The Notion of Social Identity – What is it? How is it formed? and Why?

THE SCAFOLDING OF THOUGHT

The relationship people have with everything around them—indeed, everything in life, be it with a person, a thing, an event, or even the self—begins in a concept. This mental image of a person, a thing, or an event eventually becomes the grounding for what is known as rapid cognition. One can think of rapid cognition as a Rolodex. Preloaded with information, you use the information without thinking about it; all that is required is to spontaneously retrieve and use it. It is not necessary to think analytically or critically when using the information because one has, in advance, done all the thinking that was necessary to basically understand the information and apply it.

Perception, once formed, creates a resident tendency for quick, active, and intuitive cognition of the person, people, thing, or event being perceived. Perception leads to non-deliberate thoughtful decision-making or decision below the level of consciousness. It has been called “thinking without thinking”, and it ultimately leads to unconscious prejudice or similar behavior.

Perception derives from definition or determination. The Webster dictionary defines definition as “a statement expressing the essential nature of something.” ¹⁶⁵ Indeed, statements expressing the essential nature of something or someone are based on the intrinsic or artificial nature of the thing or person being defined. Stated differently, definition gives content or essence to the person, thing, or event being defined. The content conveyed by definition derives from the intent that precedes or underlies the definition. In other words, in definition, intent is prior to content. The essence of a person, people, or thing, as established by the content of their definition, could be the product of real (intrinsic) or imaginary (artificial) attributes.

Definition influences personality—by affirming it or by creating it. In definition, an attribute that becomes a great asset and advantage to some can become a great liability and disadvantage to others. Such is the case with the racial color codes that symbolize the identity of those defined as “White people” and those defined as “Black people” by virtue of skin color (which is hardly white or black) and the associations therewith. The late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of this reality in his now famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, when he said that people (individuals) should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters. I strongly believe that this admonition, in fact, prophetic injunction, has equal application to all people, including those defined as “White people”, even though it was made with regards to the so-called “Black people”.

Dr. King’s statement is a truism, an axiom, and as such, one with fidelity to the essence of humanity—an original truth, just as the premise for the Declaration of independence and enactment of the Constitution of the United States of America is a truism. Even though Martin Luther King’s statement was made with respect to the so-called “black people”, it has equal implication for those defined as “white people” even at the time it was uttered, though this implication was present only as a potential and was largely missed because it had little consequence with regards to the so-called “white people”, who were not being discriminated against on the basis of the color of their skin. In fact, it is perceived that skin color was synonymous with privilege or lack thereof.

Now that conducts of the day towards the so-called “black people” are viewed in a different light, one that is not associated with good virtue and with which people would not feel a sense of pride, honor, and privilege to be associated, the potential that was innate all along in Dr. King’s statement about color and character holds true for the “white man” and as it does for the “black man”, in the sense that the so-called “white people” should not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character—their conducts towards the so-called “black people”.

In the same sense, the great documents that established the United States of America—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—did not have the so-called “black people” in mind at the time of its scribing but were established with only the so-called “white people” in mind. Nevertheless, they contained the potential that can only be intrinsic in an axiom or a truism, hence the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America having come to equally apply to “black people” following the long march that was and is the civil rights movement.

I am fully aware that a mere mention of the phrase “white people” and “black people” risks leading readers to assume that this book is about racism. There is a heightened sensitivity associated with the subject of race and racism. The risks I allude to are attributable to the fact that these phrases are “traditionally” highly controversial and often inspire passionate sentiments, frequently acrimonious in nature, yielding no useful results and causing greater animosity and deep divisions. In view of this realization, I wish to emphasize that the book is not about race. It is particularly not about the so-called “Black people” and “White people”. However, it is about the process that leads to establishing the perceptions that inhabit those classifying phrases and the perceptions stemming from said phrases and that inspire aberrations of humanity, such as racism.

In view of the broad applications of these “terminologies”, one cannot ignore the sentiments that tend to accompany them. Perhaps, I might be able to disable that tendency, by noting that majority of those defined as “White people” has nothing to do with the definition that established that particular classification or consciousness; just as those defined as “Black people” have nothing to do with the definition that established the particular classification or consciousness they are associated with. Hence, any argument made against these terminologies is by no means an indictment of the people they are associated with. In a way, the aim of this book is to liberate and exonerate people, from this generation henceforth, from the pains and sins of the previous generations—liberate the so-called “black people” from an oppressive definition and exonerate the so-called “white people” from the burden of guilt associated with establishing that oppressive definition.

As you might have guessed, I happen to fall within the group defined as “Black people”, but many of my friends and many of the good people I know happen to fall within the group defined as “White people”. They have nothing to do with establishing the particular definition that they are subjected to, just as I have nothing to do with establishing the particular definition that I am subjected to. We are all victims of definition. Without question, there are more privileges associated with being “White” than with being “Black”. Nevertheless, as the term “Black” in referring to people of African descent is laden with negative and undesirable attributes, so also is the term “White” in referring to people of Caucasian descent. Bottom line is, as I would standup for a brother, so would I for a friend. It is not uncommon that we have a friend or neighbor who sticks closer than a brother and a brother who is as a foe. The lesson for us all is that in the eyes of justice, we should judge people as they are, not as they are portrayed and perceived by others.

Before going any further, it may be necessary to establish the focus of this work with respect to the subject matter. To put it differently, let me frame the context of the subject. The perspective that I express in this book is with regard to people’s relationships with other people, both as individuals within a group and as part of a group in relation to other people-groups. Henceforth, all references to definition shall be implicitly and otherwise in the context so stated (i.e. people’s relationship with one another—individually or as groups). Now that we know where we are going with this topic, let’s begin the journey.

Definition can determine the perceived essence of a person or people. The perceived essence, in turn, determines the value or worth attributable to the person or people. Consequently, definition does establish or enhance the essence of the person or the people defined. Equally, definition can suppress or destroy the true essence of a person or people defined. This reality has very powerful implications for human affairs and human relationships. At the core of these implications is psychic balance (esteem) — a basic element in human relations and wellbeing.

