Orwell - The Principles of Newspeak

 

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in ‘The Times’ were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

THE A VOCABULARY. The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life—for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess words like HIT, RUN, DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE, FIELD—but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as IF or WHEN) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word THOUGHT, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by THINK, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as CUT, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb KNIFE. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -FUL to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -WISE. Thus for example, SPEEDFUL meant ‘rapid’ and SPEEDWISE meant ‘quickly’. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -FUL to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in -WISE: the -WISE termination was invariable. The word WELL, for example, was replaced by GOODWISE.

In addition, any word—this again applied in principle to every word in the language—could be negatived by adding the affix UN-, or could be strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or, for still greater emphasis, DOUBLEPLUS-. Thus, for example, UNCOLD meant ‘warm’, while PLUSCOLD and DOUBLEPLUSCOLD meant, respectively, ‘very cold’ and ‘superlatively cold’. It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ANTE-, POST-, UP-, DOWN-, etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word GOOD, there was no need for such a word as BAD, since the required meaning was equally well—indeed, better—expressed by UNGOOD. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. DARK, for example, could be replaced by UNLIGHT, or LIGHT by UNDARK, according to preference.

The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ED. The preterite of STEAL was STEALED, the preterite of THINK was THINKED, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as SWAM, GAVE, BROUGHT, SPOKE, TAKEN, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -S or -ES as the case might be. The plurals OF MAN, OX, LIFE, were MANS, OXES, LIFES. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -ER, -EST (GOOD, GOODER, GOODEST), irregular forms and the MORE, MOST formation being suppressed.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by WILL and WOULD. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. WHY so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.

THE B VOCABULARY. The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.

The B words were in all cases compound words. [Compound words such as SPEAKWRITE, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideologcal colour.] They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, ‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, GOODTHINK; past tense and past participle, GOODTHINKED; present participle, GOOD-THINKING; adjective, GOODTHINKFUL; adverb, GOODTHINKWISE; verbal noun, GOODTHINKER.

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word CRIMETHINK (thoughtcrime), for instance, the THINK came second, whereas in THINKPOL (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word POLICE had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of MINITRUE, MINIPAX, and MINILUV were, respectively, MINITRUTHFUL, MINIPEACEFUL, and MINILOVELY, simply because -TRUEFUL, -PAXFUL, and -LOVEFUL were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a ‘Times’ leading article as OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.’ But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by INGSOC. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

As we have already seen in the case of the word FREE, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as HONOUR, JUSTICE, MORALITY, INTERNATIONALISM, DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, and RELIGION had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word OLDTHINK. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by GOODSEX—that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation ‘good’ when applied to the Party and ‘bad’ when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called RECDEP, the Fiction Department was called FICDEP, the Teleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word COMINTERN, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like MINITRUE are fewer and more controllable than those called up by MINISTRY OF TRUTH. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC, BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word DUCKSPEAK, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, DUCKSPEAK was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when ‘The Times’ referred to one of the orators of the Party as a DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

THE C VOCABULARY. The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science’, any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word INGSOC.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, ALL MANS ARE EQUAL was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth—i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word EQUAL. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that FREE had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and ROOK. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced—its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT...

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature—indispensable technical manuals, and the like—that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

From 1984

Michael Behe: how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists

 But first a necessary digression to explain how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists on this pivotal subject. Imagine my surprise a while back when I opened an academic journal called Biology & Philosophy and spotted this sentence: “To see the point quite palpably, note that Stalin, or Osama bin Laden, or Michael Behe, or your favorite villain is also . . .”7 The man who included me in that rogues gallery was Alexander Rosenberg, R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University—a fellow I’ve never met. His article had precious little to do with me. The line was an offhand remark in the course of arguing that the well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett—a founding member of the New Atheists—was something of a wimp, because in his books he didn’t clearly spell out the utter nihilism that Rosenberg saw as a consequence of Darwin’s theory.

It was a silly remark but, unfortunately, it does accurately reflect the hostility felt by a large chunk of academia toward those of us who publicly argue the case for purpose in nature. (Notice that the overt insult was passed along by the reviewers of the article and the journal editor.) We might see ourselves as just trying to puzzle out those existential questions that kept us awake at night as kids. But folks such as Rosenberg seem to envision peasants with torches and pitchforks marching on their faculty offices. We might just be wondering what the evidence of nature really shows. But “since nihilism is true,”8 too many academics think there’s nothing to think about; therefore contrary views must be dishonest. So before we begin the book I want to try to head off such charges of bad faith. To show that I come by my views honestly, let me very briefly recount the history of my own thinking.

I was born into a large Roman Catholic family and, like all of my brothers and sisters, attended Catholic grade school and high school. Unlike some Christian denominations, the Catholic Church never had much of a problem with evolution. I remember being taught about it in seventh grade by Sister David Marie. The important point, she stressed, is that God created the universe, life, and humanity. How he did that, whether quickly or slowly, employing natural law or not, was up to him, not us, and our best evidence these days shows that evolution is correct. That view was perfectly fine with me. In fact, although I wasn’t aware of it then, it had been the predominant understanding in Catholic circles for a long time. For example, the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia has a lengthy scholarly article on evolution that makes a number of crucial distinctions, including a distinction “between the [basic] theory of evolution and Darwinism.”9 Plain “evolution” was no big theological deal. But framing it as necessarily nihilistic, as Alexander Rosenberg and many others do, was tantamount to denying Christianity. Even as a boy I had plenty of reasons to believe in God that had nothing to do with evolution.

When I went off to Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), I decided to major in chemistry, specifically because I wanted to know how the world worked; I wanted to know what made things tick. Since everything is made of chemicals, then chemistry seemed to be the obvious choice. During my college years I had a summer “co-op” job in a biochemistry lab at the Department of Agriculture research facilities near Philadelphia, where I became fascinated with the chemistry of life. Senior year at Drexel I took a course on evolutionary biochemistry to learn how it all came together.

During graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, I had no qualms about standard evolutionary theory and would occasionally (and smugly) tease friends who did. I remember one day at the NIH chewing over the Big Questions with a fellow Catholic postdoc, Joanne (her brother was a priest), who was in the same lab I was. Talk turned to the origin of life. Although she and I were both happy to think life started by natural laws, we kept bumping up against problems. I pointed out that to get the first cell, you’d first need a membrane. “And proteins,” she added. “And metabolism,” said I. “And a genetic code,” said she. After a short time we both looked wide-eyed at each other and simultaneously shouted, “Naaaahh!” Then we laughed and went back to work, as if it didn’t really matter to our views. I suppose we both thought that, even if we didn’t know how undirected nature could begin life, somebody must know. That’s the impressive power of groupthink.

After three years at my first job as an assistant professor at Queens College in New York City, my new wife, Celeste, our firstborn daughter, Grace, and I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where a new job awaited at Lehigh University. Several very busy years later I paused to read a book that startled me and changed my view of evolution. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton, a geneticist and medical doctor then teaching in Australia, offered no solution to the riddle of life, but pointed out numerous serious problems for Darwin’s theory at the molecular level that I had never even heard about—even though I was a biochemistry professor whose goal in entering science was to understand how the world worked! At that point, when I thought back, I realized I had never heard any of my teachers critique Darwin’s theory in all of my science studies.

I got mad. Over the following months I spent much time in the science library trying to find papers or books that explained in real detail how random mutation and selection could produce the exceedingly intricate systems routinely studied by biochemistry. I came up completely empty. Although many publications would pay homage to Darwin and a few would spin “Just So” evolutionary tales, none spelled out how his mechanism accounted for complex functional systems. Vague stories had kept me satisfied in the past, but no longer. Now I wanted real answers.

At that point I concluded that I had been led to believe in Darwin’s theory not because of strong evidence for it. Rather, it was for sociological reasons—that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days. My professors hadn’t been intentionally misleading—that was the framework in which they thought about life too. But from then on I resolved to decide for myself what the evidence showed.

When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than as an assumption, it takes about ten minutes to conclude it’s radically inadequate. It takes perhaps another ten minutes to realize that the molecular foundation of life was designed, and for effectively the same reason that Anaxagoras, Galen, and Paley reached the same conclusion for visible levels of biology (although, because of progress in science and philosophy, the argument is now necessarily much more detailed and nuanced than their versions): the signature of intelligent activity is the arrangement of disparate parts to fulfill some purpose. The molecular parts of the cell are elegantly arranged to fulfill many subsidiary purposes that must blend together in service of the large overall purpose of forming life. As we’ll see in this book, no unintelligent, undirected process—neither Darwin’s mechanism nor any other—can account for that.

