ONE VERSUS MANY—AN EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA FOR ALL CULTURES

[This month I am posting the same thing on my historical Jesus blog. This is adapted from the book I am currently working on: Darwin's Racism: The Definitive Case, Along With a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time.]

One of the worst things we ever did was invent the word religion. There is no such thing as religion. There are only cultures, which is a broader and looser term, much less loaded with preconceptions than religion is. By inventing this word, we have set up a bogus conflict between religion and science, and we have prevented ourselves from facing the real issues.

 
Call something a religion and we make assumptions about its beliefs about God and life. We automatically assume that it teaches God is all-knowing and all-powerful. We assume all religions believe God dictates and man’s duty is to obey; and when he doesn’t, God punishes. But anyone who reads the Torah honestly would have to admit that none of this accurately captures its depictions of God and human beings. There, the relationship between man and God is hardly ever straightforward.
 
I would not call the frequent debates, for example between God and Moses or God and Abraham, a simple matter of God proclaiming and man obeying. Sometimes God learns from them. He agrees to debating what truth is instead of proclaiming it. He accepts Moses confronting him about an appropriate punishment for Miriam and, in fact, reduces a lifetime of leprosy for Miriam to seven days. There is an implication that God makes or is capable of making mistakes. He agrees to reason with Abraham about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. He practically begs Abraham to teach him. None of this fits what religious dogma is supposed to say about who God is and what he wants.
 
A better description of ancient Jewish culture, like other cultures, is that it wrestles with the existential problems of life. Existential problems never change. They are there in so-called religious culture and they are there in scientific culture. That’s what we should pay attention to, that’s what ails us, and not the manufactured, bogus conflict between religion and the secular. Existential dilemmas, often the exact same ones, remain in every culture, and calling them secular or religious does not change a thing. Verbal gamesmanship never solves anything.
 
The existential themes of life have been around forever. The ancients were as much concerned with them as we are. They were just as sophisticated, just as rational, just as historical, just as sensible and foolish as we are in attempting to figure out what is what. We are not superior. We have nothing over them. They too struggled to understand human nature, where we fit in the scheme of things, where we come from, and whether we can tolerate diversity or do we have to force everything into one mold. Their answers are comparable to our answers and as good as ours. Their mistakes were just like our mistakes. The grammar of their wrestling with these questions may have been different than ours, but I can assure you that they were no less rational than we were.
 
It is arrogance to think we secularists or scientists are superior in any way. We are still not sure if we can accept the diversity of human life on this planet or does everyone have to fit the mold of western civilization with all its devotion to technology and consumerism. We have our gods too. We have our Towers of Babel.
 
Just to switch over to Greek culture for a moment: In the play Ajax by the very ancient Greek writer Sophocles, Ajax enters the scene completely mad. The goddess Athena, visible to the audience but invisible to the human characters on stage, mocks him and enjoys her act of having driven him crazy. But if we pay attention, we realize that Ajax has gone mad because he had always considered himself to be the number one warrior in the world and now he has just lost a contest with Odysseus. For the first time in his life, he is now the second best fighter in the world. His self-image has been shattered. He cannot adjust or bend, so he breaks. He goes mad and then commits suicide. Ajax could not accept that he could be more than one thing.
 
When Odysseus appears later on, he tries to convince the authorities to give Ajax an honorable burial despite the shame of his suicide. Odysseus, we realize, has the flexibility that Ajax lacked. The rules of tradition are pliable for him. He would rather bend (including bending his attachment to tradition) than break. (I owe this interpretation of Ajax to a great philosophy teacher I had at Queens College in New York, Professor Henry Wolz—one of the great teachers who become more unforgettable as time passes.)
 
It reminds me that the Talmud points out that copies of Torah are made with the pliable reed, and not a more rigid implement, to teach us that to study and learn Torah you have to be as bendable as that reed (Taanith 20b). Torah in each verse is more than one thing. Only the man or woman who bends can fully appreciate what Torah has to tell us.
 
