11.17.08
Liberal blogosphere needs to pick up postdarwinism
Comment from Hucklebird, Arianna Huffington (and his book)
I haven’t read the interview of Arianna Huffington in EnlightenNext magazine but I suspect I agree with you that she may not quite see the failure of Darwinism. But I suspect she suspects there is a problem of some kind (given the once numerous articles by Deepak Chopra there).
On the other hand Darwin heresy can be a deadly ‘mistake’ for those who want media share. Whatever their views you can be sure they will dissemble. So we don’t really know Arianna Huffington’s views on evolution. But she is obviously receptive to New Age variants such as we see at EnlightenNext, of which I am critical because these ‘do a little yoga and evolve’ notions have invented a new evolutionary fallacy. Also, she uses the phrase ‘beyond left and right’, and that New Age sludge, the ‘non-dual’ mode, seems to have generated a typical confusion, abetted by people like Andrew Cohen, and Ken Wilbur.
The non-dual between ‘left and right’ is a piece of nonsense, and is a typical botched usage of dialectic. Cohen and Wilbur don’t understand the non-dual, and a non-dual politics is a phrase without meaning.
The phrase has an equally obvious and simple meaning: both the right and left are so problematical that a kind of ‘leap out of your skin’ vertical movement is the only option. Maybe.
A better question is why so much reactionary thinking lurks behind the various anti-modernist New Age types. Huffington ought to be wary of such things.
The left is unable to generate any spiritual movements, but there is nothing intrinsic to that. After all a great surge of materialist Samkhya lay behind one of the great trends of Axial India.
In any case, the issue of Darwinism is going to cripple the liberal world and it is time to shuck it off. Liberalism needs to graduate beyond any hint of the Social Darwinist theory of Darwin, yes Darwin.
Beyond that, a study of the eonic effect shows how easy it is to do that in the context of science, with its analysis of the ideologies of science, liberalism, and its new conception of the descent of man and the meaning of evolution.