“Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding.” … Clarence Darrow
There is nothing as compelling as a good courtroom drama. “To Kill a Mockingbird” may be the most famous. A favorite of mine is the 1960 movie classic, “Inherit the Wind”, based on a play by the same name. Although it is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes’ “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, much of the dialogue was based on trial transcripts. Spencer Tracy portrayed Colonel Henry Drummond (patterned after actual trial lawyer Clarence Darrow), who was defending a schoolteacher charged with violating a Tennessee statute banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Fredric March portrayed the prosecutor, Matthew Harrison Brady (patterned after the actual prosecutor, former U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan).
The authors used the real-life criminalization of the teaching of evolution in public schools to attack McCarthyism and defend intellectual freedom. As the playwright noted, “we used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control ... it’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.”
More than I would like, the words of Colonel Drummond rattle around in my brain these days. In a passionate address to the Court, Colonel Drummond argued that making it a crime to teach the law of evolution in public schools was a slippery slope. It threatened our very freedom to think and to believe because, as he explained, “fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding.”
These words have been true since long before the Scopes Monkey Trial. They are true today and will be true long after we exit this earth. This truth naturally leads to fear, anxiety, and distrust. But to me those words are also inspiring as a constant reminder that as lawyers we are engaged in a profession that often serves as a crucial line of defense protecting the rights of our fellow citizens to think and to express their truths.
In protecting THE RIGHT TO THINK we would do well to recognize that, sometimes, maybe oftentimes, one person’s fanaticism is another person’s passion, and one person’s ignorance is another person’s facts. In my view, a corollary to the right to think is THE OBLIGATION TO LISTEN. There may be hard and fast lines to be drawn but we must first have the patience to listen carefully to and seek to understand one another. Undoubtedly, there are people on the opposite sides of the many issues dividing us that intentionally deliver false or skewed messages whose purpose is to inflame and foment divisiveness for their own ends. That is nothing new and is as true today as it has been throughout history and within every civilization on earth. Today those lessons should serve to make us more rather than less resolute in protecting everybody’s right to think and to express what they think – and to achieve that, we must be equally resolute in listening to each other, no matter our disagreements – to avoid the slippery slope and find our collective common ground. Lawyers have a unique role to play in making that happen.