An Example

Letter of Charles Darwin to Heinrich Fick

July 26 [1872]
Down Beckenham, Kent

Dear Sir,

I am much obliged for your kindness in having sent me your essay, which I have read with very great interest. Your view of the daughters of short-lived parents inheriting property at an early age, and thus getting married with its consequences, is an original and quite new idea to me. — So would have been what you say about soldiers, had I not read an article published about a year ago by a German (name forgotten just at present) who takes nearly the same view with yours, and thus accounts for great military nations having had a short existence.

I much wish that you would sometimes take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,—namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-Unions, that all workmen,—the good and bad, the strong and weak,—sh[oul]d all work for the same number of hours and receive the same wages. The unions are also opposed to piece-work,—in short to all competition. I fear that Cooperative Societies, which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competition. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind. — Nevertheless under any system, temperate and frugal workmen will have an advantage and leave more offspring than the drunken and reckless.—

With my best thanks for the interest which I have received from your Essay, and with my respect, I remain, Dear Sir

Yours faithfully

Ch. Darwin

This is the full letter, from Darwin Online, not some anti-evolution website.   Notice what Darwin said about trade unions from his framework of natural selection and compare it to liberal policy of the past two centuries.   Ask yourself how President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to the near desperation level of $9.00 an hour would survive in Darwin's "scientific" economic analysis.   Unions would, clearly, have to go.  It is an irony, isn't it, that this aspect of Darwinism is most popular in those states in which creationism has political power.  Only, that's only ironic if you haven't read Darwin in detail.  Both Darwin and conservative economic policy are derived from Malthus.

The nearly ubiquitous belief among people on the nominal left is that Darwin's legacy is, somehow, a bulwark of liberalism.   The history of Darwinism as politics is anything but liberal.  Eugenics and  Social Darwinism (which Darwin explicitly endorsed), extremely regressive taxation schemes - taxing the poor at a higher rate than the rich  to discourage the poor having children and the rich to have more, on the assumption of the biological superiority of the rich -  the assertion of the negative effects of Cesarean delivery of babies (saving presumably 'unfit' babies or the presumably "unfit" mothers), opposition to artificial birth control (though, tellingly, not infanticide or abortion) .... All of those positions, and I can back every one of them up with quotes,  have been proposed on the basis of protecting the population from the presumed interruption of natural selection, allowing the unfit to produce children, all of them citing Charles Darwin's authority for the idea.  There is nothing, whatsoever, in Darwin's understanding of natural selection that could be considered as consistent with assertions of equality, inherent rights, an obligation to protect the rights of the most vulnerable in the population.  As seen in the quotation from Thomas Huxley yesterday,  natural selection was implied to negate the reality of equality.   Equality is the absolutely essential holding of democracy and a just world and natural selection is based in an assumption that equality doesn't really exist and that political attempts to create equality will be a disaster for the human species.

Rush Holt is a physicist, he likely never read any of the relevant literature from Charles Darwin, his closest associates and children.  I've found very few of Darwin's greatest fans who have done that.   He really should look into the explicit record that they and those they passed the torch to have produced.  Up until the Second World War, eugenics and Social Darwinism were considered respectable applications of natural selection.  It was only after the war that the history built up in the previous eighty-six years was denied and suppressed.  It would be a moot point if neo-eugenics and a refurbished Social Darwinism didn't reemerge among what Gould and Lewontin called "Darwinian fundamentalists", finding their most extreme forms in Sociobiologists and "Evolutionary" Psychologists.    You can read W. D. Hamilton's promotion of eugenics to see that it is not any kind of departure from the most putrid eugenics of Karl Pearson early in the 20th century.   Both Hamilton and Pearson derive their ideas from things that Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton,  Ernst Haeckel and others within the Darwin circle wrote.

Political liberalism is not based in science, it is based in the history of human beings in the real world, in real societies, it is founded in the human experience of imposed inequality, discrimination, racism, sexism.  That experience is no less real than the fossil record and the mapping of DNA, it is far more intimately known in excruciating detail than any of the purportedly objective observations of scientists.   History and human testimony carry a mass of detailed information that is far too complex to treat with science, it takes human experience, the widest of human understanding to derive the truth from that abundant mass of evidence and information.   The lessons for anyone who has the integrity to look at it without self-interest and the blinders of privilege knows that equality is real, it has a real and beneficial effect in the world.   By the pursuit of equality and justice, life is transformed into something greater and more real than science can account for,  science could look for it forever and never find it.   The attempt to find a basis of political liberalism in science is an illogical folly, the attempt will end up destroying the only reason for it to matter.

The reality of equality, inherent rights, and justice, of the benefits of those is confirmed by the hardest of reality, the human history of their absence.   Thomas Huxley's Darwinian analysis of Lincoln's Emancipation is shown to be false by the history of the United States, especially in the short period during which the last legal remnants of it are being destroyed.    Darwin's predictions for human societies in The Descent of Man have proven false as well.   The human experience of putting Darwinism into the law has shown it produces a reign of terror, not the dream of an ever better human population.  Considering that Darwin, Haeckel and others held up ancient Sparta as an example of what could be achieved by enhanced human breeding, that's not such a surprise.

Liberals need to get over Darwin.  They really do.  The post-war propaganda is shown to be false by anyone who does what anyone should do before expounding on it, read the record left by him and those he was promoting.   Until that is done,  anything that is said about him will be the product of ignorance.  Reading the conventional political,  application of Darwinism starting in the late 19th century is a history that has to be known if it is not to be repeated.

Rush Holt became a politician when he ran for office, it is his responsibility to know that history as revealed in the primary documentation and not in post-war fables.  His oath of office requires that he learn what it has to tell him.