The Great Lincoln-Darwin Debate

I hate to make it sound as if I'm trying to abuse Darwin -- to say nothing of science -- but unfortunately, he has became the brand name for a certain kind of philosophical and moral idiocy. As always, first the superior master ruins the disciples, then the mediocre disciples ruin the master. Which, of course, is why Raccoons don't have disciples, so we don't ruin one another.

Like most everything else, Darwinism is a good slave but a bad master. But to even affirm that one can master Darwinism is to render the theory void, at least in its vulgar, totalistic sense. As I have said before -- and this should be a truism -- either I can explain Darwinism or Darwinism explains me. Both cannot be true, for a thing that can transcend and explain itself is not just a thing.

Amazingly, we have had trolls who object to this axiom. However, I must remind them: I never said that Darwinism doesn't explain a soulless entity as simple as you. But even James Brown, the most righteous sex machine of them all, wasn't only a sex machine.

If man is susceptible to being contained and enslaved by something as simple as Darwinism, then he is susceptible to slavery, period. Do you really fail to see why this is the case, numbskull? If man is no longer a nonlocal soul with infinite possibilities but a mere replicating machine, what is so special about him? Why not just keep the good ones and enslave or eliminate the ones we don't like?

It's not as if it hasn't been tried in the past. Contemporary Darwinists hate to be reminded that some political movements -- including in America -- have actually taken the theory dead seriously, and moved on to the next step. For again, if the theory is true, it has undeniable political implications.

For one thing, it renders the underpinnings of our entire Judeo-Christian heritage null and void. I don't know about rank-and-foul Darwinians, but for the more prominent ones such as Richard Dawkins, this is the whole point. He detests religion, and wishes to use Darwin as a club to beat it to death. He's barbarous enough, but in the grubby hands of a Charles Frogster Queeg, the whole bloody scene is reduced to an intellectual version of Lord of the Flies, with the primitive children dancing around Darwin's brain on a pike.

Again, America's founders surely believed in evolution, just not the Darwinian kind -- which again, properly understood, is not even evolution, only change. To even say the word progress is to lift oneself from the stream of mere Darwinian change. To know truth, to create beauty, to recognize virtue, to embody cosmic funkmanship -- these are specifically human modalities that are above the plane of mere horizontal change.

As Watson explains, the Founders recognized that "while truth might be incrementally revealed in history, it was not created in or by History or beholden to it. The truth was indeed 'out there,' and the Americans' new science of politics, in both its creedal and cultural facets, represented a sustained effort to approximate it."

This is the Orthodox Raccoon position, enunciated by Toots Mondello and confirmed by Herman Hildebrand during happy hour at the Tip On In tavern over a century ago. It is not subject to evolution or revision. No random mutation can improve upon it. It is perfect as it is. It is absolute, inviolable, sacred, and true. To disbelieve it is to auto-excommunicate oneself from the nonlocal Body of Toots.

As discussed yesterday, it is strictly impossible to reconcile philosophical Darwinism with America's founding principles. Can't be done. It's just too bad for the Confederacy that they were too occupied with the Civil War to know what was going on across the Atlantic with science, but if Darwin's magnum opiate for the scientistic masses had only come out a decade or so earlier (it was published in 1859), they would have had the perfect rejoinder to Lincoln's nonsense about natural rights and the dignity of man. There would have been no need for that silly war. Instead, we would now have the north living under the principles of the Founders, and the south living under the principles of Darwin.

Watson writes that "the political rhetoric and actions of Lincoln remain among the greatest affirmations that there are such things as natural rights that do not change with time, that the American Constitution is dedicated to preserving them, and that the role of great political actors, while responding to urgent necessities, is to look backward rather than forward." But please note: we look backward in order to move forward, i.e., to evolve, for if there are no fixed principles, evolution is again impossible. As in driving a car, we look in the rear-view mirror in order to move ahead.

I don't think I want to bore you with how this is the very opposite of what modern day "progressives," believe. For one thing, that's the purpose of Watson's book -- to explain the intellectual roots of contemporary progressivism, and how their whole program is founded upon a rejection of the timeless principles embodied in our Constitution. To the extent that progressives rely upon the Constitution -- which they must at least pretend to do, in order to fool the public -- it is always as a pig leaf to conceal their swinish purposes. This is why they are always at cross purposes with themselves, because they only use the Constitution selectively, never as a sacred document embodying transcendent first principles. If they did that, they would no longer be progressives.

And "sacred" is not too strong a word, at least for Lincoln. When he declared that America was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," he understood this to be "the central truth of the American political experiment," "grounded in the laws of nature and nature's God" (Watson). These truths were "handed down by the Founding Fathers for later generations to preserve." These were truly Great Men, and a spineless pipsqueak such as Obama has no right to reject them. He doesn't have to live by them, but he has absolutely no right to prevent us from doing so.

Either our rights are grounded in the "nature of things," or they are not rights at all -- only privileges granted by man, i.e., the State. Again, this proposition is a sword that cuts straight through the body politic and defines left and right today. It is the whole basis of the energy animating the tea parties. Racism! Ha! Such transparent projection. For we declare with the Founders that all men are endowed by the Creator with sacred rights that no man -- not even Obama -- can deny.

When we look at Obama, we do not see black, white, color, or black & white. Rather, we see only the worldly emperor's new empty suit. That is all.

To be continued...

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