Not a half hour after returning Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (Kenneth Miller's eloquent and well-reasoned response to the Intelligent Design movement's attacks on evolution) to the library, I was linked via Facebook to a collection of photos featuring the outraged responses (prepare for some (at best) eye-rollers) of tea-party conservatives to Obama's financial response to the recession. What struck me is a simple dichotomy of thought in the American Far-Right, but interesting enough that it bears a few words.
Wielded with glee by American Conservative movements seeking a resurgence in the teaching of Creationism in schools, Intelligent Design - in a manner feigning science - dismisses the notion that nature alone, unguided by some manner of, well, intelligent designer, can achieve the sort of complexity and grand functionality they see in the universe. (A more astute observer might see most designs as too complex, almost as if they had been evolved from forms of a different purpose, while scoffing at the notion that despite 99.9% of total species having gone extinct, life's design can be considered "functional," but I digress.)
At any rate, this line of reasoning struck me as oddly familiar. It took the angry, scribbled signs of the tea-party photos, decrying the intrusion of socialism into the White House, to communicate it: those who would support planned economics, the very enemies of these shouting, sign-holding mammals, show the same sort of incredulity when faced with the idea of a self-governing, "free" economy. Indeed, the trust Conservatives place in the free market theory is discarded whole-sale when applied to Biology. When one reads of Locke's Invisible Hand, guiding an economy not from the top-down, but rather from the unrestricted monetary decisions of the individual integrated across the entire population, one can't help but be reminded of Darwin's self-correcting genetic algorithm, unaided by any external force save for natural selection (with which the markets share more than a few similarities!). With respect to life as a system, intelligent design is a-okay, but with respect to the economy as a system it's positively Satanic!
So why all the faith in this sort of economic Darwinism, while Intelligent Design, with a level of intervention and Big Brother-ism that would redden the face of any McCarthyite, gets the thumbs-up as well? In all likelihood it's a simple manner of camps and clans supporting what's expected of them, heedless of the hypocrisy they court. Or perhaps at it's core is the American drive for individualism, fed by economic liberty and affronted by the idea that we're just another drop in a purposeless, directionless gene pool. I'm no more qualified to answer this question than any other, but it's an interesting question nonetheless.
So why all the faith in this sort of economic Darwinism, while Intelligent Design, with a level of intervention and Big Brother-ism that would redden the face of any McCarthyite, gets the thumbs-up as well? In all likelihood it's a simple manner of camps and clans supporting what's expected of them, heedless of the hypocrisy they court. Or perhaps at it's core is the American drive for individualism, fed by economic liberty and affronted by the idea that we're just another drop in a purposeless, directionless gene pool. I'm no more qualified to answer this question than any other, but it's an interesting question nonetheless.