I am not here to proclaim that this is the central message of Torah or that love of the stranger and immigrant (alluded to so often in Torah) is the central message. There is no one final lesson. The Bible, like the writings of Darwin or the essays of Wallace or the varied output of Constantine Rafinesque or the plays of Shakespeare or the plays of the Greeks, has no one theme. Any great work has multiple threads running through it. ‘God don’t like empire or oneness’ is one theme of Torah, not the ultimate theme.
 
The problem of one versus many, autocratic rule (in personal or social life) versus the flexibility of diversity, goes back for ages. We are just as capable as the ancients of letting irrationality intrude into our system of knowledge (science) and they were just as sophisticated as we are in finding rational answers. We are not superior, better, wiser. If Darwin came up short in some respects (in his anthropological opinions of the inferiority of native peoples), it is a far more serious problem that we have come up short in discussing what he said. It is nothing but arrogance to misrepresent his complete views. It is arrogance to treat him or any modern figure as superior to previous accomplishments. If we are serious about defeating arrogance and if we truly (as opposed to hypocritically) believe that this is one of the purposes of science, then we had better learn this—learn it well and learn it fast—that our “advances” are just travels in a circle.
 
© 2105 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

 

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

One would think that the following is a simple proposition that everyone could agree to:  The enemy is bad reasoning, no matter where it occurs, no matter who does it, and by bad reasoning, I mean primarily failure to pay attention to the evidence. But I continue to be amazed by how many people cannot accept this. There have always been certain religious people who will disdain evidence and regard any secular approach to evidence as unacceptable. But more and more, I see atheists who are convinced that religion is the enemy (it is always wrong, they say, and cannot prove any of its claims) and that, while science is not perfect, it is essentially always good and self-correcting of its mistakes.

 
This is not a contest. This is not a game. This is not about scoring points. This is not even about making mistakes and who makes more of them. This is about a deep flaw in human nature which you can see in any human activity including science and religion. It is the very human inclination to reject evidence in favor of ideology.
 
The idea that practicing science is inherently good and practicing religion inherently bad is despicable nonsense. Both are human institutions which are good or bad depending on the human beings running them. Science is not sacrosanct. It is a product of human beings.
 
Many religious people are deeply devoted to a God who created the world according to certain rules. These people believe we have a duty to understand the laws of nature. They are deeply committed materialists because their religion tells them to study and honor the world just as God created it. You cannot define these people out of existence by claiming all religion is false or a case of bad reasoning.
 
Science in the ideal is one of the greatest things there is, but professional science and ideal science are not the same thing. Professional science does not get a free pass just because the word ‘science’ is in it. When we think of science, we usually have in mind the science of technology which gives us useful things. In that kind of science, we excel. If we don’t reason correctly, the immediate practical results are bad. Bridges and buildings will collapse, refrigerators will stop running, the a/c will go on the fritz, cellphones will drop calls. But in fields where there are no immediate practical results, scientists will champion ideological preconceptions over evidence which becomes irrelevant. It happens all the time.
 
One such field is the study of history. Historical study is a science because, when done right, it is mainly about evidence. But history (including the history of science) is notorious for being influenced by ideology and throwing evidence to the winds. Who is hurt when history is misused? No bridges will collapse. Tell lies about history and everything continues to function. Usually, it is only minorities who are hurt when historical lies are perpetrated, and the majority in power could care less about that.
 
Here is a small bit of the history of science: Fifteen years before Darwin came along, Robert Chambers proved by a preponderance of the evidence that evolution (descent from previous species) was more probable than independent or special creation. Mainstream scientists of the time refused to acknowledge his accomplishment. Today, Chambers and his accomplishment are still erased from history. Darwin has been made into a god who cannot have any competition. Chambers was more holistic than Darwin. He believed all organisms are connected into a great whole in which no one part gets special treatment. That meant the feelings and rights of animals would have to be respected. He pushed this further than Darwin did.
 
I mention this because I believe that when we get the history of science wrong, it means there are still problems in science today. When a field cannot accurately study its own history, something very odd is going on. Religion has the same problem. Being dishonest about its own history is a vice shared by both science and religion. Both seek power rather than truth-telling.
 
