The Western Dogma

"There is no god, and Darwin is his prophet"

In 1854, five years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Schopenhauer foresaw that “the unparalleled zeal and activity displayed in every branch of Natural Science … threatens to lead to a gross, stupid Materialism,” and “moral bestiality.”[1] Twenty years later (1874), and three years after The Descent of Man by the same Darwin, Nietzsche predicted that if such ideas “are thrust upon the people for another generation…, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed.”[2] In 1920, Bernard Shaw foresaw the same danger: Neo-Darwinism [Darwin revisited by August Weismann] in politics has produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it.”[3]

Where are we a century after this grim prediction, and half a century after Richard Dawkins proclaimed in his world bestseller The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”? He congratulated himself in 1989 that “in the dozen years since the Selfish Gene was published its central message has become textbook orthodoxy.”[4]

Well, now we have Yuval Harari, the world star of what might be called trans-Darwinism, i.e. Darwinism coupled with transhumanism. In Sapiens (2015), he drives home the point of Darwinian wisdom: “life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer — and no meaning.” We are nothing but combinations of algorithms. Hence the idea, quite “natural”, of tinkering with ourselves. In Homo Deus (2017), Harari announces “the upgrading of men into gods” through the miracle of high technology: “having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.” But how?

bioengineers will take the old Sapiens body, and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. … Cyborg engineering will go a step further, merging the organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, or millions of nano-robots that will navigate our bloodstream, diagnose problems and repair damage. … A bolder approach dispenses with organic parts altogether, and hopes to engineer completely non-organic beings.

Harari is “the world’s most important thinker”, assures us Le Point for the promotion of his new book 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century — the Socrates of post-modernity, a gay Israeli so a genius twice. Klaus Schwab has made him his mentor, Macron has been anointed with his brain oil.

If the human being is the result of a blind and random evolutionary process (accidental errors in the duplication of chemical molecules), then why shouldn’t man, now endowed with a powerful brain, put it to use and take his own evolution in his own hands. Surely we can do better than mere chance! This logic is simple and hard to contest. Even more obvious is the moral consequence of Darwinism: there is no moral law other than the law of the strongest.

Most Westerners, though educated in the Darwinian catechism since elementary school, recoil in horror from this conclusion, because their moral conscience prevents them from doing so. They are rationally convinced that Darwinism is as firmly established a natural law as heliocentrism, but they still want to believe that natural law and moral law are two independent orders of things. Darwin is taken as scientifically right when he explains that human races are the result of natural selection, but condemned as morally wrong when he draws the following conclusions in The Descent of Man:

We civilised men … do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. … Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.

In short, good people think that Darwinism is true, and therefore good, but that its social or political applications are bad, and therefore wrong. You have to be Darwinian, but not behave like a Darwinian. What a religion!

These people are confused and don’t think clearly. Consistent Darwinians, who follow through on their ideas and aspire to be “the fittest”, believe on the contrary that natural law, which is an objective, absolute and infallible truth, takes precedence over all moral and legal laws, which are merely arbitrary human conventions. If natural law is that the fittest crush the least fit, so be it. These Darwinians have, in their dishonesty, the honesty to live in accordance with their belief, and to behave in a Darwinian manner (but artfully, using all the Darwinian tricks such as crypsis or mimicry). I’m sorry to say, but if you’re a Darwinian with moral values, you are not philosophically consistent.

A good example of a consistent Darwinian is Jeffrey Skilling, one of ENRON’s executives indicted in 2006 in the biggest financial fraud of all time. His favorite book was Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Dawkins protests that Skilling has misunderstood his book, but no one is fooled: it’s Dawkins who pretends not to understand his own book. Dawkins, it’s true, is a little inconsistent. In The God Delusion, he describes the God of the Old Testament as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser,”[5] without realizing that the people who gave themselves such an immoral god must logically be “the fittest” of all peoples, Darwinistically speaking.

Darwinism is based on the premise that life can be reduced to chemical reactions. According to Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the discovery of DNA, “the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”[6] Darwinism is therefore opposed to the view held by the “vitalists” who, in Darwin’s day, did not deny the evolution of living things, but attributed it to a “vital impulse”. Schopenhauer was a vitalist, who denounced the “incredible absurdity” of the modern biological postulate: “for by it even vital force is denied, and organic Nature is degraded to a mere chance play of chemical forces.” Shaw was a vitalist, calling his religion “Creative Evolution,” which was also the title of a book by Henri Bergson (1907), who wrote: “The more one fixes one’s attention on this continuity of life, the more one sees organic evolution approaching that of a consciousness, where the past presses against the present and brings forth a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents.”

The Darwinian theory of evolution produced by a series of chance events sorted by natural selection is now more absurd than ever, given current knowledge of the extreme complexity of living organisms. Biochemist Michael Behe therefore feels compelled to endorse the “intelligent design” hypothesis. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, he explains that the simplest of known organisms is “of horrendous complexity”: “Synthesis, degradation, energy generation, replication, maintenance of cell architecture, mobility, regulation, repair, communication—all of these functions take place in virtually every cell, and each function itself requires the interaction of numerous parts.”[7] It is mathematically impossible for such complexity to be the result of a series of accidental errors in gene replication, even over millions of years. Stephen Meyer points out in his book Darwin’s Doubt that the revolution in biochemistry has led to the realization that life is not fundamentally matter, but information. And information can only be produced by intelligence.

Rupert Sheldrake distances himself from the theory of intelligent design, which he criticizes for perpetuating the monotheistic model of a creator external to his creation, and opposes it with a form of pantheism: it is life itself that is intelligent, and increasingly so. Sheldrake also professes a “dynamic Platonism”, which attributes morphogenesis to “morphic fields”, a kind of Platonic “idea” or “form” in perpetual evolution.[8]

But despite its obvious absurdity, and despite its deep crisis in the scientific community, Darwinism remains the catechism of disenchanted modernity, taught already to several generations of Westerners from elementary school onwards. So it should come as no surprise that there are many Darwinists today who are not only believers, but also practicing ones. The history of Catholicism is proof enough that the influence of a moral code on behavior is independent of the rationality of the dogma.

Darwinism has colonized the collective psyche of the West. Freud, who saw the sexual drive as the force behind all human thought and action, based himself on Darwinism. Marx wrote to Engels that The Origin of Species “contains the basis in natural history for our view.”[9]

I think Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Shaw were right. The Darwinian vulgate is largely responsible for the widespread psychopathy of the elites who govern us today: in a society that has made Darwinism the fundamental truth about what it means to be human, it’s normal for the psychopath to be at the top of the social pyramid.

Worse still, Darwinism is also largely responsible for the transformation of the collective West into a monster that devours civilizations. Western geopolitics is strictly Darwinian, and no one in high places is fooled by its moral rhetoric designed for mass consumption. Samuel Huntington sums it up perfectly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”[10]

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[1] Foreword to the second edition to On the Will in Nature (first edition 1836).

[2] Untimely Meditations, II.

[3] Preface to Back to Methuselah.

[4] Preface to the first edition (1976) and preface to the second edition (1989).

[5] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 51.

[6] Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men, 1966, quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Coronet, 2012, p. 29.

[7] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, S&S International, 2006, p. 46.

[8] Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, Icon Books, 2011.

[9] André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, p. 167.

[10] Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 51.