Darwinian Liberalism

Libertarians need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human evolution supports classical liberalism.

In his review of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1860, Thomas Huxley declared, “every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of liberalism.” The Whitworth gun was a new kind of breech-loading cannon — a powerful weapon, then, for liberalism.

The reason why I post this is not evolution vs. creation debat but to point out something historical. The author of this article is just a continuation of "political thinkers" going back to the publication of Darwin's work who have used Darwin's work to justify the whole spectrum of political philosophies from Classical Liberalism to Marxism and Nazism.

People have misused information innumerable times over the years, including religious texts. Evolution loses some of its luster when it’s boiled down to “a change in allele frequency through time,” which is all it really comes down to.

The main significance of the article is that it indicates how desperate the Cato crowd is to try to justify natural rights without God.

The article is an obvious failure, just as every effort after David Hume laid down his challenge has been a failure. The claim that Darwinism brings something extra to the table beyond classical liberalism itself is also wrong.

Unfortunately for Cato, you can’t have natural rights in any meaningful sense without God. But they don’t want God because Christianity is so declasse in their inside the Beltway circles, and Christianity interferes with the pursuit of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

Even Murray Rothbard knew that this was an enormous problem, and I was in a meeting years ago at Harvard when Nozick rubbed Murray’s face in it. All Murray could say was that libertarians needed more philosophical firepower.

Secular libertarians can’t get past this problem, which is a critical weakness the left exploits. This is why Cato-style libertarians ultimately find themselves making utilitarian arguments.

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