but the heart of the downtown shopping and business district. Yet at 5:30 pm, the sidewalks were filled with people who were neither on business nor doing any shopping. Aimless youths and aged panhandlers, of all races, they were loafing, and in a pervasively threatening way. Shouts, arguments, insults, vulgarities mixed with noxious, sickly clouds of pot smoke every few feet.

A couple was slouching ahead of me, a young man with his hand prominently grasping his young lady’s rear end. They passed the entrance to a parking garage where a traffic cop was directing cars out onto the street. The youth turned to the officer and did a sort of obscene dance step in the cop’s face, then kept walking. The cop looked at him and gave a half-grimace. The open disrespect, right in front of a crowd of people, made me feel ashamed for the policeman. The powerlessness of that facial expression…there was not a thing he could do about it.

Meanwhile, in the safe and wooded Seattle suburb where my family lives, the local cops have little to police other than giving out speeding tickets. Yet they ride around in intimidating black cop cars and sport SWAT-like military-style uniforms. They command respect. In downtown Seattle, where policing is really needed, the cops are impotent and they know it.

In a different part of Seattle, the University of Washington campus, I imagine evolutionary biologist David Barash was wrapping up his day’s work. This is the same Professor Barash who wrote provocatively in the New York Times about The Talk he gives to students each year about how biology has demonstrated the non-existence of a deity.

The predominant picture of man we carry around in our head — whether a beast with an attitude problem, or the cherished product of intelligent design — matters deeply to any society. It would have to do so. But different groups of people can assimilate the evolutionary picture better, more safely, than others.

David Barash’s students were admitted to the University of Washington in the first place because they had a successful, which is to say disciplined, high school experience. It’s a safe bet they have the habits needed to live productively despite the corrosive message from their teacher.

As that same message filters out to other parts of population, through media and other channels, the effect could not help but be otherwise. Some segments of the culture digest the toxin without visible ill effects. Others are far more vulnerable to it. The successful demographic is the one responsible for distributing the toxin to the more vulnerable cohort. That’s exactly what many college students will grow up to do.

It’s a tale of two cities, two Seattles, very different from each other. David Barash should take a walk through the streets of that other Seattle sometime to see the effects of demoralizing materialism outside his own classroom. David Brooks might take a look as well. To have his impressions, as a chronicler of moral crisis, would be fascinating.

Image: Downtown Seattle, by Walter Siegmund (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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