Category Archives: Darwinism

Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase "survival of the fittest" in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology. Photo illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Getty Images and public domain

Victorian England had its fair share of great minds. Some, like Charles Darwin, changed the way we think about the world, while many more have faded into obscurityalong with their ideas. Teetering on the boundary is Herbert Spencer, born 200 years ago this week.

Spencers first writings on evolution came in 1851, eight years before the publication of Darwins On the Origin of Species. And it was Spencer, not Darwin, who gave us the phrase survival of the fittest, though Darwin would later use it in his writing. Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology, where he saw parallels between his conservative ideas about economics and what Darwin had written about the natural world: This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.

For a brief period, for a couple of decades at the end of the 19th century, he was world-famous, says Bernard Lightman, a historian of science at York University in Toronto.

Like his more famous contemporary, Spencer was enamored with the idea of evolution. But where Darwin focused on biology, Spencer imagined that evolutionary thinking could be applied much more broadly. In his mind, it governed entire societies. Today, when Spencer is remembered at all, it is usually for inspiring the ideology known as social Darwinism: roughly, the idea that the successful deserve their success while those who fail deserve their failure.

Modern scholars, and the public at large, understandably view this idea with disdain. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described social Darwinism as an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous, while the journalist Robert Wright said that social Darwinism now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. Today, few read Spencers dense and ponderous books, and his ideas are rarely taught. Gregory Claeys, a historian at the University of London, writes that of all the great Victorian thinkers, it is Spencer whose reputation has now indisputably fallen the farthest.

Yet some scholars and historians dispute this characterization of Spencers work. Yes, Spencer misunderstood Darwins theory in important ways, and his attempt to anchor an entire philosophy on it was ill-fated. But, they argue, Spencer doesnt deserve to be so closely linked to social Darwinism and the noxious ideas that grew out of it (and which occasionally surface today). He may have been misguided, but those who utter survival of the fittest to justify callous, mean-spirited or even racist ends may be doing the man who coined the phrase a disservice.

Born in Derby in central England, Spencer was largely self-taught. He worked as a railway engineer and a journalist before making a name for himself with his philosophical writings, which were published in Britains leading intellectual journals and later in a series of wildly ambitious books. Eventually, he supported himself solely through writing. He settled in London and became a regular at the citys exclusive gentlemens clubs, where he rubbed shoulders with great intellectuals of the day.

Beginning in 1860, Spencer focused his energy on his System of Synthetic Philosophy, which was to be a multi-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology, ethics and metaphysics. Nine of these volumes appeared between 1862 and 1893. Like Darwin, Spencer was struck by evolutions explanatory power, but he took the idea much further than his countryman.

Spencer goes on to ask: What are the implications of the theory of evolution for our understanding of human society, politics, religion, the human mind? Lightman says. Evolution is the glue that holds this synthetic philosophy together. Its a comprehensive worldview.

In Spencers view of evolution, nature is seen as a force for good, guiding the development of individuals and societies, with the power of competition allowing the strong to flourish while eliminating the weak. In his first book, 1851s Social Statics, he argues that suffering, although it harms the individual, benefits society at large; it is all part of natures plan, and leads to improvement over time. Spencer wrote:

The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence.

(Arguably, some echo of this sentiment was on display in the past few weeks, as protesters voiced their disapproval of mandatory lockdowns in the fight against COVID-19. In Nashville, at least one protester held up a sign saying Sacrifice the weak / Re-open Tennessee.)

Spencers view, though mostly anathema now, appealed to influential conservatives and laissez-faire capitalistsamong them, the industrialist Andrew Carnegiejust as it angered the socialists of the time. Spencer hated socialism because he thought socialism was all about protecting the weak, Lightman says. To him, that was intervening in the natural unfolding of the evolutionary process.

Spencer imagined a better, more moral society, and believed the best way to achieve that goal was to let the market loose, says David Weinstein, a political scientist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Weinstein says Spencer advocated the idea that those who survive the struggle are by definition not only the fittest but also morally the best. So its defining good as survival. Whatever survives is by definition good.

Later thinkers, especially in the early years of the 20th century, took a hatchet to Spencers logic. Critics accused him of committing what has come to be known as the naturalistic fallacyroughly, the mistake of trying to derive morality and ethics from nature. The term was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica, which was highly skeptical of Spencer. The attack by Moore really served to discredit Spencer among serious philosophers, Weinstein says (though Moore, too, has largely disappeared from history).

More recently, however, a few scholars have sought to salvage Spencers reputation. In 2014, a collection of essays titled Herbert Spencer: Legacies, edited by Mark Francis and Michael Taylor, explored Spencers far-reaching influence and the diversity of his ideas. For example, while Spencers ideas were used to justify imperialism and conquest, Francis notes that Spencer himself was committed to pacifism, including his vocal opposition to Britains participation in the Boer War. While Spencer felt that war might have been a necessary part of humanitys past, he also believed that a progressive society would be a peaceful one. Violence, in Spencers view, was on its way to becoming a relic of the past.

Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, says that Spencer is not as heartless as he is now remembered, pointing to Spencers emphasis on altruism, sympathy and pacifism. Pamela Lyon at the University of Adelaide goes even further, arguing that Spencer used the phrase survival of the fittest to mock it. Rather than seeing nature as cruel, he saw it as beneficent; nature was a progressive affair. (This view, she notes, became harder to maintain as Darwins more scientific approach to evolutionone driven by chance and not guided in any waytook hold.)

Meanwhile, Gowan Dawson of the University of Leicester has argued that both the ideological left and the right embraced Spencers ideas, especially that of social evolution. Weinstein also notes that Spencers writings have been adopted and appropriated by socialists as much as by libertarians, and asserts that his ideas have shaped modern liberalism. And a few scholars, including Dawson, argue that prominent contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson, who have written on the power of evolution to shape culture, may be more indebted to Spencer than they realize. In Legacies, sociologist Jonathan Turner writes that many of Spencers ideas have endured to the present day, though most people do not know that they came from Spencer, so ingrained is the avoidance of anything Spencerian.

Spencer, by the standards of the day, also held a progressive view of gender, arguing that women were as intellectually capable as men and advocating for full political and legal rights for women. Claeys even describes him as a feminist.

That label is open to debate. Ruth Barton, a historian at the University of Auckland, points to Spencers treatment of the women in his life, especially the novelist Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot. She really fell in love with Spencer, Barton says. They went to the theatre together, they went to Kew Gardens together, they went everywhere together for a year; people thought they were engaged. Then Spencer broke off the relationship. Spencer told her that he enjoyed her company, he liked her mind, but she wasnt beautiful enough for him to marry. He wanted a prettier, more feminine sort of person, Barton says. I wouldnt label him a feminist.