Psychic balance is the invisible foundation upon which every aspect of human relationship is constructed and maintained. This foundation is in turn seated on a certain fulcrum—conscience. The human element of conscience is defined as (1) “the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good” ¹⁶⁵ or (2) “a faculty, power, or principle enjoining good acts, sensitive regard for fairness or justice.” ¹⁶⁵ Since conscience exists to serve the sense of right and wrong, therefore it must derive from truth—the foundation (or basis) for determining right and wrong conduct or good and bad conduct.

Conscience cannot and should not derive from opinion or subjective facts—a product of definition. In short, conscience is the self-revealing moral compass that tells a person where he or she is with regards to their conduct and points the person in the direction he or she ought to be going. Of course, one may choose to ignore conscience, but it is still relevant and still applies in the fullness of dispensation, in spite of one’s action and the apparent results of that action.

Even the law can sometimes require people to disregard their conscientious objections (moral imperatives), by superimposing impious imperatives. In fact, such is the dispensation we live in—the age of legality, not the age of morality. That is why there are people doing things that would and clearly go against the human conscience, for example, the Payday Loans and other predatory lending industries, which charge down-and-out-people (people already in deep financial woes) exorbitant (morally prohibitive) interest rates—as high as 400%.

Subjugation of conscience is also the reason for people taking advantage of other people in need and people at a disadvantage—for example, the despicable trade in human trafficking and child pornography. The predators are able to subjugate their conscience by hiding under the umbrella of legality (as with the law) or the façade of rules (as with a system, say capitalism). Many of them admit that their conducts are morally reprehensible, as can be found in such statements as, “we know what we do is probably wrong, but it is legal” and “there are people who need our service”.

Legality is a product of definition, based on knowledge and intent, while morality is based on truth. We know that knowledge and intent can and do change, quite often indeed, but real truth is unchanging, as they are established on permanent facts. Laws can be enacted on the premises of false assumptions (false knowledge, even apparent or partial truth), and impious intents. On the other hand, conscience is based on truth. Not too long ago, people were bought and sold as slaves in America and Europe, because it was legal to do so at that time, even though people knew it was morally wrong. The law that permitted the conduct was motivated by a combination of impiety and false assumptions or false knowledge. That is precisely why people can no longer buy and sell other people (as slaves) in this day and age. In fact, it is illegal to do so.

Why was it legal to buy and sell people then, but illegal to do so now? Well, it is because the human conscience, a product of truth and unchanging referential meaning, prevailed and overturned the legality that was based on false assumptions or false knowledge. Even though the suppositions, as assumptions and “knowledge” or rather the lack thereof, upon which the laws in question were based have changed, the truth that contradicts those laws remains unchanged and the referential validity thereof remains active and undiminished. It is that unchanging truth that led to the changing of the laws that permitted immoral conducts, such as slavery and apartheid.

Conscience can and has been frequently displaced by definition. By virtue of the application of definition, conscience has often been confused with feeling (emotion) or self-interest. It is not the same as feeling or emotion. Feeling, according to the Webster Dictionary, is an emotional state or reaction—susceptibility to impression. The dictionary also defines feeling as “often unreasoned opinion or belief, or capacity to respond emotionally especially with the higher emotions” ¹⁶⁵. Feeling or emotion is a construct of particular dispositions and it is as variable as those dispositions.

The way one might feel about something today may not be the way he or she feels about the same thing tomorrow. For example, the way Americans felt about slavery and race in the seventeenth century is certainly not the way they felt about slavery in the twentieth century. Invariably, it is to be expected that the way Americans feel about abortion in the twenty-first century will not be the way they feel about it thereafter.

In fact, feeling and the expression of it have frequently involved the subjugation of conscience by means of definition. People have the tendency to define something to satisfy their intent or the feelings that drive the intent. Such inclination is depicted by the movie Kinsey—portraying Alfred Kinsey, a nineteenth century entomologist and counselor, who specialized in substituting conscience with emotional impetus, particularly unrestrained sexual urges and conducts. For example, a man or woman may have sexual desires for another person’s spouse and may on the impetus of that feeling engage in illicit sexual conducts, in spite of his or her conscience. Kinsey, who frequently engaged in wife swapping, group sex, as well as other promiscuous sexual practices, actively encouraged practices such as inter-marital sex, polygamy, and perhaps, even sexual contacts that borders on pedophilia. He claimed that such desires are natural impulses that should not be modified or hindered. In other words, Kinsey implied that any restraint of sexual desire is contrary to human nature and in effect oppressive and inhumane. By logical extrapolation, his claim could be extended to other negative emotions such as anger, fear, jealousy, and hatred.

The situation of emotion versus conscience could perhaps be illustrated with a certain song that lamented the dilemma faced by a woman “in love” or better stated, lusting after a man married to another woman. She decided that if being right or doing what was right, in other words, if complying with conscience means sacrificing one’s desires or feelings, then she would not want to be right. Of course, “being right” means acting according to the dictates of conscience—in her case, it would be to leave another woman’s husband alone. A similar situation confronted the antebellum southern United States of America—the era of slavery—in which case, being right meant setting the slaves free and ending segregation, but that would also mean the loss of economic power and privilege. In keeping with the preceding analogy, they subjugated their conscience by the definition they brought to bear on their conducts and on African-Americans.

When the fulcrum— (conscience) upon which psychic equilibrium rests, remains in balance, it leads to psychic harmony—mutual respect among people and peoples. When it becomes displaced, the result is psychic domination, which leads to social, political, economic oppression, and disenfranchisement. The presence of psychic equilibrium is key to peaceful coexistence; the absence of it is recipe for disasters—strife, hatred, enmity, wars, and destruction.