With the aid of the then newfangled internet, over the years I met other academics who had had experiences roughly similar to mine, who had been perfectly willing to accept Darwinian evolution, but at some point realized with shock that the larger theory was an intellectual facade. Like me, most had religious convictions, which freed them from the crippling assumption that—no matter what the evidence showed—unintelligent forces simply must be responsible for the elegance of life. Some of us banded together under the auspices of the Seattle-based think tank Discovery Institute, the better to defend and advance the topic of intelligent design (ID), to which we had become dedicated.

In conversations with them I discovered that, as a biochemist, I had ideas to contribute that the others did not. At the urging of Phillip Johnson, then a professor of law at the University of California–Berkeley, I set about writing a book that in 1996 became Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Except for answering extravagant Darwinian claims or attacks on ID,10 I thought I was done with writing at that point. But the rapid progress of science in the subsequent decade allowed further arguments to be made. In 2007 those became The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which, as the title suggests, tried to locate the point in life where what can be explained solely by unintelligent forces is reached. (One common confusion of critics is to think that ID argues everything is planned. That’s not the case. Chance is an important, if superficial, feature of biology.) Again I thought I was done, but even greater unanticipated progress in biology over the past ten years has spurred me to write this book.

Where We’re Headed

The firm conclusion I’ve drawn over the past decades is this: despite occasional questions and bumps along the road, the greater the progress of science, the more deeply into life design can be seen to extend. In Darwin’s own day, the mid-nineteenth century, scientists wondered whether there was sufficient variety in nature’s creatures to fuel his theory. After DNA and proteins were discovered in the late twentieth century, a pressing question was whether Darwin’s mechanism—natural selection acting on random mutation—could account for even the biochemical level of life and the sophisticated molecular machinery unexpectedly discovered there.

As science rapidly advanced in the early twenty-first century, large studies showed only surprisingly minor changes in genes under severe selective pressure. And as we’ll see in this book, now several decades into the twenty-first century, ever more sophisticated studies demonstrate that, ironically, random mutation and natural selection are in fact fiercely devolutionary. It turns out that mutation easily breaks or degrades genes, which, counterintuitively, can sometimes help an organism to survive, so the damaged genes are hastily spread by natural selection. Strangely, in the space of a century and a half Darwinism has gone from the chief candidate for the explanation of life to a known threat to life’s long-term integrity.

Here’s how we’ll proceed. The two chapters of Part I introduce major problems facing any theory attempting to account for life. In Chapter 1 I’ll emphasize a philosophical difficulty—the question of how we know what we claim to know. The second chapter of Part I throws down the gauntlet. It describes biological systems of astonishing elegance and complexity that demand explanation; many of them were discovered as recently as the new millennium. Part II examines a number of ideas that have been offered as answers, from Darwin’s own theory to the most recent non-Darwinian accounts of evolution such as neutral theory and natural genetic engineering. We’ll see why, although they may account for some features of life, they all are severely limited in scope.

Part III (Chapters 6 through 9) compiles pertinent evidence from numerous studies on a wide range of species by many insightful investigators. These studies have only become available in the past few decades due to rapid advances in laboratory techniques that closely examine the molecular level of life. The studies indicate that not only is the Darwinian mechanism devolutionary; it is also self-limiting—that is, it actively prevents evolutionary changes at the biological classification level of family and above. After Part IV (described below), the Appendix reexamines criticisms by top scientists and others of my earlier arguments for intelligent design from the clarifying perspective of more than twenty years later.

The failure of Darwin’s mechanism as an explanation for the evolution of all but the lowest levels of biological classification reopens the primordial question of what does account for the elegance and complexity of life. My answer appears mainly in Part IV (the final chapter). There I defend the reality of mind—a necessary foundation of science itself—and argue that, for its own sake, science must explicitly acknowledge mind’s existence. Once the reality of mind is affirmed, the explanation for life follows easily. In brief, although chance surely affects superficial aspects of biology, the newest evidence confirms that life is the intended work of a mind and that that work extends much more deeply into life than could previously be seen.

From introduction to Darwin Devolves

By Michael J. Behe

Envy in Language

Both in literature and in discussions with a number of people as to what they understand by envy I have been struck by the tendency to use the word ‘jealousy’ instead of ‘envy,’ the former no doubt being more tolerable to those who confess to it than the latter, which is an ignominious sentiment. The jealous man has been defeated in a struggle for power or in competition; he is not inferior in relation to the asset under contention as, by definition, the envious man is. Yet even the behavioural sciences often shirk the phenomenon of envy and of envious behaviour as though it were taboo, disguising the motive of envy with concepts such as ambivalence, aggression, tension, rivalry, jealousy and similar indirect descriptions.

The primary role of envy in human society and the comparatively unproblematical nature of common jealousy—or what is usually meant by the term—are apparent both from language and from proverbs.

Envy and jealousy in English

The Oxford English Dictionary[1] treats ‘envy’ and ‘envious’ as ‘jealousy’ and ‘jealous.’ About four columns are devoted to both terms.

‘Envy’ and ‘envious’ in modern English are derived from the Latin invidia and invidiosus, which have the same meanings. The verb ‘to envy’ corresponds to the Latin invidere. In Spanish, Portuguese and Italian there are similar derivatives from the Latin to denote the same states of mind.

Early English examples are: ‘There be others that be envious to see other in gretter degree thanne they.’ ‘No lawful meanes can carrie me Out of enuies reach.’ ‘It is much more shame to have envy at other for mony, clothing, or possessions.’

Definitions emphasize the feeling of hostility, spite and ill-will. According to these, envy is present when there is ‘mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages.’ On the other hand, envy may simply mean that one wishes one might do the same as someone else. The first definition of envy as a verb is most specific: ‘To feel displeasure and ill-will at the superiority of (another person) in happiness, success, reputation, or the possession of anything desirable.’

It is also called envy when a person withholds a thing from someone else out of spite; further on we shall have to consider the phenomenon of avarice and its relationship to envy. Thus in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was said of the peacock that he so envied men their health that he would eat his own droppings (then used for medicinal purposes).

Incidentally, the modern English words of Latin origin for ‘envy’ and ‘envious’ have practically the same meaning as those in modern German deriving from ancient Germanic words, which express the same states of feeling and of mind.

‘Jealous’ and ‘jealousy’ are given detailed treatment by the Oxford English Dictionary. Obviously ‘jealous’ at first denoted simply an intense or highly excited emotional state, and then came to include a craving for the affection of someone else. Later it came to designate the fear of losing another person’s affections, just like ‘jealous’ in the modern sense. Sometimes ‘jealous’ has the sense of ‘envious,’ as in: ‘It is certain that they looked upon it with a jealous eye.’ Earlier there was also an English term ‘jealous glass,’ meaning the frosted glass used for ground-floor windows, analogous to the French jalousie. But the principal meaning of ‘jealousy’ remains the passionate endeavour to keep something that is one’s own by right. In complete contrast to the envious man, therefore, one may postulate a man of jealous disposition whose mind is at rest once he knows that he is free of rivals. In 1856 Emerson wrote: ‘The jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony to the reality they have found in life.’ Where jealousy acquires undertones of mistrust or hatred, what is meant is generally the suspicion that somebody is seeking to take something from us which we have hitherto enjoyed in tranquillity. In some cases jealousy may even represent the pugnacity of the rightful defender holding his own against the envious miscreant.

More precisely, the jealous man can never normally become a spontaneous, primary aggressor. His hostile behaviour begins only when a rival appears on the scene to give him specific reason for anxiety. This rival may be genuinely striving for an asset, or he may be driven by envy. Everyone is familiar with the type, often described in fiction, who wants to seduce his friend’s fiancée, not because he wants to marry her, but only because he begrudges the other his happiness.

In contrast to the envious man, who usually knows exactly what provokes him, the jealous man is often in doubt as to the nature of his antagonist: whether he is a genuine, honourable rival on his own level or an envious man, ostensibly a rival but in fact intent merely on destruction. The envious man, on the other hand, may have hostile feelings towards a person who may actually be ignorant of his existence. Sociologically, therefore, envy and jealousy represent basically distinct social situations, for in jealousy two or more persons must confront each other in a relationship that is avowedly reciprocal.

