We live in a country where reality is being replaced by “alternative facts,” where we are besieged by an anti-vaccine campaign that replaces objective scientific truths with distortion and outright lies, and where to counter these lies, the prosecuting attorney in the Derek Chauvin trial told the jury to “Believe your eyes, you saw what you saw.”
It is tempting to blame Trump, Fox News, and their co-conspirators for the seemingly rapid increase in the acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories. However, this is actually the current stage in the ruling class’s strategy to disorient the response to economic and social destruction and to blunt the movement towards a new cooperative society. Their goal is to replace scientific materialism —the understanding that objective reality exists independently of human consciousness and that the world can be understood and changed — with idealism, in which objective reality exists only in the mind and where there is no possibility of understanding nature and its laws. In essence, to make the predominant philosophy, “believe what we tell you, not what you see.”
The ruling class’s strategy is illustrated by the work of the Discovery Institute (DI). Revolutionaries can learn useful lessons from this strategy and apply it to today’s debates. The DI’s objectives and strategy were laid out in the 1999 “Wedge Document”:
“The DI seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies… In order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a ‘wedge’ that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The ‘thin edge of the wedge’ is Darwinism.”
Darwinism is a “wedge issue” because it provides a scientific description of the world and the understanding that the world changes and can be changed. Darwinism demonstrates that systems undergo internal changes, that these changes are expressed when the external environment changes, and that this process leads to new relationships and systems. These are dangerous concepts for a ruling class that requires the primacy of idealism and the appearance that capitalism and the social relations that arise from it are natural and unchanging.
The DI’s tactical approach is to challenge the teaching of evolution in elementary and secondary schools. The initial step is to accuse Darwinian evolutionary theory of being amoral, anti-religious, and anti-God. Then, using church-based and reactionary organizations, agitating for the addition of the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) to school curricula. The basic tenets of ID are that humankind came about due to God’s “intelligent design” and that the world runs according to “God’s will”. Thus, pandemics, poverty, and natural disasters are preordained and must be endured. The brilliance of this tactic is that the DI could argue that they were not attempting to stop the teaching of scientific materialism (evolution), only asking for an opportunity to present idealism as an alternative theory using the slogan “teach the controversy.” In this manner, they grew their base and increased the effect of their message, thereby winning even if they lost at the school board or in the courts. Is the DI’s strategy working? According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 40 percent of Americans believed in Creationism.
The “teach the controversy” strategy put the pro-evolutionary forces on the defensive. It exposed the weaknesses of their strategy, which was to block the introduction of ID in Federal courts using the First Amendment and the “separation of church and state.” Their main tactics were to extoll people to support science because it is the right thing to do and to characterize the anti-evolution movement as an attack on science by religious reactionaries. This approach was successfully executed by numerous broad-based religious and secular organizations. However, the 2019 Gallup poll suggests that while the pro-evolution forces won in the courts, they lost on the streets.
This was predictable as the DI was allowed to frame the struggle and to pick the battlegrounds. There is a more effective strategy that revolutionaries can use to defeat the DI’s anti-Darwinism campaign and to promote scientific materialism. The approach is to expose the perception that evolution is described by “the survival of the fittest,” a class-based distortion of Darwinism, and to replace it with the fact that human evolution is based upon cooperation and peace.
“Survival of the fittest” originates from a 1798 essay by Thomas Malthus written during the consolidation of the Industrial Revolution in England. Malthus used the phrase “the struggle for existence” to justify the growing impoverishment of the working classes and the enrichment of the capitalist class by characterizing those who grow rich as the fittest. Later, Herbert Spencer replaced “struggle for existence” with “survival of the fittest,” using the phrase to define Social Darwinism and to justify capitalist and imperialist exploitation. In the words of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., “The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest …. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
However, the driving force behind Darwinian evolution is adaptation to changing environments and cooperation, not “survival of the fittest.” In his book Darwin, Competition and Cooperation, Ashley Montagu wrote, “To ‘struggle for life’ is to be cooperative, for life is of its nature social and all activities calculated to maintain it in the individual and in the species are cooperative.” Thus, while there is one set of material facts that describe evolution, there are two different conclusions drawn from the process reflecting competing world views.
One detaches Darwinism from its historical economic and political bases and presents economic exploitation, inequality, oppression, and war as a natural, evolutionary phenomenon. The other presents this same exploitation, inequality, oppression, and war as anti-evolutionary and demonstrates that the basic foundation of humankind is not competition but cooperation.
These competing world views present the pro-evolution forces with the possibility of reframing “teach the controversy” moving from defense to offense. Recognizing that “survival of the fittest” is evolution’s “Big Lie,” the discussion can then be reframed to be about the mis-teaching of Darwinian evolution with the demands that schools teach that Darwinian evolution demonstrates the cooperative, collective nature of humankind, that change is inevitable, and that we can develop a society based upon cooperation, peace, and love.
A key lesson from the DI’s attack on evolution is that the ruling class’s campaign against scientific materialism is multi-faceted and opportunistic. While evolution remains a front of struggle for the DI, they are currently developing a campaign using the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a “wedge issue.” The DI’s analysis and strategy are outlined in “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It”, which uses the CRT-associated concept of “equity” to frame the issue in the following manner:
“An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority.”
The DI is following the strategy and tactics perfected in the anti-Darwinism campaign and framing the issues to limit the response to “fight racism and white nationalism” in order to distract from their real objective, scientific materialism. The lessons of the pro-evolution struggle teach that it is not enough to respond within the DI’s frame. Just as we need to expose “survival of the fittest” within the pro-Darwin movement, it is up to us to identify and grasp the key link in the anti-CRT campaign and to use it to educate the American people about scientific materialism. RC
September/October 2021 Vol31.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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