Annals Of Darwinism And The Myth Of God’s Creation–Which Is The Bigger Scam?

There are pictures circulating on the Internet of impossibly bedecked creatures – far too intricately designed either to secure a safe niche in a competitive natural environment or to attract a mate.  Insects that mimic flowers and flowers that have feelers, faux mandibles, and lures ; fish with adornments, attachments, trailers, and incidentals.   Surely something far simpler, more elegant, and less showy would do the trick.  On the contrary, nature seems to have its own particular designs.
Who, for example, does not wonder at the periodicity of the seventeen-year locust, an insect which lives below ground for years, comes up after seventeen, mates, dies, and leaves its offspring to burrow back down into the earth from which it emerged to hibernate for another seventeen? And why seventeen and not sixteen, or twelve?

Darwin teaches that such incredibly profuse, elaborate, and seemingly silly and unnecessary mutations are in fact part of Nature’s ineluctable design.  No ‘one’ decided to make insects, fish, or fowl so outrageously festooned.  They evolved through an incremental process of evolution, survival of the fittest, adaptation, and survival.  The seventeen-year locusts have an evolutionary advantage because no other species of locust has chosen that particular periodicity.  It, apparently, is worth the wait.  No finery, no frills, no exaggeratedly showy dress and behavior is irrelevant or unnecessary.



Yet there are not a few people who at least once in their lives have questioned Darwin.  Surely such operatic excess cannot possibly be necessary, nor such a profusion of peculiar and particular niches essential for survival.  Surely the Madagascar Archangel Moth need not be so obvious.

Yet Darwin insisted that such fanciful and dreamy notions of ‘purpose’ or ‘divine intervention’ are no more than signs of human intellectual flaccidity – a lack of the intellectual rigor, objectivity, and an inability to think beyond the here and now; to conceive of nature as a complex system of organisms interrelated with no purpose whatsoever, with no pre-ordained plan, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.  He would have been thunderstruck at the naivete of New Age apostles of universality, commonality, and belonging.  Get over it, he would say to the idealists who search for meaning.
Hard as it is to stomach, Darwinism postulates that there is no value in nature nor in the universe.  All is subject to randomness and to the forces of natural selection, an indifferent, valueless process the only rationale for which is the survival of the fittest.

Neo-Darwinian conservative apologists applaud Darwin for his perspicacity; but airy-fairy progressives, otherworldly idealists who have assumed, on the basis of no empirical evidence whatsoever, that the world is not random,; that human activity can actually influence positive, conclusive change for the better; that good and goodness are possible; and that we are not all billiard balls clacking against each other in a universally timeless game of chance, object.

Everyone else says, ‘Hmmm….” when seeing extraordinary caterpillars, tricked-out moths, and fish of impossible colors and striation.  Randomness cannot possibly account for such diversity.



The idealism gets worse. When faced with the peculiarities of the human race – not its race, ethnicity, or gender, but infinite physical, mental, and psychological expressions – idealists will be thankful to Darwin and God for enabling such diversity.  Others will wonder why such freaks of nature – dwarfs;  hairy, full-breasted, passive-aggressive creatures of indeterminate sex; eight-foot tall robotic geniuses; tiny gnomes; and reptilian Amazons – were born, and what earthly purpose they serve.

Either Darwin or God had it wrong.  Given God’s infinite power, why would he have ever permitted such anomalies?  And if Darwinism is indeed the anti-God, secular, amoral, objective force  that it has been touted to be, why should there ever be side shows? Why should we have to suffer through generations of hopelessly deformed personalities to see some improvement in the human race?

The ordinary gym is a good laboratory for both points of view.  There, on display, are all the physically odd, eccentric, side show remnants.  The irony of it all is that they primp in front of the mirror as though they were Errol Flynn, Brad Pitt, or Marlon Brando.  Why on earth did God choose to let such aberrant, deformed, and irrevocably ignorant beings exist?  Why has Darwinism not provided for some inhibitory mechanism that would prevent such unnecessary excess?

The Barking Scarecrow is anorexic, loud, and needy. She barks instructions about proper positioning on the adductor machine, the best posture for working abs, lats, and tris; the shortest route between Falls Church and Montgomery Village; how to test for doneness on a roast chicken; and the number of miles she has logged for the week.

It is hard to feel sorry for this barking, insufferable woman especially when she is sitting on the bicep machine, positioned at the top of the stairs, disconsolately waiting for someone to talk to.  She struts like a model on a catwalk, but with an exaggerated jock-walk without an ounce of feminine allure, sexuality, or grace.