Self-respect and the respect a person receive from another person derives directly from the value or worth ascribed to the person. Equally, the respect a group of people accords itself, and the respect it receives from other people derive directly from the value or worth ascribed to the group. This in turn determines a person’s or people’s self-esteem. It also determines the essential attitude of people within a group towards themselves, their attitude towards other people within and outside their groups, and the attitude of other people-groups towards them. In the Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, Kenneth Clark wrote of “The Psychology of the Ghetto”, as follows:

Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth. Since every human being depends upon his cumulative experiences with others for clues as to how he should view and value himself, children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve no more respect from the larger society than they receive. These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self- and group-hatred, the Negro's complex and debilitating prejudice against himself. ⁹

These situations are all linked to perception and definition. In view of the profound implications of perception and definition, it is tremendously important that people define themselves rather than be defined by other people. People who have been defined by other people should, if I may borrow an expression from the incomparable Bob Dylan, “change their way of thinking and make themselves a different set of rules”.²⁴⁴ They should “put their good foot forward, and stop being influenced by fools”.²⁴⁴ In other words, they should develop what C.S. Lewis called “resistance thinking.”244

There are two fundamental facts that every conscious and reasonable person must know, regardless of what the person might have been told or led to believe. These are simple but important facts that make it a matter of necessity that people have the prerogative and the responsibility to define or determine who they are or who they become—philosophically and realistically.

The first reason or fact is that no one else knows you as much as you know yourself. So, if you think you know so little of yourself, you can be sure that no one knows you as much. In other words, everyone else knows even less or nothing about you. The second reason is that, fundamentally, no one else seeks your real interest more than you do. Hence, you are the best or most suitable person to represent and project those interests. Remember, the word “you” here refers to the operative phrase “conscious and reasonable person”.

Many people have been led to a false understanding of the virtue of humility and essence of providence. There is a certain timeless value and virtue in being humble and modest—not to think too highly of oneself or more than one ought. Nevertheless, we must also be cognizant of the natural tendency and attitude of humans towards other humans. For centuries, people have been led to accept the definition ascribed to them by others, in some cases regarding such definition as providential imperative, divine order, or scientific exactitude.

For too long, people have been forced to accept definitions imposed on them by others. Even today, many people have been led to believe that standing up for themselves— speaking up or speaking out and speaking for themselves—constitute a lack of virtue—self-aggrandizement. This misnomer has been conveyed in that uncertain proverbial phrase that we have all heard — “blowing one’s own trumpet” or “beating one’s own drum”. There is no question, modesty is a virtue, but timidity, subservience, and obsequiousness are not; indeed, the latter are vices.

Those who hypocritically peddle this notion of “virtue” use it as an instrument of domination and exploitation by defining themselves favorably and in ascendant glorious terms while defining others in pejorative and limiting terms. It was, that people were discouraged from speaking up for themselves and were mischaracterized as “blowing their own trumpets”, when they did. This notion essentially gave the wrong people the power to speak for others, and they often did, with malicious intents and deleterious motives—mischaracterizing others and taking advantage of them. As Dr. Ravi Zacharias said, “every interpretation is tangentially stated to satisfy the interpreter.” ²³⁷ Hence, definition, essentially being a form of interpretation, is in tangent with the definer’s motives.

We can illustrate this fact by borrowing from a certain story with which Dr. Zacharias illustrated the preceding quote. In paraphrase, the story is about a fugitive by the name of Hosea Rivera, who absconded with millions of dollars of stolen money. A bounty hunter, commissioned to find him and recover the stolen money, tracked Hosea to a bar in Mexico. The bounty hunter told the bartender that he was looking for Hosea Rivera, and the bartender identified a man sitting and drinking alone in a dimly lit corner. The bounty hunter walked over to the identified man and asked him if he was Hosea Rivera, to which the man sitting and drinking alone affirmatively nodded. Then the bounty hunter told him that he had come to recover all the money he had stolen, and if Hosea didn’t tell him where all the money was, he was going to shoot him in the head, right there and then.

However, the man identified as Hosea Rivera, did not understand a word of the bounty hunter’s threat. He did not understand nor spoke English, just as the bounty hunter did not understand nor spoke Spanish, so the bartender was called over to interpret to both men what each had said to the other. The story holds that Hosea Rivera, on hearing the demands and threats that accompanied it, said to the interpreter “Very well, tell the bounty hunter to walk outside, turn right, walk a certain distance to an old well, covering the well is a pile of stones, remove the stones and you will find all the money in the well.” The interpreter turned to the expectant bounty hunter and said, “He said go ahead and shoot.” Perhaps, this is merely a story, but it underscores the intent that precedes and underlies an interpretation.

Speaking of the dubiously canny and unpredictable tendency of the human intent, the Bible itself, in Jeremiah 17: 9-10, said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” ⁴⁹ who can understand it, but God. Therefore, leave your fate in no one’s hands except God’s and yours. Perhaps, in the realization of the abuse to which many people have been subjected due to mischaracterization, people are now encouraged and indeed expected to speak for themselves, because if they fail to do so, no one will speak for them as they ought to be spoken for. If we may use the trumpet analogy still, it would be to say that truthfully, no one can or would “blow another person’s trumpet better than his own or blow it accurately”.

Hence, people who resign to letting others speak for them may never be heard or heard justly. This is what participatory democracy or egalitarianism is all about. In fact, the First Amendment of the Constitution empowers people to speak for themselves, a necessary precursor to speaking on behalf of others.

To be clear, blowing one’s own trumpet, in the context it is used here, is not the same as unabashed self-promotion or propaganda that is all too common these days. However, now more than ever, there is a need for people to understand who and what they really are, not who or what someone else says they are. In our society, there is a tendency for people to feed off the definition and perception other people have of them, because that is how they have been taught , humans being socially interdependent by nature. Intrinsically, people value other people’s opinions of them. Numerous sociological and psychological studies prove this reality. It is a condition of our interconnectedness as humans—an essential part of humanity.

However, there is a crucial balance which needs to be maintained between how we view ourselves in own eyes and how we view ourselves in other people’s eyes. Unfortunately, there is the tendency for many people to derive their worth or esteem completely and directly from other people’s opinions. This has left many people without the proper knowledge of who they really are — a sad and tragic existence.

