What Went Wrong? Scientific Materialism and the Abolition of Man
John G. West - 02/15/08
excerpted from Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science
Julian West went to sleep in Boston one night in 1887. He awoke in the same city in the year 2000. When he fell asleep, Boston was being torn apart by growing battles between rich and poor. When he awoke, Mr. West was astonished to find himself in a brave new world.
Slums and tenements had given way to fountains, tree-lined avenues, and buildings of “architectural grandeur.” Poverty had been abolished, capitalism had been replaced by centralized planning, and the state was now everyone’s employer. Social problems had all but disappeared. Jails were a relic of the past, and the few remaining criminals were treated as evolutionary throwbacks and interned in hospitals to be treated rather than punished. The continuing improvement of the race was assured by a program of positive eugenics based on Darwin’s law of “sexual selection.” There was little need for checks and balances against corruption because environmental conditioning had produced a new race of men who were both equal and morally good.
According to Mr. Barton, a celebrated clergyman of the new era, “the ten commandments became well-nigh obsolete in a world where there was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another. Humanity’s ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity . . . at last was realized.” Human evolution had finally made realistic the goal of creating heaven on earth. “The long and weary winter of the race is ended,” declared Mr. Barton. “Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”
This fanciful depiction of life in the twenty-first century was the invention of Edward Bellamy in his popular utopian novel, Looking Backward (1887). Bellamy’s novel perfectly embodied the optimistic vision offered by scientific materialism at the end of the nineteenth century. During an era when science seemed to be uncovering the material basis of all human problems, it was widely believed that science could lead to the transformation of society, bringing about greater human freedom, dignity, and happiness in the process.
A transformation of society did occur, but not of the sort anticipated by the early boosters of scientific materialism. Human nature was not reformed, crime did not disappear, and scientific materialism did not usher in a new age of “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
What went wrong?
An idea’s consequences may not be fully anticipated by its proponents. Nathaniel Hawthorne wryly observed that “no human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors . . . We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for.” Scientific materialism was supposed to be a great engine of human progress in politics and culture. It was not. And its failures continue to influence American public policy.
Technocracy
One consequence of scientific materialism for politics was the elevation of technocracy—rule by scientific experts—over democracy. Since science was supposed to be the true source of objective information about the world, proponents of scientific materialism logically concluded that scientists—not the general public, or their elected representatives—should be the ultimate arbiters of public policy.
At its core, this message was profoundly anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. Speaking before the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921, Alleyne Ireland declared that current conditions had rendered America’s original form of government established by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “utterly unsuitable.” America’s Founders believed that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and they set up arrangements “designed with a view to making abuse of power difficult.” But in an age when government must increasingly provide a wide range of social services, society could no longer afford to rely on government by nonexperts. Ireland stated that it was “imperative . . . that the omnipresent activity of government should be guided by the light of scientific knowledge and conducted through the instrumentality of a scientific method.”
The claim that society should place its faith in scientific experts rather than ordinary citizens or elected officials was a common refrain in public-policy debates colored by scientific materialism. To be sure, few were as blunt as Ireland in directly attacking the Constitution or demanding a governing role for scientists. Yet in controversy after controversy, the message was unmistakable. Whether the issue was education or welfare or crime, members of the public were urged to place their trust in the findings of scientific experts rather than their own core beliefs or the views of political and religious leaders. Science with a capital “S” dictated the replacement of punishment with treatment in the criminal-justice system, the enactment of forced sterilization in the welfare system, and the substitution of “value-free” information from sex researchers for traditional moral teachings about family life in public schools. In each of these areas, the claim was made at least implicitly that scientific expertise should trump other sources of knowledge, including ethics, philosophy, tradition, religion, and common sense.
Much could be said in favor of the authority of scientific expertise in modern life. In an increasingly complex and technologically driven world, the need for scientific input on public policy would seem obvious. Since many policy questions today arise in such science-based fields as medicine, transportation, and ecology, why shouldn’t politicians and voters simply defer to the authority of scientific experts in these areas?
