On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:51:48 -0400 Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net>
writes:
> In Under God, Gary Wills had an interesting argument defending Bryan
> from Darrow in re: the Scopes trial on progressive grounds. Don't
> remember the particulars though.
I am not familiar with Wills's take on Bryan, but I do know that other writers have argued that Bryan's antipathy towards evolution had a progressive political basis. Apparently, according to these writers, Bryan's concern was really with social Darwinism. And just as many of the Darwinians of his time confused social Darwinism with Darwinism, so did many opponents of evolution like Bryan. Bryan himself said that he became alarmed over the implications of Darwinism as a result of his participation in the interrogations of captures German officers during WW I.
And certainly during that time many educated Germans embraced a form of social Darwinism that had been popularized by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, which maintained that. For Haeckel, international relations was characterized by a struggle for existence between the various nations and races of the world. Thus for Haeckel nationalism was applied Darwinism. This idea easily blended with the racialism that was becoming popular in Germany at the same time.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Mar 24, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Chris Maisano wrote:
> >
> >> I don't think one needs to go in for religious apologetics to
> recognize
> >> that there are some very deep flaws in the New Atheist
> intellectual project.
> >> Terry Eagleton seems to me to have struck the right balance
> between
> >> recognizing both the perniciousness of much organized religion
> and the
> >> limitations of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et. al.
> >>
> >> Here's a good precis of his perspective:
> >> http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/culture-barbarism-0. I find it
> to be
> >> pretty convincing.
> >
> >> If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and
> >> civilization, it is partly because its founder was both a
> Romantic humanist
> >> and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about
> culture and
> >> civilization together-sensuous particularity and universality,
> worker and
> >> citizen of the world, local allegiances and international
> solidarity, the
> >> free self-realization of flesh-and-blood individuals and a
> global
> >> cooperative commonwealth of them. But Marxism has suffered in our
> time a
> >> staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those
> radical
> >> impulses have migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology
> nowadays, one
> >> can find some of the most informed and animated discussions of
> Deleuze and
> >> Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not
> entirely
> >> surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth
> claims, is
> >> one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an
> increasingly
> >> specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than the
> nature and
> >> transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not issues
> easily
> >> raised in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s
> remoteness
> >> from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this respect.
> >
> > In other words, this interest in religion on the left is another
> symptom of
> > defeat.
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
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