The Creep is scary.  At least 6’5” and scowling he reenacts the torture chambers of the Inquisition between the stationery bikes and the rank of television sets.  He straps himself in rubber tubing, tying his legs together, immobilizing his arms, and restricting movement of his chest and torso.  He always wears a black hoodie, pulled over his eyes, black sweatpants, and black athletic shoes. He grunts like an ox and moans like a cow.  He prances back and forth, then sits on the treadmill, staring out over the elliptical machines, rowers, and pulleys. He, like the others does not seem overtly psychotic; but his behavior is marginal. He never talks, is solitary and weirdly predictable, to be given wide berth.

Perhaps in any randomly selected group of 100 people there are  many who fall into the dubious category. It is hard to tell, because once one eliminates the obviously deranged – the man who wears a multi-colored beanie with a plastic propeller shouting about the Second Coming; the woman who covers her head in tinfoil to deflect alien radio waves; the woman who dresses all in black, wears mascara, and does martial goose steps on Connecticut Avenue, careful to miss every other line in the sidewalk – everyone is a bit ‘off’.  Somehow in the anonymous and yet personal, half-naked and buck-naked environment of the gym, those on the mental margins may be less visible and harder to ignore, but they are  just as freaky, weird, and undesirable as ever.



There are those who fit only on the margins, peculiar enough to be noticed but not so distorted in looks or behavior to cause alarm.  The Contortionist was one such character.  Ordinary in appearance, middle aged, middle class, only slightly out of proportion (a head too large for its frame, too stalky on a long neck, and unusually mobile), and well-within the spectrum.  His behavior was equally unremarkable – moderate, respectful, considerate and in no way offensive – and it was only when he began his elaborate warmups in front of the large floor-to-ceiling gym mirror did one take notice.  As he shook his limbs, twisted his head, and bent his torso, and pranced and danced to loosen his ankles and metacarpals, he looked like a skeleton in a danse macabre, all joints and bones rattling and shaking without ligaments and connective tissue.



There was nothing particularly frightening about him, and despite his awful dance he seemed harmless enough; but as he went through his routine, methodically stretching each joint in his body – first his fingers and thumbs, then elbows, wrists, neck, pelvis, femur, shins, ankles and toes – his body seemed to disappear and only his skeletal bones remained, loose and jangling, his joints forced into oblique and radically acute angles.
 
This was only a prelude, however because when he raised his legs, first the left then the right high up on the exercise bars, his body returned but only in a freak show form.  He became a contortionist – a fakir, a side-show freak with disjointed joints, India rubber tendons and ligaments all stretched to the breaking point – and before he was through his legs were high above his head, crossed, and bent backwards in a tortuously distorted deformation.  He looked like a giant spider in a web, a spider man, an elegant, balanced creature but an insanely contorted man.

He was hors-série, the square peg, the one-in-a-thousand bits pulled from the assembly line.  It wasn’t so much what he did, nor how he did it – circus contortionists have stretched their bodies to far greater limits – but why he did it.  What made this otherwise ordinary man climb the monkey bars and stress his joints to the most exaggerated obtuse and acute angles?



Where did he begin and where did he end? What was up and what was down?

One is between a rock and a hard place to sort this all out.  Neither option is good.  Either we live in a randomly-sorted universe where the survival of the fittest produces the most impossibly remote mutations, leaving the rest of us to put up with the idiots who survive and who never reproduce; or we live in a divinely-ordered universe, created by God Almighty with some unknown and strange purpose, one which allows for the most alienable, supernumerary offspring.  What’s a mother to do?

Enjoy the ride is the answer.  Whether it is a Barnum & Bailey side show, American politics, or simply life in the aisles of Walmart, Target, and Wegman’s, anyone who is not delighted with the way the world works needs to think twice.  Everyone from the hairy lady of Borneo to the two-headed fetus from Chad, or the political grand guignol, auto-da-fe of Washington is worth the price of admission.  Only the most missionary, purposeful, idealistic true believers in goodness are unmoved.  The rest of us are having a grand ol’ time.

