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More on Yockey’s critique of Darwinism, consciousness, evolution and life.

Yockey saw everything in terms of Grand Dichotomies, anthropomorphized forces utterly opposed. He saw Darwinism as an outgrowth of Rationalism, like Liberalism, and thus felt compelled to deconstruct Darwinism using sophmoric strawman arguments.

Imperium, page 70:

The easiest refutation is the palaeontological. Fossil deposits — found in various parts of the earth — must represent the possibilities generally. Yet they disclose

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only stable specie-forms, and disclose no transitional types, which show a species “evolving” into something else. And then, in a new fossil hoard, a new species appears, in its definitive form, which remains stable. The species that we know today, and for past centuries, are all stable, and no case has ever been observed of a species “adapting” itself to change its anatomy or physiology, which “adaptation” then resulted in more “fitness” for the “struggle for existence,” and was passed on by heredity, with the result of a new species.

This is denial, not refutation. The palaeontological record is incomplete, full of holes, yet even a puzzle missing pieces can convey information.

Darwin’s theorizing was inspired by his observations of living “transitional types”, the beaks of Darwin’s finches. Science has uncovered copious evidence of speciation. For example, Population Genomics Reveal Recent Speciation and Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Polar Bears: Cell.

Calling Culture-man a “higher” animal still treats him as an animal. Culture-man is a different world spiritually from all animals, and is not to be understood by referring him to any artificial materialistic scheme.

Yockey rejected the reality that man is animal. What he identifies as spirit can be just as well understood as consciousness, awareness. Culture-man is conscious-animal. Culture springs from consciousness.

If this picture of the facts were correct, species ought to be fluid at the present time. They should be turning into one another. This is, of course, not so. There should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals, engaged in a race to reach — man. But the “struggle,” again, is quite inconclusive. The “lower” forms, simpler — less fit? — have not died out, have not yielded to the principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have had for — as the Darwinians would say — millions of years. Why do they not “evolve” into something “higher”?

Yockey rejected speciation, the name and details of the theory were irrelevant. Thus the silly strawmen. Individual species appear stable, the whole is in tumult.

The utilitarian aspect of the picture is also quite subjective — i.e., English, capitalistic, parliamentarian — for the utility of an organ is relative to the use sought to be made of it.

The naive, tautological, doctrine of utility never asked “Utility for what?”

Utility for survival, of course. “Fitness”, in an evolutionary sense, is defined as objectively as possible, in terms of survival. Yockey, however, seemed determined not to see it this way.

The soul of the lion and his power go together. The hand of man and his brain go together. No one can say that the strength of the lion causes him to live the way he does, nor that the hand of man is responsible for his technical achievements. It is the soul in each case which is primary.

This primacy of the spiritual inverts the Darwinian materialism on the doctrine of utility.

Yockey asserted the “primacy of the spiritual”, placing his own mysticism over and above material reality. It’s far easier to assert the primacy of material reality, because whatever anyone has to say, it’s right there just waiting to be probed and tested – this is the rationalism we call science.

The whole grotesquerie of Darwinism, and of the materialism of the entire 19th century generally, is a product of one fundamental idea — an idea which happens also to be nonfactual to this century, even though it was a prime fact a century ago. This one idea was that Life is formed by the outer.

Evidently, Yockey also denied external agency.

And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is the actualizing of the possible. The possible turns into the actual in the midst of outer facts, which affect only the precise

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way in which the possible becomes actual, but cannot touch the inner force which is expressing itself through, and, if necessary, in opposition to, the outer facts.

“Life is the actualizing of the possible” sounds Darwinian, e.g. adaptive radiation.

Life is the unfolding of a Soul, an individuality.

Darwinism, to Yockey, was of a kind with two jewish intellectual movements, Marxism and Freudianism.

Darwinism was the animalization of Culture-man by means of biology … Marxism, the animalization of man through economics

Page 88:

As Socialism [i.e. Spengler’s Prussianism, Aryanism, National Socialism] creates the form of the Future, Marxism slips into the Past with the other remnants of Materialism. The mission of Western man is not to become rich through class-war; it is to actualize his inner ethico-politico-Cultural imperative.

There is another view of life and evolution which embraces a rational, Darwinian understanding of reality, rather than rejecting it. In his July 2014 broadcast, William Pierce: Cosmotheism’s Hard Way, Kevin Strom quotes Don Kaiser’s Life is Evolution:

THE SOLE CHARACTERISTIC that ultimately distinguishes living from non-living matter is classical Darwinian evolution. Life is simply matter that evolves.

…

Evolution is the sole feature that differentiates living matter from non-living matter.

…

Life is evolution.

