Transgressive reading, part 7: Science as a candle in the dark

 The Trump regime is pressuring the various Smithsonian museums to censor our history and now, our art. I don't believe they have used the Nazi phrase, "degenerate art" yet, but they've gone after certain artists for depicting American life that they don't want anybody to look at. History has to be nicey nicey, and to depict the glory of white Americans.

I was going to list some books about the Nazi attacks on modern art in 1937, but most of them seem to be out of print and rather pricey. You can do your own digging online.

I visited Washington, DC, on Saturday to test Trump's assertion that, now that he's deployed the National Guard, the streets are safe, and "the crowds are back!" He picked a bad time to tout throngs of tourists, seeing that school is back in and people aren't bringing their kids to the Mall. For a lovely Saturday, DC was starkly empty. But I imagine that masses of tourists inhabit Trump's fantasy mind, along with treacherous urban streets.

Now that the museums are being told to dismantle exhibits the regime finds unpleasant, I couldn't bear to go into any of them: the art museums; the Museum of Natural History; the Museum of American History; and, especially, the Museum of African American History. I can't go back until the regime is over.

So, as Trump is trying to shut real history and science and art down, what other t transgressive books can I suggest? Get 'em while you can.

How about some science?

Timothy Ferris wrote a book called The Science of Liberty, in which he posits that most scientific progress is made in a liberal environment. Liberalism holds science in a positive light; reading science makes, or should make, a person more liberal. That seems to be borne out (in a negative way) in today's fascist/religious situation.

How about a few classics? Darwin is quite readable and engaging. The Voyage of the Beagle is an account of his South American adventure, and how the things he saw and samples he collected solidified his views on evolution. Origin of Species lays out his great theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin was a very exacting scientist, and reading about some of his experiments amazed me in how rigorous the science was. I came away from Origin thinking that there was no more to be said after that book. Following Origin, Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Many people may have been fine with the idea of evolution as it pertained to plants and animals, but they were very reluctant to conclude that humans were included in evolution: humans were thought to have been created by God separately from the rest of the animal kingdom. So, Darwin wrote this book to show continuity between humans and animals when it came to emotion. That led him to his doorstopper of a book, Descent of Man. That book plainly shows that evolution also led to homo sapiens. Descent of Man is not particularly readable, but the slog is worth it.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. "Hey, farmer farmer, put away the DDT, man!" as Joni Mitchell sang. Carson waged her campaign against pesticides, and the result of listening to her warnings was, among other things, bringing back the bald eagle.

And how about a little cosmology that shows how the universe could come to be without a creator?

One of the things religious people ask the atheists is, if there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing? The simple answer is the question, "Why does the answer to that question have to be God? Why doesn't 'We don't know yet' suffice?"

Check out Lawrence M. Krauss's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. For some scientists, there being "something" is more natural and likely than there being "nothing." Lots of cosmology and quantum physics in this book. My mind stretches, partially successfully, to understand the science.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote a true classic, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, in which they argue for better scientific education for the public. What makes science different from other practices? The scientific method is self-correcting. Scientists observe nature, make predictions, and then test those predictions with experiments. They post their findings in scientific journals, and their fellow-scientists do more experiments to see if their results agree or disagree with the original researchers'. The scientific method takes us out of the darkness of superstition, pseudo-science, and anti-science. This book is more urgently needed than ever in the Trump-RFK Jr. era.

Get 'em while you can, before they start policing bookstores.