That was a dumb title of an article I wrote several years ago talking up the manly authors Mansfield and Tom Wolfe.
My BUILDING BETTER THAN THEY KNEW TOUR continues next Thursday at the Rochester Institute of Technology. There Darwinian Larry Arnhart and I will speak on Darwin and the Evolution of America in the Xerox Auditorium. Rochester, as I’ve mentioned before, is also America’s leading Cougar Town. I mention that again for scientists wanting to observe reproductive behavior that Darwin might find somewhat hard to explain but means to alleviate a the form of cruel suffering specific to women that the graphically naturalist playwright Aristophanes chronicled in THE ASSEMBLY OF WOMEN. Rochester is also the home of our Ivan the K.
Darwin came up in Brad Watson’s fine Founders vs. Progressives jurisprudential talk in Dallas last Friday. The progressives were Darwinian, Brad explained, in their view that government should be an instrument of facilitating our adaption to our changing natural environment. They were also Darwinian in their evolutionary confidence that this change would be for the good. Our natural moral sense or instinct, Darwin sanguinely observed, moves us away from beastly aggressiveness and toward a kind of cosmopolitanism based on sympathy for all living creatures. Things will get better and better, Woodrow Wilson claimed, unless we unnaturally resist change we should be believe in by sticking with our separation of powers based on the false mechanical science of Newton. Government has to go with the flow–actually, direct the flow–by being much more open to dynamic leadership. And Brad could point to many Supreme Court opinions based on the Darwinian thought that the Constitution must be adapted to our evolved moral sense when it comes to, say, the death penalty or discarding our brutal animosity toward gays. The progressives agree with, say, E.O. Wilson that for members of our species evolution has become less impersonal and more and more conscious and volitional–or cultural or historical.
But the Progressive (and even Darwin himself with his soft utopian optimism) were confused on what’s NATURAL and what’s HISTORICAL. They were both Darwinian and Hegelian. Hegelian HISTORICAL evolution is the movement of man away from nature in the direction of freedom. From a human point of view, Hegel agreed with Kant and Locke, nature gives us virtually worthless materials. And so we have to create ourselves as free–or genuinely significant moral beings–out of nothing.
A genuine Darwinian (someone like Arnhart who prefers the impersonal natural truth to what the master actually says) wouldn’t make that mistake. The human SPECIES has remained basically the same and hasn’t been changed by HISTORY, and so the laws of nature–while not eternal–have been the same for our species all along.
So Darwin rightly understood might be the foundation for defending NATURAL RIGHT against HISTORY–against the illusory hopes and fears generated by our false consciousness of freedom.
Then two big issue come up: Does Darwin give an adequate account of who we are by nature? According to the original natural right vs. history guy, Leo Strauss, Darwin can’t explain what’s distinctive about man. For Strauss, the world is the home of the human mind, not the whole human being. And so most or all of our pro-species behavior is based on moral illusions. The philosopher–the most natural kind of human being–is free from being governed by the moral sense or instinct. And he knows enough to know that his most characteristic or philosphic behavior–unesoterically unhidden–is bad for the family, the country, and other forms of pair and group bonding that keep our species around. That means excessive ENLIGHTENMENT is bad for the species (look at the Europeans’ or even sophisticated Americans’ dearth of effective reproductive behavior).
Issue no. 2: If Darwin is right about who we are according to nature, is it any wonder than the only species smart enough to know the truth about nature would engage in a massive techno-rebellion against it? That, in my opinion, is the real message of, say, Locke–not to mention our libertarians these days. More and more, the truth is that the moral sense is waning; I care less and less about being a part of anything bigger or greater than ME.
I’m going to say more, but not right now. See you in Cougar Town.
March 23rd, 2010 | 11:23 am
Well that sounds like one great event, and I’m not just saying that because I organized it. I should point out that I did not design the advertisement linked which inexplicably includes a big picture of me versus some of Peter and Larry. Anyone who comes out to the talk will be taken to only the finest Cougar haunts.
