Music and cognition

When educational budgets are cut -- which they are, every year -- inevitably what is hit the hardest are programs for the arts, music, theater, and other electives.

This is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who spent thirty-two years teaching science, a so-called "core" subject.  And I don't mean to criticize the importance of having a good "core" education; we all need to be able to read and write, do mathematics, understand the history of humanity, and have a basic and broad grasp of scientific principles.

But that's not the be-all-end-all of education, or at least it shouldn't be.  I mean, consider not what gets you a job, what allows you to do mundane chores like balancing your checkbook, but what actually brings joy to your life.  What are your hobbies, things you spend your spare time doing, things you'd spend much more time doing if you had the leisure?  My guess is very few of us fill our free time doing chemistry experiments, even admitted science nerds like me.  No, we paint, sculpt, garden, play an instrument, sing in the choir, play or watch sports (or both), cook elaborate meals, write stories.  And while those do take a basic 3-Rs education -- I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I had a lousy vocabulary or didn't know how to write grammatically -- for many of us, our real fascinations were discovered in the classes that go under throwaway names like "electives" and "specials" and "optional courses."

So cutting these subjects is, for many students, taking away the one thing about school that makes it tolerable, and robbing them of the opportunity to find hidden talents and undiscovered passions that will bring them joy for a lifetime.

But a study has shown that it's more than that.  Research by Katherine Sledge Moore and Pinar Gupse Oguz of Arcadia University, and Jim Meyer of Elmhurst College, has found that music education correlates strongly with the development of flexible intelligence -- and that those gains translate across disciplines.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacob Garcia from Reus, Spain, The Cello Player, CC BY 2.0]

In "Superior Fluid Cognition in Trained Musicians," published in the journal Psychology of Music, the researchers found that the degree of experience a person has in playing music (or singing), the higher they score on a variety of metrics -- episodic memory, working memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed.

It's hardly surprising when you think about it.  As the researchers put it, fluid intelligence skills "are highlighted in musical training," which involves "quickly comprehending a complex symbolic system, multitasking, reasoning, and more."  I can say from personal experience that performing music -- not just playing it at home for your own entertainment -- takes those skills up an additional notch.  I was a performing musician for years, playing flute in a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence.  Being up on stage requires that you think on your feet, and often make lightning-fast alterations to what you're doing.  As an example, most of what my band played were medleys of three or four tunes, and we almost never planned ahead how many times we were going to play any one of them (nor who'd be playing melody and who'd be playing harmony).  Our fiddler, who was more-or-less in charge of the band, just gave me a wiggle of the eyebrow if she wanted me to take a solo, and said "hep!" if we were switching tunes.  Sometimes the inevitable happened -- the fiddler and I both jumped to harmony at the same time, or something -- but almost always, one of us recognized it in under two seconds and slipped right back into playing melody.  Despite the complexity of what we did, the times we had a real crash-and-burn on stage were very few and far between.

So this study is spot-on.  And its conclusions are further evidence that we should be expanding arts and electives programs, not cutting them.

Not, honestly, that I expect it will have an effect.  Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but the educational establishment has a long track record of completely ignoring research on developmental psychology in favor of "we've always done it this way."  The most egregious example is our determination to start foreign language instruction in seventh or eighth grade, when we've known for years that our brain's plasticity with respect to learning new languages peaks around age three or four, and declines steadily thereafter.

Or, as one of my students put it, "So we start teaching kids languages at the point they start to suck at it."

A close second is that researchers have been saying for years -- with piles of evidence to support them -- that children need recess or some other unstructured play time in order to improve overall behavior and attitudes about being in school.  Not only that, but recess time correlates with better scores on tests, so like music, it's an investment that pays off across the board.  Nevertheless, schools across the country have been gradually reducing unstructured leisure time, in some places to twenty minutes or less per week, in favor of devoting more time to preparing for standardized tests.

Now there's a way to make kids look forward to going to school in the morning.

I'd like to think that this research will influence educational establishments and (especially) budgetary decisions, but I'm not holding my breath.  Any change on that count is likely to be very slow to come.  But still, every piece of evidence counts.  And anything we can do to foster the development of fluid intelligence, positive attitudes, and confidence in children is movement in the right direction.

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The fight continues

September is Bisexual Awareness Month, which ironically I only became aware of on September 1.

I guess I must have known that at some point, but given that my entire approach to life has been one long tug-of-war between "please notice me" and "OH NO SOMEONE JUST NOTICED ME," I'm not sure how comfortable I am adding to my own visibility.

