[Bret L]

Pat Buchanan on Darwin

Kevin MacDonald

July 1, 2009

"Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator that we have. His writings on the death of the West, immigration, the neocon influence in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with
his recent op-ed “Making a monkey out of Darwin.” The article and the
book it relies on, by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of
Creationist ideas claiming that Darwinism has no scientific basis and
that it has led to great evil. I have discussed some of these issues
in a previous article on Ben Stein’s movie Expelled which links
Darwinism to the Holocaust and represents the scientific community of
evolutionists as an oppressive Inquisition-like establishment bent on
squelching heresy.

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by
Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck’s idea that people
can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during
their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact
opposite of Darwin’s view that the basic mechanism of evolution is
natural selection — the selective retention of genetic variants
because they result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet
Union — the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature
and produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko applied this
to agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic
characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far
worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change
the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their
children would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a
golden age where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like
greed, envy, and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently
reasonable to simply exterminate those who didn’t get with the program
and who clung to their pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the
Lamarckians in the Soviet Union rationalized the murder of many
millions of their fellow citizens in the name of creating the new
Soviet man.

Creationists who link Darwin with evil should also think long and hard
about the fact that genocides and a great many other evils have been
carried out under religious ideologies. Christiane Amanpour’s God’s
Warriors on Jews, Christians, and Muslims certainly shows that
religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of fanaticisms, from
Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement (including both its
Christian and Jewish supporters) — all of which Buchanan presumably
abhors. Is that a reason for getting rid of religion?

The problem of evil is very much with us and continues to haunt all
ideologies and scientific theories that address it. For a great many
people, it is completely incomprehensible that a God would allow all
the violence, pain, and suffering that have always been the fate of so
many humans — and animals. Positing a God to explain human behavior
and human traits is useless. It doesn’t really explain anything,
because we then have to ask why He would make us to be so prone to
inflict suffering on others. And why would he create animals that
inflict so much suffering on other animals.

The scientific route of explaining human evil as resulting from
Darwinian natural selection for traits that were adaptive in spreading
the genes of our ancestors is unacceptable to many because it seems to
justify violence and aggression. As Buchanan notes, racial nationalism
in the period prior to World War I was very much in the air and was
invoked by some advocates of war. But wars and genocides occurred long
before World War I — without any Darwinian ideology.

And at least some wars would not have occurred if the war mongers had
been good Darwinians. For example, the Civil War was a cousin's war
fought between closely related men from different British sub-
cultures. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to
the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that
inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-
Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. (See here.) Militarily, the
war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and
property ever made by Americans. From a Darwinian perspective it was a
disaster in which mass murder of cousins was rationalized by a moral
ideal.

Or consider World War II, the subject of Buchanan’s brilliant The
Unnecessary War. It was indeed an unnecessary war — and one that would
not have been launched by a British Darwinian. Buchanan is quite
correct that Winston Churchill should live in infamy for his role in
promoting both World War I and World War II. But did Churchill and the
rest of the British elite who jumped over the cliff with him act like
good Darwinians?

Buchanan is quite correct to point to Churchill’s bellicosity, his
vanity, and his desire for personal power; and there are strong hints
of his corruption as a result of being rescued from near bankruptcy
after the stock market crash of 1929. But if Churchill was a good
Darwinian, he would have been able to control these all too human
impulses and think rationally about the long term good of his people.
(Yes, evolutionists do believe that humans can control their primitive
tendencies.) It simply made no sense to go to all out war with the
closely related Germans over German hegemony over the continent —
especially because in order to win, Britain had to make an alliance
with the Soviet Union, the most murderous regime in history. The
victory of the Soviet Union, made possible by military aid from the
West, then subjected Eastern Europe to decades of brutality and
economic stagnation, and it led to a prolonged and destructive Cold
War. But from the standpoint of the West, all this sacrifice was
endured in order to destroy genetically closer Germans. Churchill
himself seems to have reveled in the destruction even of German
civilians.

