1. The thought Locke=Nature and Darwin=History described above is almost completely backwards. Locke=Freedom From Nature (and implicitly history) and Darwin=Nature is much closer to the truth. That’s why Darwinian Larry can use Darwin, with some initial plausibility, to oppose History (by which he really means Locke/Hegel/Heidegger or Christianity or any claim that we’re free from nature).
2. So from this perspective, nothing is more un-American than Darwinism. Locke and Christianity agree that the human person is free from nature and “the city.” Locke and the Christians disagree on whether or not that freedom is social/relational and on whether that freedom is for knowing and loving the personal Creator. But they agree that human freedom–personal or individual freedom–is different in kind from anything possessed by the other species. Our goal of securing one’s own personal being against natural indifference, our goal of not being merely species or city or even family fodder, isn’t shared with the other animals. Unlike the dolphins, we’re, among other things, technological beings; the dolphins have no desire to and so are incapable of rebelling against who they are as natural beings. That means, among other things, the future of the dolphin is in our hands, but not ours in the dolphins’. Anyone with eyes to see knows that we’re the species that screws up an otherwise orderly nature. Nature is, so to speak, indifferent to the future of the dolphin. But nature would cheer if we were to disappear. There are no dolphin environmentalists; there are no dolphin radical ecologists who take the side of nature against their own species. Unlike the dolphins, we’re also capable of believing in a personal God and personal salvation. And we can’t help but be obsessed with our personal significance or importance as not merely a part of nature or some group.
3. So Darwinian Larry pretty well ignores Locke’s teaching on property or man’s inventive transformation of virtually worthless natural materials. For him (and E.O. Wilson sometimes), we’re much more like the bees and ants than Hobbes and Locke think. For Darwin, we find our purpose and happiness by following natural instinct, either blindly or after some deliberation. Nature is a welcoming environment, our home; our perceptions of alienation are mistaken. Living according to nature, for all species, is more about happiness than misery. The false modern alternative is the mistakenly anti-natural pursuit of happiness that ends only in death. Our true natural goal is not the deliberate or methodical avoidance of death but living a complete life, a life where we accomplish fully our desirable natural duties. There’s no reason to fear death, because death is simply not-being. We won’t be around to know whether death is good or bad, and it’s unnatural to sweat it, at least too much. A Darwinian, is at one level, an Epicurean. But that doesn’t explain why we alone about the species are so anxious about not-being or miserably experience our own being as so contingent and ephemeral.
4. It’s actually really hard for us to be Epicureans or to live beyond hope and fear or to be free from illusions about our cosmic significance. So the high-level Darwinian is a large distance from living according to moral sense or social instinct. For Darwin himself, the happiness of the philosopher is much more intense than the happiness of the peasant. The pleasures of the intellect and imagination are so much more enjoyable than anything else members of our species experience that Darwin said that the sum total of happiness of the philosopher is much greater than that of the peasant (or dolphin or chimp), even if mixed with some distinctively human misery. It’s this Epicurean side of Darwin/Arnhart that reveals the real self-help program of affirming a comprehensive, impersonal, scientific explanation of everything. Darwin contradicts himself when he writes about the perfection of the human species or the intolerability of the thought that our species is destined to disappear. In any case, the genuinely intolerable thought that science tries to make tolerable is that particular human beings mysteriously come into being and disappear all the time. No animal consciously devotes itself to species perpetuation.
5. Darwinian Larry isn’t against religion, but he says it must be judged according to nature. Religion is good for its social utility; it’s bad if it opposes itself to what’s required for the species’ perpetuation and biological flourishing. So the famous story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son is immoral, and there’s other cruel stuff in the Old Testament too. Larry prudently stays away from criticizing the New Testament. There God really does allow his own Son to be sacrificed, and there’s the pernicious teaching that it’s possible for us, like the God-man, to live for an existence beyond this merely biological one. The model man of the New Testament engages in no reproductive behavior, and love becomes primarily love of God, a love that detaches us from our natural, primary group loyalties. Eros points us beyond anything sexual or even physical. Larry, like Strauss, is clearly enough anti-Christian above all; he’s against the illusory freedom from nature that morphed into Lockeanism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Heideggerianism.
6. So Larry also finds to be unreasonably unnatural the Christian view of marriage as to death do you part. It’s reasonable, as Locke says too, to stay together only until the kids are raised. And Larry’s indifferent on the monogamy vs. polygamy issue. Both are very good for reproduction and raising. But the truth is what really seems to be bad for reproductive behavior in our time is discrediting the “sacred” character of marriage and its reduction by Locke in one way and Darwin in another to a merely utilitarian union. It turns out that couples break up way before the kids are raised all the time these days. And nobody, certainly not the law, does anything about that. Not only that, it turns out that people more and more choose deliberately a childless marriage. What would Darwin say about contraception or excessively safe sex or sex detached from the natural events of birth and death? What would he say about the reduction of sexual morality to safe sex or the consensual use of condoms? What would he say about healthy people living in prosperous environments consciously choosing not to be replaced? And what would he say about the shameless proliferation of single moms? It could be all this unnatural behavior is making people more unhappy than ever. But why has nature, so to speak, allowed them so consciously and willfully to choose it?
