Christopher Mackay's Blog

In a story called “Evolution of religious bigotry”, Jonah Goldberg says a few curious things about Darwin car emblems.

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

Why should anyone care what he — or anyone else — finds offensive? No one has the right not to be offended.

Why does he imagine that people with Darwin emblems on their cars are any more or less smug than people with Jesus fish?

Do Republicans with GOP logos on their bumpers show smug superiority over Democrats? Of course not: it just means they support one party, not the other.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that “hate is not a family value.”

Darwin fish are also commonly stuck next to Honda logos, Automobile Association stickers, license plates and “This car climbed Mt. Washington” stickers. So what?

But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

Disagreement with is a long, long way from intolerance of.

Darwin fish are, for many, a defensive response to creationism and its aggressive and dishonest cousin, Intelligent Design. ID pretends to be a non-religious scientific theory, but it’s just religious creationism with God removed (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) so it can demand entry into public schools. It isn’t science at all. It is “Lying for Jesus”.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

Like the way Goldberg attacks the Darwin emblem as “smug”, “hypocritical”, “intolerant” and “annoying”?

The only thing Goldberg is missing here is that fish (or something close enough to fish for marketing purposes) did evolve legs. (Darwin fish isn’t a very accurate name, is it? Once fish evolve legs, they aren’t fish any more, are they?)

The Darwin emblem is not, to me, a mockery of a Christian symbol — it’s a biologically-appropriate symbol representing evolution. Yes, it calls to mind the Christian fish; and that resonance makes it that much more effective. But you don’t need any awareness of the tradition of the Christian fish symbol to understand what the Darwin emblem represents.

Goldberg’s charge does bring another symbol to mind, though:

This is an explicit example of what Goldberg says he sees in the Darwin emblem. That is a smug, superior, attack, but it’s nothing like the Darwin emblem.

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It’s a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

So Jonah Goldberg, in a story where he brands people with Darwin emblems as intolerant hypocrites, can’t imagine any possible repercussions for publicly denying belief in gods? Now that’s hard to believe.