The fully revised edition of the most comprehensive dictionary of American English, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, which appeared in 1961, devotes very little space to the terms ‘envy’ and ‘envious.’ Two examples of contemporary usage are cited: ‘the sterile and envious principle of artificial equality’ from Time magazine; and, ‘examining the tire with envious appreciation.’ ‘Envious’ is defined as a disgruntled emotional state arising from the possessions or achievements of another, a spiteful wish that the other should lose them. By contrast, the word ‘jealous’ is used when we observe or imagine with mistrust or dissatisfaction that someone is acquiring something which is really our due or which belongs to us.

Thus the decisive difference is evident: jealousy is only directed against a definite transfer of coveted assets or their removal elsewhere, never against the asset as such. Envy very often denies the asset itself. Further, ‘jealous’ may be used with no critical implications at all, as when John Galsworthy writes: ‘. . . conscious of their duty, and jealous of their honour.’

Webster’s examples of envy eliminate this fine distinction and give samples of contemporary English, or more especially and significantly of American English, according to which one says ‘I envy you’ when it should in fact be ‘I am jealous of your. . .’ Thus Hollis Alpert writes: ‘I have a wild envy of the man in the taxi with her,’ while V. S. Pritchett writes: ‘I often envy the writer who works in a university.’

The emphasis, in the definitions of ‘envy’ and ‘envying’ in Webster’s third edition, is laid on the desire to possess what belongs to the other, not to see it destroyed. Indeed, this shift in emphasis corresponds almost exactly to the present American view of envy. Thus an American advertisement is able to declare that one should buy this or that in order to be envied—that is to say, so that the other man should at once do his utmost to get the same thing, not, as in earlier cultures, that he should try to damage it out of spite.

Jealousy as compared with envy is defined by Webster principally as fear of unfaithfulness or rivalry, but the dictionary also mentions that ‘jealous’ can be used in the sense of ‘envious,’ as in: ‘Jealous because her coat isn’t as nice as yours.’ ‘Jealousy’ has rather the meaning of hostile rivalry, and we believe that, as opposed to genuine envy, it does not anticipate the downfall of the rival. Webster’s example of this is: ‘Intense local jealousies among existing villages.’

Envy and emulation

A masterly definition and description of envy is found in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, published in 1912. Therein, William L. Davidson, Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, has this to say:

Envy is an emotion that is essentially both selfish and malevolent. It is aimed at persons, and implies dislike of one who possesses what the envious man himself covets or desires, and a wish to harm him. Grasping-ness for self and ill-will lie at the basis of it. There is in it also a consciousness of inferiority to the person envied, and a chafing under this consciousness. He who has got what I envy is felt by me to have the advantage of me, and I resent it. Consequently, I rejoice if he finds that his envied possession does not give him entire satisfaction—much more, if it actually entails on him dissatisfaction and pain: that simply reduces his superiority in my eyes, and ministers to my feelings of self-importance. As signifying in the envious man a want that is ungratified, and as pointing to a sense of impotence inasmuch as he lacks the sense of power which possession of the desired object would give him, envy is in itself a painful emotion, although it is associated with pleasure when misfortune is seen to befall the object of it.

The writer of the article also quotes Dryden:

Envy, that does with misery reside,

The joy and the revenge of ruin’d pride.

The article compares envy with jealousy. They have much in common yet represent completely different emotions. Jealousy differs from envy in being infinitely more spiteful, as well as more impassioned and less restrained. Jealousy arises out of an opinion as to what is one’s due; it is not purely a sense of inferiority, as is envy. For the jealous man, furthermore, there is a twofold source of irritation and uneasiness, since three people are involved: he is not engaged with one rival only, but with two (individuals or groups). If I am jealous of somebody this is because he has won someone else’s affections to which I think I have a right. Thus I hate not only the usurper but the person he has seduced.

Next, envy is compared with emulation, a term that has been equated with it. Americans, for example, prefer ‘envy’ to the obsolete use of ‘emulation,’ but are quite unaware of the shift in meaning. They have forgotten envy’s spiteful, destructive aspect.

The article rightly considers emulation to be very different from envy. He who emulates, who seeks to do what another has done, is neither self-seeking, spiteful, nor filled with hatred. Emulation requires a rival, a competitor, but the latter does not have to be seen as an enemy. He may even be a friend whose example stimulates our own powers and talents. Behaviour that reveals emulation is observable in many animals and is also apparent in the simple games of young children.

Again, the article draws a distinction between ambition and emulation. While ambition may be laudable, it may also degenerate into a ruthlessness leading ultimately to methods of harming a rival very similar to those of the envious man. Emulation may turn into envy as when, for instance, shortly before the end of the race a runner realizes that he will not be able to outpace the winner and so tries to trip him up. The article cites the following distinction drawn by Joseph Butler in one of his sermons (Sermon 1, note 20):

‘Emulation is merely the desire and hope of equality with, or superiority over others, with whom we compare ourselves. . . . To desire the attainment of this equality or superiority by the particular means of others being brought down to our own level, or below it, is, I think, the distinct notion of envy.’[2] John Gay (1669–1745), philosopher and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, gives a brilliant analysis of the phenomenon of envy in his study of the fundamental principles of virtue or morality.[3] He regards envy as a diabolical passion and concurs with Locke in believing it possible for some people to be completely devoid of it. Moreover, Gay rightly observes that most people, were they to give the matter some consideration, would remember the first time they ever felt themselves to be under the influence of envious emotions. This he sees as being especially important, since the ability to remember the first active experience of envy indicates the series of fundamental motives that leave their stamp on the personality. Because the most important experiences of envy cannot easily be forgotten, Gay believes, those people who think they have never been affected by it are probably right. He could not, of course, have been aware of such a factor as repression.

To begin with, Gay keeps to the common definition of envy as the anguish that besets us when we observe the prosperity of others; but this he at once qualifies with the statement that it is not the prosperity of all and sundry but of specific persons. What persons? As soon as we look around us to discover who it is we might envy we will, Gay maintains, find the source of this passion: the objects of envy invariably prove to be persons who had formerly been the envious man’s rivals. Gay rightly comments on the importance of social proximity in envy. It is usually directed only towards persons with whom it has been possible to compete. But to restrict envy to genuine and factual rivalry is to go too far, for it blurs its distinction from jealousy. There is no doubt that envy may occur where competition has been only imagined, or even where it is inconceivable. What is decisive, however, as we shall see repeatedly, is the envious man’s conviction that the envied man’s prosperity, his success and his income are somehow to blame for the subject’s deprivation, for the lack that he feels. Now if the capacity for envy derives from the experience of sibling jealousy, this aspect of envy becomes explicable; for within a family the favouring of one child (even if this be purely imaginary) will necessarily involve discrimination against the other (or will arouse a sense of injury).

According to Adam Smith, envy, malice and resentment are the only passions which could bring someone to injure another’s person or reputation, yet few people succumb frequently to these passions and the worst scoundrels only on occasion. And even if one does give way to such feelings, little is gained. Therefore, Smith opines, in most human beings envy is restrained by rational reflection.[4]

The evidence for Smith’s confident assumption is, of course, the fact that it would not be possible to imagine any kind of orderly co-existence if the prevailing society had not succeeded in largely suppressing mutual envy.

Causal delusion in envy

Scheler is responsible for a very important conceptual clarification. He sees envy, in the ordinary sense of the word, as the product of the feeling of impotence

which inhibits the striving after a possession that belongs to another. The tension between such striving and such impotence only leads to envy, however, when it is discharged into an act of hatred or vindictive behaviour towards the owner of the possession; when, that is, owing to a delusion, the other with his possession is experienced as the cause of our painful failure to have the possession. This delusion, whereby what is in fact our impotence to obtain the possession appears to us as a positive force ‘opposing’ our striving, has the effect of somewhat reducing the initial tension. Genuine envy is no more possible without the particular experience of such impotence than it is without the causal delusion.