Spencer never married, and he appears to have been isolated and lonely in his final years. He spent nearly two decades writing and rewriting his two-volume autobiography. He struggled to control his public image, even going so far as asking to have his letters returned to him and then destroying those that he felt might damage his reputation.

All the while, English politics were drifting to the left. The political climate was changing, says Barton. His antagonism toward socialism of any kind was less and less acceptable. Anything that had any scent of government regulation about it, he associated with socialism.

Science and philosophy had moved on as well. Already in the 1890s, hes saying Everyones forgotten me; I gave my whole life for this, Lightman says. So he becomes a very tragic figure. Today, Spencers tomb can be found in Londons Highgate Cemetery, just about opposite that of Karl Marx, whose ideas he despised (and who ended up with a far more elaborate monument).

Still, as remote as Spencer and his ideas seem today, he was a vital figure in his own time, Barton says. He seemed to know everything, which made him impressive, she says. He was full of confidence; he had this really ambitious vision of the universe. Above all, he appeared to be one of the few philosophers who fully embraced science at least, his interpretation of science.

Science seemed to be the way of the modern world, Barton says. And Spencer seemed to be a philosopher who understood science.

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The Complicated Legacy of Herbert Spencer, the Man Who Coined 'Survival ...

Photo: Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin, Italy, by John G. West.

A new episode of ID the Futurespotlights Darwinian racism, past and present. In this first half of a panel discussion at the 2022 Center for Science & Culture Insiders Briefing,Darwin Day in Americaauthor John West introduces the other panel members, notes an upcoming book,Darwin Comes to Africa, and discusses his experience visiting the Museum of Criminal Anthropology (pictured above) in Turin, Italy, where the work of infamous Darwinian criminologist Cesare Lombrosos racist ideas about evolution and race are on dramatic display. Then historian Richard Weikart, author ofDarwinian Racism, debunks the popular media claim that white nationalist racism in America is a Southern evangelical phenomenon. Weikart shows that the most prominent white nationalists demonstrate little if any interest in promoting Christianity, but they very consistently anchor their racist ideas of white superiority and the racial struggle for supremacy in Darwinism, with straightforward links to Charles Darwins own ideas and arguments inThe Descent of Man.

Weikart emphasizes that Darwinism does not necessarily lead its adherents to racism and, in fact, most Darwinists today are not racists. But racist ideas were woven into modern evolutionary thinking from the beginning and do serve as a major inspiration for white nationalist writers and even for some recent mass shooters. Weikart ends his lecture with a twist. He says there is one strongly anti-racist component in Darwinian materialism: such materialism, if true, means that all humans are equally without value just so many DNA survival machines in a world without higher purpose or meaning. A grim takeaway, but only for those who feel compelled to embrace modern Darwinism. If you are open to questioning it, there are a wealth of resources here and atintelligentdesign.orgshowing that the evidence points strongly in another direction. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Excerpt from:

Darwinian Racism, Past and Present - Discovery Institute

According to Genesis 1, God created things, organisms, wholes. On Day 3, he summons seed-bearing grasses and fruit-bearing trees from the earth, and on Day 4 he makes the sun, moon, and stars and places them in the firmament. On Day 5, he commands the seas to swarm with swimming things and the air to be filled with flying things, and on Day 6 he calls up varieties of land animalscattle, beasts, and creeping things. Animate creatures are defined by their environments. Fish are creatures of the sea, whether they lay eggs or bear live young; birds fly across the face of the firmament, whether theyre furry or feathery. This ecological classification is as much ontology as taxonomy: Animals are what they are by virtue of a created harmony with their habitats. The products of Gods creating are mature things, mutually related to other mature things. He creates formed entities rather than chemical components, organisms rather than cells, trees rather than seeds, chickens rather than eggs.

It seems a trivial point, until we compare Genesis with other accounts of origins, ancient and modern. Theres enough overlap between Genesis 1 and Timaeus to lead some church fathers to suspect Plato plagiarized his best bits from Moses. Like Genesis, the Timaeus affirms the goodness of the Creator and describes the demiurges formation of entire organisms and objects. Unlike the author of Genesis, Timaeus is interested in the physical, geometric, and metaphysical components of things. The demiurge mixes the same, other, and essence, and then cuts the compound into strips to form the inner and outer spheres of the cosmos. In Platos cosmology, the triangle is the most basic shape, and triangles combine to form the three-dimensional particles that make up fire, water, earth, and air.

Much post-Darwinian biology is closer to the Timaeus than to Genesis. As Michael Hanby points out in No God, No Science?, Darwin considers living things to be an accidental aggregation of traits, or, in Darwins own words, the summing up of many contrivances. The aggregated parts even have their history of development. The five-toed foot is granddaddy to its four-toed descendants, never mind that no foot ever existed without being the foot of some multi-pedaled creatures. Darwin compiled mountains of evidence by observing organisms, but he paid comparatively little attention to them as organisms, since his main interest was to discern the operation of natural selection. Richard Dawkins brings this trajectory to a peak, as he reduces the organism to a bearer of selfish genes, bent on their own survival and perpetuation. For Dawkins, the gene (an itty-bitty part) rather than the organism (the whole) is the unit of selection.

What Hanby describes as the disappearance of the organism is rooted in assumptions Darwin and his followers shared with Bacon, Newton, and other modern scientific thinkers. In Aristotles cosmos, things have interior connections to other things, but Newton imagined a universe without intrinsic relations among entities. Even the internal parts of a body are external to other internal parts, related only by the force they exert upon one another. Arguably, Darwins main contribution was to apply the Newtonian model of the physical universe to living things. Given his mechanistic ambitions, it was inevitable that biology would lose track of the organism.

The loss of natural teleology has a similar result. Newton eliminated purpose from his theory of motion. Things are moved by external forces, rather than by internal Aristotelian impulses toward actualization. Darwinian biology completes the eradication of teleology; its the final triumph of mechanistic science over Aristotelian superstition, with its occult forms and ghostly what-nots. Strictly speaking, Darwinian theory prohibits every for the sake of relationship from the natural world. Eyes arent for the sake of sight nor feet for the sake of walking. What appear to be teleological relationships are mere appearances. But without sake of relationships, Hanby argues, there can be no organisms: a world of functions only is an utterly accidental world of parts that are, impossibly, parts of no real wholes. Ultimately, neither Darwin nor Darwinism truly escape teleology. Darwin regularly recurs to the personified language of his earliest essays on natural selection, describing natural selection as a power that acts, seizes, works, scrutinizes, improves, modifies, preserves, rejects, masters, and favors. Yet insofar as Darwinism successfully excludes teleology, it loses the biological organisms it set out to study.

