The View From 1776

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The fact that so many readers are unaware of European and American history merely demonstrates that modern education has been eviscerated by socialism.  Socialist John Dewey, the driving force behind progressive education here in the 1920s and 1930s, taught generations of teachers and state education commissioners that history was a “dead” subject that had no place in a modern school curriculum.

Add to this the 1960s student anarchism that resulted in students dictating to college faculties what subjects were to be considered “relevant,” and you have the Baby Boomer generation, cocooned in its own self-important ignorance.  When a society deliberately disowns its own history and traditions, it is set adrift, with no road map and no highway signs to determine where it is or where it’s headed.  You get the shipwreck that is American social mores since the 1960s.

Today’s students, the victims of the Boomers’ hubris, get their “history” from Michael Moore “documentaries,” Oliver Stone movies, and the propaganda of the Democratic National Committee delivered as “news” by the New York Times.  Most of them, knowing nothing about history, have no way to gauge the tripe served to them.

What are the facts that link Darwinian evolution to social disintegration?

“On the Origin of Species” appeared in 1859, a time crowded with revolutionary social doctrines, all aimed at destroying the foundations of Western civilization and conforming political society to the socialist model conjured by French Revolutionary philosophers in the 18th century. 

Most students in the United States since the 1930s have been taught a romanticized version of the 1789 French Revolution, the view that kings are always bad and overthrowing them lets everyone live happily ever after.  American educators, heavily influenced by historians like Vernon L. Parrington and Charles A. Beard, taught that the French Revolution was just like our 1776 War of Independence and that the French had merely embellished our English traditions of individual political liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights.  They taught that the thrust of American political development was and should be to emulate the socialism, euphemistically called “democracy,” of Revolutionary France.

Reality was altogether different.  French philosophers of the Revolution believed that, by destroying the age-old political, social, and religious institutions of France, they could design a new and perfect society on a clean slate.  Their model was socialism, which denies the existence of a Creator God and proclaims that the rational mind of man created everything we know and can therefore perfect humanity and human society.  This doctrine, in the hands of a less than benevolent socialist, becomes the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

After the Revolution, French philosophers claimed to have discovered “immutable laws of history,” that controlled what they identified as the evolution of Western society from earlier periods of ignorant belief in God and moral codes, and into the atheistic and materialistic new Age of Science, of which socialism was the fulfillment.  Note that this was one of the first instances in modern times of the idea of evolution inherent in history itself, a doctrine that was twenty years later to become central to Karl Marx’s theories of scientific socialism heralding the inevitability of political evolution into socialism.

Science was claimed by the French philosophers and by Marx as the foundation of evolutionary and revolutionary socialism.  In just the same way, and at the same time, Darwinian evolutionists asserted that science supported their atheistic religious doctrine that life on earth was spontaneously generated from primordial ooze as the essential first step in materialistic biological evolution. 

In neither case, however, are we dealing with issues that are properly within the realm of the physical sciences.  In both cases theoreticians sought to impose a purely intellectual construct, ungrounded in any historical or biological facts, as the controlling paradigm in biology and human political existence.

In contrast to the French Revolution, our 1776 War of Independence was entirely a conservative action.  Our aim was not to destroy historical traditions and institutions, but to guard the age-old individual liberties of Englishmen from arbitrary interference by the crown and Parliament ("No taxation without representation").  Apart from no longer being subject to the British crown, none of our social, political, or religious institutions was altered by the War; we merely carried on with the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation.  God was universally acknowledged as our Creator and protector, before the war, during the war, and afterward.  English common law, town meetings, and state legislatures remained the framework of social and economic interaction.

The French Revolution, instead of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, produced the world’s first example of terrorism as official state policy to control public opinion and to quell all opposition to the centralized government.  More than 70,000 French citizens were slaughtered as enemies of the Revolution during the Reign of Terror.  Thereafter, Napoleon set out to conquer all of Continental Europe and make formerly independent nations units of the French Empire.

Napoleon’s brutalities and the rigidities of the French socialist rule from Paris embittered the German republics and principalities, producing a new sense of nationalism that flowered fifty years later into Bismarck’s 1860s German Empire and set the stage for two world wars.

In the forty years from the 1820s into the 1860s, French philosophers Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte had articulated socialism and propounded the atheistic Religion of Humanity; the socialist revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had profoundly altered the politics of Continental Europe; Karl Marx had published “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”; and, in England, John Stuart Mill had advocated social and political libertinism in “On Liberty” and later expressly advocated socialism in his “Chapters on Socialism.”

It was into that ferment of political and social turmoil that Charles Darwin, probably innocently unaware of the social and political implications of his work, issued “On the Origin of Species.”

His supporters, especially Thomas Huxley, were not so naive.  As did Karl Marx and his followers, they seized upon the implicit doctrine of amorality (survival of the fittest) in materialistic evolution as “scientific” confirmation that Judeo-Christian morality was ignorance and that socialism was the inevitable evolutionary destination of political society. 

Marx was so taken with Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” that he requested permission in 1861 to dedicate the first volume of “Das Kapital” to Darwin, who demurred, writing to Marx that being publicly identified with an atheistic work would cause pain to some members of his family.

During the furious debate in England over evolution, Americans were fighting the Civil War (1860 -65).  Not until the years after that war did the doctrines of socialism and evolution become fairly widely known in the United States.  They were introduced here by college professors who had journeyed to Germany to obtain the new PhD degrees that were becoming essential to success in academia.  German universities then were the best in the world, and they were backed by first-rank German chemistry, physics, historiography, and mathematics.  There American academics absorbed both the collectivist, statist political traditions of German society and the secular, materialistic religious precepts of socialism.

Darwinian evolution, being such a heated controversy in England, also became widely known in American colleges and universities.

The physical sciences in that era of rapid industrialization and westward expansion enjoyed a very high status in America.  Socialism and Darwinian evolution, self-described as scientific, got a respectful hearing in the United States, beyond the college faculties.

John Dewey and his colleagues had either attended German universities or been heavily influenced by the ideas taught there.  Dewey was the most influential American liberal-socialist in the first half of the 20th century, and his ideas spread throughout our educational system.

Dewey combined Darwinian evolution and socialism, both atheistic and materialistic doctrines, into his theories of progressive education.  Darwinian evolution was the philosophical foundation of socialism’s social justice, and education was the tool to infuse the minds of young students with the Darwinian socialist paradigm.

In his lectures at Columbia University in the first decades of the 20th century, Dewey told his students that Darwin had proved that everything is continually evolving, thus the Judeo-Christian teachings of timeless morality revealed in the Word of God were ignorant nonsense.  Instead of morality, there were the evolving causes of social justice.  And the way to attain social justice was to work for a collectivized, socialist government that could impose regulations impinging on the people’s material welfare in order to remove private property rights and to redistribute wealth as equally as possible.

Those ideas were the source of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, which failed to end the Depression, but imposed state planning modeled on Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism, and of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, with its profusion of welfare entitlements programs and, for the first time, direct Federal funding of elementary and high school education. 

The result of the Great Society was savage social disintegration: cities were burned and looted; illegitimate births reached heights never before experienced in world history, single-parent families became commonplace, crime rates rose exponentially, going on welfare became a lifetime career to be passed on to one’s children and grandchildren, and our education went from the best in the world to near the bottom of the industrialized world.

Liberal-socialists today do their best to revive and perpetuate these barbaric results by championing multi-cultural education, politically-correct codes of speech and conduct, and by teaching evolution as the scientific basis for atheistic materialism.

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