13. WESTERN RATIONALISM
DARWINISM ... AND MARXISM
Darwinism
Marx
Lenin
Elitist intellectuals versus middle-class commoners
Anarchism
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America – The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 402-415.
DARWINISM |
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When in 1859 Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of Species – the culmination of years of research and earlier publications – he shook the moral foundations of Western civilization. This occurred not because Darwin invented a new worldview out of thin air. The ideas of progress through struggle were by this time rather widely accepted. The British Whig party, in fact, was built on this idea: that Britain should be run by those proven strongest in life's competition and that no tears should be wept for the poor swept aside by life's struggles, because that would only hinder human progress. No, it was not the newness of Darwin's
ideas that made his works so spectacular, but it was because he gave
such precise explanation – and justification – to these Whiggish ideas.
His great contribution to this debate of worldviews was that he built
his Darwinist theory of life on a vast field of scientific evidence,
something that had by that time become the absolute requirement for any
claim to Truth. Robert Malthus … and early versions of "survival of the fittest"
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck ... and genetic progress
An earlier Darwin
It is important to note that Lamarck was himself influenced by Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who in 1796 described in his publication Zoonomia how species had developed slowly over the generations by their abilities to pass on from generation to generation not only their basic traits, but also useful alterations in those traits. Thus Erasmus's grandson Charles Darwin came from a family already securely located in the evolutionist camp! Darwin himself
Thus every living creature we saw around us was naturally evolved from a less complex ancestor by a process termed "natural selection." In short, morally speaking, life was at its core simply a matter of the survival of the fittest. Herbert Spencer
Soon Spencer would even outdistance Darwin as the most recognized philosopher of the late 1800s. But the very names Darwin and Darwinism would still serve as the most powerful symbols able to raise strong debate, pro and con, not only well into the 20th century but still even today. Nietzsche
He also was distinctly an atheist – informing the world that "God is dead." He (like Marx) saw the Judeo-Christian religion as offering humanity only enslavement to earthly commonness by teaching people to aim not for greatness in this life – but instead to aim for some supposed afterlife that Judeo-Christianity claimed awaited the humble and faithful at death. Nietzsche was very emphatic in stating that there was no evidence whatsoever that such a Heavenly life actually existed. Darwinism in the late 1800s
In any case, all of this debate rising in the late 1800s helped to shape the rising spirit of the times ... with Darwinism’s clear message to all: the past is dead and to be put behind us. We need to move forward boldly into the future with all of its promising possibilities. We must not become unnerved by the process of change itself. We must not let our progress be handicapped by a clinging to old superstitions and cultural habits of the past. Darwin's theory fit well with the interests of the evolving industrial class, the British Whigs, who dominated fast rising British industry ... and who also pushed for their entry into the British social status system that long held absolute control over British society. This ancient status system had accorded social superiority or privilege only to those with long family pedigrees and a landed estate of some considerable acreage that had been passed down from generation to generation. Breaking into the ranks of those highly privileged within the British class system was virtually impossible if you were not already a member of it by birth. Those who tried to enter the realm of the British aristocracy through simply the demonstration of newly acquired wealth were considered by the aristocracy merely as vulgar upstarts unworthy of social recognition ... no matter how vast their newly acquired wealth.
What Darwin – or more precisely his followers, especially social-theorist Thomas Huxley (who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest") – put in the hands of the Whigs (or Liberals) was the demonstration that in fact life by its very nature was designed not to protect tradition but to reward those who demonstrated vastly superior life skills in the way that they secured success in the face of a very competitive environment. These were the people, by nature itself, who were destined to lead ... not the leisured aristocrats who clung to social privileges merely brought forward from the past. These inherited privileges served no useful social purpose ... and should be dismissed in this highly competitive world. The strong should rule. And government should not intervene in the process ... but instead step aside. Society needed to be liberated from the restraints of custom ... and especially by the political and social habits of the State. Thus English Liberalism was born as a distinct social doctrine of the Whigs ... eventually leading to the creation of the English Liberal Party itself.
