IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

Celebrating Darwin Day: Some of the most disastrous ideas of the 20th century were nourished by the ideas of Charles Darwin. (Bill Muehlenberg, 15 January 2009, MercatorNet)

Of course there is plenty of debate about how much Darwin should be credited – or blamed – for the way in which his theories were translated into social realities. But one writer, John West, has argued in a recent book that the social implications of Darwinism are part and parcel of his worldview. His 2007 volume, Darwin Day in America is well worth examining in this regard.

"Social Darwinism" is a term which refers to the social and political ramifications of biological Darwinism and the materialism which it is imbedded in. Darwin regarded humans as basically higher animals, and as the social sciences became more and more tinged by the Darwinian outlook, humans increasingly began to be treated as mere animals, or machines.

The volume by West looks at how the materialistic worldview of Darwinism has impacted on a wide range of fields. As academics, scientists and politicians apply the Darwinian view of man to various social sciences, some very negative outcomes have ensued. We have steadily become dehumanised and depersonalised as we have taken on board the logical implications of evolutionary materialism.

West offers a far-reaching and profound look at numerous areas clouded by the Darwinist mindset. He examines the fields of law, education, business, economics, sociology and ethics to see how the revolutionary ideas of Darwin have penetrated every aspect of Western culture. Scientific materialism, flowing forth from Darwin and the Neo-Darwinists, today underpins much of public policy in the West.

Consider how extensive scientific materialism has become in public life. The title of this book refers to the move to make February 12 Darwin Day in the US, a date usually associated with the birth of Abraham Lincoln. But so great has the influence and impact of Darwin’s ideas become that he has now risen to the status of a secular saint in many quarters.

West is certainly right to argue just how far and deep the influence of Darwin has been. Consider the issue of crime and punishment. For much of human history crime was about punishment and restitution, based on the belief that humans had free will and were morally responsible for their actions.

But with the advent of Darwin -- in part -- academics and elites increasingly began to view humans as simply animals who needed treatment, not punishment. After all, if we are simply the products of our biology, how can we be held accountable for our actions? Such thinking flows directly out of Darwin’s materialistic account of evolution.

Thus the American lawyer who defended evolution in the famous Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow, for example, took materialistic Darwinism to its logical conclusion and argued that criminals are basically programmed by material forces. If men are simply machines, powerfully determined by their heredity and background, then crime and punishment must be radically redefined. Crime began to be studied not only in terms of one’s biology, but also in psychosocial terms. Crime was seen as a mental illness, not willful immorality. Criminals came to be seen as victims, and punishment was replaced with rehabilitation and therapy. If crime is just an illness, then cure, not punishment, was required.

West also reminds us that the ugly eugenics movement also flowed very nicely out of the Darwinian worldview. Eugenics was the idea that man could "take control of his own evolution by breeding a better race". The father of the eugenics movement, Francis Galton, happened to be a cousin of Darwin, and was inspired by The Origin of the Species to "improve" the human race.

Of course the rest of the title of that book reads, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. People like Margaret Sanger – who founded Planned Parenthood -- simply took all this to its logical conclusion. Compulsory sterilisation of the "unfit", lobotomies, electric shock treatments and other coercive measures were all features of the eugenics movement. And it found its fullest and most ghastly expression in the Nazi death camps.

West shows how the materialism of Darwinism leads to the Nazi worldview. Hitler argued that eugenics had a scientific basis, and that race betterment was a result of the biological principles articulated by Darwin. Indeed, the three great genocidal regimes of last century – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China – were all firmly grounded on the principles of scientific materialism.

In Edward J. Larson's excellent book, Summer for the Gods, Darrow's Scopes trial opponent, William Jennings Bryan, emerges as maybe the pivotal figure in America's long resistance to and eventual triumph over Darwinism. Where today it is a given that a liberal politician will be a secular advocate of the Culture of Death, Bryan, the liberal icon of his day, could not accept Darwinism precisely because of the ethos of the strong violently preying on the weak:

Certainly some conservative Christians rejected Darwinism all along, but when doing so even Bryan earlier had added, "I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory." Some articles in the fundamentalist series The Fundamentals--published from 1905 to 1915, these pamphlets were the founding documents of 20th century American religious conservatism--criticized the theory of evolution, but others accepted it. Indeed, the Baptist leader who founded that series and later helped launch the fundamentalist movement, A.C. Dixon, once expressed his willingness to accept natural selection theory "if proved," while a subsequent series editor, R.A. Torrey, persistently maintained that a Christian could "believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type." But such tolerance largely disappeared during and after the First World War, as the fundamentalist movement coalesced out of various different conservative Christian traditions.

Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called "fundamentals" of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in doing so gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and anti-evolution crusade. Certainly modernism had made significant inroads within divinity schools and among the clergy of mainline Protestant denominations in the North and West, and fundamentalism represented a legitimate theological effort to counter these advances. Biblical higher criticism and an evolutionary world view, as the twin pillars of this opposing creed, stood as the logical targets of this conservative counter-attack. Without more, however, a purely theological effort rarely incites a mass movement--at least in pluralistic America. Much more stirred up fundamentalism--and turned its fury against evolutionary teaching in the public schools. The First World War played a pivotal role. American intervention in that gruesome conflict, as part of a progressive effort to defeat German militarism and make the world safe for democracy, was supported by many of the modernists who revered the nation's wartime leader, Woodrow Wilson, who was himself a second-generation modernist academic. As a passionate champion of peace, William Jennings Bryan opposed this position and, in 1915, resigned his post as Wilson's Secretary of State in protest over the drift toward war. He spent the next two years criss-crossing the country campaigning against intervention.

Many leading premillennial Christians shared Bryan's open hostility toward American intervention in World War One--seeing that conflict as both a product of natural human depravity and the possible fulfillment of prophesy regarding the global catastrophes that must precede the coming of heaven on earth. With Shailer Mathews, a liberal theologian from the University of Chicago, leading the charge, some modernists took this opportunity to attack premillennialism as an otherworldly threat to national security in wartime. Premillennialists responded in kind by stressing the German roots of higher academic criticism, attributing an evolutionary "survival-of-the-fittest" mentality to German militarism, and accusing modernism of undermining traditional American faith in biblical values. "The new theology has led Germany into barbarism," the premillennialist journal Our Hope declared in a 1918 editorial, "and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization." The trauma of war stirred passions on both sides, and spurred a bitter, decade-long battle among American Christians.

Fundamentalists came to view modernism, together with its twin supports of biblical higher criticism and an evolutionary world view, as the source of much that troubled Western culture. When a horribly brutal war led to an unjust and uneasy peace, the rise of international communism, worldwide labor unrest, and an apparent breakdown of traditional values--the cultural crisis worsened for conservative Christians in the United States. "One indication that many premillennialists were shifting their emphasis--away from just evangelizing, praying, and waiting for the end time, toward more intense concern with retarding [social] degenerative trends--was the role they played in the formation of the first explicitly fundamentalist organization," one historian noted. "In the summer of 1918, under the guidance of William B. Riley, a number of leaders in the Bible school and prophetic conference movement conceived of the idea of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association [WCFA]."

In 1919, Riley welcomed some 6,000 conservative Christians to the WCFA's inaugural conference with the warning that their Protestant denominations were "rapidly coming under the leadership of the new infidelity, known as 'modernism.'" One by one, seventeen prominent ministers from across the country took the podium to denounce modernism as, in the words of one speaker, "the product of Satan's lie" and to call for a return to biblical fundamentals in church and culture.

Although these early developments laid the foundation for the anti-evolution crusade and the ensuing Scopes trial, they did not predestine it. Fundamentalism began as a response to theological developments within the Protestant church rather than to political or educational developments within American society. Even the name of the WCFA's journal, Christian Fundamentals in Schools and Churches, originally referred to support for teaching biblical fundamentals in divinity schools and churches rather than opposition to evolutionary instruction in public schools--though it neatly fit the organization's later emphasis. "When the Fundamentals movement was originally formed, it was supposed that our particular foe was the so-called 'higher criticism,'" Riley later recalled, "but in the onward going affairs, we discovered that basic to the many forms of modern infidelity is the philosophy of evolution." Riley was predisposed to make this connection, but it took the much better known William Jennings Bryan to turn the fundamentalist movement into a popular crusade against evolutionary teaching that led directly to Dayton.

Bryan was not a dispensational premillennialist: he did not agree with their view that the Bible prophesied the imminent degeneration of the world in preparation for Christ's second coming. Quite to the contrary, he thoroughly enjoyed many things of this world--particularly politics, oratory, travel, and food--and believed in the power of reform to make life better. Reform took two forms for Bryan--personal reform through individual religious faith and public reform through majoritarian governmental action. He maintained a deep faith in both throughout his life, and each contributed to his final political campaign against evolutionary teaching. "My father taught me to believe in Democracy as well as Christianity," Bryan observed late in his life.

