AS HAS BEEN POINTED OUT HERE before, when the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence were trying to come up with a justification for breaking the standing law in effect in the American colonies they had to do so in terms of the rights of People, rights have to reside somewhere, as Barney Franck once pointed out, there is no such thing as a right that does not inhere to a living being who has that right. They did so in the famous declaration that
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That came after they asserted that it was the right of human beings to overturn the government that was governing them, stating that as the beginning of the explanation of the origin of those rights:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
As dangerous as I hold that the cult of the Founders is, I will say that that is as succinct a definition of the reality of rights of human beings as you can find. Knowing that the rich, white, aristocratic men on that committee were self-conscious members of the current trends in thinking, the so-called 18th century Enlightenment, they would have been loathe to make a resort to assert that rights came from God and not through some naturalistic explanation. They knew, certainly, that though that would make some of them uneasy, Jefferson, the author of those words, John Adams, too, certainly many of the chief of their fellow revolutionaries such as James Madison would have liked a naturalistic assertion but they were smart men who certainly knew that there was no secure naturalistic explanation that would not be subject to rejection by the typical ploys of skepticism and irreligion. Irreligion was a deeply entrenched idol of thought in the intelligentsia of the late 18th century.
Depending on that assertion that rights are an EQUAL gift to all People from God is the extremely important quality of those rights, that they cannot be removed by the act of human beings, they are "unalienable" and cannot be lost except through the act of the same God that bestowed them.
It's not necessary to fully address the obvious hypocrisies of these aristocrats, the slave owners among them, those who accepted slavery as a fact to be exploited for the profit of non-slaveholding financiers (Hamilton sold the slave-compact of the Constitution on that basis) to note that that view of rights is in direct conflict with the kind of rights that Thomas Huxley addressed in the 1880 article I linked to yesterday, speaking of the view of such things that was compatible and consistent, not with a belief in God and egalitarian democracy but with naturalistic Darwinism, the belief in natural selection.
its [a biological grouping's and an idea's] right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals
The means of "resisting extinction by its rivals," is, of course, eventually done through the successful group, THE GROUP TO WHICH HE ASSIGNS ALL OF THE RIGHTS, exterminating the other group. HE SAYS THAT THE RIGHTS BELONG EXCLUSIVELY TO THE ONES WHO SURVIVE.
If you doubt that is what he held, due to his belief in natural selection as described by Charles Darwin, read his 1865 essay in which he looks forward to the extermination of the former slaves by the former slave holders and other white people in exactly the manner implied fifteen years later, as quoted above. It wasn't the only time he or his closest colleagues, including his master, Charles Darwin, asserted that the extermination of entire groups of people, whether among other races or among the poor and infirm within the English and other "races" (as they often put it) would be a positive biological benefit to those who did the killing, the survivors in the "struggle for existence," to use Darwin's own term.
I will note in passing that in the 1865 "Emancipation: Black and White Huxley was explicit in attacking the equality of all People:
"The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion,"
But the idea of equality is no more illogical than the idea of rights, to start with. If the rights of those who Thomas Huxley wanted to deprive of them were not logically protected, there is no more logical protection for those who he wanted to grant them to. That's one of the things that those who want to deprive others of their rights never want to consider, the rights they claim and prize as their own are no more secure than the rights of others. If someone wants to reject the logicality of their rights, they are as vulnerable to attack. I don't think there is any right to claim that rights are unequally distributed nor do I think there is a right to lie and defame and attempt to alienate the rights of groups or individuals. I think what I just said renders that "right" an illogical illusion.
As a political blogger, it is clear that the two concepts of rights, their origin, their equal or unequal distribution, their removal or inalienable nature are incompatible and, since Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Galton, Karl Pearson, H. G. Wells, etc. right down to Richard Dawkins, Kevin MacDonald, Herrenstein and Murray, etc. today want to apply the theory of natural selection to the human population, human societies, determining the human legal system, social policy, educational policy, and the law, in general it is clear that Darwinism, from its inception and down till today is totally incompatible with the continuance of egalitarian democracy, racial harmony, care of the least among us, their elevation to the extent they can rise, and all other good that was aspired to, even by those most hypocritical slave-owning founders.
That is why questioning the theory of natural selection, making it answer for all of its defects, those known during the first twenty years after its publications - MANY OF WHICH HAVE BEEN VALID FOR THE ENTIRE TIME, SUCH AS THE ONE I CRITIQUED - and those which have arisen since then is a political issue.
There is absolutely no reason that any member of any group, any individual whose rights and very existence is called into question by the dogma of natural selection has to merely shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, well, science says so I have to just accept it." I would suggest that people look at the long list of those Darwin held to be inferior in The Descent of Man, claiming that any inferiority held by our ancestors at that time would be held by their descendants, ask themselves if they really believe what he claimed. And they can ask the same about the long line of Darwinists who loved to make lists of those they held to be inferior, in English as well as German and other languages. I have gone into considerable detail about how the famous British Darwinist Karl Pearson and his colleague Margaret Moul wrote a paper detailing their claims about the biological defects of Polish and Russian Jews in 1925, a paper cited by Nazi scientists - at least one of whom is thanked by Pearson and Moul in their paper - as a reason for eliminating them from the Aryan population, something they put into stupendous effect only stopped by the combined forces of the Allies putting a stop to it, including the democracy such as the United States was then trying to become.
With the persistent power of the putrid political-Darwinist tome, The Bell Curve, this Darwinism is among the most dangerous engines of Republican-fascist political and judicial attack on democracy there is. If natural selection was not the hegemonic requirement of the scientific establishment it would almost certainly not have the force it does.
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