December 22, 2004 News & Views » News Feature

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Believing in Miracles 

Of Prague, Religion and the past 15 years

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click to enlarge Wenceslas Square, Prague
  • Wenceslas Square, Prague

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Vaclav Havel and an indignant corps of liberal legislators stood up and walked out of parliament recently when the Communist Party leader began to wax nostalgic about Marxist Czechoslovakia. The miracle has lost much luster in 21st-century Prague; students on the Charles Bridge no longer sing protest songs with stars in their eyes. But the Czechs' disillusionment with democracy doesn't compare to their disillusionment with America -- once idolized in Central Europe, now a source of puzzlement and dismay. Anywhere you visit in Europe this winter, even nonconformist Prague, people make sure Americans aren't Bush loyalists before they'll talk to you at all. When they consent to talk, conversations take on a quality of wonderment, as if they were interviewing astronauts returned from Mars.

"What is wrong with your people now?" Martina asked us. "They seem hungry for propaganda, they question nothing. Do they know about Iraq? Here we know propaganda. Under communists we grew up on propaganda, nothing but propaganda. But here everyone knew it was propaganda -- everyone. But you are free, yes? There's something wrong with your schools?"

Our replies were lame ones. We felt compelled to remind her that 48 percent of American voters had not swallowed that poisoned bait of fear and fraud with which George W. Bush had gone fishing for a second term. I offered my opinion that our schools, inadequate as they seem to be, are doing a better job than our media. The role of the American abroad, in these strange times, is to hang his head and listen carefully, and hope to learn. In all my travels, I think this was the first time I could listen to harsh criticism of the United States with no defensiveness or resentment. I didn't meet anyone in Prague or London who was as angry about Iraq as most of my friends in the States.

But Martina, an educated child of Prague who grew up doubting every word her government issued or approved, had asked the questions none of us can answer. The United States of America, technologically advanced, technically literate and nominally civilized, now stands in the dock of world opinion with little choice but to plead guilty to pernicious, pandemic, pre-Enlightenment, near-medieval gullibility.

Most countries in Europe are emulating America's obsessive materialism. Few of them have offered much resistance to even the cheesiest, sleaziest manifestations of America's gangrenous popular culture. The great abyss of difference that now yawns between Europe and America is the average American's eagerness to believe damn near anything. Writing the day after the election, historian Garry Wills cited a poll showing that 75 percent of the president's supporters still believed, in the face of three years of uncontested evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein was intimately involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Had the media failed these citizens utterly, even conspired with the government to mislead them? Or do they simply ignore the media and believe as they please?

"Respect for evidence seems not to pertain anymore," wrote Wills, stunned and discouraged, in an op ed column headed "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." A critical election decided by self-blinding voters was just one of the crimes against reason that had reduced Wills to despair. Recent surveys, he claimed, indicate that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Charles Darwin and his "Origin of Species." Wills' essay coincided with a fresh assault on evolution by a school board in Pennsylvania, of all places, seeking to dilute Darwin's theory with a new theory of "intelligent design" -- which one science educator disparaged as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."

Little wonder Wills despairs. Creationism, the kind of thing that leaves Europeans speechless, is the piece de resistance of imbecile fundamentalist rubbish. When the Darwin-bashers crawl out and try to flex their muscle, bookburners and witchburners are never far behind. Their case was closed 100 years ago; it's so tedious to repeat for the ten millionth time that evolution, itself, is not a theory. It's a scientific fact, as basic as gravity or photosynthesis, supported by a comprehensive fossil record -- measureless tons of carbon-datable fossil material on which all bio-science depends. Theory begins only when we try to explain how evolution works -- genetically, biologically -- and it's evolving theory to which Darwin and many others have contributed.

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