The two are inseparable. Given the fact that all life forms die, how do they persist through time and changing environments? Every environment harboring life forms must change, simply because of their existence, so evolution is the only way life forms can persist through time. Not only did Charles Darwin discover what makes life possible despite the fact that all life forms eventually die, he unwittingly discovered the sole feature that distinguishes living from non-living matter. Charles Darwin defined life.

Life is Evolution.

Strom notes:

To the Cosmotheist, Nature is God. And science, logic, observation, reason, and the deepest stirrings of our race-soul are the means of apprehending God … Mathematics, physics, and genetics are the real words of God.

Cosmotheism asserts that we are matter and energy become conscious — and, more than that, that we are the Universe become conscious, that we are Nature become conscious of itself and all that that implies. It further shows us that we have reached a radically new stage in the evolution of the Universe — as significant, perhaps, as the evolution of non-living matter into living beings — as significant as the first rise of consciousness itself – as significant as the faltering steps of the first amphibians on the surface of the Earth. This new stage has come only recently, when European man first grasped the concept of evolution, and discovered the principles of genetics and heredity. It is the stage of conscious evolution — of the ability of living beings to direct, and vastly accelerate, the future course of their own evolution.

To the extent jews have outcompeted Whites it is by being more conscious of themselves and their survival as a people. In contrast, and in large part due to the efforts of jews, Whites have been relatively unconscious. Thus we seek to awaken, to inform and educate ourselves and others. The study of previous attempts, like Yockey’s, is part of this process.

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A hallmark of Yockey’s world-view is his anthropomorphization of concepts and abstractions. He spoke of them as if they were Greek Titans, with thoughts and goals of their own, distinct and set in opposition to one another.

At the root of it all Yockey saw two titanic ideas. From Imperium, page 115:

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men.

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism.

Yockey’s Ideas are not ideas, but have agency and causality. His intangible immaterial mystical philosophizing is “organic”, while man and his rationalism is “inorganic”.

Yockey’s twisting of the meanings of words goes beyond poetic license, beyond an honest attempt to describe the indescribable. He verges into mysticism, detached from reality and facts, and in some cases to the contrary.

Nationalism and racialism are related, connected, complementary. Not opposites.

As Northside commented previously:

Yockey exalts telos (ultimate purpose or state) in his cosmology, constructing his envisioned universe such that an “organic” causal life force (existential source or basis of existence) operates unilaterally upon the mean, “inorganic” stuff of observable experience, which he debases.

Do ideas drive men, or do men drive ideas? The truth, I think, is not one or the other but both. Yockey arrogated telos (and causality, agency) to Ideas, while denying it to people. But Yockey himself was a man driven by ideas, to promote his ideas.

What constitutes organic? The organic is the inorganic plus something else. Yockey might have described this something as Ideas. I say the something is consciousness, awareness, agency. Consciousness is what distinguishes human life from inhuman, not to mention non-life, the inorganic.

Returning to Yockey’s critique of Darwinism, page 69:

The human soul itself — known as the “brain” in the 19th century — is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man.

Yockey, like many critics of Darwinism, was apparently disturbed by the fact that man and monkey are biologically related, distant cousins. Similar like apples and oranges, the difference is consciousness – communication, coordination, history, culture.

It is understandable that Englishmen were the primary “social Darwinists”. Instrumental in deciphering the mechanics of life, of evolution, they naturally envisioned themselves as the result, the pinnacle of the process. This is more anthropic principle than anthropomorphism.

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions.

Yockey’s argument is even more applicable to his own faith in Ideas. Darwinism is based on science, a system farther from faith and closer to fact than any other man has yet devised.

In the first place, there is no “Struggle for existence” in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur

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are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be “struggle,” since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war.

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal-world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life.

Yockey anthropomorphized capitalism, though it is defined and driven by men. It does not have an existence or will of its own. Such things are constrained and shaped by the same forces, the same reality as the life from which it springs.

The “struggle for existence” is only a conscious struggle in man, who naturally projects his own awareness onto the unaware. Yockey does it himself when he imagines carnivores “spiritually equipped for war”.

The competition in nature is over limited resources. The rule in nature is feast and famine. The rabbits boom, then the coyotes boom, then the rabbits crash, and then the coyotes crash. Darwinism is an observation of the rules of the reality of life. Not just how the environment shapes and molds life, but also how various forms of life shape each other. This involves not only competition/predation, but also cooperation/symbiosis.

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the “unfit” died out to give place to the “fit.”

Fitness, in evolution, is not a moral or aesthetic value judgement. It is an objective metric: survival. Life fits its environment like clothes fit a body.

I suspect that Yockey’s lame arguments against Darwinism were based on by his misunderstanding and thus revulsion toward “survival of the fittest”. He was perhaps unwilling to face the fact that the jews have out-competed Whites, rule us, and are slowly killing us. The problem, as I see it, is not with Darwinism, or rationalism, or any philosophical clash, but the simple fact that Whites, relative to jews, are not conscious.