Kenneth C. Blanchard Jr. - Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question

PART ONE: DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM

By Larry Arnhart

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation for research grants that supported the writing of this book. I am also grateful to my political theory graduate students at Northern Illinois University, who helped me to think through many of the ideas in this book, often by forcing me to answer thoughtful criticisms. In particular, I should mention Jennifer Guon, Lauren Hall, Jason Jividen, Steve McCarthy, Andy Schott, Marlene Sokolon, and Chris Whidden. I should also mention Carson Holloway, a former graduate student at Northern who now teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His new book The New Darwinism (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2005) develops many of the objections that I have tried to answer in this book.

Larry Arnhart

June 2005

Introduction

Conservatives need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectibility and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence. The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the twenty-first century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought.

Oh, yes, I know, these first few sentences will be enough to provoke many conservative readers to toss this book away, because they think the very idea of Darwinian conservatism is silly. A few years ago, when I proposed this idea in First Things , one of the leading journals for religious conservatives in the United States, Michael Behe responded: Im sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd.

Behe is a biologist who criticizes Darwinian science for failing to explain the irreducible complexity in the living world that points to an intelligent designer as the cause of life. Behe and others defend intelligent design theory as superior to Darwinism. Many conservatives - particularly in the United States - have adopted this argument as part of a political campaign to challenge the teaching of Darwinian science in public schools. This continues a controversy over the public-school teaching of evolution that began early in the twentieth century when William Jennings Bryan supported legislation in the state of Tennessee prohibiting any teaching of evolution as denying the biblical doctrine that human beings were created by God.

The debate here is not just over the scientific truth or falsity of Darwins theory, but also over its moral and political implications. Many conservatives regard Darwinian evolution as a key idea for a scientific materialism that is morally and politically corrupting because it denies the moral dignity of human beings as created in Gods image. So this debate over the teaching of Darwinism in the public schools has become part of what is called the culture war in the United States. This is said to be a war about moral values in which conservatives defend traditional moral and religious values against the scientific materialism and moral relativism of the liberals. Many people have suggested that President George Bushs re-election in 2004 was due, at least in part, by his winning the support of religious conservatives who thought he was on the right side of this cultural war over values.

But my argument is that conservatives can more easily win this cultural war by using Darwinian biology as an intellectual weapon supporting traditional morality - and conservative principles generally - as grounded in human nature. I am not alone in making this argument. Recently, some conservative thinkers have shown how much of the reasoning about human nature in Darwinian biology supports a conservative view of morality and social order generally. For example, in an article for National Review , John McGinnis declared: Conservatism will certainly be easier than liberalism to integrate with evolutionary biology. The constraints of our biological nature explode the most persistent delusion of the Left: that man is so malleable that he can be reshaped or transformed through political actions. Consequently, a Darwinian politics is a largely conservative politics. And yet such claims have disturbed those conservatives who fear modern science.

Consider, for example, the conservative reaction a few years ago to Francis Fukuyamas book The Great Disruption .

Conservatives like Ferguson and Lawler are at least partially correct, because some Darwinians (Richard Dawkins, for example) do interpret Darwinian theory as dictating a reductionistic view of human beings as governed by their selfish genes. I think Fukuyama ultimately has the better argument, however, because he sees that Darwinian biology rightly understood confirms our common-sense view of human beings as naturally social animals whose social life depends on a natural moral sense, which supports the conservative view of human nature.