I may be one of the only scholars
to escape Claremont without being or becoming obsessed with the Progressives. As a result, I have never paid much attention
to John Dewey or Woodrow Wilson or the rest of that lot. The general idea, if I get it, is that the
Progressives wanted to empower the people and get rid of silly constitutional
limitations on the popular will‑guided, of course, by experts in the sciences
of politics and economics.
I have just finished reading a paper
about the use of “Darwinism” by the Progressives. I can’t site the paper, because it is a draft
of what will be presented at the panel I am chairing at the meeting of the
International Political Science Association in Brisbane, Australia. By the way, that’s Brisbin to those in the
know. It is a wonderful introduction to
Progressive thought, so now I know more than I really want to know.
This is my summary of the paper,
for which the unnamed author bears no responsibility. The Progressives believed that modern science
could produce much more efficient societies, free from the old evils of factionalism,
greed, etc., if only it could get complete command of the powers of
government. Standing in the way of that
complete command were the constitutional devices—separation of powers, checks
and balances, federalism, etc.
To fully empower government to do
what the Progressives thought it could do, they had to get rid of those obstacles. To do that, they had to discredit the
philosophical principles on which the constitutional order was based. The Founders believed that they understood
human nature. The believe that human
tendencies toward corruption and self-destruction could not be eradicated, they
could only be ameliorated. That is what
limited government was designed to achieve.
The Progressives attempted to
undermine the Founding principles by attacking the idea of a fixed human
nature. The Founder’s work made sense by
the light of late 18th century science, they argued, but science has
moved on. We now know that human nature
changes just like everything else does. We
can mold ourselves into new and better beings, free from the moral infirmities of
our predecessors, if only be can break free of the shackles they put in
place.
This is where Darwin comes
in. At the very least, Darwinian
evolution allowed the Progressives to argue that human nature was not something
fixed; therefore, a political doctrine based on the idea of natural rights was
untenable. However, Darwin didn’t give
the Progressives what they really needed.
They needed the idea that history had a direction from the primitive and
bad toward the advanced and good. They
got that, more or less consciously, from Hegel and Marx. Without the latter, the idea of a changing
human nature provides no comforts, let alone a promise of liberation.
If I get all this right, Darwinism
was little more than a gloss—if a very useful gloss—on Progressive doctrine. It allowed them to dismiss the idea of human nature
without much serious thought. They didn’t
have to understand it; they just needed to employ it as a slogan.
To put it charitably, the
Progressives’ view of Darwin was a little more sophisticated than Adolph Hitler’s
understanding of genetics. In Mein Kampf, which I haven’t read and neither
have you, Hitler apparently argued that if someone from a superior race mates
with someone of an inferior race, you get children who are mediocre. The problem, of course, is that genetics
doesn’t work that way at all. Breeding a
tall animal with a short one might get you middle sized offspring, but it also
might give you some tall offspring and some short ones. Genetics is digital rather than
analogical.
The problem with the Progressives’
view of Darwinian theory is threefold.
The most important problem is that evolution by natural selection is not
fundamentally progressive. It shapes
organisms for their respective ecological niches, but that can mean simpler,
dumber creatures as often as more complex and smarter creatures.
It is true that there is a
progressive dimension in the history of evolution. All organisms are autonomous in the sense
that they resist the influence of environmental forces. That is what it means to be alive. The increases in organic complexity over time
map onto increases in autonomy: warm blooded animals segregate their organs
from one another and maintain their body temperature in order to (adaptationist
language here) be more independent from the local environment.
The second problem with the
Progressive view of Darwinism is that it completely ignores the relevant time
frames. Yes, the human species has
changed over time; however, it matters how much change and how much time we are
talking about. According to most current
accounts, human beings have been pretty much the same animals for at least
fifty-thousand years. Have we changed
enough since Romulus and Remus, let alone Jefferson and Madison, to make a practical
difference for political theory? No. If the Founder’s theory was good enough for
human beings two hundred and forty-two years ago, no contemporary evolutionary
theory will undermine it.
The final and most important
problem is that species do not change in all parts of their organic structure
at the same rates and some parts of them do not change much at all. While the simplistic model of the triune
brain—reptilian, mammalian, and neomammalian—may be discarded, the basic idea
is sound: evolution doesn’t work transforming existing organisms into brand new
ones, but by reorganizing what it has already got and keeping what works.
Human beings may be more than
animals (I think we are) but we are at least animals. Almost all of what our ancestor was before
she split into Pan and Homo lines is still in both of us. Most of the earliest mammal is still in our
neocortex. The reptile was not purged;
he was reassigned.
Human beings are such interesting
and promising creatures precisely because we carry within us the history of our
organic predecessors, back to the Ur organism and yet have achieved a human
world. The organic burdens are part and
parcel of the organic promise. We still
come into this world, eat and defecate, and go out of it the same way our dogs
do.
The political principles of the
Founding recognized both sides of the coin.
We are capable of living beautiful lives; yet to do this, we have to
manage our animal nature. The Founders
were wise and mature in their thought.
The Progressives were naïve and simple minded.
