THE only time we’ve written about our title’s twisted triumvirate of creationist enemies is here: Marx, Stalin, and Darwin, where we were primarily concerned with demolishing the “Darwinism = Communism” myth to which creationists are devoted. But we did mention the “Darwin, Marx, and Freud” trio in the body of that post:
In this article by Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute, Kirk Answers Brooks on the Status of Darwinism in Western Culture, Chapman mentions Darwin, Marx and Freud together, and says: “My own view, realized about eight years ago, is that Darwin is the last remaining leg of the dangerous three-legged ideology that the 19th century bequeathed the 20th century.”
Chapman was dutifully following the script laid down in the Wedge Strategy, which is the guiding doctrine of the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute‘s creationist public relations and lobbying operation, the Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids, a/k/a the cdesign proponentsists). It says:
Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.
Why Marx, Freud & Darwin? What do they have in common — other than being dead? When we first saw that group of names together we thought it was an IQ test question: Which of these three doesn’t belong? The same question could be asked about Capone, Manson, and Edison.
Although it’s insane, throwing Darwin’s name in with the other two makes a certain kind of sense as a tactical tool. The Discoveroids can be virtually certain that anyone who buys into their dogma of the Evil Three is incapable of rational thought, and is therefore likely to serve them faithfully as a useful idiot.
Given that the crazed clustering of Darwin-Marx-Freud is bedrock Discoveroid dogma, we’re surprised at how seldom it’s mentioned these days. Perhaps that silence is another indication of the Discoveroids’ overall intellectual failure. But it does come up from time to time in other creationist sources, so we always pay attention when we see it.
We found it in an article that appeared in WorldNetDaily a couple of weeks ago. We present to you, dear reader, some excerpts from Death of big ideas, written by “Vox Day,” which we assume is a pen name. Who would name a kid “Vox” which is such an obvious rhyme with “pox”? But maybe it’s his real name. No, it’s not — see Theodore Beale.
At the end of the article, Vox is described as “a Christian libertarian opinion columnist” who is a member of “SFWA, Mensa and IGDA.” The first of those we recognize as the Science Fiction Writers of America. Most of us know about Mensa, although few of its members are so tasteless as to publicly brag about membership. The last of those we had to look up — it’s the International Game Developers Association.
All in all it’s an intriguing resume — but writing for WorldNetDaily essentially overwhelms Vox’s other accomplishments. Okay, that’s enough about the author. Here are some excerpts from his article, with bold added by us:
The 20th century was greatly affected by the ideas of several influential men from the century previous. Charles Darwin‘s theory about biological origins had an impact that ranged from biology to philosophy, theology and even politics, while Sigmund Freud‘s ideas transformed the way men thought about their own minds. With the help of Friedrich Engles, Marx inflicted his particularly virulent form of socialism on the world.
There it is, right up front in the article’s first paragraph — the Discoveroids’ Triple Target. However, most of the article is an argument against the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes — which are currently dominant in Washington. Your Curmudgeon favors free enterprise, and thus we’re not Keynesian (Keynes advocated expanding government’s role in the economy), but that’s way off topic for this blog. We’ll have to skip around to find the anti-Darwin material in Vox’s article. Let’s read on:
Keynes inherited his amoral, materialistic outlook from the Darwinians, his notion of the integral role of “animal spirits” was derived from Freud, and one of his primary objectives in constructing the general theory was to save liberal democracy from what he saw as the imminent threat of Marxism.
Aha — Keynes was Darwin’s fault! And Freud’s fault too. That’s two of the Discoveroids’ Terrible Troika. Marx is mentioned a bit later. You’ll see:
It can be argued, and in fact it was repeatedly predicted by Austrian School economists [those are the free enterprise advocates], that Keynesianism was intrinsically flawed and therefore doomed to failure. But the Austrian case is a logical one, and there is little respect for logic in a modern world that has made a universal fetish of the scientific method …
What? Never mind. Here’s more:
Marx was the first of the great 19th century figures to fall. While the “scientific” part of “scientific socialism” was always a dubious assertion, the appearance of information technology and robotics put the final nail in the coffin of the conceptual foundation of socialism, the labor theory of value. Freud, too, was eventually unmasked as an unscientific charlatan; no one has ever managed to find a superego anywhere and patients undergoing psychological therapy have a significantly worse recovery rate than those who rely on their own resources.
Okay, Marx and Freud are in the dumpster. That’s two down, and one more to go. Moving along:
The Austrian School Keynesian skeptics, long ignored by academics and politicians alike, are having the last laugh, as one stimulus program after another fails to lift the global economy out of its immense slough of debt. Only Darwin still remains potentially viable thanks to the ex post facto revision of his theory to account for Mendel’s genetic science, but there are growing signs that the theory of evolution by natural selection will soon go the same way as scientific socialism and psychoanalysis and the theory of the tripartite mind.
