09.18.08
Obama/McCain: evolution, Toward A Postdarwinian Liberalism
Comment on Obama/McCain: Evolution
The question of how the issue of evolution impinges on political discourse is in chaos at the moment. Here is an essay from http://eonic-effect.net on a discussion of evolution at Alternet.
Towards A Postdarwinian Liberalism
Toward A Postdarwinian Liberalism
The Darwin Debate: Changing The Subject
The Alternet site recently had a review/discussion of Lauri Lebo’s The Devil In Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America:
Despite Overwhelming Evidence, Creationists Cling to Unreality
By Nathan Schneider, Alternet, July 31, 2008.
Here is my response:
The account of this trial in some ways speaks for itself: the attempt to bring Intelligent Design into the classroom violated constitutional grounds and was struck down. The strategy of the those attempting insert design into the classroom was flawed and ill-conceived, witness the way the background lobby, the Discovery Institute, and many of its members, dropped out of the case.
But behind this trial lies a larger issue, and the trial itself was a misleading victory handed to defenders of Darwinism they didn’t deserve. Part of the reason lies in the flawed formulation of Darwin critique produced the design group. An initiative that in many ways began with Philip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial. which may have triggered the design movement, but never mentioned it directly, finally had its day in court, but lost it, and should have been better prepared to put ‘Darwin on Trial’, but instead ended up putting ‘Design on Trial’. The clever way the legal team at the trial performed this reversal of villainies might seem brilliant to the defenders of Darwinism, but to anyone familiar with the problems with Darwinism the episode smacked of a stage-managed deception, with inappropriate pronouncements by the judge on what constituted science. The trial ended up being a public publicity stunt for the promoters of Darwin boilerplate, the daily fare of such organizations as the NCSE and other Big Science lobby groups, matching the Discovery Institute.
In passing we should note that subsequent challenges from religious conservatives in Louisiana and Texas have produced still another strategy, that of ‘teaching the criticism’, and in principle this approach, now signed into law, allows critics of Darwinism a foot in the door. Since the Alternet article is ultimately about science education the issue is direct: can promoters of ’scientific’ evolution teach critical thinking for a new generation of students, so many decades after Sputnik? Evidently they can’t. The author proposes that we change the subject, but that we can’t do if science itself is frozen in a paradigm indoctrination mode, precisely what creationists and intelligent design proponents have been saying all along. If Darwinism is a flawed science then we are at back at square one, a stalemate.
In the context of the larger debate over the social ideology of liberal politics, we can change the subject in another way by changing it to a look at the eonic effect, and the new perspective on evolution given to it by the ‘eonic model’ and its associated concepts, and critique of standard Darwinism applied to the descent of man. This model allows us to approach questions of theory and ideology in one comprehensive framework, to see how the debate over evolution is essentially ideological in character.
In that context, the objections of critics, however flawed or limited the design gambit might be, are seen to revolve around the incorrect metaphysical claims for natural selection made by Darwinists, and the attempt to make this aspect of evolutionary speculation the foundation stone for a secularist world-view legitimated, supposedly, by hard science. Roundabout this we have the vociferous chorus of Dawkins-style Darwin defenders, with their tactics of loudmouthed ridicule, capped recently by the anti-religious diatribes of the so-called New Atheists. In the separation of church and state, a paradox has arisen, whereby religion is banished, but a new brand of anti-religion is a de facto standard, given the false imprimatur of science. We won’t succeed in changing the subject in this situation.
So let’s change the subject to the eonic effect. This involves seeing that we cannot easily arrive at a conclusive theory of evolution. That the limits of observation make the dogmatic claims for natural selection speculative at best. That Darwinism borders on being a pseudo-science for this reason, and that its claims for metaphysical universality are simply a gross distortion of scientism. The full set of criticisms emerges in the various accounts available on this site and in World History And The Eonic Effect, and this demands that we challenge the imperialism of Darwinian theory by showing how it is missing the crucial insight into macroevolution that is required by a true theory.
From there the analysis of the eonic effect proceeds to consider the question of ‘evolution in history’, and the existence of non-random evolution in world history, seen with sufficient evidence at close range to really get a sense of what evolution is about, a ‘glimpse’ of how greater nature really does evolution. The result is a displacement of our concerns about evolution from deep time, where research without a full theory must continue, to the fact of ‘evolution in history’.
The study of the eonic model allows us to withdraw from claims about the mechanism of evolution even as we discover a means to deal with the issue of evolutionary dynamics applied to our own history. The details of this new model may be open to question, but the exercise of constructing it is instructive and shows us a way to proceed with a secularist account of evolution, but one now in the context of the philosophy of history, that is, the history of freedom and human self-consciousness.
The irony of this approach is that we stumble on the mystery itself of secularism and its historic clash with religion in the context of world history. We also discover the evolutionary context of liberal ideology itself and, all at once, the need for a liberalism that is based on something broader than its current match with scientism.
The problem with much current liberalism, a point clear to the ‘infamous’ Bryan of the original Scopes trial, is that it has been muddled by the crypto-conservative Social Darwinism latent in Darwin’s theory, this fact now disguised by the liberal/conservative polarization of the current debate.
What we need is a new liberal philosophy of history based on a less dogmatic view of evolution than that enforced by the dogmatism of the Darwin paradigm enforcers. The study of the eonic effect provides that with ease, even as it embraces both science, and its Kantian critiques. The attempt by technological Big Science culture to dominate the politics of liberalism is fatally flawed by its essentially conservative brand of ‘classical liberalism’ disguised behind the Social Darwinist theory of natural selection, which, as Marx clearly sensed, was basically an economic/Malthusian ideology in disguise. The failure of the later left to grasp this point has been another obstacle in the way of a postdarwinian ‘liberal’ or leftist cultural politics.
So we need to change the subject, but that can never involve compromise on the issue of the Darwin propaganda machine peddling selectionist Darwinism, next to the Big Science technological capitalism being promoted by business elites who need cadres of well-behaved technologists. The latter is instantly obvious every time anyone mentions Sputnik, whose implications are the enforcement of scientific ideology for technological competition. Such a strategy has apparently failed, and isn’t necessary in any case. Nothing in the attempt to promote technological education requires anything whatever about Darwinian theory. If anything, this injection of pseudo-science into the felicities of ‘calculus and onward’ is an impediment to sound scientific reasoning as the graduates of such education mix the rigors of basic science with the buffered contradictions and ideology of the Darwinist biology. Kicking Darwinism off the team just might produce some real scientists in the graduate class of needed technologists and technical specialists.
Changing the subject to the eonic effect would allow a Kantian discipline to be brought to the often outrageously biased metaphysical postures of the Darwin-trained and remind us publicly that the chronic character of the Darwin debate arises from the metaphysical naivete of both parties. We can change the subject to this ‘glimpse of evolution’ and its ‘idea for a universal history’. There ironically the liberal tradition receives a truly evolutionary footing for the first time.