The Darwinian dictatorship

I had heard that Ben Stein will be releasing a movie on intelligent design next year, but I didn’t realize how powerful its theme is. As explained at WorldNetDaily, the movie concerns the rigid dogma that has taken over the scientific community and that forces all scientists to toe the line on Darwinism. If even a well-respected scientist shows any interest in intelligent design or questions Darwinism at all, his career is destroyed.

I believe it. The most obvious sign—and I’ve run into this attitude personally—is the way some Darwinists increasingly equate any rejection of Darwinism with creationism and blind superstition. As more and more Darwinists see it, to doubt the Darwinian orthodoxy is to attack science, to reject reason itself, to be a faith-based zombie trying to take over the schools and society. It’s gone so far that an EU body has declared anti-Darwinism a threat to human rights. And what must society do to protect itself from such a threat? It must officially suppress it. What we have here, then, is not just a culturally dominant materialist atheism, which is bad enough, but the makings of a materialist atheist dictatorship.

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Chris H. writes:

It seems odd that we can have the advent of a material atheist dictatorship on the one hand and the worry of ever increasing Islamic influence on the other. These two must be mutually exclusive. Do the supreme Darwinists not see what Islamic influence would (or does) have on their beliefs?

LA replies:

The Muslims are coming from without, the Darwinian dictatorship is coming from within. What they have in common is the hostility to traditional Western society. They may be mutually exclusive, but they haven’t encountered each other yet, so that’s not a problem for them.

The issue you point to is more clearly drawn in the case of moral liberationism on one hand and Islam on the other. Liberalism promotes both. They don’t yet attack each other. What each of them attacks is whatever remains of our historic nation and culture. Each attacks the traditional culture. Each carries out its own work of destruction. Will they ultimately confront each other, over the corpse of our culture? Yes. But by then, as I’ve argued, the liberals, who will have grown tired of the moral chaos they’ve created, will eagerly surrender to Islam.

I think the same will happen to the Darwinian dictatorship. The spiritual bankruptcy of pure materialism will have run its course, and people, wanting to restore meaning and order to their lives, will be ready for a religious dictatorship.

Mark A. writes:

It’s more hatred of Western society than love of Darwin. I’ve never met a leftist who is truly Darwinian, as the leftists never support the essence of Darwin which is natural selection. The left advocates all that goes against natural selection: giving public money to the shiftless, giving public money to those who are unable to raise children properly, giving public money to drug abusers and criminals, etc. This fact shows the true motives of the Darwinian Dictators.

Terry Morris writes:

Your reply to Chris H. is too ominous, and simply unacceptable from my point of view. I’m not saying you’re predicting dogmatically that these events are going to transpire, but in your reply it sort of reads that way. If things continue to progress (or degenerate) as they are now, then yes, I agree, this is bound to happen—Islam will assert itself with full force, and having grown weary of the fight, the left will gladly accept its chains. But we can’t let that happen!

LA replies:

Mr. Morris is correct that my reply to Chris H. could be read as though I were predicting the destruction of our culture. Not my intention. This is a theme I’ve written on before, in which I follow the left to its logical end point of surrendering to Islam. It’s is not a prediction. It’s a scenario, a projection, along the lines of, “If things continue as they are now going, then, based on the nature of Islam and the left, what will happen?” But of course, I believe in fighting to turn things around before they reach that point.

Kristor writes:

Mark A. writes:

“It’s more hatred of Western society than love of Darwin. I’ve never met a leftist who is truly Darwinian, as the leftists never support the essence of Darwin which is natural selection. The left advocates all that goes against natural selection: giving public money to the shiftless, giving public money to those who are unable to raise children properly, giving public money to drug abusers and criminals, etc. This fact shows the true motives of the Darwinian Dictators.”

Yes. But to a consistent Darwinist, it is not a problem to do something that contributes to the extinction of a species, or of a culture, or of a scientific paradigm such as Darwinism. From the strict Darwinist point of view, there is no such thing as problems. To the strict Darwinist, there is no such thing as goodness; there is only stuff happening for no reason.

LA adds:

Yet, even as they say that there’s no such thing as goodness, there is only stuff happening for no reason, they somehow can’t help piggy backing teleology onto their strictly non-teological view of life. They can’t help but present the chance process of evolution, which they say has no purpose, as purposeful. Which shows on a deep level the falsity of their enterprise. But that is an argument I need to explain at another time.