When you look at any science where practical results are not at issue, ideology tends to replace the hunt for evidence. That is the key issue and we don’t pay attention to this in part because of this stupid, false battle between science and religion, which blinds us to the real issues at stake. Religion versus science is a false issue. It is not based on evidence. It is an ugly ideological battle that has nothing to recommend it. When people mess with the evidence in order to champion their ideology, that is where the trouble lies, and it happens in science as well as religion more often than we would like to think.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

A REVIEW OF JERRY COYNE’S RECENT BOOK

[I posted the following review of Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible on Amazon last week. Like all my reviews, it is not a full-scale review but focuses on one issue. I will add a few comments at the end.]

 
There is no essential conflict between religion and science. There is certainly conflict between individuals, ideologues, on both sides. But to introduce this into the fields themselves is artificial. It serves those who want to promote their own power, but contains no truth beyond that.
 
Coyne has cherry picked his evidence, and worse yet, his definitions, especially of religion, to manufacture a controversy. He eliminates awe and wonder, experienced by many scientists, from his definition of religion (103) because it interferes with his ideology. Coyne knows very well there are many examples of science and religion getting along (e.g., the “science-friendly believer” on 64), but that does not suit his purpose. He picks out the most irrational features of religion (belief in miracles and a willingness to blind oneself to the evidence) and compares these to the best science has to offer. How is this fair?
 
It is as if Coyne were out to demonize religion—making it dangerous to both science and society (225). But it is only a certain type of fanatical religious thinking that is dangerous. Coyne might agree. What he misses is this: It is not in its character as religious that this thinking is harmful, but in its character as bad reasoning, and such reasoning (like ignoring evidence) is not limited to religion.
 
Here is a series of simple propositions which seem to make many people angry whenever I propose them: The enemy is not religion. The enemy is not science. The enemy is bad thinking wherever it occurs, no matter who does it. Scientists are just as capable of doing it. To deny that is to be guilty of a cover-up.
 
Professional science and science in the ideal are not the same thing. There is often a gap between the two. If we make out professional science to be sacrosanct, we create a situation as dangerous as what Coyne addresses. Religious officials once claimed for themselves the mantle of power. They falsely convinced people they had the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Most people don’t buy that anymore. The irony is that the mantle of power is now wrapped around scientists who claim to have the keys to the kingdom of truth. It is a terrible power to give anyone. Scientists are just human beings. Some will abuse their power. It is a human failing.
 
Good science demands constant vigilance. That vigilance is not on display in Coyne’s book, despite his admission that “venality, irrationality, and immorality” are universal human features (221). He portrays working science in too golden a light. Professional scientists need watching as much as anyone. Granting them power carte blanche is a bad idea.
 
Coyne acknowledges that science has done some bad things, but he blames this on individuals who have misused science, not on science itself (217-21). He is right. He just won’t allow the same defense to be raised when religion is abused. He has defined religion to make it inherently bad. This is typical of the stacked deck type of argument in this book: Let’s compare science at its best to religion at its worst. How is any of this fair?
 
The problem is not that religious belief blinds people to the evidence, as he frequently says. That is just one example of a deeper problem: Cultural values can hamper and skew looking at the evidence. This affects secularists as much as religionists. You can change your clothes, but the same human frailties lurk underneath.
 
Would it be fair if we judged science by its most egregious errors? Would it be fair if we rejected science just because Darwin and most of his fellow scientists took the wrong direction in their treatment of indigenous peoples? To the end of his days, Darwin insisted that most savage tribes were inferior to Europeans and, as a result, would gradually be exterminated. Humanity would rise higher, he said, when all the lower races were gone. Darwin had to violate his own basic tenets to maintain this. He had always insisted that natural selection acted slowly and locally. But indigenes were not endangered by changes in their local environment. Europeans had come from far away and the doom they were inflicting on natives was happening much too rapidly to be natural. This was closer to artificial selection, but Darwin never acknowledged this.
 
Only a handful of writers have recognized that Darwin naturalized or rationalized genocide (there was constant talk in his time of exterminating the natives). Most scholars are still in denial about this and refuse to look at the abundant evidence for this misuse of science. This twin belief in the inferiority of other races and their inevitable elimination was based on cultural ideology, not evidence. Many humanitarians of the day objected, but few paid heed. Shall we use this tremendous failure as indicative of science?
 
