Darwin vs. the Progressives

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 18^th 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.