Darwin Day in America. By John G. West. ISI Books. 395 pages. $28.
The title of this book comes from recent efforts to turn February 12
into "Darwin Day" in American schools. John G. West, senior fellow at
the Discovery Institute, reveals here to what extent scientific
materialism has become the foundation for much of American politics and
culture, and how dangerous this is for democracy.
After a
brief survey of scientific materialists from antiquity to the 18th
century, West launches into an in-depth analysis of Darwin's The Descent of Man
(1871), showing how this work laid the groundwork for contemporary
scientific materialism. West says that Darwin found "no fundamental
difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties"
and claimed that traits considered uniquely human -- such as abstract
thought and self-consciousness -- were also found in animals.
Secondly, Darwin claimed that our moral faculties were based on social
instincts rooted in our biology, and that these social instincts were no
stronger than anti-social instincts like self-preservation and lust.
Thus, Darwin offered no permanent basis for ethics. Later, in The Descent,
he declared that the first human beings were probably polygamous or
serially monogamous and that marriage was the result of the struggle for
survival. And so, mankind had no "superior form of sexual relations"
and no sacred form of family life.
Thirdly, Darwin prepared the
way for eugenics. Indeed, his immediate family would soon be involved
in that movement -- his sons George and Leonard became active in
promoting it (Leonard serving as "president of the Eugenics Education
Society, the main eugenics group in Great Britain"), and his cousin
Francis Galton became the founder of the "eugenics crusade." Evidently,
Darwin was sympathetic to eugenics: West quotes him as vowing "to cut
off communication" with his disciple Mivart when the latter "criticized
an article by Darwin's son George that advocated eugenics."
'[T]he
whole nation has awakened to and recognizes the extraordinary importance of the
science of human heredity [eugenics], as well as its application to the
ennoblement of the human family…'
- President Woodrow Wilson, on eugenics, 1913
Darwinists are always trying to set a distance between the theory of
evolution and the eugenics movement, but West cites Darwin, in The Descent,
as approving of how "the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated"
among "savages," and disapproving of how civilized men "build asylums
for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick," with the result that "the
weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind." Then,
comparing man to livestock, Darwin added, "no one who has attended to
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly
injurious to the race of man." After this statement, he gave lip service
to compassion for the weak, but the implication remained that such
compassion undercut the survival of the human race. Darwin again
complained about how "the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members
of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and
generally virtuous members." He would return to this point in his last
conversations with Alfred Russel Wallace, speaking "very gloomily on the
future of humanity" because "in our modern civilization natural
selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive." (Although
Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," Darwin
readily appropriated it as an "accurate" description of natural
selection.) The Darwinian basis for eugenics is often downplayed, West
observes, yet it is a fact that eugenicists drew their "inspiration"
directly from Darwinian biology. A number of the chief eugenicists of
the early 20th century declared that natural selection was the "law"
they followed to improve the race. Moreover, the American leaders in
eugenics, who were "largely university-trained biologists and doctors"
affiliated with places like Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and
the Museum of Natural History, presented eugenics as biologically
"justified." Between 1920 and 1939, West shows, Darwin's theory was
constantly used in high-school biology textbooks to support eugenics,
something that shows how much mainstream science accepted this form of
population control. The book that Darwinist schoolteacher John Scopes
was using in his Tennessee high-school classroom before his infamous
"Monkey Trial" was G.W. Hunter's Civil Biology (1914), which
followed the trend of advocating eugenics on Darwinian grounds. There
Hunter spoke of "parasites" in society who, if they "were lower animals,
we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading."
Scholars today place the blame for the eugenics debacle on politicians,
but West finds it more accurate to describe the movement as "an effort
by scientists to dictate government social policy based on their
presumed scientific expertise." This was the first time they used
science "to expand the power of the state over social matters."
Scholars also turn a blind eye to the argument for racism that eugenicists drew from The Descent.
Darwin there claimed that the break between apes and man in evolution
fell "between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." West argues that
Darwin's allegation about blacks belonging to "a more primitive stage
of human evolution" soon became a powerful scientific rationale for
racist public policies, including laws against miscegenation.
'The
Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded
the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.'