In 1898, Alfred Wallace, a more humane evolutionist than Darwin, bitterly lamented that science was being used to create weapons of mass destruction. Shall we condemn all of science for that? Wallace didn’t. Neither should we. Racism still occasionally rears its head in science. It has never entirely gone away. Shall we disparage science as a whole because of these problems and much more? Yet it is precisely this kind of unfair reasoning that Coyne arrogantly applies to religion. Whatever else Coyne’s book is, it is not an example of good science.
 
I can agree with a sentence here and there (e.g., about self-correction in science), but the overall effect of this book is to distort reality. Near the end, Coyne relates some horrific examples of what Christian Scientists have done to their children by withholding medical aid. Coyne implies this represents the essence of religious faith. I would despise anyone who argued that what Nazi doctors did represents science. For Coyne to indulge one argument while rightly condemning the latter is as double a standard as any I have ever come across.
 
The enemy is bad reasoning and failure to attend to the evidence. Remember that and eschew all ideological combat which serves only egos and not humanity.
 
That was the end of the review.
 
I feel the need to add a few words about how deceptive Coyne’s book is, and this is in addition to the fact that he employs a double standard to judge religion as a whole, not just religious extremism. Religious fanatics who defy and/or seek to undermine science are pretty out there. They make no bones about believing that their faith gives them knowledge superior to that of science. As such, I don’t consider them to be the greatest danger to science. Far more dangerous for any field of knowledge are the unconscious forces that subvert an honest look at the evidence. Coyne pays that no attention at all, and in failing to do this, he covers up the most serious problems of all.
 
Coyne pretends that when scientists make mistakes, it is the fault of this or that individual scientist, which of course is sometimes true. But the deeper problem is that cultural biases will influence scientific investigation. There are many examples of this in the history of science and they are often extremely difficult to correct. I gave one in the review. The scientific racism in the 19^th century, which included Darwin and which continued well into the 20^th, was not the error of just a few scientists. It was a huge cultural error. It infected mainstream science.
 
These scientists would have sworn up and down that their work was totally objective, when it was anything but. It is an extraordinary case of how mainstream science can sometimes be so blind. We are mostly over it now, but it still occasionally shows up in some scientist or other. It is a legacy that haunts us still.
 
When culture or any form of bias affects a scholarly field, it usually happens unconsciously. It is difficult to correct because no one likes facing and admitting that unconscious forces can take hold of us. Ignoring that is probably the most serious defect of Coyne’s book. He has created a false bogeyman so that the greater villains can escape undetected.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

A PANORAMA OF HUMANITARIANS

Not all humanitarians in the 19^th century looked alike or sounded the same. There was quite a range. You could say it is like the gradation of species. There were many grades of humanitarians. All deserve some praise and those with deficiencies should be noted.

 
Sir George Grey, who served as Governor of New Zealand and then in South Africa in mid-century, was a low-level humanitarian. He took a very strong anti-racist position by arguing that all human beings were equal in intellectual endowments and that different races should be able to live together. He was opposed to the separation of races. But that was about as far as it went for him. He drew no conclusions that native peoples should be treated with justice or be given any power. He had no respect for native cultures. Despite his belief in equality, he was bent on taking all the land from the Maoris in New Zealand and the Xhosa in South Africa. They lost a lot because of him.
 
Way up there on the list of great humanitarians were people like Saxe Bannister and Charles Napier. They not only stood firmly for anti-racist views, they were not afraid to follow up with demands for justice. Equal treatment under the law was a theme that both struck. They were committed to colonialism, but they objected to its callousness towards native peoples and its unfairness.
 
Bannister, an Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s, wanted to see colonial expansion regulated with an eye to restraining the worst vices of colonists. He expressed so much concern for native rights (e.g., that there should be a board independent of the Colonial Office to oversee the interests of natives and that colored people should serve on this board) that an under-secretary would say he suffered from mental aberration.
 
Napier was a British military hero who was offered the Governorship of a new colony in South Australia in the 1830s, but his demand for enough soldiers and money to ensure success in case the colony ran into trouble resulted in his not getting the job. He despised people who ranked races and who looked at Australian Aborigines as the missing link between man and monkey. He saw no reason why natives should not be allowed to live as it suited them. He said that if he had been appointed Governor, he would have made sure that natives were treated the same under the law, equal to himself and the men who served under him.

