While our political press obsesses on Fred's trophy wife, John's haircut and Hillary's cleavage, a far more revealing political milestone has passed with barely a ripple: the moment when ten Republican candidates for president, during the first in their endless series of sort-of debates, were asked if they believed in evolution. Three would-be leaders of the free world raised their hands to say no.
The revelatory aspect of this has nothing to do with the evolution versus creationism debate per se. Nor am I addressing the question of whether any person is fit to be president if he rejects broad scientific consensus in favor of the 5,000-year-old writings of nomadic goat herders who thought the world was flat, the sun circled the earth and the children of blasphemers ought to be executed.
What's most important is the question itself: Do you believe in evolution? It is at once unintentionally illuminating and profoundly stupid, and the fact that a panel of elite journalists and ten major presidential candidates alike failed to recognize this should shock and worry us all.
To fully appreciate the absurdity, imagine the moderator instead asked: Do you believe in gravity? Do you believe in atoms? Do you believe germs cause disease? These scientific theories, like evolution, are matters of knowledge and evidence-based explanations for the natural world. They have nothing to do with "belief." This is the heart of science, the great gift of the Enlightenment. Conversely, belief -- be it a gut feeling, a superstition, or faith in God -- exists without need of evidence and sometimes in spite of it.
The two coexist productively so long as we do the hard work of adjusting our beliefs in the face of new evidence and understanding, an enlightened practice that brought us the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the abolition of slavery (thanks to the reasoned abandonment of belief in the divine right of kings, the impossibility of democracy and the Biblical correctness of slavery). Belief untempered by reason, however, has not served us well, bringing crusades, the KKK, Nazism, jihad and, yes, an Iraq war launched against the wrong adversary for the wrong reasons with the wrong expectations (remember the cakewalk? the roses that would be tossed at our soldiers' feet?) by a president with strong beliefs but little knowledge. Belief without reason is ignorance -- dangerous, passionate, addictive.
That America is a nation of believers is hardly news. What is new is a growing unwillingness to distinguish belief from knowledge, wishful thinking from fact. Confusing the scientific principle of evolution with belief, not in a middle-school science class but in a presidential debate, is a sign of things gone very wrong. In his new book's title, Al Gore calls such confusion, The Attack on Reason, but there's more to it than that. Americans too often prefer pleasing beliefs, even false ones, over knowledge, and we cling to them not with the tenacity of a warrior, but with the sick obsession of an addict.
What other than the endless rationalizations of addiction could sustain our belief in presidents who promise to cut taxes while increasing spending (as with the Iraq War), when anyone who has wrestled with a household budget should know spending more than you earn brings disaster? Yet any candidate who challenges America's "free lunch" beliefs is unelectable. George H.W. Bush's first presidential run flopped after he branded Ronald Reagan's tax-cut and spend policies "voodoo economics;" he became electable only after he publicly embraced the voodoo. In their most recent debate, the ten Republican candidates fed the same addiction when discussing the recent fatal bridge collapse in Minneapolis, one of many instances of crumbling infrastructure for which there are no public funds to repair: They'd fix the bridges by cutting taxes! News report did not portray this as reality-defying lunacy, but as sensible vote-getting appeals to the -- you guessed it -- "true believers."
Or consider our beliefs about public education: Only a nation in an addict's state of denial could spend more per household on hair-care products, movie rentals and restaurant meals than on reading material and education, contribute less per capita to support public schooling than any other Western democracy, and let its children watch 12 hours of TV a week (versus 78 minutes of reading and homework), yet still believe schools and teachers are to blame for America's academic woes.
We are indestructibly addicted to belief in American supremacy, but only because we blind ourselves to the facts: In a single generation, we have gone from a nation of savers, inventors and producers (the generation that won World War II, conquered space, invented computers and the Internet, cured polio and reached the moon) to a nation of outsourcers, consumers and debtors who can't even change the oil in their own cars. In 1938, a liberal president dispatched troops and work crews to New York, where they repaired in less than a year sweeping devastation from a hurricane that raged across Long Island. Today, we have leaders who believe government can't possibly do good, a faith they ratified by putting a horseshow manager in charge of federal disaster response. New Orleans paid the price.
Then there is the enduring belief that Republicans are most trustworthy in matters of national defense. What else can explain the reelection in 2004 of an otherwise flagrantly incompetent incumbent? But consider reality: World War I and World War II were fought and won under Democratic presidents (while Republicans bitterly opposed entering World War II, opposed maintaining a pre-war draft, opposed assisting our allies). It was a Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, who "won the peace" after WWII by enacting the G.I. Bill, sending a generation of scientists, educators, businessmen and doctors to college while transforming America from a nation of renters into a nation of homeowners. With Republicans in the White House, however, the Korean War ended without victory; we "cut and run" from Vietnam and Lebanon; we slashed the GI Bill and reduced premier military hospitals to crumbling wrecks of neglect; America armed mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan who became the Taliban and supported Osama Bin Laden; and it was a Republican president who failed to act on direct warnings of imminent attack by Al Qaeda before 9-11. The August 2001 CIA memo warning Bush, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," is public record, he and his party have been wrong about every significant aspect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet America still remains addicted to the belief that Republicans are the go-to guys on defense. Rudy Giuliani bases his entire candidacy on it -- all but screaming, Elect a Democrat and Die! -- and our belief-addicted political press corps reports this as smart campaigning, not fact-free nuttiness.
Like a drug addict facing the inevitable crash and burn, America faces a growing list of perils, from the Middle East mess to global warming, exacerbated by decades of false beliefs and misguided policies. But we cannot allow America to crash and burn. As with any addiction, there is a cure, beginning with admitting we have a problem. I believe that the country is ripe for this, that a solid majority is sick of having a true-believer, know-nothing president and national policies to match, and is ready to cast some reality-based ballots.
But first we must do something uncomfortable: We must question. Doubt. Listen to the voices of reason and caution rather than the finger-pointers and flag-wavers who appeal to emotion with no facts to back them up. We must demand leaders who do the same, who consider the evidence before forming their beliefs, rather than dismissing the evidence that contradicts their (and our) desires, then blundering into the maelstrom. Is it really too much to ask for a candidate who says, "Being president isn't about what I believe, it's about what I know. Our greatest leaders in war and peace, Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, understood this simple truth: Presidents don't have the luxury of wishful thinking."
Had our first new president of the 21st century taken this approach, we would not have spent more time killing and dying in Iraq that we spent winning World War II, nor would we have spent a half trillion dollars on a war that has left us less secure, nor would we be despised throughout the world as a lawless bully, such a far cry from the image FDR, our most successful "war president," left behind: America as the "arsenal of democracy."
And who knows? We might instead have spent all that money, manpower and good will on a crash program to develop alternative energy sources, to free us from foreign oil dependence, the truth threat to our national security, the true economic engine of terrorism. Now that's something to believe in.
* *
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes is the author of Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul, and Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream. His website is www.EdwardHumes.com