Ben Stein: Expelled
Stein's new documentary speaks out about the dangers of questioning Darwin.
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Ben Stein is angry. Not that you’d know it, though. He speaks in the bland monotone you might remember from his roles in “The Wonder Years” and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (Yeah, that’s his real voice.) Stein is more than an actor, though. He graduated from Columbia University with honors in economics and was valedictorian of his Yale Law School class, in addition to being Richard Nixon’s speechwriter and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, among many other accomplishments.
That monotone might be his trademark, but through that bland delivery you catch his passion to right a wrong in our culture. His outrage is aimed at the academic establishment, which suppresses intellectual dissent from Darwinism and silences any competing theories such as Intelligent Design.
“It is like a theology,” he said of Darwinism. “It is not open to discussion. Why do we allow, even celebrate, dissent in every other area of society, but not here?”
Stein’s answer to this suffocating orthodoxy is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary examining what happens to teachers and other professionals who dare to raise questions about Darwin. Some are forced from their jobs and have their personal lives investigated. Others are denied tenure. Stein simply can’t understand how this is allowed to happen and why the quashing of academic dissent does not draw cries of outrage from the usual defenders of free speech.
Stein is also motivated by the pernicious effects that Darwinism has had on our culture.
“I was horrified on the effects of social Darwinism,” Stein said. “It teaches that superior species would do everyone a favor if they just killed off all the inferior species. You can draw a straight line from this grandfatherly old man [Darwin] to Hitler and the Holocaust.”
Darwinism also has implications for moral reasoning, Stein stresses. “Is all life random and we are all meaningless blobs, or is there moral meaning in the world? One of the people we interviewed postulated that there is no God. People like that idea, since if there’s no God, there’s no morality. Maybe they’re scared that if there’s some God, they’ll be held accountable. If there is a God, some of these guys had better watch out.”