Why is Social Darwinism seen in such negative terms in popular discourse? It is seen as endorsing violence, ruthless capitalism, violent militarism and imperialism, Nazi eugenics. In fact Darwinist theory was multivalent and multilayered, and a myriad of political derivatives were made from it, including liberal reformist, even socialist agendas. For Paul’s comments on this dark imaging, see his contribution to a symposium on Truth and Reconciliation for Social Darwinism in the online science journal This View of Life: The Evolution Institute, issue September 2015. Paul’s piece is entitled “Social Darwinism: Myth and Reality”.

… we are but dust, like grass before the rake, a flower and falling leaves. The wind has only to blow over it, and it is there no more. And so man passes away, his end is nigh [Psalm 149, set to music in Bach’s “Sing to the Lord a New Song”].

Are Americans reappraising themselves, or at least are intelligent Americans doing so?

The old stereotype was of America, the land of the free, the home of the brave etc.  Not that all writers and thinkers thought this by any means. But a new collection of writings shows a growing sense of disillusionment. Ben Marcus’s New American Stories, according to a reviewer in the Guardian Weekly (11.9.2015), “steadily crystallises a vision of the US as a locus of callous narcissism, exclusionary greed and militaristic aggression”.

Does the same apply to Australia?

“The problem of death is not a ‘problem’ at all, it is due simply to the clash between an idealistic egoistic philosophy and the disappearance of the individual, not in the least to the fact of death” [Pascal].

Thomas Browne wrote this in his work Religio Medici (1643):

“There is yet another conceit that hath made me sometimes shut my books, which tells me it is a vanity to waste our days in the blind pursuit of knowledge; it is but attending a little longer, and we shall enjoy that by instinct and infusion, which we endeavour at here by labour and inquisition. It is better to sit down in a modest ignorance, and rest contented with a natural blessing of our own reasons, than buy the uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation, which Death gives every fool gratis, and is an accessory of our glorification”[I, 9].

New Eugenics

“…no matter how precisely we measure the size of the universe, and the speed with which it expands, and how many dimensions we ascribe to it…we will go on banging our heads against the same two limits that the human mind is incapable of crossing. These limits are ‘nothing’ and ‘infinity’. [Cosmologists] will never stop fidgeting between the eternal paradox of the creation of something out of nothing and the idea of eternal duration: the kind of challenge to which our minds, formed as they have been for servicing a finite life, are found to be grossly and sorely unequal, and which all the experience of our senses contradict”

[Quote from the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman].

Quotes from Chinese classics:

“He who comes with the odour of enmity will invite the clash of weapons. He who comes with the fragrance of friendship will be loved like a brother”.

“Within the four seas all men are brethren”.