Will Darwin Be Canceled From Our Woke Culture?

11/05/2019
by: jonathanhenderson
Source: IntellectualConservative
03/03/2020

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British biographer A.N. Wilson mocked hypocritical atheists on the Left who would like us to believe that if you do not worship Darwin you are some kind of nutter" in his op-ed for the British newspaper The Evening Standard on August 17 2017 where he correctly assessed that Darwin has become an object of veneration comparable to the old heroes of the Soviet Union such as Lenin and Stalin whose statues came tumbling down all over Eastern Europe 20 and more years ago." The pseudo-science known by both natural selection and theory of evolution ― which Darwin shamelessly ripped from the pages of legitimate Christian scientists he loathed such as Gregor Mendel; or Goethe Cuvier and Lamarck before him ― borrowed the phrase survival of the fittest from the now forgotten and much discredited philosopher Herbert Spencer for inventing a consolation myth for the selfish class to which he belonged to persuade them that their neglect of the poor and the colossal gulf between them and the poor was the way Nature intended things. Darwin did however bring two new ideas to the evolutionary debate both of which are false: one was that evolution only proceeds little by little that nature never makes leaps. The two most distinguished American palaeontologists of modern times Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge both demonstrated some 30 years ago that this is not at all true. But the area which should get Darwin into trouble under normal circumstances is how he invoked his belief that Nature is always ruthless: that the strong push out the weak" according to Wilson and that compassion and compromise are for cissies whom Nature throws to the wall." Yes Darwins ideas were so compelling that they convinced many among the Victorian Age gentry that his class would outbreed the savages he defined to be the black and brown peoples of the globe Jews and of course the feckless drunken Irish. But as luck would have it for the Darwinian cosmopolitan elite the unfittest survived: they in fact had more babies than the Darwin class. The Darwinians led by his cousin Francis Galton then devised the hateful pseudo-science of eugenics ―a scheme to prevent the poor from breeding. Its ideas were put to good use at least for their purposes by Hitlers National Socialists through a great assist thrown to them by raging racist feminist Margaret Sangers Planned Parenthood Federation through board members Ernst Rudin Hitlers director of genetic sterilization and cofounder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene; and Lothrop Stoddard the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy who also propagandized Nazi Germanys eugenics program for Sangers publication Birth Control Review. Natural selection and eugenics let it be known were the mother and father behind Hitlers Final Solution to the Jewish question as well as the atrocities that would kill millions under communism. In fact not even the democratic West gets a free pass here considering this science is back in the mainstream through green politics. And this is where we see emerge in the mainstream the philosophy behind Postmodernism which at the very core of political correctness foundation is the defining intellectual cult of the modern world. I say cult because in reflecting upon today being modern Postmodernism must necessarily negate Modernity. For precisely these reasons Postmodernism is difficult to define because to do so would violate the postmodernists premise that no definite terms boundaries or absolute truths exist. Being necessary that by its nature the definition of Postmodernism must remain vague given its proponents themselves hold varyng beliefs and opinions on issues I will do my very best to trace how from the times of Hobbes and his Leviathan and Nietszche and God Is Dead to the 21st century the ancient left-wing foundation accredited to Darwin ― given his entire perspective with respect to human species development begins and ends with Savages are intermediate states between people and apes" ― may soon become as enfeebled as what political correctness has similarly done to the church… or perhaps will not.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: FROM THE LEVIATHAN TO POSTMODERNISM AND SOME THINGS IN BETWEEN

Critical to the Postmodern imperative are its supplementary talking points which are in the immediate past expansions on Friedrich Nietzsches introduction to nihilism (the abandonment of values and knowledge) which he defined in his book Will to Power Every belief every considering something true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world." For Nietzsche who spoke of the death of God and foresaw the dissolution of traditional religion and metaphysics there was no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. That objective of nihilism manifests itself through several perspectives:

Epistemological nihilism denies the possibility of knowledge and truth and is linked to extreme skepticism.
Political nihilism advocates the prior destruction of all existing political social and religious orders as a prerequisite for any future improvement.
Ethical nihilism (moral nihilism) rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Good and evil are vague and related values are simply the result of social and emotional pressures.
Existential nihilism the most well-known view affirms that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.