The ultimate way to achieve real and legitimate self-determination is through a direct personal relationship with God — the God that offers peace, life, and freedom to the world. Such relationship can only be consummated through his son Jesus Christ—the Prince of Peace, who gives life more abundantly, and truth that makes one truly free. All that one needs to do is to honestly investigate His claims and what He offers. In essence, it is critically important that people understand and see themselves the way God sees them. This is an absolute necessity in the struggle for self-determination and self-preservation. As Abraham Lincoln said, “It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.” ²⁴⁵

Similarly, it is easy to make a person or a people miserable when the true sense of self—their true identity, has been lost and while they feel unworthy of themselves and are ignorant of their kindred to the great God who made them. No one deserves to be cast in any image that is not truly his or hers, whether good or bad.

It has been shown that every interpretation is tangentially stated to satisfy the interpreter, hence even when someone speaks for someone else or blows that proverbial trumpet for someone else, it may not sound the way the owner wants it to sound, as good as it can sound, or the way it ought to sound. The way someone is portrayed by someone else is determined by several exigent and mitigating factors. It could be that the person speaking for you does not know you well enough to speak accurately of you or portray you as you truly are. It could also be that he or she does not want you to be perceived as good as you really are—perhaps equally good or better than he or she is.

The point to be made, however, is definitely not self-promotion; rather, it is to highlight the necessity for people to speak for themselves, to make their viewpoints and nature clearly known. Obviously, this sometimes leads to self-promotion and self-aggrandizement, but it is better to mischaracterize oneself rather than be mischaracterized by others. For the simple reason that it is better to promote oneself than demote another or be demoted by another, since self-promotion is also intrinsically self-correcting.

It is your right to define yourself; how you define yourself is another matter with a different set of implications. Psychology shows that many people with superiority complex, nearly always, have certain inadequacies, inferiority complexes veiled with the superiority complex they exude—excessive projection or over-promotion of self. It is equally true that others create a superiority complex for themselves by creating inferiority complexes in other people. It is a classic case of casting someone in a bad light so that another can look good at the expense of the one that is made to look bad.

The implication of the prerogative of self-definition and self-determination is that even if people have established an exaggerated or false definition for themselves, they still have to live up to that definition. This is what I meant by self-definition being self-correcting. Whether they succeed or fail is of much less consequence than being subjected to a pernicious definition or characterization by others. In the latter case, to emerge from such definition, the people so defined are still compelled to depend on those who imposed the definition in the first place for approval or affirmation.

The point to be made here is that it is much more difficult to emerge from a bad image and much easier to lose a good image. A person who has been falsely accused has more to lose and a greater difficulty redeeming himself in the court of public opinion than someone who is guilty and has never been charged and rightly judged. Everyone knows that in the court of public opinion, there is no presumption of innocence for anyone accused of a crime or portrayed negatively.

It has been said that self-definition is inescapably self-correcting, as numerous doping Olympic and professional athletes and lip-sync pop stars have all failed to live up to the image or definition they had sought for themselves. On the other hand, an imposed definition is not self-correcting but largely dependent on those who imposed it be lifted. Such is the case with people who have been defined negatively or people who have been given a negative image by others, for example, the so-called “black people”.

The definition of a person or people is fundamental to the essence of the person or people defined. It sets boundaries for those defined and often determines the options and opportunities available to people. There is power in the spoken word. The Holy Bible says, “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (Proverbs 18:21). ⁴⁹ All through history, people have sought to dominate, reject, and oppress others for selfish and impious motives. People who have been defined by others are often or usually at disadvantages that put them in vulnerable positions or in positions of weakness—unable to claim or defend their rights. Examples of such people include abused children, abused wives, orphans and widows in some societies, aborted babies, euthanatized elderly, and people stricken with “terminal illness” (such as Terri Schiavo), poor people, conquered people, oppressed people, people without rights, people without privileges, etc.

In general, people who cannot assert their rights, either because they have not acquired the capability to assert their rights or have lost the ability to assert their rights, are all frequently defined by those who possess the means to do so. Either the victims do not have the means to present a definition of who they are, or they have been compelled to accept the definition ascribed to them. Often, they are constrained to believe that they do not possess the knowledge, intellect, or other abilities to define themselves, that someone else knows better.

On the other hand, those who have defined or attempted to define others have done so from a position of advantage, power, control, or influence. It could be as with a parent repeatedly telling an abused child that he or she will never amount to anything, that he or she is unworthy, unwanted, an accident, stupid, foolish, or “a monster”, hence leading the child to believe that he or she is worthless, unlovable, and undesirable. It could also be as with an employer or a ruler subjecting his employees or subjects to humiliation and servitude. It is particularly so in the case of the definition of people groups (“races”) where people concertedly act towards a particular group of people in ways that suggest that they are inferior. Race definition, also known as racial formation, is a socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Richard T. Schaefer wrote:

Those in power define groups of people in a certain way that depends on a racist social structure. The Native Americans and the creation of the reservation system in the later 1800s would be an example of this racial formation.⁸⁰

Schaefer made a sobering and ominous observation as to the far-reaching power of racial formation. He said, “No one escapes the extent and frequency to which we are subjected to racial formation”. ⁸⁰

In the antebellum south, an example of social construction of race was known as the “one-drop-rule.” This tradition stipulated that if a person had even a single drop of “Black blood”, that person was defined and viewed as “Black”. Today, children of biracial or multiracial marriages try to build their own identity in the United States that seems intent on placing them in some single traditional category. ⁸¹

Such harmful definitions of race stem from one of two dispositions. The first is hatred, especially stemming from narcissism—a bizarre satisfaction derived from mistreating others. The second is the desire to exploit other people for the exploiter’s own narcissistic interests. These are, in large measure, the focus of this book, because they are largely relevant to the context of the subject.

The essential purpose of defining people is to create two sets of consciousness, in other words, to establish two sets of realities. The first set of realities is to put limitations on those defined and create a demarcation to exclude them and constrain them to accept such definition as providence or inevitability. The second set of realities is to subjugate the conscience of the one who defines, in order to create a disposition that justifies or rationalizes his actions, however reprehensible and contrary to reason they may be, for example the mistreatment of those they defined.