Although this line of reasoning exhibits a surface persuasiveness, it ignores the natural limits of scientific expertise. Scientific knowledge may be necessary for good public policy in certain areas. But it is not sufficient. Political problems are preeminently moral problems, and scientists are ill-equipped to function as moralists. C. S. Lewis warned about this drawback of technocracy in the 1950s. “I dread specialists in power, because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects,” Lewis wrote. “Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
To cite a concrete example: Wildlife biologists may be able to provide policymakers with information about which species are in danger of extinction and perhaps predict some of the costs of their extinction to biodiversity. But they have no more authority than anyone else in determining whether a particular endangered species is more valuable than the jobs that may be lost trying to save that species from extinction. Politics is largely about ranking and reconciling competing goods. But the ranking of goods involves questions of justice and morality, and as Lewis pointed out, “a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value” on such questions.
Technocracy poses a further difficulty: Experts can be wrong, sometimes egregiously. If the history of scientific materialism in politics shows anything, it is that scientific experts are as fallible as anyone else. They are capable of being blinded by their own prejudices and going beyond the evidence in order to promote the policies they favor. Alfred Kinsey’s empirical claims about the sexual behavior of the general American public were junk science, given his deeply flawed sample population; yet that did not stop him from boldly making his claims and vigorously defending them as sound science.
What is true of individual scientists can be true of the scientific community as a whole. For decades, eugenics was embraced as legitimate by America’s leading scientists and scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Critics of eugenics, meanwhile, were stigmatized as antiscience and religious zealots. Yet the critics turned out to be right. Similarly, the lobotomy was uncritically embraced for years by the medical community as a miracle cure, and the scientist who pioneered the operation in human beings won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Only after tens of thousands of individuals had been lobotomized did healthy skepticism prevail.
To cite a more recent example, various scientists and medical professors into the 1990s continued to invoke Haeckel’s discredited theory of embryonic recapitulation to supply a scientific justification for abortion. And in 2003, hundreds of scientists in Texas defended inaccurate biology textbooks they likely had never read because they were more interested in safeguarding the public image of Darwin’s theory of evolution than they were in presenting students with accurate facts.
Any suggestion that policymakers should simply rubber-stamp the advice of the current majority of scientists is profoundly subversive of the fundamental principles of representative democracy. As equal citizens before the law, scientists have every right to inform policymakers of the scientific implications of their actions. But they have no special right to demand that policymakers listen to them alone.
Unfortunately, a growing chorus urges that public policy be dictated by the majority of scientific experts without input from anyone else. This bold assertion is made not just with regard to evolution, but concerning a host of other controversial issues such as sex education, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, cloning, and global warming. Any dissent from the orthodoxy of “experts” on these issues allegedly represents a “war on science.” But that’s just not the case.
Utopianism
A second consequence of scientific materialism for public policy was the cultivation of a vigorous form of utopianism. Believing they possessed the key to understanding and ultimately controlling human behavior, defenders of scientific materialism were confident that science could usher in heaven on earth—if only they tried hard enough.
Their heady optimism is not difficult to understand. By the late nineteenth century, science had produced marvelous advances in medicine, agriculture, sanitation, and transportation. Why couldn’t the triumphs of the scientific method over the natural world be extended to the social sphere? If science could prevent the spread of physical diseases like smallpox, why couldn’t it also prevent outbreaks of social diseases like crime and poverty? If science could breed better strains of cattle and corn, why couldn’t it breed better kinds of people?
Addressing the American Breeders Association in 1913, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson acknowledged that the wholesale replacement of “inferior” human stocks with “the best part of the human race . . . at first seems like an Utopian vision,” but he then quickly added: “Why should it not come? Must science stop in its beneficence with the plant and the animal? Is not man, after all, the architect of his own racial destiny?” Wilson’s rosy rhetoric revealed the startling naïveté at the heart of the scientific-materialist agenda.
