Darwin and the absence of human dignity

Last updated on: August 14, 2016 at 8:55 am by Gerald McDermott

Darwin and the absence of human dignity 2016-08-14T08:55:47-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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It is de rigeur among academics to disparage the unwashed masses who are suspicious of Darwin’s theory. Darwin-skeptics are thought to be unscientific and fundamentalist. (For those who wonder if any scientists are also Darwin-skeptics, I recommend David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion.)

It is also unfashionable for scholars to link Darwin’s scientific theory to Social Darwinism, the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same laws of natural selection as plants and animals. It is often claimed that Darwin would have been horrified to see his scientific theory used to bolster eugenic and Nazi-like social theory.

In an article linking Donald Trump to Social Darwinism, M.D. Aeshliman, emeritus professor of education at Boston University, argues that Darwin would have been proud of that connection. Here are some excerpts:

“The even deeper worry is that Trumpery has vigorously resuscitated that shadowy, sneering, behind-the-hand pop ideology that has been a proximate cause of so much tragedy and evil since its conscious emergence in the 1860s: Social Darwinism. Anyone who doubts the longevity, durability, revivability, and destructiveness of this ideology — and the plethora of forms that it can take — should take the trouble to consult the English scholar Mike Hawkins’s authoritative 1997 study, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945. Hawkins is keen to vindicate the essential theme, argument, and insights of the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s great 1944 book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, against revisionists who downplay the book’s thesis. Taking Hofstadter’s argument forward in time to treat recent ‘sociobiologists’ such as E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, Hawkins writes: ‘It is pointless and misleading to present this popularization as a vulgarization of Darwinism. The application of Darwinian theory to human society and psychology was an explicit goal of Darwin and the early Darwinians,’ a contention Hawkins documents in detail. ‘There is, therefore, no such thing as ‘vulgar’ or ‘crude’ Social Darwinism.'”
“Having reread all of Darwin’s major works in a new edition edited by the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard, the distinguished English biographer, intellectual historian, and novelist A. N. Wilson (no relation) concludes a 2006 London Daily Telegraph review by saying: ‘The domination of one race over another is inherent in his story. This is not what most of us call humanism. Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among other things, of European fascism.'”

“It was Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who gave Darwin the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ and helped impart a veneer of philosophical coherence and respectability to the theory. In The Descent of Man, Darwin called him ‘our great philosopher’; Darwin cited him in the book seven times, while citing the proto-Nazi German biologist Ernst Haeckel eleven times.”

The Darwinian philosopher James Rachels, writing 25 years ago, insouciantly described the intellectual-moral effects of Darwinism: ‘Darwin’s theory does undermine traditional values. In particular, it undermines the traditional idea that human life has a special, unique worth.’ Rachels continues: ‘Darwinism undermines both the idea that man is made in the image of God and the idea that man is a uniquely rational being. Furthermore, if Darwinism is correct, it is unlikely that any other support for the idea of human dignity will be found.’ Thus, the ‘idea of human dignity turns out . . . to be the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics’ (Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism). So much for Plato, the Jewish Law, the New Testament, Shakespeare, Descartes, Kant, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln, Jacques Maritain, and the main tradition of Western ethics that has intermittently civilized us to some degree across 2,500 years.”

“The distinguished contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel — no Christian or even theist — has had the necessary, disciplined intellectual power. In 2012 he published Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. At the outset of his sharply argued treatise, he writes: ‘I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. . . . What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the [Darwinian] story has a non-negligible probability of being true.’ Nagel’s book vindicates thoughtful dissenters, from Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, through G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, Jacques Barzun in the 1940s, and Gertrude Himmelfarb in the 1950s, down to Berlinski, Sheldrake, and Himmelfarb’s more recent writings.”

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