The definition of people by other people has fundamental implications. Definitions such as “race” establish attitudes of racial superiority and inferiority, prejudice, and bigotry. These attitudes ultimately evolve into an institutionalized system of discrimination, exclusion, deprivation, and oppression based on superficial and imposed qualities or characteristics, such as skin color and other racial definitions, and sentiments associated with race definition—superiority and inferiority complex, prejudice and bigotry. Through the ages, definition has been used as an instrument of domination, exclusion, and oppression.

Such definitions also bring about racial and cultural aggression, all of which are highly destructive to the people so defined. This is particularly true of Native Americans and African Americans, who have experienced the extreme impact of definitions that inspired and established racism and cultural aggression towards them.

Historically, the definition of people, such as race or race definition, constitutes a system of special privileges and benefits. It guarantees psychological, symbolic, and material rewards for those who have successfully defined others to exclude those they have defined from the benefits of privilege. At the risk or repetition, the emphasis is warranted, that the purpose of defining people is to establish a system of privilege, designed to exclude or include them.

Definition has been used and is still being used as a servo and strategy to divide, exploit, and destroy people. Such is the color complex associated with dark-skinned people, particularly Africans and the Aboriginal people. Increasingly, poor and low wage working “class” people are subjected to similar treatments or mistreatment, albeit without the destructive power of the presuppositions that inhabit racial definitions, yet nonetheless deleterious.

Definitions, such as the one borne by the Darwinian “theory of evolution”, create and infuse a destructive state of consciousness in a society. For example, the Darwinian theory of evolution established the notion that humans are basically animals; therefore, the human existence is essentially survival of the fittest—the quintessential extreme capitalist paradigm of eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated. Darwin himself, so stated in his book On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. ¹⁴ The notion of biological evolution, at least, as Darwin propounded, is the most pernicious idea ever conceived by man to relegate and destroy the people excluded by that definition—the so-called non-favored races.

Darwin’s idea has inspired the worst atrocities and most heinous acts of man’s inhumanity to man that the world has ever seen, and it continues to plague and afflict the world like no other plague known to man. It is largely responsible for the intractable social problems confronting the world today and has been a constant threat to world peace and stability. It is the foundation of the growing human moral insensitivity and the linchpin of the old vice which has become the new “virtue” — greed. The callousness that prevails in the world today and the justification for social and economic inequality are largely the result of Darwin’s definition. Those, who by virtue of this definition believe that they are at advantage (favored by nature), are all too eager to embrace this philosophy and to live by it. Indeed, it is a religion.

In his article “Biological Science and the Root of Nazism”, George J. Stein states that the core idea of Darwinism was not evolution but selection (“Evolution … describes the results of selection”104); even the most ardent evolutionists, such as David Quammen and Richard Dawkins, agree. There is no question, Darwin’s philosophy inspired contemporary racism, the worst of which was committed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. In fact, Sir Arthur Keith, one of the foremost evolutionists, believed that Hitler, by his actions, was part of the “natural forces” of evolution — essentially moving the evolutionary process along, indeed hastening the process. He wrote, “The German Fuehrer … consistently sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.” ¹⁵⁴

Keith also wrote:

The leader of Germany is an evolutionist, not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him, the national “front” of Europe is also the evolutionary “front;” he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people. ¹⁵⁴

Perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from the “monster” he had helped create, to extricate and exculpate himself from the disastrous atrocities conceived and nurtured by Keith and his peers, the so-called scientists of the day, and unleashed on humanity, Keith was quoted as saying:

If war be the progeny of evolution — and I am convinced that it is — then evolution has “gone mad”, reaching such a height of ferocity as must frustrate its proper role in the world of life — which is the advancement of her competing “units”, these being tribes, nations, or races of mankind. There is no way of getting rid of war save one, and that is to rid human nature of the sanctions imposed on it by the law of evolution. Can man […] render the law of evolution null and void? […] I have discovered no way that is at once possible and practicable. “There is no escape from human nature.” Because Germany has drunk the vat of evolution to its last dregs, and in her evolutionary debauch has plunged Europe into a bath of blood that is no proof that the law of evolution is evil. A law, which brought man out of the jungle and made him king of beasts, cannot be altogether bad.156

If this was a sign of remorse, it was a shameful and pathetic contrition. However, I am inclined to believe that it was not. Keith’s ideology was patently evil; it was evident even in his veiled attempt to distance himself from the ultimate executor of his ideas. Keith may have sought to distance himself from the messenger but not from the message, a message he, perhaps more than any other man, articulated and promoted to the detriment and destruction of millions of people, be it by war or by abortion. In the light of justice, he is just as culpable as those who by the impetus of the ideology he helped shape have murdered millions of people.

There can be no doubt that Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) was inspired by Darwin’s writings, particularly the theory of evolution. In fact, it is believed that the title was taken from (or was inspired) by Darwin’s subtitle, “Struggle for Existence”, and by Ernst Haeckel, the chief German advocate of evolution), who published a book in 1905, titled, Der Kampf um den Entwicklungs-Gedanken (“The Struggle over Evolutionary Thinking”). Abraham Foxman wrote in the introduction to the Ralph Manheim’s translation of Hitler’s book, “Many of the ideological themes of Mein Kampf were embraced to varying degrees by groups in Germany, Europe, and even the United Sates before Hitler wove them together to form the foundations of National Socialism”. ⁴⁷

Perhaps next to the Alfredo Rosenberg’s 1930 The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Mein Kampf, revered by every active racist, topped the list of the ‘must read’ literatures for white supremacist groups, even the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and Muslims extremists. It has been the inspiration for all active hate-groups, particularly white supremacists all over the world.

