Dr. Larry Arnhart has written an interesting book that calls for conservatives to embrace Darwinian evolutionary theory and thus make themselves presentable at the altar of scientism.
Darwinian Conservatism
By Larry Arnhart
Imprint Academic
Exeter, UK
Ppbk, 156 pgs., index, bibliography
ISBN: 0 907845 99 1
WHERE THE FEEBLE SENSES FAIL.
— St. Thomas Aquinas, Tantum Ergo
Dr. Larry Arnhart, professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, is on a mission to save conservatives from the curse of ignorance that afflicts those who have adamantly refused to yield to the revealed wisdom of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is Arnhart’s salvific purpose then to act as a modern John the Baptist and proclaim the inerrancy of "Darwinian conservatism” that will allow conservatives to embrace “modern science” and not be mocked as Luddites, and (God forbid) fundamentalists.
Dr. Arnhart’s dissertation, his discussions of human nature, culture, and reason are a compendium of modernity’s higher law. He explains that human nature “is a spontaneous order because it has arisen as a product of genetic evolution by natural selection, in which complex order arises without a designer.” And, in his “twenty natural desires” the author explains that “religious understanding” is the product of man being “Driven to fear and despair by their experience of pain and death, human beings imagine themselves surrounded by mysterious forces that determine their fate. Driven to hope and pride by their feeling of spiritual exaltation, human beings imagine that their existence can be redeemed by ecstatic union with the divine.”
Arnhart declares that man’s first concern is survival and that morality is inherent in our bipedal specie, not as a function of right or wrong or any moral codex but simply to act as a means of specie preservation. Morality is viewed as a mere utilitarian function; if any behavior acts to avoid extinction it’s good, if it places the individual, family, or clan in peril, it’s evil.
If Darwinian materialism is to be the foundation of a new scientific conservatism one is required to ask; what is it we are to conserve? Darwinian conservatism fails to address the question of a higher or transcendent order, and its biological view of human morality lacks any apodictical finality; it is constantly in flux and presumably at times unstable as the specie continues to evolve. All of which are in opposition to St. Aquinas’s teaching that the natural desires of men are to “seek the truth about God and to live in society.” Rational man, be he of the late Middle Ages, or modernity, was never a being ruled by his instinctive nature, but rather is a being with a soul and conscience, able to examine in detail his instincts, and capable of considering a higher, transcendent morality. That man frequently succumbed to sin is a matter of the historical record, but this failure was the outcome of an ongoing confrontation between the good and evil that is and will be an inherent element of humanity’s constant struggle.
The single, most pernicious result of Darwinian materialism is its refutation of man’s “image” of himself. Rhetorician Richard Weaver, in his essay The Critique of Modernity defines this traditional image as “something arrived at through the imagination…It is the product of our total awareness of what man has been, is now, and — the indispensable component of the picture — what man ought to be.” Weaver goes on to discuss how this component is achieved and remarks that “If one proceeds in this fashion, one takes the oldest and most widely received view of the subject, which is that man is a creature in whom a creator takes a special interest and whom he holds to a standard of responsibility.”
Intellectual historian John Lukacs has defined the current era as “The Age of the Bourgeoisie” and argues that it is about to come to an end. We can observe the pressures inherent in such a condition: the destruction of the American bourgeoisie via “Globalization (i.e. post-modern capitalists chasing cheap labor),” the inimical attacks on Christianity, the corresponding rise of “spirituality” and its sundry cults, a startling increase in personality disorders, and a nearly universal acquiescence to the concepts of progressivism, the machine, and “scientism.” Dr. Arnhart’s book and thesis represents, I think, the latter.
In his final chapter, Biotechnology, Arnhart argues that there are “technical limits to using biotechnology to increase human intelligence.” In a decidedly cogent moment Arnhart writes, “If I am right that the biotechnological manipulation of human life will always be limited in its technological means and moral ends by the adaptive complexity of human nature, then one must wonder why so many people are forecasting the biotechnological abolition of humanity.” Arnhart’s question reveals a myopic view of human nature. There is nothing intrinsically “good” about human nature; indeed, one may argue that human nature, devoid of a transcendent moral worldview is inherently evil. And, that is the reason many people are “forecasting the biotechnological abolition of humanity.”
Dr. Arnhart has written an interesting book that calls for conservatives (I think he really means neo-conservatives) to embrace Darwinian evolutionary theory and thus make themselves presentable at the altar of scientism. To his credit he suggests that both Darwinism and Intelligent Design be taught in our schools and speaking of Intelligent Design we’ll give one of its chief proponents, Dr. Michael J. Behe, the last word" “The experimental evidence that natural selection could build a vertebrate from an invertebrate, a mammal from a reptile, or a human from an ape is a bit less than the experimental evidence for superstring theory — that is, none at all.”
Darwinian Conservatism is available on Amazon.com.
Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
robertcheeks@core.com
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Of course, if you already believe in the supernatural, then a book like Larry Arnhart's, which, implicitly at least, rejects this belief, may not be welcome.
But I think that religious conservatives should evaluate it on its own merits. That is, it may be that the gods wish us to order our society in a certain way. But it may also be the case that biological realities also indicate the same end. If so, religious people need not fear this book, which in fact reinforces their own (religiously-derived) beliefs. And since many of the liberal persuasion are also not religious, this book, and the arguments it presents, should be a useful weapon against the Left.
It would be a mistake to insist that someone must have religious belief before embracing conservatism, doubly so since there are so many incompatible religious beliefs. Surely the principles of conservatism may be argued for as independent truths, whether or not a transcendent order exists.
Comment by Douglas Hainline | May 18, 2006
I would rather be a monkey and bite Dr. Wilberforce on the ankle than imitate him.
Comment by Ron Berman | June 13, 2006