(Download) "Life in the Pack: Of Dogfights and Social Moralities" by The Humanist * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Life in the Pack: Of Dogfights and Social Moralities
- Author : The Humanist
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Reference,Books,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 48 KB
Description
THIS PAST SUMMER two sociologists from the University of California at San Diego wrote in the Washington Post that public schools could, in effect, compromise on the issue of teaching science versus intelligent design by holding that human morality is separate from evolution and that we are, in fact, separate from the animals in that regard. The concept that we are "above the creatures of the field" comes from the Old Testament, and in the nineteenth century it (pardon the pun) evolved into social Darwinism. This came at a time when racism and social bias were rife, and people spoke without irony of how the millennia-old cultures of India and China were "savage" and that they were obliged to take up the "white man's burden" Darwinism was seen as a justification of competition that came at a time when Western society was both vile and exploitative, and compensated for it with a stifling blend of rank hypocrisy, suffocating self-righteousness, and prudery masquerading as morality. The notion that humans were above the "law of the jungle" (while benefitting from it) was a comforting one to the movers and shakers of Victorian culture.