Anti-Vaping–The Latest Example Of Puritanical Righteousness, Witch Hunts, And Moral Sanctimony

After more than sixty years after the Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of tobacco (1964), the anti-smoking lobby has something to cheer about.  Technical engineers have developed a new product designed to deliver nicotine without the carcinogenic effects of burning tobacco.  Not only does vaping safely provide nicotine and eliminate concerns about cancer, emphysema, or heart disease; it offers the same additional social benefits of smoking – panache, cool, adolescent rebellion, and social confidence.  In other words, the perfect solution.  Former smokers are happy because they can get nicotine without health worries.  The American Cancer Society is happy because removal of one of the major causes of the disease is finally near.  Tobacco companies, new vaping startups, marketers and retailers are happy because a new, highly lucrative market has opened and will take up the slack from decline tobacco sales.  Teenagers are delighted because they have found an attractive replacement for cigarettes and their social allure.

Yet, despite this good news, critics are howling.  Vaping is not only perpetuating nicotine addiction but encouraging it.   Nothing is said of the dramatic drop in tobacco-related deaths, no more lifetime addiction to tobacco, and for the first time in decades, the promise of clean lungs, good hearts and arteries.  We hear only of ‘the new scourge’, ‘America’s new health crisis’, ‘a generation at risk’.  Why?

America has always been a Puritanical country, and centuries of Enlightenment rationality, industrialization, and rapid technological change have done little to modulate the moralistic, hyper-religious sentiments of Cotton Mather and Salem.  While Americans prefer not to dwell on their history of witch trials and burning at the stake, they are quick to embrace Puritanism’s legacy -  moral righteousness, sanctimony, and intolerance. The current political correctness is no more than part of this inheritance.  Society must be as pure and without sin as that envisioned by the deacons of the Massachusetts Colony in the 18th century.  Men must be cured of their sexual irresponsibility, put in the stocks for transgression against the sexual code; hectored, badgered, and socially marginalized until they are pacified, repentant, and obedient to women. 

Women must be protected from themselves by creating safe havens, free from men and their unwanted attentions.  Children must be educated according to the neo-Puritan canon.  American society cannot be free from evil – racism, misogyny, homophobia, and nationalism – unless children are brought up under the protection and tutelage of the state.  In 21st century America the state has replaced the churches of Salem.  The state authors vigilance, investigates offenders, subjects them to trials based on a priori assumptions of guilt no different than the parsons of Massachusetts.  Such authoritarian supervision is necessary, progressive advocates claim, because only an institution as large and ubiquitous as the state, granted authority by elected representatives as righteous as parsons, and committed to doing something to propel the nation towards a better, Utopian world, can be trusted.

In this current angry, righteous, and morally purposeful world, there can be no room for tolerance or forgiveness, only punishment and repentance.  Men cannot be forgiven for their chromosomes, their innate, permanent, impossibly obsessive desire for women.  They can only be called out for their anti-liberal, prehistoric sexual aggressiveness, pilloried for it, dunned and excluded until they repent and reform.  No context can provide cover for uneducated, retrograde opinions on race and sexuality.  Any perceived slight, innuendo, reference, or notation about racial dysfunction, performance, irresponsibility, or anti-social street behavior must be taken as a profoundly racist comment and cannot be tolerated or excused.  No religious concern, Biblical injunction, or profound spiritual sentiment can exonerate anyone for questioning the fluid gender spectrum, transgenderism, or homosexual union.  No one can be excused for criticizing ‘people of color’ who, desperate for refuge and asylum, challenge America’s borders. Offenders’  shops must be closed, they must be dismissed from service and excluded from civil discourse.

Progressive Utopians do not stop at the present – extirpating negativism and social evils to create a better future – they have turned to the past.  Not until all traces of former heresy have been removed can America possibly move forward to a better world.  All traces of slavery must be expunged – statues of Southern Civil War heroes must be taken down. Federal buildings named for racist Senators and streets named for slaveowners must be re-oriented and renamed for Northern progressives, unmarked, unblemished heroes of right governance.  It makes no difference to neo-Puritans that most of those honored deserved the respect given.  Their legitimate renown can never be acknowledged when it occurs within the larger perspective of social righteousness and condemnation.  Social, religious, philosophical complexity means nothing in a neo-Puritanical era.  One is either God’s chosen or God’s condemned.

Because there are so many evils in America, critics claim – racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, environmental destruction, wealth accumulation and disparity – it is better to unite the progressive causes; and since capitalism is at the heart of all social distortion and dysfunction, why not assemble all reformists in one big tent, joined for a fight against a common enemy.  Every evil is related to every other.  It is racism and its lack of concern for human dignity and society as a whole which contributes to diffidence about climate issues.  Systemic misogyny feeds systemic racism and vice-versa because both show ignorance about human potential, equality, and essential goodness.  Homophobia and xenophobia are products of the same social ignorance; and capitalism with its market-driven amorality, fuels all.

