Is It Time to Cancel Darwin?
Today’s society is hyper-sensitive to anything that is or was, racist. The perception of racism is so “critical” that we have to change our lexicon (no more “Brown Bag Lunch”); forego long-established disciplines (Mathematics, for instance); abstain from the masterpieces (Shakespeare, Mozart, and others); even “climate change” and Dr. Seuss have not escaped the new race police. These seemingly innocuous issues linked to racism are one part of Grievance Studies called Critical Race Theory where everything and everyone (except for white males) are victims of racial discrimination which must be eliminated, changed, or apologized for.
When the racial police come after someone or something, they continually attack online; in the media; and, in growing numbers of incidents, in person. The point of the attacks is to “cancel” the object of revulsion – statues must be torn down; buildings must be renamed; history must be rewritten, and white people must grovel.
This brings me to Darwin, who, along with Karl Marx are the saviors to the Left. Both men wrote their tomes in the mid-1800s, (from a very white Europe I might add). Both were white males, misogynists, and racists – strike one. I would also add that both men were also anti-religion, anti-freedom, and anti-Semites.
Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, has been retitled over the years with publishers quietly dropping more than half of the original title from later printings. The book had been titled, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (emphasis mine). In his later book, Descent of Man, Darwin makes very clear that his “favored race” is Caucasian calling all others savage and uncivilized.
Karl Marx took Darwin’s evolutionary ideas in the physical realm and applied them to the social and economic realm with the estimated results to be at least 100 million people killed and countless others imprisoned, tortured, or worse. Those 100 million people were citizens of countries under Marx’s philosophy who were killed by their own state, not enemies killed in wars of expansion. Let that sink in for a moment – that means that leaders in these countries sanctioned the killing of their own citizens in order to keep control. Why? Because it defies human nature, squashes freedom, and kills innovation. Plato himself came to that conclusion when contemplating his Socialist Utopia in Republic.
There is clear causation between evolution presented as science and the horrors of the 20th century perpetrated by Nazis, Soviets, and others. If we all came from nothing, then what value is human life? Eugenics is just a way for humans to “help” the evolutionary process. Racism is nothing more than recognizing the evolutionary progression of one “species” over another (Darwin used species and race interchangeably).
I understand that Logic has been removed from schools and common sense is no longer very common, but based on the recent calls for everything the United States embodies to be canceled because we had slaves and segregation (news-flash: nearly every country on the planet has slavery in their history), shouldn’t we also cancel other philosophies that have perpetuated the same?