Be that as it may, and notwithstanding how many days and months are set aside to commemorate ridiculous stuff (January 21 is National Squirrel Appreciation Day?  Really?), overall I think Bisexual Awareness Month is a good thing.  When I was a teenager and first figured out that I was equally attracted to men and women, I had no idea there was even a name for that, much less that it was normal and okay.  The fact that we're now able to talk about this stuff will -- I fervently hope -- save the current generation of shy, scared, confused fifteen-year-olds from going through the hell I endured.

However, in the past ten years we've seen a staggering upsurge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States, and as we queer people and allies have become more vocal, the bigots have, too.  Just last week Baptist minister Dillon Awes, of Watauga, Texas, said that another minister -- Andrew Stanley -- should be shot in the head for allowing two gay men to deliver a sermon at his church.  The fact that there was a single person in the congregation willing to sit there and listen to his vicious diatribe shows that we are far from eradicating homophobia.

When Awes is screaming his ugly invective into an empty room, I'll be satisfied.

However, we're also far from done as far as legislation goes.  Anti-LGBTQ+ bills are like the Hydra -- defeat one of them, and nine more spring up in its place.  Here are a few current battles:

• Arizona -- House Bill 2657, which forces school employees to out queer children to their parents -- even if that would put the child in danger.  Parents, the bill says, have "inalienable rights" to know everything about their children, including information given to school employees in confidence.
• South Carolina -- Senate Bill 3728 -- places all authority over the teaching of "morals, ethics, and civic responsibility" into the hands of parents, allowing them carte blanche for prohibiting undefined "certain concepts" from being mentioned in the classroom.  It doesn't take much imagination to guess what "concepts" they're talking about.
• Delaware -- Senate Bill 191 -- defines sex and gender as binary (contrary to known biological science) and restricts athletes from competing on teams split by gender according to "sex as determined at or near birth."
• Oklahoma -- House Bill 3120 -- prohibits any mention in public schools of "sexual activity that deviates from a traditional family structure" and "non-heterosexual orientation."
• Florida -- Senate Bill 1382 -- allows employers to use whatever names and pronouns they see fit, irrespective of the employee's request.

And so on and so forth.

I have to state for the record that there's a discussion to be had about age-appropriateness of any educational material surrounding sexuality (and anything else, honestly).  That is not what this is about.  No one -- no one -- is recommending placing sexually-explicit or age-inappropriate material of any kind into public school classrooms.  The characterization of legislation like South Carolina SB 3728 as "protect the children" is a smokescreen, designed to deflect criticism and re-marginalize queer people, returning us to the closeted, terrified environment I grew up in back in southern Louisiana in the 1970s.  If you doubt this, ask yourself seriously how long it would take for Oklahoma HB 3120 to be used to prevent a gay teacher from being out publicly.  Is having a photograph of him and his husband on his desk "promoting sexual activity that deviates from traditional family structure"?

Yes, we queer people have much to be thankful for.  We've come a very long way.  Had the general tolerance and acceptance we have now been present when I was a teenager, my life would have had a very different trajectory.  And if you look at the list of current and proposed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it's heartening how many of them are labeled "defeated."  Just the fact that I can post Bi Awareness Month stuff on my social media, and have nothing but positive responses, is encouraging.

But the fight isn't over.  

So buckle up, friends and allies.  We still have work to do.

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Indoctrination

By now, I'm sure you've all heard that my former home state of Louisiana has passed a law requiring all public school teachers to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.  The argument, if I can dignify it by that term, is that the Ten Commandments represent a "historical document," not a mandate of religious belief.

Shall I refresh your memory about what the First Damn Commandment says?

"I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me."

How, exactly, is that not a mandate of religious belief?

Others include "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," and also "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox, nor anything else that belongs to him," which has the added fun of being a tacit endorsement of slavery and the subjugation of women.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The latest in this christofascist attack on separation of church and state -- a principle which, allow me to remind you, is mentioned explicitly in the Constitution of the United States, unlike God and Jesus -- is a sparring match between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana state representative Lauren Ventrella, wherein he tried to corner her on various points revolving around the secular basis of the United States and the fact that the new law is inherently discriminatory against non-Christians.  Of course, you can only corner someone with logic if they're arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence, so it was bound to end in failure.  Ventrella did what the MAGA types always do; launched into a Gish gallop of irrelevancies such as what Sanchez's salary was, the fact that "In God We Trust" is printed on the dollar bill (neglecting to mention, of course, that it was only added in 1956), and ended with her solution for people of other religions (or no religion at all) to a clearly religious document posted on the classroom wall, which was, "Then don't look at it."

