Darwin's Gift To Mankind

In times of crisis, the matter of morality often comes back to the fore. It is usually conveniently forgotten during the good times, when profit is there for the taking so long as one doesn’t ask too many questions—at such times morality is largely seen as negativity.
But when a bubble goes to smash and we find we simply cannot “make a dollar out of sixty-five cents” or pay a huge mortgage on a tiny salary, then we raise the moral standard. “They” gypped us. “They” succumbed to the deadly sin of greed. “They” were IMMORAL.
I am usually not impressed by these post facto condemnations—which largely serve merely to point blame away from ourselves. We all cheered, didn’t we, when constraints were taken away from banks, regulations away from business, and we were given the opportunity to make millions in the market to cover our retirement, rather than rely on stodgy old fixed pensions?
Only after the fact—when we realize sixty five cents is only sixty five cents—do we start ascribing moral failings to our erstwhile heroes. To me it is interesting that this should be happening on an anniversary year of one of the most important publications of the last few centuries.
November 24, this year, will mark the 150th anniversary of one of the most significant MORAL treatises ever written—Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin of Species.” Moral treatise? you ask. I thought the book was about science.
Oh, it was. Pages and pages. But its impact on human morality was far greater than its impact on science. The “Theory of Evolution”, which is usually ascribed to Darwin, was well underway before he wrote a line.
The French Revolutionaries who marched on the Church of Notre Dame (it’s not the cathedral) to dethrone God in 1794 really began it. They put Human Reason at the altar in place of deity—and declared they would worship nothing else.
Up until that time you simply could not do respectable science—whether you were Copernicus or an alchemist—without positing the existence of a creator. Even Aristotle thought it absurd to think of a universe without an intelligent designer.
But that philosophical position came with a lot of theological baggage that was unacceptable to scientists, politicians and businessmen. You see if an intelligent being created the universe, he then might claim the right to say something about how it is run. He might even impose rules of conduct for beings he created. These would be called morality.
As I said before, during good times, morality is a negativistic pain. Politicians can’t live with it; business men reject it out of hand; scientists complain that it unnecessarily ties their hands while doing beneficial research. To make things work more smoothly, one MUST eliminate unnecessary restrictions. As I said, we feel this way when times are good.
“My God, John,” old Commodore VanderBilt is said to snapped at an aide, “do you think you can run a railroad according to the laws of the State of New York?” After dynamiting the competition and giving himself a monopoly of the ferries in New York harbor, he proceeded to help build a railroad complex that very much created the modern United States. With the same ruthlessness.
Think how a pedestrian religious morality would have limited him. VanderBilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Gould and Fisk were all devotees of Darwinian morality. The fit survive and thrive. The dollar-a-day working stiff goes to well deserved extinction. Darwinian business and nature are equally ruthless.
By 1796 a French scientist, Georges Cuvier, proved that species become extinct. Darwin’s own grand-father propounded the notion of common ancestry for warm blooded species before Charles was born. Charles Lyells wrote a book in the 1830s on geology in which he suggested gradual change over millions of years. Jean Baptiste Lamarck published a book with a complete theory of evolution in 1809.
But morality, buttressed by conservative theologians held on. Darwin’s book would finally toss it all out and leave us free to enjoy the benefits of unregulated markets, science and politics (Nazism, Communism, or laissez faire capitalism, for instance).
When Christ spelled out his moral theology two thousand years ago, he employed only one top-notch evangelist to sell it to the Roman Empire, St. Paul. Within a decade of publishing “Origin”, four terribly effective evangelists for Evolution had taken up the cudgels on its behalf.
It took Christian preachers three hundred years to change the Roman world. Darwin’s apostles would change the world in a few decades. They left us with no legitimate appeal to morality or any other restraining set of rules of conduct. That’s Darwin’s gift to us.
But before the moralizers go up in arms, let’s take a look at all the reasons why Christianity made it so easy for Darwin’s followers to pitch its preachments on the scrap heap of history. Much of the fault, does indeed lie with Christianity.
Let’s look at that—and Darwin’s chief followers and boosters tomorrow.