Iceland is a fascinating place for reasons geologic, geographic, linguistic, and cultural. Add to the list that it’s one of the least religious nations on Earth.
Unlike most of secular Europe, this isn’t a recent development. Prominent Icelandic expressions of nonbelief extend nearly a thousand years into the past. To gaze into the soul of a culture, look at their legends, the stories they tell about themselves. For Iceland, that would be the Sagas of Icelanders.
Consisting mostly of refugees from Norway in the 9th century, the earliest Icelanders brought Norse paganism along with them. The official religion became Christianity, though many of the settlers retained their pagan beliefs. And whenever two prominent religions cohabitate, a third strain of nonbelief is usually found nestling between them.
The first of the Sagas were written in the 13th century, at the tail end of a period wracked by violence and political uncertainty, and describe life in Iceland from the earlier period just after the Norse explorers had settled it. Among the most popular is the Saga of Hrafnkell.
13th-century Icelandic manuscript. Public domain.
Hrafnkell’s Saga tells of a warrior chief, Hrafnkell, who worships Freyr, the Norse god of such lovely things as wealth, sunshine, and sex. Hrafnkell gives Freyr his best offerings and constant devotion, even building a grand temple to the god. Despite all this devotion, Hrafnkell is attacked by an enemy, his temple burned, and he and his people enslaved.
“It is folly to believe in gods,” he says, vowing never to perform another sacrifice. Stories of lost faith in hard times are easy to come by, and you can usually count on the hero to experience a sudden epiphany that leads him back to the fold before the closing credits. But Hrafnkell’s Saga takes an unexpected turn: He escapes slavery, spares the life of his captor in exchange for freedom, and lives his life in peace and contentment without gods.
The most famous contributor to the Icelandic Sagas was the wonderfully-named Snorri Sturleson. In addition to leading the nation’s parliament and writing history, Snorri was a mythographer, a gatherer of myths and beliefs. And interestingly, Snorri came to precisely the same conclusion as the mythographer Euhemerus of Crete about the origin of god belief: Human warrior chiefs and kings were venerated in life, then venerated in death, then gradually became venerated as gods.
The more contact a person has with human mythmaking, the more he or she seems to see the man behind the curtain.
It’s unsurprising that Hrafnkell remains among the most beloved and widely-read of the Sagas of Icelanders among Icelanders today. Though most are nominally Lutheran, fully 60 percent of Icelandic respondents in a 2011 Gallup poll said religion is unimportant in their daily lives. It’s a number that is certain to have increased since then, making Iceland one of the least religious countries on Earth.
If you are trying to puzzle out reality, Donald Trump is done. If you are writing a story with Trump as the hero, he’s invulnerable. The difference comes down to an irritating artifact of bad drama.
Reading Time: 6 MINUTES
In a 2004 article in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Ron Suskind recounted a surreal conversation he had with an aide to President George W. Bush:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’…’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” NYT Magazine, Oct 17, 2004
It was a simpler time. We thought we had reached our presidential nadir. The reaction from those of us in the reality-based community (RBC) to the statement by the aide—now believed to have been Karl Rove—was utter disbelief that such gibberish could emanate from the White House.
Like I said, a simpler time.
But in the fullness of time, that bush-league reference to created realities would be trumped…
…and given a shiny new name:
Chuck Todd’s sputtering, incredulous reaction to the invocation of “alternative facts,” like mine, was classic RBC. Conway had said something transparently insane. And then both Chuck and I went on our way, shaking our heads but never stopping to wonder if Karl and Kellyanne, each in their own era, might have signaled something useful about this ludicrous timeline of ours.
The question has a new urgency as a former president juggles the court calendar for four felony criminal indictments while his supporters retreat further into another false reality—one in which this obvious figure of unprecedented criminality, corruption, and incompetence is actually a Christ-like victim of a leftist conspiracy bent on keeping him from retaking the White House to resume his ordained mission to fix everything.
The RBC imagines that enormous energy must be required in Trump-supporting heads to manage the cognitive dissonance between the obvious reality and the Beloved Story. But there is no dissonance to manage in a mind that has never done any reality curation to begin with. It’s Beloved Story all the way down. Far from creating dissonance, a perceived attack on a Beloved Story often results in a redoubled commitment and deeper retreat into the story—a psychological defense called reactance or the backfire effect.
This is the essential point that we in the RBC keep missing. When you’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out the real world around you, despite your own weaknesses and biases, it’s natural to assume that others are doing the same thing, just really badly.
That’s not what’s happening.
One of the defining features of the human mind is the continuous creation of what research psychologist Dan McAdams calls “narrative identity”—a coherent story into which we can comfortably embed ourselves. That process is inherently subjective. As much as we’d like to think of our senses and minds as faithful recorders of reality, it is never true. Every perception and data point passes through a subjective filter, and our identity emerges from that.
As neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang puts it, “Emotion and cognition are not ever separate. There’s no such thing as one without the other. Emotion is the quality of engagement we have with the cognition, and the cognition is driving how we’re going to react and make sense out of it.”
Being in the RBC or engaging in science doesn’t exempt someone from this. The scientific method didn’t eradicate emotion from our observations of the world. It created procedures and systems that control for the subjective emotion that is always, always present where humans are involved, so we could maybe start getting more things right.
But our basic nature has not changed. We are not just incidentally storytellers—it is, for better or worse, a defining feature of who we are.
The luxury to care about the truth
Because of mostly unearned circumstances, I’ve had the luxury to care more about figuring out what’s true than about creating a story in which I could feel safe. When new information presented itself, I learned to deploy a small kit of tools that are mostly designed to get the mess that is me out of the way. It becomes a habit, then a way of life.
As a result, I’ve been able to take in some harsh realities—death is final, there is no all-powerful protector, we broke the climate and probably can’t fix it, my country/race/gender is responsible for enormous suffering, and so on—and incorporate them into my narrative identity without much need for alternative facts. More often than not, I have enough personal security to accept reality, even when it grates against my preferences.
This isn’t the human default.
Consider someone who lacks those advantages. They were born into a family that either didn’t value critical education or couldn’t afford it. They grew up surrounded by parents and peers and pastors who reinforced comforting narratives, plus an entire mediascape devoted to the profitable maintenance of that bubble. They are continually assured that they live in the greatest country in the world, that they worship the right god in the right way, that they will live forever under his wing, and that all those who contradict this story are in thrall to [insert demonic being or social system or political party here].
Now shift the culture under their feet in a way that tips them out of dead center.
A presidential candidate comes along who shares their temperamental disregard for reality, albeit for different reasons. When during the first Republican debate in August 2015, he says, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” jaws drop on both sides of the reality barrier—the RBC in horror, the narrative-weavers in love.
At that moment, Donald Trump acquired plot armor.
Bending the rules to protect the main character
Plot armor is present when you know an important character in a drama will survive a dangerous situation because they are needed for the plot to continue.
My son discovered this phenomenon at age nine, watching a lightsaber duel in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. “I hate these fights,” he said. “You know the good guy is going to win.” Maybe it’ll be magic, or luck, or the sudden appearance of the cavalry, or a bending of the laws of physics. One way or another, the necessary good guy will live.
That’s plot armor.
From the reality-based POV, it is beyond bizarre that 80% of white Evangelicals support Trump. But once you grasp narrative identity, it makes perfect sense. They are a people born and bred on the creation of preferred narratives that disregard inconvenient realities, narratives in which they are the good guys and they win. The reason Jesus couldn’t stay dead is the same reason Trump’s support will never drop below a certain floor: both are needed on set for the plot to continue to the cathartic fourth act.
And in that moment, Trump said, You’re right, the world has gone crazy with all this political correctness. Everyone is blaming you, but it’s not your fault. It’s their fault! And I alone can fix it.
That was a moment of intense narrative lock, a way to restore the triumphant story of white Christian supremacy that had been rudely interrupted by all that progress. Nobody else was talking this way. And the other 6,895 candidates in that GOP primary, with their political mealy mouths and half measures, winked out of existence.
This is the crucial realization: Trump supporters are not trying to get it right. They didn’t arrive at their support by examining evidence badly. When the reality-based community says, “How the hell can they still support him?” then trots out the Access Hollywood tapeand 30,573 lies and hush money for porn stars and calls for violence and religious and political illiteracy and two open-and-shut impeachments and four criminal indictments and call it “evidence”—it’s only evidence of our failure to get through our heads what they are actually engaged in. They are not trying to get it right. They are trying to finish a story in which they are the good guys and they win.
And you, with your bad storytelling, are going to get thrown out of the writers’ room.
I don’t remember who I was talking to when this dynamic finally struck me. I was arguing against some theological nonsense with an intelligent friend, years ago, assuming that we were engaged in the same enterprise, but seeing him miss the catch over and over, when it hit with the force of revelation: He is not trying to figure it out. He is writing an acceptable story and wondering why I am being so obtuse by losing the plot.
The fortunate thing about Trump’s plot armor is that it doesn’t translate to the ballot box. The unfortunate thing is that when he loses, at the ballot box or in the courtroom, there is no extreme measure the faithful remnant will not consider in defense of the Beloved Story.
I’m sometimes asked by religious friends why I make such a big deal over evolution in particular. Some suggest that secular types beat the drum for evolution only because it’s a sharp stick in the religious eyeball.