Recent developments in biology have brought the organism back into focus. Even Dawkins doesnt really believe in genetic determinism, and research has made it clear that the operation of genes depends on more than the genes. Systems approaches encourage attention to biological wholes. Its not clear whether or not these shifts will escape the impasses of Darwinian theory. Yet, with Aristotle making an unexpected comeback, theres a chance biology will catch up with the ancient wisdom of Genesis: God made things.

Peter J. Leithart is President ofTheopolis Institute.

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God Created Wholes, Not Parts | Peter J. Leithart - First Things

No Republican governor has been more vocal in his opposition to what he describes as socialism than Floridas Governor Ron DeSantis. I stand against socialism, DeSantis thundered in Floridas 2018 gubernatorial election. Socialist policies have failed time and time again.

In June, DeSantis signed an education bill directing Floridas Department of Education to develop a curriculum educating students on the evils of socialism (as well as communism).

One hint came in 2013, when as a freshman congressman he claimed that a federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle. I sympathize with the victims, he said. But his answer was no.

The House overwhelmingly passed the bill nonetheless, providing $9.7 billion in flood insurance aid for Sandys victims. All 67 votes against the aid came from Republicans, including DeSantis. The Senate passed the bill too, although Florida Senator Marco Rubio also voted against the aid package.

So, would DeSantis call any form of government assistance to those in need socialism?

Apparently, DeSantiss definition is more elastic than this. As his state confronts the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ian, the fiercely anti-socialist DeSantis is asking the Biden administration for the help Floridians need asking, in effect, for a form of social insurance that the United States government automatically provides Americans when disaster strikes.

The administration has already put 1,300 federal response workers on the ground. It has pre-staged 110,000 gallons of fuel and 18,000 pounds of propane, and has readied 3.7 million meals and 3.5 million liters of water. And it has moved in generators and has 300 ambulances in the state working alongside local officials.

Yesterday morning, DeSantis and Biden discussed further steps, including the issuance of a major disaster declaration that will provide Floridians with federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts. Residents of nine counties will also be eligible for individual assistance.

We all need to work together, regardless of party lines, DeSantis told Fox Newss Tucker Carlson, Wednesday night. When people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when theyve lost everything if you cant put politics aside for that, then youre just not going to be able to.

My point is not to accuse DeSantis of hypocrisy, but only to point out that a major disaster tends to focus the mind on why we need to work together rather than issue meaningless attacks on socialism.

DeSantiss stance against socialism has been the Republican Partys harangue for a century.

Long before Trump hijacked the GOP for his pathological narcissism, it stood for youre-on-your-own social Darwinism and steadfastly against all forms of social insurance, which it termed socialism.

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In the 1928 presidential election, Democratic candidate Al Smith, then governor of New York, put it this way:

The cry of socialism has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation. Is that cry of socialism anything new? Not to a man of my experience. I have heard it raised by reactionary elements and the Republican party for over a quarter century.

Socialism was the scare word used by the Liberty League in 1935 when Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed Social Security.

In 1952, President Harry Truman noted that Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last twenty years.

Socialism is what they called public power Social Security bank deposit insurance free and independent labor organizations anything that helps all the people. When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan down with socialism, what he really means is down with progress.

As a practical matter, what is the alternative to social insurance against hardship? Its a survival-of-the-fittest society in which only the richest and most powerful endure.

Social insurance is what government is for -- pooling our resources for the common good. In contrast to the Republicans your-on-your-own social Darwinism, the Democrats social insurance recognizes were in it together.

We can debate whether some forms of social insurance reduce some peoples incentives to take reasonable precautions against potential hazards or cause some to become overly dependent on the government or undermine personal responsibility.

But there is no debate that social insurance is critically important. We are in it together.

Yet America spends very little on social insurance compared to other advanced nations. Almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance. Nearly 51 million households cannot afford basic monthly expenses including housing, food, childcare, and transportation. We are the only industrialized nation without paid family leave.

Many Floridians (and, as seems likely, residents of South Carolina and adjacent states) clearly need the help of their fellow Americans to weather this monster of a hurricane. And their urgent, palpable need should remind us how often we need one another not just in a terrible hurricane, but through many unforeseen and terrifying hardships.

Because of this, we have depended an institution that pools our national resources and helps those of us in need. Its called the federal government.

Robert Reich

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Does Ian Remind Us We're in This Together? - LA Progressive

We produce so that we may consume. (Photograph by Getty Images.)

The previous installment of Economics for English Majors, on the subject of comparative advantage and its role in producing gains from trade, emphasized the cooperative nature of the market economy: Cooperation in the form of specialization and the division of labor produces wealth and abundance beyond what each of us could do on our own, while an ethos of narrow self-sufficiency produces poverty and shortages. If you want to make a ham sandwich with no help from anybody else, be prepared to wait a long time for your croque-monsieurturning seed grain into bread takes a long timeand be prepared for it to be the most expensive sandwich youve ever heard of.

In reality, even the most ruthlessly competitive capitalist is entirely dependent upon partners who produce the raw materials and tools he needs to do his workand they, in turn, are dependent upon him for whatever it is he produces. Looked at with the right kind of eyes, capitalism is the opposite of the cartoon Social Darwinism of the anti-capitalist imaginationit is based on an understanding that we are, after all, in this together.

That sounds a little too close to, You didnt build that! some of you protested. But if my presentation of comparative advantage sounded like goo-goo socialist horse pucky to you, wait until you hear about this weeks subject: Says Law, sometimes summarized (clumsily, in my view) as the principle that supply creates its own demand.

Like comparative advantage, Says Law is often misunderstood, and at times it is intentionally misrepresented by those who do not like its implications. Whether Says Law is coherent as a technical economic matter is, in fact, a lively issue, one that typically breaks down along tribal cleavages: Free-market types tend to be better disposed toward it, while capitalism-skeptical would-be social engineers reject it in part because it complicates their political ambition to follow a policy of fine tuning the economy, particularly through neo-Keynesian monkeying around with aggregate demand.