Some of the Darwinists were even to take the position that the strong have the natural right to rule over the weak – the latter who in life’s natural competition should not only be allowed to fall by the wayside but in fact should not be supported at all by any special favors coming from the strong ... because this would impede the natural process of social progress, which England (and the entire West) was certain was well underway. As an Anglican clergyman, Malthus himself had wrestled with the problem of why God would allow suffering to occur within his creation. Malthus finally concluded that God wanted man to rise to the challenge of life, to succeed in the face of life's difficulties through the discipline of hard work. Those who fell short of the challenge were simply some kind of disappointment to the great Creator.1 Those who failed merely reaped that which they had sown. This in essence was the British version of Sturm und Drang! Malthus's explanation of course was a terrible reading of what the founder of the Christian faith himself had taught the world. Jesus put the challenge not in terms of natural selection, but quite the opposite. According to Jesus, the challenge of life was to find ways to help the poor in the face of the huge challenge of survival in a competitive world of economics and politics. This ability to do charity, when the opposite would be so much more tempting, was for Jesus the measure of greatness of anyone in God's kingdom. At some point people were going to have to choose between the two, Jesus or the Darwinists. The original Puritans had chosen Jesus, and built an experimental society of mutual service among social equals based precisely on the spiritual ethics of Jesus Christ. The Virginians, not exactly Darwinists but of the same mindset, chose instead personal success at the cost of others (the slaves). Thus by the mid-1800s this was not a new issue. It is simply that Darwinism finally gave aggressive selfishness the moral justification that an increasingly aggressively selfish society seemed to require. But Darwin himself, very sensitive to the
importance of human charity and mutual concern in human society, was
quite aware of this ethical matter, and actually troubled by how many
were choosing to read cruel ethical justification into his theories.
1It is truly amazing the extent to which man can go in rationalizing about God and God's intentions.
In 1848 Marx published his famous 30-page Communist Manifesto in the hope of capitalizing on the spirit of political rebellion that was rocking continental Europe at that time. His Manifesto
outlined history as a series of quite Hegelian dialectical struggles
over time between those who legally owned the land, tools, machinery
(what Marx summed up as social property or the "means of production")
that produced the wealth that the people of society lived off of, and
those (the proletariat2) who, though they owned none of those means of
production, labored physically in using those means of production to
bring forward the wealth that society lived off of. Typically in
history, in the distribution of the wealth that a society jointly
created for its survival and prosperity, most all of that wealth went
to the class of property owners, with very little making its way to the
hands of the proletarian workers. This would bring tremendous tension
to society, which eventually would turn into physical conflict because
of this social injustice. Again, in Hegelian (and eventually Darwinian)
dialectical fashion, such conflict or class struggle would then move
history forward to a new, and better social system, shaped by the way
the opposing classes synthesized their social positions into a new
social structure.
In his analysis, he carefully described
the situation around him in Europe where the feudal system, once
dominated by landed aristocrats, had been challenged by a new social
class of industrial and financial capitalists, thus creating the age of
capitalism. But he also saw how capitalism in turn had created its own
opposing social force in the form of the industrial workers (the
industrial proletariat) whose labors supported the capitalist system.
And he predicted that conditions were quickly rising that would cause
the industrial proletariat in its turn to rise up against the
capitalist class, and through the necessary historical conflict or
revolution open the way to a new social system. Time was on the side of the worker,
because capitalism by its very nature is highly competitive even among
the capitalists themselves – each capitalist trying to eliminate his
competitors in order to gain greater control over the market. This way
they could increase their profits, even establish total or monopolistic
control over the whole process. But of course as they drove each other
out of business, they were inadvertently thinning out their capitalist
social ranks, making their numbers smaller at the same time that the
ranks of the proletariat were growing. Thus simply the calculus of the
few against the many meant that the days of capitalism were numbered.
At that point (which supposedly was now upon them) all the proletariat
had to do was rise up and seize control of the means of production,
thus destroying the power of the capitalist class, and the public
government that had been protecting the capitalists. Thus in rising up
against their capitalist oppressors, they had "nothing to lose but
their chains." But, according to Marx, the resultant
social system would be different, it would be utopia itself. There
would be no further class of dominators or exploiters of the
proletariat, because the new society would be made up solely of
industrial workers. There would be no other class of people in the new
society but this one single industrial class. Everyone would now live
as social equals – as comrades, rather than as a two-class system of
gentlemen lording it over a servant class. Being equals, all would live
communally, as in all land, tools and machines being owned jointly by
all – and by nobody in particular. Consequently, there would be no need for
the political enforcing agency of the state or government. It would
simply wither away, because the sole purpose of the state was to
protect the interests of the privileged class of property owners,
whether feudal, capitalist or whatever. In the communist society there
would be no personal property, thus no state. Something like a
Rousseauian bliss would then hold this happy world together. Also, the new society would end the long
historical dialectic of a ruling class and a proletariat class finding
themselves once again in conflict. With no division under communism
between a propertied class and a proletarian class, there would be no
cause for social conflict, no tension, no stress, only blissful peace.