Scientists and policymakers who were readily skeptical of claims made by religion or tradition turned out to be supremely credulous when it came to claims made in the name of science. They accepted at face value the purported benefits of such procedures as lobotomies, psychosurgery, and forced sterilization. They made grand promises about how science could solve intractable social problems such as crime and poverty. They showed little appreciation for the fact that science, like all human endeavors, could be misused, especially when allied with political power. Eugenist Herbert Walter sanguinely predicted that nothing like “the Spanish Inquisition or . . . the Salem witchcraft persecution” would take place in an age of modern science. Only two decades before the Nazis ascended to power in Germany, Walter predicted that “it is unlikely that the world will ever see another great religious inquisition, or that in applying to man the newly found laws of heredity there will ever be undertaken an equally deplorable eugenic inquisition.” Harry Laughlin asserted with confidence that no one—not even one person—had been wrongly sterilized in America. AAAS president Charles Eliot at least acknowledged the prospect that physical and chemical science could be enlisted “as means of destruction and death.” But even he thought the application of biology to society held no danger: “Biological science has great advantage in this respect over physical and chemical [science]. It can not so frequently or easily be applied to evil ends.” Eliot wrote those words in 1915 as the eugenics movement was well on its way to compelling the sterilization of thousands of people across America.
Prior to the rise of scientific materialism, a strong anti-utopian sentiment in American political culture counterbalanced the zealousness of reformers. America’s Founders, in addition to their idealism, displayed a keen realism about the imperfections of human nature. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” wrote James Madison in The Federalist. “The best Institutions may be abused by human depravity . . . they may even . . . be made subservient to the vilest of purposes,” echoed George Washington. Nathaniel Hawthorne satirized the overblown hopes of contemporary reformers in his short story “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844). There he described how militant do-gooders planned to cleanse the earth of imperfection by creating a giant bonfire out on the western prairies on which they could throw every conceivable cause of social evil. The great conflagration burned for days and consumed everything thrown into it, but the fire still did not produce the perfect society. Hawthorne’s punch line was that the reformers failed because they could not reach the ultimate cause of human misery, the human heart. Social conditions might wax and wane, but sinful human nature was unchangeable this side of heaven.
Scientific materialism tried to refute this kind of political realism. Human nature, said the scientific materialists, was not fixed; it could be remade through the methods of modern science. Men may not be angels now, but under the right biological and environmental conditioning they might become angelic. Scientific breeding and medical treatment could usher in a new age only dreamt of by previous reformers.
One would like to believe that Americans have learned from the excesses of scientific utopianism, but current political controversies inspire no confidence in this regard. The miracle cures may be different today, but the utopian rhetoric is remarkably similar. Seventy years ago, eugenics promised to cure America’s social problems through better breeding. Today, mental-health crusaders promise to eliminate behavioral problems among America’s children by screening every schoolchild for mental illness and then putting millions of them on psychoactive drugs. Like the eugenics crusade, the current push to dramatically increase the number of children on psychoactive drugs reduces all behavioral problems to a material basis. And like the eugenics crusade, it is accompanied by grandiose claims that go far beyond the actual science. Like the eugenics crusade, it is justified in humanitarian terms even while it raises serious issues about civil liberties and human dignity. How many children will be hurt before this latest crusade runs out of steam?
Dehumanization
A third consequence of scientific materialism for public policy was dehumanization. Although its boosters saw scientific materialism as a way to solve social problems and advance human dignity, the historical record shows that it often denigrated entire classes of humanity. The belief that men and women could be reduced to their physical capacities plus their material inputs could be profoundly dehumanizing.
In criminal justice, the belief that a person was “no more ‘responsible’ for becoming wilful and committing a crime than the flower for becoming red and fragrant” may have led to more humane treatment in some cases, but it also robbed the criminal offender of the dignity of being treated as a rational being whose choices matter. At the same time, it opened the door to horrific forms of “scientific” rehabilitation that never would have been allowed if they had been imposed as punishments.