Bryan's crusade against evolutionary teaching capped a remarkable 35-year-long career in the public eye. He entered Congress in 1890 as a 30-year-old populist Democratic politician committed to roll back the Republican tariff for the dirt farmers of his native Nebraska. His charismatic speaking ability and youthful enthusiasm quickly earned him the nickname "The Boy Orator of the Platte." Bryan's greatest speech occurred at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where he defied his party's conservative incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, and the Eastern establishment that then dominated both political parties by demanding an alternative silver-based currency to help debtors cope with the crippling deflation caused by exclusive reliance on limited gold-backed money. A potent mixture of radical majoritarian arguments and traditional religious oratory--defiantly demanding, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"--the speech electrified the convention and secured the party's presidential nomination for Bryan. For many, he now became known as "The Great Commoner"; for some, "The Peerless Leader."A narrow defeat in the ensuing bitter election did not diminish Bryan's faith in God or the people. He retained leadership of the Democratic Party and secured two subsequent presidential nominations as he fought against imperialism and militarism following the Spanish American War, and for increased public control over corporate business practices. His vocation now became speaking and writing, with majoritarian political commentary and evangelical Protestant lectures serving as his stock in trade. During the remainder of his life, the energetic Bryan gave an average of over 200 speeches each year, traveled continually throughout the country and around the world, wrote dozens of books, and edited a political newspaper with nationwide circulation. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the White House in 1912, Bryan became Secretary of State and idealistically set about to his pet cause, negotiating a dreamed-of series of international treaties designed to avert war by requiring the arbitration of disputes between nations. This became more of a religious mission than a political task for Bryan, who called on America to "exercise Christian forbearance" in the face of increasing German aggression and vowed, "There will be no war while I am Secretary of State." Ultimately he had to resign from office to keep this promise.

Left without a formal governmental post but with an expanded sense of mission, Bryan resumed his efforts as an itinerant speaker and writer on political and religious topics. Although his campaign for peace failed, he helped to secure ratification of four constitutional amendments designed to promote a more democratic or righteous society: the direct election of senators, a progressive federal income tax, prohibition, and female suffrage. Out of office, he found two new campaign targets--the conservative Republican administrations in Washington, and evolutionary teaching in public schools. Bryan remained a progressive even as he crusaded against evolutionary teaching. "In William Jennings Bryan, reform and reaction lived happily, if somewhat incongruously, side by side," biographer Lawrence W. Levine concluded.

Bryan's anti-evolutionism was compatible with his progressive politics because both supported reform, appealed to majoritarianism, and sprang from his Christian convictions. From this earliest point, he described Darwinism as "dangerous" for both religious and social reasons. "I object to the Darwinian theory," Bryan said in 1904 with respect to the religious implications of a purely naturalistic explanation for human development, "because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God's presence in our daily life, if we must accept the theory that through all the ages no spiritual force has touched the life of man and shaped the destiny of nations." Turning to the social consequences of the theory, Bryan added, "But there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate--the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak." Bryan's standard stump speech on Darwin allowed for an extended geologic history, and even for limited theistic evolution in which God "stands back of" natural selection. But Bryan dug in his heels regarding the supernatural creation of humans, and described it as "one of the test questions with the Christian." Though Bryan regularly delivered this speech on the Chautauqua circuit during the early years of the century, he said little else against Darwinism until the twenties, when he began blaming "Social Darwinism" for the First World War.

As a devout believer in peace, Bryan could scarcely understand how supposedly Christian nations could engage in such a brutal war until two scholarly books attributed it to misguided Darwinian thinking. In Headquarters Nights, renowned Stanford University biologist Vernon Kellogg, who went to Europe as a peace worker, recounted his conversations with German military leaders. "Natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals," he reported, and served as their justification "why, for the good of the world, there should be this war." Whereas Kellogg used this evidence to promote his own non-Darwinian view of evolutionary development through mutual aid, Bryan saw it as a reason to suppress Darwinian teaching. Philosopher Benjamin Kidd's The Science of Power further explored the link between German militarism and Darwinian thinking by examining Darwin's influence on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Bryan regularly referred to both books when speaking and writing against evolutionary teaching. For example, Bryan warned in one of his popular books, "Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion and denied the existence of Good, denounced Christianity as the doctrine of the degenerate, and democracy as the refuge of the weakling; he overthrew all standards of morality and eulogized war as necessary to man's development."

