Scientism Poisons Everything
by Asa Boxer
Bad Atheism
In the introduction to Michael Shermer’s How We Believe,1 he reviews a couple of extreme responses concerning his suggestion that it’s okay to believe in God. One interlocutor wrote, “Anything less” than complete rejection of “religion/belief” was “duplicitous, disingenuous, appeasing—and ultimately helps the other side by providing approval where disapproval should instead be offered.” Shermer takes issue with how this person imagines “the other side.” To his credit, Shermer engages his analogical mind and notes the following: “What a revealing way to phrase a critical attitude toward religion, whose long history of dividing the world between ‘our side’ and the ‘other side’ is a notoriously bloody one.”2 The next extremist position he presents is from one who said, “I won’t let anyone who believes in god in my home. I won’t sleep with them and I have none in my social circle. But I can do more.”3
This type of intolerance betrays a zealotry and fanaticism we generally associate with religion. In this case, however, we observe a transference of religious fervour to atheism, and by extension, to belief in science. Shermer’s book was first published in 2000, so we can conclude that this tendency was already in play during the twentieth century. The extremist ardour of New Atheism and its attendant rhetoric, claiming objectivity and science as its core guiding principles, however, had to wait till the twenty-first century to begin revealing the true dangers of the irrationality lurking behind its rationalist facade.
In a debate entitled Atheism Poisons Everything—hosted by the Fixed Point Foundation in 2010—mathematician, molecular biologist and philosopher, David Berlinski, faced off against New Atheist journalist, and chief prosecutor of religion, Christopher Hitchens, whose book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, set the phrasing of the resolution under discussion.
In rebuttal to his adversary’s contention that the Nazi project demonstrated how rationalism and science could be turned to evil purpose, Hitchens, in a deepened and severe tone, often turning to the ad hominem, argued that the Nazi movement was chiefly a religious organisation. Their discussion is worth examining in some detail because their exchange yields a number of insights due not only to the facts under consideration but also to their manner of delivery.
After conceding that “religion poisons some things” Berlinski’s two main points were as follows:
In the first place, the men guiding these regimes [committing unparalleled brutality, stupidity and violence in the twentieth century] and their entourage did not believe for a moment there was any power higher than their own… And they acted on that assumption.
And in the second place, in the mass murders they conducted, they were aided and supported by any number of crackpot scientific disciplines. . .In the case of the Nazis, the scientific disciplines were derived from biology and especially from Darwinian biology. In 1937, having murdered 70,000 handicapped women and children, the Nazis released a film, and on the background of the film, the narrator says in terms of solemn incomprehension, “My goodness, we have sinned against the law of natural selection.”
After attacking the character of his interlocutor, and chastising him for blaspheming the irreproachable Saint Darwin, Hitchens argued that Darwinism was not taught in pre-WWII Germany. Hitchens admitted that The Origin of Species was translated and published in Germany along with a “misprint” concerning the idea that evolution requires “the survival of the fittest”—but, Hitchens contended, this was no fault of the canonical Darwin. One wonders how this constitutes a rebuttal unless the issue for Hitchens is a relationship to the letter of The Origin of Species as gospel, rather than as an intellectual framework, laying the premise for ideas like social darwinism. After all, Berlinski was not impugning Darwin; he was discussing “crackpot scientific disciplines” “derived from. . .Darwinian biology.” Had Hitchens read Darwin’s The Descent of Man and had he been familiar with Darwin’s Malthusian (survival-of-the-fittest) attitudes and late political statements, he could not have made the counter-factual claims he did. (Darwin was a racist, eugenicist and elitist anti-democrat, a fact I’ve discussed elsewhere.)4 This unread and often misinformed approach to argumentation is typical of New Atheist debating (a theme I plan to return to in a future essay).
The fact is that Germany did not need Darwin to politicise natural selection. After all, natural selection was not Darwin’s invention. His survival of the fittest was Malthusian, and in any event, Germany had its own homegrown Nietzschean ideas to pervert. Moreover Germans were enthusiastic about evolutionary science and had their own, preferred school known as structuralist evolutionary theory. According to science historian Nicolaas Rupke, during the Third Reich “Darwinism became thought of as ‘un-German’.”5 That said, Germans were familiar enough with Darwinist notions. German translators made eager appeals to Darwin to give them first dibs on The Descent of Man, which was a best-seller, both in England and across Europe.6 So Hitchens was partially informed with selected ideas in defence of Saint Darwin. He was however entirely wrong in his conclusions: (a) about the biographical Darwin having no truck with cruel Malthusian policies and (b) also about the pervasiveness of Darwinist ideas in popular discourse across Europe, including Germany. So whether Darwinism was officially curricular there is a moot point.
