Yesterday was Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (or would have been had we evolved for greater longevity). And tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Hence this token of affection.
Why do we love him? Partly because he taught a new and natural basis for human self-love and self-esteem, a great gift to a species prone to both self-disparagement ( we are all sinners) and raging narcissism ( we are images of God). Darwin’s contribution wasn’t the notion of evolution, which had been advocated by others. It was his theory of natural selection. This accounted for our species by a natural process tracing back not just to monkeys but, implicitly, to inanimate matter – cosmic dust, rocks, water etc. – though he graciously left it to future explorers to fill in the steps, including the origins of life. It meant humans didn’t have to be plunked down from beyond, into a dullish world. We are an intricately connected piece emerging from it, a realization of part of its potential.
This doesn’t so much demote humankind as it promotes the world. It doesn’t need to be infused with anything from beyond itself, nor shaped by a Designer. It’s true this deprived the Creator God of his role and dignity, but it conferred on the natural world a dignity at least equivalent to that loss. Not just on life or on conscious beings, but on the primal stuff out of which, as Darwin plausibly indicated, all the rest could unfold. Mere matter turned out to be not so mere and far more mysterious than previously thought. This is not irreligious. It is less atheism than it is pantheism, deism or, perhaps, paganism.
I’d say that, for those of us who live on the Canadian Shield or just summer there, the fact that we emerged from water, rocks and air comes as no great surprise. We always sensed that there was something ineffable in that combination.
We also love Darwin for the modesty of his claims. He was no social Darwinist. He never claimed progress was inevitable or those who survived and succeeded were inherently superior. Survival of the fittest wasn’t even his phrase; it was Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin had an impulse for social justice, but he didn’t argue for it biologically. Survival, not progress or merit, was his sole scientific criterion, and merely of the fitt er. That means the best available option was naturally selected. The available options themselves emerge from random mutations, so no one should get too juiced over the results.
It often amounts to simply the least worst option, nothing grander. Darwin does not suggest that we have achieved the best possible survival arrangement, or that humans are the pinnacle, the most advanced, the most complex etc. So he has less to justify and explain than the Intelligent Design people, who have some pretty iffy outcomes to defend, as chosen by the Intelligent One in charge. That modesty and honesty lead, you might say, to at least the possibility of a healthy narcissism on our part.
Then there is the concept of romantic love, along with the evolution thereof. Some decades back, it was common in university courses to teach that it was invented or discovered by minstrels in medieval Europe. Various literary texts were cited as proof. Others were said to acquire it from those sources. This seemed inherently idiotic to anyone who had an acquaintance with human beings anywhere, in any era. Or with the animal kingdom, for that matter.
I don’t think it’s nearly as current now. Scholars such as British anthropologist Jack Goody have debunked it, along with equally fatuous notions about democracy, capitalism or individualism being unique creations of “the West,” rather than broadly human tendencies. I don’t want to make immodest claims, but it seems to me that those were ideas not fit to survive and that their decline testifies to not the inevitability, but the possibility of progress.
Israel, apartheid, anti-Semites March 6, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Canada, Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Racism.Tags: anti-semitism, apartheid, bernie farber, Canada, canadian jewish congress, check-points, cupe, david ahenakew, gaza, hamas, israel apartheid, israel apartheid week, jason kenney, Michael Ignatieff, palestinian state, palestinine, rick salutin, roger hollander, sid ryan, toronto, west bank
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RICK SALUTIN
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
March 6, 2009 at 12:00 AM EST
What is the sound of one side condemning? It’s the media rendering of Israel Apartheid Week, now under way. B’nai Brith ran full-page newspaper ads asking universities to “prevent” it and the attendant “anti-Semitism on campus.” There were no ads from organizers, so we didn’t hear them being anti-Semitic in their own words – or denying the charge.
Here’s the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno: “That detestable, despicable annual campus hate-fest … Jew-bashing cloaked in self-righteousness … students who don’t recognize racism when they’re spewing it.”
I don’t know if she meant to be ironic, spewing hate at the spewers. But I’ve talked with friends, Jewish and non, about these claims. They’re disturbed, they don’t want to witness the rise of a new horror. Here’s my take.
Cabinet minister Jason Kenney calls Israel Apartheid Week “a systematic effort to delegitimize the democratic homeland of the Jewish people” by linking it to racism, a line virtually mouthed by Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff. That is way too cute. Any “settler state,” such as Canada, which took someone else’s land, can be seen as illegitimate. But it’s an abstract point. “Apartheid” became widely used in this context only when Israel began building what came to be called an apartheid wall, looming over Palestinians, sequestering more land, cutting them off from each other.
The usage grew as Israel expanded settlements, built Israeli-only roads and set up checkpoints so Palestinians would at best be left with “Bantustans,” such as those that apartheid South Africa offered blacks, rather than a true state of their own. A small but real Palestinian state would be accepted by almost everyone. The Arab League has offered peace in return for Israel just leaving the West Bank. Even Hamas has a (nuanced) position on living with Israel. You can look it up.
What of the “new anti-Semitism” that Jason Kenney says is “based on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland”? Well, who are these new anti-Semites? I never see names or quotations. Canada has always had anti-Semites, but they’ve felt no need to hide their hate behind a screen of anti-Israel criticism. Think of David Ahenakew. A cartoon banned from hallways at the University of Ottawa showed a helicopter marked Israel rocketing a kid in Gaza holding a teddy bear. It’s crude, but that’s cartooning. There’s no anti-Semitism in it. A front-page National Post cartoon showing CUPE Ontario’s Sid Ryan offering David Ahenakew a job was far more scurrilous. No one can say Sid Ryan embraces anti-Semites, though he criticizes Israel strongly. Opposition to Israel seems well delineated from anti-Semitism to me.
Most of the specifics come down to shouts at protests. As in: “Cries of ‘Die, Jew’ and ‘Get the hell off campus’ were heard.” The Canadian Jewish Congress’s Bernie Farber says he’s “never” seen it this bad “on the streets of Toronto and university campuses.” Well, I spend lots of time on streets in Toronto and it doesn’t look like Kristallnacht to me. But wait, that’s glib. It’s these images that scare my friends: They evoke Nazi Germany. I know that.
But Nazi Germany wasn’t about name-calling and group hate. Those will persist, perhaps always. The Holocaust occurred largely because anti-Semitism was historically rooted and respectable there: religiously, socially, intellectually, politically. Writers and politicians were proudly anti-Semitic. Here, anti-Semitism is unacceptable in all those ways. This whole debate proves it. We should be glad for that, and keep it in perspective.
Why does perspective matter? Because Israel is now a state among nations and must be held to account, not absolved for fear of igniting a new Holocaust. Israel Apartheid Week should be gauged on its critique of its subject, not anathematized due to shadows and terrors from another time.