June 15, 2022

DARWINISM IS RACISM:

The strange afterlife of New Atheism (Sebastian Milbank, 15 June, 2022, The Critic)

What do the terms "biological reality" and "objective truth" conjure for you? Or how about "freedom of speech", and complaints about "orthodoxy" suppressing "scientific inquiry"? In current political debates you're likely to think of the never-ending trans controversies, or rightwingers complaining about the lack of free speech in workplaces and university campuses. 

In other words they're now "conservative" coded terms, and if you hear someone using them you can make educated guesses about the rest of their beliefs. But not very long ago this sort of language was deployed not by the right, but the left, in arguments about climate change, and the reality of Darwinian evolution. In the early 2000s being progressive meant being pro-science, pro-objectivity and pro-materialism. 

The great battles, we were told, were between moderate, rational liberals who just wanted to agree on objectively observable facts -- we knew how old the earth was, and it wasn't created 8000 years ago; we knew the climate was changing, and that humans were causing it. It was wild-eyed religious conservatives who put ideology before observable reality. But insisting too hard on the importance of genetics today gets you drummed out of academic institutions by the left, not the right. 

It was never about anything more than liberating white men from morality. 

Posted by at June 15, 2022 12:00 AM

  

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