There were many more who were somewhere in between Grey and Napier or Bannister. Those humanitarians who stuck by their convictions often suffered for it. They became outcasts, leading ruined lives. Others, when push came to shove, compromised so that they could continue to live in their society. The history of humanitarianism deserves better treatment than it has received so far.
 
Where does all this leave Darwin? Where does he fit into this spectrum? I am not sure that he even reaches the low level represented by Sir George Grey. In The Descent of Man, he is very clear that he does not regard all races as equal. Savages are generally ranked by him as intellectually and morally inferior to Europeans. It is their inferiority which he regards as the chief cause of their impending extermination and not immoral behavior on the part of colonizing Europe.
 
The only reason anyone thinks Darwin could be considered a humanitarian is because he was anti-slavery. But that was a very limited idea. It was legalized slavery that he abhorred. As far as I know, he never raised concerns about illegal slavery or forced labor. He totally supported colonialism which was a kind of de facto slavery, as far as indigenous people experienced it. Many humanitarians saw colonialism that way too and some thought it was worse than slavery, but Darwin never joined them.
 
It is hard to know everything about the relationship between Darwin and humanitarianism because he was basically silent on most of these issues, except for his firm belief in the inferiority of most natives. There were quite a variety of humanitarians around Darwin. Some of them, like Grey, he read. But none of it seems to have had an impact on him. He certainly did not agree with their humane views, but he never took the trouble to acknowledge them or dispute them. He gives them the silent treatment. And that is troubling.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

EPISTEMIC CLOSURE, OR, LYING IS ITS OWN REWARD

[My post this month exactly parallels the current post on my other blog, http://historicaljesusghost.blogspot.com. Same title and the same first six paragraphs. Each post then gives examples appropriate to each field of how scholars blind themselves to the evidence.]

 
When I was a kid, sometime in high school, I think, I bought a paperback book called “30 Days To A More Powerful Vocabulary”, or maybe it was a better vocabulary. I think I still have it, buried in a box somewhere. I got my money’s worth with that book. It did its job and I did feel my word power grow. It made learning an entertaining exercise. I remember it had single-panel cartoons throughout the book. The one that stuck with me was of a young boy who had just returned home from school and says to his mother, “I learned a new word in school today, Mom. Try and surmise what it is.” It still gets a laugh out of me.
 
A couple of weeks ago, I learned a new term from a journalist on NPR: Epistemic closure. He described it as a condition in which a person is so sure of his own position that he will not hear any evidence to the contrary. I have been talking about that for years and never knew there was an expression for it. I was kind of delighted that there is now a name for it, but then I immediately had doubts about its usefulness. Is it good to have a name for something, and a fancy one at that? Sometimes naming something can help bring attention to a problem, but with something like this, the condition has been described for a long time and where has it gotten us?
 
And would a simpler term or description be more useful?
 
For a very long time now, I have frequently quoted Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haitian historian among other things, who wrote, “Worldview wins over the facts.” (I recently checked on Amazon and found that his incredibly enlightening book Silencing the Past has recently been reissued in an anniversary edition.) Trouillot’s simple sentence is a more powerful description of what epistemic closure points to. You could also say ideology wins over the facts. He used it to describe how Europeans could not accept that there was a slave rebellion going on in Haiti which was defeating European armies. So they explained the facts away to fit their worldview that, on the one hand, slaves were too docile to desire much less fight for freedom, and on the other hand, they were not skilled enough to defeat European might.
 
If “Worldview wins over the facts” does not hit your over the head like a ton of bricks, I don’t see why epistemic closure would be any more instructive. In True Jew, I described the same condition this way: The less we see, the more we know. That captures what scholars in many fields do. All these expressions do. Usually what happens is that tradition has handed them a certain point of view, and while scholars are fond of spinning it in ways that sound like something new is being said, nothing new happens at all. The same tale gets told over and over again, and everybody is convinced, “We don’t need no stinking evidence” because our worldview or ideology tells us everything we need to know. Our knowledge is closed down. It closed a long time ago. It would be too much trouble to open it up now.
 
