The Creation Museum in Kentucky

On my recent road trip around the USA I visited the Creation Musuem and here are my thoughts.

Firstly it is technically impressive. The animatronic exhibits are excellent and the feel of the entire place is one of quality; they’ve clearly spent a lot of money on the place. They also have many audio visual exhibits which cuts down on the amount of reading required; I really dislike museums that have walls and walls of text to read. The videos they play are normally rather short so you are constantly moving rather than stuck watching a video for half an hour. As an aside the more explicitly sciencey short videos were the most interesting item there. They also had some lovely gardens and a zoo but we didn’t see much of them due to time constraints.

The aim, as I understood it, was to show that everyone looks at the world with a particular lense which is non-neutral- the examples used were atheism and Christian theism- but with a greater emphasis on the Biblical narrative making sense of the universe particularly 6 Day Creation, Fall, the Flood, Babel and finally Christ. Consequently the amount of science content was proportional low; most of it was focused around geology which was quite informative.

It did not though succeed even on its own terms: the worldview analysis was rather shallow and misleading at times- it was hardly assumption quaking; the Biblical narrative exposition was good although it felt as it was focused towards Christians rather convincing others of it i.e. far too little of actual creation evolution debate (and anthropology). It took me a while to figure out the purpose of the museum.

If you are a Creationist or an Evolutionist of any stripe it doesn’t provide enough science to get your teeth into. If you are a non-Christian it won’t convince you of the Biblical narrative since it doesn’t adequately engage with non-Christian narratives.

All in all, a missed opportunity and an expensive one at that- not cheap especially if you took a family (it’s deliberately kid friendly but there are clearly adult exhibits). So if you are a Creationist or an Evolutionist I’d say go to some botanic gardens and read some books on the subjects.

Libertarianism and the Arts

The arts are one area in which I think libertarians need to engage in more. Firstly we need to appreciate there importance, especially narrative art (stories in any form) which I will be focusing on.

When we look at book sales it is clear that fiction far out sells non-fiction, but why? My contention is that stories are far more akin to real life human experience than non-fiction: they have a real sequential element. All humans exist and act in time and thus a story being a condensed version of human life is far more appealing than non-fiction which in essence is timeless: empirical science, economics, philosophy et al; history would be an exception but a lot of that is done rather impersonally and you really need a pre-existing interest in the period itself to read it. One of the great strengths of narrative is that you can create emotions and realistic characters which you can’t do timelessly. Herein lies the appeal and the power of narrative.

With stories you can create ideals to aspire for and systems to denigrate. This can be powerfully demonstrated by human cost or achievement to a character you already have an emotionally investment. We therefore need a libertarian saga, or meta-narrative, which libertarian novelists and filmmakers can feed from. A saga which shows the world before the state to the descent to it and finally its obliteration, whilst demonstrating the dignity of the individual person and the virtue of liberty. So essentially we need our own version of the Marxist theory of history. Now one of the main obstacles to this raises its ugly head which is due to libertarianism being such a broad church (here a libertarian is defined as one who adheres to the NAP): we all agree on the pre and post statist world but disagree on how the state came into being and how it will collapse. For example I see the state as the ultimate rejection of God since becoming a state is the closest thing to God you can get. Thus it fits in well with my Christian meta-narrative of creation, fall and redemption. Others would see it as the outworking of an authority based life view and that a non-statist world would be rather egalitarian. I do not intend to discuss the validity of these competing views here but to illustrate their existence.

Consequently more work needs to be done on the origin and rise of the state. Even though some sides are unlikely to come to agreement this it will help to articulate more precisely different libertarians sagas. From this framework the evils of statism can be exposed and the virtue of freedom lauded. However it needs to be understood however that stories do not convince people of certain ideologies: they merely sensitise people towards them. To use stories as propaganda is hokey and makes for bad stories. At present statist films sensitise people to the idea that business is sleazy and evil so they want to here logical arguments as to why it is and the state is better (having said that a lot of films essentially are propaganda but we shouldn’t stoop that low). This is why we always get the question: what should the government do? One of the main tasks for the libertarian story teller is to sensitise people to the goodness of liberty. Today most people want a cushy life without responsibility. We need to change that.

So the task for the libertarian story teller is to create stories with real characters, we should not do the opposite of the socialists and make every government official a bogeyman, and compelling plots within a libertarian meta-narrative.

As an addendum can any body recommend any decent libertarian films or literature? I obviously know of Rand but I get the impression her work tends towards propaganda. I’ve read the first of the Sword of Truth series, the Wizard’s First Rule, by the Objectivist Terry Goodkind which was actually very good but I hear the rest of the books get worse. As for my own recommendations I can go no further than recommend the TV series the Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan. I’m not sure the show is a show case for libertarianism as Chris Tame argued but for a show championing the individual it’s brilliant.