nature red in tooth and claw

[lotesse]

Is Obama's change in stance on gay rights the rhetorical origin point of this "my views have evolved" language I keep hearing? I'm not sure I like the formulation. Not because of anything to do with civil rights or viewpoints or personal change, but because I feel like it muddies evolution as a term - and it's already an awfully murky one. It seems to me, looking over the history of evolutionary science & education, that the hardest thing for folks to grasp about natural selection is its inherent directionlessness. Biological evolution isn't a directional force. It has no teleology. In many ways, natural selection is in fact deeply random, species responding to the chaos of the environment. But it was awfully easy for Darwin to graft the Whig Theory of Progress onto species differentiation - the two ideas do have a certain resemblance - and I don't notice that we've cleared the tangle yet.

By describing the process of being educated out of regressive views as an "evolution," the president - and all the other leftist voices that have followed him in this, I'm looking at you Rachel Maddow - misframes the situation. Learning is not an evolutionary process, nor should social justice be; while evolution is a nonteleological system for survival, education and social justice are, in point of fact, both attempts at (semi?)linear improvement. (I hedge because I AM awfully fond of chaos and productive directionlessness, but no matter how unschool your schooling is it still does come with a clear end goal. But although it is possible to fail to learn, or to deliberately resist learning, nb that you can't escape evolution by burying your head in the sand. Failure to evolve is death - but not, um um um, not culpable death. Not the way that failures of social justice are culpable failures.) Framing progressive change in individual minds and hearts as an evolutionary process only further entrenches our cultural difficulty in really groking evolution as it is rather than in some sort of theistic Whiggish Just-So-Story sort of way, imo, and it also leaves room for oppressors to wiggle out of responsibility for their own views and ignorance.

Comments

[melannen]

....tbh, I have always read "my views have evolved" as said by politicians to mean "my views, lacking any actual direction, have altered randomly until I hit upon some that will probably increase my chances of survival in my current environment."

I agree with you about the ways "evolution" as a term is used, though, and the way our culture so very much wants it to be directed toward some higher goal.

[lotesse]

lol that it a far more technically accurate usage

if the phrasing does date back to Obama and his gay rights "evolution," well, sure shit he was squirreling. it's a big fat checkmark in my pro-Biden column that he set off the ammo dump the way he did with that one; it was a darn elegant application of gentle shaming.

I don't feel like it was a common phrasing before that? bt don't trust my memory. have to poke the google.

[msilverstar]

I think it's a common metaphor and better than creationism?