Now it is significant that, as we shall show, many primitive peoples (e.g., the Dobuans and the Navaho Indians), as well as some village communities in more developed societies (e.g., in Central America), bring about the kind of causal delusion described by Scheler, not unconsciously or subconsciously like our contemporaries in modern societies, but with intent: my neighbour’s harvest can only have turned out better than mine because he has somehow succeeded in reducing mine by black magic. It is this view of the world, the magic thinking of the primitive man within us—also discernibly at work in many other forms of superstitious compulsive behaviour—which provides the dynamic of envy in modern, enlightened society.

Scheler declares explicitly:

Mere displeasure at the fact that another possesses the thing which I covet does not constitute envy; it is, indeed, a motive for acquiring in some way the desired object or a similar one, e.g., by working for it, by buying it, by force or by theft. Only when the attempt to obtain it by these means has failed, giving rise to the consciousness of impotence, does envy arise.[5]

 From:

ENVY A Theory of Social Behaviour

by Helmut Schoeck

Freud's projections and dark side of ignorance

The article provides an ariyan interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, plus very interesting although shocking data, which shows that Freud’s reading of the play is a projection of very real problem in his own ethnic group. As Herve Ryssen says: "The truth is that everything they ever say about others and about “humanity” is, at bottom, nothing but the reflection of themselves". With such knowledge we immediately can recognise ethnicity of "Polish" writer Herling-Grudziński. In his journal several times he informs readers that incest is much more common practice than they suppose! In his particular case it may not be a deliberate subversion, since otherwise he is indeed the first class writer, but ...

For instance, let us apply what we have learnt from our author to a work composed by one of the Buddha’s contemporaries, in order to better understand a critical Pali concept. Probably the most famous ancient Greek tragedy is Oedipus Tyrannus, also known as Oedipus Rex. It dramatizes the downfall of the protagonist, a foundling, who by virtue of his acumen rose to power in the city of Thebes. Abandoned on a mountain by his father King Laïus, who was warned by the god Apollo that his son would kill him, he was saved from death by a shepherd, then adopted and raised kindly by Polybus and Merope, king and queen of Corinth. But upon hearing the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he flees Corinth. On his journey he quarrels with and kills a man who blocks his way. He then travels to Thebes, which at the time was being harassed by the Sphinx, a monster who posed a riddle to passers-by and devoured all who could not answer it. Oedipus solves the riddle, thus freeing Thebes, and in reward is made its ruler and given in marriage to its widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he has four children. Subsequently, Thebes is ravaged by famine and plague, and according to the Delphic Oracle, these calamities will persist until the slayer of King Laïus, Jocasta’s first husband, is banished from the Boeotian capital. Oedipus is charged with finding and punishing the offender. Tiresias, a blind seer, comes forward and hints that the tyrant himself is the one responsible for the city’s plight. Oedipus becomes enraged, refuses to admit guilt and accuses others of plotting against him. However, ensuing evidence confirms his true parents are Laïus and Jocasta, not Polybus and Merope, and that the stranger he murdered was his own father. At last, the protagonist is forced to admit to himself and others that he is guilty of parricide and incest. Upon these revelations, Jocasta hangs herself in the palace, and out of grief and remorse, Oedipus puts out his eyes.

Many who have never seen or read the play by Sophocles are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s famous analysis of it, the basis for his controversial theory known as the ‘Oedipus complex’, explained in The Interpretation of Dreams (V, D). For the Austrian psychologist, the drama represents a latent sexual attraction on the part of every male child to his mother, accompanied by jealousy and antipathy towards his father.x Hence the universal appeal of the tragedy since, according to Freud, we all share the guilt of Oedipus: ‘His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.’

Freud’s reading of the play has been widely accepted. It does merit consideration, especially for perceiving that Sophocles dramatizes a latent guilt in all of us. However, the major drawback of his theory is that a crucial component of it—the contention that everyone undergoes an Oedipus complex in his early years—is purely speculative. While it is possible I was once infatuated with my mother, I do not recall my infancy; so I must rely on a psychologist, who in turn does not remember his, to tell me about it: because, according to Freud, memories of incestuous desire are “repressed”, i.e. buried in the unconscious. This fails to meet the criteria of Ven. Ñāṇavīra’s method, in which all assertions about human experience must be immediately verifiable. Even if I could recall events of a repressed past, even of a past life, I would remain in doubt: for as our author avers in “A Note on Paţiccasamuppāda” §7, ‘memory is not on the same level of certainty as present reflexive experience’. Therefore, we must go beyond the incest taboo in order to explain why ‘the oracle laid the same curse upon us as upon him’.xi

Let us see if we can arrive at a more satisfactory interpretation of the myth. The Italian novelist and essayist Alberto Moravia raises some crucial questions about the great Sophoclean tragedy which are seldom, if ever, addressed.* While allowing that myths portray improbable events, he says it is reasonable to assume they still have realistic elements to them. So, for him it is striking that throughout their long marriage, Oedipus and Jocasta apparently never spoke of King Laïus, in whose palace they sleep; or, assuming they did, why does Oedipus—married to an older widow, and knowing full well the prophecies of the oracle—never suspect that those prophecies have come true? From his arrival in Thebes through the epidemic of the plague, he remains strangely ignorant or unaware of who he is and what he is doing. For as we recall, he is renowned for his intelligence, having solved the Sphinx’s riddle.

The only plausible explanation is that the protagonist makes himself deaf and blind to his own guilt, ignoring or repressing, if you will, the obvious connection between what he knows and what he fears. Thus, his is a studied, intentional ignorance with moral implications, unlike a mere lack of knowledge.

There is no riddle to his motives. Clearly, Oedipus continues to act in bad faith because it suits him. He prefers to remain in the dark because in so doing he may unabashedly prolong his enjoyment of power and pleasure: for only as long as he conceals the facts from himself and others may he maintain the position he usurped from his father, as ruler over Thebes by day and lover of Jocasta by night.

Hence, for Moravia the story of Oedipus is not one of illicit love and failed ambition, which, though powerful, would lack universal relevance. More profoundly, it is the tragedy par excellence of ‘wilful, presumptuous, cowardly and wicked ignorance’, which is ‘the origin of all evils’. Therefore, in the standard “recognition scene” of Greek drama, in which the identity of someone previously unknown is at last revealed to the protagonist, Oedipus is compelled, like Joseph K., to arrest himself. The charge is neither parricide nor incest, but rather that of closing his eyes to his own self-deception; his past crimes are not so grievous as his refusal to admit them, nor so despicable as his ongoing indulgence in greed and sensuality, facilitated by remaining conveniently unknowing and ‘unseeing’. Thus his comeuppance is not death or castration, but self-induced blindness.

In sum, we have witnessed the ultimate drama of crucial aspects of taṇhā and avijjā. As Ven. Ñāṇavīra writes in Letter 149, ‘Avijjā functions automatically, but conceals this fact from itself. Avijjā is an automatically functioning blindness to its automatic functioning.’  (...)

* See L’attenzione (Milano: Bompiani, 1965) pp. 86–89.

John Stella from The introduction to Ven Nanavira's Letters

**

The Myth of the Oedipus Complex

The father of psychoanalysis built his theories based on the study of hysterical pathology, which was obviously no accident. Based on his personal case history and on a study of and his fellow Viennese Jews, he showed that incest was the major cause of hysteria.

 In 1896, Freud categorically supported the notion that the specific cause of hysteria must be sought in some sort of sexual problem. Thirteen cases analysed by him permitted him to arrive at this conclusion. Hysteria, he affirmed, was caused by a serious incident of a sexual nature, passively experienced and occurring before puberty.

What his biographer Ernst Jones writes is edifying, as long as one understands that we are only speaking of the Jewish community: “From May 1893, the time in which he speaks for the first time to Fliess, in September 1897… he admitted that a sexual seduction committed against a child by an adult – most often the father – was the essential cause of hysteria. The proofs provided by the analytical materials seemed irrefutable. For more than four years, his conviction remained unshakeable, although the frequency of these so-called incidents surprised him more and more. Everything appeared to indicate that agreat number of fathers were addicted to the commission of incestuous crimes… Freud concluded that, judging by certain symptoms observable in his brotherand a few of his sisters, his father might havebeen guilty, too” (letter to Fliess, 11 February 1897).