That kind of macroeconomic management is a tricky business: Our Federal Reserve is, for all of its many faults, one of the better central banks, and it has been generally effective in its responses to challenges such as the 2007-08 financial crisis (two cheers for the creature from Jekyll Island!). But even with its great expertise and genuine autonomy, it is a blunt instrument, one that is, for example, almost certainly about to push the country into a painful recession in order to counteract the current destructive inflation that is in part a result of earlier Fed intervention. Says Law implies that what really drives the economy is the supply side rather than the demand sidedemand just sort of comes along for the ride.

What does it mean to claim that supply creates its own demand? What it doesnt meanthough the misapprehension apparently is commonis that firms have the ability to simply exnihilate demand for their products into existence just by putting them on the market, possibly with the help of a crafty advertising campaign. If that were the case, there would be no failed products or failed companies, but products fail all the time: We Generation Xers remember the trauma of New Coke like it was our own D-Day. Ill leave it to you younger readers to dig into the history of Clairols Touch of Yogurt Shampooand lets just go ahead and meditate on the juxtaposition of yogurt with shampoo for a second herefor yourselves. (There are lots of examples: Business genius Ray Kroc thought McDonalds needed a meatless burger to sell to Catholics during Lentthose were more observant timesand his first effort was the Hula Burger, which was a thick slice of pineapple and two slices of cheese on a hamburger bun.A local franchisee in Cincinnati had the better idea: the Filet-O-Fish, which even sounds Catholic.) Companies fail, too: In David Foster Wallaces futurist novel Infinite Jest, Wayne Huizenga is still a Very Big Deal in the business worldbut many of you readers will know his most famous endeavor, Blockbuster Video, only as a 1990s nostalgia totem.

Says Law doesnt say anything about demand for specific products. What it says, rather, is that because human wants and desires become economic demand once you add income to themonce your desire for x is complemented by something you can trade for xsupply creates demand in the economic sense because production creates income. If you produce a widget, then you have created not only a widget but economic demand that is equal to the market price of the widget. You dont do $500 worth of lawn work because you wish to create $500 worth of landscaping services but because you want to consume $500 worth of other stuff. Bobs Tire Factory doesnt produce tires because Bob wants tiresit produces tires because Bob wants a yacht.

As Thomas Sowell put it in his short book on Says Law:

The basic idea behind Says Law is both simple and important. The production of goods (including services) causes incomes to be paid to suppliers of the factors (labor, capital, land, etc.) used in producing the goods. The total price of the goods is the sum of these payments for wages, profits, rent, etc.which is to say that the income generated during the production of a given output is equal to the value of that output. An increased supply of output means an increase in the income necessary to create a demand for that output.

It is an aggregate issue: If you create $1,000 worth of widgets, then you create $1,000 worth of income and, hence, $1,000 worth of demand in the economy. How that shakes out as a matter of large-scale economics and national economic policy is, as you might imagine, up for debate. Policymakers used to worry a lot about general gluts, meaning an oversupply of goods and services in the economytoo much stuff and not enough demand for that stuff. Says Law, the critics say, implies that a general glut is impossible, but such gluts have been (the same critics insist) observed. Again, much of the conversation ends up taking on a tribal quality: Some free-market true believers insist that any unhappy economic outcome must be the result of government intervention rather than the result of markets at work (this is the No True Scotsman Theory of Markets), while some market skeptics insist that unfettered capitalism (hooray for fetters?) must always produce disaster and catastrophe. One gets the distinct impression that the animating force in much of that discourse is not economics.

From my point of view, the interesting thing about Says Law is not what it tells us about central-bank policy or anything like that (these particular and complex policy concerns are far removed from the gorgeous certitude of anything that could be called a law) but the human side of the observationthat we produce in order to consume. Says Law is a variation on Adam Smiths theme: It isnotfrom the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. In an economy based on pillage, it pays to be strong; in an economy based on state control, it pays to be good at politicssneaky, duplicitous, a flatterer. But in an economy based on free exchange, the only thing that pays is doing something for others. Economies based on free exchange (free trade is a subset of free exchange) force us to be, as Adam Smith observed, other-directed. A free-exchange economy forces us to take an interest in other peoples interests: in their desires, their needs, their priorities, their ambitions, even their moral and cultural aspirations.

That doesnt always produce results that are good in the most meaningful sense. Yes, we probably have enough varieties of Oreos. Theres a great deal of effort being spent trying to figure out how to shove 800 grams of sugar into a 400-gram can of sodareal mission-to-Mars-level innovation and intensityand there is plenty of market demand for products that are straight-up malum in se: We arent going to legalize child prostitution on the theory that Mr. Market is never wrong. The arguments against allowing certain kinds of goods or services into the marketplace arent usually economic arguments, or arent usually generally applicable economic arguments. (Some of those parochial economic arguments are less persuasive than they seem at first: You might think that having a strip club or a gigantic pornography emporium next door to your fancy shopping center would be bad for business, but it seemed to work just fine in Houston, where the zoning laws are about as assertive as my hairline.) And thats fineeconomic analysis is great for answering economic questions, but it isnt the only kind of analysis, because those arent the only kind of questions. There is a world of difference between arguing that we shouldnt have regular trade relations with the Peoples Republic of China because it is governed by a brutal junta and arguing that we need 25 percent tariffs on Chinese-made tires because American consumers simply must be protected from the bane of low prices and choice.

Of course we draw moral lines, and other kinds of lines, too, related to prudence and order and other concerns. Those moral principles can be distorted, too: In my Texas hometown, the powers that be once used the local law governing sexually oriented businesses (meaning strip clubs and what we stupidly call adult bookstores and theaters) to stop a Hooters from opening in a location where some politically influential people just happened to not want to see a restaurant opened. But we should take some time to appreciate the moral consequences and moral character of a free-exchange economy, too: It directs our efforts, however imperfectly, away from force and guile and toward service, toward finding out what it is that other people need and want and trying to supply those needs and wants. That is in and of itself a powerful force for social harmony, a very important community good that is not generally well served by command-and-control economics and other arrangements based, however obliquely or politely, on domination.

An early biographer of the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards (famous for his Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sermon) described him as having led a holy and useful life. The Puritans were big on being useful and were repulsed by idleness. But how should we proceed to follow that example? Holiness is beyond my remit here, but price signals are an excellent way of understanding precisely what it is other people value and to what extent they value it, showing us how to be useful to others in a practical way. Of course we labor in our own interestthe genius of a free-exchange economy is that it binds our interests to the interests of others. It is what makes us workers, traders, and entrepreneurs rather than pillagers, pirates, or commissars. We work for others evenespeciallywhen we are working for ourselves.

