If there’s a God, and He made the world, it wasn’t in seven literal days, as creationists affirm. Nor, as many aboriginals profess to believe, did the world begin with “Sky Woman” descending to Earth in the shape of a turtle. If you don’t agree, no need to read on.
Such fanciful narratives may serve to transmit cultural values, but they are still myths and, “when science meets mythology, some-thing’s got to give, and it shouldn’t be the science.”
I am quoting here from a certain Professor Chris diCarlo, whom I recently interviewed over the telephone. He will be the keynote speaker at this weekend’s annual convention of the Humanist Association of Canada in Toronto. diCarlo is an academic and the author of the enticingly titled How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass: A Practical Guide to Thinking Critically.
The man knows whereof he speaks. For refusing to privilege myth over science in the classroom, he was sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
Mr. diCarlo’s troubles began in 2005 while teaching a course in critical thinking at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., ironically, not long after he’d been named TVOntario’s “Best Lecturer.” From all reports a beloved and inspiring teacher, diCarlo is a rare bird nowadays: a non-ideological truth-seeker.
Caucasian himself, diCarlo had a T-shirt printed with the logo “We are all Africans”—a reference to the widely held scientific view that Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna about 200,000 years ago, and then later migrated to other parts of the world.
But his anti-racist message that a disparate humankind evolved from a common genetic ancestry ruffled aborigino-centric feathers in his classroom. The result: an accusation of what is known in academia as a “stolen legacy.”
Archaeologists believe that North American aboriginals’ forebears traversed the Bering Strait when it was still an icy land mass 13,000 years ago. That’s what diCarlo taught. But aborigino-centrists would prefer the folkloric notion that aboriginals were, uniquely, always here. The Bering Strait migration evidence, it is felt among some Alaskan aboriginals, may even undermine land claims. So opposition to the historical evidence is both emotionally and politically charged.
In diCarlo’s case, the message was perceived by the student who brought him down (“My people don’t believe in what you’re saying”) as both racist and—the statement being moored in scientific methodology—eurocentric. There are more than enough ironies to savour at every stage of this story, but a humanist embodying a rigorously anti-creationist view of human origins being perceived as an agent of Christian elitism has to top the list.
Mr. diCarlo’s subsequent crime was to stand his intellectual ground. It wasn’t a moral issue or a contentious empirical debate: One side represented the best of what we know from science, the other was demonstrably untrue. Nevertheless, the “offended” students knew their “rights”: They complained.
And hey, presto, before you can say “craven university administration,” diCarlo had lost the tenured job for which he was already short-listed. (He has since won damages in a grievance and is happily tenure-bound at a school that appreciates him.)
Pandering to aboriginals’ stolen-legacy gambits has become commonplace, I’m informed by my “moles” studying Canadian history at various universities. One is now job-hunting in the academy, so I’ll call her Lori, not her real name.
Lori feels her academic freedom has been constrained by academics’ obsession over the empowerment of “oppressed” groups at the expense of historical fact: “When aboriginality comes into the mix, academics fall all over themselves to compromise their core secularism.”
She indignantly reports that more than one of her professors suggested she teach native creation stories—not as anthropological lore but alongside the Bering Strait theory—to accommodate aboriginal sensibilities.
When history teachers can’t—or won’t—distinguish between allegory and fact to avoid accusations of stolen legacies, they are denying an entire generation of students their intellectual inheritance: the unbiased pursuit of objective truth. We could help students—and principled teachers—to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs by asking: Who is the real thief here?
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