Fine, that's the angle you want to take, Representative Ventrella?  Two can play that game.

A teacher wants to put a Pride flag up in the classroom, and you don't like it?  Don't look at it.

You don't like books representing racial or religious diversity, or ones that feature queer people?  Don't read them.

You think drag shows are immoral?  Don't attend one.

You're against gay marriage?  Then the next time a gay person proposes to you, say no.

Or does that approach only work when you're trying to shoehorn Christianity into public schools?  

And more importantly, are these people really so stupid they don't see how easily their arguments could backfire on them?  

The problem here is that christofascists like Lauren Ventrella only want students exposed to straight White Christian... well, anything.  Fiction?  Of course, that goes without saying.  Non-fiction, too -- Florida's banned books list included biographies of prominent People of Color and LGBTQ+ individuals, for no other apparent reason than their not being about straight White people.  History has to be whitewashed to emphasize the benevolence of White Christians and downplay (or ignore completely) anything that casts them in a negative light -- or anything that brings up the contributions of other cultures.  

So they're not against indoctrinating kids; quite the opposite.  They love indoctrination.  They just want to make sure the indoctrination lines up with the way they were indoctrinated.

And that's not even getting into how the hell the leaders of a state that ranks 49th in education think this kind of nonsense is the priority.  Or the screeching hypocrisy of the same people who want the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and who claim to follow an incarnated deity who said "Let the little children come unto me," regularly voting against aid for underprivileged youth and subsidized school lunches.

Seems like the idea is keep 'em poor, hungry, uneducated, and brainwashed.

I hold out some hope that the inevitable lawsuits this is going to trigger from the ACLU and the FFRF will strike down this law as unconstitutional, but given the unabashedly far-right leaning of the Supreme Court, I have no confidence that they might not end up siding with Ventrella et al. on this.  The only thing we moderate and left-leaning people can do is to get our asses to the polls in November and vote.  Vote like the future of democracy in the United States depends on it -- because it does.

Otherwise, I fear that the christofascist takeover of the country may well be a done deal.

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Leading the way into darkness

New from the "I Thought We Already Settled This" department, we have: the West Virginia State Legislature has passed a bill, and the Governor is expected to sign it, which would allow the teaching of Intelligent Design and other "alternative theories" to evolution in public school biology classes.

It doesn't state this in so many words, of course.  The Dover (PA) decision of 2005 ruled that ID is not a scientific theory, has no place in the classroom, and to teach it violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.  No, the anti-evolutionists have learned from their mistakes.  State Senator Amy Grady (R), who introduced the bill, deliberately eliminated any specific mention of ID in the wording of the bill.  It says, "no local school board, school superintendent, or school principal shall prohibit a public school classroom teacher from discussing and answering questions from students about scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist" -- but when questioned on the floor of the Senate, Grady reluctantly admitted that it would allow ID to be discussed.

And, in the hands of a teacher who was a creationist, to be presented as a viable alternative to evolution.

I think the thing that frosts me the most about all this is an exchange between Grady and Senator Mike Woelfel (D) about using the words "scientific theories" without defining them.  Woelfel asked Grady if there was such a definition in the bill, and she said there wasn't, but then said,  "The definition of a theory is that there is some data that proves something to be true.  But it doesn’t have to be proven entirely true."

*brief pause for me to scream obscenities*

No, Senator Grady, that is not the definition of a theory.  I know a lot of your colleagues in the Republican Party think we live in a "post-truth world" and agree with Kellyanne Conway that there are "alternative facts," but in science you can't just make shit up, or define terms whatever way you like and then base your argument on those skewed definitions.  Let me clarify for you what a scientific theory is, which I only have to do because apparently you can't even be bothered to read the first paragraph of a fucking Wikipedia article:

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.  Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment... Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

Intelligent Design is not a theory.  It does not come from the scientific method, it is not based on data and measurements, and it makes no predictions.  It hinges on the idea of irreducible complexity -- that there are structures or phenomena in biology that are too complex, or have too many interdependent pieces, to have arisen through evolution.  This sounds fancy, but it boils down to "we don't understand this, therefore God did it."  (If you want an absolutely brilliant takedown of Intelligent Design, read Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker.  How, after reading that, anyone can buy ID is beyond me.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe, Watch with no background, CC BY 3.0]

And don't even get me started on Young-Earth Creationism.

What gets me is how few people are willing to call out people like Amy Grady on their bullshit.  People seem to have become afraid to stand up and say, "You are wrong."  "Alternative facts" aren't facts; they are errors at best and outright lies at worst.

