10.31.08
Darwinism=Social Darwinism, liberal confusion over Darwinism
The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics
Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted October 31, 2008. Quote below flap.
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Critiques of American anti-intellectualism are important, but Monbiot, via Jacoby, falls in the trap of Darwinian confusion, and the confusion over Social Darwinism. Monbiot actually notes that Americans had good reason in the wake of Darwin to criticize the theory of natural selection.
But how has anything changed? It hasn’t changed at all, and the stark fact of the matter is that the ‘stupid’ fundamentalists, carrying on the tradition of the progressive William Jennings Bryan (without his progressive views), have proven themselves smarter, on this question at least, than the liberal elites, who, along with the left, should have long since shucked off the Darwin paradigm. And the next stark reality is that the fundamentalist/ID-ists, armed with purloined critiques of Darwinism of secular scientific critics who have been suppressed, are in the vanguard of that critique of natural selection, save only that they got too ambitious and tried to ‘steal bases’ by turning the critique of selectionism into a case for intelligent design.
It is time for the liberal/left sector to recover the original distancing stance on the issue of natural selection and to give the same critique of ideology to Darwinism that they give to classical liberalism.
There is no excuse anymore for this liberal ‘stupidity’, even as they point to this flaw in Bible Belt Christians.
Liberalism is not a scientific subject but an ideology of action in a universal history of freedom. It need not apologize for its lack of science as it lives under the umbrella of the philosophy of history.
An age of science, or scientism, beggars religion for its metaphysical worldview, but the basis for liberalism itself, the idea of freedom, is, to press the point to the wall, ‘unscientically’ metaphysical, hence a superstition. Therefore, in strict logic, liberalism has no basis in science.
Nor need it have one, as it came into existence in parallel with the scientific revolution as an independent component of modernism. Trying to abrogate this by applying universal Darwinism to all secular subjects will backfire, and merely feed the resurgence of religion.
This calamity of reductionist science was carefully addressed by the founders of liberal philosophy of history, such as Kant, attempting to harmonize the liberal and scientific projects in tandem.
This was a done job long before the degenerate scientism of Darwinism came into fashion and confused the issues completely.
In the final analysis, if you adopt Darwin’s theory, you suggest to millions that if they imitate the law of natural selection they will advance evolution, a runaway fallacy that automatically produces Social Darwinism in a context of publicly embraced Darwinism. Nothing has changed, save that the Social Darwinists hire better public relations teams, and that so-called liberals have been systematically conditioned to think around the basic fallacy of their embrace of Darwinism, genuine dummies, beside their dummy Christian brethren, whose archaic philosophies of history detected the problem in Darwinism, while the generations educated in scientism could not.
For some notes on a postdarwinian politics, cf The Politics Of Evolution
Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy — now known as Social Darwinism — of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.
Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.