Over at his Substack, Robert Wright puts in a defense of Charles Darwin against a comment in Science, “The Descent of Man,” 150 years on. On the whole, I agree with Wright, and not with the author of the Science piece, Augustin Fuentes. But, I will say that I’ve always found the hagiography and adulation given to Darwin the man a bit tiresome and overdone. This was probably taken to the most ridiculous extremes in Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. Fuentes’ piece is somewhat hard to parse for me, but if he thinks that most students (as opposed to intellectual historians) should reflect on Darwin’s non and para-scientific views as if it’s worth their time, then he’s not super interested in the science. In many ways, Darwin was not an atypical exemplar of the English gentry of his period.
The reason we remember Darwin is because of his exceptional science, not his unexceptional social views. For Victorians, Darwin would have been viewed on the liberal or progressive side. But for our time he would seem hopelessly reactionary and problematic. That’s really all there is to it.
But as a practical matter, I think Fuentes will win and Wright will lose, and that in the near term the muddled thinking will reign supreme. The analogy here I will use is Herbert Spencer, whose views were misrepresented by Richard Hofstadter in the 20th century. Today, most non-specialist intellectuals know Spencer through Hofstadter’s distortion, not Spencer’s primary works. Those who read Spencer in the original are often surprised at the extent of the misrepresentation, but attempts to correct the record are futile. No one cares nerd.
I believe that something similar may happen to Darwin. Many scientists know the truth and have read Darwin’s work. He’s a complex figure who is hard to position in the modern landscape, and reductive analyses often miss the mark. But most scientists have better things to do, at least in their opinion, than counter ridiculous propagandists. Additionally, those ridiculous propagandists are often fellow-travelers in far-Left politics, which saturates modern science. I believe that one day scientists will wake up, and come to understand that the lie has become the truth, and then they will have to make the choice whether to speak the true truth, as opposed to the socially expected false truth. I don’t think there’s any suspense in my guess as to what choice they’ll make.
Of course to understand the fullness of who Charles Darwin was you can read his works and his letters, and draw your own conclusions. But you will be the few. Most people will rely on the most lurid and misrepresentative letters posted as screenshots on Twitter.
I believe that one day scientists will wake up, and come to understand that the lie has become the truth, and then they will have to make the choice whether to speak the true truth, as opposed to the socially expected false truth. I don’t think there’s any suspense in my guess as to what choice they’ll make.
No suspense in my guess either. (;﹏;)
Is this really a new phenomenon though? How much of history of man as we know it today has been subjected to one form of myth-making or another? As a faithful Christian who believes in that which are greater than man, I subscribe to enduring, even eternal, Truth, but how prevalent and persistent has been that paradigm?
you ask a disquieting question
btw, i assume the british will still revere him for patriotic reasons. america and britain might diverge on darwin.
“I don’t think there’s any suspense in my guess as to what choice they’ll make.”
Follow the money.
I was educated to be a historian and certainly not a scientist as you are. I am not even well-versed in the history of science. But one disturbing fact I have discovered through an education in history is that the true agents of successes and achievements were too often not the ones celebrated (forget about enriched) by the public and through the ages.
It’s almost as if “peacocking” matters and he who has superior public relations wins the acclaim of history. Hence, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…”
So I am not as alarmed by the current trends among scientists (saddened, yes, but not alarmed or surprised). It seem to me to be a reversion to the historical norm.
Re-paganization of America? 😉
Incidentally, Robert Wright’s essay, which was excellent, reminds that Darwin’s heritage from his grandfathers was of anti-slavery politics. The story of that movement was very well told in:
“Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” by Adam Hochschild (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Bury-Chains-Prophets-Rebels-Empires-ebook/dp/B004H1UE90/geneexpressio-20
An interesting irony is that the leader of the movement in Parliament was William Wilberforce. William’s son Sam became a bishop in the Church of England. He famously debated The Origin of the Species with Thomas Huxley (Aldous’s grandfather) Sam was however anti-slavery.
The sad thing is that the author Wright is criticizing is a tenured full professor at Princeton, supposedly one of this country’s better universities.
He is laying out a rationale for allowing his students to be ignorant about an important moment in intellectual history.
Fuentes, and people like him are creating a generation that is simultaneously absolutely ignorant of all times and places other than their own, and absolutely sure of their own virtue and morality. It is a toxic combination.