The question itself is a good one. The answer is even better.
It’s not just because evolution is true. That’s never enough. It’s also true that George Washington had no middle name, but I’m unlikely to devote much of my life force to opposing someone who insists that yes he did, and it was Steve, and that only Martha called him George, and only when she was drunk. Even if this hypothetical Stevist insisted on teaching the middle name in American History classes, I might think it was bananas, but I have other fish to fry.
Evolution, on the other hand—that’s a fish I choose to fry. It’s an idea that I want my kids and as many others as possible to know and care about. Because the story I’m about to tell is centered on evolution in schools, I want to start with a quick list of why it’s important:
First, it is an everything-changer. If knowing about evolution hasn’t changed almost everything about the way you see almost everything, dig in deeper with the help of people like Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life and Full House), Richard Dawkins (Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable) and Daniel Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).
Second, it inspires immense, transcendent awe and wonder to grasp that you are a cousin not just to apes, but to sponges and sequoias and butterflies and blue whales.
Third, it annihilates the artificial boundaries between us and the rest of life on Earth.
Fourth, it puts racial difference in proper perspective as utter trivia.
Fifth, when taken as directed, it constitutes one of the four grandest-ever swats of humility to the pompous human tookus.
Sixth, it contributes enormously to our understanding of how and why things work the way they do.
Seventh, that understanding has led in turn to incredible advances in medical science, agriculture, environmental stewardship, and more.
The list goes on.
When my older daughter Erin was in eighth grade, she came home from school one day and sat in front of me with evident drama.
“Guess what.”
“Uh, Norway fell into the sea. You can burp the alphabet. Am I close?”
“Dad, stop.” She leaned forward. “We started evolution in science today.”
A tickle of dread went down my spine. I’m a busy boy. No jonesing for a fracas.
“And?”
“And it’s awesome. He’s teaching all about it, just like you would. He explained what theory really means, and said that the evidence is incredibly strong for evolution, and when kids started saying, ‘But the Bible says blah blah blah,’ he just put his hand up and said, ‘You can talk about that with your minister. In this class, we are learning about science, about what we know.”
I had never seen her so jazzed about a class experience. She knows what a crapshoot it is, knows that she has less than a 50-50 chance of learning about evolution in any depth in the classroom. She lucked out.
So what’s a parent to do? Most, including me, will do a nice cartoon wipe of the brow and go back to the next thing on the plate. That’s a mistake. It’s also simply wrong.
We’re happy to fire off a blistering corrective to the teachers who fall down on the job and take our kids with them. But we’ve got to get just as good and consistent at complimenting the good.
It’s not just a question of good manners. If we really care about quality in the classroom, it’s imperative.
Praise the good
Imagine you’re a biology teacher. The evolution unit is approaching, again, and you know for certain you will get a half dozen scolding emails from angry parents the moment the word crosses your lips. Again. If you’ve never received a note of thanks for tackling the topic honestly, it’s easy to feel isolated and beleaguered. Who could blame you for gradually de-emphasizing the topic until it disappears completely? Even a teacher with the best of intentions can be worn to a nub from years of self-righteous tirades.
And those of us who sit silently, never lifting a finger to reinforce good teaching when we see it, deserve what we get.
I finally woke up to this when Erin was in sixth grade, and I started making a point of shooting off a message of thanks to teachers who rocked my kids’ worlds. This is especially important for middle and high school teachers, who are much less likely to hear any positive feedback through parent conferences and the other frequent contacts elementary teachers get.
When Erin was working her way through a much better-than-average comparative religion unit in social studies, I dashed off a note of appreciation to the teacher, who nearly passed out from the shock. When Connor told me his high school science teacher spent some time explaining what “theory” really means in science, I shot him some kudos. And when Erin came home with this story of courage and integrity, I sent a message expressing my deep and detailed appreciation…and cc’ed the principal.
The teacher replied, telling me how gratifying it was to hear the support. “It’s a passion of mine,” he said. Even passion can be pummeled out of someone. But now, the next time he approaches that unit, he’ll hear not only angry shouts ringing in his ears, but a little bit of encouragement from someone who took the time to make it known.
I’m better at this than I once was, but I’m still about three times as likely to pipe up when I’m pissed as when I’m impressed.
When she was in elementary school, my youngest daughter Delaney wanted to be a scientist.
When Charlie’s Playhouse, a company that made evolution toys and games, announced an Evolution & Art Contest that fall, she was all over it. Imagine an island with a unique environment. Choose an existing animal to put on the island. Fast forward a million years or so and imagine how the animal would evolve as a result of that environment. Draw a picture of the evolved animal. Awesome.