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A Pleasure to Serve - by Kevin D. Williamson - The Dispatch

Mark Lynch, Oghma Partners

Mark Lynch, partner at Oghma Partners, discusses the food and beverage investment landscape and the subsegments garnering healthy interest from crowdfunding sites, angel investor networks and early-stage venture capital firms.

A review of early-stage investing in the food and beverage industry over the period 2012-2022 shows a step change in activity from 2015 onwards as more companies came forward for investment. From 2018 onwards, there was a step up in the size of investment as, in part, businesses matured and the need for capital expanded along with this growth.

The overall period reflects a healthy start-up culture in the UK food and beverage industry, as well as a keen appetite from investors to back businesses and brands in the sector. Some of the most notable investments, by size, have been a function of mega trend and tech businesses tapping investors for growth capital.

Looking forward, we see some of these trends continuing to drive funding, albeit a decline in the overall outlook for the economic environment is likely to reduce levels of activity and fundraising, as we move into 2023.

2012-2014 saw an average annual total of 60 food and beverage companies receive early-stage funding from a variety of sources, including crowdfunding sites, angel investor networks and early-stage venture capital firms.

From 2015 onwards this activity stepped up to 150 p.a. and has remained at this level, or higher, until now. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons for this change; however, we believe that it is linked to an increased appetite for risk on the part of investors, assisted by low returns elsewhere (ie. bank interest rates) and importantly the higher degree of accessibility of interesting investments.

Investing in innovation

While a notable beneficiary of investor interest has been Brewdog, in some senses, it is an outlier amongst the larger (50m+) fundraisers over the last ten years in the regard that it has a traditional business model.

The other notable fundraisers of scale (which in total made up over 25% of all funds raised over 2012-22), were, in our view, leveraging new business models.

Thus, for example, Gousto (meal kits) and Butternut Box (pet food), which together raised over 360m are direct-to-consumer delivery businesses. Along with companies like Simply Cook, Mindful Chef and Tails they are offering internet-ordered, bespoke, products delivered direct to the door of the consumer.

They broke from the traditional consumer model of shopping at the supermarket. They have leveraged the internet and using a tech stack, are able to present product variants to consumers based on historic choices and desires surmised by the algorithms embedded in the ordering software. These businesses were born from the internet and software changes of the last 20 years and wouldnt have existed in their current form without these developments.

A new wave of investment opportunities

While direct-to-consumer businesses have been prevalent in terms of volume of fundraisers, being the second most popular by volume of deals in the period 2018-22, there has been a very strong bias of investment for one particular business. Gousto has been the whale of the sector, scooping up a total above 300m, over 70% of funds raised; it is also probably the only unicorn in this group with an estimated valuation in excess of 1bn.

Technological developments have assisteddirect-to-consumer businesses and likewise have helped the agribusiness area, which was the fifth most active sector for fundraising (by volume of deals) in the second half of the period under review.

The notable company in this area, again taking up circa 90% of funds raised, is GrowUp a vertical farming business that has raised over 100m from two funding rounds. GrowUp appeals to investors through its use of renewable technology, developments in vertical farming and the desire to produce food more efficiently and closer to market.

The final business to mention demonstrates the leveraging of the meat-free trend. Our analysis shows that this segment of the food and beverage space was the third most active by volume and value of deals in the second half of the decade. Consumer concerns around healthy eating and animal welfare have driven consumer interest in this area. In the UK, Meatless Farm has raised almost 100m from investors as it has taken part in the meat-free land grab that we have witnessed in recent times. We estimate that this sum represents almost one-third of all funds raised in this segment.

An eye toward the future

We can conclude that while a favourable investor environment has helped to raise funds in the industry for early investment, equally important has been the emergence of a handful of leaders in the direct-to-consumer, agribusiness and meat-free subsegments, which have leveraged technology and consumer mega-trends.

The above theme continues with the latest iteration of this trend being Ivy Farm, a cultivated meat business that raised 36m earlier this year. These businesses have grabbed a large slice of the equity on offer and therefore probably have given themselves the best chance for success.

Darwinism, it would seem, holds true in the early-stage food and beverage investment space as it does elsewhere in life.

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Opinion: Darwin, mega trends and tech drive food and beverage venture investing - FoodBev.com

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Huxleys in Nature and Culture

Alison Bashford

Allen Lane, pp. 560, 25

Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwins representative on Earth, was that while Homo sapiens emerged from its primitive state among the other apes and lemurs, some Europeans developed at a faster rate. Humankind had evolved from a hairy, tailed quadruped, which was itself probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal (Darwin). But once the human species emerged, men differ more widely from one another than they do from the apes.

This ineluctably leads to the conclusion that there is as much difference, perhaps more, between the higher type of human being (such as members of the Darwin and Huxley families) and the savages as there is between, say, Queen Victoria and an orangutan. Writing to Charles Kingsley, having sent him a copy of Mans Place in Nature (1863), Huxley opined: I suspect that the modern Patagonian is as nearly as possible the unimproved representative of the makers of flint implements of Abbeyville.

It is no accident that while Huxley was penning Mans Place in Nature (or Darwin his Descent of Man, 1871) the British Empire was changing gear, moving from a commercial and missionary endeavour in Asia and Africa to a theory of racial superiority which justified not merely the abusive trading relationship between the East India Company and the indigenous civilisation but all-out colonisation. All the Polynesian, Australian and central Asiatic peoples, Huxley wrote in Mans Place in Nature, were at the dawn of history substantially what they are now.

That European humanity with the British at its apex, naturally out-classed Asian and African humanity went without question. Possessing steam trains, winged collars, top hats and newspapers made Europeans obviously superior to people who dressed and behaved differently. Inevitably, the higher races would develop Maxim guns, which could subdue the warriors who carried only spears and darts.

Alison Bashford confronts these matters honestly in her story of the Huxley family. The two central figures are Thomas Henry and his grandson Julian, who did so much, in the 20th century, to pioneer the fusing of genetics (which was scientifically proven) and Darwinian theories about human origins (which were not, and never could be). Hence emerged the modern way of viewing the world a planet with no God, which an impersonal nature had designed for the use of European humanity. This superior branch of the human race could, while polluting Earth with heavy industry, bring to it incalculable benefits such as mechanised warfare and chemical and nuclear weapons. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, Bashford writes, and it is a plausible notion. We, western humanity, have been shaped by these ideas and by these people to an extent which many of us do not fully appreciate.