There is no question that Nazism sought to exterminate people defined as “inferior races” — Jews, Gypsies, Slovaks, dark skinned people, and other Caucasians who did not meet the criteria for the definition of the “ideal white race”. There is equally no doubt that Nazism built upon the foundation of Darwinism. In fact, Darwin himself wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes [. . .] will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro [sic] or Australian and the gorilla.²⁴⁷

Referring to the Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Harvard University’s Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”²⁴⁹ Abraham Foxman wrote in his introduction of Ralph Manhein’s translation of Mein Kampf what many people, including scientists and scholars such as Gould, have always known. Manhein notes:

“When coupled with nationalism, racial (social) Darwinism led to the development of national stereotypes; thus, educated people at the end of the nineteenth century could seriously claim that the distinctive cultural characteristics of the English, French, Americans, and Germans were biological. Eugenics movements with the goal of improving national or racial “stock” through selective breeding (which later became inextricably linked with the Nazi regime in popular perception) arose in England, Scandinavia, and the United States.” ⁴⁷

The eugenics drumbeats are again sounding, as we have seen in recent past with the Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray along with other racists masquerading as scientists. History, arts, science, religion, and culture have all been implicated in the effort to act on the desire to dominate others. Of course, this is by no means a blanket indictment of these institutions. It is, however, to suggest that we must be cognizant of the continued attempts throughout the history of man to exploitatively employ these institutions to dominate, control, exclude, exploit, and destroy others.

It must be clearly understood that the essential nature and purpose of the disciplines of history, arts, science, and religion are not the end to which they have been so frequently employed. The illegitimate application of these social entities is vividly illustrated by Napoleon’s notion of history, as “a set of lies that people have agreed upon.”¹⁷⁸ Napoleon’s sentimental conviction and his intent to manipulate history to render what he desired was evident in his statement, “even when I am gone, I shall remain in people's minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes.”¹⁷⁸ One could argue that the same is true of virtually all people who have sought to dominate others.

Clearly, Napoleon’s assessment fittingly describes Darwin, whose name has become the “war cry” for the efforts of those driven by the same pre-suppositional framework that drove Darwin, for those in agreement with his philosophy. He has become “the motto of their hopes”, whose set of lies they agree upon as the vehicle for what Aldous Huxley¹⁴⁸ described as “simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality,” the morality that interferes with their “sexual freedom”.

The worst atrocities man has committed against fellow man has been inspired not so much by religion, science, culture, and history, but by people who bear and act in the name of religion, science, history, and culture, those who claim authority in the name of religion, science, culture, and history for purposes other than the essential truth of these institutions. Their deviation from the essential truth and nature of the institutions they claim to represent has culminated in the birth of vicious ideologies, such as the Darwinian philosophy (“theory of evolution”), xenophobia, and intolerance.

The so-called theory of evolution is indeed the root of contemporary racism. Though it may have drawn inspiration from a certain philosophy, it seems to have indirectly, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced the eastern philosophical beliefs that established the caste class systems. The “theory of evolution” is a direct contradiction and a frontal assault on Christianity and the foundations of the United States’ Constitution.

In fact, many of the ardent proponents (mostly atheistic and humanistic academics) of Darwinism have clearly indicated that they would not have supported the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Because, they do not believe in the central premise of the document—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The aberrant humanistic thinking epitomized by Darwin’s philosophy has robbed many people of their true self and decimated the world in substance and in essence.

To borrow a famous quote from the great Abraham Lincoln, in paraphrase, this book is an effort to essentially bring all people to the realization that some of us have been fooled all the time, all of us have been fooled some of the time, but we all should not and must not be fooled all the time. This book is a twelve-chapter volume that seeks to lift the veil, to reveal the philosophy and intents underlying the definitions and perceptions which have established the individual and group identities to which we have all been subjected. It also seeks to establish the direct connection of the world’s most intractable problems — racism and other forms of bigotry – to those definitions and perceptions. In establishing this connection, however, the ultimate goal is to inspire people to change these aberrant ways of thinking.

Let us illustrate the theme of this book with something everyone can relate to —a name. Imagine going to a gathering or an event with friends or colleagues. At the event, everyone identified themselves, gave their names, said who they were and what they do for a living—essentially who are they are and what their life is about. When it was time for you to introduce yourself, someone else got in front of you and introduced you as someone and something you are not. Would you remain mute and allow the definition you have thus been given to stand? It is very likely you would not. Why then are many people allowing an even greater wrong to be done to them, by continually failing to speak up for themselves, in the face of such wrongs, thereby condemning themselves to life-limiting mischaracterization and misperceptions?

Definition, classification, or naming is central to one’s identity; everyone knows that a person is identified through use of the name. When asked to identify someone or something, we are expected to name or categorize the person or thing. “Naming assigns ‘words of identity’, which form part of the appearance of self (Stone 1962: p. 93)”, remarks James Valentine in his paper “Naming the Other: Power, Politeness, and the Inflation of Euphemisms.”²²⁵ He goes on to reference Anselm Strauss of Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity: “Strauss notes the centrality of language in general, and names in particular, in fixing identity and marking its changes (Strauss 997: pp. 17 - 19).”²²⁵ Names can therefore demonstrate achievement, privilege, or inclusion. Even so, names are also ascribed, and can be imposed on recipients against their will to demonstrate subjugation, lack of privilege, or exclusion—the naming of people of African descent as “black”, for example. Such names, as with the labels indicated by the labeling theory, are difficult to get rid of.

In some cases, names may be denied to people, as with the exclusion of the descendants of American slaves from citizenship—denying them the identity inherent in the classification or identification known as “American”. This situation is etched in the memory of the nation by the infamous 1857 United States Supreme Court decision led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, which declared in the case now known as the Dred Scott case, that all “blacks”—slaves as well as free—were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The Supreme Court decision stems from the recognition that names establish claims or entitlement to being. It is a proclamation of who we are and who we are not—self and others. African Americans were deemed unworthy of the claims and entitlements embodied by the title or name “American”, hence excluded from citizenship and the most basic rights. As I indicated before, unborn children are now subjected to similar treatment, whereby they are denied the most basic title or name “human beings” or “people”, hence excluded from the most basic claims and entitlements: the right to live.