Let’s face it: It’s all about telling lies and getting away with it. Lying is its own reward. What is shocking is that the lies can be bold-faced and still they get away with it. You know it’s a closed discussion when everybody is content with the lies that are being told.

Look at what happens in Darwin scholarship. If you read a thousand books on Darwin or evolution, you will be told a thousand times, or more likely two thousand, that Darwin was a revolutionary. They claim he gave us the theory that man and all life forms are descended from lower life forms. Sometimes, they also mean he gave us a more humble understanding of man’s place in nature. But Darwin gave us neither of these ideas. They were a gift from previous evolutionists and they rarely get any credit for their accomplishments.

 
It was scientists like Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Rafinesque, and Robert Chambers who enthusiastically spread the news that a theory of the development of species made more sense of the evidence. All admitted that no one quite understood how it was happening, but they all saw important pieces of evidence that demonstrated that organisms were related to each other and to previous species. Erasmus Darwin compared the generation of species to the generation of individuals; so did his grandson in his early Notebooks.
 
Charles Darwin was the first to offer an explanation (natural selection) as to the mechanism of species development, but he was definitely not the first to suggest or even prove the greater probability that evolution was indeed occurring. So if there is a revolution in the very idea of the gradual change of life forms on this planet, it was brought to us by several investigators who came before Charles Darwin. Darwin was a latecomer to the field, through no fault of his own as he was born later. But why should the last to enter the field get the credit for the revolution?
 
As for the lesson of humility for mankind, credit for that really belongs to those who pushed that into the consciousness of the public, and again that was not Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin and Robert Chambers did so much to stress that all forms of life were related to each other. Chambers more than anyone else drew the conclusion that this should make us incredibly humble. He even argued that we should respect the rights and feelings of animals, something Charles Darwin would never say. What Chambers, E. Darwin, Rafinesque, and Lamarck argued was that all life is netted into one great whole which is more important than any one part, including humankind.
 
Scholars have taken this teaching and claim it is one of the essential lessons of evolutionary theory, and further claim that it comes from Charles Darwin, but he never declared this as much as the others did. He rather gave himself to almost the opposite idea. What Darwin saw was a hierarchy of life, an order and ranking, not an interconnectedness into a whole. Over and over in The Origin of Species, he told his readers that life gives us groups subordinate to groups, yielding dominant groups that beat feebler groups in the struggle for life. What is revolutionary about “let the strongest live and the weakest die”, the last words of Chapter VII of Origin?
 
Charles Darwin was far more a medieval thinker than the preceding evolutionists who all had a holistic approach to nature. In theory, Darwin should have been as holistic as his predecessors, but in practice, he stressed the subordination of groups and ranked groups from lowest to highest. He made the dominant more worthy of life than the weak and small. I cannot see a revolution in any of this. He applied medieval theology to biology and gave comfort to the ruling classes. Considering the accomplishments of the others who came before him, Darwin was more of a counter-revolutionary.
 
That’s not the way most scholars tell it. The point is not just that they are exaggerating what Charles Darwin did, they are erasing the important work of the first evolutionists who were taking the theory in a more holistic and humbling direction than Darwin ever would. I suppose they need a heroic Charles Darwin in their ideological combat with religion, but whatever their reasons, it is a dishonorable way to study history. They are embracing the same motto historical Jesus scholars follow: The less we see, the more we know.
 
They are spinning the evidence, and erasing portions of it, until it says nothing we do not want to hear. Whatever you call that—epistemic closure, worldview winning over the facts, or anything else—it is the end of learning anything.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com
 

EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IS SAFE

The biggest worry that people seem to have about Darwin’s racism and his devotion to colonialism is that if established as thoroughly true, then this will undermine the theory of evolution. It won’t. No matter what Darwin’s prejudices were, no matter even if he misused the theory of evolution, the science of evolution is safe. That is because there is more than one way to be an evolutionist. Even when it comes to natural selection, Darwin’s version of evolution, there is more than one way to pursue it.

