Compared to some of the religiously inspired racist rhetoric of that time and later, Douglass’s comments do not seem hyperbolic. ‘Slavery is of God’ they used to say in antebellum times. As one of many loathsome post-Civil War examples, Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (American Book and Bible House) taught its pious readers that ‘the Bible and Divine Revelation, as well as reason, all teach that the Negro is not human’. In more modern times, some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable with appeals to the Bible as an ‘impregnable bulwark’ against even examining the evidence.
It is worth noting, though, that much of the abolitionist ferment arose out of Christian, especially Quaker, communities of the North; that the traditional black Southern Christian churches played a key role in the historic American civil rights struggle of the 1960s; and that many of its leaders -most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. – were ministers ordained in those churches. Douglass addressed the white community in these words:
[Slavery] fetters your progress, it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds indolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse of the earth that supports it, and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.
In 1843, on a speaking tour of Ireland shortly before the potato famine, he was moved by the dire poverty there to write home to Garrison: ‘I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.’ He was outspoken in opposition to the policy of extermination of the Native Americans. And in 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton* had the nerve to call for an effort to secure the vote for women, he was the only man of any ethnic group to stand in support.
[* Years later, she wrote of the Bible in words reminiscent of Douglass’s: ‘I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women.’]
On the night of 20 February 1895 – more than thirty years after Emancipation – following an appearance at a women’s rights rally with Susan B. Anthony, he collapsed and died, a true American hero.
22
Significance Junkies
We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
Henri Poincare (1854-1912)
I hope no one will consider me unduly cynical if I assert that a good first-order model of how commercial and public television programming work is simply this: money is everything. In prime time, a single rating point difference is worth millions of dollars in advertising. Especially since the early 1980s, television has become almost entirely profit-motivated. You can see this, say, in the decline of network news and news specials, or in the pathetic evasions that the major networks offered to circumvent a Federal Communications Commission mandate that they improve the level of children’s programming. (For example, educational virtues were asserted for a cartoon series that systematically misrepresents the technology and lifestyles of our Pleistocene ancestors, and that portrays dinosaurs as pets.) As I write, public television in America is in real danger of losing government support, and the content of commercial programming is in the course of a steep, long-term dumbing down.
In this perspective, fighting for more real science on television seems naive and forlorn. But owners of networks and television producers have children and grandchildren about whose future they rightly worry. They must feel some responsibility for the future of their nation. There is evidence that science programming can be successful, and that people hunger for more of it. I remain hopeful that sooner or later we’ll see real science skilfully and appealingly presented as regular fare on major network television worldwide.
Baseball and soccer have Aztec antecedents. Football is a thinly disguised reenactment of hunting; we played it before we were human. Lacrosse is an ancient Native American game, and hockey is related to it. But basketball is new. We’ve been making movies longer than we’ve been playing basketball.
At first, they didn’t think to make a hole in the peach basket so the ball could be retrieved without climbing a flight of stairs. But in the brief time since then, the game has evolved. In the hands mainly of African-American players, basketball has become – at its best – the paramount synthesis in sport of intelligence, precision, courage, audacity, anticipation, artifice, teamwork, elegance and grace.
Five-foot-three-inch Muggsy Bogues negotiates a forest of giants: Michael Jordan sails in from some outer darkness beyond the free-throw line; Larry Bird threads a precise, no-look pass; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unleashes a skyhook. This is not fundamentally a contact sport like football. It’s a game of finesse. The full-court press, passes out of the double-team, the pick-and-roll, cutting off the passing lanes, a tip-in from a high-flying forward soaring from out of nowhere all constitute a coordination of intellect and athleticism, a harmony of mind and body. It’s not surprising that the game has caught fire in America.
Ever since National Basketball Association games became a television staple, it’s seemed to me that it could be used to teach science and mathematics. To appreciate a free-throw average of 0.926, you must know something about converting fractions into decimals. A lay-up is Newton’s first law of motion in action. Every shot represents the launching of a basketball on a parabolic arc, a curve determined by the same gravitational physics that specifies the flight of a ballistic missile, or the Earth orbiting the Sun, or a spacecraft on its rendezvous with some distant world. The centre of mass of the player’s body during a slam dunk is briefly in orbit about the centre of the Earth.
To get the ball in the basket, you must loft it at exactly the right speed; a one per cent error and gravity will make you look bad. Three-point shooters, whether they know it or not, compensate for aerodynamic drag. Each successive bounce of a dropped basketball is nearer to the ground because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Daryl Dawkins or Shaquille O’Neal shattering a backboard is an opportunity for teaching – among some other things – the propagation of shock waves. A spin shot off the glass from under the backboard goes in because of the conservation of angular momentum. It’s an infraction of the rules to touch the basketball in ‘the cylinder’ above the basket; we’re now talking about a key mathematical idea: generating n-dimensional objects by moving (n – l)-dimensional objects.
In the classroom, in newspapers and on television, why aren’t we using sports to teach science?
When I was growing up, my father would bring home a daily paper and consume (often with great gusto) the baseball box scores. There they were, to me dry as dust, with obscure abbreviations (W, SS, K, W-L, AB, RBI), but they spoke to him. Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they weren’t too hard for me. Eventually I too got caught up in the world of baseball statistics. (I know it helped me in learning decimals, and I still cringe a little when I hear, usually at the very beginning of the baseball season, that someone’s ‘batting a thousand’. But 1.000 is not 1,000.. The lucky player is batting one.)
Or take a look at the financial pages. Any introductory material? Explanatory footnotes? Definitions of abbreviations? Almost none. It’s sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics! Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It’s not beyond their ability. It’s only a matter of motivation. Why can’t we do the same with maths, science and technology?
In every sport the players seem to perform in streaks. In basketball it’s called the hot hand. You can do no wrong. I remember a play-off game in which Michael Jordan, not ordinarily a superb long-range shooter, was effortlessly making so many consecutive
three-point baskets from all over the floor that he shrugged his shoulders in amazement at himself. In contrast, there are times when you’re cold, when nothing goes in. When a player is in the groove he seems to be tapping into some mysterious power, and when ice-cold he’s under some kind of jinx or spell. But this is magical, not scientific thinking.
Streakiness, far from being remarkable, is expected, even for random events. What would be amazing would be no streaks. If I flip a penny ten times in a row, I might get this sequence of heads and tails: H H H T H T H H H H. Eight heads out of ten, and four in a row! Was I exercising some psychokinetic control over my penny? Was I in a heads groove? It looks much too regular to be due to chance.