No Darwinian would have done this. But Churchill — an egomaniacal,
short-sighted, vainglorious war monger unaware of his ethnic genetic
interests — loved it.

Buchanan also fails to see how the defeat of Darwinism in the social
sciences has led to all the ills that he deplores in the US and the
contemporary West. The period from around 1890 to 1924 was a period of
ethnic defense in the United States, and Darwinism was a potent tool
in the hands of immigration restrictionists. Bluebloods like Henry
Cabot Lodge and Madison Grant were extolling the virtues of Northern
Europeans and funding the movement to end immigration — a battle that
ended with the ethnically defensive immigration law of 1924 that was
reaffirmed by the 1952 McCarran-Walter act. But at the same time,
academic anthropology was coming under the control of the Boasians for
whom the entire idea of race was anathema.

I have argued that Boasian anthropology is a Jewish intellectual
movement that had the effect of undercutting Americans' natural desire
for an ethnically homogeneous culture. As immigration historian John
Higham noted, by the time of the final victory in 1965, which removed
national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and
opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of
cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic
wisdom. The result was that “it became intellectually fashionable to
discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The
whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful
ideological weapon.”

The demise of Darwinism had major implications because it removed the
only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan
ideology and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of
an intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to
conservative religion and the popular attitudes of the less educated.
These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectual elite who
quickly became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US—
especially the media and the academic world. In a very real sense, the
demise of Darwinism has led to the death of the West that Buchanan
deplores. Without an intellectually compelling and scientifically
based ideology of ethnic defense, it was not possible to erect
barriers against the invasion of other peoples.

As I noted elsewhere, Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea.

Evolutionary theory points to the deep structure of genocide as a
particularly violent form of ethnic competition. But ethnic
competition is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an orgy
of violence, or by forcible removal of people from land on the West
Bank by Jewish settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans
during the 19th century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement
of whites via current levels of immigration into Western societies.
From a Darwinian perspective, the end result is no different. The
genetic structure of the population has changed, and there are winners
and losers. …

And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian
perspective would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by
understanding that ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence
of our evolutionary psychology, we could at least build societies
that, unlike the Soviet Union, are not likely to commit genocide on
their own people. Nor would we be saddled with a multicultural
cauldron of competing and distrustful ethnic groups. And, as noted in
a previous article, societies based on ethnonationalism would have
other benefits as well: Greater openness to redistributive policies;
greater trust and political participation; and a greater likelihood of
adopting democratic political systems based on the rule of law.

My alternate view of the 20th century in America is that if a robust
Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place, the cosmopolitan
revolution that opened up America to immigration of all peoples never
would have occurred. The immigration restrictionism of the 1920s would
have been institutionalized in all the elite institutions of the
United States, and it would have developed an increasingly
sophisticated theoretical underpinning as the evolutionary
understanding of human behavior progressed. Immigration policy would
have been carefully formulated to ensure that immigrants were
genetically similar to the founding stock — just as American
immigration policy was crafted until 1965.

I close with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould where Buchanan follows
Windchy in distorting a comment by Stephen Jay Gould. Based on his
reading of the fossil record, Gould had proposed that evolution was
less gradual than Darwin supposed, while certainly not disagreeing
with Darwin’s central view on natural selection.

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to
discern among my colleagues. I sense that some now wish to mute the
healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary
biology. It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if
only by distortion. Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the
flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment—a kind of old-time
religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have
to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition.
For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to
quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to
present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we
are truly lost.

I can’t say that I am a fan of Stephen Jay Gould because of his role
in attempting to shape Darwinism to his leftist sympathies and, I
think, his sense of Jewish interests. But I certainly agree that we
have to continue to attempt to understand nature and let the chips
fall where they may. "

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...d-Windchy.html

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Jul 2, 12:02*am, Bret L wrote:
Pat Buchanan on Darwin

Do you really think anybody gives a flying **** what Buchanan thinks
on *any* subject, Bratzi?

LMAO!