On Evolution

In the comments, Jgress asks:

How would acceptance of Darwinism fit into this picture? My impression of most of the neoreactionary blogosphere is that evolution is not questioned and is more or less held to account for everything significant about human nature. I see only the Christian Traditionalists as being perhaps a bit skeptical, but my reading of blogs like Bruce Charlton or Chronicles indicates that whatever philosophical or theological problems they see in Darwinism, they are unwilling to embrace creationism or ID.

The Cathedral does not preach evolution; the Cathedral doesn’t believe in evolution, except as a tool for shaming fundamentalists and beating them into submission about other issues. If certain Traditionalists in the reacto-sphere don’t believe in evolution, that puts them on the opposite side of things in this one case. They know it, I suppose, and that’s why most of them just don’t bring it up.

The fact is, most creationists and ID’ers have more in common with the Cathedral than they would care to admit. Dinesh D’Souza’s book What’s So Great About Christianity has an entire section devoted to “Christianity and Science,” in which D’Souza* toes the same line as the Cathedral: evolution stops at the neck, and it’s something that happened a long time ago, doesn’t concern us today. He quotes Stephen J. Gould at multiple points in order to “refute” the likes of Dawkins and Dennett (who, for all their flaws, are much closer to HBD than Gould). Watch Ben Stein’s Expelled, the intelligent design movie. At one point, Stein starts equating evolution with Nazism, and he sounds just like a Professor of LGBT Studies equating sociobiology with racism. A lot of creationists are big fans of G.K. Chesterton, who advocated for a political system called distributism, which was essentially repackaged Communism. Conservative evangelicals—especially the ones combating The New Atheism—are always jumping at the bit waiting to tell you about how it was Christians (good, anti-Darwinian Christians!!) who were at the forefront of the abolition movement and the Civil Rights movement. Lutheran and Catholic charities—the ones importing third-world refugees by the vanload—are typically run by the same sorts of Christians who buy Dinesh D’Souza books; they’re anti-evolution at the bare minimum, creationists by default.

You need to ask yourself: how many evangelical, Bible literalist church-goers do you think would love to come together for Bible study, fellowship, soda pops, and some old fashioned discussion about the failure of American democracy and the average IQ of Asians versus Haitians?

Outside the American South, the Christian Traditionalists of the reacto-sphere would be pariahs in any evangelical community espousing Bible literalism and disregarding evolution. Such communities are on the fringes of the Cathedral, yes, but still miles from neoreaction. Even the most “conservative” religious communities in Southern California—my homeland—would never suffer conversation about issues discussed in the reacto-sphere. You send one of those pastors a link to Chateau or Foesti—hell, even hbd chick—they’ll start praying for you.

But none of this should be a point of contention for the anti-evolution Traditionalists. The Dark Enlightenment is Dark precisely because it has followed the evidence where it leads, which turns out to be—in a great historical irony—right back to some of the conclusions (emphasis on some of the conclusions) reached by certain Christians pre-Darwin, the intellectual descendants of whom now inhabit the Christian Traditionalist end of the reacto-sphere.

The great divide between, say, John Derbyshire and Dalrock is that the former is a reactionary because he realizes society is ordered against natural reality; the latter is a reactionary because he realizes society is ordered against an old-school understanding of God—a God who doesn’t care all that much about earthly equality, who told the Israelites not to race-mix, who said the poor are always with us, who proclaimed the husband head of the wife, who ordained Original Sin, who doesn’t want mankind trying to bring Heaven to Earth. (Most Christians have abandoned this God in favor of Buddy Christ; the Christian Traditionalists have not.)

In other words, the HBD worldview turns out to be remarkably similar at certain junctions to the ancient Christian worldview, though very different reasons buttress the worldviews. The Christian Traditionalists believe the world is Fallen and awaiting its Savior. The rest of us believe the world is naturally Fallen. And any utopian Leftoid trying to “fix” it wholesale is just gonna make things worse. The Christian Traditionalists believe in gender roles because God said so. The rest of us believe in gender roles because there’s a thing called testosterone, and men make more of it, and we’re fucking sexually dimorphic hominids for Christ’s sake, not fungi.

So, must you accept evolution to be a neoreactionary? Yes. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that you must accept the world as it presents itself, not as we wish it to be. Whether you accept it as the result of “evolution” or of “God’s ordained existence” is a philosophical argument that, I hope, will not divide the Derbyshires and the Dalrocks.

*I’m using D’Souza to make a point here, not to frame him as a Cathedral mouthpiece. His books are worth reading, and he makes a lot of good reactionary points. He’s a champion of Western Civilization, if nothing else. But, like any mainstream conservative, he just can’t take his reaction too far.