It's mysterious that Pat Buchanan should write on Darwin. Evolutionary
science is not his area of expertise. Since he did, and drew several
arguable conclusions, it is worthwhile to distribute a rational
response.

V.

....................................



Pat Buchanan on Darwin

Kevin MacDonald

July 1, 2009

Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator
that we have. His writings on the death of the West
<http://www.amazon.com/Death-West-Populations-Immigrant-Civilization/dp/03122854\
85>

, immigration
<http://www.amazon.com/State-Emergency-Invasion-Conquest-America/dp/B0012F48DC/r\
ef=pd_sim_b_1>

, the neocon influence
<http://www.amazon.com/Where-Right-Went-Wrong-Neoconservatives/dp/0312341164/ref\
=ntt_at_ep_dpt_8>

in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby
<http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/mar/24/00007/>

are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among
the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of
political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with his recent
op-ed "Making a monkey out of Darwin
<http://townhall.com/columnists/PatBuchanan/2009/06/30/making_a_monkey_out_of_da\
rwin> ."

The article and the book it relies on <http://theendofdarwinism.com/> ,

by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of Creationist ideas claiming that
Darwinism has no scientific basis and that it has led to great evil. I have
discussed some of these issues in a previous article

<http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html>

on Ben Stein's movie Expelled which links Darwinism to the Holocaust and
represents the scientific community of evolutionists as an oppressive
Inquisition-like establishment bent on squelching heresy (obviously far more
true of the $PLC and the ADL).

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by
Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck's idea that people
can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during
their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact
opposite of Darwin's view that the basic mechanism of evolution is
natural selection - the selective retention of genetic variants because they
result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet Union
- the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature and
produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko> applied this to
agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic
characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far
worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change
the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their children
would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a golden age
where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like greed, envy,
and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently reasonable to simply
exterminate those who didn't get with the program and who clung to their
pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the Lamarckians in the Soviet Union
rationalized the murder of many millions of their fellow citizens in the
name of creating the new Soviet man.

Creationists who link Darwin with evil should also think long and hard
about the fact that genocides and a great many other evils have been
carried out under religious ideologies. Christiane Amanpour's God's
Warriors on Jews
<http://video.aol.com/video-detail/gods-jewish-warriors-1-of-11/3750416569> ,
Christians
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uD86cieOaU&feature=related> , and
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwUcl05_CRA&feature=related> Muslims
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwUcl05_CRA&feature=related> certainly
shows that religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of
fanaticisms, from Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement
(including both its Christian and Jewish supporters) - all of which
Buchanan presumably abhors. Is that a reason for getting rid of
religion?

The problem of evil is very much with us and continues to haunt all
ideologies and scientific theories that address it. For a great many
people, it is completely incomprehensible that a God would allow all the
violence, pain, and suffering that have always been the fate of so many
humans - and animals. Positing a God to explain human behavior and human
traits is useless. It doesn't really explain anything, because we then
have to ask why He would make us to be so prone to inflict suffering on
others. And why would he create animals that inflict so much suffering
on other animals.

The scientific route of explaining human evil as resulting from
Darwinian natural selection for traits that were adaptive in spreading
the genes of our ancestors is unacceptable to many because it seems to
justify violence and aggression. As Buchanan notes, racial nationalism
in the period prior to World War I was very much in the air and was
invoked by some advocates of war. But wars and genocides occurred long
before World War I - without any Darwinian ideology.

And at least some wars would not have occurred if the war mongers had
been good Darwinians. For example, the Civil War was a cousin's war
<http://www.amazon.com/Cousins-Wars-Religion-Politics-Anglo-America/dp/0
465013708> fought between closely related men from different British
sub-cultures. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led
to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that
inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related
Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. (See here
<http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-Transcendentalism.pdf> .)
Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in
lives and property ever made by Americans. From a Darwinian perspective
it was a disaster in which mass murder of cousins was rationalized by a
moral ideal.

Or consider World War II, the subject of Buchanan's brilliant The
Unnecessary War
<http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X> .
It was indeed an unnecessary war - and one that would not have
been launched by a British Darwinian. Buchanan is quite correct that
Winston Churchill should live in infamy for his role in promoting both
World War I and World War II. But did Churchill and the rest of the
British elite who jumped over the cliff with him act like good
Darwinians?

