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The hallmark of modernity is metaphysical materialism: the notion, as atheist Daniel Dennett put it, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” The consequences of proclaiming that immaterial reality––mind, soul, God––doesn’t exist has been the rise of antihumanism, the stripping from people of their transcendent worth, and the reduction of them to a “sort of stuff” in the world, to be studied, understood, reshaped, and ultimately controlled like any other bit of matter.
Our world increasingly over the last two centuries has seen not just man’s eternal inhumanity to man, the result of our destructive, immutable passions and impulses that have made history, as Edward Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Now there’s antihumanism, a much more subtle danger, always cloaked in claims of progress and improvement in human affairs that are brought on by science, a pretension that has made it much more destructive.
Robert Zubrin writes in Merchants of Despair that “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism,” is Thomas Malthus and his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus claimed that any population always grows geometrically larger than its food supply, a hypothesis which ignored the creative ingenuity of people. Worse were the consequences of his theories when applied to the real world.
For example, falsely believing that Ireland was overpopulated, the British government allowed this food-exporting island to spiral downward into famine partly because, as Malthus himself said, many agreed that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Over a million Irish died of starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition.
Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect in India contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”
The same antihuman sentiments and amoral logic characterized the work of neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted hundreds of millions dead from mass starvation by the 1970s, and the disappearance of England by the year 2000. And like Malthus, Ehrlich proposed illiberal and inhumane interventions like involuntary sterilization, which China later imposed on millions of its people with its “one-child” policy. In 1977, Ehrlich co-authored a book, Chelsea Follet writes, that proposed “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child,” and discussed “adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods.”
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection put the problem of overpopulation into a context even more ripe with antihuman barbarism and suffering. The malign effects of overpopulation were now the consequences of natural selection exterminating the “unfit” and clearing space for the better fit to survive and flourish. And this grim process, as Social Darwinism claimed, included human beings not just in their physical being, but also in their inferior cultures and racial characteristics.
Thus the inhuman, brutal logic of eugenics and “scientific racism.” As Darwin said in The Descent of Man, “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,” because the superior intelligence of the “civilized” Northern European races, whose “intellectual faculties have been mainly and gradually perfected through natural selection.”
Also like Malthus, Darwin had no patience with sentimental Judeo-Christian ethics and scientific knowledge that sought to alleviate suffering and improve human life with medical advances like vaccinations, or social welfare institutions like asylums for the sick, insane, or poor. Because of this effort “to check the process of elimination,” Darwin groused in The Descent of Man, “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.”
We know the monstrous evil that ultimately followed from these antihumanist ideas, which accepted and promoted sacrificing unalienable human rights and humanity itself of the “inferior” ethnicities in order to achieve a “higher” type of human being. “Race hygiene” policies like eugenics which sheltered the “superior race” from “race suicide,” became the “settled science” of cognitive elites during the turn of the 20th century. Compassion, humanitarianism, and the Golden Rule were dismissed as irrational superstitions.
For example, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who coined the word “eugenics,” decried the humanist and religious sentimentalism that endangered this progress toward “racial hygiene.” To avoid “race suicide,” the inferior “unfit” must be kept from procreating, for “if these continued,” Galton warned, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”
So too Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the phrase “race suicide.” He wrote about his disdain for “the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like” as the product of “well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists.”
The ovens of Auschwitz––specifically engineered to quickly reduce murdered human beings to ashes––remain the gruesome outcome of this respectable antihumanism.
Finally, environmentalism––born along with eugenics and “scientific racism”–– is todays’ stealth antihumanism par excellence. From its beginning in the early 20th century, “saving the planet” has frequently accepted sacrificing human well-being and freedom to protect nature. One manifestation of this sensibility is the decrying of “anthropocentrism,” the smear-term for the belief that benefiting human beings should always take precedence in our environmental policies. We protect nature, husband our resources, avoid needless waste, and clean up pollution because doing so improves human life today and for the future.
But many “green” evangelists scorn such ideas as “speciesism,” an irrational bigotry aimed at other forms of life. As the founder of the radical Earth First! movement put it, “man is no more important than any other species.” So too Bill Devall and George Sessions, promoters of “deep ecology.” This movement calls for “ecocentrism, which means rejecting the position that some life forms (such as humans) have greater inherent worth than other life forms.” Such beliefs are the gateway ideology for murder and genocide, as demonstrated by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who in the mid-Nineties killed three people and maimed 23 with package bombs; and the eco-friendly Third Reich, the first nation to pass laws protecting nature.