The effect of Darwinian materialism on criminal law was deadly too. In
1876, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that criminals were a
"throwback to earlier stages of Darwinian evolution," and in 1924
Clarence Darrow argued (in defense of Leopold and Loeb) that criminals
were "programmed for crime by material forces over which they had no
control." Since eugenicists believed that criminal tendencies were
inherited, they strove to curtail the breeding of groups that produced
criminals. By the early 1930s, thirty states in the U.S. had
sterilization laws, and by 1958, around 60,000 Americans had been
sterilized, many by coercion. When Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme
Court Justice, approved of Virginia's forced-sterilization law, he said
it was the way to "build a race." Later, when Nazis forcibly sterilized
the "unfit" in the 1930s, they claimed to be acting, like us, on
"biological principles." Hitler even declared that he had studied the
laws of several American states for the sterilization of people whose
breeding was "injurious to the racial stock."
After eugenics
was discredited by Nazi use, leading American eugenicists turned to
contraception and abortion for population control. In 1953 they issued a
document entitled "Freedom of Choice for Parenthood: A Program of
Positive Eugenics," in which they linked so-called "voluntary
parenthood" to natural selection. The tactics were new, the principles
the same: West cites Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret, as making a
Darwinian defense of abortion in 2004, asserting that "abortion is
good," and "we must become proud that we have taken control of our
reproduction. This has been a major factor in advancing human evolution
and survival."
'Heredity is the fundamental cause of human
wretchedness… The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane
means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of
this high privilege [reproduction], is a gentle, painless death. In carbonic acid gas, we have an agent which would
instantaneously fulfill the need.'
- Dr W. Duncan McKim, Heredity and
Human Progress, 1900
Darwin's scientific materialism, West
demonstrates, has infiltrated both political theory and sexual mores.
Marx and Engels took up Darwin's theory as the "basis in natural science
for the historical class struggle," and it was worked into the official
Soviet doctrine of dialectical materialism. Woodrow Wilson remarked in
1912 that the U.S. Founders' view of the Constitution was too static or
Newtonian, and since government was now "accountable to Darwin, not to
Newton," the Constitution should henceforth be interpreted "according to
the Darwinian principle." We know where that led. As for sexual mores,
Darwin's account of "human mating practices" as part of "mammalian
biology" in The Descent led to sex-education programs supported
by SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.) and
Planned Parenthood, in which children of five years of age could be
taught that masturbation and homosexuality were faultless choices.
The hostility shown to scientists who express doubt concerning Darwin's
theory "is hard to overstate," West remarks. Even those who base their
caveats on science are labeled "Taliban" and are said to be waging war
on science. Some teachers have been intimidated and silenced for sharing
with students published scientific criticisms of Darwinism, as in the
case of Roger DeHart, who showed his students an article by Stephen Jay
Gould about how biology textbooks still used the pseudoscientific
diagrams of Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. These diagrams depict the unborn
child as going through a "recapitulation" of evolution from fish to
mammal, and were used to defend abortion. So "obsessed" are Darwinians
with "denouncing their opponents as dangerous zealots," West adds, that
states have had to pass laws to protect the right of teachers to "teach
scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory."
Not long ago,
mainstream scientists who shaped social policy were Darwinian
materialists who favored eugenics for population control. These
"experts" are now utterly discredited. Today, mainstream scientists who
shape social policy are still Darwinian materialists, only they favor
different varieties of (and names for) population control. These experts
fully expect to stand above public scrutiny because it is thought, West
notes, "that scientists know best and thus politicians and the public
should blindly accept the policy views of scientists." The danger is
that if they avoid public scrutiny we may soon be living in a
technocracy instead of a democracy. Talk about a dystopia -- to have
scientific materialists who regard the rest of us as no better than a
herd in a stockyard presiding over us as our infallible and unelected
masters!
Darwin Day in America is a thoroughly
documented book (with almost 100 pages of endnotes) written in an easy,
fluent style. It is much to be recommended.
Anne Barbeau
Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of
English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has
published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the
17th century.
Related Reading:
Eugenics And The Nazis -- The California Connection
Sterilising the Left’s Eugenics History
'War Against the Weak--Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race'
Progressivism, Eugenics, and the Jewish Butcher of Buchenwald
"Being A Progressive Means Never Having To Admit That You Were Wrong Or Saying You're Sorry."
The Left's Lie About Fascism Will Outlive Cockroaches In A Nuclear Winter
George Bernard Shaw Favours Euthanasia
Taking Life: Humans
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