Nietzsche claimed the exemplary human being must craft his/her own identity through self-realization and do so without relying on anything transcending that lifesuch as God or a soul. To some commentators Nietzsche advanced a cosmological theory of will to power ― and that will must emerge from the individuals appetites and passions for self-preservation ― while others interpret him as not overly concerned with working out a general cosmology.

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Nietzsches thoughts which drove the rise of German nationalism and the Russian Revolution under the Bolsheviks following World War I have dominated even evolved to consume the whole of the themes driving consumerism in the realm of advertising and marketing our popular culture during the postwar era (after 1945). In effect the present malaise destroying our society is not so much a consequence of democracy or even politics in general but of an -ism that simply sells itself that exists everywhere (and no where) simultaneously. With the end of the Cold War after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the incremental push for an international global government by the United Nations and the European Union set forth agendas which while wholly Western in context nevertheless requires that under the Postmodern objective we question their relevance in reality without relying on conventional wisdom or rational theories.

Are nationalism politics religion and war the result of a primitive human mentality?";
Is truth an illusion?"; and finally
How can Christianity claim primacy or dictate morals?"

Within the Postmodern narrative much like the Soviet model with which many postmodernist philosophers were once aligned the questions stem from lost confidence in what they have determined to be a corrupt Western world. For others freedom from traditional authority is the issue; for example Postmodernist scholar Stanley Fish articulated in his book Is There a Text in This Class? how Deconstruction" ― the means by which Fish and other postmodernists believe that ancient Western historical and cultural truths must be broken down based on metanarratives ― relieves him of the obligation to be right… and demands only that I be interesting." Through metanarratives may the postmodernist Left illustrate the need for deconstructing ancient and traditional religious morals nationalism capitalism and inept political systems. Preceding the theatrics of the 16-year old autistic green political prop Greta Thunberg by several decades one should understand how her condemnation of capitalisms role in the degradation of the planet at the United Nations echoes Postmodernisms end: to deconstruct what they see as the unwise use and adverse impact of promoting trade offs between energy resources and environment for economic gain. These metanarratives constitute the majority of Jean-Franois Lyotards work ―whose book The Postmodern Condition gave the namesake to the philosophical movement hed long already been a part ―are however unified by a consistent view that reality consists of singular events which cannot be represented accurately by rational theory; and that similar to Rousseau nearly 200 years prior our objective reality can only be driven by two predominant forces self-love and compassion ― and in the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" so long as it is understood that Love is the Law; Love under Will." So whether climate change is a lie or whether the West has run its course with the end of Modernity is not a matter of truth: we cannot according to Postmodernism be certain truth exists. But this was not the conventional thinking 300 years before Lyotard. During the day of one Sir Thomas Hobbes he invited his readers in Leviathan how to consider what life would be like in a state of nature that is a social condition without government ― in the state of anarchy ― where we might imagine that people might be free to openly act to be each his own judge jury and executioner over all we survey uniquely in his or her own case whenever disputes arise and that at any rate this state is the appropriate baseline against which to judge the justifiability of political arrangements in this condition of mere nature of perfectly private judgment. In such a brutish pessimistic state of existence what if there is no agency with recognized authority to arbitrate disputes and effective power to enforce its decisions? What manner of social entropy saturated in ennui is this if mired in chaos such a dissolute condition of masterlesse men without subjection to Lawes and a coercive Power to tye their hands from rapine and revenge" would make impossible all of the basic security upon which comfortable sociable civilized life could continue if there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of all continuall feare and danger of violent death"? What of the life of man solitary poore nasty brutish and short" if by boredom in this state of mere nature people have strong reasons to avoid it to again simply Do what thou wilt as the whole of The Law? In which Love is The Law Love under will for so long a man is in the condition of mere nature (which is a condition of war) as private appetite is the measure of good and evill"? As people are not by their nature good Hobbes (a royalist writing during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century) believed that subjects should not dispute the sovereign power nor under any circumstances should they rebel. It is here where the foundation of modern Western political thought experienced its genesis: the attempt to demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between political obedience and peace ―and hence the Leviathan the vain-glorious victors in civil war we come to understand may emerge from the rubble of embracing the devil we didnt know over the devil that we did.

