Though Cowards Flinch

In one year, Iris Robinson had derided homosexuality as an ‘abomination’, Sammie Wilson has dismissed the notion of man-made global warming as ‘propaganda’ and Mervyn Storey has claimed that a legal challenge may follow the Ulster Museum’s display of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution because it doesn’t give room to the Creationist theory. I imagine the good people at Ulster Museum laughed their asses off at the suggestion.

No one in Northern Ireland is unfamiliar with the nonsense the DUP come off with. Sure, they vote for the DUP because the DUP take a dim view of Republicans and that always gets votes. There’s nothing like tribal politics. But there are a great number of Northern Irish academics and people who have literally nothing in common with the nutjob biblical literalists that seem to populate what at times seems a party of theocracy.

Strangely, the other day I was reading J.D. Bernal’s Shaw the Scientist, which is an article in G.B.S. 90, in celebration of George Bernard Shaw. Bernal, the quintessential historian of science, talked about how Shaw believed science to be the new realm of credulity and religion to be the realm of scepticism. Zizek said something similar in his In Defence of Lost Causes about religion providing room for doubt.

I think we should legitimately agree with Bernal’s approach and say of Shaw, “what bollocks.” Shaw, never an elected official, we can dismiss without further thought. His arguments against evolution marred what was otherwise a distinguished literary career. Unfortunately we can’t really dismiss the DUP, espousing as they do some pretty grim bullshit, all of it at the heart of government in Northern Ireland.

Though it is unlikely, what if the Ulster Museum is forced to display the Creationist theory of (no) evolution? What are the grounds for this? It has zero credibility in the scientific community; the only scientists it has gained credibility with are (shock) those funded by evangelical groups and the corporations with ties to those groups. Creationist “museums” are springing up in the United States, for example.

If there are no scientific grounds for creationism, and it becomes a matter of faith, the creationist story has no business in a proper museum, except as a study in the evolution of ideas. Some of the comments by Storey indicate that, because a lot of people believe in creationism in Northern Ireland (which is not substantiated), the Museum should bow to the weight of public opinion. Knowledge, however, is not democratic.

If we can’t vote to declare that the Earth is the centre of the universe, why should we permit weight of numbers to force a museum to put up a Creationist display?

A major problem with Northern Irish democracy particularly is that our representatives are even less accountable than in the UK. With the collapse of the Ulster Unionists and SDLP, Sinn Fein effectively monopolize the nationalist vote, and the DUP the unionist vote. For as long as the national question is at the forefront of politics, that will decide who people vote for – not something peripheral such as secularism.

Moreover, no one elected Sammie Wilson, who is not even representative of his own party, to be environment minister. That was a shocking display of idiocy from the DUP leadership, and that leadership’s attempt to dismiss the censure of Wilson by the Assembly’s environment committee as partisan is even more shocking. Nor is the Ulster Museum in Mervyn Storey’s constituency.

Unaccountability aside, however, I wonder increasingly whether we could persuade the Royal Society to hand out “Bloody Stupid” awards. Maybe the DUP could get a three-for-one deal on theirs, since they seem to qualify so often for this sort of thing.