Buchanan is quite correct to point to Churchill's bellicosity, his
vanity, and his desire for personal power; and there are strong hints of
his corruption as a result of being rescued from near bankruptcy after
the stock market crash of 1929. But if Churchill was a good Darwinian,
he would have been able to control these all too human impulses and
think rationally about the long term good of his people. (Yes,
evolutionists <http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/EffortfulControl-PsyRev.pdf>
do believe that humans can control their primitive tendencies.) It
simply made no sense to go to all out war with the closely related
Germans over German hegemony over the continent - especially because in
order to win, Britain had to make an alliance with the Soviet Union, the
most murderous regime in history. The victory of the Soviet Union, made
possible by military aid from the West, then subjected Eastern Europe to
decades of brutality and economic stagnation, and it led to a prolonged
and destructive Cold War. But from the standpoint of the West, all this
sacrifice was endured in order to destroy genetically closer Germans.
Churchill himself seems to have reveled in the destruction even of
German civilians.

No Darwinian would have done this. But Churchill - an egomaniacal,
short-sighted, vainglorious war monger unaware of his ethnic genetic
interests - loved it.

Buchanan also fails to see how the defeat of Darwinism in the social
sciences has led to all the ills that he deplores in the US and the
contemporary West. The period from around 1890 to 1924 was a period of
ethnic defense in the United States, and Darwinism was a potent tool in
the hands of immigration restrictionists. Bluebloods like Henry Cabot
Lodge <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cabot_Lodge> and Madison
Grant <http://www.amren.com/ar/1997/12/> were extolling the virtues of
Northern Europeans and funding the movement to end immigration - a
battle that ended with the ethnically defensive immigration law of 1924
that was reaffirmed by the 1952 McCarran-Walter act. But at the same
time, academic anthropology was coming under the control of the Boasians
for whom the entire idea of race was anathema.

I have argued <http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofCchap2.pdf> that
Boasian anthropology is a Jewish intellectual movement that had the
effect of undercutting Americans' natural desire for an ethnically
homogeneous culture. As immigration historian John Higham noted
<http://www.amazon.com/These-Other-Immigrants-Urban-America/dp/B00128M89
A/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245863765&sr=1-3> , by the time of the
final victory in 1965, which removed national origins and racial
ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human
groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and
anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that
"it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of
persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race
feelings of a powerful ideological weapon."

The demise of Darwinism had major implications because it removed the
only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan ideology
and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of an
intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to
conservative religion and the popular attitudes of the less educated.
These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectual elite who quickly
became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US-especially the
media and the academic world. In a very real sense, the demise of
Darwinism has led to the death of the West that Buchanan deplores.
Without an intellectually compelling and scientifically based ideology
of ethnic defense, it was not possible to erect barriers against the
invasion of other peoples.

As I noted elsewhere,
<http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html>
Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea
<http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Dangerous-Idea-Evolution-Meanings/dp/0684
82471X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209591449&sr=1-1> .

Evolutionary theory points to the deep structure of genocide as a
particularly violent form of ethnic competition. But ethnic competition
is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an orgy of violence, or
by forcible removal of people from land on the West Bank by Jewish
settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans during the 19th
century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement of whites via
current levels of immigration into Western societies. From a Darwinian
perspective, the end result is no different. The genetic structure of
the population has changed, and there are winners and losers. ...

And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian perspective
would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by understanding that
ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence of our evolutionary
psychology, we could at least build societies that, unlike the Soviet
Union, are not likely to commit genocide on their own people. Nor would
we be saddled with a multicultural cauldron of competing and distrustful
ethnic groups. And, as noted in a previous article
<http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/080327_muller.htm> , societies based on
ethnonationalism would have other benefits as well: Greater openness to
redistributive policies; greater trust and political participation; and
a greater likelihood of adopting democratic political systems based on
the rule of law.

My alternate view of the 20th century in America is that if a robust
Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place, the cosmopolitan
revolution that opened up America to immigration of all peoples never
would have occurred. The immigration restrictionism of the 1920s would
have been institutionalized in all the elite institutions of the United
States, and it would have developed an increasingly sophisticated
theoretical underpinning as the evolutionary understanding of human
behavior progressed. Immigration policy would have been carefully
formulated to ensure that immigrants were genetically similar to the
founding stock - just as American immigration policy was crafted until
1965.

I close with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould
<http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html>
where Buchanan follows Windchy in distorting a comment by Stephen Jay
Gould. Based on his reading of the fossil record, Gould had proposed
that evolution was less gradual than Darwin supposed, while certainly
not disagreeing with Darwin's central view on natural selection.

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern
among my colleagues. I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy
debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology.
It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by
distortion. Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of
strict Darwinism, at least for the moment-a kind of old-time religion on
our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to
tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition. For
if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench
our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a
united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly
lost.

I can't say that I am a fan of Stephen Jay Gould because of his role
<http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofCchap2.pdf> in attempting to shape
Darwinism to his leftist sympathies and, I think, his sense of Jewish
interests. But I certainly agree that we have to continue to attempt to
understand nature and let the chips fall where they may.

Kevin MacDonald <http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/> is a professor of
psychology at California State University-Long Beach. Email him
<mailto:%20kmacd@...> .



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