The Atheist "Left" Its Magical Thinking And The Disastrous Results

Yesterday I criticized the idea that egalitarian democracy, economic justice, social equality were compatible with materialism, that those rarest of fragile phenomena in politics and society could just, somehow, manage to arise from the substrate of assumptions and ideas that constitute materialism.   That assumption of substrate neutrality for those central holdings of authentic liberalism, the program of any legitimate left in regard to materialism is, I think, central to the failure of the left.  It is implicated in many if not all of the disastrous and self-impeaching trends in the left for the past century and a half and it has alienated the left from its natural base among people who reject materialism.

That concept of substrate neutrality in regard those very concepts such as equality and justice is especially bizarre when asserted by materialists because materialism is, itself, incompatible with the idea that the effects wouldn't be determined from their causes.  In the radically restricted and monist system that is materialism different causal precedents would necessarily lead to different effects.   You couldn't start from something which produced, say, a real effective and determining belief in universal equality or its resultant economic justice, change one of the essential components that led to that kind of potent belief in equality and come up with that belief in its most potent form from the radically changed causal antecedent of the results.   Yet materialists who assert that their purported devotion to equality and justice are the product of their materialism instead of in essential conflict with it are in constant denial that magic has to, somewhere, be involved in their alchemy.   They have to constantly violate their materialism to hold both things and, when push comes to shove, it is as likely to be their ideals that suffer on behalf of their materialist faith.

That is especially true when that most useful of ideas in the  culture of atheism is brought into the mix, Darwinism.  There the would-be lefty atheist has to pretend the entire history of Darwinism WITHIN SCIENCE never happened to maintain the illogical balancing act between their ideology and their ideals.  It is an inconvenient and unmentionable fact that human eugenics was and still is an inevitable conclusion whenever it is a required belief that natural selection is a universal law of science. That is shown by mainstream Darwinsts from Charles Darwin, through his closest associates such as Haeckel and Galton, right up through the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Fischer and Haldane, through the period of DNA fundamentalism of Watson and Crick and the Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists and even, I suspect, as non-adaptationist genetics and epigentics are placed in a marriage of convenience with natural selection.  Eugenics has been asserted by most of its main figures, promoted by them in both its most aggressive or passive forms. The history of  conventional Darwinism shows that the short post-war period when eugenics was discredited, socially, is the fluke not eugenics.

That eugenics is central to Darwinism as relevant to the human species was noted by Darwin, both in his endorsement of the most extreme form of it, stated in works he endorsed by both Galton and, even more so Haeckel*.   The attempt to distance scientific Darwinism from "Social Darwinism" depends on the lie that Charles Darwin, himself, didn't state that they were identical in the fifth and sixth editions of Origin of Species and that assumption was held and asserted by virtually every conventional Darwinist from then on.  It was the anti-eugenic Darwinists such as Franz Boaz who were the flukes, not the Karl Pearsons, Ronald Fishers, James Watsons, and Francis Cricks.  And such people as Richard Dawkins  occasionally let slip that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing, blaming Hitler for making it disreputable.

Whatever else you might justifiably say about the throughly repulsive though entirely conventional Darwinist*, Ernst Haeckel, he was honest about both the usefulness of Darwinism for atheism and its logical conclusions, given his ideological foundation.  It was Darwinism to which he credited the "final triumph" of  materialist monism which has no room for such concepts as justice and morality and that it necessitates a belief in innate inequality in humans and that the extermination, by nature and by human beings as agents of nature, of even entire ethnic groups of human beings is inevitable and the way of nature.  Since natural selection is a development from Malthus and incorporates and extends his assumptions, I don't see how a materialist could hold that those aren't essential to the idea and that it doesn't, inescapably, refute the very bases of political liberalism, as, indeed, Haeckel stated in writing which Darwin endorsed. You would have to acknowledge something outside of their materialist monism for that to not be an inevitable conclusion and that is not permitted under materialism.  And the same is true for other materialist systems of thought, such as Marxism and its various sects and cults.

In an article published in The Nation in 1997, Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh issued a sort of atheist fatwa against the critics of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, the currently fashionable form of biological determinism.   The central issues in their condemnation are old ones, as old as the use of biology as a pillar of atheist ideology, accusing the critics of those of the intellectually unforgivable, of being religious.   In the process, I'll point out, they conveniently ignore quite a bit of stuff, even claiming the most prominent critics of Sociobiology, Gould, Lewontin and Hubbard as allies for the defense of the very things they rejected.  It's such a mish-mash of stuff - including falsified history - that it would take a series of posts to sort it out but it is based on pretending that natural selection and history of Darwinism isn't strong evidence that it is basically at odds with the central pillars of the left.   Inequality IS the central assumption of natural selection, it is intrinsic to the idea, it is an inescapable conclusion of that idea  BECAUSE IT IS THE FOUNDATION OF IT.  In materialist monism it will always and inevitably lead to the conclusion that equality and justice are illusions.  It will turn the moral obligations central to liberalism into the opposite, a foolish generator of dysgenic forces in the human population which could lead to our extinction.   The only possibility for someone to hold that both natural selection is valid and that the very foundations of the left are true is to acknowledge that there is more to life, to the universe than what is included in that materialist monist system which is the actual god of atheists faith.

I think the failure of that materialist "left" is due to the fact that its central faith is incompatible with what defines a real left and it, inevitably, will turn on the great underclass that is the genuine center of leftist politics, turning them from the image of God into the "unfit" or at least "the masses" to be managed by an elite of the most fit or those who are in some way superior.  Not a single, even Marxist government, has not had that as its major failing and in most a central aspect of its very being.  The failure of the atheist left is founded on the basic conflict between their faith and their alleged ideals which will always, in practice,  be placed aside for their atheism.  I think that the election losing condescension and snobbery that is inherent to the secular left is a cultural product of it.  The People are not such fools that they don't notice at least that much of it.  Barbara Ehrenreich's Nellie Bly turn in Nickled and Dimed hardly makes up for it.  As I've said before, I'd guess that book was read more by church folk devoted to social justice than atheists.

*  Based on no less an authority than Charles Darwin, also by Thomas Huxley.

Update:  I have set out the extensive record of endorsement of Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton and other eugenicists, scientific racists and advocates of both eugenics and the salubrious effects of the "unfit" being killed, up to and including entire ethnic groups by Charles Darwin.  I don't hesitate to say that the case is open and shut and based, entirely on Charles Darwin's published words endorsing specific works in which those things are said, especially by Haeckel, the record of his endorsement of Haeckel is massive, specific and without reservation.  Charles Darwin has a unique place in the history and phenomenon of Darwinism, his identification of Haeckel's POV with his own was explicit in the introductory pages of The Descent of Man, throughout that book and in many existing letters in his own hand.   If you want to deny that record you will need documents in which Charles Darwin retracted his endorsement after he made it, which would need to be not too long before his death.  In order to overcome the documentary record in Darwin's words nothing short of more of Darwin's words will do it.  So long as it's an honest evaluation of the truth you want, which I have generally found people of your ideology aren't really interested in.