Quote mining in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion?
I don’t have time this morning to delve more deeply into it, but I will: an article by Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier in the latest Journal of the American Academy of Religion is guilty of what amounts to creationist quote mining. I doubt that was their intention, but in “He Blinded Me with Science,” the two authors (Cho does East Asian Studies, Squier does computer science, both at Georgetown University) quote from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man in order to demonstrate that his theory of evolution is “riddled with a Hobbesian and imperialist narrative”, and his “racist, classist, and colonial worldviews…gave rise to the more than rhetorical eugenics movement.”
The selection they quote? The same one used selectively and out of context by Ben Stein in Expelled:
Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
They did include the words in bold which Stein himself omitted, but they did not include the explanation Darwin then gave,
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
At other points, in their effort to maintain that religious studies is not inferior to science, they strain credulity in their characterization of scientific study as “storytelling” and having its own “religious tale.” While I’m sympathetic to critiques of naive objectivism through philosophy of science, Cho and Squier (who in another place characterize evolution approvingly as “random“) do an injustice to those in the humanities who are trying to understand and responsibly appropriate the sciences. They–in my novice opinion at least–come across as scholars who have dabbled in some epistemology and thus can dismiss concepts of “mass” and “gravity” as just another set of heuristics, no better and no worse than any concepts Mircea Eliade or Clifford Geertz came up with.
I hope to, later, explain how I think it’s possible to walk the line between a healthy skepticism about science as containing ultimate truths and the relativism which maintains any concept is generally as good as any other.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I’m not especially moved by the Darwinian explanation you quote. Are you? He seems to be saying that if we could ignore the helpless without eliminating or deteriorating our sympathy (which, as I read this, he is calling either “the noblest part of our nature” or something on which the noblest part of our nature depends) then it would be permissible (maybe ‘right’ or ‘rational’ would be better)) to do so. So we have this instrumental reason not to ignore the helpless, viz., that we cannot fail to do so without thereby deteriorating our sympathy. That’s an unfortunate explanation.
May 29th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Mike,
You’re right that I didn’t comment on Darwin’s explanation, merely cited its existence as a kind of hand-waving argument that Cho/Squier’s interpretation of Darwinism is incorrect. My haste this morning is a poor excuse.
I suppose there are two things going on here:
First, I think that blithley asserting that Darwin’s imperialist narrative gave rise to the eugenics movement is irresponsible without a little bit more than just that one (contextless quote). It seems like the authors could have at least, as you have done, looked at Darwin’s argument and found it failing. Merely arguing from the milieu his ideas arose in is fallacious, though it is situated in their larger claim that, just like religious studies, science has historical roots.
Second, in terms of whether the second paragraph blocks the move to eugenics–the way I’m reading this, the instrumental reason isn’t aimed at maintaining sympathy but (interpreting the metaphor of the doctor) at acting for the good of individuals. I could be wrong, but it sounds like he’s saying two things: one, a discussion of where he thinks sympathy came from; two, an argument that neglecting the weak for the sake of “reason” is actually irrational because it is not like a physician causing pain temporarily for benefit.
But perhaps I’m wrong; I’ll want to look more closely at the rest of the passage.
Edit* - by the way, I’m not claiming that Darwin didn’t have a lot of classist ideas and some views which we would condemn today. Rather, I’m questioning the necessary link implied between Darwin and eugenics.