I guess it’s worth discussing the role of Darwinism within the conservative movement now that 30% (Huckabee, Brownback, and Tancredo) of the Republican candidates running for president assert that they don’t believe in the theory of natural selection. But this is ridiculous:
Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy?
There seems to be little doubt that ‘Darwinism’ (and I’m not sure why the NYT’s insists on using that term) undermines conservative confidence in their ‘notions of religion and morality’. But, this has much less to do with the details of molecular biology than it does with the curious beliefs of conservative Christians. If you insist on believing in a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation story then naturally you are going to feel threatened by more than mere ‘Darwinism’. Plate tectonics will be just as unsettling. How, we might ask, does continental drift threaten morality? The answer is that is doesn’t threaten it directly at all. Rather, continental drift undermines faith in Biblical inerrancy.
It’s seems beneath serious discussion, as least in a political sense to debate the inerrancy of the Bible. We should strive to respect literalist’s religious beliefs insofar as those beliefs are privately held. But the idea that such nonsense should inform a policy debate within one of the two major American political parties is ridiculous.
For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor.
Again, I don’t dispute that many conservatives feel this way. But it doesn’t even make theological sense. The strong Christian tradition against infanticide dates from the early church fathers’ campaign against the practice in the Roman Empire and has nothing to do with literal interpretations of the Old Testament. What threatens conservatives about the theory of evolution is that is destroys the inerrancy of the Book, and not the details of the theory.
It is the same impulse that led the Church to condemn Galileo and Bruno. The specifics or their astronomical theories didn’t undermine morality, but undermining faith in the accuracy of Scripture possibly could have that effect.
Is it a sad, sad spectacle to watch the Republican Party having an internal debate about the merits of biblical literalism. And it is even sadder to see the arguments being made in favor of ‘Darwinism’.
Mr. Arnhart, in his 2005 book, “Darwinian Conservatism,” tackled the issue of conservatism’s compatibility with evolutionary theory head on, saying Darwinists and conservatives share a similar view of human beings: they are imperfect; they have organized in male-dominated hierarchies; they have a natural instinct for accumulation and power; and their moral thought has evolved over time.
The institutions that successfully evolved to deal with this natural order were conservative ones, founded in sentiment, tradition and judgment, like limited government and a system of balances to curb unchecked power, he explains.
Yeah..yeah…and marriage enforced by a male clergy. I get it.
It’s as disgraceful to see Republican intellectuals trying to use natural selection to justify their cruel policies as it is to see Republican presidential candidates that are unembarrassed to disavow evolutionary theory.
And this crap is on the front-page of the New York Times. It’s just an embarrassment.
The Rightwing/GOP have been living with a deep contradiction for decades. One the one hand they exploit the gullible “religious” fundies’ fear and hatred of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, they propound a heartless pseudo-libertarian ideology to justify winner-take-all social policies as “survival of the fittest”, a gross distortion of evolutionary theory. Only the infinitely self-serving mentality of the Right could have sustained the cognitive dissonance for this long.
Maybe the cracks are finally beginning to show. Maybe the GOP cannon fodder is finally shaking off its biblical sleep?
Also do not forget “Thou shall not kill” unless of course it is a mother over a baby, or anybody that a group of other humans votes to kill for whatever reasons!
Not an original observation but a revealing one nevertheless. These Christian conservatives are more like the Taliban than they will admit.
Stupidity, ignorance, repressive politics, religious intolerance, degrading the role of women, and the willingness to visit death and destruction upon those that don’t BELIEVE the same way.
However, when many folks all embrace the same ignorant uneducated and violent coping behaviors so readily as the Taliban and the Christian conservatives it would be appropriate to understand what their payoffs are? (What they get for acting the way they do?)
You’re absolutely right that the issue for the fundamentalists is the inerrancy of the bible. I went to seminary for my master’s degree and my father (the ultimate fundamentalist) was upset about the evangelical seminary I chose to attend because they were actually having debate about whether the correct belief was inerrancy or infallability. Talk about dancing on the head of a pin!!
My brother and sister-in-law wouldn’t let their children go see the movie “The Land Before Time” years ago because they didn’t “believe in dinasours’ for chrissakes.
And then there are the people that believe in dinosaurs but insist that people lived with them.
between science and wingnuts. Here are some quotes from Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive from February 2005:
I was appalled by this article. Before I read it, I was not aware that there is such a thing as “mainstream science”: I thought there was just science and quackery.
Note that this article nowhere mentions, even in passing, that evolutionary theory is true. By the corporate media’s standards of balance, that would be to take sides, and hence would be to abandon “objectivity”. The Times thus frames a scientific issue politically, just as the regressives do.
I especially like the claims that intelligent design is “as much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis”—in fact it is nothing but a pathological symptom of being unable to deal with modernity— and that it puts “Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive”.
To the Times, evolutionary theory, and by extension science in general, is just another point of view.
The problem with Social Darwinism is that it’s like the Nazi embrace of Friedrich Nietzsche, who himself despised anti-Semites and thought the Germans were degenerates. Darwinian theory does not predict the ascendance of the strong, nor does it establish competition as a measure of fitness. Most relationships in nature are not competitive; they are overwhelmingly cooperative and the competition stands out mostly because of its rarity. Real Social Darwinism, if there could actually be such a thing, would be socialism, not the sort of plutocracy envisioned by so-called Social Darwinists.
There’s a real danger in trying to derive social policy by analogy from science. Science doesn’t work by analogy and metaphor — those are religious modes of thought, and a large part of the reason why modern science has produced a world of wonders in only a few centuries while religion has produced nothing of lasting value, ever. The overwhelming majority of animals are arthropods, while the overwhelming majority of life on earth is unicellular. Are we going to base social policy on our observation of lobsters and microbes?
Of course, in the natural world, parasites outnumber non-parasites by a comfortable margin. I guess the GOP is drawing some lessons from science.