The Art of Correct Reading

Carol Iannone takes a break from fretting over America's declining academic standards, and complains that biology's standards are too high:

Ben Stein's Expelled is entertaining and informative. Among the bracing clarifications the film provides is that Darwinian evolution is not even necessary for the study of modern biology and medicine; that Darwin and religion are at odds, as Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has written; that the Nazis did indeed take Darwinian science as inspiration; and that science is even more fanciful about the origins of life than religion could ever be (one anti-Darwinian hypothesizes that organic life may have begun on the backs of crystals).

Iannone once spent some time debating NR's Anthony Dick on evolution. The paragraph above gives you some sense of how little she learned from it.

The claim that evolution (we'll ignore the cunning adjective "Darwinian") "is not even necessary for the study of modern biology and medicine" is remarkable not because it's such a brazen lie, but because Iannone is so careful to designate this imaginary biology-without-evolution as "modern." This is as exquisite a critical distinction as I've seen, and I'm sure it'll help to advance Iannone's reputation as a brave thinker of thoughts about things.

Hitler did indeed take certain useful elements of his era's "Darwinian science" as inspiration, when he wasn't being equally inspired by Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Hans Horbiger, Henry Ford, Karl May, Napoleon, occultism, Christianity, mythology, and anything else that appealed to his magpie mind. In Mein Kampf, he sets forth his method quite clearly:

A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing....

What's "generally worth knowing," from the standpoint of a power-hungry ideologue, is precisely that which serves the purpose of gaining and maintaining power. It's immaterial whether Jesus died on the cross or not, so long as you can score political points by blaming the Jews for it.

If he were alive today, Hitler might well embrace Intelligent Design; it's by no means incompatible with pseudoscientific racism, it's vague enough to leave room for Odin as well as YHWH, and it's prone to a type of wishful thinking and paranoia that could easily have resonated with his own (if we weren't intended by some supernatural intelligence to discriminate against the Jews, how come they were designed to look Jewish?).

Current scientific thinking on race wouldn't be any more suited to Hitler's purpose than it is to, say, Charles Murray's; as manufactured anti-elitist causes go, ID would probably have been at least as useful as Horbiger's Welteislehre was in its day. This idle speculation aside, it's clear enough that Hitler had little interest in any scientific theory (or historical account, or philosophy, or religious dogma, or art) that he couldn't use to prop up opinions he'd already formed.

Iannone's final point, about science being more "fanciful" than any religion, is both gratuitous and, ironically enough, irreligious. This is much more significant than any of her "attacks" on evolution, the basic facts of which hardly need defending.

Iannone would like you to think that she worships an omnipotent god. At the same time, she wants to treat certain (potentially divine) origins and mechanisms of life as too "fanciful" to have any chance of being correct. But unless she's a Biblical literalist of a type that's really pretty rare in her circles, she's free to view any and every fanciful thing as revelation, from hummingbird beaks to animated hypercubes to crystal-mediated abiogenesis. The Lord works in mysterious ways, or so I've heard.

Her crowd generally avoids this more humble and affirmative approach, though, lest they be reduced to cheering science from the sidelines for the insights it provides into the Great Chain of Being, instead of challenging or usurping whatever authority its relatively objective successes have earned.

In other words, what's being defended here is not God's omnipotence or wisdom, or some other spiritual doctrine, but the drab materialism of political domination, which requires the basso profundo of divine thundering to ground and dignify the mandrake shrieks of authoritarian dimwits like Iannone.

To assume that this is actually a clash between belief and unbelief, or reason and faith, is basically to concede the argument to the Right before it begins (which is, unfortunately, a tactic at which the Left has excelled for as long as I've been paying attention). It's not about religion or science; it's about the need to capture or marginalize opposing sources of authority. The typical left/atheist outrage is already factored into this game, and is in fact one of the main justifications for playing it.