Criticisms of Darwin's theory aside, you have to admit there is an intuitive logic to his reasoning. Paraphrased it goes something like this: Natural selection is the preservation of a functional advantage that enables a species to compete better in the wild.Cells, plants, animals, species, races and cultures come, some stay around and leave something, and the rest go.. There is nothing inherently evil or unfair about this, it just seems to be the way of nature. It's the same with ideas. Someone proposes an idea (say the Earth is the center of the universe) and it stays around until that idea dies out (no one is interested) or proven to be false (the Earth orbits around the sun).
Ideas should be exposed, examined, criticised, debated then if they are any good and stand up to the scrutiny, kept. Others should be forgotten or relegated to the circular filing cabinet.
This is a slightly flippant way to encapsulate Enlightenment philosophy, of which our culture is a direct descendant and beneficiary. Individuals spoke their minds under direct threat of violence or death for first raising the idea of, and then advocating a clear separation of Church and State. For 400+ years, this intellectual debate raged on and I think we can be all happy that the secularists (those for the separation of Church and State) won.
This is perhaps the best gift the West can give the world. The idea that man governs man, and not some ineffable space monkey who has a too personal interest in the minutiae of each and everyone of our lives.
The fact that we have evolved past certain ideas is a good thing. Off the top of my head here are some bad ideas we have grown out of: slavery, women are weak or deficient and not as capable as men, death penalty for homosexuals,, that Priest and Church should govern the affairs of State.
In this age where Tolerance has now become the all encompassing dogma, there is a strong tendency to tolerate that which should be intolerable.
A few stupendously moronic ideas people 'overlook' if they arise in certain protected victim minority groups:
– physical violence against a spouse or partner, usually women
– polygamy (except in Utah, US...they're already
– sexual discrimination
Intellectuals, luminaries and activists in the West put their reputation, livelihood and lives on the line to defeat these ideas and we can thank the space monkey they succeeded. Now we are facing calls to reinstate some of these ideas, not because those ideas have anything to offer per se, but because these ideas are in danger of dying out (still don't understand the logic behind that)
"Cultural minorities need special rights, then, because their culture may otherwise be threatened with extinction, and cultural extinction would likely undermine the self-respect and freedom of group members. Special rights, in short, put minorities on a footing of equality with the majority."Well boo-@#$%ing-hoo. Your culture is in danger of dying out, so you demand that your adopted host culture
--Susan Moller Okin, (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/okin.html)
accommodates some really bad ideas, which may or may not be contributing to your culture dying out, and on top of that, you demand that it be beyond discussion or criticism (because your space monkey says so). Unfortunately, thanks to the moral and cultural-relativism which infects much of the public discourse, these demands are being heard and in some cases, being accomodated.
The point is that the world is constantly turning, and that all cultures have the opportunity (read: necessity) to engage with the modern world, or be consigned to irrelevancy, along with their bad ideas.