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By contrast French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau repeatedly claimed that a single idea hits at the heart of his world view ― namely that human beings are good by nature but in fact are rendered corrupt by society. Did he mean that since society the alleged agent of corruption is composed entirely of naturally good human beings that somewhere somehow evil got a foothold in some perversion of the Adam and Eve narrative in the Book of Genesis? And what of this natural goodness he implies given Rousseau frequently stated that morality ― the eternal internal dialogue between sin and obedience to God good and evil justice and injustice ― is not a natural feature of human life? If in whatever sense it must mean human beings are good by nature is it not in the moral sense that the casual reader would ordinarily assume but rather like reading a mystery novel from the very start we understand that God sees the humanity from perspective of the author himself who likely started from the end and wrote to conform to its designed beginning? If we compare Rousseaus secular dialogue with that of the Bible and we understand that God is The Alpha and the Omega the First and the Last the Beginning and the End (Revelation 22:13) Rousseaus point of humanitys innate goodness implies a sense of perfection which neither upholds to the principles of perfectability nor a sense of his own destiny. Only God lays judgment according to the Bible: He is after all the beginning and end to all that is. But for Rousseau the apostate it is people and not God who simply drift through life: living in the moment still good by their nature but alas are corrupted by the society and others only good in their truth (morally-correct per Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; or Truth not facts for Joe Biden) as determined by each individual. The individual person by exerting their force on the orbit of other individual(s) who may not find them agreeable in the small microcosm of ones own mere nature finds as his problem that our mere nature for Rousseau is uniquely built on his instinctual drive towards self-preservation by our most basic biological needs (for things like food shelter and warmth). Given humans like other creatures who live strictly off instinct are part of the design of a benevolent creator they are individually well-equipped with the means to satisfy their natural needs. But who is this creator to Rousseau? In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Rousseau imagines a multi-stage evolution of humanity: from the most primitive condition to something like a modern complex society which in his day emerged at the dawn of what Postmodernism seeks in Modernity to deconstruct based on Rousseaus device for separating the natural and the artificial elements of our psychology at each stage where human beings change their material and psychological relations to one another and correspondingly the sentiment of their existence in living basically solitary lives in the original state of the human race since they do not need one another to provide for their material needs. Chance meetings between proto-humans are the occasions for copulation and reproduction; while child-care is minimal and brief in duration. Henceforth if humans are naturally good at this stage of human evolution their goodness is merely a negative and amounts to the absence of evil distinguishing themselves from the other creatures with which they share the primeval world only by two characteristics: freedom and perfectibility. For Rousseau freedom in this context is simply the ability not to be governed solely by appetite; perfectibility meanwhile is the capacity to learn and thereby to find new and better means to satisfy needs. Together these characteristics give humans the potential to achieve self-consciousness rationality and morality but ultimately the good that humans were born as their whole innate trade in living basically solitary lives will devolve into a life less savory once such characteristics are more likely to condemn them to a social world of deception dissimulation dependence oppression and domination. If humility according to the Bible means that our innate sinful nature requires that in God we trust we must through faith alone find our way back to salvation in atoning for the fall of Adam and Eve then for the individual believing himself to exist as both naturally good and at the same time born free a life bound in chains paints a pretty grim reality given how in life we are all naturally slaves bound to our destiny. Most notably Rousseau posits that our ability to empathize are drawn from two other passions piti (compassion) along with amour de soi (self-love; or literally love of self) which direct all of humanity to attend to and relieve the suffering of others (including animals) wherever possible without endangering our own self-preservation. Rousseaus words have taught over 250 years of left-wing thinkers how may the restraints on man become legitimate": through a social contract implemented and enforced by a few masters selected to rule as a guardian class over the whole of the state who are to be legitimized as The Sovereign by the support of the general will. Things beginning from birth can therefore only go down hill in such a pitiless state of mere nature ―for Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains… and yet he sincerely believes that he is the master of others and still he is more of a slave than they are." Therefore The Sovereign whether a benevolent dictator or the guardian class ruling over his slaves (defined here as the general will which includes The Sovereign himself) should love humanity so much that in the name of the general will he must murder the very people standing in its way.

CONCLUSION

As Phil Moore wrote for The Gospel Coalition Charles Darwin is a great British hero... I happened to live opposite Darwins former lodgings when I was a student at Cambridge University so I looked out each morning on a blue plaque hailing him as one of the greatest Britons who ever lived." View it objectively he never said that Darwin didnt deserve that commemorative plaque." But he did say that (Darwin) wasnt a British hero but a British villain." Furthermore Darwin Moore pointed out didnt hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species" ― after all the full title of his seminal 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life and which he would follow with his more explicit psychobabble in The Descent of Man where he spelled out his racial theory:

The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors that they stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world."

