Skip to main content

What many right-wing social Darwinists get wrong about evolution

“Mother Nature is doing her best to destroy that area (Africa)—it’s slop! Just in the last few years, he’s sent every plague, war, famine, drought, anything she can do to mute Africa!” (David Vincent of Morbid Angel, published in Kerrang! #440, April 24, 1993, pp.48–49)


Here, if "Mother Nature" were replaced with the word "God", then one could hardly distinguish the statement from most evangelist preachers today. Many fans of metal and alternative life-styles really fancy themselves as rebels, as having rejected mainstream Christianity with their "edgy paganism" or "satanism", and so on. But what here is really different besides the name they bestow upon their "God"? They prefer the words used by ancient "European" pagan tribes when these primitive tribes still thought thunderstorms were punishments, and they worshiped nature, believing various aspects of nature are due to various gods.  


But here where these alternative spiritualists assert this absolute difference between themselves and Christianity, one has to notice that it is exactly the opposite: an identity. Vincent makes the exact same move Christians do in relation to their God. (Historically, it was the other way around as paganism and this nature religion came first in time before Christianity, which simply made a further step in Abstraction in the various conceptions paganism and nature religions had turned into dogmas.) Vincent conceives of "Mother Nature" as if it were a subject, and takes Darwinian "natural selection" as if Nature is a subject -- a God or "life force" with reason, purpose, telos and so on -- that is selecting who is worthy of life ("Survival of the fittest"). As if "nature" (an abstraction, sometimes describing real processes, sometimes not) is a subject with Will. Put simply: a crude anthropomorphism is taking place where features that belong to human consciousness are projected onto nature. What happens in nature is then retroactively projected backwards as if nature was a subject selecting for what happened due to random occurrence.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ghost Hunting - On the history of ideas about anti-communism

A rough and dirty translation from an article "Gespensterjagd -- Zur Ideengeschichte des Antikommunismus" from Gruppen Gegen Kapital Und Nation (Groups Against Capital and Nation). Original can be found here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/gespensterjagd-zur-ideengeschichte-des-antikommunismus/ “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."“ All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy hunt against this specter,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto — and that, contrary to other claims in that work, is a pretty true statement. Hatred and fear of radical change in civil society is as old as its revolutionary implementation itself. At the latest with the French Revolution, which did not operate in a religious disguise like the Dutch and English revolutions, and which was much more radical in its theoretical justification than the American one, the fear of the “Red Terror” arose (before “La Grande, by the way. “Terreur” really started in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The concept of cultural appropriation – a critique of racism on its own foundations

Original here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/das-konzept-der-kulturellen-aneignung-eine-kritik-des-rassismus-auf-seinen-eigenen-grundlagen/ In recent years, a new form of racism,  cultural appropriation,  has been criticized in some anti-racist circles . They always discover this where members of a group adopt cultural productions (e.g. certain cultural customs, hairstyles, items of clothing,...) that, according to advocates of the concept of cultural appropriation, come from other groups, namely those who have less power over the acquiring group due to racial discrimination. When criticizing cultural appropriation, respect for these cultures is demanded. This respect should then contribute to combating racial discrimination. There was criticism that a non-indigenous artist in Canada integrated elements of indigenous art into her artwork.  1  Even when “white”  2  people wear dreadlocks or throw colored powder at each other (a practice inspired by th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Reader writes to Freerk Huisken: "I am not a nationalist because I fear foreigners taking my job!"

  A reader writes: ".... in a recent lecture in.... you framed the fears of fellow citizens for their jobs amid increasing demand from foreigners for work as nationalist. Your 'arguments' were not at all convincing to me. I personally have nothing against foreigners; I just fear for my job. Therefore, I am not a nationalist. I would never vote for the AfD or any other right-wing extremist party. That's why I think it's good when you and others speak out against the AfD. However, I am writing to you so that you reconsider your 'arguments' and refrain from calling harmless fellow citizens nationalists in the future..." Before anything, I'd like to set a few things straight: First, I didn't – directly – oppose the AfD in the aforementioned lecture. More on that in a moment. And second, I didn't call anyone a nationalist. Rather, I tried to criticize the slogan that foreigners are taking "our" jobs, and to point out its flaws and its ...
Post a Comment
Read more