Is/ought: Just say not.

When it comes to evolution, sloppy and/or unscrupulous thinkers (to say the least) peddle some pretty heavy nonsense. They try to pass off that whatever is ought to be. In this obtuse language game what could be more natural than natural selection? And if we apply natural selection to the artificial construct of government isn't that the way it ought to be? Surely not. But The Disco Tute's John West, an endless harpy for the link between Darwin and Hitler continues to make this error over at the DI's propaganda wing.

He tries to take Richard Dawkins to task for saying the following in 2005:

No self respecting person would want to live in a Society that operates according to Darwinian laws. I am a passionate Darwinist, when it involves explaining the development of life. However, I am a passionate anti-Darwinist when it involves the kind of society in which we want to live. A Darwinian State would be a Fascist state.

That's easy enough to understand. If one tries to institute a government built on a humanly constructed selection process that is every bit as cold to human desires and aspirations and our agreed-upon human rights as natural selection, then you will get a eugenics program and a vicious society that is "red in tooth and claw." If you were dumb enough to apply what is in some parts of nature to what ought to be in human culture then you will get fascist states and the institutions of Social Darwinism that were so popular at the end of the 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries.

West states that "Darwinian ideology provided the Nazis with one of their key justifications for sterilizing the "unfit" and killing the handicapped." To call it a Darwinian ideology is false. Darwin's contribution to the world was not a set of ethical or ideological statements; they were a set of observations on the evolution of life that formed the backbone of a predictive and descriptive theory that remains largely intact as a scientific tool. Others, including his own cousin Francis Galton, sought to create human breeding programs to elevate us from our miserable genetic state via either positive or negative eugenics programs. But in Galton's case, it was his racist and classist views from his imperial Victorian culture that formed the foundation of his desire for eugenics. His misunderstanding of evolution and development of statistical analytical methods were tools he could use to support (fallaciously) his ideological goals.

The same is true of the Nazis. There is no evidence whatsoever that Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hoess, and Heydrich had the foggiest notion of what the theory of evolution actually predicts and describes. It is abundantly clear that they could appropriate a term like "survival of the fittest" wherever they saw fit to prop up the T4 program or garner sympathy for the Endlosung der Judgenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question) to an ideology built on ancient German anti-semitism richly reinforced by Martin Luther's "On the Jews and their Lies" (among other things), Catholic
anti-semitism, and bizarro-world pagan mumbo jumbo. Their appropriation of "survival of the fittest" was fallacious.

The free market, that market that the DI tries to defend in its apologetics every day, has more historical ties with actual Social Darwinism than does the modern field of biology. Very briefly consider the words of Ray Crock, the founder of McDonald's:

"Look, it is ridiculous to think this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of the survival of the fittest.” (emphasis added)

There's more where that came from. A lot of it. And something comes to mind about Crock being a Christian too. Am I supposed to link his adoration for the alleged savior of the universe to his capitalistically-driven Social Darwinism? That would be ad hominem of me.

But are we supposed to expect that because the industry is "rat eat rat" that that is the way it ought to be? Am I supposed to accept as inevitable and good that Crock or Carnegie or the rest of the magnates think that because there is such a thing as natural selection that they should be able set up institutionalized selection processes? Of course not. Neither does Dawkins. Neither did Darwin.

This naturalistic fallacy is also known as Hume's Law, defined in Flew's Dictionary of Philosophy "...that conclusins about what ought to be cannot be deduced from premises stating only what was, what is, or what will be - and the other way about."

Slavery. Childhood sexual servitude. Genocide. Gang rape. Murder. Environmental degradation. Reruns of Dallas. Barney the big purple dinosaur. Ben Stein's acting career. All of these were, are, and will be (tragically in Darfur and much less sad though not a affront to all human benevolence so will Stein's acting career though that might be a faulty piece of induction that Hume could point out). Got it?

People mature within political, social, and economic systems that they perceive as natural. Aristotle thought that slavery was natural. Who's to argue? We are.

West's bluster is so huge he's written a book on the matter. I've read enough of his propaganda posts to induce that it's a steaming pile of misconstrued history, sophistry, scholarly and moral irresponsibilty, and logically fallacious garbage. He's a sloppy thinker and a double-talker who works for an organization that wants the market to be free to select as it sees fit so long as they get to keep their magical man in the sky. Hey. The ends justify the means. Lie for Jesus.

People have been lying for him for almost 2,000 years. That's what you're supposed to do. Right?