09.14.08
Liberal Darwinists take note: ye are dupes of ‘darwinian conservatism’
Arnhart never ceases to amaze me with the way he isolates the concealed ideology of Darwinism even as he evokes its conservative character, Darwinian Conservatism.
I have already suggested Arnhart should read World History And The Eonic Effect to see how the problem he is struggling with is solved in a clear and precise fashion. But this he will refuse to do. A self-published book by a peon who isn’t a prof in the system would violate the canons of academic pomposity.
It can’t be helped, but peddling this rank idiocy of conservative ideology is toxic, save only that making it so explicit exposes its absurdities.
Beginning with David Hume’s criticism of the English Puritan Revolution and Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution, conservatives have rejected the rationalistic metaphysics of political revolutionaries as a dangerous attack on social and political order as rooted in historical tradition. Conservatives like Hume and Burke have recognized the need for reforming the traditional orders of society. But they have argued that such reform is best understood as a gradual, evolutionary process within concrete traditions. By contrast, the metaphysical rebellion of revolutionaries attempts a total restructuring of society to conform to some abstract blueprint of rational perfection. The ideological fanaticism of the past two centuries–Marxism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and so on–manifests the danger coming from such total revolutions of common life by metaphysical thinking.
Darwinian conservatism continues in the tradition of Hume and Burke by explaining the history of moral and political order as arising from a complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and prudential judgments. The Darwinian science of morality and politics is a historical science of human social order in all of its concrete historicity. Any presumed total transformation of social life by reference to some abstract, metaphysical conception of perfect order is rejected as an incoherent and destructive form of utopian perfectibility, which disregards the imperfectibility of human life in its evolving historical contingency and particularity.
These attacks on the Puritan and French Revolution miss the point so completely as to leave one bewildered at the conservative mind. What is the charge against Puritian Revolution? Its seminal character gave birth to the modern world. It was the turning point toward the creation of a secular society. That its gyrations give the illusion that it failed forgets that the organized ‘revolution’ was one thing, the larger context another, and that larger context shows a rapid shift to a new order of society. Is Arnhart seriously suggesting that this prime example of rapid social evolution (on a scale of centuries relative to millennia) should be replaced with some kind of conservative slow/incremental change? The whole point was that such processes weren’t going anywhere. I fail to grasp the logic behind claims that it would be better to spend five millennia going from medievalism to modernity, when three centuries did the job.
Similar remarks can be made about the French Revolution. The focus is constantly on the gyrations of the revolution itself, not on the larger context of which it was a symptom. Pointing to the failure of revolutionary episodes fails to account for the ultimate success of that revolution within a generation, or two/three.
Arnhart scrambles all this with the false charge of metaphysical utopianism, visible to be sure in the later left. The Marxist theories of revolution are simply another phase of history, and their failure (which is easily accounted for in World History And The Eonic Effect) does indeed show the problems with socialist revolutions, which are not utopian, something Marx denounces, but attempts to deal with the structure of bourgeois property rights, something structurally too complex for revolutionaries to bring off. These later revolutions were something quite different, and are so far failures, but the aims they wished to bring about remain in the background of all discussions of the fruits of the French Revolution and its period/context, a type of economic society with well analyzed flaws.
Arnhart fails to grasp what Marx clearly saw and made explicit, that the ‘bourgeois’ revolutions of the early modern brought into existence the very society Arnhart finds so desirable, save that he wishes, evidently (??) that we had evolved to it more slowly(???)
The issue is thus not revolution vs slow change, leastwise the red herring of Darwinian evolution, but something more complex that turns out to be a hybrid of the two, and is clearly marked out with great clarity in the study of the eonic effect.
I recommend its study before pouring this Burkean poison into the cultural mainstream.
Meanwhile the ‘liberal Darwinist’ gang should take note of the way Arnhart with superb boobhood and without realizing that he is revealing the weak spot of the whole game exposes the conservative ideology of the pseudo-science of Darwinism for what it is, a sort of Whiggish monstrosity, a bastard child of classical liberalism. I agree that Darwinism is conservative, but it is not a science, and the evolution it posits doesn’t explain biological evolution.
Meanwhile episodes of ‘fast evolution’ are historical fact. Consider the Axial Age. In three centuries a whole new order of civlization came into being. It was ‘revolutionary’ but not a series of revolutions. History shows therefore that ‘fast evolution’ is a reality. And more that the periods in between tend to not evolve at all, but drift.