7. If you really think about it, a genuine Darwinian would agree with the Christians that Darwin shouldn’t be taught in our schools as the whole truth and nothing but. It’s our observant, Christian Darwin-deniers who are living pretty much as Darwin would describe and recommend. The future of the species in our country is more and more in their hands.
March 23rd, 2010 | 2:24 pm
Dr. Arnhart as a secularist may simply ignore the question of God, historical revelation, and related categories. He embraces a type of anti-gnosis where instead of escaping the prison of the world, Arnhart turns to what he interprets as the essential meaning of man-in-the-world. And, like the gnostic thinker significant elements of his analysis of reality may be correct.
Where the good professor is derailed is in his failure to comprehend and/or embrace the encounter with the Incarnation which Voegelin describes as “…the point of transcendental irruptions that constitute history.”
Point 7 is particularly powerful.
March 24th, 2010 | 11:39 am
[...] Other Darwin Thoughts Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 1:32 PM Peter Lawler [...]
March 24th, 2010 | 1:59 pm
Well, the Greeks and the Romans, for example, surely had a natural moral sense, and I doubt that has “naturally evolved” since their time. It never occurred to them that slavery was wrong, and even the ancient democracies were built on slavery. According to Tocqueville, Jesus Christ had to come down to earth to show how all human beings are equal, and slavery as a result gradually started to disappear from the world. It was brought back, unfortunately, on a restricted or racist basis in the American South–among the not particularly Christian adventurers in Virginia. In New England, meanwhile, the Christian Puritans built the first democracy not grounded in slavery, and the first based on the thought that all human beings are created equal all the way down. Jefferson’s “moral sense” theory taught him that slavery was wrong, but it didn’t push him to anything about it. And his Epicurean scientism caused him not to lose any sleep about it. Meanwhile, the abolitionists tended to be Calvinists or neo-Puritans in New England or the Midwest, and even the Transcendentalists viewed themselves as Christian in this respect. And the South viewed the abolitionists and not the few “natural lawyers” in the Lincolnian mode as the real threat. The ruling class of the antebellum South was far less Christian than aristocratic–Stoics reading Greek and Roman philosophy. Of course the Bible can be read in various ways, as can Darwin, who has been cited by every modern tyrant since he wrote as an authority. The natural moral sense can hardly explain either the heroic virtue of Solzhenitsyn or the ideological viciousness of Hitler or Stalin–calling them mere psychopaths hardly gives them the credit they deserve.
March 25th, 2010 | 9:33 am
Speaking of happiness, marriage and kids…studies show that married people tend to be happier, even after children are raised and out of the house. Studies are mixed on the benefit of children to happiness. Having kids adds to your daily stress and concerns–people worry about their kids as to their safety, their future, and also kids are costly and so money concerns rise with having kids–and so seems to detract from happiness. But most people, when reflecting on their lives, generally regard having kids as greatly adding to their life satisfaction. The death of a child is about the worst possible misfortune any individual can experience. Studies also show that it’s easier to know the events that detract from happiness than the events and factors that make happiness.
I’m full of ridiculous “studies show” sayings lately.
March 25th, 2010 | 2:39 pm
Actually, Mr. Lawler, slavery was practiced in every colony prior to the American Revolution and emancipation in the Northern states was through compensation. The Puritans did indeed possess slaves–this is not in historical dispute. And the descendants of the Puritans were engaged in the slave trade, both licitly and illicitly, after that.
I admire DeTocqueville, but as an authority on Christianity I would set him lower than St. Paul, who instructed slaves to obey their masters.
March 26th, 2010 | 4:37 am
Whoa, well there goes the “shining city on the hill” thing!
Does this mean the Yankees really weren’t morally superior to the boys in butternut and gray?
Thank goodness they can’t grow cotton in Massachusetts!
March 26th, 2010 | 11:25 am
Slavery is, of course, unjust–in the “shining city on the hill” i.e. the city in speech, that is. In the actual city it was a necessity. It is not true, for instance, that “it never occurred” to the Greeks and Romans that slavery might be wrong (see Aristotle’s Politics, Book 1, Chapter 6). The ancients retained their slaves because without them the life of the free citizen with the leisure and economic self-sufficiency to participate in politics is impossible, a manifestly unjust situation: You can have slaves with no free men; you cannot have free men without slaves. Furthermore, some civilizations were obviously superior to others, which meant that when “barbarians” were captured in war, they could not be simply “assimilated” as citizens, but could only be slaves (if they were not to be slaughtered outright). The early Christians, for their part, eschewed politics almost as a doctrinal imperative; only when Christ returned to overturn the given natural order would the spiritual equality in the body of Christ be translated into something like political equality. Until then, Christians were to accept their lot in this world if only because Earthly or political perfection was impossible for men. In this they were in implicit agreement with Plato, for whom the best city in speech could only be prayed for.