And if we live in a "post-truth world" it's because we're choosing to accept errors and lies rather than standing up to them.

As historian Timothy Snyder put it, in his 2021 essay "The American Abyss":

Post-truth is pre-fascism...  When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.  Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.  If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions...  Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.

But Carl Sagan warned us of this almost thirty years ago, in his brilliant (if unsettling) book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.  I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

People like Amy Grady are leading the way into that darkness, and it seems like hardly anyone notices.

We cannot afford to have a generation of children going through public school and coming out thinking that ignorant superstition is a theory, that sloppily-defined terms are truth, and that pandering to the demands of a few that their favorite myths be elevated to the status of fact is how science is done.  It's time to stand up to the people who are trying to co-opt education into religious indoctrination.

In the Dover Decision, we won a battle, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have not yet won the war.

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The backfire

From the Spectacular Backfire department, today we have: the guy who sponsored a bill to crack down on "pornographic and inappropriate" materials in public school classrooms in Utah has stated that he needs to "revisit" the wording of the law when a school district used it to remove Bibles from elementary and junior high school libraries.

Representative Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) was alarmed at the unintended consequences of his bill, and held a rally of "faith and conservative" groups at the State Capitol this week, where protestors held signs saying "God cannot be cancelled" and "Remove porn, not the Bible."

"Is there any artistic value to the Bible?" Ivory asked the crowd.  "Has anyone been to Rome and visited the Sistine Chapel?  Has anyone also been to Paris and in the Louvre, seen The Last Supper?  Or have you been to Florence and seen the sculpture of the David?"

Which is an interesting example to choose, because it was people of precisely the same mindset who, just three months ago, got a school principal in Tallahassee fired for showing fifth graders a photograph of Michelangelo's David.

But hypocrisy, however blatant, never seems to register with these people.  Apparently, material is inappropriate whenever they say it is, and might well be appropriate tomorrow if the context changes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amandajm, Bible Johns Gospel 3 16, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The deeper problem is, it doesn't take much searching to find parts of the Bible that are inappropriate for children.  I mean, really inappropriate.  One of the best-known examples is Ezekiel 23:20-21: "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.  So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Then there's Genesis 19, which is not just about sex, but about drunken incest:

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains—for he was afraid to stay in Zoar—where they lived in a cave.  One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man in the land to sleep with us, as is the custom over all the earth.  Come, let us get our father drunk with wine so we can sleep with him and preserve his line.”

So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Look, I slept with my father last night.  Let us get him drunk with wine again tonight so you can go in and sleep with him and we can preserve our father’s line.”

So again that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

Thus both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.  The older daughter gave birth to a son and named him Moab.  He is the father of the Moabites of today.  The younger daughter also gave birth to a son, and she named him Ben-ammi.  He is the father of the Ammonites of today.

And don't even get me started about the Song of Solomon.

The trouble is, people like Ken Ivory want one standard for Christian texts and a different standard for everything else.  A kids' story about a child with gay parents?  Oh, no, can't have that, it's inappropriate.  But a text that features lots of sex (consensual and not), violence, torture, and genocide -- that's just fine, because "God cannot be cancelled."

If he, and the others like him, want to have an honest conversation about what is and is not appropriate to have available to schoolchildren, that's just fine.  I don't know of a single person -- liberal or conservative, religious or not -- who wants to expose children to material that is unsuited to their personal and emotional development, and no one argues that young children should read explicitly sexual or violent books.

But you can't just set a standard, then when it's applied to your favorite book, say, "No, wait, not like that."

So as usual, it's not the idea behind the law that's the problem, here; it's the hypocrisy of its supporters.

Something I don't suppose Ken Ivory will understand.  People who specialize in performative virtue seldom do.  But maybe another biblical quote, from Matthew chapter 6, will strike home with him more clearly, something Jesus said about making a show of being holy: "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men… but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray in secret, to your Father who is unseen."

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The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Dear readers:

I am going to take a long-overdue two-week break from writing here at Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post until Thursday, August 25.  Until I return, keep suggesting topics, keep reading, keep thinking, and keep hoisting the banner of critical thinking!

cheers,

Gordon

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Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than ninety percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added. "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said.  "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud.

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Yanking open the closet door

If you needed another reason to be outraged at the direction the United States is going, a bill currently moving through the state congress of Florida -- and 100% supported by Governor DeSantis -- would not only prohibit teachers from mentioning anything about sexual orientation (their own or anyone else's), but would require them to out LGBTQ students to their parents.

