Beyond Darwinism:
“The problem in today’s education is that the root motivation is the acquisition of things and material wealth rather than cultivation of the human spirit.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan – A torch light for America
By Roger Muhammad
In 1882, the European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche introduced a paradigm-shifting idea with a book entitled God is dead. He argued philosophically against the existence of a Deity and, thus, furthered the cause of atheism already in progress in the Western world.
In claiming that the “God-hypothesis” had been overcome by the science and reason of modern man, which really meant the white man, Nietzsche advocated the creation of the “Over-man” or “Super-man”, who no longer would need the constraining shackles of religion to define moral rectitude.
On the scientific level, or so it was claimed, his position had already been supported and consecrated by the Naturalist Charles Darwin in his equally paradigm-shifting book, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection published in 1859.
Even though the two men held very opposite views on matters such as the notion of “progress” vs. “Eternal Recurrence”, with the speed of wildfire spreading through a forest, the Victorian age gladly embraced Darwin’s version of the Theory of Evolution along with Nietzscheism as the final scientific and philosophical death-blows against a teleological explanation for life and the universe, i.e. God.
In other words, based on their theories and those of others going back to the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”, there is no such thing as a God who created the Heavens and the Earth.
The influence of this thinking on today’s scientific and educational paradigms can be exemplified by the words of the Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, the co-founder of the Standard Model of particle physics, when is says: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
To the Western mind, there simply is no God, no point, no purpose; all that we see is nothing but a giant cosmic accident of which life is but a particularly lucky, yet entirely random outcome.
Initially, the rise of this view came in an era when man, more specifically Western man, or even more specifically the colonial white man, felt like he was, so to speak, at the very top of his game. Feudalist Great Britain was by then completely revolutionized by industrialization. The rest of Europe was quickly following suit.
The benefits from the Slave Trade led to the creation of oligarchic financial and industrial institutions which needed to get religion out of the way in order to facilitate the process of gradually eliminating moral coercion, which would allow this new industrial society to thrive more freely toward the ideals of capitalism à la Adam Smith, namely: individualism, imperialism, materialism, greed, the worship of profit at all cost, the survival of the fittest, etc.
While on the side of Marxism, the very same ideas were also used to justify the establishment of Communism as the final stage of Evolution in man’s ascension toward social-political-economic perfection (in fact, both ideologies – capitalism and Marxism – were initially financed by the same set of bankers – but this is a different topic).
In that sense, new ideas such as those of Nietzsche and Darwin came in a timely fashion. As we know, educational paradigms are always the result of scientific ones. Whatever ideas are championed by the latter ultimately end up dictating the former.
This is why the Darwin/Nietzsche scientific paradigm ultimately became the battle-horse for the secularization movement of education, progressively pushing God out of the classrooms in the early formative years of Western Society’s bright new minds of the future.
But this new future, from an industrialist standpoint, was already predetermined to fit into the grand social vision of the latter, thus forwarding an agenda to dominate the world’s resources at the expense of the poor.
American historian Edward John Larson substantiates this fact in his book, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (Modern Library Chronicles) in the following words: “essential to Darwin’s conception was a modern worldview influenced by ideas of utilitarianism, individualism, imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism. Of course, Malthus was a utilitarian-minded political economist who championed the laissez-faire ideal. Darwin also read the writings of Adam Smith and other utilitarian economists who presented individual competition as the driving force of economic progress. Perhaps most important, he lived in a society that embraced this view….”
This contextual framework largely accounts for the eventual rise of Darwinism as the prima facie of the present scientific worldview.
Today’s Black Scholarship when articulating a revisionist history of our people must take this into consideration. Too often, our scholarship adheres to the underlying Darwin/Nietzsche paradigm without questioning its undergirding political and ideological roots, which ultimately lead back to a racist white supremacist philosophy at its prime.
As a result, when formulating historical accounts on the evolution of civilization and culture in Africa, many of our most prominent Black intellectuals have embraced and echoed the Darwinian paradigm with a certain level of blind faith.
Conversely, they will frown on Christianity and Islam as condemnable sources of religious colonialism, while in fact; Darwinism did more to support colonialism, imperialism, injustice and racism in the 19th and 20th centuries than all religious beliefs combined.
As pointed out by Wilhelm Reich in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “Charles Darwin, the English naturalist whose books On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and The Descent of Man, which followed in 1871, launched controversies which affected many branches of European thought… The ideas of Darwin, and of some of his contemporaries such as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer…were rapidly applied to questions far removed from the immediate scientific ones… The element of Darwinism, which appeared most applicable to the development of society, was the belief that the excess of population over the means of support necessitated a constant struggle for survival in which it was the strongest or the ‘fittest’ that won. (…) The doctrine of natural selection could, therefore, very easily become associated with another train of thought developed by the French writer, Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, who published an Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1853. Gobineau insisted that the most important factor in development was race; and that those races, which remained superior, were those which kept their racial purity intact. Of these, according to Gobineau, it was the Aryan race which had survived best…”
Charles Darwin’s strongest advocate, Thomas Huxley, echoed Gobineau’s views in the following statement: “No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man.”
In fact, Darwin himself saw in his own (version of) Theory of Evolution, strong evidence for the eventual extermination of the Aboriginal People of the planet.
In his own words, written in his second book, The Descent of Man, in which he purports that Man, specifically the Black Man of Africa, descends directly from the apes, he foresees the extinction of darker people in the following words: “(…) at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”
In this same book, he gives his reasons why civilized people – here meant to be Caucasians – have evolved differently from “savages” – here meant to be darker people of the planet: “With civilized nations, the reduced size of the jaw from lessened use, the habitual play of different serving to express different emotions, and the increased size of the brain from greater intellectual activity, have together produced a considerable effect on their general appearances in comparison with savages.”
These horrific words were written by the man who is called the Father of Life Sciences (biology, genetics, etc.) by most of the scientific, academic and educational community. This is partly why, as the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has called for, we need a new educational and scientific paradigm.
Stay tuned for Part II…
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Thank you for reading these few words. As-Salaam Alaikum!
