The Reactionary Utopian
December 27, 2005
DARWINIAN GRAFFITI
by Joe Sobran
I can never sufficiently thank Al Gore for creating
the Internet. It has become an indispensable tool for my
work and even an important part of my life. I owe it new
friendships and the renewal of dear acquaintances, to
mention only two of its countless benefits.
The drawbacks are hardly worth complaining about.
But if I were the plaintive type, I might wish that
Mr. Gore had also invented a Coward Filter.
Now and then I get messages from people who don't
like what I write. Usually they are reasonably polite and
intelligent; sometimes they correct me in real errors and
leave me indebted.
But then there are the others. I got several of them
in a single day after I wrote about my friend Tom
Bethell's stimulating critique of Darwinism (THE
WANDERER, "Washington Watch," December 1, 2005). The
writers, defending Darwin after their fashion, assured me
that Tom and I are a pair of dunces (never mind that Tom
went to Oxford University), one of them using words like
"excrement" and, for good measure, trashing the Catholic
Church and the Bible into the bargain. An odd way to
vindicate the scientific spirit, if you ask me.
I don't want to blame Mr. Gore for such baffling
people, who have as much raw courage as it takes to send
insults on the Internet, and who seem to think others can
be intimidated by schoolyard taunts. But they make me
wonder. Do they suppose anyone is going to take these
tantrums for the Voice of Science? Is this the tone of
someone who cares about truth, either scientific or any
other sort? Don't they even have any self-respect? Nearly
anyone, I should think, would disdain to write a message
that would demonstrate nothing but his own mean spirit
and cowardice.
What makes it amusing is that it doesn't seem very
Darwinian. I doubt that Darwin himself, a proper
Victorian, would have tried to persuade others of his
theory by mailing them unsigned abusive letters; he had
enough tact to know that vulgar invective doesn't prove
much of scientific value.
The Internet has shown dramatically how many people
out there lack any sense of their own dignity. Most of us
don't want to look in the mirror and see a lower life
form; we like to feel we've evolved beyond that, if
you'll pardon the metaphor.
I've often felt the same disgusted curiosity when
seeing some crude graffiti in a public lavatory. What
kind of person chooses to express himself in this way? To
what purpose? It can't even hurt anyone else, and I've
never heard of anyone taking pride in it or even
admitting doing it. So why does it happen at all? It's
not as if vile graffiti had any survival value, even in
New York. If anything, they suggest that Darwinism can't
account for our irrational impulses, especially those
that seem more akin to self-destruction, in some obscure
way, than to self-preservation.
I have difficulty imagining Al Gore, or even Bill
Clinton, scrawling obscenities on a men's room wall. So
who does these things? Do they do it on impulse, or do
they plan it? If they act with premeditation, do they
take a felt-tipped pen with them so they can leave their
mark when they go to a fast-food joint?
I mean, =somebody= is doing these things, though
nobody ever admits to it. I don't say it's a sin, but why
is it even a temptation? It's not as if this were an
impulse most of us have to resist. Does smoking reefers
cause certain unstable individuals to do it? Is it some
aberrant gene?
This is not my sly way of implying that Darwinians
are especially prone to it. I frankly doubt that. Some of
my own friends are Darwinians, and they are generally
fine people otherwise. I'm just groping for a more or
less scientific explanation for a form of behavior so
base that we usually pretend not to notice it, until the
Internet forces us to acknowledge it as something
peculiar to our species. The nearest thing to it in the
animal kingdom, as far as I know, is when monkeys play
with their own doo-doo, another fact Darwinism can't
account for any better than Aristotelian teleology.
(Platonists tend to duck the whole issue.)
I'm afraid that Darwinian hate mail, then, must
remain a mystery. But I beseech those who are inclined to
it to send it to Tom, not me. He studied at Oxford,
whereas I'm not sufficiently evolved to deal with it.
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