10.09.08
Monthly Review gang takes on ID, applause
There is a website for Critique of Intelligent Design, Materiallism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
I haven’t, of course, read this book (I emailed for a review copy), and find this new slant (from the Marxist left, I presume) of potential interest, but I already have a foreboding that the by now stale cliches of Marxism will prove insufficient to the task at hand. In fact, many of the problems that haunt contemporary scientism arose in the generation of Marx and the post-Hegelian generation.
The materialism of Marxism was always a millstone around the neck of the left.
The ID group may well be reactionaries, but they aren’t stupid, and have their own histories in this vein.
Extending the discussion backwards to the Greek era is a great idea, but this long-range historical perspective should remind us that the ‘dialectical’ spectrum tends to remain invariant over time.
In any case, all we need to know is if this book is going to ‘ditto ditto’ the claims for natural selection in standard Darwinian boilerplate. If so, the book will fail.
Meanwhile, just for the record, let it be noted that Bellamy, one of the co-authors, nicely uncovered the evidence of Marx’s dissent on the issue of natural selection. The book is Marxism and Ecology.
The ‘marxist’ embrace of Darwin can is thus deceptive.
The book is pegged as a critique of ideology. Fair enough. But the foolishness inherent in Marxism here is the inability to expose the ideology of classical liberalism latent in Darwin’s theory. If the Marxist left can’t achieve that critique, they should be put out to pasture.
For these and other reasons of marxist decripitude I have invented my own semi-solipsistic Ultra Far Left, one of whose main tenets is a postdarwinian social philosophy of history.
Marx, it should be noted, was a post-Hegelian, just at the boundary of the age of scientism, and his philosophy of history still bears the clear traces of the theme of ‘reason in history’, as clearly indicated by Allan Megill, in his Karl Marx: The Burden Of Reason. Megill’s anti-marxist critique, then, is that Marx still adopts the ‘design’ argument of Hegel under the rubric of ‘rationality in history’.
Rationality in history is, what, materialistic, designish, none of the above…..