Thus this last historical revolution would bring history to a
completion, the kind of millennialist completion that everyone was
expecting because of the unprecedented progress they had been observing
coming forth at mind-boggling speed. All history was supposedly about
to fulfill itself, and Marx was showing how that was to be accomplished. This was all pretty powerful stuff. And
it appealed to the interests not only of European industrial workers,
but also to intellectual Progressivists – not only in Europe but also
in America. Marx's theories seemed to be irrefutable because they were
built on hard fact. Unlike the philosophical speculations of social
philosophers before him, but quite like Darwin, Marx had thrown a lot
of data into his analysis, supposedly hard economic data, thus
qualifying his theory as "scientific socialism," making him – and those
who followed his lead – "scientific socialists." As all materialists or mechanists, Marx
had no need of the concept of God, or some divine hand driving forward
the economic process he had outlined. It all worked – similar to
Darwin's theories – entirely mechanically. Marx personally was an
atheist. In fact he was quite opposed to the Christian religion, or any
religion that saw history shaped and judged by a Supreme Being. As for
Christianity, he saw the religion simply as a cruel psychological tool
used by Europe's ruling classes (most lately the capitalists) that
savagely exploited their own servants or workers, by excusing their
horrible treatment of the workers under the promise that if the
oppressed workers all cooperated with the system and behaved themselves
(not rebel against their oppressors) they would be rewarded in the next
life with heaven. To Marx, such religious theory was only a form of
spiritual opium given to the masses to keep them docile.
Even though America was going through the
same process of social industrialization as Europe, America really
never connected with Marxism the way Europe did. Marxism had virtually
no place in the semi-feudal South, and even in the industrial North it
gained only a marginal position among the American industrial workers.
Intellectuals took an interest in it, largely because of its utopian
features. But in general Americans developed their own versions of
intellectual utopianism, quite apart from Marxism. There would be some
similarities, which would get these intellectuals in trouble,
especially during the Red Scares that hit America from time to time. But by and large, America did its own
thing. From their very founding, the New England and mid-Atlantic
colonies had been opened up, settled, and defended not by resident
kings and feudal lords but by a huge class of commoner individuals and
their families – giving American culture its individualistic character.
With America's expansion west across the Appalachian Mountains, the
rural Midwest and the frontier West were settled by the same type of
very individualistic Americans. To these proud Americans the very idea
of giving up their independence to some kind of hovering governmental
institution was itself anathema. Socialism – or government by a
politically entitled set of enlightened supervisors – would not gain
ground in America ... until the second half of the 20th century. But we
will have more – much more – to say about that in the next volume of
this historical study. Meanwhile, as Europe headed into the
Twentieth Century, clearly a growing number of social and political
philosophers were convinced that, through some kind of Darwinian
process, Western civilization (and, via the West, also world
civilization as well) was moving into a bright future in which utopian
existence for all – even (and especially) the unwashed masses – seemed
to loom into view. Society just needed some adjustments here and there
– led of course by these political philosophers or social scientists –
in order to bring this process to completion. "Historical progress" and
"democracy" – however conceived specifically (and the variation was
indeed huge) were the bywords, the slogans, the shibboleths, of those
who supposed that they possessed special intellectual insights into
where the world was headed. Within
that group of Western social
reformers was a large group of Marxist ideologues and political
activists – forming the Social Democratic Party in a number of European
countries – whose expectations were that Marx's Communist revolution
would soon break out across Europe. This supposedly would occur
naturally first in a society experiencing the most advanced state of
capitalism, probably Great Britain or Germany. After all, Marx's
scientific socialism would not work except under the historical
circumstances he had so carefully described. Every stage of historical
development had to be completed before history would be ready to move
on to the next step or phase in its development. The dialectical method
demanded that kind of historical precision.
2A
term drawn from Roman times in reference to the members of the Roman
working class who held little or no property and thus few or no
political rights.
