The Worst Pseudoscientific Ideas
The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
Forgotten in their original form but not gone, the worst pseudoscientific ideas emanating from the late nineteenth century are constantly being marketed under new brand names in the United States. Social Darwinism has never died: it manifested itself as a bulwark of eugenics until the Second World War; in the tedious midcentury “objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand; and, most recently, in the form of market economy worship that presents itself not as political opinion but as a summa of objective facts. All of the theories included in the general category of social Darwinism may be summed up in the immortal line uttered by the hero of Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943): “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is — ‘Hands off!’” Rand was an atheist, but Americans have managed to translate her social Darwinism into the language of faith: according to a recent poll, a majority mistakenly believe that “God helps those that help themselves” is a line from the Bible.
It is useful to recall that intellectualism was not always synonymous with liberalism, especially economic liberalism, in the American mind. The irreconcilable conflict between evolutionism and biblical literalism would probably have been sufficient to engender a permanent fundamentalist antagonism towards all intellectuals and scientists who disputed any part of the creation story in Genesis. But the fact that so many prominent intellectuals once used Darwinian evolution as an argument against all social reform provided yet another reason for populist fundamentalists to dismiss not only the theory of evolution but the rich intellectuals who seemed to be its most ardent proponents. [William Jennings] Bryan would no doubt have been astonished had anyone told him 1896, when he made his “Cross of Gold” speech, that by the end of the twentieth century, many Americans who shared his religious beliefs would ally themselves with the political party favoring the interests of the rich — and that the Social Gospel, enjoining Christians to help their fellow man, would be replaced by the conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves (and that the Bible tells us so).
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