Following that awkward episode of scriptural fundamentalism coloured with Darwin hagiography, Hitchens launched into an emotive diatribe marked by biblical style parataxis, almost like a revivalist minister, making the following five points: (1) “How! come!?” Hitler invoked God in the opening chapter to Mein Kampf, claiming to be doing God’s work and executing God’s will? (2) “How! come!?” Nazi officers took an oath in the name of Almighty God, pledging allegiance to their führer, “making Hitler into a minor god”? (3) “How! come!?” upon the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier was emblazoned Got mit uns (God is with us)? (4) “How! come!?” the very first treaty of the dictatorial National Socialist regime was with the Vatican, handing over power of Germany to the Catholic Church? (5) “How! Come!?” the churches celebrated Hitler’s birthday every year?
Then to round off this trembling appeal to the emotions of the audience, Hitchens concluded with, “To suggest that there is something fascistic about me and my beliefs… I won’t hear said, and you shouldn’t believe.” Berlinski, it ought to be noted, at no point in the debate indulged the ad hominem, so Hitchens appeared confused and engaged in wild rhetoric when he made it sound as though he had been personally insulted as a holder of certain beliefs. Indeed, he sounded like one of the many religious who were personally offended by his own book. (Though perhaps I should add that he earned enthusiastic applause for all this misinformation from the audience.)
If I may add to Berlinski’s observations, the problem with Hitchens’s counter-argument was quite glaring. The Christian aspect of the Nazi movement was, at least to some extent, the charitable side, the side that brought soup kitchens to the streets when Germans were starving from the devastating hyperinflation ravaging the country. To be sure, there were also cruel, ethno-religious elements motivating the idea of an Arian Master Race. But eugenics was hardly a Christian idea. Elimination of cripples and genetic degenerates was most definitely not Christian. And the systematic methods at work in the extermination camps, the machine-like heartlessness that permitted Germans to carry out their cruel duties, the methods devised and employed, were all done under the aegis of objectivity, not God. Not the wrath of God, but the rational, machine-like superiority of the German people would vanquish the inferior, degenerate races through their superior mechanical, social and genetic engineering. This thinking was a legacy of the Enlightenment and industrialisation.
The Nazis were effectively Godless, or in the Jungian idiom, they conflated themselves with, and usurped the God-image. That is how come the name of God and the Christian religion were invoked by the National Socialists. A glorious leader would reshape humanity in place of God. And the Master Race was not sold as an image of divinity, but of technological evolution. Even the racism, anchored as it was in phrenology and physiognomy, was decidedly scientific by the standards of the time.
Furthermore, the designation of Jews as unclean—although tied to Christian notions of the hateful Jew—was not ultimately perpetrated using religious arguments as the inquisitions of yore had done. Segregation was achieved through the invocation of virology: the dirty Jews had typhoid and therefore had to be quarantined. Moreover, the Jews had to be weeded out of society because they threatened the gene pool. It is odd indeed that Hitchens would not cede such obvious points unless we count him among the fanatically inclined New Atheists. If the teachings of Darwin cannot be criticised due to misprints, misunderstandings, and warped interpretations, then neither can the teachings of Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth be held to account for the atrocities committed in his name.
In short, Hitchens was wrong to paint Nazi evil as a purely Christian phenomenon. The German people were ethnically Christian, and therefore their Nazi ideology had a Christian flavour. One wonders if Hitchens is being disingenuous in characterising Hitler as a religious man, motivated by strictly religious zeal. Surely a journalist and social critic as experienced as he was at the time of the debate would be familiar with politicking. Are we to characterise Barak Obama as truly religious simply because he affirmed his Christian faith as a politician? How about Donald Trump? Most do not expect these leaders are truly religious, only that they demonstrate some respect for religion and the dominant ethnicity of their constituents, perhaps at times invoking religion to make a show of their solidarity and moral upstandingness. Hitler counted himself a Catholic, but he did not ignite a war of religion against Christians of other denominations to restore the one true faith, and claim Germany and the Empire he planned to conquer for the Pope. He was first and foremost an ethnic nationalist.
When Israelis complete their basic military training, they take an oath on the Bible. Yet the entire ethos of the country is based on a breaking away from religion, a kicking over of the traces of religious ancestry who failed to take back their birthright. The Bible there signifies ethnic heritage, not necessarily a belief in God. Oaths are taken with reference to some higher power; otherwise, what is the value of an oath?
Until after WWII, the famed Hippocratic Oath sworn by MDs invoked the gods and goddesses. How come? And in the 1964 revision, the phrase, “Above all, I must not play at God” was included. How come?—if not to address the growing problem of atheism in the practice of medicine, and a concern over the increasingly characteristic feeling in the profession (as per Dr. Mengele) that there was “no power higher than their own,” as Berlinski put it.
There is a will to incorporation that drives worldviews—whether of the spiritual type or of the Grand Theory type—to establish institutions that represent the entire body of humanity, that promise moral salvation and social safety to those who join, and that punish those who stand aside, resisting absorption into the common body.
On the other hand, I think Hitchens did have a perfectly valid point that, had it been expressed with more nuance, would have been entirely true. The Nazis were an extreme instance of a two-headed, religio-scientific beast that was corrupting the Enlightenment project and threatening the terms of an amazing secularism that had been successfully and steadily inching forward with the progressive values of human equality for several centuries. Hitchens was on the right track when he indicated a religious source to the animus. But it wasn’t religion proper as he claimed, nor was it a spiritual orientation in the world. It was something that runs more covertly through the human psyche, a fanatical fervour beset by a tendency to codification and institutional mechanisation meant to turn out goodness by formulaic processes. This is a key materialist meeting point of organised religion and modern science. There is a will to incorporation that drives worldviews—whether of the spiritual type or of the Grand Theory type—to establish institutions that represent the entire body of humanity, that promise moral salvation and social safety to those who join, and that punish those who stand aside, resisting absorption into the common body.
In both religious and scientific spheres (and likely in those to come), there exists an impulse to establish a means of ensuring peaceable individual behaviour. It is felt by many that if we just had the right system, we could guide people toward goodness, even force it upon them. The reasoning seems obvious: if even vicious folk were to practice good deeds, we’d have a good society. It makes such perfect sense, it seems foolish to argue. But there’s a fatal flaw to such thinking because it is informed by a naive materialism, emphasising acts over faith, to put it one way (namely, the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther’s), or emphasising outer performance over inner development. This sort of theorising, however, has been the rationale behind every oppressive regime ever to emerge in human history. What actually winds up happening is a hollowing out of the ideas motivating the system, followed by rapid social decline. Piety replaces intention, and soon enough, vicious persons find a way to outwardly appear upstanding while, in fact, subverting the ethical framework they pretend to uphold. In reality, the very mechanisms put in place to police compliance provide a haven for the vicious to practice their evils under the guise of service to the public good.
When naive materialism corrupts religion, we get empty pieties and inflamed egos; we get fanatical brutality and a devolution into the very barbarism the religion was designed to supplant; we get rampant hypocrisy, bloodlust, and inverted values.
Bad Religion
Implicit in my critique of science is a critique of religion. I am not, however, an atheist. My trouble with religion does not stem from a rejection of spirituality or God. I even find aspects of theology to be of value. It is religion as an institution with which I take issue because the structures of its offices and doctrines breed a naive materialism that undermines and subverts the raison d’etre of its spiritual teachings. Once we put the bureaucrats in charge and try to make any system run by mechanism, we abandon the heart and intention of any enterprise, no matter how noble. Conditions rapidly deteriorate. When naive materialism corrupts religion, we get empty pieties and inflamed egos; we get fanatical brutality and a devolution into the very barbarism the religion was designed to supplant; we get rampant hypocrisy, bloodlust, and inverted values.
Anyone who participates in a religion, who attends a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or any other temple; anyone who listens to sermons and socialises with a religious community, and truly takes to heart—I mean deeply, inwardly, in a way sincerely affecting one’s intentionality and behaviour—truly takes to heart the responsibilities of personal evolution without slipping into narcissism will struggle with this problem of institutional materialism and personal shallowness among the most pious. Those who wrestle in this way with their religion are never fanatics because such people reject elements of doctrine that are quite clearly not God, not divinity, not spiritual, but instead, the interventions of priests and administrators absorbed in temporal matters and ego. All the intelligent, religious folks I have met and talked with know this; they understand that the institutions are human and flawed.
To give these abstract cogitations a concrete, human face, let’s consider an anecdotal example of fanatical behaviour among the pious. In conversation with a severe and dogmatic Catholic, I urged that the teaching of the Sacred Heart was at heart about being a good person, not in the materialist, pious sense, not in the sense of worship and sacramental devotions, but rather in the immaterial sense. Abandoning all humility (humility representing a cornerstone of the teaching of the Sacred Heart), my interlocutor explained that being good is not enough. It was imperative to partake of the rites of the one true Christ and to believe in and devote one’s life to the only true religion, the Catholic Church or be damned for all eternity.
I then asked how he could square his extremist position with the understanding that the fanatics of all other religions felt the same as him toward their religions, and that these attitudes have historically led to persecutions and wars. He replied that his religion was not at present persecuting anyone. I rebutted by pointing out that this was only because our civilisation had enacted a separation of Church from State, and that given his position, were others like him to ever again assume the reins of power, political persecutions and wars of religion would inevitably ensue. To this, he simply replied that he himself wasn’t persecuting anybody. In other words, he refused to consider my point.
Essentially, he believed that his religion is the one true Truth and that was that. Worst of all, his dogmatism led to a complete inversion of the teachings of Yeshua and the early Apostles because the Sacred Heart was not a concept to him, not a symbol of humility, charity and good will to all humanity; it was a material ritual that bestowed by a magical grace outside himself, something superior to goodness. He found a way to despise the majority of humanity while wearing the pious and sanctified mantle of doctrine. I see this attitude and behaviour as bad religion, and try to distinguish it from good religion, which can potentially dispense social and personal harmony.
The analogical mind understands that institutional creep is not a phenomenon unique to religion, but applies to all great paradigms that establish systemic structures to dispense and implement their visions in the social and political spheres. Atheism is no exception. Whereas atheism is a philosophical stance that—if taken seriously and is not conflated with nihilism or just plain, shallow thoughtlessness—can amount to a spiritually respectable condition, New Atheism is a dogmatic and fanatical form of naive materialism that, like the above example in the Catholic context, leads to a close-minded inversion of scientific epistemology and the secular ethos. Stated baldly like that without much qualification, my claim may seem outrageous to the committed New Atheist, for how, after all, can it be argued that he is in any way, shape or form, in fact a sort of religious zealot? Given the dominant paradigms shaping our civilisation, it would take several chapters of a book to draw aside the curtain on my position for someone thus inclined. Hence my motivation for launching analogy magazine. If there is any chink in the New Atheist’s teflon-coated armour, the articles that appear here hope to exploit that slim crevice of curiosity and undo the programming.
Here we find the conflation of politics with science, which, like the merging of religious fervour with science, is fundamentally unscientific and ought to be perceived as beneath the dignity of the scientific mind.
Scientistic Orthodoxy
Painful though it may be for many scientists (and science fans) to hear, science in the twenty-first century has become doctrinaire and dogmatic—a fact that is evidenced by the cultural pushback and tug-of-war we are witnessing today in the 2020s. Semiotic confirmation of this recidivism abounds: “follow the science” has recently become a slogan only because of the substantial lack of faith questioning minds have been evincing toward the most popular claims science makes: The Big Bang, Darwinism, vaccine safety and efficacy and anthropogenic climate change, to name a handful. Believers follow “the science,” whereas, unbelievers, or heretics, or heathen—rebranded as “deniers” or “denialists” in present discourse—question and challenge “the science,” but this questioning is denigrated as an indulgence in “conspiracy theory,” promulgated by devilish and demented entities spreading “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation.” If science were behaving as promised, if it resisted and kicked over the traces of dogmatism, this situation could not have arisen: there would never be such a thing as the science—a newly popular coinage that aggregates supreme authority to those who invoke the term by indicating its singular, monolithic, unquestionable, and implicitly unchangeable nature. Indeed, this new entity has replaced God as a conversation stopper in our culture.
Among New Atheists, who are essentially fanatics of this religification of science—deniers are nothing short of evildoers, and are treated with scorn, derision and dehumanizing insult. In fact, as we have seen during the unfolding of the covid mysophobia scare, and as we continue to see vis a vis the millenarian “climate emergency”—followers of the science believe that deniers should be punished for their moral delinquency. Believers call unbelievers “deplorable,” “selfish,” “ignorant,” “stupid” and “a menace to society” never mind to life on earth. When politics enters the equation, deniers are deemed “white supremacist,” “patriarchal,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “domestic terrorists” who threaten to unravel the hard-won liberal freedoms humanity has been fighting to establish for several millennia. Here we find the conflation of politics with science, which, like the merging of religious fervour with science, is fundamentally unscientific and ought to be perceived as beneath the dignity of the scientific mind.
From a linguistic perspective, the definite article “the” in the noun phrase, the science, is misplaced. By scientific standards, the term, The Science, should have no truck in scientific thinking, which is supposed to encourage rather than suppress questions and challenges. Implied in this terminology is the notion of the scientific consensus, a misleading collocation meant to solidify authority and dogmatic adherence to approved ideas. Who approves the right kinds of ideas? The Science as represented by scientific consensus. How is consensus established? Either through statistical hijinks—as research into the 97% climate consensus reveals—or through institutional intimidation—as borne out by the various medical associations and hospital boards who threaten MDs with license revocation and the end of their careers should they be caught practicing or expressing dissent. These cultural examples represent only the very tip of the iceberg, but they suffice to illustrate the morass into which present day science has fallen.
Perhaps it is worth dwelling briefly on how this oxymoronic situation has come about, if only to help point the way toward a return to a scientifically motivated culture, and hopefully to help identify how we might prevent such confusion from setting in again if we’re lucky enough to find our way through. The desire to wield authority is the most obvious among human impulses, and we needn’t belabour the point. Twenty-first century historians of science point out an increasing politicization of science during the French Revolution (and subsequent upheavals in France), the American Civil War and a deepening entrenchment of scientistic approaches to political sophistry following WWII.7 Significantly Enlightenment luminaries including Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin deployed scientific styles of intellection and scientific methods of presentation to rationalise political ends.
In her book The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science, nineteenth century science historian, Ruth Barton, has explored the lobbying efforts of the nine prominent scientists who formed a group called The X Club in 1864. Monumental figures like Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)—known even to non-specialists—came together to coordinate efforts to displace the oppressive authority of the reigning elites, their religious commitments to the Church of England and their educational emphasis on Classics (Greek and Latin) and its associated literary-historical and religious studies. Notably, Barton explains, “Clearly, many eminent men were concerned by the state of scientific and technical education and wished their voices to be heard. The X Club was one group among many.”8 Of especial interest to my theme is how in their agitating for authority, “Spencer and Huxley sometimes directly attacked ‘literary’ education.” In 1867 Frederic Farrar (not of the X Club, but directly associated with it) delivered a lecture arguing that “an education confined to Greek and Latin was an anachronism,” in Barton’s words.9 Due to the struggle of science advocates against the elites and ensconced authorities in those times, a compromise was achieved:
This was a two-cultures argument for both-science-and-literature rather than either-science-or-literature. The scientific witnesses [at the Devonshire Commission 1875] agreed that science students needed literary culture for breadth, but the part of the argument that performed useful work was that, equally, classics and divinity students needed scientific culture for breadth.10
Let’s recall that I am attempting to recover when and where scientism or our notion of The Science originated. These political disputes over the place of science in education were the start. It’s essential to understand that the Huxleys and Spencers of the English world at that time felt overlooked by the arbiters of power and influence. The governing and titled elites who moved in parliament were all educated in the old system and had little respect for what they perceived to be a non-intellectual occupation. (Yes! That’s right: there was a time, not that long ago, when science was not deemed the pinnacle of human intellection.) Those who understood that science required rigorous study and disciplined thinking and were themselves advancing scientific discovery wanted to command public respect; and they desired more cultural acceptance of their divergent religious and spiritual beliefs. In the struggle, this new cultural entity called “Science” emerged as a radical progressivist vehicle of political and social reform and came to be closely allied to Victorian Liberalism. And since the elites weren’t having any of it, science became an avenue of self-improvement and empowerment for the under-classes. Barton explains as follows, sharing an exceptionally juicy bit from Huxley:
The contributions of the X-men were at lower levels, to science teaching in elementary schools, night schools, and “third grade” secondary schools. “The English nation will not take science from above so it must get it from below,” wrote Huxley to [Joseph] Hooker [1817-1911], with medical allusions for his fellow navy surgeon: “if we cannot get it [the nation] to take pills [we] must administer our remedies par derrière.”11
Perhaps even more relevant to my thesis is how conscious some science lobbyists could be in the mid- and late-nineteenth century regarding their representing a new religion they hoped would oust the predominant one. Here’s another passage from Barton, central to understanding where the religious fervour of scientism today comes from:
In Huxley’s rhetoric, teaching science was preaching a new truth. He understood science education as a secularizing force that would counter the religious emphases of conventional education and described his teachers as “scientific missionaries” who would “convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith.”12