Further support of journalist Adam Serwer's statement that with the GOP, the cruelty is the point.

Nicknamed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, Florida's House Bill 1557 initially was intended to prevent any discussion of queerness in the classroom -- up to and including teachers revealing, even in passing, that they are queer themselves.  So this would, in effect, prevent a gay teacher (for example) from mentioning his partner's name, or even having a photograph of the two of them on his desk.  So what happens when he's seen holding hands with his partner in public, and a student asks him point-blank, "Are you gay?"  Is he supposed to say, "I can't answer that?"  Or "None of your business?"

Joe Harding, a Republican (surprise!) in the state House of Representatives, proposed an amendment on Friday to the bill that made it even worse.  If the bill passes -- and it looks like it will -- teachers who find out a student is LGBTQ are required to tell the parents.  Schools would be compelled to "develop a plan, using all available governmental resources" to out children to their parents "through an open dialogue in a safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment that respects the parent-child relationship and protects the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the student."

Originally there was a clause providing an exemption "if a reasonably prudent person would believe" that outing the student might cause "abuse, abandonment, or neglect," but Harding took that bit out.

The cruelty is the point.

I'm going to say this as plainly as I know how.  I doubt any Florida Republicans are listening, and even if they are, I doubt even more that they'd care,  but despite that:

No one ever, ever, ever has the right to out a person to anyone, except the person him/herself.  Ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

While I often have wished that I'd had the courage to come out as bisexual much earlier in my life, I can't even imagine what my life would have been like if one of my high school teachers had outed me to my parents without my consent.  I wouldn't have been physically abused; neither of my parents ever laid a hand on me.  However, I was already enduring so much emotional abuse that now, almost fifty years later, I'm still dealing with the damage.  I shudder to think of what my life would have been like if my conservative, traditional Roman Catholic parents had found out I was bi when I figured it out myself at age fifteen.

Even without this, I was already told enough times what a crashing disappointment I was.  Add this on...  Well, to put things in perspective, as it was I attempted suicide twice, ages seventeen and twenty.  That I didn't succeed was honestly just dumb luck.

Had someone told my parents I was bi?  I have little doubt that I wouldn't be here today.

Oh, and the clause that outs the kid in a "safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment that respects the parent-child relationship and protects the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the student" is unadulterated bullshit.  I can vouch for this from my own experience.  No one -- no one -- knew about my suicide attempts.  Not family members, not friends, not teachers.  From the outside, my parents looked like they were straight out of The Brady Bunch.  My mom, especially, was very good at being a chameleon, and the way she treated me in public was 180 degrees from the way she treated me at home.  There is no way that anyone would have known that I wasn't in an environment that supported my mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Once again, let me put this plainly: teachers don't know what students' home life is like.  Not even if they've met the parents, not even if they've talked to the student.  And I can say with complete assurance that if I were a teacher in Florida, they would have to fire me, because no way in hell would I comply with the proposed law.  Putting teachers -- even well-meaning ones -- in charge of revealing a student's sexual orientation isn't just irresponsible, it's actively dangerous.  Queer teenagers already have a four times higher risk of self-harm or suicide than straight teens do; this bill, if it passes, will make it much, much worse.

But I suspect that won't make a difference.

The cruelty is the point.

The only thing that might stop this is if people in Florida contact their representatives and senators and say, "No.  This is unacceptable."  It's all well and good to say, "The blood of every queer teen in Florida who comes to harm after this is on your hands," but by that time, it's too fucking late.  This bill needs to be stopped, and it needs to be stopped now.  Somehow, the most unfeeling, unkind, bigoted people have become the ones who are making the laws, and while there's no easy way to get them out of office until the next election, they sure as hell can get buried by angry letters and emails.

Please.  Do it now.

Lives are at stake, here.

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The catalyst

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a class called Modern American Literature.

To say I was a lackluster English lit student is something of an understatement.  I did well enough in science and math, but English and history were pretty much non-starters.  I took the class because I was forced to choose -- one thing my high school had going for it was that each student developed his/her English program from a smorgasbord of semester-long classes, which ranged from Mythology to Sports Literature to Literature in Film to Syntax & Semantics -- but that semester I kind of just closed my eyes and pointed.

So Modern American Literature it was.

One of the assignments was to choose one from a list of novels to read and analyze.  I found that I didn't have a very good basis to make my decision, because although I'd heard some of the titles and recognized a few of the authors' names, I didn't really know much about any of them.  So once again taking my "what the hell does it matter?" approach, I picked one.