Soon the sketches were flying. Finally, with just days to go before the deadline, Laney showed me her entry.
Used by permission of Delaney McGowan
“The island has purple polka-dotted trees and bushes and quiet predators,” she explained. “And the only food is hard nuts. So after a long, long time, the monkeys evolve to have purple polka dots, huge ears to hear the predators, and sharp teeth to crack the nuts.”
She might not know an allele if it jumped up and mutated all over her, but her grasp of natural selection outstrips that of most adults. And she got this grasp not through lectures but by observing the results of natural selection all around us, and caring enough to think about it.
If I’m out on a walk in the woods with my own daughter and we see a deer with protective coloration, I’ll often say, “Look—you can barely see it. What if I was an animal trying to find a deer to eat? That one wouldn’t be very easy to find. And its babies would have the same coloring, so I’ll bet they’d be hard to find, too.”
[Then] imagine a poor adaptation. “Hey, what if it was bright pink? I think I’d have a pink one for supper every night, they’d be so easy to catch.” I step on a twig and the deer bolts away. “Ooh, fast too! I’ll bet I’d have to eat slow pink ones every night. Soon there wouldn’t be any slow pink ones left because I’d have eaten them all!”
When she did eventually encounter allele frequencies, cladistics, the modern synthesis and all the rest in high school, it glided (glode?) into place on the foundation she had laid for it. The key when she was young was to keep her engaged.
Winning the national contest for her age group didn’t hurt that one bit. She nearly passed out in excitement. We let her teacher know about it, and he showered her with kudos, then forwarded the news to the front office.
The call
The next week we received a call. It was Ms. Warner, an assistant administrator at the school. Becca answered. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but it was obviously good news of some sort.
Until it wasn’t.
When she hung up, she was clearly upset.
“Laney’s going to be interviewed by the principal on the Eagle News” — that’s a closed-circuit TV program that starts each school day — “about winning the Charlie’s Playhouse contest.”
I waited.
“But Ms. Warner said they’re not going to call it an ‘Evolution & Art’ contest — just an ‘Art’ contest. When I asked why, she said, ‘Because evolution is not in the curriculum.’ I said yes it is, it’s in the high school curriculum, and she said, ‘But it’s not in the elementary curriculum, so it’ll just be described as an ‘Art’ contest.’”
The heat started in my neck and spread to my ears, then into my face. Becca began swearing a blue streak. I sat down and wrote the most fabulously profane email of my life to a friend. Venting is good. Not sure if I was madder about the ignorance or the cowardice or the dishonesty — or the fact that this educator was dismissing the truly exceptional nature of what Laney did.
It wasn’t an art contest, you see. Delaney’s accomplishment had been scientific, not artistic. The drawing is lovely, but it’s just a way of expressing her grasp of the science. To have her school — savor that for a moment, her school — not only disregard her achievement, but send her the message that it’s something to be hidden, to be ashamed of…
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, this is Georgia. But as I’ve said before, in the four years we’ve been here, I’ve had far more opportunity to be pleasantly surprised than not. In addition to living in an area even more culturally and religiously diverse than the one we left in Minneapolis, our kids are getting an incredible education in top-ranked schools.
After many years in the national basement, Georgia’s latest science standards are excellent. And when it comes to the teaching of evolution itself, it ranks in the top tier of the Fordham study (see maps) — above Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and 24 other states.
Science standards don’t have to be in the South to go south. As Lawrence Lerner put it in the NCSE Journal,
Although there is a disproportionate concentration of ill-treatment of evolution in the Bible Belt, geography is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such treatment. Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, treated evolution very well while New Hampshire and Wisconsin did not.Lawrence Lerner, “Good, Bad, and Lots of Indifferent: State K-12 Science Standards,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, vol. 28 no. 3
The most relevant anti-science spectrum in the US (and elsewhere) is not North-South, but urban-suburban-rural. The suburbs of Atlanta have more in common with the suburbs of Philadelphia than either has in common with the small towns in its own state. The quality of science education tends to drop in sync with population density.
But that’s on paper. As Ms. Warner and Mr. Taylor clearly show, individuals in the system will do their level best to undercut even the best standards.
A deeply depressing Penn State study found that only 28 percent of high school biology teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred. About 13 percent of biology teachers explicitly advocate creationism in the classroom, while 60 percent use at least one of three strategies to avoid controversy: (1) pretending that evolution applies only on the molecular level; (2) telling students it does not matter if they really ‘believe’ in evolution, only that they know it for the test; and/or (3) “teaching the controversy,” which one researcher noted “tells students that well-established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions.”
According to the researchers, these conflict-avoiders “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”
by DALE MCGOWAN OCT 17, 2023
The Pencil Driven Life 