I know I said yesterday was going to be the end of my answers to the Darwin fan club members who sent me hate mail over one of my old posts but re-reading some of my archive, I feel morally obligated to point out again that when Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, et al. talk about Darwin's Natural Selection at work in the human population, they couldn't have been plainer that they meant stronger people killing weaker people as the main feature of that Natural Selection, the murderers would be the embodiment of the selective force whose ability to dominate and murder other people would be what rendered them superior or, in Darwin's sometimes favored adjective, "higher" and that their victims being dominated and murdered would be what rendered them "lower" or inferior.
As always, you don't need to and shouldn't take my word for it, read The Descent of Man, Haeckel's History of Creation (translated by one of Darwin's closest colleagues) and the rest of the primary material flowing from Darwin and into the further generations of conventional Darwinists up to, during, and after a brief hiatus of attempting to suppress that inconvenient truth lasting till about the mid 1970s, on to today. I mentioned Peter Singer* and his fellow "ethicists" - I would imagine most or all of them quite convinced Darwinists - who have turned "Ethics" into a thrilling and attention getting game of who it is who will be allowed to be killed and who gets to make that decision. Unsurprisingly, they seem to think it's they, in their superiority, who should determine that.
But why I am writing this, today, is that it is Martin Luther King Day and, after pointing out that the slaugher of Black Africans by the Belgians under Leopold II and the Germans in their pre-Nazi death camps in East Africa and in the assertions of that quintessential Darwinist (he gave the word "Darwinism" its current meaning), the man who Darwin, himself, appointed as his guard dog, Thomas Huxley asserted on Darwinian principles that the inferior freed Black Slaves were to be dominated and slaughtered by the superior white population. He said that infamously, callously, openly and without any room for any kind of misunderstanding. Darwinism, as articulated by him, by his approved interpreters and others, in that and generations down to today, has been a bulwark of the very racism that Martin Luther King jr. struggled against and which we are in full blown regression to with the election of the massively racist Donald Trump, the Senate in the control of Mitch McConnell and the neo-confederates, the House in control by the Ayn Randian psychotic Paul Ryan and the Supreme Court about to be re-tilted in favor of their racist, fascist policies through McConnell and the Republican-fascist party making Barack Obama into an incomplete president through denying his Supreme Court nomination to even get a hearing.
The very conditions set into effect in the wake of the civil war, the violent oppression, domination and terror campaign against Black people in the United States are coming back, I can see no reason to believe they won't be at least as bad as some of the periods before Martin Luther King jr. preached his first sermon against racism. When Thomas Huxley wrote of the eventual killing of freed Black slaves in his infamous essay, when Charles Darwin blithely anticipated the extinction of entire races which he certainly knew his readers realized were Black people, what has turned into an epidemic of black killings. the destruction of black people through drug pushing, the promotion of alcohol, the promotion of racist stereotypes were what that destruction of what they claimed with the mantle of scientific reliability were inferior people was exactly what they meant.
The word "liberalism" has had dual and largely antonymic meanings. It means, as Marilynne Robinson and others have pointed out, either the moral obligation to provide the least among us with the means of a decent, dignified life or it means merely having a government which will not intervene in the economy so those who can rig it for themselves can rise and those who can't will fall. I think the real meaning of that latter, 18th century secular liberalism would mean that it should be called "private sector fascism" because that will be the result of it. That is how so many "liberals" in the 18th century meaning of the word, how many of those "enlightenment" heroes of that time and onward could be slave holders while claiming that "all men are created equal", opponents of women's rights, full blown racists and even advocates of genocide of those they deemed inferior. Jefferson, Voltaire, Hume, pretty much the biographical dictionary of heroes of areligious liberalism, when investigated, fit that description (including Peter Singer's Darwin - read the article linked to in the footnotes). I think it's what made the drift of so many "leftists" to neo-conservatism so easy, what made it possible for the late Nat Hentoff to migrate from the Village Voice to the Cato Institute.
Liberalism has paid with its life for the suppression of the original liberalism based on the Mosaic Laws of economic justice in favor of private-sector fascism. Liberalism will never be revived until it faces the existential impossibility of both being contained in the one entity. Either that 18th century atheist definition of "liberalism" or actual liberalism will exit. Considering that real liberalism and everything it brings with it, including absolute equality, is far harder than its depraved counterpart, it will be far harder to revive it. The greatest thing in its favor is that it is egalitarian, far more people have a real stake in its success than the majority which will be suppressed, oppressed, robbed and murdered by private-sector fascism.
