David Klinghoffer

At the risk of sounding a brief religious note and therefore inviting from ID critics the usual (and so extremely logical!) inference that Discovery Institute supports theocratic rule, let’s consider for a moment the message of Purim. That Jewish festival is upon us today and, with its themes of randomness versus a guiding providence at work in history, it happens to be an excellent time for reflecting on themes relevant to ENV.

Celebrated with lots of eating, drinking, and charitable and other gift-giving, Purim recalls the events told in the Bible’s book of Esther. In the story, which is very much screenplay-ready, a conniving minister to the king of Persia uses his influence on the monarch to plot the destruction of the Jewish people. This fascinating villain, Haman, is no mere mindless anti-Semite. He is motivated by his own views about life’s ultimate meaning, or the lack thereof — a secular theology, a religion of a kind that’s precisely opposite to Biblical faith.

According to Scriptural tradition, Haman was a descendant of the Bible’s personification of wickedness, the mysterious tribe called Amalek. As recounted in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Amalek, seemingly without reason, fell upon and slaughtered many Jews. That was back when the children of Israel were living in the desert, following their exodus from Egypt.

Actually, Amalek’s attack was not without reason. The Hebrew text associates Amalek with the word “keri,” which means a chance or random event: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he happened upon thee (karecha) by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). The same Hebrew verbal root can mean to “cool” someone’s ardor, put a chill in his faith.

I’ve been corresponding with Nicolas Gotelli, a University of Vermont biologist. When I received his response to my initial email, I thought it was so ridiculous and hypocritical that I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be amusing to publish this on ENV? Then I reflected disappointedly, No, it’s a private correspondence, that would be unethical! I can’t do it without his permission and, since he’d have to be pretty thoughtless to allow someone to reprint his hysterically bristling letter, it’s not worth asking.

Luckily, Professor Gotelli has solved my problem for me. He promptly and without seeking permission sent our emails off to PZ Myers, who immediately published them on Pharyngula. You can read the correspondence there. Thank you, gentlemen.

Gotelli is the fellow who wrote an op-ed in the Burlington Free Press expressing the view that it was only proper that UVM should cancel Ben Stein as graduation speaker because the popular entertainer is also a “notorious advocate of intelligent design” who maintains that Darwinian ideas had deadly consequences in the form of Nazi racist ideology (only too true). Gotelli asserted it was appropriate to invite “controversial” speakers to campus, since “one of the best ways to refute intellectually bankrupt ideas is to expose them to the light of day.” But a commencement speaker is someone special, Gotelli went on, someone chosen for his peer-reviewed scholarship.

Someone, it turns out, like the widely published scholar Howard Dean, to whom UVM turned next and who will deliver the commencement address. What, as one online reader of Gotelli’s op-ed plaintively asked, “Was Daffy Duck unavailable?”

As I mentioned in previous posts in this brief series, the ID-bashing blog Little Green Footballs has done important work in sensitizing us to the sympathies expressed in parts of the Muslim world for Hitler and Nazism. One of the most sickening videos I’ve ever seen was noted recently on LGF. It was of a smiling, youngish Egyptian cleric in front of a slick TV backdrop, praising the Nazis for slaughtering Jews and saying he only hoped it would be Muslims who do this work, blessed by Allah, next time around. On an inset screen, the cleric nodded and gestured approvingly to old black-and-white newsreels from the death camps, of Jewish corpses being bulldozed, or pulled out of ovens as smoking skeletons.

LGF author Charles Johnson is troubled by the weakness of Western leaders who don’t want to see what we are up against in the war on terror, who shrink from a strong and confident stance in dealing with challenges from the Muslim world. However, Johnson never makes the connection between the Darwinism he defends and the sapping of Western confidence that he laments.

This may seem surprising to those who are familiar with the history of 19th-century colonialism. Darwinian theory fueled an arrogant contempt for other nations that seems the very opposite of liberal guilt and weakness. It was not some sort of “crude” distortion of Darwin’s thought but a straightforward application of it that led to the biologization of foreign policy in the age of imperialism.

