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Saint Darwin is the Jesus, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Paul of new atheism because he was the one to spread the good news that life is an accident, that men and apes descended from a common ancestor, and that God is entirely unnecessary to a scientific explanation of the appearance and variety of life on Earth. I speak ironically, but the religious adoration of Darwin is no joke. Science historian and Darwin biographer, James Moore notes how “obituaries constructed Darwin as a scientific saint.”1 William Spottiswoode (1825-1883)—a member of the influential X Club, a supper group famous for defending and promoting Darwin—read an obituary saying it had been his fortune “to have been able by a short pilgrimage to enjoy his bright welcome…” Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), another member of the X Club, famously dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog,” in his obit for Nature magazine, wrote of how Darwin was “the incorporated ideal of a man of science” and how his actions “irradiated” with an “intense and almost passionate honesty.” Indeed, “one could not converse with [him] without being reminded of Socrates.” John Tyndall (ca. 1822-1893), another X Clubber, opined the loss of Darwin, casting him as “the Abraham of scientific men—a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.”2
Prior to the Darwinist heresy and the activities of those Victorian men of science who came to be associated with the X Club, science and religion got along just fine. Those were the days when science was called “natural philosophy” and “natural history” before claims for science as something “exact” occluded the philosophical substrate. Indeed (according to the new atheist creed) all the seekers after Truth before Darwin reside in the hazy pre-history of the grand narrative peopled by Old Testament types like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. These were the mythic heroes defined by two interdigitated principal traits: (a) stoic objectivity, and (b) irreverence toward orthodoxy in the face of Truth. Essentially, the myth goes, these forerunners carried the torch of scientific values through benighted times, suffering the consequences that honest men must endure at the hands of misguided deniers. And with Darwin we finally get The New and Final Revelation.
This Final Revelation is predicated on the foundational dogmas of gradualism and mechanical accidentalism, as discussed last week. And the fallout is a new ethics that sees life as an accident and therefore objectively meaningless. As I’ve mentioned previously, this means suffering and death are meaningless; and this perception in turn implies that it is our ethical duty to eliminate all suffering and death by any means. We have been witnessing the consequences of this paradigm in everything from radical policing of thought and speech to safe spaces to sensitivity training to lockdowns.
With no higher power, megalomania emerges, too. The idea, for example, that human beings can “fight climate change,” or even reverse it is as absurd as the notion that we’ve caused it. Arbitrary judgments against, say, the so-called “unvaccinated,” denying them life-saving transplants, while still supposedly maintaining the notion that enemy combatants deserve medical care—demonstrate another kind of megalomania that finds expression in arbitrary ethics dispensed without principle.
In this meaningless universe, we essentially make up whatever meaning we want as we go along, just like school children playing out all manner of pretend in the school yard. There is no need in such a worldview for consistency or coherence to any ethics other than safety. “Stay safe in your safe space!”—encapsulates pretty much the entire ethical universe of the modern, insurance minded, bureaucratic regime.
There’s a further ethical aspect, however, that bears some consideration as well and that’s what we might call “selfism.” I come to this topic via science historian and ethicist, Mary Midgley. (Thank you, Chris Bateman at Stranger Worlds for recommending her work). In chapter 14 of Midgley’s indispensable book Evolution as a Religion, she addresses the trouble caused by notions like those found in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.
According to her, the analogy of selfishness is deployed by the Dawkins crew as not really a motive, but apparently as a very loose metaphor, since genes and most biological entities do not have motives in Darwinist theology. Nevertheless, Midgley contends, such a term as selfishness still has ethical impact in socio-political spheres. Here’s Midgley:
The fact that ‘selfishness’ in its ordinary sense is not just the name of a motive but of a fault naturally makes things much worse. To widen the imputation of selfishness is to alter people’s view of the human race. This widening had of course already been deliberately undertaken by various thinkers who have developed theories of psychological egoism, and had been given a special political function by Hobbes and his followers in social-contract theory. People in society were then held not to have any motive in their interactions other than self-interest. If this bizarre story had been true, the notion of selfishness could never have arisen. Had regard for others been impossible, there could have been no word for failing to have it. And it needs to be stressed that the word ‘selfish’ in its normal use is essentially a negative word. It means a shortage of this normal regard for others.3
The moral danger that bothers Midgley is that this selfish-gene notion “makes possible the use of egoism to justify retributive bloody-mindedness based on a low opinion of our fellow-men.” It’s a slippery slope, if I may invoke an old ethical cliche, and Midgley explains it well:
Egoist cheats enquire why we should be expected to bother about the rest of the human race, which has been proved guilty of the sin of selfishness? They warn anyone who is still rash enough to be unselfish that they are out on a limb and should quickly fall in line with the already universal tendency.4
Let’s face it, this is the predominant view held by nearly all those who consider themselves practical sceptics. (A successful cheat like Gordon Gekko is a role model whose villainy is cloaked by the motto: business is business.) That’s a majority of people. This moral positioning crosses the political spectrum and may have a lot to do with the extreme polarisation we’ve been witnessing over the past ten years or so.
The recent terms “anthropogenic” and “anthropocene” are culminations of this metaphysic anchored in mechanical accidentalism and the selfish nature of human behaviour as it negatively impacts the entire planet with its sinful tendencies. So it’s not just selfishness that’s in play with this selfish-gene ethic, it’s self-loathing, too. We are all burping, farting climate change machines and contagious flesh bags who deserve the just deserts of our uncontrolled, hard-wired selfishness.
“If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Matthew 5:30). And what has become offensive is humanity itself. This is the chthonic flip side of the safety ethic. Anti-lockdowners and freedom convoy supporters were deemed “selfish,” if you recall. Meanwhile, those germaphobes too afraid to embrace their fellows or see off their dying relatives were somehow deemed selfless. Cowardice became a virtue along with snitching and segregation—all in the name of safety, of cutting off the diseased part and casting it away. But let’s not miss the role played by selfism here; and by selfism, I mean to build on Midgley’s observations by including both selfishness and self-loathing. The word safe has become a mask for this selfist ethic. My hope is that by drawing attention to the fanaticism here and how it arises from a false, nihilistic, accidentalist metaphysic, we may free ourselves from some truly bad ideas widely considered to be scientific facts.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
See Barton, Ruth. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 416. This is not a direct quotation but a paraphrase in Ruth Barton’s words.
Ibid.
Midgley, Mary. Evolution as a Religion: Strange hopes and stranger fears. (First published, Methuen, 1985.) London and New York: Routledge, 2002. pp. 136-7.
Ibid. p. 137.
A "megalomania that finds expression in arbitrary ethics dispensed without principle." That phrase stopped me. It seems to describe the irrational expression of power we see in elites who assume that their status (in politics, the press, media, etc.) imparts wisdom to their preferences, their ethics, and hence affirms their right to manage the lives of others. Your paragraphs expose the crudeness of elite thought. Their ethics are arbitrary but those ethics are dispensed (just the right word) according to a principle of power, it seems to me. "Selfish ethics" is another striking expression. Great reading, for which thanks.
A pleasure to have opened you up to Midgley's work, Asa! As you know, she is the closest I had to a philosophical mentor, and I found her commitment to ordinary language philosophy an inspiration that still kindles a fire in my soul today. As it happens, I have a piece about one of her philosophy classmates at Oxford on Tuesday at Stranger Worlds - all four of that group of friends at Oxford were incredible.