It’s the Mentality, Stupid!
Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, May 26, 2008.
Part I
Modern naturalism or Darwinism, the prevailing mentality in the United States, is undermining this great nation. From his notebooks we learn that Darwin was a rigorous materialist. This is what prompted Karl Marx to congratulate the author of The Origin of the Species. But what is Darwinism?
Darwinism maintains that organisms undergo chance mutations, some of which are inherited by their offspring. Offspring whose variations are favored by the environment will survive and accumulate in populations by natural selection. Chance mutation and natural selection constitute the creative force of evolution. Darwinism makes God obsolete.
Phillip Johnson, the father of Intelligent Design, is the most formidable critic of Darwinism. He is the author of Darwin on Trial (1993) and Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education (1995). Here I will not speak about Intelligent Design or the case against Darwinism. My topic is how Darwinism affects America’s mentality.
American intellectuals have been profoundly influenced by Darwinian naturalism—by its atheistic conception of man and the universe. Today’s high priest of atheism is English biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. For Dawkins, the universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”
Dawkins contends that anyone who holds a religious view of man is either a fool or a charlatan. That many scientists believe in a personal God does not disturb Dawkins: he dismisses them as intellectually dishonest. Dawkins rejects religion as irrational and conducive to war. That Hitler and Stalin were atheists and probably Darwinians does not moderate the ferocity of Dawkins’s atheism.
His atheism is not merely an idea. It has become a political movement to eradicate religion. Dawkins’s atheism is fundamentalist and its tendency is totalitarian.
Darwinians like Dawkins regard naturalism as equivalent to rationality because it excludes any supernatural source of natural events. This naturalism is liberating: it frees people from the illusions and moral laws of the Bible. Darwinian naturalism also provides a foundation for democracy: it relies on empirical knowledge available to everyone. Anyone wishing to base public policy on religious grounds is undemocratic.
America may be a democracy, but the voters get their information from what the media tells them, and the media regurgitates the evolutionary naturalism propagated by academia. The judges who make legal decisions get their education from the universities, where naturalism reigns in the unassailable name of science. But science is the exclusive domain of experts. Scientific naturalism may be democratic in theory but it is elitist in practice.
Ordinary people have no alternative but to accept what the experts tell them about man. The old creation story that man was created in the image of God has been replaced by a new creation story: man and all living creatures evolved by an unguided, purposeless material process of random genetic mutations and natural selection. The new creation story makes God a delusion.
Now, if Darwinian naturalism alone is objective, it follows that moral values are purely subjective. Darwinism thus bolsters the moral relativism that permeates the democratic world. Of course, Darwinian naturalism may not be true. Perhaps the prevailing intellectual culture is based on a delusion? Perhaps all the media of education are propagating an atheistic religion sanctified by science and democracy?
The idea that moral values are subjective did not originate with Dawkins or evolutionary naturalism. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote in the 17th century: “Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he … calls good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil . . .” This is the most lucid statement of moral relativism.
People in the West call democracy “good.” But according to relativism, there are no objective standards of what is good. Perhaps democracy is based on a delusion? Perhaps Darwinists, who say scientific naturalism conduces to democracy, are just being “politically correct,” hence, intellectually dishonest?
Since the education of Americans and their ruling elites is dominated by a godless and amoral naturalism, perhaps this is why they do not take Islam and the enormity of evil seriously? Perhaps this is why 9/11 did not awaken America—the political ascendancy of Barack Obama indicates! He promises to lower the defense budget, pull the troops out of Iraq, and negotiate with the Hitler of Iran. Can it be that the mentality spawned by evolutionary naturalism is making America less fit to survive?
Part II
Although America won World War I on the battlefield, German sociology defeated America in academia. Max Weber, Germany’s greatest sociologist, conquered American intellectuals via moral relativism, which denies any objective standards by which to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong, noble or base. By the 1950s, moral relativism permeated every level of education in the United States. More and more professors were waging a war against America’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Allan Bloom wrote about this 21 years ago in The Closing of the American Mind.
But nothing has stultified America’s mentality more than Darwinism or scientific naturalism. As Freud, a Darwinist, wrote before the Holocaust: “biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of being specifically created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.” Farewell the eternal verities of the Bible. But also the American Declaration of Independence, with its references to “God,” the “Creator,” the “Supreme Judge,” and “Providence.” A Dawkinsian fundamentalist might complain that the Declaration is unconstitutional!
What cosmic irony! American universities like Harvard and Yale, founded by clergymen, have virtually pronounced God dead! The “God is dead” mentality fostered by Darwinian naturalism is making America brain dead. America no longer has any vibrant intellectual tradition, none that can unite diverse people, none that adorns life with meaning and purpose, none that can withstand Islamic imperialism.
Although most Americans believe in God or the Judeo-Christian heritage, this does not yield public policies designed to preserve the nation’s identity and security. Hundreds of mosques in the U.S. preach jihad and hatred of America and do so with impunity. Countless immigrants do not integrate, as they did before World War II, and mindless politicians facilitate this denationalizing of America.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the Democratic Party are emulating Chamberlain, anxious to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. These useful idiots have been tainted by the relativism that led to Munich in 1938. Since the Republican Party has no Churchill, I see little hope for America unless Israel is revitalized.
Today, Israel is enslaved by an evil government that wants to eliminate the nation’s Jewish identity by withdrawing from its heartland. The prophets would not call this government leftist; they would call it evil, and we should use the language of the prophets, not the language of journalists and intellectuals.
Israel’s spirit is encased in a hard shell. The shell is an encrusted system of government that stifles the Chosen People, who were given the mission to enlighten mankind via the Seven Noahide Laws of Universal Morality—the true catholicism. We have to crack the shell; we have to get rid of this stultifying system of government. This is what I have been writing and speaking about all these years. It’s not enough to engage in criticism. The Torah tells us we must first eliminate idolatry—not just a policy like “land for peace”—but a system of government that keeps God out of public life.
We need to get rid of a pseudo-democracy that empowers elites linked to foreign paymasters. We need a constitutional democracy that empowers the Jewish people, upholds the rule of law, and does not yield our God-given patrimony. This, in a word, is the program of my book The Myth of Israeli Democracy: Toward a Truly Jewish Israel.
Only if we construct a Jewish democracy can we save ourselves. By so doing we will bring America back to its Declaration of Independence, which was inspired by Jewish ideas. This Declaration contains the political philosophy of the American Constitution. The Constitution is but the means of securing a just government, the rule of law, and the religious values of the Declaration shared by all Americans.
Therefore, since Jews were instrumental in the founding of the United States, a Christian nation, I call upon Jews and Christian Zionists to save America by liberating the Jewish spirit of Israel from the bondage of an evil government.
