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It was inevitable that cancel culture would take a few swings at Darwin since he generated a really big idea that, while it seems obvious to us now, really wasn
by rsj_hn 6y ago
It was inevitable that cancel culture would take a few swings at Darwin since he generated a really big idea that, while it seems obvious to us now, really wasn't before:
That the accumulation of small changes and trials can result in an end state that creates a work of far higher intelligence and insight than the best that anyone could design on a blank slate. So it was a way of explaining how nature can appear so wonderfully designed just by undergoing a series of small mutations, each of which appear insignificant.
This idea than infected so many other fields, from business competition leading to better products than would have been possible in a planned economy to social conservatism that viewed cultural and moral traditions as the result of evolutionary processes and thus imbued with collective wisdom superior to that of the individual philosopher.
And as far as I know, there is basically no known counter to this except to argue that the conclusions of Darwin are morally repugnant and must, therefore, be wrong.
So obviously, people who tend to view the world through a rigid moral/immoral lense or who love to design utopias in their heads are going to take exception to Darwin. They are not going to let Darwin's steady whisper interrupt their Grand Plan to Save The World and Bring Justice to Mankind or to create the new Jerusalem in England or anywhere else.
But I think Darwin will win in the end, and those who criticize him today are going to look just as foolish as those who did in the past.
- jokoon 6y agoSocial darwinism is a problem. Darwin warned about it. The problem is when people reinterpret darwin for their own political interest, and apply it in civilization, in ways that is convenient for them. Generalizing an idea or theory to different domains is not always virtuous.
- rsj_hn 6y ago"Social darwinism" is an ill-defined slur, usually coming from the left, to describe situations where people advocate for regressive tax cuts and other things that reward societies' "winners". The analogous right wing slur would be "social engineering", whenever people on the left adopt various utopian projects to transform society, such as the eugenics movement, or wealth transfers, etc. Neither have much to do with long run evolutionary processes, they are all temporary short run things. To really be an evolutionary process you would need to control the success function, but you can't just create whatever success function you want, you need to feed that state back to the next generation in a stable way over many generations, but the exact same thing that makes a real success function stable is what prevents the ideologue from changing it. If every generation could make their own success function, then no evolutionary process would be at work. So it's important to tease out what is meant, and when there really are pre-conditions for evolutionary processes, then these must be recognized as operating, but when these do not exist, using the name of Darwin isn't going to make them exist.