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.” And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either–but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.” He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The popular conservative blogger Little Green Footballs has it in for Darwin doubters and recently called me a near-liar merely for alluding in an article to the well-known Darwin-Hitler connection. He regards the very idea of such a connection as a “creationist” canard. “Klinghoffer’s claim,” comments LGF, “is just short of an outright lie.”

Normally, I think it’s best for friends of ID to avoid a defensive posture and generally let critics say what they want without our always feeling obliged to respond. But here, because LGF is otherwise such an interesting and valuable blog, and because he’s given me an occasion to raise important related questions, I am going to answer him after all.

As of this writing, if you glance at LGF’s tag cloud, you’ll see that he has devoted more items tagged to the topic of “Evolution” in the past 60 days (33 tags) than he has to that of “Militant Islam” (32 tags). That’s significant because LGF came to prominence in the first place after the blog’s author — whose name is Charles Johnson — had his political consciousness transformed in the wake of 9/11. Ever since then, he’s been an outspoken and influential critic of Muslim fundamentalism. He never misses an opportunity to chide liberals for weakness and naivety in the face of Islamic fascism.

I like his blog, including the lovely photos he used to post, shots of the Pacific Ocean from the coast around Los Angeles, a geography I love. He’s also a bicycle enthusiast, so we have that in common. But as I say, he’s not a fan of Discovery Institute (DI). One doesn’t get the sense that he’s contemplated the scientific issues involved very seriously. Instead, his thinking seems to proceed along the following lines.

In previous posts in this brief series, we’ve been looking at the relationship between Marx and Darwin, who developed parallel theories of historical or natural law. In a religious context, law is perceived as static and eternal: God’s law, higher than any man, worthy of judging kings and tyrants by its light. Marxism and Darwinism, as materialist philosophies, believe they have succeeded in obviating the need for God, or metaphysics generally. For them, there is no such thing as a static, eternal moral law. Thus in the Descent of Man, Darwin describes the process by which morals evolve, just like animal bodies. He finds nothing absolute or God-given even in a seemingly fundamental moral instinct like that against incest: “We Read More ›

In 1891 in Gori, Georgia, a 13-year-old choirboy with dreams of becoming a priest, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was discovered by his mother at dawn, having stayed awake through the night reading Darwin’s Origin of Species.

“I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading,” he explained. He later told a friend that God “doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived.”

“How can you say such a thing?” the friend exclaimed, to which the boy, the future Joseph Stalin, replied by handing him a copy of Darwin.

In this little series, we are asking, among other things, what came from Stalin’s precocious appreciation of evolutionary theory? Hitler and Stalin alike sought to create a new race of supermen. Where did they both happen to get this idea? From Darwinian theory, in the broad sense, of course.

Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one? Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view. He’s been having a good run with his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — that is, apart from being taken to task by a number of reviewers for applying a Darwinian framework to understanding market forces. In the current New York Review of Books, economist Robert Skidelsky chides Ferguson for purveying “false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection….These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naïve.” Ferguson describes Read More ›

There is a lot to be said on the passing of Father Richard John Neuhaus, dean of the theoconservatives, of whom I count myself one. The phrase he is most associated with, which has to do with giving religion a place “in the public square,” has become a cliché. Yet clichéd phrases can still refer to profoundly important ideas. The idea that faith has a role to play in public discussions of public issues, notably in politics, did not seem obvious at all when Fr. Neuhaus wrote his controversial 1984 book The Naked Public Square. It’s an idea that still has legions of enemies, including among some political conservatives, even as it continues to guide those of us who followed the lead of this brilliant, principled, immensely influential Catholic priest and intellectual.

His many friends and admirers will remember different things about him. Speaking for myself, he was both an inspiration and an irritant — one that sometimes inspired by irritating — a story I told in my first book, The Lord Will Gather Me In. I knew him from New York, when I was an editor at National Review, and he and I had a couple of intense disputatious and personal conversations about Judaism and Christianity that had a definite impact on my spiritual future, if not the one he intended.

What readers of ENV need to know, and what they probably won’t read elsewhere, is that Fr. Neuhaus was among the few prominent conservative intellectuals who, when it came to the Darwin debate, really “got it.” In his journal First Things he published articles by ID writers like Stephen Meyer and Phillip Johnson on subjects where other conservative journals still fear to tread.