 
People forget a basic fact of history: Darwin does not own the idea of evolution. He was not the first to propose it or even the first to prove that it is more probable than special or independent creation (the belief that God created each species separately). Evolutionary theory has a history that goes back well before Charles Darwin entered the picture. By the time Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, probably a majority, or at least something close to a majority, of the general population in England believed that the birth of new species, in descent from older species, made sense. It was an attractive idea and its popularity was due in part to Robert Chambers, who put together enough evidence (in 1844) to demonstrate that it made more sense than the prevailing theory of independent creation.
 
The majority of professional scientists was still stuck in the older idea. This was one case where the people were ahead of the scientists. It was the reason why Chambers had such a hard time of it and had to publish anonymously. His book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, caught the people’s fancy, but scientists gave him quite a knocking. Almost half a century earlier, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, enthusiastically promoted evolution, called generation in his time, and while he may not have proved it, he presented enough evidence to make it a reasonable theory to pursue. A common argument made by many was that the generation of new species was very much like the generation, or birth, of new individuals, and that the birth of a new species was as normal as the birth of a baby. Just a few months before Chambers’s book, Emma Martin was handing out pamphlets in the street, comparing the two types of generation.
 
But the intellectual atmosphere was still too hostile. In France, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would make the theory more reasonable still, but his name became a term of abuse among English scientists. In America, Constantine Rafinesque wrote a long poem, which is really more of an essay, called The World, or, Instability, arguing that we should welcome constant change as a law of life. He was also one of the first to argue that racism against other human beings was irrational.
 
The previous evolutionists were much more holistic than Charles Darwin. They saw each part of the whole, including the various races, as serving the whole in some way. Darwin changed that. He saw nature as a hierarchy of groups, with dominant groups becoming ever more dominant and wiping out the weaker groups. You can already see the seeds of disaster in that point of view. But whatever prejudices and preconceptions Darwin dragged into this, his way was not the only way to espouse evolution and his way was not the original way to be an evolutionist.
 
For some evolutionists, having a common ancestor would engender a feeling of brotherhood among all peoples. Darwin unfortunately did not see it that way. For him, the common ancestor evolved into varying descendants, descendants that were so different that some could be said to be higher than others.
 
It is important to distinguish between a theory and the ways it can be misused. If it turns out that Charles Darwin made a contribution to both, that does not invalidate the former. If we remember how many people made evolutionary theory a reasonable theory (before and after Darwin), then it should not be upsetting to learn that Darwin did not always advocate the theory in the purest, most objective way. His failings are independent of the theory. If we don’t pay careful attention to this history, we will miss a much needed lesson in humility.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

AHEAD OF ONE'S TIME

We say it so easily and we mean it as high praise. He was ahead of his time, what a genius! We choose not to think about how painful and frustrating it was to be in that condition. No one who’s been through it will tell you it was a good thing. Wake them all up from the dead. They’ll tell you it was a raw deal. Ahead of your time? You might as well be told you have cancer or you’re bleeding to death. And nobody would go through it again, if they had a choice.

 
Well, it’s all so ironic because, in fact, no one is actually ahead of their time, as Gertrude Stein reminded us. Whatever you come up with, you got it from the materials available to you exactly in your time. It did not come from a lightning bolt out of the blue. It came precisely from its time and place. It’s just that, as Gertrude Stein pointed out, everybody else was busy creating for the same time; they were busy with their own vision, and no one had a need for yours. Your vision will come into its own only when a future generation needs it and responds to it. You needed something before everyone else did. It was that need that came early, not your ideas.
 
Think about that when we look back at people or ideas that were “ahead of their time”. It’s about needs, and who needs what and when. The possibilities were always there, available to all. It could have happened much earlier. It didn’t take a genius to see the goodness of a certain idea. It only took a feeling that we need it and want it. The shame of it is that so many decided we don’t want it, and then later, they cover up by saying that other guy was ahead of his time, so it’s not our fault we didn’t see it. Oh, but it is our fault. We saw it, we weren’t blind. We rejected it because we had other needs.
 
We will say something was ahead of its time because it startles us to see it so early in history. When Josephus, the ancient Jewish-Roman historian, writes that Jewish law requires that no one can be put to death without first getting a trial by the Sanhedrin, we think how advanced that is. We don’t expect to see such a clear statement of due process. But it is not all that surprising. The legal system of any culture will have procedures and it is not unreasonable to foresee that people will demand adherence to those procedures. That’s due process.
 