Darwin will fall.. to push up)
Interestingly, another Princeton history professor has written some of the best criticism of the Hofstadter myth: Thomas Leonard’s Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism and Mistaking Eugenics for Social Darwinism. In his book Illiberal Reformers, he shows how many of Hofstadter’s criticisms apply to the Progressives who were Hofstadter’s intellectual ancestors.
I agree Darwin will remain an icon in the UK, because modern Britain is not even so much a secular society, but an anti-religious society: mockery of religion and treating it as a joke is common there in a way that you only saw/still see among some of the most zealous New Atheists in the US. In this regard, since Darwin has for well over a century in that country been used as the primary rival to religious establishment, he’s practically a modern saint in the UK. Unless the current trend of US-style racial politics is exported in full to the UK (not out of the realm of possibility), Darwin’s legacy is safe there.
I think defending Darwin’s views is engaging the woke on their terms, which is a loss for sanity.
Why are the views of an important scientific figure relevant today independent of the truthfulness of their claims? How is it useful or relevant to moralize historical figures?
Lets say Darwin was a virulent racist. Who cares? Does that change probability that his theory was true supported by heaps of evidence since? Would that change its importance? What if we discover Einstein had anger management issues and could be abusive to his colleagues (just making this up). Would we have to care less about his work?
It’s insane and we must stop engaging on these terms.
If we want to protect what is valuable i.e. in this case science and history from woke imperialism, we should make the woke defend the relevance of their criticisms, rather than defending figures like Darwin from the criticism.
^ a more timely hypothetical would be Einstein having dim views on gays rather than being abusive towards colleagues. In both cases, who cares?
I agree with you, Twinkie. It’s not new yet not ineradicable. However, the notion that misrepresentation is due to the ‘Far-Left’ (who they?) is baffling, given performances by the Right. Frankly, it’s something that all ‘sides’ and none do.
Being raised a Christian I accepted that Darwin was wrong. Then, still young, I decided to read Origin of Species expecting to strengthen my convictions.
I thought it was beautiful, lucid and thoroughly convincing. I finished the work with my views inverted.
Darwin was right, Christian dogma was wrong.
I don’t really care much about his personal life or views or whatever thoughts he had on slavery. His science is a jewel. Truth trumps all.
Somewhat related, but its funny to see the fall of anti-theists like Dawkins or Harris. They played a critical role in the decline of religion among young Americans and I won’t be shedding any tears when the new religion they helped create ends up cancelling them.
Wokism would have arisen without New Atheism though, and the most virulent woke activists are not ex-New Atheists. Dawkins and Harris are old-school liberals with extremely different politics from the woke—they were never into intersectionality, racial and gender grievance, blaming everything on Capitalism, etc. The rise of wokism owes more to conditions at the modern American university than to the efforts of a couple outspoken atheists.
One of the unintended consequences of new atheism I would say. The vacuum left by the decline of organized religion helped wokism rise. Most wokes are irreligious and had they remained religious I don’t think they would have cared for socialism or intersectionality. Regardless even if new atheism had no effect on Wokism, I still like it when the wokes go after new atheists lol.
@ Revelator
The rise of wokism has occurred because it purports to answer an incredibly important question. Even though Americans say they aren’t racist and even though there hasn’t been Jim Crow and legal discrimination for more than 5 decades, why is it that blacks still do so much worse than whites? The answer given is a pervasive system of white privilege that can only be extirpated by extreme measures–because obviously less extreme measures haven’t worked.
Wokism may remain popular because there are only two other possible explanations and they are both socially unacceptable. One says, to put it in it’s most objectionable form, “it’s black people’s fault.” Fatherless children. A culture that doesn’t encourage “deferred gratification”. Etc. But that is to “blame the victim”, something that many find emotionally unacceptable.
The other is positively Voldemortian. Like women are on average shorter than men, blacks are on average substantially less smart than whites or northeast Asians. And this can’t be changed; it’s powerfully genetic. But to even think such a thing would make most moderns feel dirty–perhaps like telling a Victorian that there is no God.
Roger, yes, I think there’s an argument there (one as least as plausible as any other in this “Why Woke, why now?” perpetual conversion, where we all offer our hot-takes on this confounding trend). If you largely remove most (not all, but most) individual level discrimination, and the problem persists at like 50-70% of the level, then you have to accept that either that was only 50-30% of the problem, and differences remain (culturally, or in heritable terms). Which is culturally unacceptable. Or you double-down, which takes you into the “Critical Theory” that there would be no differences were it not for “arbitrary” social structures that are designed to produce such differences and biases, and which exist above the individuals ability to choose.