George Huxley, the father of Thomas Henry, was a schoolmaster in Ealing who taught the boy John Henry Newman. Something was amiss with the man. He gave up teaching and took the family to live in his native Coventry. He sank into poverty and ended his days in an asylum. Thomas Henry, who had a permanent chip on his shoulder, never had a proper schooling and wrestled all his life with appalling depressions paroxysms of internal pain. He became a ships doctor after really quite rudimentary training, and subsequently took a job as a lecturer at the School of Mines the forebear of Imperial College.

He was a fluent, beguiling writer, but it has never been clear how much science compared with giants such as Darwins tutor at Edinburgh, Edmond Grant, or Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire in Paris Huxley actually knew. He was a bombastic, combative figure, who discovered in the theories of his hero Darwin one which explained everything, a weapon with which to drive out Christianity.

After his death, as Bashford explains, the scientific world laid Darwinism to one side, largely because the discovery of genetics a scientific realisation of how inheritance actually works in nature rendered the theory of natural selection dubious (her word). Julian Huxley fused the two, rather in the way the early Church Fathers had fused the religion of Jesus the Jew with the higher flights of neo-Platonism. Bashford writes:

As Julian already perceived, and as his colleagues recognised, sustained and intricate experiments were not his strength. Translating biological ideas for public consumption, however, was his clear talent.

He became an inspired populariser of evolutionary ideas, rather as David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins have been in the television age. He too was an incurable depressive. When his first son was born, he wrote: I see you now an infant. It is the eternal wish of fathers to instruct their sons in the art of living. But how could he, when he had himself lived so much of his life in torment? Your mind will burn your feet because it is paved like Hell with unfulfilled desires, will mock you with its puny futility. Like his grandfather and most Darwinians, Julian keenly embraced the bogus science of eugenics, openly designed to maintain the purity of the race.

It is a curious fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed, most western leftists began to re-examine their idolisation of Karl Marx. With the emergence of Black Lives Matter and a keen awareness on all sides of how the western mind was programmed to be racist by Victorian scientists, Darwin and Huxley remain enthroned. Bashfords patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws and for much of the time half insane will, I suspect, do little to wobble the idols who created the myth by which modern humanity so bafflingly chose to live.

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The mad, bad and dangerous theories of Thomas Henry Huxley - The Spectator

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. Im Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And Im Nick Eicher. Next up, evolution.

Many people may not realize the far-reaching effect the theory of Darwinian Evolution has on American culture.

WORLDs Emily Whitten recently read the book Darwin on Trial and recommended it as this months Classic Book. Today, she takes it further to explain that evolution is the root and wokeness is its fruit.

EMILY WHITTEN, COMMENTATOR: If you want to root out wokeness in American society and schools today, start with evolution.

As I recently read Phillip Johnsons 1991 book, Darwin on Trial, it reminded me of a time not so long ago when evolution in schools was a hot political topic. Johnson writes about the 1981 Louisiana law that sought to require equal class time for evolution-science and creation-science. He also relates how the courts struck down that lawand in 1987, how the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

Today, conservatives fighting for traditional values in schools have plenty on their plates. Why dredge up this old saw?

For one thing, Marxism and Darwinism are blood brothers. They arose around the same time and out of similar intellectual milieus. As Johnsons book reminded me, both teach us to see the real world as matter onlyin a box that excludes the supernatural. Both close up human understanding to that immanent frame Carl Trueman talks about in his recent book, Strange New World.

That naturalistic box isnt abstract for me. Ive been in it before. When I drove down winding Mississippi highways to Ole Miss in 1996 and began to study English Literature, I may have heard one professor openly promote Marxism. I didnt hear the term Critical Theory until my higher level classesif I hadnt been in the Honors College, I might not have heard it at all. What I did hear embraced and taught openly, without criticism from any quarterDarwinian evolution.

When we look at literature and through it at the wider world, Christians know God is our maker. Per Psalm 100, It is He who made us, not we ourselves. It took me years to realize the core tenet of my college humanities curriculum was a direct inversion of that. We were taught, It is we who have made ourselves. Just as science classes across campus ruled God out from serious study, our humanities classes did the same. People alone, we were taught, make art and culture. People alone create languages, societies, relationships, and concepts about gender, sexuality, and everything else. If we made them, why not change them?

Thats not to say we didnt believe in a god. Almost all of my fellow students and I believed in some sort of God. But whatever or whoever He wasHe was outside the box of facts and reason and reality. As Johnson wrote, Darwinian evolution relegates both morality and God to the realm outside of scientific knowledge, where only subjective belief is to be found.

Do you hear the connection to woke ideas yet? From gender identity to racial identity, my 1990s humanities classes taught me to define myself, to make myself, to be my own Creator. Why? Because evolution had already cut God out of the picture. What God thought about me, or purposed for me, could not be studied.

As new woke ideas threaten to upend our society, were seeing a new willingness to push back against academic elites. Im grateful for that, and I hope Christians will model how to do that well, in truth and love. But if Christians want to win the war and not just todays battle, if we want to shut off the spigot on all the woke madness, we cant ignore evolution.

God didnt design Americaor any cultureto work that way.

Im Emily Whitten.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.

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Emily Whitten: Start with evolution | WORLD - WORLD News Group

The all-American story faces precarity and theres a biblical blueprint for how it happened. The American story never had a true foundation and was always on the cusp of a great fall, but now it is coming apart at the seams. If ever a Bible story reads like our national mythology, its Jesuss story of the rich farmer in Luke 12. If there was ever a character in the New Testament that seems like our guy, the rich farmer is our guy. Hardworking, successful, rich, ambitious and he has a vision. He could probably convince the Shark Tank investors to put a pile of money into his expansion project.

Rodney Kennedy

The all-American story comes out whole hog for the hogs. Those who have plenty desire to have more. The rich farmer seems afflicted with what has been called Social Darwinism. The application of the brutal survival of the fittest to society and the economy should be dubbed anti-social Darwinism. As an unrepentant, churchless, born-again antisocial Darwinist, the rich farmer comes out in favor of himself, bigger barns, more money, more acquisitions, more consumption, and the all-American slogan, eat, drink, and be merry. But none of this shows up at first in the story. He looks like a good guy, a basically good person who works hard, takes care of business, and is a huge success. Today, he would be a run-of-the-mill billionaire buying larger private jets, yachts, and mansions.

