Here's another point of view that Conservatives NEED Darwin and it is mostly Liberals that are at odds with it. There are interesting considerations to be found here, but one must get out of the pure scientific mode to deal with them. The unanswerable questions (via Darwin) come at the end:
But Is It Good for the Conservatives?
Darwinism and its discontents.
by Andrew Ferguson
05/14/2007, Volume 012, Issue 33
They only had two and a half hours to settle some knotty questions--Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe?--so they had to talk fast. But not fast enough. By the time the formidable panel discussion was over last week, I, as a member of the audience, had even more questions about the nature of reality than usual.
This hardly ever happens at a think tank, even Washington's most audacious and interesting think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. One reason AEI stands as the capital's premier research organization is that it alone would think to assemble a quartet of intelligent and accomplished people to debate the implications of Darwinism for political thought and public policy. Specifically, the panel's title was "Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?" Its moderator was Steven Hayward, the biographer of Ronald Reagan, and in the quartet he conducted were Larry Arnhart, a political scientist from Northern Illinois University; John Derbyshire, an author and a blogger for National Review Online; John West, a political scientist formerly of Seattle Pacific University and now of the Discovery Institute; and his colleague at Discovery, George Gilder, the legendary author of Wealth and Poverty, Microcosm, The Spirit of Enterprise, and Life After Television. (Gilder is routinely and correctly called a visionary, partly because he's the only man on earth who can imagine life without television.)
In the yin-yang, either-or, whose-side-are-you-on language that we Washingtonians prefer, you could say that Arnhart and Derbyshire are pro-Darwinians--defenders of Darwin's theory of the origin of species and relatively satisfied that it explains most of the things that need explaining. Gilder and West are anti-Darwinians, who work hard to point out the theory's limitations, both scientific and philosophical. And all four of them, to one extent or another, are men of the right. Note, though, that the subject of their panel wasn't the primary question of whether Darwinian theory is true; it was the secondary question of whether Darwinian theory and political conservatism abet each other as ways of understanding and shaping the world: "Does Darwin's theory help defend or undermine traditional morality and family life? Does it encourage or discredit economic freedom?"
In his remarks, Derbyshire objected that such questions, which were after all the point of the panel he had traveled to Washington to be on, were nonetheless pointless. "Conservatism and Darwinism are orthogonal," he said. "Neither one implies the other."
That sort of party-poopery could easily have ended the discussion right there--except that, as Hayward said, the commingling of Darwinism with political theory and practice has a long and unavoidable history. The relationship has waxed and waned. Most obviously and infamously, Darwinism spawned Social Darwinism, or so Social Darwinists claimed. Its pitiless principle of survival of the fittest was, Hayward pointed out, invoked by the Confederacy's most articulate theorist, Alexander Stephens, and also by the champions of unregulated capitalism in robber baron America. Throughout the late 19th century, Social Darwinists assumed that Darwin's theory had disproved the liberal (in the old sense) tradition of natural rights and natural law that inspired the Founding Fathers. John Dewey argued for Darwin's relevance to social and political arrangements, and so did most of his fellow Progressives: Woodrow Wilson, for instance, who said that "living constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice." Traces of Social Darwinism can be found too in Hitler and Stalin, both of whom were even worse than Woodrow Wilson.
In light of such unhappy history, Hayward said, "I sometimes wish there could be a separation of science and state to go along with a separation of religion and state."
It's a nice idea, but it too might have ended the discussion right then and there, except that Darwinism is once again being used by partisans of a particular political philosophy. This time the lucky philosophy is contemporary American conservatism, and the foremost proponent of the conservative-Darwinian dalliance is Arnhart. He offered a quick summary of his position, which has become popular among right-wingers of a libertarian stripe and has found its fullest expression in Arnhart's book Darwinian Conservatism.
"Conservatives need Darwin," he said. Without the scientific evidence Darwinian theory offers, conservative views would be swamped by liberal sentimentality. The left-wing view of human nature as unfixed and endlessly manipulable has led to countless disastrous Utopian schemes. Hard-headed Darwinians, on the other hand, see human nature as settled and enduring and stubbornly unchangeable, and conservatives can wield the findings of Darwin to rebut the scheming, ambitious busybodies of the left and their subversion of custom and tradition. (I'm paraphrasing, by the way.)
Darwinism, he said, supports the conservative view of sexual differences and family life. Left-wingers see these things as social constructions, mere conventions that can be overridden in the quest for personal liberation; Darwin anchors them in nature. Darwinism supports the conservative view of private property and the marketplace, because our innermost desires, shaped by natural selection over thousands of years, include an unstoppable need to own property and to find gratification in trading our property with others. And Darwinism supports the view of limited, decentralized government, since the selfish human nature revealed by Darwin requires that no single authority be trusted with unchecked power.
West, the anti-Darwinian, began his rebuttal by pointing out that many leftists have criticized Darwin, too, so no one should think that anti-Darwinism is exclusively an obsession of religious primitives on the right. Kurt Vonnegut, oddly enough, spoke against Darwinian evolution, so anti-Darwinism is an obsession of overrated novelists on the left as well. West's most important point, though, is that Darwinism is an intellectual package deal. Accepting its larger scientific claims about the origins of life, and about how human nature came to be the way it is, requires acceptance of its much less appealing philosophical suppositions: that the universe is a random, directionless process, that human existence has no point or purpose, that free will and the sanctity of the self are ultimately illusions.
The amorality built into Darwinism, West said, explains why it has so easily been employed by eugenicists of both left and right. Reduced to the material processes of chemistry and physics, life as it is, even human life, no longer seems terribly worthy of respect. "Why not use reason to direct evolution to produce a new kind of human being?" West asked, in devil's advocate mode. "What's so sacrosanct about existing human dispositions and capacities, since they were all produced by such a purposeless process?"
As anti-Darwinians like to do, West has combed the vast corpus of Darwin's writings to find the creepiest possible examples of the great man's cold-bloodedness. Darwin himself apparently didn't believe that scientific questions of natural selection and political questions of human social arrangements were wholly unrelated. In pointing out how vaccinations had saved thousands of otherwise infirm people from death, he wrote:
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
So Darwinism, viewed one way, can easily be considered morally disastrous. But, responded pro-Darwin Derbyshire, Is it true? "The truth value of Darwinism is essential," he said. "The truth value always comes first." If Darwinism is true--and its undeniable success in explaining the world suggests that it is--and if Darwinism undermines conservatism, as West had claimed, "then so much the worse for conservatism."
It was left to Gilder to provide a way out of this dilemma, if it is a dilemma. He noted that extremely complex explanations of physical processes can be thoroughly accurate, yet still incomplete--or even beside the point. Consider the microchip, he said. Like the human mind, it is often "presented as a thinking machine."
"But," he said, "you can know the location of every molecule and atom in a microprocessor, you can know their movements and how each gate within it is flipping, without having any idea at all of the function the computer is undertaking." You can explain all these things, in other words, without explaining the most important thing: What's it doing--and why?
Thus Gilder offered a concession by way of a compromise: "Darwinism may be true," he said, "but it's ultimately trivial." It is not a "fundamental explanation for creation or the universe." Evolution and natural selection may explain why organic life presents to us its marvelous exfoliation. Yet Darwinism leaves untouched the crucial mysteries--who we are, why we are here, how we are to behave toward one another, and how we should fix the alternative minimum tax. And these are questions, except the last one, that lie beyond the expertise of any panel at any think tank, even AEI.
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