One should take DeTocqueville’s somewhat hyperbolic statement that Christianity “destroyed servitude” with a grain of salt, or better yet, while also making sure one reads DeTocqueville all the way through. Is “serfdom” freedom? Weren’t non-Christians routinely enslaved in southern Europe and the Levant even into the Renaissance? Why did no major political, theological, or philosophical thinker in the ancient, medieval, or even (early) modern world consider slavery illegal as such (not even Locke), let alone a basis for revolution or warfare? These questions aside, one should note (given the rather naive cheerleading of the Puritan New England posted here) DeTocqueville’s decidedly un-idealistic interpretation of Northern motives in selling their slaves south (cf. Democracy in America, Vol. 1, Part 2, Chap. 10) and the impossible security situation this created in the South and elsewhere, for whites and blacks. Lincoln’s actions and this statements must be judged in this context.
The role of the modern technological project, the adoption of which correllated strongly with the unprecedented mechanization and industrialization of world economies, seems to me related to the rise of Darwinian theory. As Bacon declared, philosophy and science were to be placed into the service of the relief of man’s estate, but man’s estate (of which one aspect, I might note, is the permanent political necessity of slavery) could not be so fundamentally altered if nature, especially man’s nature, is considered eternal and immutable. Darwin explains the human species as essentially changeable and derivative from simpler (and manipulable) elements, all of which implies that man may, by the practical application of his knowlege of the laws of nature, control his own development. Without altering his own nature, by contrast, the final relief of man’s estate is not possible.
March 27th, 2010 | 7:11 am
CDK, I am most interested in your thinking on Lincoln and the necessity of a “civil war” to resolve the slavery question. Also, in this “technological” age why is slavery required (if I understand you correctly)? And, is man’s nature changeable or “eternal and immutable.”
March 27th, 2010 | 7:05 pm
I identify three primary differences between the conditions faced by ancient and modern thinkers:
1) The enthronement of Christianity as the official religion of European nations;
2) The discovery of the New World;
3) The tecnologization and industrialization of economic life, made possible only by a politicized science and the fortuitous discovery of abundant fossil-fuels to power machine labor.
1) meant that nations and cities would always face great pressure to try to force the kingdom of God to become a living reality. 2) resulted in enormous pressure to find new sources of human labor to exploit the resources of the new continents. 3) tended to liberate societies from dependence on agrarian economics in favor of an urbanized, mechanized labor environment, which in turn fueled the rise of the monolithic modern state with its attendant imperialism. Slavery would not have been instituted if not for 2), and emancipation would not have been possible if not for 3).
You wonder what I think of Lincoln; ironically, I wonder what Leo Strauss thought of Lincoln. I’m not all sure he would have toed his students’ line about Lincoln’s supposed “statesmanship”. I think he would have regarded Lincoln as between a rather imprudent statesman and an outright tyrant. I’m not even sure he thought the American colonists had a right to revolt in 1776!
March 30th, 2010 | 8:33 am
Well, had I known all this Darwin talk would really turn out to be SLAVERY talk, I would have poked into the comments sections sooner.
I think I’m largely in agreement w/ CDK on the ancients and slavery…although I confess I’d never heard this interesting an disturbing argument about the difficulty of assimilation.
I do think, however, that a much more subtle account is needed to do justice to the dual topics of 1) Christianity and slavery, and 2) Christendom and slavery, 2a) in medieval times, 2b) in modern (1492 on) times. With 1) you’ve got to consider several Pauline letters most carefully, particularly the shortest(Philemon), and with 2) you’ve got to admit, amid all the exceptions and reversals, that the broad pattern of Christendom’s internal social organization is away from slavery and near-slavery statuses. Orlando Patterson’s book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is quite helpful on these topics, and it is by no means pro-Christian. (Patterson has adopted some kooky ideas on other topics, but his stuff on slavery and freedom is worth studying). My sense is their should be a Christian book on 2a) out there in the spirit of David Bentley Hart’s recent vigorous defense of pre-modern Christianity/Christendom, but I don’t know of one myself.
And maybe Peter plays up the NE Puritans too much, but what about Wilberforce? It is certainly disturbing for Christians like myself that my American forebears seemed to require Locke to spark-plug and even guide their Christian hostility to slavery, but my sense is there is a far more complex story of early modernity-plus-Christianity engagements, reinforcements, and conflicts occurring on the particular topic of Atlantic World slavery from 1600 to 1800 than we are acknowledging here.
March 30th, 2010 | 8:56 am
I might add this: Lincoln’s grand prudence on slavery, was not possible without the precursor of (often unprudent) Christian abolitionism.
And to any Porchers in the house–do note CDK’s point #3. The Modern spirit may have to shoulder a lot of the blame for the Atlantic slave trade, and yes we Americans had to fight a horribly bloody and risky war and reject race “science” to keep ourselves, even in very modern times, from keeping slavery, but it is nonetheless the case that little in human history has been as effectively anti-slavery than the acting out of modernity’s technocratic hubris, at least in the long short-run. Bacon freed the slaves! After he screwed them! (I knew there was a reason his portrait was up there in Monticello!) Less dramatically, American Christians and American Lockeans needed modernity’s industrialism to dismantle the slave-economy that earlier modernity had helped to briefly revive and make even worse than the ancient one.
So let us all go read the 2nd Innagural–I’d recommend doing so on our knees.
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