Bulldogging Darwin

David Brooks of the New York Times recently wrote a paean in praise of Darwinism.  Like a prizefight promoter touting the latest contender, he offers the theory of evolution as the champion who, having vanquished the Judeo-Christian worldview in a bruising twelve-rounder, will now dispatch postmodern deconstructionism with a single sucker-punch.  “It’s clear,” he bellows, “we’re not a postmodern society anymore.  We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history.”  Thus Derrida goes down for the count almost before the combatants have touched gloves.

I agree with Mr. Brooks that Darwinism (as opposed to the actual scientific hypothesis of evolution) is a grand narrative, what C. S. Lewis in his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth” calls “one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which has ever been imagined.”  Lewis, an Oxford scholar who knew a thing or two about Medieval and Renaissance literature, compares the amoeba-to-monkey-to-man motif favorably to Elizabethan tragedy.  Whether Darwin packs sufficient psychological glue to put the Humpty Dumpty smash-up of modernism back together again is more than I am qualified to say, but I do want to point out a couple of what I believe are faults in Mr. Brooks’ reasoning.

His first mistake arises from intellectual snobbery - which rests on intellectual ignorance.  “Creationists,” he scoffs, “reject the whole business, but they’re like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle developed philosophy.”  Well, yes, creationism rejects Darwinism; he got that right.  But even a casual glance into Plato’s dialogues reveals that he took the gods as seriously as anyone else in his day.  A deeper dip into Socrates’ disciple shows that he laid the foundations for much of Christian mysticism.  But this flaw really isn’t so egregious.  Everyone knows that bigotry against Christians enjoys amnesty in our society.  As G. K. Chesterton says, “It (looks) not so much as if Christianity (is) bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick (is) good enough to beat Christianity with.”

I can spot Mr. Brooks his failure to understand Christianity; more culpable is his failure to understand his own story, or even to tell it consistently.  In contrast to religious narratives, on which he blames war and genocide (not very original, by the way, and as usual he forgets atheist holocausts like Buchenwald and the Gulag), “evolutionary society,” he demurs, “is built low to the ground.”  In other words, the diffidence of descent with modification replaces the egotism of special creation.  Actually, the thing works the other way ’round.  In point of fact, the whole Apostles’ Creed of Darwinism contains only one clause, “I believe in progress.”  Far from engendering humility, the recently-concluded Century of Evolution touched off pyrotechnical displays of hubris unrivaled in human history.  The geocentric medieval model, by contrast, placed humanity not (as is often mistakenly asserted) at the center of the universe so much as at the bottom.  In the old system, we knew our place; the new one gave us a biological and sociological horse race in which win, place, and show were up to the striving of the individual.

At any rate, Mr. Brooks cannot even keep the pride out of his own voice as he writes of this lowly outlook.  Moments before making the claim for humility he barks out praises to “human progress,” “mankind’s upward march from primative culture to higher civilization.”  Which is it?  The bedtime tale of submissive organisms bound by their biology, or of upwardly mobile DNA strands striving and overcoming?

But Mr. Brooks’ biggest flaw is his hypocrisy.  He seems willing enough to accept (and even celebrate) the view of humanity which Darwinism demands.  You and I and Beethoven and Rosie O’Donnel and your great aunt Sally are all of us nothing more than “machines for passing along genetic code.”  What we call morality (and its opposite, which we call immorality) are chimeras.  There is no such thing as what “should” happen and what “shouldn’t” happen; only what does happen.  “Individuals,” Mr. Brooks lectures us, “are predisposed not by sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells.”

Fair enough on April 15, 2007, when Mr. Brooks originally published his op-ed piece.  By the following Friday the same writer saw things differently.  Gazing back through the blood-soaked lense of a mass murder at Virginia Tech, things look different.  While still paying tribute to his idea that the individual “is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces,” Mr. Brooks insists that “it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists.”  But that’s what a grand narrative is:  a monopoly on the imagination of an entire society.  “It should be possible,” he continues, “to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility close to the center.”  Not, I think, if we find that ground zero occupied by a mindless mechanism for repeating chemical sequences on a double-helix.

Having yelped that Darwin’s black box must have a clearly marked exit, Mr. Brooks then slams that escape hatch shut when he sneers that, “It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons by better sermons.”  As Francis Collins, one of Mr. Brooks’ fellow-believers in evolution, a real scientist - head of the human genome project - and also a convinced Christian might point out, it is madness to suggest salvation could have come from anywhere else.

Real science tends toward real humility.  Stephen J. Gould, one of evolution’s leading advocates, declares that “to say it for the umpteenth million time:  Science cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.  We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”  Mr. Brooks’ views demonstrate what inevitably happens when amateurs attempt to generalize and popularize what specialists keep carefully within its proper boundaries.

Pseudo-science sneers at faith because this is easier than examing the content of belief.  In his novel A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter Miller, Jr. depicts a Catholic monastery perched in the deserts of the American southwest a few centuries after one nuclear holocaust and a few centuries before a second.  Most scientific learning was lost when the world blew itself to bits, but humanity has begun to make significant strides toward its recovery.  One of the leaders of this new intellectual elite visits the abby and holds a Q&A with the brothers.  A young priest asks the expert if the academy has considered Augustine’s view that God created “germinal causes,” which then evolved into more complex forms, eventually including human beings.  The scientist’s smile, almost a sneer, makes his views of such silliness plain.  “‘I’m afraid it has not,’” Miller has him reply, “‘but I shall look it up,’ he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.”  Before Mr. Brooks chuckles at the hopeless backwardness of belief, he should, perhaps, look a few things up.

It may be worth noting that Mr. Brooks began his original meditation under the inspiration of the Rockefeller Museum which stands on a hill in Jerusalem.  Perhaps we would do well to ponder the social trajectory traced from a monument to western colonialism built by the ill-gotten gains of an American robber baron.  Perhaps we would do well to look to a different hilltop, one located outside that same ancient city, where a downwardly mobile Messiah redefined what it means to be “lifted up.”

This entry was posted on April 25, 2007 at 9:38 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.