A repeat of Wiker from the opposite angle rather than a detailed critique — and a socialist’s book that never mentions “capitalism”

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York in Critique of Intelligent Design often seem to be rewriting Wiker from the opposite angle rather than looking more deeply

Two decades ago, the “intelligent design” movement became widely publicised following the court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which to the anger of its advocates, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (based in Harrisburg) declared that:

1. intelligent design was a form of creationism
2. the school board policy [of Dover Area School District of York County] violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

(The fact that Judge John Edward Jones III, who decided the case, was appointed by Bush junior and not a Democratic president, undoubtedly further angered intelligent design’s supporters).

Soon after Kitzmiller — of which I would have no knowledge for a long time afterwards — Regnery Publishing published the late Tom Bethell’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science and nine months afterwards Jonathan Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. At that time, I had no idea of socialist criticisms of intelligent design, for the inability of Trotskyists to explain September 11, 2001 satisfactorily had substantially turned me away from them. I was wholly aware of critisms by my mother of intelligent design, but they entirely failed to refute the arguments of Wells and Wiker.

In more recent years, intelligent design has faded from view as Republican-dominated courts have substantially permitted private education curricula teaching young Earth creationism, whose unacceptability drove intelligent design in the first place. However, it has become clear to me today why the far right dislikes Darwinism. It dislikes Darwinism because of its well-established connections with Marxian socialism. These connections established themselves whilst Marx and Darwin remained alive, and European working classes were developing a rigid anti-religion politics. As John Kautsky noted in his Social Democracy and the Aristocracy (review here) this politics was always much less intolerant of private capitalism than of Christian influence, because Christianity was viewed as the key obstacle to workers’ political rights. This accords with Orthodox apologist Vladimir Moss, who in ‘Must An Orthodox Christian Be A Monarchist’ (written a few years after Critique of Intelligent Design) showed that Christianity was uniformly viewed as absolutely incompatible with any form of democracy [though not incompatible or much less so with the Herrenvolk democracies of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia] from its foundation until the Great Depression. Eusebius of Caesarea famously developed a political theology for absolute monarchy, arguing that:

“just as there is one God ruling the cosmos, there should be one Emperor ruling the earth”

Yet, a large part of Critique of Intelligent Design focuses upon merely reversing the arguments of familiar Intelligent Design advocates, most especially Benjamin Wiker. For anybody familiar with Wiker’s Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, the book’s narrative is remarkably familiar. The exact same historical arc is used to reach an opposite conclusion, a fact which severely weaken’s Foster’s intended argument. It prevents the possibility of creationism being linked to capitalism or, more than very weakly, to the reactionary politics Foster, Cark and York attack inadequately. Remarkably for an ecosocialist like Frost, the book does not once mention “capitalism” or any related word! Plainly, although there is substiantial discussion of how social issue are linked to the divide between materialism and creationism, the book makes essentially no attempt to show how, if socialism is linked to materialism, then capitalism must logically be linked to creationism. As I noted discussing John Kautsky, there exist problems with doing this. These problems increased greatly beyond the rise of Nazism — a dictatorial political system with an ideology not linked to any form of creationism, but in which the state took over the traditional role of the Church itself as well as its own such role. This severely reduces its effectiveness as a critique of the present political order and its massive ecological and social problems, because as Critique of Intelligent Design reads there is no link between creationism and capitalism. Amy Gilligan’s 2012 review in International Socialist Review notes in this context that:

“A more thorough explanation of the reasons why many in the ruling class today continue to hold and promote creationist ideas would have been welcome.”

Gilligan grossly understates that issue. Eusebius and his contemporary, Saint Gregory the Theologian, did demonstrate creationism as entirely incompatible with mass political power. Creationism’s design-based cosmology requires social stability and a defined moral order which even an immense majority has no right to challenge. Today, Muslim nations like the Gulf monarchies and Erdoǧan’s Türkiye forbid teaching evolution to children with the undoubted goal of defending existing social hierarchies — whether feudal or capitalist or tribal — as divinely designed. This has allowed them to develop a more advanced form of capitalism than possible under a materialist cosmology because divine design constitutes an unrivalled means of defending the right of the extremely rich to accumulate unlimited wealth. The fact that Muslim theologian Hârun Yahya is known to have used Christian intelligent design materials in his writing proves that creationism is not merely a Christian institution. Creationism indeed predates monotheism and was used by the monarchs of Egypt and Sumer to justify their rule.

Further problems with Critique of Intelligent Design relate to its omission of working-class perspectives, especially of how working class gains depend upon defying the creationism used by the ruling classes to justify thier power. In 2009’s ‘The God Debates and the Materialist Interpretation of History’, Alex Saxton makes one extremely relevant point:

“Some [socialists] perhaps fear that to concur in a critique of religion might alienate religiously oriented resistance movements that seem to be shaping up again in other parts of the world.”

What Foster, Clark and York needed to do but did not (or could not) was study historical failures of religiously oriented resistance movements and thus demonstrate materialism’s significance for the lower classes. Silvia Federici in ‘All the World Needs a Jolt: Social Movements and Political Crisis in Medieval Europe’ from her 1986 Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation discusses the many religious movements that flourished as protest during the High Middle Ages, especially during the Black Death. Federici also studies workers’ movements at the end of that period, noting that Marx called the fifteenth century

“[the ]golden age of the European proletariat”

without ever analysing why efforts to fight against what she sees as a ruling class counterrevolution failed as completely as they did. The complete absence of a materialist cosmology is at the very least a potential factor. Further examples of the failure of religiously-oriented resistance movements completely overlooked within Critique of Intelligent Design occur in Ward Churchill and Michael Bryan’s 1984 Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Although that book has a very limited focus and by its nature cannot critique religious resistance movements in, say, Palestine [e.g. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] it does suggest that religiously oriented nonviolent resistance was inadequate for such successes as Indian independence (see also ‘Revolt in the Colonies’ by Neil Faulkner), civil rights, and the social struggles of late-twentieth century Latin America. The Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century — in which originally radical sects became extremely conservative “Old Order” churches — provides further evidence that genuine social reform is barred without a materialist cosmology.

All these problems make Critique of Intelligent Design not nearly the detailed critique it could (should) have been. More than that, the book entirely fails to link creationism to the most advanced forms of capitalism in the United States, Türkiye and especially the Gulf monarchies today, although such links stand undeniable. As such, the book is deeply flawed and misdirected even if it appears revealing at first sight.