There you are, dear reader. Darwin’s theory — and its evil influence — is fading. Vox says “there are growing signs” that this is so. We have also learned that the ultimate evil behind Obama’s economic program isn’t Keynes — he was just a transitional figure. The true enemy is Charles Darwin!
When Darwin is finally rejected, it’s going to be happy days again. That’s the word from WorldNetDaily — and you know where they got it.
See also: Ted Beale (“Vox Day”) Expelled from SFWA.
Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Freud and Marx remind me of the Wedge theocrats, bypassing all “materialistic” causes to instead credit mysterious historical and mental causes for everything. In claiming that “mind” does what matter does not do, as Stephen Meyer does, they sound especially close to Freud, yet their oppositional dialectics sound Marxian.
Darwin is definitely the odd man out in the Marx-Freud-Darwin hodgepodge, but he stands as much against the DI, and for the same reasons–Darwin is concerned with identifiable causes.
“Vox Day” as in vox dei, you see. Get it? It’s so, so clever, don’t you think?
He’s an inveterate denier of any evidence that might either make him think, or which may run counter to one of his pet notions that he’s discovered some really original thought and should be celebrated as the smartest member of Mensa in history.
Beale’s claims that Darwin was a Marxist are annoyingly common (he would say, “legendary”). I had a run in with the guy at my blog, explained in this post.
This fascination with trying to denigrate Darwin, Marx and Freud is an interesting study in psychopathology, I think. All three of them threaten their Christian faith, in my opinion because their faith is so shallow and their ignorance so vast.
Marx is denigrated as the founder of Stalinism, though of course, Marx was long dead by that time and had nothing to do with the evils of Stalinism. Marxist economics may not work, but Marx’s starting point threatens the gospel of “I’ve got mine, f— you” which people like Beale appear to favor. Marx observed, accurately and simply, that the Industrial Revolution threatened the mental and physical welfare of individuals, and that Smith’s invisible hand couldn’t do much to stop industrialization from crushing people, both figuratively and literally. Such an idea should be favored by Christians, one would think — and it gained traction with the Progressive Movement, which was rather overtly Christian-based in the western world.
Freud irritates fundamentalists because he suggested that there are physical and chemical causes to some of the things that fundamentalists like to claim to be able to cure by prayer or lightning — mental disease, for example.
Darwin’s sins are wholly invented. Fundamentalists invent a version of creation not found in scripture, which they then hold up as the acid test of belief (see Austin Peay and the Tennessee “no human evolution” law), and then they claim Darwin has run afoul of that. In their haste to make Darwin and science villainous, they fail to note that they end up rejecting more scripture than Darwin, solely on the issue of creation (there are no fewer than six different creation stories in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles, including two different versions in Genesis — if only one can be correct, that means several other chunks of the Bible are falsified . . . but don’t bother them with logical consistency).
Marx asked Darwin for permission to dedicate a book to Darwin. Marx and Engels thought that Darwin’s observation that there is a struggle for existence corresponded with, and perhaps confirmed, part of their economic hypotheses that there is constant class struggle. Darwin didn’t read Marx’s stuff, didn’t care for Marx’s politics (Darwin was a rich man, remember, living off of his inheritances), and Darwin refused consent for the dedication. For fundies, who eschew evidence of all sorts, this guilt by passing-in-the-night is enough to justify their prejudices.
Ed Darrell says:
I’ve never studied Freud, so I have no opinion about him. As for Marx, he was wrong about pretty much everything, and I have no interest in debating that. The only one of the “Terrible Troika” who gets defended around here is Darwin. As far as I know, he and his ideas had nothing to do with the other two. The alleged linkage invented by the Discoveroids is pure fantasy.
Clearly, the DI doesn’t give a whit about Marx or Freud. Darwin is their beef because Darwin doesn’t invoke magic.
Although we haven’t heard from Michael Egnor, aka Dr. Egnorance (the combination of arrogance and willful ignorance) on the duality of the brain, rest assured that a chemical explanation of the workings of the brain with what we call consciousness as an emergent property is near the top of the list, right below defeating Darwinism.
The DI needs magic, it’s the fuel of their theocracy. Darwin drains their tank and that pisses them off to no end.
All I can surmise is that with all of the DI’s defeats in the past 5 years old Chapman must be sucking his thumb to an obscene extent. I wonder what Freud would make of that?
