12.19.05
Go the last mile
Patrick Buchanan regurgitates Bethell’s ‘republican war on science’. Buchanan seems to be roaming the battlefield without a rifle. It is somewhat comic to see these conservatives claim Darwinism is classical economics in disguise, and to be so hard on one of the right’s great champs, Malthus. Why not go the last mile and take a potshot at classical liberalism too? Perhaps Bethell and Buchanan could follow Huffington and become liberals.
Marx’s ideas with a Malthusian root? Not quite. What on earth gave you that idea?
Bethell is not alone in suggesting Darwin smuggled Malthus’ mid-Victorian political economy into biology. As Bertrand Russell observed, Darwin’s theory is “essentially an extension to the animal and vegetable world of laissez-faire economics.”
Marx’s ideas also seem to have a Malthusian root.