More importantly (Iguess), there’s a paradox included in issue #2: If Darwin is right about who we are, it’s not clear that we could, in fact, know the truth about who we are given that our exhaustion in nature would preclude the detachment from nature, or the free philosophical consciousness, that seems to be a precondition for self-reflection. This is why History begins, for Rousseau, and ends, for Kojeve, with the dissapearance of the philosopher. It would also seem to rule out a techno-rebellion since that too would require a self-conscious and willful transcendence of our natural selves.Locke turns out to be a kind of half-Darwinian–we might be reducible to our natural selves but nature evolves–Locke merely wants to willfully control and expedite that evolution in a way that is good rather than indifferent to our longings. So the impersonal character of nature is really both good and bad news for Locke: it’s good because that means we can do what ever we want with it (so we need to divorce nature from Divine providence) and its bad because that means, left to its own devices, nature could really care less about us. The internal contradiction of Locke is that the commandeering of nature, and the self-awareness that we have the capacity to achieve it, means that we have a freedom that can’t be reduced to nature, and is therefore mysterious.
March 23rd, 2010 | 11:39 am
Another way of looking at it: Darwinian nature is helpful as a corrective to History but only to a point: Darwinian evolution gets transformed into History by the Lockean techno-rebellion. We end up either with a full liberation from nature by History (mastery and possession) or a return to it (Kojeve). The impersonal evolution of nature commands some respect for nature as long as we lack the capacity to either direct or significantly expedite evolution itself–but once we can do these things, there is no other ground for veneration. Real respect for nature requires an interpretation of it that leaves some of nature beyond evolution–and maybe a part of us that is not entirely natural
March 23rd, 2010 | 2:07 pm
For those interested, Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober recently had a series of rather memorable exchanges concerning the former’s latest book, “What Darwin Got Wrong.” It may help in these matters to proceed slowly, and to understand the argument as it understands itself.
March 24th, 2010 | 10:16 am
Yes, the Progressives claimed to be followers of Charles Darwin, just as they claimed to be followers of Abraham Lincoln.
Is there any evidence that they were careful readers and accurate interpreters of Lincoln and Darwin?
March 24th, 2010 | 10:58 am
Well, I agree with Larry, of course. But truth to tell I wouldn’t go to a Progressive or a Darwinian to dedicate myself to the proposition that all men are created equal. Darwin’s own political teaching was a kind of soft utopianism that might be compatible with progressivism and certainly would have been mocked by Lincoln. We’re certainly not evolving toward a universal sympathy for all created beings either by Nature or History. And if we were, even Darwin suggests, hard reason would suggest that such sentimentality would be bad for the species.
March 24th, 2010 | 11:23 am
According to Billy Herndon, Lincoln accepted the theory of evolution as taught by Robert Chambers in his VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, which Darwin recognized as an early version of his theory.
Darwin was on Lincoln’s side in the Civil War, although he thought Lincoln should have moved more quickly to abolish slavery.
March 24th, 2010 | 12:51 pm
That Lincoln was ok with the idea that evolution happened I have no doubt. That there’s some Darwinian foundation to his noble rhetoric seems less likely. And didn’t Lincoln’s view of WHO we are deepen as a result of the experience of the Civil War? (See the Second Inaugural, for example.) It’s hard to imagine a Darwinian explanation for the war or people dying to make men they’ve never met free. In the most important sense, Jefferson was more Darwinian than Lincoln, and that’s not praise in this context. (I probably should add that I’m against making Lincoln some kind of secular saint or the final arbiter of anything really important. He was a fine commander-in-chief, and it’s good the North won the war.)
March 24th, 2010 | 1:32 pm
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural indicates that one lesson of the Civil War is that we cannot rely on Biblical religion to resolve a great moral issue like slavery. “Each side reads the same Bible, and prays to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”
Both Lincoln and Darwin were disturbed by how proslavery folks could use the Bible to support the morality of slavery.
