ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
the public debate continues. Newman gets at a provocative accommodation when he
writes to a friend, “It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the
Creator…years ago gave laws to matter…I do not [see] that the accidental evolution of
organic beings is inconsistent with divine design – It is accidental to us and not to God”
(77).
But not all debates can be settled with a more consistent vocabulary. Some are more
thorough, more hidebound and less reducible to semantics. Such debates are unlikely to
be settled in a single conference, much less a single paper. Celebrity intellectuals such as
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – Terry Eagleton enjambs them into one,
“Ditchens” – concoct a heady mix of Darwinism, scientism and fatalism. They explain
human behavior in terms of body chemistry, biological instincts, anarcho-capitalism
and sexual needs reflecting our evolutionary history.
Thus evolutionary studies can become a form of eliminativism, whether tacit or explicit,
according to which any number of impersonal forces converge to explain the way your
life and your wider culture work. Your autobiography is the result of these impersonal
forces; they explain you better than your decisions do. In part this is what Darwin want-
ed. Species are, he says, “utterly inexplicable on the ordinary view of the independent
creation of each species, but are explicable on the view of colonisation from the nearest
and readiest source, together with the subsequent modification and better adaptation of
the colonists to their new homes” (849). Evolution does not describe natural history as
much as attempt explain it. Billions of years of cosmic expansion serve as a backdrop to
our lives, and the backdrop does not disappear just so one actor in its drama can freely
choose Coke or Pepsi. We are produced within a universe we cannot do without.
Hobbes uses the English Civil Wars to prove his own Ditchens point. Participants on
both side of the conflict revert to brutality and mindless cruelty to hide their vicious-
ness behind appeals to justice, rights, God’s will, each of which is a mask for the will
to power. Eliminativism edges out moral decision-making by rendering it superfluous.
The choice to do something looks appealing if and only if impersonal forces coordinate
to render it so. Social Darwinists in the past century contend every act of charity works
against the natural order by which some are weak and others strong, some poor and
others rich. Many today do all manner of intellectual gymnastics to preserve the unkind
choices made in the past, to defend the injustices of the status quo. Reflecting Robert
Chambers’ idea of species transmutation, as evolution was known before Darwin, Alfred
Lord Tennyson gives us the line about nature “red in tooth and claw.” Dawkins ap-
proves in The Selfish Gene: “I think [Tennyson’s phrase] sums up our modern under-
standing of natural selection admirably” (2). It is bald, brutal praise for the predator te-
naciously willing to do what it takes to survive.
Enticed by this view of freedom and taken in by the strength it rewards, some neo-
Darwinian theorists endorse survival as the criterion of success. If it lasts, it must be
good. If it is still around today, it must be really good. Longevity is the arbiter both of
life and of virtue. But history is “not a biological category” any more than riding a
bike is a psychological one. Aristotle through to Spinoza contend happiness is the goal
of life, the answer to the question of why we get up in the morning and do what we do,
and when some endorse survival as a more persuasive alternative, I think a few short-
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