In principle, all well and good.  Joined forces are better than individual ones; but the unexpected consequence of such energized, cooperative action is issue fatigue.  It is tiring enough to flog racism at every turn, and be as vigilant as the ministers of Salem at uncovering and punishing it; but fatiguing to say the least when one’s fight must be fought on many fronts.  Righteousness is not a simple or easy matter. 

Yet there is an anodyne for issue fatigue – replace old, familiar, and now shopworn issues with new ones; and vaping is in the cross-hairs of New Age Salem witch hunters.  No energy can be spared to outlaw vaping; for once it is removed from the American scene and once it joins tobacco in the neo-Salem graveyard, America will be on its way to a better world.

Anti-vaping is the perfect new issue for it plays perfectly to neo-Puritanical fervor.  It is not health concerns which drives the new Salem parsons, but addiction.  Reformist zealots care little about health and survival, but about the far more pernicious effects of dependency.  For like their Puritan forefathers, neo-Puritans see human dependency as a denial of God (Utopia).  Dependency on evil whether on male sexual imperatives, Biblical injunctions against homosexuality, territorialism, or nicotine, is an evil in and of itself.

Admittedly, the anti-vaping campaign has been put aside in light of resident evil.  Before Donald Trump, the Anti-Christ finally come to Earth, is removed and eliminated, no relatively minor campaign can be considered.  The Holy War against Trump, however, is an energizing force for Neo-Puritan reform.  While it may temporarily divert some attention from relatively more mundane issues, it will give the whole movement new power and perceived authority.

So, while conservatives may claim a more legitimate right to American political influence, citing the rationality, intellectual rigor, and reasonableness of Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and the thinkers of the Enlightenment; it is progressives who, for better or worse, represent America.  ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic’ goes the old saw – once indoctrinated in true belief, no abandonment is possible – and the same holds true for Puritans.  Americans are Puritanical to the core and no diversity, inclusivity, or heterogeneity can occlude that fact.  It is our heritage, our ethos, our purpose no matter what.

Gone With The Wind– Gentility, Heartless Vixens , And Rhett Butler, The Modern Man’s Hero

For years, and before I had seen the movie,  I thought that Rhett Butler’s “I don’t give a damn” referred to his rejection of Southern gentility, his confident foray outside the confines of Cavalier society into the realm of love, so indoctrinated was I with American individualism and anti-establishment courage.  Of course his words had nothing to do with either Southern manners or the independence of the American spirit, but the final, frustrated, and righteous door-slam of a gentleman who had had enough of female duplicity and supposition.  Of course.  The hype and the romantic Hollywood vision of the Old South had nothing to do with reality.  Women have always been succubae, manipulative, and ambitious, and Scarlett O’Hara was a failed hero of her sex.

Shakespeare was a master at portraying feminine ambition.  Tamora, Dionyza, and Volumnia among other women were indeed vixens who, in the name of honor, children, inheritance, or legacy had little to do with the men in their lives except to exploit them. Of course the society in which they lived necessitated such chicanery.  Women of the Renaissance could only work their wiles behind the scenes, catering to husbands and lovers only to gain traction and a hold on power – as was the case for Victorian Scandinavia. Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, or Miss Julie were harridans only because of the unfair, patriarchal strictures placed upon them.

In all three cases – the Renaissance, Victorian Scandinavia, and the antebellum South – society was ordered, controlled, and mannered.  From a male perspective it was ideal.  Women were in their place, God was right and in His heaven, and few aberrations to the social contract were even considered.  From a female perspective, the world was upside down.  Women were clearly the more intelligent sex – more insightful, more able, and more determined – and since there was no point in challenging the status quo per se, the avenues to prosperity, while devious, were ordained.

Neither Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, or Mitchell apologized for their characters’ aggressive pursuit of power, control, and dominance.  All understood that, given women’s equal intelligence, native will, and social ambition, they would best men at every turn.  Shakespeare’s Comedic and Romantic heroes were women – Rosalind, Portia, and their sisters ran rings around the men who courted them.  Who can forget the famous scene in The Merchant of Venice where Portia invites her suitors to guess the contents of the lead, silver, and gold boxes to gain her love? Each and every man is a parody of manhood – arrogantly and ignorantly confident, pompous, and comic. 

