Halfway down the Danube

Serbia vs. Darwin

No, that's not fair. It really should be "the current Serbian government vs. Darwin".

This news from Serbia today:

Serbian Education Minister Ljiljana Colic has ordered schools to stop teaching children the theory of evolution for this year, and to resume teaching it in future only if it shares equal billing with creationism. The move has shocked educators and textbook editors in the formerly communist state, where religion was kept out of education and politics and was only recently allowed to enter the classroom.

"(Darwinism) is a theory as dogmatic as the one which says God created the first man," Colic told the daily Glas Javnosti. Colic, an Orthodox Christian, ordered that evolution theory be dropped from this year’s biology course for 14- and 15-year-olds in the final grade of primary school. As of next year, both creationism and evolution will be taught, she said.

[...]

"Both theories exist in parallel and legitimately in the rest of the world," Colic asserted. "The evolutionist, which says man is descended from the ape, and the one which says God Almighty created man and the entire world."

Now, the present government of Serbia does not exactly represent the best in Serbian society; and Minister Colic is arguably not the best thing in the present Serbian government. One of her first moves was to cancel foreign-funded teacher training seminars, while telling the nonplssed foreign donors that all their work would be "reviewed". Since then, she's been most famous for proposing a 70% budget cut for Serbia's university system (The government later backtracked and said the budget had been drafted "in haste", and that they really only wanted a 25% cut) and for appointing an ex-crony of Slobodan Milosevic to run a university in Kosovo.

I never met Colic when I was in Serbia. Looking at her CV, though, I note that she was born in 1956, and has both her undergraduate degree and her Ph.D. in philology from the University of Belgrade.

That's suggestive in a couple of ways. One, it means that she didn't study abroad. Yugoslavs of her generation could, and the best of them generally did -- the country's best and brightest were taking degrees in Paris and Hamburg and Milan, thousands at a time. (I can remember being surprised to find a Slovene sitting next to me as an undergrad exchange student in London in the 1980s).

Two, it means that she was a Ph.D. student in the early or mid '80s -- exactly the years when Serbian academe began to embrace Serb nationalism en masse. It's a bit hard for an American to grasp, but it was in obscure disciplines like philology that this shift was felt the hardest.

The fact that she signed up as a founding member of the Democratic Party of Serbia is entirely consistent with this; DPS started as a pretty hardline nationalist group, with the main difference from Milosevic being (1) they were more traditional God-and-country nationalists, and (2) being in opposition for 12 years straight, under a government that rewarded opposition, not with jail, but with mockery, poverty and obscurity, they tended to be a bit crank-heavy. Sp anyone who's been with DPS since the very beginning is likely to be extremely devoted, rather strange, or both.

Mind, it's not likely that the coalition government gave Colic a Minister's chair simply as a reward for devotion. Those positions are powerful engines of patronage, and much in demand. So I'd guess that she was put there, in part, as a sop to hardline nationalists and as a bridge to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Keep in mind that the current government is a fragile coalition of ex-Communists, monarchists, modernizing technocrats, nationalists, and socialists. The Church is a powerful institution in Serbia these days, so appeasing it makes good political sense.

-- That said, I'm a little surprised that the appeasement is taking precisely this form. I didn't realize that the Serbian Orthodox Church -- or any Orthodox Church -- was down on Darwin in the way that conservative American Protestants are. (The Catholic Church, by way of comparison, made its peace with Darwin years ago; Catholic schools worldwide have no problem teaching evolution.) Can any of our Orthodox readers tell us more?

I should also note that using the Education Ministry to suck up to the Church didn't begin with Colic, either. In 2002, the Ministry promulgated a new alphabet textbook for young children -- you know, an "A is for apple, B is for bear" type of thing, for new readers, with a little slogan or poem for each letter. Except that this one had one page with a little picture of an (Orthodox) Church full of happy children, and a text saying "C is for church! You're crazy if you don't go." I remember thinking that it was basically the same stuff I'd seen in an old textbook from East Germany ("L is for Lenin, wisest of leaders..."), just with the direction of attack shifted a bit.

But anyhow. I'm not sure what else to say about this. Minister Colic seems like a pretty complete idiot, but she's probably going to keep her job for as long as this government lasts. And while this government is pretty screwed up, right now it looks like the least bad choice on the menu; the most likely alternative would be a government formed by the Serbian Radical Party, and that would just suck.

If any of our Serbian friends are still reading this, we'd love to hear what you think.

Posted by douglas at September 9, 2004 12:09 AM | TrackBack