However members of the West's property-owning
middle class – and certainly that included the vast number of
middle-class Americans – loved their private property and not only had
no interest in the idea of intellectuals taking command of society in
order to bring their world to some kind of utopian property-less
democracy but were positively horrified at the idea. Indeed, in Puritan America (colonial New
England) it had been well-understood that property ownership was
crucial to the development of a sense of social responsibility, which
is why new Puritan settlements were designed with small but equal
property allotments given to each new family joining the community.
Thus it was that – to what eventually became Middle-Class America – the
ownership of a home and adjoining property was an absolutely
foundational principle never to be violated. Any talk about removing
property rights of the people was absolute anathema to such Americans,
and a key part of the fear or Red Scare that would occasionally sweep
America when intellectuals were heard talking of social property rather
than private property. In any case, Marxist-Leninist ideas were
rampant in Western intellectual circles, especially with Lenin’s
successful overthrow of Russia’s very brief middle-class democracy and,
as a result of the very brutal Russian Revolution and Civil War of
1917-1921, the installing in its place of a Communist working-class
democracy ... a "democracy" directed and controlled by Lenin’s
Communist Party elite, of course. Indeed Lenin – and his chief partner and
heir-apparent, Leon Trotsky – intended their Russian Revolution to be
merely the first phase of a larger, world-wide revolution designed to
sweep away bourgeois, middle-class culture and society and replace it
everywhere with a Communist working-class society – directed by the
vanguard of the proletarian revolution, the Communist Party elite. And it looked for a while as if they
might actually succeed in spreading their revolution, at least to the
defeated powers of the Great War, Germany and Austria-Hungary, when
Communist uprisings occurred in the capitals Berlin and Budapest. Thus while Marxist-Leninist thoughts
delighted a good number of Western intellectuals, who found it easy to
identify with such high ideals (and such marvelous political
opportunity for themselves as society's managers), it set off a Red
Scare among the comfortable middle classes of Western societies
everywhere. And thus also a serious social cultural
breach between intellectuals and Middle-Class or bourgeois commoners
began to grow within Western society, especially in America. A battle
between "high-brow" intellectuals and "low-brow" commoners3 was
beginning to form. The battle would become intense and bitter – and
rather persistent through the rest of the 20th century (and even still
today).
3Or
"a basket of deplorables," as Democratic Party presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton labeled them in a September 2016 campaign speech.
We need to include another political philosophy
that developed along these same lines towards the latter part of the
1800s, Anarchism. Anarchism was not a movement or an ideology. Instead
it simply was a mood that infected European politics as the familiar
feudal world began to fall apart and as the emerging post-feudal Europe
was not yet moving towards any set social form or structure. Anarchism
might be considered Rousseauian. It might be considered Marxist. Both
philosophies stressed how a better world would be one in which the
little people led their lives without having to live under powerful
overlords who wanted to control their lives. But anarchists were not
the type to wait for revolution to develop. They simply took matters in
their own hands, and assaulted those leaders themselves. In short, they
were simply assassins assuming the heroic responsibility of removing
evil overlords from society, or else they were just socially
maladjusted individuals, bitter because things were not working out for
them socially and taking their sense of vengeance out on the leaders
who symbolized an uncaring society. In any case there would be a rash of
anarchist events in Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and even
in America (President McKinley was shot and killed by one). In fact it
was a small group of anarchists (believing themselves also to be
loyal Serbian nationalists) who, in assassinating the Austrian Grand
Duke and his wife in 1914, would set off a huge war that brutalized and
ultimately crippled European civilization itself. |
Since the publication in 1798 of the book 
Going at the issue of evolution from a different perspective, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamarck had concluded in his 1809 
Darwin himself. What Charles Darwin had achieved in his 1859 book 
Darwinism
was further buttressed by the writings of other social philosophers of
the day. Besides Darwin's pupil Huxley, who actually coined the term
"survival of the fittest," there was Huxley's friend Herbert Spencer,
who had been moving in the direction of Darwin's thinking even before
Darwin published his first work in 1859. Spencer had been working on
both social theory (his 1851 
The
German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche was not exactly a
Darwinist, but certainly was – or would soon become – a voice of his
times (the late 1800s), a period deeply steeped in the Darwinist
mindset. In his multi-volume series 
Yet oddly enough Marxism was very popular among a
number of intellectuals in Russia, where industrial capitalism had
barely got itself underway as it slowly emerged from under the Russian
feudalism that still largely dominated the Russian social scene. Surely
by Marxist logic, Russia was hardly ripe for revolution.