The story, having started with such adulation for the rich man, turns a darker color when the voice of God invades the property: You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? This doesnt add up in the American imagination about being rich. The all-American hero is dubbed a fool. Thats not the kind of language we usually use in polite company, at least not until Donald Trump weaponized rhetoric and branded people with an array of nasty words. Can you imagine anyone calling the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway a fool, or the CEO of Goldman Sachs? Well, Lloyd Blankfein, as CEO, once did say that Goldman Sachs was doing Gods work. I wouldnt say that makes him a fool, but I roll my eyes at his comment. Forbes puts out an annual list of the richest people in the world. It is not called the Fools List. If anything, it reads like the list of the greatest idols in our culture. People we adore, worship, emulate, and want to be. I am convinced that poor people support the 1% because they want to be in the 1%. If we arent rich, we probably want to be rich. This story doesnt make American sense.

Lets consider that this may be the right story for us to be reading because of our current economic difficulties. Theologically, some people would say that our chickens are coming home to roost because our greed has grown out of control. I dont think it is clear how greed is connected to our economic troubles. I have friends convinced that we are suffering because some became too greedy. We continue to be troubled, they tell me, because the rich are getting very, very, very rich and the poor are getting very, very, very much poorer. In this reading, greed has no limits or shame. Greed has to increase because it is the necessary engine for economic growth, and we believe that the economy has to always be growing. We once had millionaires, now we have billionaires. Who will be the first trillionaire? How rich do we need to be to have enough? Im not sure.

The rich farmer seems oblivious to his own greed. How subtle. He sees no warning signs on the horizon. Like people who ignore floods, hurricanes, and forest fires by denying climate change, the rich farmer denies that he is greedy while howling for more. The one characteristic associated with greed is the presumption that no matter how much we have we need more. We need more because we cannot be sure that what we have is secure. So, the more we have the more we must have. The rich farmer is a living caricature of the more syndrome: And he thought to himself, What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? Then he said, I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. Hes fixated on I a raging individualism and he has what one preacher dubbed more-itis.

Theres a gnawing insecurity between the words uttered by the confident rich farmer. Perhaps a bit of St. Augustine can help here. He says that the essential context for ambition is a people corrupted by greed and sensuality. For all his boasting about bigger barns and living it up, the rich man was afraid of dying and he lived in fear of the loss of status and comfort. He was greedy for significance, and he dreamed that his bigger barns would give him significance. Bigger barns were the signs of his status and significance and the means of sustaining status and well-being, but ironically, the bigger the barns the more social anxiety and insecurity in the rich mans mind. The irony drips from the farmers words the one with the most is the one who is the most anxious in irrational and uncaring ways.

Yet in America, we dont recognize this as greed. We call it a vision, a game plan, a business strategy, good sense. I am suggesting that we have lost the ability to see how greed possesses our lives. We live in a culture that celebrates and desires wealth. I am a preacher of the gospel of Jesus, who teaches us that we are gripped by greed. Mixed messages? Of course. Greed, the most subtle of vices, has managed to get inside the church, be baptized, and become a virtue. When evil becomes good, we should know we have a problem. Our parents told us to work hard, to get ahead, to be the best we could be. I am not convinced this was a totally good idea, because greed has insinuated itself into all these parental lessons and we dont even realize it. How subtle!

Now, look at the story once more. Do you identify with the rich farmer? Are you at all uneasy about the judgment that this man, in Gods sight, has been foolish, and that now he must face the consequences of his greed? After all, as we have seen, his greed is invisible to us. I am not suggesting to you that this man went to hell for being rich. The story doesnt address the subject. I am saying that something is not exactly right in this mans life. His All-American desire, expressed in the All-American slogan, eat, drink, and be merry, turned out to be insufficient for a flourishing and meaningful life.

Ralph (Ravi) Kayden / Unsplash

Sometimes we need to read an Old Testament story to get at the meaning of a New Testament story. So, lets go back to the story of Pharaoh in the Old Testament book of Exodus. The story of the rich farmer parallels the story of Pharaoh. The Old Testament story is not subtle, and it shows the greed of Pharaoh in living color. Pharaoh had a surplus of food. In fact, he controlled the food supply of the ancient world. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that Pharoah is a metaphor. He shows us what raw, earthly power looks like. He is a stand-in for all the greedy, powerful people who take what they want and in doing so create damage for all others and place all others in situations of precarity. Pharaoh has a food monopoly, and he uses it as a weapon. Pharaoh shows us greed as the principal vice, greed before we baptized it, made it a virtue, and turned it into a necessity for economic growth.

And Pharaoh has a man of God on his side. His name is Joseph. The story tells us that Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. There was a severe famine and Joseph bought all the land at a cheap price. Because Pharaoh has so much land and produces so much food, he needs granaries where he can store his surplus. Now remember the words of our rich farmer: and he thought to himself, What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? Sounds like Pharaoh.

Now, please look at what Pharaoh does. He used forced labor, made slaves of all the people, including the Jews, and put taskmasters over them, and they were forced to build supply cities to store the food. The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance companies where surplus wealth is kept among us. Now again remember our rich farmer: he built bigger barns. He acts like Pharaoh.

Pharaoh, not content to have all the food supply, not content to have all the land, not content to enslave all the people, decides that he will cut his costs by taking away the supplies that his cheap labor had to use to make bricks. You shall no longer give straw to the people to make bricks as before. They still must meet their daily quota of bricks, but they also have to gather their own straw. Pharaoh then accused his slaves of being lazy. You are lazy and thats why you pretend that you want to go and sacrifice to your God. Pharoah is the definition of greed. He is greed revealed.

The rich farmer is subtle greed, invisible greed, all-American greed. He is the tolling of the last bell for the all-American story of excess capitalism, the Market God, Mammon, money, success, and everything that he thought was Christian because it was so American. When the American dream fails, when the all-American hero flounders, we are all in trouble.

Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio which is an American Baptist Church for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His sixth book The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump is now out from Wipf and Stock (Cascades).

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The Fading All-American Story - Word and Way

An Oklahoma farmer reads a newspaper. Courtesy of Library of Congress

By Dan FriedmanSeptember 18, 2022

In every generation, America struggles to explain itself as a nation. In The U.S. and the Holocaust, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein provide an insight into the horrors of the 20th century, how America related to them at the time and how it should relate to them now.

Over three episodes, lasting six hours, the team tells the story of a major economic power and developed country that believed in its manifest destiny to conquer and colonize a continent. Its ideology stretched to transporting and slaughtering those it deemed degenerate while segregating or subjugating those it deemed merely subservient. The genocide of the former and the socially engineered cull of the latter, the leaders believed, would be forgotten, overlooked or seen as necessary for progress as the state marched from one success to the next.