In this letter, as Freud wrote to his great friend, Dr. Wilhem Fliess, “Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts: he is thecause of my brother’s hysteria (whose condition I am still striving todiagnose), and some of my younger sisters…

”In 1897, however, after his father’s death, which occurred at the end of October 1896, Freud abandoned the “seduction theory” and adopted the “fantasy theory”: hysterical women were no longer the unfortunate victims of incest committed against them during their childhood, but were now merely fantasizing about their fathers! His father was henceforth washed clean of any suspicion. Parents were no longer guilty. It was now necessary to believe that the children were in love with their parent of the opposite sex and desired incestuous relations.

Ernst Jones writes here: “During the winter following the death ofhis father (more precisely, in February), Freud accused his father ofacts of seduction; three months later (on 31 May 1897), an incestuous dream he had put an end to his doubts relating to the seduction story”.

In his letters of 3, 4, and 15 October 1897, Freud described the progress of his self-analysis and acknowledged “his father’s innocence” – or so it would appear. Ernst Jones appears satisfied with this explanation and supported the Freudian hypothesis: “What is important above all, more than the parent’s incestuous desires, even more than occasional acts of this kind, was the general fact of incestuous desires inspired in the child by the parent of the opposite sex”. Et voilà: “infantile sexuality” and the “Oedipus complex” were born!

Freud was obviously the object of very heavy pressure from his fellow Jews while he was still in the process of constructing his theories on the origins of hysteria, so as to avoid revealing to the world the heavy secret of Judaism. By inventing the theory of the “Oedipus complex”, he concealed the reality of incest within Jewish families while exculpating Jewish parents. And he covered his tracks even further by projecting this Jewish specificity onto a universal plane, through the mechanism of a Greek hero (Oedipus). In reality, the famous “Oedipus complex” is in reality and above all nothing more than an “Israel complex”, i.e., the complex of a son who has slept with his own mother, and who wishes to “kill his father”, for quite understandable reasons.

We nevertheless owe it to Freud for raising the question of incest, which is the one true great secret of Judaism. The only thing we need to do now is place this “psychoanalytic theory” in front of a mirror, which will then reflect the following conclusion: “Judaism is the illness which psychoanalysis sets out to cure”. Everything written by Jews must be read with a mirror. The truth is that everything they ever say about others and about “humanity” is, at bottom, nothing but the reflection of themselves.

After Freud, psychoanalysts replaced priests in caring for the souls of the faithful. The only difference, really – from the Jewish point of view – was that while priests were free of charge, while psychoanalysts demand to be paid cash on the barrel head! Or possibly credit card. Just the same, it’s a little bit comical to see all these “sick people” (the phrase is from Jacques Attali) forming the heavy battalions of all those who set out to cure humanity of its ills. But this is just one of the “paradoxes” of Judaism. The truth is that Jewish psychoanalysts don’t just practice their profession to treat their patients; rather, they treat their patients to try to treat themselves.

Typically, in claiming that the origin of neurosis were to be found in the repression of sexual impulses by Christian morality, Freud was, once again – and, once again, typically – deliberately projecting his own neurosis – and the neurosis of Judaism – onto a civilization which he consciously hated. He himself warned us, in embarking for America: “They do not know that we are bringing them the plague”.

*

Sexual Crimes Against Children

Paedophilia in the Jewish community is much more widespread that it appears. The media pass over the problem in silence and accuse Catholic priests. In reality, the phenomenon is incomparably more important within the Jewish sect, particularly among Orthodox Jews. We have compiled innumerable testimonies and legal proceedings since the publication of The Psychoanalysis of Judaism, in 2006.

In the United States, an Internet site – the Awareness Center – listed hundreds of rabbis, both Israeli and American, persecuted for sexual attacks on children. The site, unfortunately, no longer exists, but we compiled a few of these cases in the chapters of our books ( ThePsychoanalysis of Judaism, The Mirror of Judaism). Each week, the American and Israeli press provides us with new examples. In December 2011, the umpteenth scandal erupted in the Orthodox Jewish community of Brooklyn, where the New York City Police Department investigated charges of sexual abuse brought by no fewer than 117 children. 85 people were arrested in this one case. 

In January 2012, the rabbi Daniel Fahri, eminent founder of the Jewish liberal movement of France, was indicted for similar misdeeds. This Daniel Fahri was also the father of rabbi Gabriel Fahri, who had been much talked about in 2003, who claimed to have been attacked with knives in a Paris street. Police investigations very quickly established that the rabbi had stabbed himself. (We have listed numerous cases of similar affairs in Jewish Fanaticism).

These sexual deviations are explained in part by the content of the Talmud, the holy book of Judaism, which contains the teachings of the rabbis, and which the Jews consider more important than the Torah. We have already studied this question in our books. Let us summarize the essential facts here: 

The Sanhedrin treatise (54b-55a) teaches that as long as children have not reached sexual maturity, they are not physiologically capable of having sexual relations, are not considered persons, and the laws on sodomy do not apply to them. Many pages are dedicated to the description of paedophilia and “cohabitation” with young children. Sanhedrin 55a clearly establishes that a boy is considered sexually mature at age 9 years and 1 day, and a little girl at the age of 3 years and 1 day.

In France, very well known personalities have defended paedophilia in their books. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former “68” leader, or the TV announcer Michel Polac, for example. We have long been aware of the morals of former Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, who declared in the newspaper Gay Pied on 31 January 1991: “The sexuality of children is still a forbidden continent. It is the task of the discoverersof the 21st century to approach the shores”. In September 2009, at the time of the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski, all Jewish intellectuals defended the paedophile as one man: Bernard-Henry Levi, Claude Lelouch, Constantin Costa-Gavras, etc. Even Frédéric Mitterrand got involved. It is necessary, once again, to note the convergences between Judaism and the “sexual minorities”.

At Last: Psychoanalysis Explained

The question of incest is a nagging one among Jewish intellectuals. Direct testimonies are rather rare, due to the fact that incest victims are highly reluctant to discuss the matter, and very few victims bring charges against their own parents. But if we read the Jews with a mirror, we will soon see that this whole problem is an absolute obsession in the cultural production of Judaism. Jewish intellectuals and film makers always talk about it with an air of great mystery, in an anecdotal way, or by projecting the problem onto a universal level, always using a goy family as an example. We know that the Jewish people love to encourage an air of mystery and secrecy, and that incest, in particular, is one of the secrets, if not the top secret of Judaism. 

In our books The Psychoanalysis of Judaism (2006), Jewish Fanaticism (2007), and The Mirror of Judaism (2009), various chapters show that the near-totality of Jewish intellectuals, artists and film-makers have dealt with the problem at one time or another, usually via the mechanism of “projection”. This is not an accident.

Of course, incest is formally proscribed among Jews, as stipulated by the Torah (Leviticus 18) and the Babylonian Talmud (Yabamot 2a). But the interpretations of Jewish intellectuals are always ambiguous. Everything is ambiguous in Judaism. 

Ambiguity may even be said to constitute the principal characteristic of Judaism. In the case in question, one must observe that the Jews know how to rationalize their war around the Biblical texts.

 See for example, the film Chinatown, by Roman Polanski (USA, 1974): at Los Angeles, in the 1930s, a drought compels small farmers to sell their land. The land is purchased at rock-bottom prices by large landowners with the connivance of the municipality, which releases the badly needed, precious water over a spillway every night. Jack Nicholson, private detective, investigates the affair, which displeases powerful enemies. At the end of the film, the beautiful Faye Dunaway, slapped by Nicholson, finally admits that the little girl she has been hiding from everyone is both her daughter and her sister. Her father is a monster, a rich landowner. This is a typical example of the manner in which an intimate and highly sensitive, almost uniquely Jewish problem is projected onto the goyim, by a Jew who is a child rapist himself, Roman Polanski. 

Examples of this genre are very numerous. Incest may also be depicted as occurring between father and son. Director and actor Tim Roth, for example, has admitted being abused by his own father. In his film The War Zone (Great Britain, 1999) he denounces the incestuous relations between a father and his daughter. The horror finally ends when Tom and his sister stab their father to death. 

An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on 13 December 2006, reports interesting statistics. We learn that Israel, over the course of the year, received more than 2,000 complaints alleging the sexual abuse of children under the age of 12, and nearly 2,500 others concerning adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years. 90% of the victims were attacked by someone they knew; 60% of the cases involving children below the age of 12 were incestuous relationships. One must remember that, in the immense majority of cases, the victims of incest never bring charges. 