Several thousand miles away from Darwin Cecil Rhodes gleefully embraced Darwins thinking as justification for white expansion across southern Africa. He was so inspired by Darwinian evolutionist Winwood Reades The Martyrdom of Man that as Moore noted Rhodes later confessed That book has made me what I am" the architect of one of the most brutal and immoral acts of European expansion and genocide in history; while furthermore writing in 1877 that:

I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. . . . It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human most honorable race the world possesses."

caption id=attachment_31632 align=alignleft width=300 Carol

Dr. Carol M. Swain a former associate professor of politics at Princeton University and former professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University./caption Thankfully most British people and indeed the whole of Western civilization are today embarrassed by the racist rhetoric Moore cites undergirded the late-Victorian British Empire. Yet in todays cancel culture where anything from the past one says can and will be used to destroy him some day down the line we seem to be taking the motives driving racism away from what actually makes a person a racist. For instance Dr. Carol Swain a black conservative scholar from Nashville bemoaned that Ronald Reagans legacy as a great president is facing a new and unexpected challenge after a tape released in July where Reagan can be heard venting with then-President Richard Nixon about the July 1971 United Nations vote to recognize the Peoples Republic of China that also cast out the fledgling democracy of Taiwan from the organization. Frustrated and irate with the Tanzanian delegation for dancing after the country was seated Reagan remarked that Last night I tell you to watch that thing on television as I did... To see those those monkeys from those African countriesdamn them theyre still uncomfortable wearing shoes!" As Dr. Swain notes

Reagans remarks were indeed racist but they are not the whole of the man... it is notable that he and the Republicans made no real effort to eliminate race-based affirmative action. He signed legislation making Martin Luther Kings birthday a national holiday even though he certainly had access to the negative information about King in the FBI files. When Reagan signed legislation imposing stricter penalties for crack cocaine than powdered it was at the urging of the Congressional Black Caucus."

She is also correct to assess that we as rational actors should be wary of a selective moral perfectionism" citing as examples that the standards now being applied to Reagan (should) also be applied to John F. Kennedy (sexual assault) Lyndon B. Johnson (blatant racism) or Martin Luther King Jr. (plagiarism infidelity and possibly sexual assault)" and that furthermore Kings College which proposes removing Reagans name from a building on its campus should not rename the Reagan House just as we should not rename every MLK boulevard." After all Canadas Justin Trudeau just won reelection as prime minister only months after photographs from parties where he dressed in black face more than 20 years ago surfaced. Barack Obama perhaps as well as Ive ever heard condemned todays idea of purity and never compromise and youre always politically woke and all that stuff … The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting might love their kids." He boldly went where no Democrat has gone before in this era explaining to his audience at the Obama Foundation Summit last week that being woke is not activism. Thats not bringing about change. If all youre doing is casting stones youre probably not going to get things done." Furthermore he advised them to get over that quickly" and to reject the new cancel culture. To his everlasting credit although he did more than anyone (perhaps inadvertently) to contribute to the sad state that our civic discourse resides today the former president had previously slammed college students who wish to be coddled from ideas they disagree with during a speech in 2015. Yet whats so astonishing in the wake of this rising moral perfectionism is how little the Left seem to understand that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution provided the doctrine behind white supremacy the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust; as well as a key component alongside Nietzsche and Ivan Pavlovs study of classical conditioning for dogs for Stalins rule by terror and conquest in the Soviet Union.

caption id=attachment_31630 align=alignnone width=850 Che

Che Guevara (to the left) and late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (to the right)./caption

For that matter it may simply be that few care to acknowledge how rational theory might dictate for the postmodernist Left that Darwin like so many others must fall prey to the current cancel culture. In a time where the post-truth world bears witness to the rehabilitation of Karl Marx and Che Guevera from the condemnation of prior history; when Joe Bidens remark that he chooses Truth over facts equally matches the lack of rational thought behind the pearl of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs wisdom (it is more important to be morally-correct than factually-accurate); or how Bernie Sanders (a pervert who has written about womens rape fantasies) can bring the house down during a CNN Q&A forum by pledging to a feminist that he would have the courage to provide billions of dollars to achieve population control for the poor black and brown peoples in Africa and Asia the likelihood that Darwin will survive is hardly surprising at all.

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