Yes, the Scopes trial is reminiscent of the US today -- a struggle between yokels and technocrats. It is not obvious to me that the technocrats are preferable to the yokels. E.g., consider this comment on the Scopes trial from Terry Teachout's recent Mencken bio:
"[William Jennings] Bryan may not have known much about biology, but he instinctively grasped that Darwinism was more than just a scientific theory.
It was also an ideology, an intellectual package that went well beyond anything that Darwin envisioned. Social Darwinism, the sink-or-swim philosophy to which Mencken avidly adhered, was part of the package, as was eugenics. George William Hunter's A Civic Biology, the state-approved textbook that John Scopes used as a substitute biology teacher, made short work of epileptics, the mentally ill, and other unwanted types. 'If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of ... preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.' ... The Great Commoner [Bryan] was quick to catch the scent of class warfare in the rhetoric of social Darwinism. As early as 1904 Bryan argued that the theory of evolution 'represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate -- the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.'"
>PS. I love HL Mencken's anti-populism and anti-clericalism.
>
>Wojtek
Oh, it's a laugh a minute with ol' Harry Mencken! Consider this from his Minority Report:
"The existence of most human beings is of absolutely no significance to history or to human progress. They live and die as anonymously and nearly as uselessly as so many bullfrogs or houseflies. They are, at best, undifferentiated slaves upon an endless assembly line, and at worst they are robots who leave their mark upon time only by occasionally falling into the machinery, and so incommoding their betters."
Carl
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