In fairness to the Discoveroid’s fantasy, both Marx and Freud claimed some affinity with Darwin. Marx famously wrote to Engels that Darwin’s ideas contained the basis in natural history for their view — which is to say, Marx understood evolution by random variation and non-random selection in terms a dialectical relationship between organisms and environments. This is not Darwin, but it’s not obviously crazy.
(This view has been defended by Richard Lewin and Richard Lewontin, both biologists at Harvard and prominent Marxist theorists (see here).)
As for Freud, he famously included himself, along with Copernicus and Darwin, as one of the great debunkers of our grandiose self-conception.
This isn’t to say, obviously, that Darwin will fall along with Marx and Freud, but it is to say only that there’s historical basis for the claim that Marx and Freud admired Darwin and saw his work as anticipating their own.
Carl Sachs says:
Which means nothing. Every internet wacko with a “theory” about gravity or the Time Cube or Noah’s Ark claims to be a brilliant but misunderstood scientist, the same as Galileo and Einstein (but somehow they never identify with Darwin).
I donno what Freud accomplished — if anything — I’ll leave that to those who may know. But Marx basically produced nuttiness. Communism goes back to the bible, and probably before that. Nothing “scientific” about it. Either a theory measures up to the test of reality or it’s nothing.
Stephen Meyer claims to honor and follow Darwin’s methods
UD headline: Robert Marks: The “Charles Darwin” of Intelligent Design
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/robert-marks-the-charles-darwin-of-intelligent-design
Exactly why they would claim to follow in the footsteps of the man they revile as being behind nearly all of the evils of the 20th century, I can hardly fathom. Well, actually I can, because they know they’re lying about Darwin causing the Holocaust, and they wish to project a science mantle for themselves that does not belong to them.
For what it’s worth, Darwin is also considered one of the founders of modern psychology, where he also made significant contributions. Maybe that’s the link to Freud?
This Beale character though is a real piece of work. Perhaps we ought to refer to him as Vox Bray. We all know what sort of animal makes a bray sound, right?
Evolutionary thought is significant in Freud. Mostly it involves the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and one reason for that is that Darwin accepted the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But Freud held to inheritance of acquired characteristics long after biology had rejected it (into the 1940s, as I recall), and his “evolutionary psychology” gets bizarre.
From whence would you think the “death wish” comes? It makes no Darwinian sense, of course. Freud’s “argument” for it is essentially that life came from non-life, so life has a desire to return to its former non-living state.
Freud’s pretty much in the tradition of German idealism. He doesn’t really owe much to Darwin that I can see, more to Nietzsche and other German psychologists (I had a teacher at New School University who denied the Nietzsche-Freud link, because Freud said he wouldn’t read Nietzsche for the sake of his own originality–but it was impossible to escape Nietzsche, as his ideas permeated the meetings that Freud and other psychologists attended). He claims empirical science, but German idealism is seen in how he takes psychological conditions straight from Greek myth, and in how he generally denies organic causes for psychotic disorders.
Of course Marx and Freud would claim Darwin, since he was a big name in science (and Marx had long felt the problem of life’s form and function having no adequate scientific explanation). Taking their word for it does not seem to be the way to ascertain any actual dependence that they may have actually had on Darwin.
Perhaps off-topic, but perhaps related, Robert Knight has an op-ed at CNN.com about the U.S. being a Christian nation. In it, the author credits religious freedom and political liberty to Christianity.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/08/28/knight.beck.bunch/
America is a unique beacon of freedom precisely because of its founders’ Christian perspective, which has protected the right of conscience and thus freedom of religion for Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. Try to identify another nation on Earth that similarly advanced individual rights without being influenced by Christianity.
The unspoken premise is that without “Christian liberty” we would all be subject to the whims of Marx, Freud, and Darwin.
LC says:
All such claims conveniently forget that Europe was solidly Christian pretty much from the time of Constantine, and nothing like the US existed. Obviously there’s some significant new factor involved, and it’s not difficult to identify. It’s the Enlightenment.
AKA: the Discoveroid’s Unholy Trinity.
“America is a unique beacon of freedom precisely because of its founders’ Christian perspective”…those “founders” and their inheritors that retained slavery and till the 50s victimised blacks, and now are doing exactly the same to gays….the nation that interred the Japanese and German citizens…the nation of J E Hoover and McCarthy……yeah….a real beacon of freedumb that is.
Y know why….cos this conspiracist crap doesnt wash with a Euro audience…and that says something about the American public, your twisted media and compromised education systems.
This is what you reap when your First Ammendment becomes the Liars Charter.
“Try to identify another nation on Earth that similarly advanced individual rights without being influenced by Christianity.”
Ok…lets see….most of N Europe post 1918…..and in particular Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, France….The UK….. Germany…. bored yet? Get it into your heads my colonial cousins….we learned FROM you and secularised our governments during the 1800s. You showed US the way. … started in France then caught on all over N Europe.