Shakespeare was harshly realistic in his portrayal of the Queen of the Amazons or the mother of Coriolanus – these women were as acquisitive and hungry as any man – but he was far more realistic in the character of his Comedic heroines.  There was nothing wrong with a little melodramatic trickery in pursuit of an ideal love or practical marriage.

The antebellum South remains – in large part thanks to its romantic interpretation on the Hollywood stage – a more perfect America.  If one can forget about slavery and its sequelae (and most white Americans have indeed done so) and its history of African tribal enterprise, European commerce, and American capitalist hunger, then the gentile, Cavalier, elegant life of the American pre-war South was indeed a period to be admired.  It had grace, elegance, manners, a code of honor and respect, and a way of life that embraced the best of Anglo-European high culture.  Slavery was only one part of the Old South – a significant one, but not the only one; and it would be wrong to dismiss the entire antebellum era because of slavery alone.

Yet this is what current progressivism demands – a total, unequivocal, unforgiving rejection of the South, its origins, traditions, and culture.

For the non-committal, fey, or incidental observer of politics and the random currents of history, such universal condemnation is senseless if not ignorant.  Each period of history simply exists without reason, purpose, or value.  The Old South is just as valid a period of history as the Enlightenment, Ancient Greece, or post-revolutionary Jacobinism.

What remains of value in all this transitory history is the unchangeable, ineluctable, permanent opportunistic nature of women.  Gone with the Wind is only the most obvious and  popular version of this, the most age-old characteristic of gender.  For generations, for millennia, women have been forced – obliged - to use cunning, duplicity, and chicanery to get what they consider rightfully theirs.

We live in a more open, tolerant, and inclusive society.  Gender equality has been well-established; and while there are still anomalies in the glass ceiling, women by and large have been granted a free ride to the top.  Why men have agreed to this is another question entirely.  Few regimes, elites, or societies have so willingly ceded power to the enemy as man have to women.  How has the feminist juggernaut so successfully neutered men, marginalized them to exist, barely, in the backwaters?

Some would argue, citing Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg among others, that women are simply more agile, more intelligent, and more opportunistic than men.  Others blame the aggressiveness of the post-modernist apologists who insist that democracy at its most fundamental cannot exist let alone flourish, without the participation of women.  Still others blame the lassitude of men – the assumption of superiority regardless of fact.

Modern feminists disingenuously insist on the equality of the sexes; but at the same time claim feminine moral, ethical, and intellectual superiority.  Men have lain down, touched the toes and kissed the hands of women in obeisance to this New Age doctrine.  They have willingly and surprisingly given up their claim to dominance, superiority, and social legitimacy.

Jack London was an apologist for maleness and the influences of Darwin and Nietzsche on his ideas and his writing.   Buck is a Nietzschean Superman whose indomitable will, rejection of good and evil and the morality of the Southland enable him to rule the North.  His slaughter of the Yeehats is not just retribution and revenge, but a brutal, willful savagery and the final portal to the wild.  Buck is also a perfect example of Darwinian evolution and the survival of the fittest.  Buck combines both evolutionary superiority and the unique character of animal will.

There is something even more compelling about the story of Buck – his aggressiveness, and male dominance.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful.  While many men may publicly disavow any such characteristics as primitive evolutionary throwbacks, privately they feel that they have capitulated their maleness, accommodated women far too much, and become neutered.  It is one thing to support women’s equality of opportunity and enterprise, another thing to feel emasculated by their insistent claims of emotional and intellectual superiority.

It seems as though the American male has capitulated – his given his masculinity over to female authority, to her judgment, and to her arbitration.

Not a few men resent and reject this feminization of American society. As paraphrased by Dana Antiochus, Bill Maher , American comedian and progressive apologist  believes that

“The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture” (Renegade Tribune)

But is Maher right? Have feminists turned the country into a nation of sissified wimps who value feeling over reason? On the one hand, feminism has changed men’s discourse, at least in public where they nod approvingly at news reports about glass ceilings, rape, abuse, and discrimination.  On the other, men in private share none of these sentiments. They know that biology and human nature have not changed since the Paleolithic.  Men raid, kill, and pillage.  Women cry a lot, like to share their feelings, and want strong men as partners.

So Rhett Butler was right in saying that he didn’t give a damn.  Not that he rejected a traditional, highly codified South ; but that he rejected the venal, self-absorbed, selfish, ambitious demands of women.  Rhett Butler is men’s hero.