In the film They Live, (USA, 1988), by John Carpenter, the hero, Nada, thanks to special glasses, discovers that a small part of the population consists of extra-terrestrials who look like everybody else, constituting an elite which governs the world through lies. Nada (“nothing”, in Spanish) we learn, was the victim of an abusive father.

 Some mention must be made at this point of the famous “Jewish mother”, which means an over-possessive, abusive mother. Jacques Attali, Bernard-Henry Levi, Romain Gary, Alain Finkielkraut and many others have left more than just a few ambiguous testimonies on this subject. This is what Elie Wiesel wrote on the subject, in Talmudic Celebration (1991): A woman visits Rabbi Yeoshoua. “So what’s theproblem?

 Here it is: ‘B’nai hakatan mibni hagadol’, she says, “my younger son’s father is my older son”. […] Jewish mothers are always guilty ofwhat happens to their beloved children”.

Wiesel puts it elliptically: “As a good Jewish son, he loved his mother – a little bit too much”. 

The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut felt the need to see a psychiatrist: “My fears and problems were no doubt a result of our frenzied intimacy… whether it was irritation or just weariness, it has happened to me to be weak and offer my Jewishness to psychoanalysis”. Finkielkraut himself writes: “Hysterical, I hadbecome Jewish to make people look at me”. 

The American novelist Philip Roth, in Portnoy’s Complaint(1967), also “let go” a little (cf. Jewish Fanaticism): “Please, who crippled us so? Who made us so morbid, so hysterical and weak? … Doctor, whatdo you call this sickness I have? Is it the Jewish suffering which I used to hear so much about?… My own mother… Her beloved, she calls me!” Jewish mothers, “in love” with their sons, no doubt imagine that they have given birth to the long-awaited Messiah of Israel. And Philip Roth adds, sickened, “What was it with these Jewish parents, what, that theywere able to make us little Jewish boys believe that we were little princes on the other hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody had ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the whole history of childhood”?

The feminist Elisabeth Badinter explains ( XY: On MasculineIdentity, 1992), that this is all quite natural: “The good mother isnaturally incestuous and paedophile. Nobody would ever dream ofcomplaining of it, but they all wish to forget it, including the motherand son”. There are many glimpses of this type in cosmopolitan cinema. In 1997, the Jewish director Milos Forman presented Larry Flynt, a film on the scandalous life of a pornographic magazine tycoon who became the flag-bearer of the struggle against the moral order in the United States. We see this “Pope” of porn (represented as a goy) persecuted by the representatives of the “moral order” for caricaturizing the moral order in his magazine and claiming to have had sex with his own mother in a toilet. Here again, accusatory inversion is the norm. In France, Catholic associations were successful in bringing about the withdrawal of the film poster, which represented a man being crucified on a woman’s pubis. 

Incestuous relations between brother and his sister are made to appear rather common, at least judging by the cultural production of Jewish cinema. References to incest are seen to be very numerous in film as soon as one starts paying attention. Here are a few: in Land ofLight (2008), director Stephane Kurc projects a history of incest between brother and sister among the French in Algeria, in a film dripping with anti-goy racism. There is also the film Disengagement by Israeli director Amos Gitai (2007); Kika by Pedro Almovodar (Spain, 1993), In Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Christophe Gans shows us the rape of a sister by her brother. The film is also very “anti-racist”: an Iroquois Indian beats the stuffing out of a load of French peasants, in the 18th century!

In the novel by Jonathan Littell entitled The Kindly Ones (Goncourt Prize 2006), the hero is a homosexual SS officer, madly in love with his twin sister Una. This is a clear case of accusatory inversion, traditional among Jewish intellectuals.

The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer also projects his guilt onto others. In his novel entitled Scum, published in 1991, we read: “In Argentina, Peru, in Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere, little girls are rapedby their fathers, brothers sleep with their sisters, mothers have sex withtheir own sons. People do not always put a stop to such crimes. They go talk to the priest, confess, and they are absolved with a little holywater.” 

In his book On Anti-Semitism, Stéphane Zagdanski himself warns us that the reader will have to “decode” his remarks and put the following sentence in the right place. With reference to “anti-Semites”, he writes: “To be decoded: they are egotistically addicted to this obscure enjoyment of incest, access to which is prohibited to them. Anti-Semites, you understand, are very greatly disturbed by incest,which is logical, since they suffer from a lack of boundaries.”

Incest, as we see, is an absolute obsession among Jews. Mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, uncles and daughters, etc. … there are what are called “stove pipe” families, in which everybody “fits” into everybody else, from generation to generation. There is no doubt an urgent need for an official inquiry into the problem to provoke a discussion, intended to break the succession of “incestuous generations”. 

At this point, there can no longer be any talk of any “Chosen People”; what the Jews need is a medical diagnosis. The “German poet”, Heinrich Heine, had the habit of declaring sardonically that Judaism is not a religion, but a “family misfortune” ( Familienunglück). Freud himself no doubt also understood that the origin of Judaism is not religious in nature, but sexual. But he lacked the courage to reveal to the world at large that the famous “Oedipus complex” was in reality nothing by an “Israel complex”, preferring to project the neurosis of Judaism onto humanity as a whole. One must always read the Jews with a mirror.

Hevre Ryssen

Understanding the Jews, Understanding Anti-Semitism

Darwinism as a spiritual poison

Note: The article in no way undermines validity of Kevin MacDonald's work.

On the level of worldview Dawinism is a spiritual poison, it is animalisation of the man, and it replaced morality received from divine power with that of animal, blindly insisting on survival, and so it is in total contradiction with Dhamma, where the highest goal is the cessation of being in space and time.

Today a naturalistic approach to knowledge is being applied to virtually every field. Some say we’re entering an age of “universal Darwinism,” where it is no longer just a scientific theory but a comprehensive worldview.

It has become commonplace to say that America is embroiled in a “culture war” over conflicting moral standards. But we must remember that morality is always derivative, stemming from an underlying worldview. The culture war reflects an underlying cognitive war over worldviews—and at the core of each worldview is an account of origins. ↓

The pragmatists were among the first, however, to face squarely the implications of naturalistic evolution. If evolutionary forces produced the mind, they said, then all beliefs and convictions are nothing but mental survival strategies, to be judged in terms of their practical success in human conduct. William James liked to say that truth is the “cash value” of an idea: if it pays off, then we call it true.

Pragmatism Today 

This Darwinian logic continues to shape American thought more than we might imagine. Take religion. William James was raised in a household with an intense interest in religion. (In the Second Great Awakening his father converted to Christianity, then later converted to Swedenborgianism). As a result, James applied his philosophy of pragmatism to religion: we decide whether God exists depending on whether that belief has positive consequences in our experience. “An idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives,” James once said. Thus, “If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence?”3 (...) As Lutheran theologian John Warwick Montgomery puts it, “Truths do not always ‘work,’ and beliefs that ‘work’ are by no means always true.”4

If James’s religious pragmatism has become virtually the American approach to spirituality today, then Dewey’s pragmatism has become the preferred approach to education. Virtually across the curriculum—from math class to moral education—teachers are trained to be nondirective “facilitators,” presenting students with problems and allowing them to work out their own pragmatic strategies for solving them. Of course, good teachers have always taught students to think for themselves. But today’s nondirective methodologies go far beyond that. They springboard from a Darwinian epistemology that denies the very existence of any objective or transcendent truth.*

NANCY PEARCEY How Darwinism Dumbs Us Down. Evolution and Postmodernism

* Revilo Oliver: By denying the concept of truth, Pragmatism necessarily denies the possibility of moral values. With the abolition of right and wrong, man can consult only his appetites and his calculations of expediency. The only test of an action is whether "it works". Logically a Pragmatist must condemn himself for a foolish weakness if he refuses, for example, to grind up his grandmother and sell her for hamburger in circumstances in which it is certain that he could get away with it and either realize a profit or have fun in the process. (...)