In sex education, the depiction of human sexuality as little more than mammalian behavior reduced human beings to the level of animals and drained human relationships of the moral and spiritual context that gave them their deepest meaning.
In the corporate world, scientific materialism fed eugenic employment policies and the use of advertising to scientifically manipulate consumers into purchasing products.
In the welfare system, the quest to identify the biological roots of poverty paved the way for forced sterilization, anti-immigrant hysteria, and the demonization of anyone who was regarded as physically or mentally imperfect.
The impact of scientific materialism on welfare policy is especially worth noting, because it directly challenged the guiding principles of the existing social-welfare system. Traditional charity was premised on the idea that all human beings were created in the image of God and therefore worthy of assistance, mercy, and redemption. Eugenic welfare reformers denounced such humanitarian views as false and dangerous. Edward East attacked as unscientific the idea that “man is created in the image of God” and suggested that the claim that all human beings have equal worth is ludicrous. Margaret Sanger warned of the “dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency.”
America’s experience with the dehumanizing effects of scientific materialism was far from exceptional. The three regimes of the twentieth century best known for being founded explicitly on the principles of scientific materialism—Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Communist China—are all remembered for their horrific brutality rather than any advancement of human dignity. In Germany, the connection between scientific materialism and Nazi crimes against humanity is unmistakable, as historian Richard Weikart has ably demonstrated in his recent book on the influence of Darwinian ethics in Germany.
The dehumanizing effects of scientific materialism remain a live issue for public policy today, especially in so-called right-to-die cases. Efforts to redefine mentally and physically disabled infants and adults as already dead, the widespread careless diagnosis of the “persistent vegetative state,” and the demeaning rhetoric of bioethicists such as Peter Singer, raise, chillingly, the ghosts of evils past.
Relativism
A fourth consequence of scientific materialism for public policy was relativism. Darwinian theory in particular supplied a powerful justification for evolving standards in politics and morality. Part of the justification was by way of analogy: If evolution was the normal state of the natural world, why shouldn’t it be regarded as the normal state of politics?
The preeminent achievement of applying the evolutionary paradigm to politics was the doctrine of the evolving Constitution championed by Woodrow Wilson and other progressives. No longer would American government be hamstrung by a static understanding of human nature or human rights. It must adapt and evolve to meet the challenges of new conditions. In the words of Wilson, “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life . . . all that progressives ask or desire is permission . . . to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
But the link between Darwinian theory and relativism was not merely analogical. In The Descent of Man, Darwin depicted morality as the evolving product of natural selection. Rather than reflecting timeless standards of truth sanctioned by God or nature, moral codes evolved by natural selection to promote survival. As the conditions for survival changed, so did what was moral for any species. In one situation, maternal love might be moral; in another situation, infanticide. In one situation, kindness might be moral; in another situation, cruelty.
While Darwin surely hoped that traditional virtues were biologically beneficial in nineteenth-century Britain, if circumstances changed and those virtues no longer promoted survival, he would have to grant that they would no longer be virtues. To recall a startling passage by Darwin quoted earlier in this book: “If, for instance . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”
Whatever his personal moral preferences, Darwin’s reductionistic account of the development of morality left little room for objectively preferring one society’s morality over another. Each society’s moral code developed to promote the survival of that society, and so each society’s moral code could be considered equally “natural.” Darwin’s evolutionary explanation of the origin of the family was just as relativistic. It was clear from his account that there could be no superior form of marriage or family life for every time and place. In Darwin’s framework, everything that regularly occurred in nature must be regarded as normal almost by definition. While for the most part Darwin did not press his relativistic analysis of morality to its logical conclusion, he laid the groundwork for others who came after him. The ultimate result of Darwinian moral relativism can be seen in the sex research of zoologist Alfred Kinsey and the moral pluralism embraced by the sex-education reformers at SIECUS and similar organizations. Their efforts to convince the public that all variations of sexual behavior are “normal”—including adult-child sex and even incest—were a logical culmination of the approach Darwin pursued in The Descent of Man.