Valentine in his article writes:

In definitions of self, the other is at least implicitly identified, just as defining the other implicitly characterizes self. Ricoeur notes that ‘the Other is not only the counterpart of the Same but belongs to the intimate constitution of its sense’ (1992: p. 329), and focuses on the way in which the other is incorporated into the self (strongly reminiscent of a symbolic interactionist perspective) through identification in or with others (1992: p. 121). Contrastive identification, of us against them, is just as significant. The often, implicit nature of this opposition means that self can be left unspecified, can go unnamed, even while basking in the reflection of a negatively constituted other. ²²⁵

A common example of this can be found in the relative, qualified, or group identification that is now uniquely American, whereby every American is identified by his or her ethnic origin, except the so-called “White people” or “White Americans”. In this definition of the other, the explicit specification of self, in this case, the dominant “White people”, is not required for that self to gain status and distinction. However, we must also acknowledge that there is another perspective or dynamic to this definition or ethnic qualifier (hyphenated identity). In America and indeed all Western society, which is increasingly becoming multicultural, new immigrants are often the force driving this definition or identity, because they view their ethnicities or religions that have become incorporated to qualify their identity as empowerments.

Nowhere is this more apparent and problematic than in the identity of Muslims in Western societies, in that Muslims completely reject the prospects of integrating into the Western society, because of the diametrical nature of Islam to the Western ideals and way of life. Others fear assimilation because it “would lead to loss of their distinct ancestral cultural identity”, which would imply colonization or cultural defeat by assimilation. Therefore, they resort to establishing cultural colonies in the Western societies, aided by multiculturalism and political correctness. Ultimately, the resulting definition, which by the way; is the subject of my previous book (Tribalizing America: The Emerging National Identity Crisis) holds a potentially dangerous outcome for Western societies, as already emerging all over Europe in the evidentiary culture clash or clash of ideas. However, as Valentine notes:

“Those who distinguish have the distinction of not being explicitly distinguished. In the same way, the most authoritative systems of classification are those that are taken as natural rather than constructed: the other is incorporated into ‘a natural order of disorder’ (Foucault 1981: p. ⁴⁴). Boundaries and limits are most effective when taken for granted, sensed rather than specified: 'The sense of limits implies forgetting the limits’ (Bourdieu 1986: p. 470). Identification of the other upholds the boundaries without the need to make direct reference to boundaries or self.

Just as names may place the self, they may locate the other in terms of a wider or narrower scope of belonging. This belonging is not necessarily conceived through relationships, a community defined by interaction. In place of interactional identification, a physical or behavioural attribute may be accorded definitional primacy in characterizing who ‘they’ are. Here names encapsulate the other’s identity in terms of key characteristics: the key unlocks the essence of being, summing up all that it is necessary to know. Such knowledge is of course linked to power.” ²²⁵

Naming, as definition, is a form of power. “The named is already bound, confined within limits, though these may mark an exclusive circle or excluded fringe.” A name may be a prerequisite not only for social position, as with the English paternalistic system of feudalism, but also for social action and political solidarity, as in the emerging America group identity. The power of names to impose recognition of one’s identity upon others has been known for a long time, as many philosophers and social scientists, notably Pierre Bourdieu, the acclaimed French sociologist, have documented. Equally significant is the power to impose others’ identity upon them as well as the power to deny names for oneself or others, as highlighted by the Dred Scott case.

THE ORIGIN OF DEFINITION

When, where, and how did the practice of definition begin? Depending on the evidence—historical, scientific, or other—that one may choose to consider, one may arrive at any conclusion as to the origin of the concept of definition. Nevertheless, as with any analysis and synthesis of historical evidence, such conclusions may or may not be accurate, at least not necessarily. In considering the question of the origin of definition and perhaps the origin of life or the universe, one cannot escape the fact that all answers are historical. No one was there when it all began, and no one was outside the phenomenon or process that brought about life or the universe, to see it unfold and to see how it unfolded.

Even believers in the so-called Big Bang theory, as the ultimate starting point —a theory that rests exclusively on the laws of physics—agree that the theory ultimately breaks down when confronted with the question of what preceded the big bang and consequently set the stage for it. Beyond the point of particularity, the laws of physics—the same laws that exclusively explain the theory—cease to apply. In view of this deficiency in physics to explain the theory, the efforts unavoidably resort to historical explanation, i.e., geological and paleontological evidence used to support the claims of the Big Bang theory. Such pieces of evidence are historical indices or historical indicators. Of course, there is also the philosophical explanation, and we shall see how it applies to our purposes herein.

As with the question regarding the origin of the universe, in deciding where to look for answers to the question of the origin of definition, let us choose another source of historical evidence—the biblical account in the book of Genesis. The choice of drawing information and inference from the book of Genesis was not driven by faith, as some might imagine, but necessarily by the preponderance of historical evidence and objective reasoning, yet in history and reason, faith may lie.

The Bible is as much a factual historical document as it is a set of religious instructions. It is not merely articles of faith as some people like to say. After all, out of history, lessons are learned and instructions are derived, as a guide for the future. The works of ancient historians such Philo and Josephus, among many others, attest to the historical validity of the Bible. I understand that referencing the Bible in a subject that perhaps falls within the bounds of “intellectual argument” might alienate some readers and may in itself become the convenient excuse for those who have customarily, though not objectively, dismissed such legitimate arguments as presentations of articles of faith, hence dubiously avoiding the issue.

Parenthetically, genuine faith and reality are not contrary to each other. Genuine faith (not wishful thinking) is indeed reality. We exercise faith every time we board an airplane, ride in a car, sit on a chair, eat something, drink something, take medicine, depend on someone. This is because we do not normally investigate the validity of what we know to be fundamentally true about these entities or their ability to perform their functions each time we use or depend upon them. Rather, based on knowledge, experience, or revelation, we develop expectations and reliance on these things. We may as a matter of necessity periodically investigate them to assess (?) their conditions, because they are susceptible to several factors, hence the variability of their functional validity. But we do not frequently investigate their essence or their functions, which is well-established and understood. For example, we don’t expect a car to fly or analgesic to cure eye defects, because their functions are given and understood. Hence, we don’t investigate their efficacy in those regards.

I recognize that there are readers (many of them, the scientists) who belong to the school of thought that has customarily dismissed valid arguments that reference the Bible, those who resort to convenient escapism, by claiming that any argument that references the Bible is an article of faith. All I can say to them at this point is that perhaps it is comforting to know that the decision to refer to the Bible with regards to the origin of definition, was driven by logic, rather than faith. Even though one is a man of faith, one is equally a man of reason, and at that, every human is a being of faith, whether or not one chooses to describe oneself in that term, is irrelevant.

