...so anxious to dispose of as many of the elderly as it suits them? Are they all Darwinists?Again I ask: If the Trump administration were trying to spread the coronavirus to as many Americans as possible, how could we tell the difference? https://t.co/NIEKGeMWQP
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 17, 2020
Darwinism is, in fact, as Ernst Haeckel said with Darwin's complete knowledge and his stated support, an ideology of aristocratic supremacy, not only class supremacy, not only biological supremacy but, in fact, their sole worthiness of survival. It was a theory that was grasped onto by the rich and powerful of the Victorian era and those in the rising or aspiring to rise middle class for that purpose, it was, as I never will stop pointing out, founded on Malthusian economics.
ReplyDeleteAs such, it's a natural for the Republican Party and the Americans of today who are directly analogous to those Victorians. And racism was a part of it from the start. It would have been a surprise if the Hoover Institution hadn't contained a malignant bunch of Darwinists, Hoover signed one of the most blatantly Darwinistic bills into law in 1929,the one restricting immigration, written by the eugenicist James Davis and his collaborator Coleman Livingston Bleaze a white supremacist from South Carolina (no doubt he'd be a Republican, today). This has been an ideological part of American conservatism, both those who admitted the origin of their Darwinism and those who officially deem Darwin to have been the devil while fully believing in his theory, only applying it to human society and not to the diversity of species.
Karl Pearson early on identified the engine of natural selection as being not birth but death, he was quite explicit in stating that Darwinian natural selection was the assertion that the deaths of the majority of people was the guarantor of the superiority of the survivors and, wouldn't you know it, those were white, affluent, North-Western Europeans of the affluent class. Funny how that worked out, wasn't it. What's funny is how many Republican-fascists would be left out of that calculation, all of those in the underclass, to start with.
"Karl Pearson early on identified the engine of natural selection as being not birth but death...." Seeing it stated so bluntly puts it in a new perspective. I long ago realized "survival of the fittest" was a claim that could only be made by the living against the dead, and the only way it worked was to lord it over the dead for not being among them. Yet. As Keynes observed, "In the long run, we're all dead." Even the "fittest" are mortal. What, then, is the standard of "fitness"? Reading the obituary and not finding your name?
DeleteIt's just another way of categorizing: me and my still living friends are "fitter" than those who have already died. Except I've lost too many friends to say that. So what does it mean?
Nothing.