Martin Luther King jr. was a radical advocate of American liberalism, a radical egalitarian calling for equal, radical economic justice. He was not and is not not the property of any one race, he was a quintessential Christian egalitarian universalist, he rejected inequality, he died, giving his life in a struggle for justice for trash men. He died for equal justice and the dignity of some of the least among us. He, in every way, stood against the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest. He did so because he, as all real Christians, took the equality, the radical egalitarian content of the Hebrew scriptures to be the very word of God, the very commandment of God (again, see below) that Peter Singer condescendingly says Christians will have to give up because "Darwin".
You can't reconcile the two views of human beings, you can't square Darwinian inequality -without which natural selection can't be real - with the radical equality of Martin Luther King jr. and the Hebrew scriptures. Liberals have to decide which they will believe. If they choose against MLK jr. liberalism will die, as it largely has.
* I will point out that in so far as it was their disagreement about vivisection that gave Darwin his excuse to break with Frances Cobbe, the celebrity animal rights-infanticide proponent, Peter Singer's claims about Darwin, such as in this article, lead me to believe he doesn't have the first clue as to what he's talking about. Either he never read much of Darwin, in full, or he's had that extremely common and so convenient amnesia endemic to the academic class as to what he read him saying or he's flat out lying about it.
It is amazing to me that someone who gets hired by places like Princeton and invited to universities to give highly touted lectures could say what he says here:
Singer also argues that Darwinism has a destructive effect, in that if you accept it, certain other positions are fatally undermined. For example, the idea that God gave Adam, and by proxy, us, dominion over the animal kingdom is a view "thoroughly refuted by the theory of evolution."
I was unsure that those victories are always so straightforward. For example, there are, presumably, many Christians who don’t buy the Adam and Eve creation myth as literal truth. Nevertheless, can’t they live with Darwinism and have their ethics?
"I don’t think Darwinism is incompatible with any Christian ethic," Singer is happy to allow, "except a really fundamentalist one that takes Genesis literally. And it’s not even incompatible strictly with the divine command theory, it just means the divine command theory is based on all sorts of hypotheses which you don’t need because you’ve got other explanations."
So how is the divine command theory undermined by evolution? Couldn’t the Christian, for example, say, yes, evolution is how man came to be, but given there is an is/ought gap, can’t the ethical commands come from on high, as it were?
"Entirely possible. I was just saying that a lot of the impetus for a divine command theory comes from the question ‘where could ethics come from?’. It’s something totally different, out of this world, so therefore you have to assume we’re talking about the will of God or something. Once you have a Darwinian understanding of how ethics can emerge, you absolutely don’t have to assume that, but it’s still possible to assume it. It’s really the ‘I have no need of the hypothesis’ rather than ‘that hypothesis is hereby refuted’."
Not only does that contradict what Darwin said in just about every aspect, it flies in the face of the further use of his theory of natural selection as articulated by him, by his closest colleagues, friends and family members and, in fact, the entire line of Darwinists as mentioned in the first paragraph above. It would seem that the Darwinism of Singers' "Darwinian Ethics" would be the post-war Darwin myth which can have everything every which way depending on what is needed for the "Ethicist" to make whatever assertion they want to.
Peter Singer is an intellectual fraud.
Update: I am putting this in bold because it is essential to my point that the radical egalitarian content of The Law of Moses INCLUDED THE FOREIGNER, THE STRANGER THE "OTHER" LIVING AMONG US in its economic justice. In the words of Leviticus, repeated by Hillel and made even more radical by Jesus, we were to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. There is no more radically anti-Darwinian holding than that. Unless it is the articulation of it by Jesus that what we do to the least among us we do to God and that we are to love each other as Jesus loved his apostles. No matter how latter day Darwinists such as Dawkins, Hartung and Macdonald lie about it, The Law was a radical extension of economic and social justice far beyond the Israelites. The extension of that equality in Christianity continues to include all people. Any "Christians" fail as Christians in so far as they don't practice that most basic commandment. It could not be more the opposite of what was invented by Darwin as Natural Selection.
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