What is Turkey’s problem with Darwin? | Hacker News Reader

What is Turkey’s problem with Darwin?

al-monitor.com

32 pointstosh30 comments

Sad but not surprising. Looking at the Turkish society overall it seems to be a regression to the mean. Even Gülen - the new designated enemy, former best friend of the AKP regime - had a book written about how wrong evolution is. And that guy is is a champion of education.

Turkish civil society unfortunately never got strong enough to counter these cranks. Always torn apart by militarists, communists, and now islamists again. edit: oops forgot to mention the ethnic nationalists, they deserve special mention, fuckers.

Which one's the Kemalists?

militarist/nationalist

If they could've gotten over the whole ethnic thing, things might look a lot better now.

I have to give it to the militarists though: they were certainly secular. When the long-overdue recent military coup failed (or didn't happen, depending on who you ask), it seems to me the flood walls just collapsed irreversibly. Fundamentalist faith is on the rise worldwide, and Turkey has especially been under attack from within and without for all of its history.

The country just feels lost at this point. It wasn't so long ago, Turkey was considered an important ally of the EU, on track to become a member state.

Being German myself, we used to have a special relationship with that country. People forget nowadays that there are so many originally-Turkish people in Germany now because at one point the influx of Turkish workers was a welcome addition to the German economy.

I often wonder about the parents of an ex-girlfriend, who after working their asses off in Germany for their entire lives, moved back to Turkey for retirement - for much the same reasons pensioners in the US move to Florida. They were a friendly, modern, secular couple. I wonder what situation they find themselves in now.

I wish secularists would do a little more soul searching on the question of why fundamentalism is on the rise at all.

Personally I think it's pretty simple: fundamentalism offers a sense of community and belonging. In the age of loneliness that's pretty compelling. Secularism offers knowledge and information but nothing human -- no community, no identity, no sense of place or culture. (I can't remember where I first heard "age of loneliness" but I think it's accurate.)

> fundamentalism offers a sense of community and belonging

That's certainly an interesting point. I must admit I struggle a bit with understanding where these people are coming from, because as an atheist I don't personally experience a lack of community and belonging. I would imagine a forced "sense" of community being prescribed at gunpoint to be quite alienating, but I've heard enough people asserting it to take it seriously.

Maybe fundamentalist islam is just a meme whose time has come. Maybe the mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought. In that case, we're not just seeing the pendulum swing here, we're seeing the transition into a new civilization: devoid of science and insight of any kind, yet wielding the tools of technology for maximum devastation.

I agree to an extent but I still see judgement here "mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought".

Huge numbers of people today have no friends and no community. Read a book called "Bowling Alone" for an America-centric view of the problem but it's actually global.

> but I still see judgement here

That judgement is absolutely intentional. How can I not judge the abject surrender to herd mentality in particular, and fundamentalist belief in general? It's bidirectional, by the way, fundamentalists have no problem judging (and doing worse to) me for refusing to submit.

> Huge numbers of people today have no friends and no community.

To be fair, the rational answer might not be to join the Borg.

It's debatable how much say common people even have in the matter when their whole region converts to religious governance. This leaves us with the people who do choose it for themselves, and they're faced with a non-trivial question: "do I agree with these values or do I just join in order to embed myself into a community, any community?"

For those who agree with the fundamentalist message anyway, community is not the driving factor. The message itself is. Those who merely surrender to the message superficially in order to achieve community will probably become disenfranchised quite soon, because the community they chose is a dangerous place, even from the inside. What use is it to be surrounded by people if you still can't connect with them fully? However, by that point, the damage is done: by the rules you can enter, but you cannot leave ever again even if there's still a "you" left. Apostasy costs your life.

As far as I can see, the religious and other "post-thruth" people live in a portion of the economy where i. The standard of living is low, ii. The feedback loop of improving one's skills to attain a better income level is broken. So they have little self-worth and almost no hope for a better future. Coupled by low-quality education, this drives them to seek solace in easy and comforting answers given by religion about the universe, and by demagogues about their social/economic situation.