Early on in this extensive documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust explains how American history inspired Hitler and the Nazi regime. The nascent Third Reich embraced and distilled American ideas of social Darwinism and eugenics, Western expansion, Native American genocide, Jim Crow segregation and American antisemitism. Though we generally understand the Allies to be the good guys of World War II, it took only a little distillation and redirection of ideas from America and Western Europe to motivate Germanys Eastward expansion, Jewish genocide, Slav enslavement and the creation of a Nazi-occupied Europe to parallel United States-occupied North America.

Those hoping for another documentary answering What did Americans know? and Did Roosevelt do enough to save the Jews? will be adequately satisfied. Though the subjects are not conclusively closed, the topics are deliberated from various points of view and addressed. Spoiler alert: They knew a lot, though it was hard to believe. The State Department was reprehensible, full of antisemites and small-minded racists; on the other hand, the War Refugee Board, belatedly set up and funded in January 1944 to carry out the official American policy of rescue and relief, was an agile, creative organization that saved tens of thousands of lives.

Occasionally ponderous and self-importantly explanatory in previous productions, the Ken Burns style is well suited to this self-evidently crucial topic. Though explained from many perspectives, the lens of Americas response keeps the Holocaust coverage relatively succinct. Though complex, American history, World War II and President Roosevelts legacy are all topics that the team has covered before. But Burns, Novick and Botstein see their remit as not only investigative and historical, but as vital, fresh and relevant.

The series title The U.S. and the Holocaust refers not just to 20th century United States, but, as Burns himself averred when I spoke to him for an interview, to us in 2022 America and the Holocaust. In todays America, ignorance of history and the world around us can combine with racism, intolerance and the belief in charismatic charlatans to leave us open to some repeat of last centurys errors.

For example, today there are more displaced people globally than citizens of England and Spain combined. But even this mass displacement and outrage at the events in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Central America can barely provoke emergency legislation in Congress, never mind reform U.S. refugee law. It is sobering to realize that our current situation is relatively enlightened in U.S. history, with a system of refugee support (however meager) in place and, even after President Trumps anti-immigrant regime, an average of over 70,000 immigrants arriving in the U.S. annually for the past 40 years.

By the end of the war, when the American population knew about the Holocaust and the horrors of Occupied Europe, only 5% thought that the U.S. should expand its immigration quotas from the extreme constraints of the interwar years. About a third of Americans thought that immigration should be reduced further than prewar national quotas that had excluded all Chinese, most Asians and all but a fraction of the murdered Jews of Europe.

In the brutal and bloody 20th century, tens of millions had to die for those invested in the states racist ideology to see the error of their ways. And, as the series shows, by no means have those lessons been fully learned by 2022s population. The final hour of the gripping production begins with a caution. There always has been and still is a dangerously large segment of the American population that believes that the so-called white race has a right to the American continent.

So, when Pearl Harbor finally forced the U.S. to take sides, that continent had to confront not only a formidable military opponent, but an ideology that was an ugly reflection of its own. American eugenics had taken its early ideas from Britain, but non-consensual sterilization targeting mostly Black and institutionalized people and mentally disabled women was law in 34 states. How could U.S. diplomats vilify German rules segregating Jews and gentiles when Jim Crow was still on the statute books? How could democracies question a sovereign nations right to transport out its Jewish undesirables, when as was made clear at the 1938 Evian Conference where 32 countries gathered to discuss helping and largely decided to withhold help none was prepared to take in Jews from German-occupied territories?

Of course, in order to explain the U.S. involvement in, and response to, the Holocaust, the series must explain the Holocaust. With a mixture of contemporary footage and current-day analysis, the series hits most of the main points of Hitlers rise. The importance of doing this cannot be understated for a country where a recent survey showed that nearly two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z dont know that over 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, let alone that those numbers constituted roughly two thirds of European Jewry.

As John A. Tures, professor of political science at LaGrange College, pointed out in these pages, Most shockingly, a little over 10% of those between the ages of 18 and 40 believed that Jews were actually the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Particularly compelling among the many interviewees is Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an account of his investigations into exactly, specifically, what happened to the Polish side of his family during the Holocaust. In the documentary, a number of experts describe in either personal or historical terms what happened. Mendelsohn does both, explicitly noting the different layers of the Holocaust. As well as those millions gassed and burnt in the infamous gas chambers and crematoria, there was the Holocaust by bullets, ad hoc killings for example, villagers locked in burning barns and systematic cullings through deliberate starvation, overwork and exposure to disease and the elements.

In February 1939, the virulently antisemitic German American Bund held a 20,000-strong rally in Madison Square Garden. American Nazis like these continued to protest that Nazi values were not only compatible with American values but, as they hoped to show by saluting a massive poster of George Washington, a logical extension of those values. Today, it is at MAGA or white supremacist alt-right rallies where you will find American Nazi sympathizers. Just like the 1939 antisemitic Bundists, Robert Packer wearing a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt conflated Nazi values with American values as he joined in the failed Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington.

Burns and his team are not interested in allocating blame, but rather in uncovering the multiple viewpoints that detail the relation between the United States and the Holocaust. American responses stretched beyond simple legislation or executive action in reaction to facts. The scale of the events and the contexts of both the war and American public isolationist sentiment meant that nothing was simple. Even reception of facts was fraught. When Felix Frankfurter, the Jewish Supreme Court justice, was presented with private testimony about Auschwitz he expressed disbelief at the messengers account. I am not saying that he is lying. I only said that I cannot believe him, and there is a difference.

In the aftermath of the racist Trump presidency, the Holocaust is a hot topic. Between states rushing to mandate (and fund) Holocaust education, Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer both airing specials about their families Holocaust experience on CNN, the recently released novel by Santiago Amigorena and forthcoming book by Jonathan Freedland on the men who escaped from Auschwitz, there is a palpable realization that we forget human inhumanity at our cost. Ignorance is real and dangerous. Massive online platforms amplify hate and misinformation for profit. Facebook and Twitter have lax rules on antisemitism which they dont even enforce. As Sacha Baron Cohen, with whom I have worked on other projects, said at the ADL just a few years ago, Just think what Goebbels would have done with Facebook theyd have let Hitler buy ads.

The vulnerability of contemporary society to othering as a result of racist and political lies is clearly uppermost in the filmmakers minds. as their production comes to air. Burns emphasized when talking to the Forward: Theres a moment in the film where the great holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt says the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. I would add that the time to save a democracy is before its lost.

The three parts of The U.S. and the Holocaust will air on PBS from 8-10pm EST on September 18, 19, and 20.

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What did the U.S. know about the Holocaust and when did we know it? - Forward