11.04.08

Obama wins! Toward a liberal postdarwinism!

Posted in Evolution at 11:57 pm by nemo

The historic win of Obama is a signal for the end of a long reign of neoliberalism, and, more ominously, the near disintegration of the American democracy.

The moment should also the signal a timely moment for the passage beyond the crypto-conservative view of evolution entrenched in Darwinism with its concealed tendency toward Social Darwinism, and a shotgun marriage with economic fundamentalism. This theory, embraced paradoxically by ‘liberals’, has always been a drag on the progressive mentality of modern political intelligence. In the name of science, in reality pseudo-science, Darwin’s idee fixe, natural selection, became a metaphysical standard for those who wished to corrupt science with a latent totalitizing metaphysics called ‘scientism’. This ideological phase, we should note, had no place for the idea of freedom, and no sound basis for an understanding of the evolution of ethics.
It is time to move past the whole lot, and look to a philosophy of history that can undertake the reconstruction of secular self-understanding via a view of evolution that recalibrates its meaning toward the reality that we see in world history, not some Just So story concocted from unobserved fancies of the Paleolithic.

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