Today, “green energy” policies and the war on fossil fuels if continued will not just economically damage Western nations by creating expensive and unreliable energy, but also further immiserate developing nations by denying them the cheap energy necessary for economic improvement.
But the damage of these policies are much worse for the developing world that does not have access to cheap electricity. For example, almost a billion people lack access to electricity, and three billion do not have clean fuels for cooking––only 14% of people in sub-Saharan Africa do. As the Wall Street Journal reported, moreover, “a majority of sub-Saharan African countries have per capita electricity consumption of only a few hundred kilowatt-hours per year—the dividing line between developing and developed countries in the U.N.’s Human Development index is 4,000 kilowatt-hours per person per year. More than 600 million Africans—roughly half the continent’s population—lack electricity.”
Given large emitters of CO2 like China and India have no intention of following the West in its anti-carbon cult, nothing the U.S., the British Commonwealth, and the E.U. do will stop temperatures from warming to the apocalyptic level the warmists have been predicting. This makes our antihumanist prescriptions not just economically disastrous, but morally idiotic.
Antihumanist cults that are willing to sacrifice human lives, rights, and freedom in order to achieve some utopian brave new world always devolve into despotism whether “soft” or hard. As Robert Zubrin writes of global warming zealots, “Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking will be punished. Many will be sacrificed. All will be controlled.”
And in the end, our way of life and political freedom and equality will be degraded, and the global despots who want to replace and haven’t committed energy suicide us will inherit the world.
Man made climate change? The inevitable conclusion is Agenda 2030 which openly calls for depopulation and they don’t want to depopulate Africa and Asia, the Africans don’t have electricity despite over 100 years of availability they simply take the development grants and…
Mr. Thorton, I hope you don’t mind, I copied the text of this article and entered it into ChatGPT (I think version 3) Here’s the response:
The passage discusses the rise of antihumanism, which is based on the metaphysical materialism that there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter. The consequences of this belief are the stripping away of the transcendent worth of people and the reduction of them to a “sort of stuff” to be studied, understood, reshaped, and controlled. The passage focuses on the work of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, and Charles Darwin, whose theories resulted in the policy of neglect that contributed to the deaths of millions of people in Ireland and India due to famine. The passage also discusses the idea of natural selection exterminating the “unfit,” which led to the brutal logic of eugenics and “scientific racism.” These antihumanist ideas resulted in sacrificing unalienable human rights and humanity itself of the “inferior” ethnicities to achieve a “higher” type of human being. Ultimately, the passage highlights the monstrous evil that followed from these antihumanist ideas, which dismissed compassion, humanitarianism, and the Golden Rule as irrational superstitions.(END)
Interesting, it states “the monstrous evil that followed”…
All created by anointed intellectuals and their vision,, as Dr. Sowell might say.
Let’s not forget the ZPG (Zeto Population Growth) movement of the ’70s.
I think ZPG was forsaken for NPG, or negative population growth. It certainly is the fashion amongst the Davos crowd.
Things to consider: Antihumanism means to be anti-human but what essentially is a human being in reality? A human being is a biological, mortal, animal consisting of body and rational mind (keeping in mind that rationality and therefore morality are always an act of choice, volitional). Aristotle defined a human as the rational animal, the animal with the capacity to reason. An indivisible, biological, and mortal whole of body and mind. To be anti-human, in this NATURAL definition of man, is to be anti-individual, anti the survival and flourishing of the individual, and therefore, most of all, to be anti-reason and anti the facts of NATURAL (as opposed to supernatural) reality.
Supernatural, monotheistic, mysticism and its modern offshoots of pseudo-secular, crypto-religious, mysticism of Marxism, Social Darwinism, Nazism, and Ecocentrism, are all united in the philosophical fundamentals that lead to anti-humanism, anti-individualism, anti-reason, and therefore anti-reality….
For God’s sake, and ours, please stop asking us question as if you are pretending to be our “teacher” You aren’t and the world does not need your daily lectures telling us how horrible we are.
We aren’t your lost little sheep to be taken care of.