To use the Bible to argue against slavery, we have to filter the Bible through our natural moral sense, which allows us to correct its moral mistake in sanctioning slavery.
This is a good illustration of how religious morality is unreliable if it is not checked by natural morality.
March 24th, 2010 | 5:34 pm
Larry: to use the bible to argue against slavery, we have to understand what things like “slavery” meant in biblical times, and also what Jewish law was like.
Race-based slavery was nothing like biblical slavery; slaves in the bible could raise families, buy themselves out of slavery, and were released every 7 years from enslavement. Only the working power of a slave was owned, and not his life, as was the case in race-based slavery.
So it’s not so much a filtering of the bible through natural morality as it is an understanding of what the bible actually says.
But I don’t think that understanding the bible would be good for the species anyway, so why try it?
March 24th, 2010 | 8:44 pm
Having read Dr. Arnhart’s work on “filter[ing] the Bible through our natural moral sense” and understanding “how religious morality is unreliable if it is not checked by natural morality”; I tend to agree with him about the utter ambiguity of the Bible as well as some of the morally contemptible notions advocated thereof. A guided tour through our natural inclinations he says in association with religion is the most appropriate venturing forward. Supporting ambiguity was science and all of the natural principles that follow blissfully thereof can lead to the good life. Whether this is actually true, that we have natural inclinations that can be reinforced by religion, is something that I feel is the cusp of it all however. Something I find ironic is that neither God nor these Natural inclinations can truly be described adequately as fundamentally truthful, nor has anyone actually attempted to do that. Making Arnharts position stronger in the sense that both idea manifest from the same notion and are both equal guides on out tour.
March 25th, 2010 | 11:07 am
Publius,
The liberation of slaves after 7 years applied only to Hebrew slaves.
The killing of slaves was not punished as murder.
The ownership of non-Hebrew slaves was passed on by inheritance.
The New Testament sanctions Roman slavery.
These and other points indicate the seriousness of the Bible’s support of slavery.
March 25th, 2010 | 10:38 pm
So I guess real men prove Darwin wrong, and endorse slavery? Sounds about right.
April 7th, 2010 | 3:43 pm
Clearly, the bible sanctions slavery when slaves are told to obey their masters. Because the gospel is a message of freedom, slaves might accept Christianity as a justification to seek their freedom from earthly master, no? This passage doesn’t praise the glories of slavery, it keeps people from breaking the already established law (slavery) in the name of Christianity. You still miss the point of the passage where slaves were to “obey their masters”; you’re not understanding the bible as life-changing, just as a religious text to be interpreted in your own worldview.
Hell I wish I could narrowly interpret any text I wanted and draw bad conclusions. Christianity is designed to fit the cultural mold of any society where it comes in, not the other way around. Christianity is not about rebellion, it is about inner revolution. If Jesus (or Paul, or Peter) had told slaves to not obey their masters, then the persecution of the early would have been justified.
I guess I understand something that you are unwilling to, about what the bible is about. For you, the bible is full of terrible injustices: every man should be “free” and moms can kill their babies if they want to (what an outstanding contradiction). I would rather have a foreign person taken as a slave rather than slaughtered (which was custom in the Old Testament; strange). Should they later be freed to return to their land at an arbitrary time? Or should they work out their lives, still able to buy their freedom from their masters? Slavery is still not an absolute state, something you miss.
July 4th, 2010 | 11:57 am
The slaves should walk off the plantation and obey their masters (Jesus Christ). Slavery is man’s institution. Jesus did not follow man’s institutions. No one else has to either. If the guys who created this institution kill someone else from choosing to walk off the plantation and into a life with Christ than he just violated a commandment, and that is on them. What makes a person go out and put a chain around someone’s neck? Beats me. I have better things to do then going around putting chains on people’s necks.
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