It was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Over the next two weeks, I read it, and I can say without any exaggeration that I've never seen things the same way since.

The story is set in 1714 in Peru, and opens with an accident.  Five people are walking on a rope bridge across a chasm when, without any warning, the ropes come loose and all five fall to their deaths in the river below.  A Franciscan friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses the disaster -- in fact, he'd been about to cross the bridge himself -- and this starts him wondering why God chose those five, and no others, to die that day.  

So Brother Juniper embarks on a quest to try to parse the mind of God.  There had to be some discernible commonality, some factor that united all five victims.  God, Brother Juniper believed, never acts at random.  There's always a reason for everything that happens.  So surely the devout, with enough prayer and study, should be able to figure out why this had occurred.

He searches out people who knew the victims, finds out who they were -- good, bad, or middling, young or old, devout or doubting.  What circumstances led each of them to decide to cross the bridge at that time?  Each was brought to that point by a series of events that could easily have gone differently; after all, if God had wanted to spare one of them, all he would have had to do was engineer a five-minute delay in their arrival at the bridgehead.

Or, in Brother Juniper's own case, speed him up by five minutes, if he'd been destined to die.

In either case, it would have been easy for an omnipotent power to alter the course of events.  So that power must have had a reason for letting things work out the way they did.

But in the end, after going into the histories of the five victims, and considering his own life, he realizes that there is no discernible reason.  There's no logic, no correlation, no pattern.  His conclusion is that either the mind of God is so subtle that there's no way a human would ever be able to comprehend it, or there are no ultimate causes, that things simply happen because they happen.  He feels that he has to communicate this to others, and writes a book about what he's learned...

... and it is promptly labeled as heresy by the Inquisition.  After a trial in which the Inquisitors attempt unsuccessfully to get Brother Juniper to recant what they perceive as his errors and lack of faith, he is burned at the stake, along with all the copies of his book.

It's a devastating conclusion.  It rattled me badly; I spent weeks afterward thinking about it.  And I never looked at the world the same way afterward.

Burned at the Stake, woodcut engraving by Ottmar Elliger (early eighteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason I bring this up is a bill that just received Senate approval in Florida that would prohibit schools from using curricula that causes students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."  On that basis, I would never have had the opportunity to read Wilder's book when I was in eleventh grade, solely because it made me uncomfortable.

This idea is so completely wrong-headed that I hardly know where to start.  One of the purposes of good books (not to mention honest instruction in history) is to shake you up, make you reconsider what you'd believed, push you to understand things that sometimes are unsettling.  I don't consider my own writing High Literature by any stretch, but I think that any book, regardless of genre, succeeds only by virtue of how it makes you think and feel.  If you reach the last page of a book and haven't changed at all since you opened it, the book has failed.  As my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, said, "If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

And this may make you feel "discomfort and anguish."  But sometimes that's what we need to feel.  Note that I'm not saying you have to overhaul your political and religious beliefs every time you read a book, but if it doesn't even make you think about them, something's wrong.  As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, you might leave the class on the last day of school with your beliefs unchanged, but don't expect to leave with them unchallenged.

It's the difference between teaching and indoctrination, isn't it?  Odd that indoctrination is supposedly what this bill is designed to prevent, when in reality, that's exactly what it accomplishes.  Don't consider our history critically; if something from the past makes you feel uncomfortable, then either don't teach it or else pretend it didn't happen (which amounts to the same thing).  Everything our forebears did was just hunky-dory because they were Americans.  

How far is that from the Deutschland über Alles philosophy of the Nazis?  Small step, seems to me.

We should be reading books that upset us.  Not only does this allow us to understand the past through the eyes of an author who sees things differently than we do, it opens our own eyes to how we got where we are -- and how we can make sure atrocities don't happen again.  Books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Richard Wright's Native Son, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying succeed because they do make us upset.  (All of the above, by the way, have a history of being banned by school boards.)

Good books should make you respond with more than just a self-satisfied "yes, we are all awesome, aren't we?"  They should be catalysts for your brain, not anesthetics.  It's not fun to realize that even our Founding Fathers and national heroes weren't all the paragons they're portrayed as, and our history isn't the proud parade toward freedom the sponsors of the Florida bill would like you to believe.  But discomfort, just like physical pain, exists for a reason; both are warnings, signaling you to think about what you're doing, and do something to fix the problem.  We gain nothing as a society by accepting sanctimonious ease over the hard work of understanding.

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Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Identity politics

Did you hear the quote from Senator Brad Zaun, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for the Iowa State Senate, a few days ago?