Continued…
Monotheistic mysticism is anti-human. Religion is not human-centric but God-centric. According to religion, man is born a depraved, defective, deplorable, evil sinner by virtue of Original Sin and this life on earth is a punishment for that sin. His duty is not to pursue his personal happiness but to seek salvation from this world by TRANSCENDENTLY sacrificing himself to God and neighbor. The TRANSCENDENCE required is the renunciation of this life and this world, of his reasoning mind, and personal happiness, for some alleged, supernatural, mystical world in an after-life.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism [modern secular mysticism] by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural [the unreal]; in epistemology, the reliance on faith [unreason]; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice [altruism].” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
Lenny must have had real effect on you, because you use the same tired phrase endlessly, as if repeating the lie will make it so.
Goebbles called that propaganda and the big lie. You are a second rate propagandist.
Obviously you think you are superior to all of us poor sinners and we should all simply shed our religious skin and follow you down the primrose path to your version of enlightenment, which is really your version of slavery for the rest of us.
Sovereign Nations’ Mere Simulacrity conference put together a stunning panel of people to lecture on these topics. I do not think there is anywhere else on the web such a beautifully rendered distillation of the threat we now face. Here is the web page:
https://sovereignnations.com/tag/mere-simulacrity/
Malthus started in back in the 1700 but Ehrlich just had to step in and continue it back in 1968
A quote from the article (itself a quote): The hallmark of modernity is metaphysical materialism: the notion, as atheist Daniel Dennett put it, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.”
When I consider the wholly material approach to creation, I often find myself asking some questions.
1) if you are just materiai stuff, you are just a collection and organization of such stuff. Is your particular organization in anyway more privileged than any other organization? How can there be a punishment for murder if I simply rearrange your organization slightly by the use of a knife or small caliber firearm?
2) If we are just arrangements of stuff, then all work towards any goal is ultimately for nought as complete entropy will result from the “heat death” of the universe and all information will be lost.
Robert Kennedy Jr belongs to a Eco-Freak group(Water Keepers Alliance) who lost two lawsuits against Poultry and Pork Farmers and he wants so called Climate Crinimals to be treated a War Crinimals and tried to grab a conservative Reporters Mic away she pulled it out of his attempts to grab it
Dr, Thornton,
My only objection to your article is that you assume that the climate change people are right that they can control our climate by eliminating CO2. The greenhouse “theory” is just that, a theory that has never been proven. New research shows that our climate is controlled by Solar Radiation and Atmospheric Pressure not by a cloud of greenhouse gases This research has data to back up the claims unlike the UN IPCC. The earth has no roof so there can be no greenhouse effect. This research is detailed on our website https://www.climate-veritas,com.
Exactly right. Climate, formerly known as “weather,” is caused by the big, bright, fiery ball in our sky. Duh.
The writer should boil down his long and twisted tale to a short sentence – atheism is anti-human. Somehow he can extrapolate that disbelief in God is responsible for man’s inhumanity to man. But where is the reality to that ? Is it always the atheist committing crimes and acting against the human race ? And what about the Islamist ? Aren’t they believers in a God ?
Surely the obvious truth is whether a person’s chosen beliefs are moral and rational. There are plenty of atheists whose philosophy is based on the sanctity of a human life, that a person’s life is the ultimate value and not some disposable stuff. What is clearly lacking in this article is ‘reason.’
Shame on you Mr. Thornton for taking Darwin’s statements out of context to falsely paint him as anti-human and pro-genocide! Here are the full passages: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part4.html#DarwinRaceQuotes
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/61d30beb-a65e-7583-bb264fabbd4cd879/
In the first passage, Darwin is saying that sympathy for the weak is a social instinct that is evolutionary disadvantageous but makes humans noble and discourages evil. He is NOT advocating eugenics or social Darwinism! In the second quote, Darwin is lamenting the extermination of non-white people by whites, because it will increase the gap between humans and apes; Darwin believed that BIPOC, specifically Australian aborigines and black Africans, were more closely related to simians (apes and monkeys) than Caucasians because man began in Africa. Darwin was. racist, he thought Europeans were superior to non-Europeans, but he was not an advocate of racial extermination or eugenic sterilization! Why doesn’t Thornton mention Darwin’s humanist slavery abolitionism?!