Yes, x, the evolution of the main idea seems to involve a certain amount of "hucksterism" in this day and age.
Speaking of T.H. Huxley, recently I found this gem, which corroborates your observation:
“The [Protestant] Reformation was the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bind the mind…. Darwinism is the New Reformation.”
Huxley penned these lines about the turn of the 20th century.
At the turn of the 19th century, Hegel – apparently in a fit of some kind of “religious” ecstasy – penned these lines in regard to the French Revolution of 1789:
“As long as the sun stands in heaven and the planets revolve around it, has it not happened that man stood on his head, that is on his thought, and built reality in conformity to it. Anaxagorus had been the first to say that Nous governs the world; but only now has man gained the insight that thought should govern spiritual reality. This was a splendid surprise; all thinking beings shared in celebrating the epoch. The age was ruled by a sublime emotion, the world trembled as the enthusiasm of the spirit pervaded it, as if only now the divine had been truly reconciled to the world.”
I don’t even want to get into problems of meaning here, WRT these two statements. (Though I might want to revisit this problem later on if there’s a reason to do that.)
All I want to know is two things. (1) Is there anybody out there in Freeperland who can detect one single FACT in either of these statements? It seems to me we are not dealing in the world of objective fact here, but in a more subjective world governed by personal taste, predilection, and preference. In short, the universe of rhetoric.
The other thing I want to know is: (2) Do people generally, these days, consider such “nit-picking” as to facts as raised in (1) unimportant or irrelevant to their actual lives? Is rhetoric finally annointed king of reality?
As far as I can tell, neither of the above reports deals with factual reality at all. And yet these two thinkers preeminently have managed to constitute a “style of thinking” that has moved humanity, arguably against its own best interests, for nigh-on two centuries by now. JMHO FWIW.
Please share your thoughts on this question, x…if you have the time and interest.
Happy 2003, x!!!
Science (or "science") has its prophets, visionaries and ecstatics, just as religion does. What's most important in Huxley may not be the details of Darwinism, but the longing for total revolution, liberation, salvation, and one true answer. The young Hegel was like that as well.
You might appreciate Lewis Feuer's book "Ideology and the Ideologists." New philosophical systems or scientific discoveries -- whether Newton or Darwin or Hegel or pragmatism -- quickly become the focus of hopes for radical transformation. A generation later these ideas have come to be considered more conservative, and the radicals have moved on to others.
For ideological purposes it's not so much the content of the scientific or philosophical ideas that matters as their familiarity or novelty. That doesn't mean that the content of ideas doesn't matter. A Darwinian radicalism or conservatism will look different from a Lockean radicalism or conservatism or an Augustinian radicalism or conservatism, but propagandists can use the raw material of ideas to support the status quo or to overthrow it, and not care much about the moral implications of the ideas they employ.
If you look back to the 1940s you will find many liberals and leftists championing "new," "scientific" and "progressive" ideas that were supposed to remake the world on a rational and scientific basis: logical positivism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, the philosophy of linguistic analysis, modern art and architecture, Skinnerian behaviorism, progressive education.
Some of these ideas don't seem particularly radical today. Someone who's still plugging away at the hot new ideas of two generations ago looks distinctly old fashioned. Nor did such ideas necessarily fit together well. It was the novelty and reductiveness of the ideas and the radical single-mindedness, overweening confidence, and enthusiasm of their adherents that made these concepts look like a progressive bloc. Conservatives, by contrast stood by older Christian or Christian humanist ideas.
Today, many conservative writers are unsure about where to place Darwinism. Is evolution radical or conservative? Is Darwinism an anti-religious materialism or does it allow for God (or does God allow for Darwinism)? Does evolutionary theory subvert or sustain current conditions or those conditions that are beneficial to morality and human flourishing? Is Darwinism just science or is it an ideology? Does it make us all animals? Does it acquaint us with the limits of what is possible? Or does it make a transformation of humanity possible? And will that transformation by good or bad?
Much depends on what one takes "evolution" or "Darwinism" to be and how one frames the question. But one can find conservative writers coming down on opposite sides of these controversies. If you're interested, you can probably find a lot of articles on the subject here. Extreme Darwinism may be a conservative "H-Bomb" that destroys radical claims and aspirations, but also destroys much else that is valuable or necessary for life along with them.
Curiously, we've been here before. A century ago, evolution was very much a topic of controversy and debate. Conservative and radical Darwinians sparred with religious or humanist anti-Darwinians. It's commonplace in retrospect to make the "social Darwinists" into racists and "reactionaries." But there were many leftists who made use of Darwinian ideas -- Shaw, Wells, Jack London, John Dewey, Lester Ward -- and some radicals of a century were not above using concepts and language that would today be called "racist."