Thursday, March 29, 2018

PUBLICITY VERSUS TRUTH


Charles Darwin is not the only person in history who has had a great publicity machine working for him, with some of it being self-publicity.  One of the most cynical and true conclusions you can reach from an in-depth study of history is that publicity works. Not only does it succeed in creating a better and undeserved image for certain people, but it also succeeds at erasing the far more deserving people whose existence is a threat to the image created for the heroes we endorse.

Darwin was not a great humanitarian, and he was not the one who came up with evolution, nor was he the first to prove its greater probability. All these descriptions should go to others, but we have so lauded Charles Darwin that we have forgotten who these others were. His contemporaries, Robert Chambers and Georg Gerland, just to name two, did much more for a humane understanding of evolution, and Chambers promoted and proved his case for the probability of evolution 15 years before Darwin published. Darwin had great publicists, the others did not.

But, as I said, Darwin is not the only example of this. Thomas Jefferson comes to mind. Not only was he not the great believer in emancipation of slaves, he was not even the great constitutionalist he is still celebrated as. In one letter, he explained that obeying the law is only one duty of a public official and not the highest. A far greater duty, he thought, was to act for the self-preservation of the country, even if that meant breaking the law. He conceived that acquiring more land for the United States was for the good of the country, and went ahead with the Louisiana Purchase without a constitutional amendment to authorize it, though he thought an amendment was necessary. The Louisiana territory was too good a bargain to pass up or let constitutional niceties interfere with.

Today we would call it using national security to justify government actions. We forget how much Jefferson supported that. But his publicity machine still celebrates him as a man of pure principles. A better example of devotion to constitutional principle would be the first John M. Harlan. He was the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which established the separate but equal doctrine for blacks. Harlan was outraged. The Constitution, he argued, is color blind and does not authorize using laws to sanction race hatred. A few years later in Downes v. Bidwell (1901) he again dissented from a decision that exempted the newly acquired territories, after the Spanish-American War, from constitutional protections. The Constitution, as Harlan argued, does not envision the United States becoming a colonial power. But who remembers Justice Harlan today? He does not have that publicity thing going for him.

There are many more examples one could give, but I will give just one. The King James translators have always had the reputation of having made a great translation of the Bible. In the translators’ introduction to their work, they admitted this was not an original translation, but no one pays attention to that. They are still praised for something they never did (which, interestingly, is how someone once summed up Thomas Jefferson). Nine times out of ten, when the King James New Testament is quoted, it is William Tyndale who is being quoted. His translation was the main source the King James Version relied on. He still gets no credit. Tyndale was executed for his efforts, and the King James was handed all the glory for what was in reality his accomplishment.

The problem for me is not just that one person or group falsely gets all the fame. It is even more that we have been unfair to others and buried some people out of sight who deserve better. And even more, in some cases like that of Charles Darwin, by our unrealistic portrait of them, we implicitly condone some of the bad things they did. In Darwin’s case, by ignoring his racism and support of genocide, we send a message that these things are acceptable as long as the person who practices them is eminent enough. It is a terrible legacy to create.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer