Darwin and Plain Politics

For a decade now, Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology have been linked in the public mind to controversies about Creationism, Intelligent Design, and what should or should not be taught to students in American schools. The controversies are now muted, the public apparently tired of them, and maybe in 40 or 50 years the state of Kansas will have recovered from the bad publicity foisted upon it by its lunatic fringe religionists.

But that doesn't mean Charles Darwin is out of politics. He's in politics in America more than ever, this time with the science of evolutionary biology twisted the other way around in a recrudescence of the social Darwinism rampant in America a century ago.

American conservatives, neo and otherwise, do not like to call themselves social Darwinists because they know the intellectual community in general, and most scientists hard and soft in particular, consider social Darwinism a scientifically and rationally bankrupt set of ideas.

American conservatives were proud to call themselves social Darwinists in the 1920s, believing it gave them the cachet of a "scientific" attitude towards social issues. Then came the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the conservative idea that the privileges of the rich were deserved because they had better genes than other people seemed a politically inexpedient idea that had to be buried. You can't tell Americans on a bread line that they're on a bread line because they have bad genes.

So conservative pundits and publicists buried the idea -- for a while, anyway.

The idea lay buried for 40 years, until the 1970s, when a slow rebirth of the idea in various forms began to infiltrate the American media and reinfect the American psyche.

These days, no one on the right uses the terms "survival of the fittest" or "social Darwinism" when they discuss social issues, but if you listen carefully to both text and subtext, you will bet your money that the American right is as socially Darwinist now as it was 80 years ago.

Are the text and subtext really there? Oh yes. Consider David Brooks, called "the thinking man's conservative", the "intellectual conservative." In his columns in The New York Times, Brooks presents himself as an American conservative intellectual eager to apply modern science to social and political issues. Brooks never calls himself a "social Darwinist," but the social Darwinism is there plain and simple.

A month ago, in his New York Times column of April 15, 2007, Brooks touted the following: "The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that everything that exists does so for a purpose."

This statement by Brooks, as a statement of "the logic of evolution," is seriously inaccurate as science. For example, no evolutionary biologist known to me believes that "everything that exists does so for a purpose." That's not the way evolution works. But never mind that, I want to focus on the politics here, not on the science.

What Brooks is telling us is that Darwinian evolution explains not only human behavior in the large but also in the details.

But if he believes this, he must also believe that human behavior is determined by genes, since its the evolution of genes that forms the machinery of Darwinian evolution.

And if that's true, then according to Brooks it must also be true that we inherit our behavior -- all of it, large and small -- from our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. We're genetically determined, according to Brooks. And the implication, of course, is that success in society, determined by behavior, is in fact determined by inheritance. The subtext is Social Darwinism Redux.

A month later, in his New York Times column of May 15, 2007, Brooks tells us that "conservatives believe inequality is acceptable as long as there is opportunity."

The problem, for me at least, is that the text and subtext show a lack of courage to state explicitly the philosophical position. As an apparent social Darwinist, what David Brooks needs to tell us is that "conservatives believe inherited inequality is acceptable." As for opportunity, the only "opportunity" that seems acceptable to most social Darwinists is nepotism.

We're back in the 1920s, folks. Good genes, bad genes, genetic elitism, genetic criminality, genes, genes, and more genes. It's all there in text and subtext on the right, and it's as phony and dangerous now as it was 80 years ago.