slow erosion, more dangerous than blunt stupidity?

[acroyear]

Pharyngula: Don't get David Attenborough mad:

The offenses of creationists aren't always blatant: it's the sneaky erosion of science, the quiet omissions, the gradual degradation of good science where they make the most gains, and it's where they get bold and stick their heads out (like Dover) where they get slapped down. We need to be aware of the small stuff, too, because it adds up — like this effort by Dutch evangelicals to edit David Attenborough's documentaries. Some changes have to be made in translations and so forth, and the BBC does allow cuts up to about 5 minutes per hour, but the nasty thing is how targeted the cuts are at slicing out just those bits a pathologically ignorant theist would find objectionable.

I've had some people complain that we ought to reserve our outrage for the big stuff, the dramatic crap the creationists try to pull. I'm going to have to disagree. The little stuff that nibbles away at accurate information and slowly destroys the public education of science that must be confronted just as strenuously.

Of the changes they make, according to Attenborough himself:

Creationists rewrite natural history - Telegraph:

"Instead of saying "70 million years ago, something happens," they say "a very long time ago something happens". They also omit paragraphs such as: "This is inherited from my warm-blooded ancestors,"" Sir David told the Telegraph.

[...]

BBC documentaries have been made compatible with creationist views by replacing spoken English text by an adapted spoken Dutch text, or by cutting whole scenes. "Nevertheless, such sanitised documentaries are presented to the Dutch public as BBC documentaries," she [Dr Gerdien de Jong, an evolutionary biologist at Utrecht University] said.

In particular, she singled out the EO DVD "Het Leven van Zoogdieren" - The Life of Mammals. The series is presented as written and "presented by David Attenborough. Yet it is censored and Episode 10, about apes and humans, is absent. In short, he said, it appears "in a mutilated form, cutting or rephrasing all passages relevant to evolution."

It's sad, really.

Historically, Holland was the great savior of science, the one place so open and so free (and so far away from Rome and the Catholic Church) for science to prosper.  It was there that great minds like Huygens, Bernoulli, and others could confirm and defend the suppressed work being done by the Italians like Galileo and Torricelli and allow science to continue to progress through the insanely repressive 17th century counter-reformation and the incessant civil wars within the HRE.  That openness to science and invention led them to be the masters of the seas, trade, and exploration for almost a century while the rest of Europe and Britain fought their "demons".

And now, today, that once shining light of openness to science is being darkened by a new reformation dedicated to recreating that 17th century hell we fought so hard to get out of.

Comments

[mandrakan.livejournal.com]

It had less to do with distance from Rome and more with antipathy for Catholic Spain (and its inquisitions and autos da fe), which had ruled the Protestant, tolerant Netherlands and still occupied (at various points in its history) the so-called Spanish Netherlands.

In essence, if the Spanish were in favor of it, the Dutch were ag'in. And vice versa.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

I wasn't referring to why they were like that actively, but passively - by being so far away from the long arm of Rome and the inquisition (then stuck in the civil wars within the HRE), they could get away with it in ways the Italians couldn't.

By this time, Spain figured in very poorly - they'd already lost the Armada and the Dutch were actively trading and keeping the money on their own terms through financial alliances with England that would eventually result in Brits buying them out (it only cost them a Crown, and even then only for 20 years).

The Hapsburg's may have had some control, but not much. The Catholic church? None at all. The more evenly dispersed the wealth is (and it flowed quite freely thanks to their new stock market system developing in the also new coffee houses), the less involvement the church has to have to keep moral order. It's a core reason why Marx insisted that true communism requires that there be no religion - when true communism is achieved then religion is unnecessary. Shades of Nietzsche (though Karl would never admit it).

The economic and political discrepancy is what causes the unrest, and so if you eliminate the discrepancy you eliminate the need for one of the key restraints: religiously driven morality and subservience. To get you there, you need to eliminate that restraint because while it is in place you can't have the revolution against the Bourgeoisie needed to complete the process.

Or at least, that was his idea. Didn't really work very well, because the other side of human nature is that those in power will want to stay there. He predicted it in predicting that there would be resistance to the revolution, but not in that the revolution would fail for the very same reason. But fail it did, in Russia, China, 'Nam, Cambodia, and on and on...