Rishon Rishon

Darwin and Bloomsbury

Since I discovered him, I have felt a kinship with David Warren: we both, in our respective ways, spent our youths and early adulthood traveling the world, and we have both come back to an unexpected home. Perhaps I have discovered the origin of our kinship. His latest-but-one article reveals his formative reading:

A friend and I once had a semi-public discussion about character-formation through books read in early childhood. I attributed my own moral outlook to Rudyard Kipling, via Just So Stories, and then Kim. He attributed his to Kenneth Grahame via The Wind in the Willows.

I now realize that the Kipling influence, which began as late as age five, could only have been superficial. The Pookie books [see source for details - DB] are the true source of my Weltanschauung.

Nothing against Wind in the Willows. I didn't read it until aloud, as a parent at the bedside of a child. I was of course joking when I suggested that an early exposure to it might explain my friend's liberal propensities. As an adult, I found it finely written, clever, and sentimental, but lacking in the quality of nobility; one of those "empathy books", with elements of stand-up comedy.

It's probably just a coincidence that the people who have told me Wind in the Willows was their formative book have all been gliberals, leftoids, and sex perverts.

I think I had 'The Wind in the Willows' read to me in school, I remember of it nothing more than vague impressions. But Kipling's 'Jungle Book', and before that 'Just So Stories' (read to me by my parents, Kipling was un-PC even in those pre-PC days when I was a child) made an impression on me that has lasted a lifetime (I am now reading 'Just So Stories' to my own children, and have just bought the 'Jungle Book') - I, too, found them possessing a certain nobility, as David Warren said. I think it a certain adventurousness of spirit, a playful earnestness - nobility, I think, comes from bearing burdens lightly, from never taking oneself too seriously, yet being serious nonetheless. It it the opposite of idle self-importance. (Not that I want to belittle earnest do-gooders, with the proviso that they are actually doing good. It just helps, I think, to remember that Man tracht und Gott lacht - Man plans and God Laughs, a Yiddish proverb.)

So I was somewhat dismayed on New Year's Eve, when David wrote (in his usual thoughtful manner) a screed against evolution, and has since expanded his thoughts into a four-part series. Of course, history is not something that can be scientifically proven - we cannot prove that evolution is responsible for the origin of species any more than we can prove that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo - but we can martial a quantity of evidence that makes the alternatives vanishingly improbable. Though this, too, is dependent on the assumption that God is not deliberately deceiving us: there is no way to assign probablies to the notion that God created the world 5000+ years ago, complete with its fossil (and human) record. But, then, you could just as easily claim that the world was created yesterday, complete with each of our false memories. In that case, however, I would claim that there must be some intrinsic truth to our false memories (after all, God created them) that it behooves us to investigate. (Rabbi Moshe Hayim Luzzatto claims that God made the world logical only for mankind to understand it.) And so, back we get, to evolution.

In any case, I think all this is odd, because it seems that David's main objection is not science at all, but politics:

What distinguishes Darwinism, in the end, is the nasty figurative edge to it, the popular use of it to communicate "nature red in tooth and claw". It became associated very early with Victorian atheism, and does the missionary work of the old Bloomsbury set that lost its Christian faith in the mid-19th century. It is an ideology that continues to reach beyond the strict realm of biology, into areas of philosophy and theology with which it has nothing to do. It sells a cosmos that is blind, random, purposeless.

It is a religion, sez I; a religion with prophets like Thomas Henry Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, and Richard Dawkins today.

Personally, I have never had this problem. I didn't learn evolution from Huxley, Spencer, or Dawkins. My official introduction to evolution was in 10th grade biology, and it was preceded by a thoughtful disclaimer, where the teacher said something like: This is what most scientists think. You don't have to believe it - this is not a religion class - but for this class you have to know it. I, too, am offended by people who mix science and politics - even when I agree with the politics. True, science can lead to conclusions of political import. But arguments of fact and arguments of policy must be kept separate, otherwise facts will be rejected because of their supposed policy implications, to the detriment of both. And that is exactly what has happened. Unfortunately ideas, like people, are judged by the company they keep.

But David redeems himself, for this is how he concludes:

Evolution is, on the other hand, not a "crock" in the way it is presented by non-ideological science writers. E.O. Wilson, for instance (whose co-written book on The Ants was among the most wonderful Christmas presents I ever received), is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Richard Dawkins, who makes a point of throwing evolution in the face of believing Christians. Prof. Wilson is a gentleman; Prof. Dawkins is a pig.

And by the way, it would be no skin off my nose if every aspect of Darwinism were by some miracle demonstrated to be true. I would then have to accept it as a genuine insight into "how" God works.

And that is a sentiment that I can stand behind 100%.