More surprising is that some Pharisees argued that everyone, including kings and nobility, are subject to the Constitution (Torah) and rules of law. The first few times they tried imposing this, they lost. In fact, I’m not sure they were ever completely successful at establishing this principle. It was only one Pharisee, maybe a couple, who insisted on it. The majority were nervous about defying a king or other aristocrat. We don’t need this, we don’t want it, it’s too much trouble. In that sense, this idea was ahead of its time. It was conceivable, but it was unwanted.
 
British humanitarians of the 19^th century were sometimes ahead of their time and on other points were not. Many humanitarians saw the need to make the justice system in the colonies more equitable. They believed that natives should be allowed to give testimony in court. A lot of people were suggesting this and gradually it got done. As an idea, it was not too advanced for its time.
 
But when someone like Saxe Bannister, Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s and later one of the founders of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, suggested that when natives can still not get judgments executed, then governors should indemnify them, that was going much further than anyone else of that time wanted to go. He also recognized that the Colonial Office could not possibly serve both the white colonists and the Aboriginal population, as the interests of these groups were often diametrically opposed to each other. Therefore, an independent body should be appointed to look out for the interests of the natives and that body should include people of color. It does not take a genius to realize that Bannister’s proposals would go nowhere. Not because his ideas were incomprehensible, but because they did not serve the needs of the white colonists.
 
Bannister was truly ahead of his time. Another humanitarian was actually capable of saying that Bannister was mentally deranged (probably in response to some points he made about overhauling the colonial system in South Africa). The outlook of the majority was that what we need is lip service to the idea of justice for indigenous peoples, but not actual justice. To put it another way, what even many good humanitarians recognized was that one could push the majority of whites only so far. They knew when to quit in the fight for justice. Bannister was a purist. He thought about what pure justice required and then said it. What he spoke up for was not that hard to see. It was just that everyone else was telling him that we don’t need this. It doesn’t serve our interests.
 
Which brings me to Charles Darwin, who was definitely not ahead of his time. Few people in history have been more in tune with what the zeitgeist will and will not allow. He knew exactly what he could deliver without having the door slammed in his face. He gave his generation what it, and he, wanted to hear: The dominant species are the most important thing ever. What no one wanted to hear was that the whole was more important than any one piece. All the previous evolutionists—Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Constantine Rafinesque, Robert Chambers—were ahead of their time in this respect. Actually, they stood for two ideas, one of which was just right for that time and place, and the other was apparently too soon.
 
The first idea was transmutation of species. The early evolutionists were right for their time in their belief that creation was on-going and species continued to develop. That idea appealed to people long before Charles Darwin came along. The upper classes did not like it, but the majority of people lower down felt the need for it. We like the idea that life (and by implication, human society) is not fixed but fluid. So the idea of species change gained ground. But the other idea evolutionists advocated for was that nature as a whole is evolving and every piece of nature, small or large, strong or weak, has a role to play.
 
Lamarck pointed out that any part of nature that could reason might try to assert itself as most important because it would perceive its own interests to be contrary to that of the whole. The powerful might not like the idea that they too are only temporary and might have to give way to the next change because it would serve the whole. I believe it was this kind of reasoning about the whole that caused so many of the scientists who came from the upper classes to reject the theory of evolution or development. It was not until Charles Darwin offered natural selection to establish that the dominant species will become ever more dominant that scientists began to find evolutionary theory appealing. Ironically, while natural selection was hotly debated, it was appealing enough even to those who rejected it.
 
In theory, Darwin saw that everything was potentially temporary. Natural selection, he said, acts only tentatively. But he never made that the mainspring of his system. He put his emphasis on the success of the strongest or most dominant species. It was a theory that was well-suited to his colonial age. It was perfect for its time. But the holistic thinkers were out of touch with the needs of their time. Not stupidly out of touch. I think they knew where they stood. They just could not help speaking the truth about seeing things from the point of view of the whole. It is still ahead of what we perceive to be our needs.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com