There is no easy fix.

Not everyone who is religious is poor or uneducated. There are plenty of people with university degrees (even PhDs) and professional or academic jobs who are devout religious believers.

Even extreme religious views aren't necessarily a product of poverty or lack of education. Creationists like to list how many creationists have PhDs from respectable institutions–almost all of whom have PhDs in fields with no direct relevance to the question of evolution, e.g. engineering or mathematics–but, the very fact that they can engage in this specious argument demonstrates that not every creationist is poor and uneducated.

At a far more extreme end, several of the 9/11 hijackers came out of the Hamburg cell, composed of international students studying at university in Hamburg, Germany. Their religious beliefs were so extreme they were willing to kill themselves and thousands of innocents along with them, yet people who can afford to enrol in university in another country are scarcely people with "almost no hope for a better future".

One thing that has helped me to understand fundamentalist groups a bit better is to see these tendencies in myself. I consider myself a strong individualist and free-thinker, but I still have places where I take comfort in fitting in to a group.

I tend to pick groups that I view as positive: hacker, scientist, feminist, etc. but they are fundamentally (pun intended) filling the same need as religious beliefs. They give me a framework to understand the world and feel connected to others.

I think as humans we are deeply attracted to belonging, and sometimes the "better" ideals are more dangerous, because we feel justified in judging others. Intelligent people are better at rationalizing their core beliefs, and therefore have trouble seeing beyond them.

Perhaps if we all could recognize the tendencies in ourselves it would provide enough empathy to facilitate change instead of conflict.

I wish religious people would do a little more soul searching on why a sense of community and belonging is so tightly connected to things like believing in zombies and telepathy.

Facts are common property and are the same for everyone, so they are useless as signifiers of community membership.

Why are you ascribing "sense of community" to fundamentalism and not religious communities in general?

And is it really the case that there are no secular communities that offer a sense of community?

Highly structured, highly exclusionary belief systems (which tends to be the common thing about "fundamentalism" when it's used as a generic term, rather than a reference to a particular Protestant Christian theology) reinforce a sense of community because they promote strong common identity markers and strong boundaries between in- and out-groups.

This is also, of course, what makes them particularly dangerous.

Regarding the "community" claim, let me tell you a joke:

A guy talks: "Last night, as I was going home, I saw three guys beating a girl, I could not hold myself, I had to intervene" Another: "So what did you do?" The first: "I jumped between them, and you won't believe, how we beat the frick out of her."

I always believed it to be a joke. Then I've learned that it's what certain religious people actually do to the girls. In groups.

Religion because "Community." No, thanks.

For a video to make you sick, search:

nytimes killing farkhunda

In Turkey, a big referendum on a set of constitutional amendments, unambiguously aiming to legalize one-man rule, is coming this April [1]. What surprises me the most is that about half of the population is either supportive or indifferent. They view rights and freedoms as abstract things that only the educated care about. But history shows dictatorships end up in wars and other troubles, which cause harm to people’s bodies or property too.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/world/middleeast/turkey-n...

> What surprises me the most is that about half of the population is either supportive or indifferent.

It's the same apathy that afflicts the EU and the US when it comes to surveillance, privacy, the rule of law, human rights and basic freedoms. Those are all seen as abstract pursuits of a disconnected elite class. When you got the majority of people thinking this way, it automatically becomes the actual truth.

> But history shows dictatorships end up in wars and other troubles, which cause harm to people’s bodies or property too.

Well, if you're at the stage where people stopped caring about ethics and you have to resort to discussing deep ethical problems in terms of property damage and economic interest, the battle is over, I'm sad to say.

It is tragic to see millions of people denied a basic understanding of the world and themselves.

Those who understand, question. Those who don't, obey.

> Islamic creationism exploded in Turkey, often using arguments borrowed from Christian creationists in the United States.

On that subject, the later are the leading force of misinformation in the whole world.

I would expect that Trump will be leant on heavily to push similar changes in the US. Maybe not throwing evolution away in schools, but teaching creationism alongside.

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