There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter.  However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation... in each case, these people [should] naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts.

Oh, wait, my bad.  That wasn't Zaun, that was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS under Adolf Hitler.  Here's what Zaun actually said, which is much in the same spirit:

I can tell you, if this material [about LGBTQ issues] was in my school, I’d be going to law enforcement.  I would be asking for a criminal investigation. I would be asking for every single teacher who disseminated that information to be held criminally responsible.  If we need to, as the state of Iowa, provide deeper clarity when it comes to that and enhance those penalties, I will do that...  My warning to all the teachers and the administrators is you’re going to be in jail.  Because this is distributing pornography.  And I will work my tail end off and it will become law.

Zaun, with the support of the President of the Iowa Senate Jake Chapman, wants to make it a felony for teachers to use LGBTQ-positive materials in their classrooms.  Even presenting same-sex relationships in a positive light, according to Zaun and Chapman, is "obscene" and should be punishable by being fired from the school, prosecuted, and jailed.

They're not alone.  A month and a half ago North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson came under fire for saying, "There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth."  Deborah Martell, a prominent member of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee, told a gay congressional candidate that she was "sickened" that he and his husband had adopted children together; Jim Lyons, the chair of the committee, was called upon to demand her resignation or at least an apology, but responded with a shoulder shrug, saying "not everybody views the world through the same lens."  South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said that he would go as far as invoking the filibuster to defeat the Equality Act, which would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people -- despite the fact that polls show it's supported by 70% of Americans.  Texas gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines, who is challenging incumbent Greg Abbott for the Republican nomination in 2022, said, "They’re talking about helping empower and celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, non-heterosexual behavior.  I mean really?  This is Texas.  These are not Texas values.  These are not Republican Party values, but these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values."

It's horrifying how much weight these attitudes still have in the United States.  In the last-mentioned case, instead of repudiating Huffines's repellant views, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services responded by removing a webpage with resources for LGBTQ youth from their website.  Patrick Crimmins, spokesperson for the DFPS, said it was for "content review," and wouldn't elaborate, but reporters uncovered an exchange between Crimmins and Maria Gonzales, the DFPS's media relations director, that started thirteen minutes after Huffines's remarks became public.  Gonzales's email had the subject line, "Don Huffines video accusing Gov/DFPS of liberal transgender agenda," along with the message, "FYI -- this is blowing up on Twitter."  Crimmins responded by contacting Darrell Azar, the DFPS's web and creative services director, recommending removing the page.

Under an hour later, it was gone.

And so forth and so on.

Okay, let's just clarify a couple of things.

First, you're not going to change a straight kid's sexual orientation by telling him/her about LGBTQ relationships.  To hear those people talk, all you have to do is say to a 100% straight teenage boy, "Did you know there are men who are attracted to other men?" and the boy will say, "My goodness, I never realized that!  I think I'll go out and have sex with a guy right now!"  This, of course, goes back to the thoroughly-debunked claim that sexual orientation is a choice.  Which brings up the awkward question of when the straight people sat down, weighed the options, and decided to be attracted to the opposite sex.

Secondly, no one is recommending putting age-inappropriate materials into public school classrooms, and that's not just for reasons of sexual content.  If you think a specific book is age-inappropriate for the grade in which it's being used, we can discuss that.  But that's not what these people are saying.  They're targeting LGBTQ material in particular; the message is that books presenting LGBTQ relationships in a positive light are never age-appropriate, and that all mention of LGBTQ issues should be expunged from public schools.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

If I sound bitter about this, it's because I am.  I grew up in a time and place where the only mention of queerness was (1) by other students, and (2) as an epithet.  Although several came out after graduation -- some of them, like myself, long after graduation -- there was not a single LGBTQ kid in my graduating class who was out at the time.  The atmosphere was one of shame and fear -- desperation that no one could find out, denial of one's own identity, self-loathing, hopelessness of ever being able to admit who we were or having an authentic relationship.  By eliminating LGBTQ materials from school curricula, you're not making everyone straight; you're taking the queer kids and making them feel like an aberration.

Which, of course, is how these people view us, even if few of them say it as explicitly as Don Huffines did. 

It may seem like a cheap shot that I started this post with a quote from Himmler, but when you have elected officials calling LGBTQ people "filth" and recommending making the teaching of LGBTQ issues a felony, how is it so different?  My recommendation to people like Zaun and Chapman is, if you don't want to be compared to a Nazi, then stop acting like one.

