The Impact Of Genetic Science

HOW WILL THE great welfare state power structure come crashing down? Conservatives like to think that the change will come from our unceasing effort to discredit and replace the liberal hegemony with good common-sense conservative ideas and policies.

But maybe the impetus will come from an unexpected direction, from the belly of the beast. That is what John Derbyshire suggests in his review of New York Times science journalist Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, a genetic history of mankind. “[I]n the history of the human sciences, false trails and dead ends abound,” he writes. There’s been a lot of wishful thinking not supported by facts. But now that scientists have defined the human genome and are beginning to take it apart and understand it in detail, we can start to build a real human history. For conservatives, the delicious thing about developments in genetics is that

many of these results are subversive of the egalitarian, “blank slate,” Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the modern Western intelligentsia. A great superstructure of policies has been erected on the SSSM, in policy areas from education to immigration, from welfare to diplomacy. Countless academic, bureaucratic, journalistic, and political careers are invested in it, together with correspondingly stupendous amounts of money.

For it is the SSSM that provides the real underpinning of the power of the welfare state. Kick away that support, and maybe the whole thing would come tumbling down.

Of course, genetic science may destroy a lot of conservative wishful thinking, too. But we can take it, right?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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