There are less spectacular, though not less baneful, applications of the doctrine to daily life. When the practicing Pragmatist expounds an argument, his words are merely the cover for his purposes. They are the flag hoisted by the pirate while stalking or approaching his victim. Where there is no truth there can be no rational debate, and the function of speech is to befuddle the gullible. And when the disinterested pursuit of truth is recognized as the Quixotic pursuit of an illusion, colleges must become hunting grounds for petty scoundrels. From: America's Decline 

Jonas Alexis:

... according to Darwinism’s fundamental principle, whatever is, is right in the animal kingdom. As Crook again puts it, “Struggle and competition, violence, bloodshed, and cruelty were the filtering mechanisms, crude, chancy, wasteful, by which species change and natural progress occurred.”[92]

In other words, according to the Darwinian mechanism, there cannot be “progress” without violence, bloodshed, and struggle. If Darwin is right, then “violence is a constant human potential, war is not aberrant and may even be commended as a biological necessity.”[93] So Darwinists, including Crook, have to do a lot of mental gymnastics in order to avoid Darwin’s fundamental principle. (...) Wilson is commonly known as the father of sociobiology. Yet listen to what Wilson has to say on ethics or morality:

“Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves as a powerful purpose without existing in substance.”[96]

For Wilson and other staunch Darwinists, morality is just a product of sociobiological evolution which has been ingrained in us and which has no serious objectivity. As Ruse again puts it, “Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”[97] If you think that Ruse is just joking, then think again. He elaborates on these in his work The Darwinian Paradigm:

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love their neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . . Nevertheless such reference is true without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .”[98]

As we have argued in the past, Darwin saw almost the same thing. He argued in the Descent of Man that “If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”[99]

The Edinburgh Review quickly saw the logical conclusion of Darwin’s point here. It declared then that if Darwin is right, then:

“most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct…If these views are true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscience…”[100]

Science writer Robert Wright agrees that Darwin’s Descent of Man “has indeed sapped the moral strength of Western civilization” and replaced it with something else.

“Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense of doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment—all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet. What’s more, we can’t take solace, as Darwin did, in the mistaken belief that these things evolved for the greater good—the ‘good of the group.’ Our ethereal intuitions about what’s right and what’s wrong are weapons designed for daily, hand-to-hand combat among individuals. It isn’t only moral feelings that now fall under suspicion, but all of the moral discourse.”[101]

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2023/04/02/david-duke-meets-jared-taylor-and-michael-hart/

Francis Parker Yockey on Darwinism

 As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts

One of the most fruitful discoveries of the 20th century was the metaphysics of nations. The unveiling of the Riddle of History showed that nations are different manifestations of the soul of the High Cultures. They exist only in Cultures, they have their life span for political purposes, and possess — vis-à-vis the other nations of the Culture — individuality. Each great nation is given an Idea, a life-mission, and the history of the nation is the actualizing of this Idea. This Idea, again, must be felt, and cannot be directly defined. Each Idea, to actualize which a given nation was chosen by the Culture, is also a stage of the development of the Culture. Thus Western History presents during the recent centuries, a Spanish period, a French period, an English period. They correspond to Baroque, Rococo, and early Civilization. These nations owed their spiritual and political supremacy during these years solely to the fact that they were the custodians of the Spirit of the Age. With the passing of the Age, these custodians of its Spirit lost their spiritually dominating position in the Culture. 

The early Civilization was the English period of the West, and all the thought and activity of the whole Civilization was on the English model. All nations embarked upon economic imperialism of the English type. All thinkers became Anglicized intellectually. English thought-systems ruled the West, systems which reflected the English soul, English life-conditions, and English material conditions. Prime among these systems was Darwinism, which became popular, and thus politically effective. 

Darwin himself was a follower of Malthus, and his system implies Malthusianism as a foundation. Malthus taught that population increase tends to outrun increase of food supply, that this represented an economic  danger, and that “checks” on this population increase alone can prevent it from destroying a nation, such as epidemics and wars, unhealthy living conditions and poverty. Malthusianism expressly regards care for the poor, the aged, and orphans, as a mistake. 

A word on this curious philosophy; first it has no correspondence whatever to facts, and therefore is not valid for the 20th century. Statistically it has no basis, spiritually it shows complete incomprehension of the prime fact of Destiny, Man, and History — namely that the soul is primary, and that matter is governed by soulconditions. Every man is the poet of his own History, and every nation of its History. A rising population shows the presence of a life-task, a declining population points to insignificance. This philosophy would legitimate a man’s existence by whether or not he is born into an adequate food-area! His gifts, his life task, his Destiny, his soul, are put at naught. It is one example of the great philosophic tendency of materialism: the animalization of Culture-man. 

Malthusianism taught that the food-population ratio imposed a continuous struggle for existence among men. This “struggle for existence” became a leadingidea for Darwinism. The other leading ideas of Darwinism are found in Schopenhauer, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Bates, and Herbert Spencer. Schopenhauer in 1835 set forth a Nature-picture containing the struggle for self-preservation, human intellect as a weapon in the struggle, and sexual love as unconscious selection according to the interest of the species. In the 18th century, Erasmus Darwin had postulated adaptation, heredity, struggle, and self-protection as principles of evolution. Bates formulated before Darwin the theory of Mimicry, Spencer the theory of descent, and the powerful tautological catchword “survival of the fittest” to describe the results of the “struggle.” 

This is only the foreground, for actually the road from Darwin back to Calvin is quite clear: Calvinism is a religious interpretation of the “survival of the fittest” idea, and it calls the fit the “elected.” Darwinism makes this election-process mechanical-profane instead of theological-religious: selection by Nature instead of election by God. It remains purely English in the process, for the national religion of England was an adaptation of Calvinism.

The basic idea of Darwinism — evolution — is as little novel as the particular theories of the system. Evolution is the great central idea of the philosophy of the 19th century. It dominates every leading thinker and every system: Schopenhauer, Proudhon, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mill, Ibsen, Shaw. These thinkers differ in their explanation of the purpose and technique of evolution; none of them question the central idea itself. With some of them it is organic, with most purely mechanical. 

Darwin’s system has two aspects, of which only one is treated here, for only one was effective. This was Darwinism as a popular philosophy. As a scientific arrangement it had considerable qualifications, and no one paid any attention to these when converting it to a journalistic world-outlook. As the latter, it had a sweeping vogue, and was effective as a part of the world-picture of the age. 

The system shows its provenance as a product of the Age of Criticism in its teleological assumptions. Evolution has purpose — the purpose of producing man, civilized man, English man — in the last analysis, Darwinians. It is anthropomorphic — the “aim of evolution” is not to produce bacilli, but humanity. It is free trade capitalism, in that this struggle is economic, every man for himself, and competition decides which life-forms are best. It is gradual and parliamentary, for continual “progress” and adaptation, exclude revolutions and catastrophes. It is utilitarian, in that every change in a species is one that has a material use. The human soul itself — known as the “brain” in the 19th century — is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man. It is orderly; natural selection proceeds according to the rules of artificial breeding in practice on English farms. 

II 

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions. 

In the first place, there is no “Struggle for existence” in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be “struggle,” since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war. A lion making a meal of a zebra portrays no “struggle” between two species, unless one is determined so to regard it. Even so, he must concede that it is not physically, mechanically, necessary for the carnivores to kill other animals. They could as well eat plants — it is the demand of their animal souls however to live in this fashion, and thus, even if one were to call their lives struggles, it would not be imposed by “Nature” but by the soul. It becomes thus, not a “struggle for existence,” but a spiritual necessity of being one’s self. 

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal-world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life. 

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the “unfit” died out to give place to the “fit.” Adaptation was the name given to the process by which a species gradually changed in order to be more fit for the struggle. Heredity was the means by which these adaptations were saved for the species. 

As a factual picture, this is easier to refute than it is to prove, and factual biological thinkers, both Mechanists and Vitalists, like Louis Agassiz, Du BoisReymond, Reinke, and Driesch rejected it from its appearance. The easiest refutation is the palaeontological. Fossil deposits — found in various parts of the earth — must represent the possibilities generally. Yet they disclose only stable specie-forms, and disclose no transitional types, which show a species “evolving” into something else. And then, in a new fossil hoard, a new species appears, in its definitive form, which remains stable. The species that we know today, and for past centuries, are all stable, and no case has ever been observed of a species “adapting” itself to change its anatomy or physiology, which “adaptation” then resulted in more “fitness” for the “struggle for existence,” and was passed on by heredity, with the result of a new species. 

Darwinians cannot get over these facts by bringing in great spaces of time, for paleontology has never discovered any intermediate types, but only distinct species. Nor are the fossil animals which have died out any simpler than present-day forms, although the course of evolution was supposed to be from simple to complex Life-forms. This was crude anthropomorphism — man is complex, other animals are simple, they must be tending toward him, since he is “higher” biologically. 