Stifling Free Speech
A final consequence of scientific materialism was the stifling of free speech and debate over the public-policy implications of science. This is surely one of the most striking ironies of the effort to enlist scientific materialism to reform society. In their own minds, proponents of scientific materialism were the defenders of enlightenment against superstition and rational debate against unreasoning dogmatism.
But the rhetoric they employed against their opponents was often far from conducive to open discussion. The repeated insistence that scientists know best and thus politicians and the public should blindly accept the policy views of scientists did not encourage critical scrutiny of scientific claims made in politics. Even more stifling of genuine debate was the frequent playing of the religion card in policy disputes involving science. With the help of sympathetic journalists, proponents of scientific materialism tried to turn every policy dispute into a battle pitting the enlightened forces of science against bigoted religious extremists. Promoters of eugenics heaped scorn on Catholic and fundamentalist critics of forced sterilization. Advocates of Kinsey-style sex education demonized parents who raised objections as Bible-thumpers who were conspiring against democracy. Today, defenders of a Darwin-only biology curriculum accuse their opponents of trying to insert Genesis into science classes, no matter the facts.
Instead of addressing the policy arguments raised by critics of sex education or Darwin-only science education, defenders of scientific materialism try to make the religious beliefs of their opponents the central issue, arguing that their real or perceived religious motivations somehow disqualify them from being active participants in the public square.
America is a deeply religious country, and no doubt many critics of the agenda of scientific materialism are motivated in part by their religious beliefs. So what? Many opponents of slavery were motivated by their Christian beliefs, and many leaders of the civil-rights movement were even members of the clergy. All of them had an equal right with other citizens to raise their voices in public debates. So long as religious persons in politics offer secular justifications for their policy proposals, they have every right to demand that their ideas be heard on the merits regardless of their private religious views.
Although evolutionists portray themselves as the victims of fundamentalist intolerance, in most places today it is the critics of Darwin’s theory who are being intimidated or silenced. Some universities are even adopting the equivalent of evolution “speech codes” to muzzle free speech by science professors who may be skeptical of Darwin’s theory. At the University of Idaho, for example, President Timothy White issued a letter in 2005 forbidding faculty from “teaching . . . views that differ from evolution . . . in our life, earth, and physical science courses or curricula.” The directive targeted tenured microbiology professor Scott Minnich, a proponent of intelligent design.
“The University of Idaho’s statement does not simply ban discussions of evolution that are unrelated to the subjects of courses being taught,” noted Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf. “Nor does it merely forbid religious-based views of evolution from being taught in science classes. The statement offers a blanket prohibition on any ‘views that differ from evolution,’ no matter how scientific, and no matter how related to the courses under study.” DeWolf concluded: “this is viewpoint discrimination in its most naked form.”
These politically correct efforts to silence the academic critics of Darwinism are fueled by increasingly toxic rhetoric on the part of evolutionists. Rather than defend the scientific merits of evolution, Darwinists have become obsessed with denouncing their opponents as dangerous zealots hell-bent on imposing theocracy. They routinely apply the label of “Taliban” to anyone who supports teaching students about scientific criticisms of Darwinian theory. Biology professor P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota, Morris, meanwhile, has demanded “the public firing and humiliation of some teachers” who express doubts about Darwin. He says that evolutionists should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots.”
Defenders of evolution who claim to fear blind zealotry might want to look in the mirror. The new “Darwinian fundamentalists” have become just as intolerant as the religious fundamentalists they despise.
Such intolerance should raise concerns for thoughtful citizens from across the political spectrum. True liberals—those who favor free and open debate—should be appalled by the growing campaign of intimidation against academic critics of Darwinism. Whatever one’s personal view of Darwinism, the current atmosphere is unhealthy for science, and it is unhealthy for a free society.
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