YOU forgot the reasons and reversed the process……we didnt. Profession of faith in N Europe is political suicide…in the USA its the only way into power. Mr Jefferson and Mr Mason would NOT be amused.
You let the religious right put out the lights back in the 80s….. we’d like your America and our America back now please….that secular one we over here love and look up to.
Not the Crusader one we fear, distrust and laugh our asses off at.
Sandman, to be perfectly candid with you, no one cares what Euro folk think of the US. It doesn’t matter and it never did. As for your never-ending condescension, it’s getting tiresome. You’ve sung that song several times now, and with each repetition it’s getting worse. The problem is that you’ve chosen the wrong audience. This site and its readers are not representative of whatever it is that you find so distasteful. Well, I don’t really know that — maybe we are. Nobody cares. If you have nothing else to say, then your continued presence here should be a passive one.
Another strange connection with your post, Curmy, is one on WEIT yesterday. I thought I was crazy when I read in your post quotes about animal spirits and the Austrian School because both of those were noted in Coyne’s post and the many comments.
His post was in response to a Templeton article by Michael Shermer. Shermer is contending that there is an evolutionary basis for capitalism.
[better link: Michael, we hardly knew ye]
<a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/michael-we-hardly-knew-ye/" title="See Coyne's post here."
Here's a quote from Shermer's article–Coyne has a link to the Big Questions article :
I know this is beyond the scope of your blog but I thought you might find it interesting.
I know you won’t agree with Coyne here but it’s an odd connection in two blogs I follow regularly.
link fail.
try this: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/michael-we-hardly-knew-ye/
But blockquote worked!
Lynn Wilhelm, yes, it’s off-topic, but I’m a big advocate of free enterprise, and I’ve posted a few times about the benefits of an unplanned economy over a centrally-planned system. The principle moral component is that in a free market system the transactions are voluntary. The end results are both evident and obvious.
The evidence sometimes exists like two Petri dishes side by side with one factor different in each. Just contrast East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Hong Kong and the old Red China, etc. It couldn’t be more clear, and there really aren’t any good counter-examples of side-by-side economies. No Designer is required, and when there is one, the economy is worse. Bad behavior certainly exists, but in a free economy it gets rooted out — but sometimes not quickly enough.
It’s an error to extend Darwin’s theory into economics, but the two concepts can be comfortably accepted with no intellectual discomfort. It surprises me that those who have no problem with evolution are sometimes so hostile to the idea of an economy that prospers without central planning.
I think the problem is this:
Not quickly enough means people get hurt. Yes, it may be ideal to allow things to work naturally, but what about those who do get hurt in the process. Part of what we can do is make sure those without much empathy don’t harm others. Until everyone develops that empathy in business, I think we need protection from a central planner.
That’s all I feel I can say on the topic, I’m really not well versed in economics. I do not think there is any current meaningful connection between evolution and the political aspects of economics and there doesn’t have to be in the future.
Karl Popper had a Terrible Troika: Freud, Marx, and Adler (who isn’t widely remembered now but was popular in the early twentieth century). What these three had in common, according to Popper, was that they claimed to be scientific and they claimed to be able to explain everything. In reaction to this Popper developed the falsifiability criterion to demarcate science and non-science.
Curmudgeon:
As for Marx, he was wrong about pretty much everything, and I have no interest in debating that.
You know, I don’t want to debate Adam Smith, but I just have to tell you know that he was wrong about everything he ever said. Especially that time when he said that the beef tasted delicious that evening, but also when he observed that the sky was blue. And oh boy was he an idiot, and all he ever wrote was crap. But I don’t want to discuss that here, so please don’t reply to my assertions. By the way, have I told you what a fool he was already? Yes? But I think not often enough.
Gabriel:
What these three had in common, according to Popper, was that they claimed to be scientific and they claimed to be able to explain everything. In reaction to this Popper developed the falsifiability criterion to demarcate science and non-science.
Indeed. Now if those happily using Marx as a punching bag would only remember that he lived before stuff like that and the stable, prosperous, liberal democracies we have today were invented. If you are beyond a schoolyard level of intellectuality, you also do not fault St. Augustine for failing to take the theory of evolution into account when developing his theology. But well, bashing Marx seems so important to some egos…
Alex SL says:
I’ve been trying to convince myself that I should just let that go. It wasn’t really an attack on me, just a wee bit of mockery in what was primarily a defense of Marx But then I decided that I put up with too much of that from my government, the press, and from far too many others. There’s no reason for me to tolerate it here.
Find some other blog, Alex. There are many that will welcome your views.