Liberals and Babies and Trust Cues
July 5, 2006
My interest in the Christian vs. Darwinian worldviews led me to this interesting review of a book by Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn.
Wade tells his readers other disturbing facts. Genetic analysis strongly suggests that all men are descended from a single male, and all women from a single female. On top of that, race is clearly genetic in origin, and not a “social construct” as the American Sociological Association insists.
With all this unwelcome news to print, Wade and his publisher did the sensible thing. They put a Darwinian devotional at the top of every chapter. They knew that even though their readers proudly read The New York Times Science Tuesday every week, they really don’t like science once it moves out of the tenured university laboratory into reality. They are all for science until it interferes with their politics. But they all believe in Darwin.
How can we demand peace and justice if every man living has the instinctive need to conduct a nice little border raid next week? How can we stamp out racism if race is imprinted in the genes? And how can we justify tossing pushy Jews like Larry Summers out of their Harvard presidencies if there really are physical, measurable brain differences between men and women?
These are inconvenient truths, and good reasons to put comforting “trust cues” into Before the Dawn to remind readers that you are really on their side.
After talking about “trust cues” and “the rational calculation to have a baby,” the review ends with this thought:
Nicholas Wade writes:
“Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem… It is religion.”
Now it’s a curious thing, is it not, that in our current secular society, in particular at the epicenter of secularity, Western Europe, we are having a real problem persuading people to have babies. Why would that be, do you think?
Perhaps in the low-trust society of secular Europe people just don’t get the trust cues they need before they will take the risk of having children.
Dave, for whom Christianity is the rational choice.
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