High price of Darwinism

Posted by Michael Vassar - While formerly intellectual strength was a gift given by god for the benefit of fellow man, after Darwin (and Nietzsche) it was increasingly seen as a badge granting privilege as one of the true in-group of real and worthy men.  As a result, less effort went into doing what one could by developing ideas to improve life, and more into trying to demonstrate one’s mental superiority.

Before reading the rest of this, please describe an orc. 

OK good.  Did you mention stupid.  Almost everyone does.  Actually though, if you look at the Lord of the Rings, Tolkein never calls orcs stupid.  The only discussion of their intelligence is where he says that they think themselves smarter than other races because they are more clever in the mechanical arts of war (and they do consistently have higher technology, better armor, etc).  Orcs often do things that seem somewhat stupid, but they do them because they are wicked, not because they are stupid.  They betray one another, flee and are routed, etc.  However, it is clear that orcs are seen as having little worth, and to a typical contemporary Tolkein reader that settles the matter.  To most of his current readers, self-evidently intelligence IS worth.  I believe that this is the high price of post-Christian ethics, and is a major cause of intellectual decline in the west.  To Tolkein, a theologically sophisticated Catholic worth is not intelligence, but this claim is far enough from self-evident that I would claim it as a major (usually missed) point of his books (where the most noble characters are the wise Gandalf and the simple Sam). 

There are three plausible justifications for our treatment of non-human animals (complex justifications, even if logical, are not plausible).  One, the natural justification, is pure pragmatism.  We can do so, we suffer few risks and harms from doing so, and they are not members of our in-group.  Trying to treat them better would be difficult.  Trying to treat them as well as we treat our in-group would be practically impossible.  This is the actual reason, but arguably not a “just"ification at all, and is inimitable to Christian ethics, and to the default version of 21st century post-Christian ethics as well. 

The second plausible justification is that we have souls and they do not.  Science tries to preserve this by substituting “self awareness as demonstrated by the mirror test” or technical uses of the word “language” for soul, but basically discredited binary distinctions between humans and non-humans with Darwin. 

The third justification is that we are smarter than they are.  This seems somewhat plausible, but also suggests something horrific.  If we were enough smarter than our fellow men, we would be entirely justified in brutalizing, mutilating, imprisoning, killing and eating them just because we wanted to.  Verily we could be like gods.  Or like those glorious orks.  I suspect that much of the opposition to Transhumanism is due to a concern about this outcome.  Even short of being eaten, most people dislike the idea that qualitatively post-human intelligence could exist if this idea carries the implication that we, with our puny minds, are essentially worthless except as means to their ends. 

It is plausible that a substantial part of the decline in the quality of Western art has to do with the tacit acceptance of the third justification.  While formerly intellectual strength was a gift given by god for the benefit of fellow man, after Darwin (and Nietzsche) it was increasingly seen as a badge granting privilege as one of the true in-group of real and worthy men.  As a result, less effort went into doing what one could by developing ideas to improve life, and more into trying to demonstrate one’s mental superiority.  Unfortunately, the best way to be seen as smart is not to have correct ideas, but to have fashionable ones, preferably untestable fashionable ideas. 

In philosophy and art the effects were particularly stultifying.  Philosophy abandoned practicality and pursued obscuritanism (on the continent) or pedantic analytical detail (in England).  Art burst with beautiful innovations for a few generations, but as soon as artists discovered that creating actual beauty was a less efficient use of their time than self-promotion high art became a nearly abandoned wasteland inhabited by the likes of Warhol.  I believe that the same phenomena accounts for some of the decline in per-capita significant scientific output which has kept the last century’s real scientific development moving in a roughly linear manner despite exponentially increasing inputs.