Calling Culture-man a “higher” animal still treats him as an animal. Culture-man is a different world spiritually from all animals, and is not to be understood by referring him to any artificial materialistic scheme. 

If this picture of the facts were correct, species ought to be fluid at the present time. They should be turning into one another. This is, of course, not so. There should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals, engaged in a race to reach — man. But the “struggle,” again, is quite inconclusive. The “lower” forms, simpler — less fit? — have not died out, have not yielded to the principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have had for — as the Darwinians would say — millions of years. Why do they not “evolve” into something “higher”?

The Darwinian analogy between artificial selection and natural selection is also in opposition to the facts. The products of artificial selection such as barnyard fowls, racing dogs, race horses, ornamental cats, and song-canaries, would certainly be at a disadvantage against natural varieties. Thus artificial selection has only been able to produce less fit lifeforms. 

Nor is Darwinian sexual selection in accordance with facts. The female does not by any means always choose the finest and strongest individual for a mate, in the human species, or in any other. 

The utilitarian aspect of the picture is also quite subjective — i.e., English, capitalistic, parliamentarian — for the utility of an organ is relative to the use sought to be made of it. A species without hands has no need of hands. A hand that slowly evolved would be a positive disadvantage over the “millions of years” necessary to perfect the hand. Furthermore, how did this process start? For an organ to be utile, it must be ready; while it is being prepared, it is inutile. But if it is inutile, it is not Darwinian, for Darwinism says evolution is utilitarian. 

Actually all the technics of Darwinian evolution are simply tautological. Thus, within the species it is individuals which have a predisposition to adapt themselves that do so. Adaptation presupposes adaptation. 

The process of selection affects those specimens with definite aptitudes which make them worthy of selection, in other words, they have already been selected. Selection presupposes selection. 

The problem of descent in the Darwinian picture is treated as finding the interrelations of the species. Having assumed their interrelationship, it then finds they are interrelated, and proves the interrelationship thus. Descent presupposes descent. 

The utility of an organ is a way of saying it works for this species. Utility thus presupposes the existence of the very species which has the organ, but lacking that organ. The facts however, have never shown a species to pick up a certain missing organ, which seemed necessary. A Life-form needs a certain organ because it needs it. The organ is utile because it is utile. 

The naive, tautological, doctrine of utility never asked “Utility for what?” That which serves duration might not serve strength. Utility is not a simple thing, but entirely relative to what already exists. Thus it is the inner demands of a life-form which determine what it would like to have, what would be useful to it. The soul of the lion and his power go together. The hand of man and his brain go together. No one can say that the strength of the lion causes him to live the way he does, nor that the hand of man is responsible for his technical achievements. It is the soul in each case which is primary.

This primacy of the spiritual inverts the Darwinian materialism on the doctrine of utility. A lack can be utile: the lack of one sense develops others; physical weakness develops intelligence. In man and in animals alike, the absence of one organ stimulates others to compensatory activity — this is often observed in endocrinology in particular. 

III 

The whole grotesquerie of Darwinism, and of the materialism of the entire 19th century generally, is a product of one fundamental idea — an idea which happens also to be nonfactual to this century, even though it was a prime fact a century ago. This one idea was that Life is formed by the outer. This generated the sociology of “environment” as determining the human soul. Later it generated the doctrine of “heredity” as doing the same. And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is the actualizing of the possible. The possible turns into the actual in the midst of outer facts, which affect only the precise way in which the possible becomes actual, but cannot touch the inner force which is expressing itself through, and, if necessary, in opposition to, the outer facts. 

Neither “heredity” nor “environment” determine these inner possibilities. They affect only the framework within which something entirely new, an individual, a unique soul, will express itself. 

The word evolution describes to the 20th century the process of the ripening and fulfilling of an organism or of a species. This process is not at all the operation of mechanical-utility “causes” on plastic, formless, protoplasmic material, with purely accidental results. His work with plants led de Vries to develop his Mutation theory of the origin of species, and the facts of paleontology reinforce it to the extent of showing the sudden appearance of new species. The 20th century finds it quite unnecessary to formulate mythologies, either in cosmogony or biology. Origins are forever hidden from us, and a historical viewpoint is interested in the development of the process, not in the mysterious beginning of the process. This beginning, as set forth by scientific mythology, and by religious mythology, has only an historical interest to our age. What we note is that once these world-pictures were actual and living. 

What is the actual History of Life, as this age sees it? Various species of Life exist, ranked, according to increasing spiritual content, from plants and animals, through man, to Culture-man, and High Cultures. Some of the varieties, as shown by fossils, existed in former earth-ages in their present form, while other species appeared and disappeared. 

A species appears suddenly, both in fossil-finds, and in the experimental laboratory. Mutation is a legitimate description of the process, if the idea is free from any mechanical-utility causes, for these latter are only imagined, whereas mutations are a fact. Each species has also a Destiny, and a given Life-energy, so to speak. Some are stable and firm; others have been weak, tending to split off into many different varieties, and lose their unity. They have also a life span, for many have disappeared. This whole process is not at all independent of geological ages, nor of astral phenomena. Some species, however, outlast one earth-age into the next, just as some 19th century thinkers have survived into the 20th century. 

Darwinians offered also an explanation of the metaphysics of their evolution. Roux, for instance, holds that the “fit for the purpose” survive, while the “unfit for the purpose” die. The process is purely mechanical, however, and is thus fitness for purpose without purpose. Nägeli taught that an organism perfects itself because it contains within it the “principle of perfection,” just as Moliere’s doctor explained that the sleeping potion worked because of a dormitive virtue inherent in it. Weismann denied the heredity of acquired characteristics, but instead of using it to destroy Darwinism, as it obviously does — if every individual has to start anew, how can the species “evolve”? — he props up the Darwinian picture with it by saying that the germ-plasm contains latent tendencies toward useful qualities. But this is no longer Darwinism, for the species does not evolve if it is only doing what it tends to do. 

These tautological explanations only convinced people because they believed already. The age was evolutionary, and materialistic. Darwinism combined these two qualities into a biologico-religious doctrine which satisfied the capitalistic imperative of that age. Any experiments, any new facts, only proved Darwinism; they would not have been allowed to do otherwise. 

The 20th century does not see Life as an accident, a playground for external causes. It sees the fact that Life-forms begin suddenly, and that the subsequent development, or evolution, is only the actualizing of that which is already possible. Life is the unfolding of a Soul, an individuality. Whatever explanation one gives of how Life started only reveals the structure of his own soul. A materialistic explanation reveals a materialist. Similarly the imputing of any “purpose” to Life as a whole transcends knowledge and enters the realm of Faith. Life as a whole, each great Life-form, each species, each variety, each individual, has however a Destiny, an inner direction, a wordless imperative. This Destiny is the primary fact of History. History is the record of fulfilled (or thwarted) destinies. 

Any attempt to make man into an animal, and the animals into automata, is merely materialism, and thus a product of a certain type of soul, of a certain age. The 20th century is not such an age, and looks upon the inner reality of the human soul as being the determinant of human history, and the inner reality of the Soul of the High Culture as being the determinant of the history of that Culture. The soul exploits outer circumstances — they do not form it. 

Nor does the 20th century, not being capitalistic, see any struggle for existence going on in the world, either of men or animals. It sees a struggle for power, a struggle that has no connection with cheap economic reasons. It is a struggle for domination of the world that the 20th and 21st centuries see. It is not because there is a shortage of food for the human populations of the world — there is plenty of food. The question is power, and in the decision of that question, food, human lives, material, and everything else that the participants can dispose of, will come into play as weapons, and not as stakes. Nor will it ever be decided, in the sense that a lawsuit can be decided. Readers living in 2050 will smile when told that there was once a rather widespread belief in the Western Civilization that the First World War was the “last war.” The Second World War was also so regarded, all during the preparations for the Third. It was a case of wish-thinking pacifist idealism being stronger than facts. 

Darwinism was the animalization of Cultureman by means of biology; the human soul was interpreted as a mere superior technique of fighting with other animals. We come now to Marxism, the animalization of man through economics, the human soul as a mere reflex of food, clothing and shelter. 

From Imperium