But it was more than just one man’s rhetoric. The evangelical quality of the lobbying efforts and educational programs of Huxley’s circle was in the air at the time. Barton tells us that “Beatrice Webb, a sympathetic but critical observer of the scientific movement, described it. . .as a ‘religion of science’.” And Webb further commented that its promoters had “an implicit faith that by the methods of physical science, and by these methods alone, could be solved all the problems arising out of the relations of man to man and of man towards the universe.” Apparently Webb “had followed this faith for only six years (1876 to 1882, she said) before she ‘found it wanting’.” Barton tells us that “Looking back, she [Webb] thought the faith in science ‘almost fanatical’ and speculated that it might have been due to hero worship.”13 A fan of X Club member John Tyndall (ca. 1822-1893), one Mme Olga de Novikoff wrote to her hero, “I sympathise now more than ever with the great number of people, unknown to you but living upon the bread you give them. Let the faith of those unknown but united be complete in you.” As Barton points out, Novikoff was invoking the symbology of the eucharist and drawing an analogy between Tyndall and Christ.14
In short, we ought to keep in mind that science recruited politics and politics recruited science for the purposes of authority very early on and that the two are entangled in a Gordian knot, infusing the whole scientific enterprise with religious zeal. The scientists of our time have inherited these qualities, the fervour, the faith and the evangelism. They have also inherited the opposition to both traditional religion and to literature. As I keep pointing out, the denigration of literature and Classical studies as just a bunch of stories has resulted in a gutting of our inner lives. And moreover the relegation of stories and myths as anachronistic fictions not worth our time and attention has resulted in a loss of the grounds for philosophical inquiry and pluralism. No doubt a separation of science from state is necessary. We know that such policy is possible and effective. So let’s get that project underway before all is lost.
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.
Shermer, Michael. How We Believe: Science Skepticism, and the Search for God. Second Edition. New York: Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2003. pp. xxiv-xxv.
Ibid. p. xxiv.
Ibid. p. xxv.
Darwin believed that “all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children. . .as Mr Galton [the father of eugenicism] has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society” (Descent 688). As Darwin scholars James Moore and Adrian Desmond point out:
Darwin never intended that his evolutionary scheme, whatever its secularizing tendencies, should sanction working-class collective self-help. Unions and cooperatives, which ‘opposed . . . competition’, were, he declared in 1872, ‘a great evil for the future progress of mankind’. (Descent liv)
So sure, Darwin felt slavery was immoral, but he still perceived certain races as primitive, savage and inferior (Descent xliv-xlv). Following the 1867 Reform Act which “created a million new working-class voters,” Moore and Desmond explain:
Darwin’s former student friend W. R. Greg warned in Fraser’s Magazine that democracy negated God’s ‘salutary’ law of natural selection. Government by the unfit would bring ruin. Yet the reckless were increasing and clamouring for power, even the ‘careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes, living in a pig-stye, doting on a superstition’, multiplying ‘like rabbits’ and so on. Greg was a mellowed radical like Darwin, who now slipped part of the Irish diatribe into the Descent, quoting Greg verbatim in the proto-eugenical section (Part I, Chapter 5), which dealt with the obstacles to breeding a better class of person. (Descent xlvi)
Numbers, Ronald L. and Kostas Kampourakis, editors. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015. pp. 109-10.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. James Moore and Adrian Desmond eds. Penguin Random House UK, 2004. pp. xlix-lii.
See Darwin “Introduction” op. cit.; and see also Gordin, Michael. The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.; also the introduction to Judson, Horace Freeland. The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2004.
Barton, Ruth. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 317.
Ibid. p. 315.
Ibid. p. 320.
Ibid. p. 328.
Ibid. p. 309.
Ibid. p. 362.
Ibid. p. 369.
Yes, let's separate science and state. I suppose that would mean terminating these global public-private partnerships that aim to establish transhumanism as the one world religion. Your concept of a 'will to incorporation' has me thinking that the Enlightenment ultimately replaced one official religion with another, and how difficult it is to break from this 'eternal return' or 'wheel of rebirth' pattern that societies go through. I'm with you that the stories and myths comprising so much of our literary, spiritual, and intellectual heritage do nourish the inner life and need to be renewed. Surely there's a way to create the sort of pluralistic society where the material and the numinous can coexist. I wonder if such an idea of the holy can be recovered and innovated on by looking for inspiration in the ancient past. Apparently there was no real division between science and religion, for example, in Greek antiquity. So saith Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers. He describes the "all-embracing vision" of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, uniting "body, mind, and spirit in an inspired and luminous synthesis" . . . Then again, Pythagoras' disciples believed his authority was absolute, like that of a god: "'the master said so' was their law."