A third book had an even greater impact on Bryan, and touched a nerve. In 1916, Bryn Mawr University psychologist James H. Leuba published an extensive survey of religious belief among college students and professors. "The deepest impression left by these records," Leuba concluded, "is that...Christianity, as a system of belief, has utterly broken down." Among students, Leuba reported, "the proportion of disbelievers in immortality increases considerably from the freshman to the senior year in college." Among scientists, he found disbelief higher among biologists than physicists, and higher among scientists of greater than lesser distinction--such that "the smallest percentage of believers is found among the greatest biologists; they count only 16.9 percent of believers in God." Leuba did not identify evolutionary teaching as the cause for this rising tide of disbelief among educated Americans, but Bryan did.In 1921, Bryan began speaking widely about the dangers of Darwinian ideas, formulating the arguments later used at the Scopes trial. This thrust was marked by a new speech, "The Menace of Darwinism," which Bryan repeatedly delivered during the remaining years of his life. "To destroy the faith of Christians and lay the foundations for the bloodiest war in history would seem enough to condemn Darwinism," Bryan now thundered, drawing heavily on evidence from Leuba, Kellogg, and Kidd.

In addition to stressing the dangers of Darwinism, both speeches denounced the theory as unscientific and unconvincing. He entertained audiences with exaggerated accounts of seemingly far-fetched evolutionary explanations for human organs--such as the eye, which supposedly began as a light-sensitive freckle. "The increased heat irritated the skin--so the evolutionists guess, and a nerve came there and out of the nerve came the eye! Can you beat it?" Bryan asked rhetorically. "Is it not easier to believe in a God who can make an eye?" As historian Ronald Numbers noted, "Bryan was far from alone in balking at the evolutionary origin of the eye. Christian apologists had long regarded the intricate design of the eye as 'a cure for atheism,' and Darwin himself had readily conceded his vulnerability on this point."

This sort of thinking inclined Bryan to seek a legislative judgment on evolutionary teaching and to accept a trial by jury to enforce the law. Bryan's mode of operation, and his optimistic temperament, required offering ready political solutions to outstanding social problems. "The Menace of Darwinism" speech, however, included only a vague call for "real neutrality" on religious issues in public schools.

This situation changed almost overnight. In 1921, Kentucky's Baptist State Board of Missions passed a resolution calling for a state law against evolutionary teaching in the public schools. Bryan immediately adopted the idea. "The movement will sweep the country, and we will drive Darwinism from our schools," he wrote to the resolution's sponsor. Within the month he was on the spot in Lexington, addressing a joint session of the Kentucky legislature on the proposal. Bryan then spent the next month touring the state in support of such legislation, which lost by a single vote in the state House of Representatives.

The campaign for restrictive legislation quickly spread. Fundamentalist leader John Roach Straton began advocating anti-evolution legislation for his home state of New York in February of 1922. Frank Norris, pastor of the largest church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, soon took up the cause in Texas. Evangelist T.T. Martin carried the message throughout the South. By fall, William Bell Riley was offering to debate evolutionists on the issue as he traveled around the nation. "The whole country is seething on the evolution question," he reported to Bryan. Three years later, these same four ministers became the most prominent church figures to support the prosecution of John Scopes.

Bryan's arguments propelled the crusade to outlaw evolutionary teaching and shaped the prosecution's case in Dayton. Bryan justified anti-evolution lawmaking on majoritarian grounds. "Teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught," the Commoner admonished the West Virginia legislature in 1923. "The hand that writes the pay check rules the school." Such reasoning went to the core of Bryan's populist political philosophy: through his campaign for world peace, when he proposed holding a national referendum before the country could go to war; to his anti-evolution crusade.

Individual rights lost out under this political philosophy. "If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught," Bryan maintained. He gave a similarly facile response to charges that anti-evolution laws infringed on the rights of non-fundamentalist parents and students. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews shared a creationist viewpoint, Bryan believed, and he sought to enlist all of them against evolutionary theory. "We do not ask that teachers paid by taxpayers shall teach the Christian religion to students," Bryan told West Virginia lawmakers, "but we do insist that they shall not, under the guise of either science or philosophy, teach evolution as a fact."

Concern about the social and religious implications of Darwinism had been a secondary issue within Christianity for two generations and, although the rise of fundamentalism revived those concerns for some, it took Bryan to transform them into a major political issue.

With just 13% of Americans professing a belief in the tenets of Darwinism--and 2/3rds of them contradicting that profession by their simultaneous belief in a Creator--American anti-evolutionism is one of the most successful social movements in human history.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2009 3:03 PM
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