As soon as I got home from Belmont Street Fair, I started looking at some books I’d just snagged for a dollar apiece, The Age of American Unreason among them.
Yes, I agree: the backlash against Darwinism wasn’t entirely over whether fossils disprove Genesis, but over whether the billionaires (as we call them today) are entitled to rule, not by divine right anymore, but by by the divine right of evolution, a eugenics ideology in other words. Social Darwinism gave Darwinism a bad name, and still does.
The eugenicists are champions of the idea of “races” pitted against one another in some struggle for supremacy. There’s no real genetic science to bolster their “races” hypothesis although we do have haploid groups, right? Traits travel together sometimes, much as personality traits do. Authoritarians like to micro-manage and obsess about others’ business. We all know the species.
I’m not especially sympathetic to the self-righteous who believe their grasp of science is what entitles them to dictate. It’s that feeling entitled to dictate that I find suspect, for whatever reason. Religion plays the same role, of cementing some hierarchy among wannabe bosses. Such organizations are attempted anyway. They come and go.