Kristor writes:

Right. One can’t live one’s life as if one doesn’t care at all what happens to oneself, one’s children, one’s community, one’s fellow humans, life on earth, and so forth. One can’t live for even a split second as if nothing matters. So one can’t be a consistent Darwinist. This is true not only of humans; no animal can act as though nothing matters, in fact no plant can behave as if nothing matters. And this as sure an indication as one could wish for, that Darwinism is false. It is as if one devised a hypothesis in, say, physics, which was in principle inconsistent with every conceivable experimental set up. The fact that the hypothesis could not possibly be exhibited in concrete reality would demonstrate its falsity. It is such hypotheses that physicists call, “not even wrong.”

LA replies:

Well, now, maybe we were too hasty. Is that necessarily their position? They do say that the only reason anything exists is that it helps a being or species live longer and have more offspring. Wouldn’t that mean that there is a desire for life, and that life is the primary good, so that there is at least this much morality and teleology inherent in existence?

Apparently not. Because according to Darwinism the subjective thoughts and feelings of organisms are entirely irrrelevent to their survival and adaptive success. The only thing that matters is organic adaptations and behaviors that help survival. Even if a sociobiologist determined that religion helped a community survive and out-compete its neighbors, it wouldn’t be the religious belief of those people that mattered, but only the behaviors that such beliefs induced.

From point of view of Darwinism, it makes no difference whether individual organisms, particularly humans, exist and survive. According to Stephen Gould, humans are no more meaningful than bacteria, they do not represent any advance over bacteria, they are just a different set of adaptations that are there because the organisms possessing them had more offspring. Having more offspring is the only purpose in life. And even that is not a teleology, because the good end that is achieved from having more offspring is not the good end of the organism, i.e., the human being; it’s only the good end of the individual genes that are thereby preserved and spread. The organism, the human being, with all his qualities and even his conscious life, his “soul,” is only the instrument of the selfish gene.

So how can Darwinists and sociobiologists speak of any human good, as traditionally and commonsensically understood? They have no right to do so. For them to do so is to make an unprincipled exception to their own denial of any morality in existence. Remember, liberalism’s main principle of equality and non-discrimination if followed consisently would make human existence impossible. So liberals devise innumerable unprincipled exceptions to their own liberalism in order to live and have a good life in this world. These are “unprincipled” exceptions from the point of liberalism because they are not and cannot be formally justified in terms of liberalism. It’s the same with Darwinism. Darwinism if believed in consistently would make it impossible to believe in any good, any morality, any purpose in life apart from having offspring so that one’s genome survives and dominates. Therefore every time Darwinists, in order to appeal to the public or even to satisfy their own need for meaning, refer to any moral or aesthetic values, they have no right to do that and they should be forced to be consistent with their own Darwinism and drop any reference to any human good and any human purpose. Just as liberals should be called on it every time they indulge in an unprincipled exception.

Unfortunately, most conservatives have the exact opposite response. They are happy to see liberals and Darwinists show an appreciation for some traditional values because they feel that this is a validation of conservatism! But by welcoming the liberals’ and Darwinists’ bow to tradition, the conservatives are just letting them get away with their scam, letting them eat their cake (i.e. deny all meaning, value, truth, transcendence) and have it (i.e., appeal to meaning, value, truth, transcendence when it suits their needs). They are allowing liberals and Darwinists to present liberalism and Darwinism as though they were compatible with human life and civilization, when in reality they are not compatible. Liberalism and Darwinism only appear to be compatible with human life and civilization because of unprincipled exceptions. Therefore the way to defeat liberalism/Darwinism is to refuse to allow liberals/Darwinists to make their unprincipled exceptions. Then the liberals/Darwinists would stand face to face with the unbearable and unlivable emptiness of their own belief system consistently applied, and those belief systems would soon be abandoned.

For conservatives to welcome expressions of moral sense and meaning from Darwinists, is like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden helping the egalitarian statist villains in Atlas Shrugged keep the economy going.

I suggest this argument be included in Alan Roebuck’s proposed anti-liberal apologetics. :-)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 28, 2007 09:15 AM | Send