Like, if there are problems with African-American education achievement or crime, then it “explains” things if that’s due to a disparate treatment of AA family structures which is fundamentally arbitrary. And therefore “we must deconstruct the model of the nuclear family” and such. And problems with education differences are simply due to the arbitrary idea the idea that education standards have meaning, and so on.
In a sense perhaps it is more genuinely aware in some sense than previous ideologies that simply stressed lack of individual discrimination would sort everything out. It’s just that, minor detail, the proposal of reimagining social structures and treating cultural standards as arbitrary is almost certain to have *crazy-bad* results because, again minor detail, those institutions and structures are actually not arbitrary at all. (Like, the police are not just some arbitrary force of property protecting bullies who can replaced by social workers who will treat all crime therapeutically as a mental health problem, markets are not just some arbitrary horribly inefficient means of allocating resources that can be easily replaced with a “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” simulation cooked up by some smart leftish computer science graduates with a can-do attitude, etc.).
(In terms of “Why now?” and not 10 years ago, maybe driven by the Millennial generation feeling stiffed by the system, or unrepresented and unable to climb, and have simply lost all faith in institutions. Whatever the reality of these things, whether that’s the case or it’s more rising expectations and elite overproduction. If people fundamentally like the social institutions, its harder for them to think about the idea that they’re arbitrarily created by mediocrities, and that I, the true person of genius looking at this problem afresh, can reconstruct them?
There are probably some differences within this by group. Tenatively, the Asian activist-types often seem possibly more interested in simply clearpathing and cancelling incumbent White elites and getting a place at the high table, while not really being quite as interested in reimagining current social structures or social conventions. While the perhaps more “WEIRDo” White activists often seem a bit more interested in using it as an excuse to rerun previous failed (but still exciting) social lifestyle experiments from their parents or grandparents generation that they wish they hadn’t missed out on, with a justification that such apparently natural social structures are simply bourgeois “Capitalist Realism” social constructs, and everyone was just too defeatist the last time around, and its capitalist propaganda that these failed and such. Worth a read on this note: https://unherd.com/2020/01/russias-brief-encounter-with-the-sexual-revolution/ )
@Roger Sweeney
As an anti-woke lefty, there’s a third possible explanation, one I buy into: lack of social mobility.
If black people were mostly poor in 1965 and your parents’ wealth more or less determines how well you’ll do in life, you don’t need institutional racism in the 1965-2021 period to explain why they’re struggling, nor do you need cultural or biological flaws in the affected population.
You just need to embrace the idea that social mobility in the US is more the exception than the rule, and that the country has a lot more in common with a hereditary aristocracy than is generally embraced; people who work their way up from nothing just aren’t that common, especially in the neoliberal age.
birdboy2000: “If black people were mostly poor in 1965 and your parents’ wealth more or less determines how well you’ll do in life, you don’t need institutional racism in the 1965-2021 period to explain why they’re struggling, nor do you need cultural or biological flaws in the affected population.”
But I think that this remains a variant of the “systemic racism” theory (in the sense of “there are social and institutional forces that favors more whites than blacks, even without racism at the individual level”). And note who many “wokes” say that colorblind measures that benefit the poor (like raises i minimum wage) are “anti-racist” and colorblind measures that benefit the rich (like tax breaks) are “racist”.
@birdyboy2000
There is certainly a substantial correlation between parental income and child income but it is nowhere near high enough to support that explanation. For example, of children whose parents are in the lowest income quintile, 33.7% end up in the bottom quintile, 28.4% in quintile 2, 18% in quintile 3, 12.3% in quintile 4, and 7.5% in the highest quintile. Meanwhile, of those children whose parents are in the top quintile, 36.5% get to the top themselves, 23.6% go to quintile 4, 17.0% to quintile 3, 11.9% to quintile 2, and 10.9% all the way to the bottom quintile. All figures are from Raj Chetty et al., Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, p. 68.
Your parents’ wealth obviously correlates with your’s but I think the hypothesis, “your parents’ wealth more or less determines how well you’ll do in life” has to be rejected. There’s a lot more churn than that.
(I suspect that a Voldemortian would argue that much of the remaining lack of mobility is caused by genetics. Smart successful parents have smart kids who then become successful. And if you rely on schools to be the main credentialing institutions of society, this will only be strengthened because, well, smart kids do well in school. Cf. Freddie deBoer)