These views thrive in darkness; they grow when the people who know about them stay silent.  We have to stand up against the bigots and homophobes -- not just once, but every damn time.  Let's show that we aren't going to live up to the quote, incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog (in fact, its origins are unknown): "America, you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of your people would cheerfully kill another one-third, while the remaining one-third stands and watches and does nothing."

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As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A moment of Judeo-Christian silence

Let me start out with a reality check: despite what the Religious Right and the pseudo-pundits on Fox News want you to believe, there is no law against students praying in public school.  Nor is it against the rules for any student in any public school in the United States to have, or read, a Bible.  Nor to cite it (or Jesus) as an influence in their lives in personal essays.  No school has stopped students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God."  Bible study and Christian fellowship groups are allowed to hold meetings on school property as long as attendance is completely voluntary.

Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong at best, and flat-out lying through their teeth at worst.

What is not legal is mandating prayer in school, or using Christian membership or affirmation as a qualification for... well, anything.  Schools cannot legally force students to follow the precepts of any religion.  The upshot is that public schools are simply not the venue for generating religious adherence, or (for that matter) preventing it.  It is no more teachers' place to alter their students' religious views in either direction than it is for churches to teach their congregations algebra.

As a personal case in point:

• I responded to questions about my own religious beliefs with "that isn't relevant to the discussion" -- even while we were studying fraught topics like evolution.
• I had a Bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  I was given it by a student many years ago, and saw no reason it shouldn't be there.
• I saw students praying before exams and saying grace before lunch, and no one ever stopped them or had any problem with it.

As a brief aside, there is an explicit conflict in the "under God" part of the Pledge, in my opinion, because if it's recited by students -- which it still is, in public schools across the country -- it pressures non-religious students to affirm something they don't believe it (i.e., to lie).  I find that people who argue against taking out the words "under God" (which, by the bye, were not original to the Pledge but were added in the 1950s) often can't come up with a cogent reason why the words should be recited in a public school where (1) attendance is compulsory, and (2) there are students (and adults) of all different gradations of belief and disbelief.

But of course, that "live and let live" (or, as my mom used to put it, "your rights end where my nose begins") attitude isn't enough for the sanctimonious spokespeople of the Religious Right, who will stop at nothing to inject religion back into public schools.  And not just any religion, of course:

If there was any doubt about this, it should be put to rest by what happened in Florida (of course it was in Florida) last week.  A new law was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that will mandate a sixty-second "moment of silence" that must be observed in all public schools.  The proponents gave some lip service to a broad-minded sentiment behind this -- that students need to have time to engage in meditative self-reflection -- but the real reason was given away by the bill's sponsor, Representative Randy Fine, who tweeted triumphantly, "Just joined Governor DeSantis to sign my fourth bill of the 2021 Legislative Session, allowing prayer back into schools via a moment of silence for all our schoolchildren.  I won't stop fighting against woke radicals who which [sic] to drive out Judeo-Christian values from every aspect of our lives!"

You'd think that anyone with any sense would recognize that saying this explicitly is just asking for the filing of lawsuits to invalidate the new legislation, but DeSantis, who certainly wouldn't be in contention for the "smartest governor in the United States" award, not only didn't contradict Fine but immediately agreed.  "The idea that you can push God out of every institution and be successful," DeSantis said, "I'm sorry, our Founding Fathers did not believe that."

"Students are free to believe what they want" isn't enough for these people; Fine and DeSantis make it clear that the "moment of silence" bill is just a foot in the door for reinserting prayer -- Christian prayer, of course -- back into public school classrooms.  And call me a "woke radical" if you like, but no compulsory prayer of any kind belongs in publicly funded institutions.

And for fuck's sake, it's not like public school teachers have time to do some kind of subversive anti-religious indoctrination.  I was a teacher for 32 years, and never once did I say, "Okay, kids, we've got an extra twenty minutes today, I will now teach you how to blaspheme!"  I had enough on my hands trying to get high schoolers to understand the Krebs Cycle and Mendel's Laws and the reactions of photosynthesis, I definitely didn't have the space in the curriculum to devote to undermining students' dearly-held religious beliefs.

Nor, might I add, did I have the desire to.  I may be a staunch atheist myself, but I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at their understanding of how the universe works in their own time and fashion, and while I may disagree with someone's worldview, it's not my place to criticize it -- or honestly, even to make a judgment about it at all.

Unless that worldview involves compelling others to alter their own beliefs and actions.  It's all very well to say, "I do this because it's required by my religion;" when you start saying "you have to do this because it's required by my religion," you're going to have a fight on your hands.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]