Ultimately, all humans must have faith—faith in something or someone. It could be a humanistic type of faith, such as faith in one’s own individual abilities, faith in someone else (e.g. a political or military leader), faith in a system or an idea (e.g. technology, democracy, capitalism, etc.), faith in the material (e.g. matter) and material possession (e.g. wealth). It could also be theistic type of faith (faith in God), faith in an object, such as a chair, a bridge, medicine, an automobile or an airplane. Ultimately, faith comes from knowledge or perception thereof, and knowledge comes from experience or revelation. But that is a discussion for another time and place.

In the book of Genesis, it is said that God named the first man “Adam” and vested in him the authority to name all of God’s other creations. So, Adam gave names to all cattle, and to all fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. ⁴⁹ Again, I am aware that some people do not accept the Bible, for “lack of scientific evidence”, as a valid source of scientific evidence. This is an ongoing debate, which we will not be drawn into here; nevertheless, let us reference it as a historical document or a version of history, whatever you prefer, and let the end decide.

In giving Adam the responsibility of naming and thus defining the animals and all of God’s creations, God delegated the authority over those creations to humans. According to the Holy Bible, such authority derives from the nature of humans and God’s purpose for humans, having made humans “in his own image.”⁴⁹ Hence, the responsibility that God gave humans through Adam is a divine impartation of authority — the evidence of mankind’s kindred with his maker, having been made in God’s image. (Gen. 1:27-28) ⁴⁹

The act of naming (i.e. defining or classifying) the animals and all of God’s creation shows mankind’s lordship or dominion, in the manner that God had exercised over all his creations, including the first human—Adam himself. It was also an exercise to set Adam and humankind apart from all of God’s other creations. The Bible says that whatever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof. ⁴⁹ In essence, by defining everything God had created, except himself, Adam exercised authority and control over them. That authority is manifest in the possession, stewardship, and perhaps ownership thereof.

Naming is basically a form of definition — a means of classification and identification. A name is not only a means of reference or identification; it also has a symbolic and psychological significance. This is true in almost every culture of the world, especially older societies. The name “Adam” that God supposedly gave to the first human is derived from the Hebrew word adamah, which means ground. Therefore, Adam literally stands for “earth man”. This identifies Adam by symbolically tying him to the substance from which he was made, his physical origin, so to speak. It specifically applies to Adam, the first human, and to humankind in general, since Adam was a historical person and the father of all humans.

However, it is important to understand the difference between the symbolism of the physical material (earth) from which Adam was made and the substantiveness or enduring nature of the true essence of which Adam was made. We shall revisit the application of this difference and its implications in subsequent chapters.

To relate to, master, and control their environment, human beings need information, and the information has to be organized — processed and stored in an orderly fashion. In general, organizing information is done through classification or categorization. Classification or categorization derives directly from definition. They are perhaps one and the same, as it were.

As with Adam, after seeing enough instances of a particular thing, take for example a bird, humans form a classification in which any given object is either a bird or not. Therefore, given a new object, let’s assume it a cow, a judgment is made based on existing classification, in this case birds, to determine whether the new object (i.e. the cow) is a bird or not. Similarly, judgment regarding particular human conducts and physical forms are also made based on existing classifications of those attributes. This judgment is based on the established or identifiable characteristics of pre-existing classifications. ⁶⁹

As much as naming the Other is a means of identification of the one named, it is also a means of establishing definitions of self—of the ones who name. It has been noted that definitional power is socially distributed; there is the power of definition exerted through and by expert classifications, mainly science. This has been called “classifications of marginality” by social scientists. An example of this type of classification is the definition of people of African ancestry as “Black people”. Sometimes, especially in response to the power of protest (a reactionary type of power of definition), etiquette, or political correctness, crudely disparaging classifications, such “black” or “nigger” are exchanged for more innocuous euphemisms, such as “Negro” or “colored”. Nevertheless, the power of the “Other” to escape labeling or naming is by nature unequal or deficient in definitional power and the resources that lend power to definition, as is with the definitional power of the “mainstream”.

In modern times, it was perhaps Swedish botanist Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnaeus) who first classified living things into subgroups. However, classifications were at the time reasonably self-consistent because they were based on observable attributes. Dr. Karl Eklund, in a paper titled “Race and Racism”¹²⁹, noted that Linne divided the human species into subgroups based on visually observed characteristics, such as skin color and geographical distribution, “but it was always clear to scientists that we were one species because we had no problem interbreeding.”¹²⁹

Dr. Eklund also wrote, “It has become customary to refer to these subgroups of our species as ‘races’ although there has never been any research that showed significant genetic differences between the ‘races’.”¹²⁹ There have now been several research studies on the human genome, and all show that there are no significant genetic differences between the so-called races.

In general, the act of classification groups similar things (e.g. objects, behavior, phenomena, processes, etc.) together for referential purposes. Obviously, there are many reasonable ways to define similarity and therefore many alternative classifications for the same things, thus leading some people to argue that there is no better or “right” way, and by implication, no wrong way, to classify things.

However, those many methods of classification or definition have frequently been contradictory. Since no two contradicting statements can be both true at the same time, in the same sense, the many reasonable methods of definition and classification may not be equally valid for the same purposes. No idea can be right and wrong, good and bad, at the same time in the same context. This is logically impossible.

Nevertheless, in the contemporary context of definition and classification, the intended application of a particular definition (hence a particular classification) is an integral part of deciding what properties the definition and classification should be based on. In other words, classification is frequently arbitrary and always intended to satisfy a pre-suppositional framework. It is tangential to the predisposition of the classifier (definer). That is to say that a definition is tangentially stated to satisfy the definer’s motives.

The intended application of a definition or classification is the motive for such definition or classification. History shows this motive to be frequently self-serving and exploitative. It has long been recognized that naming is fundamental to identity, in the symbolic interactionist tradition, which is fundamental in all societies. The collective construction of self or the identity of self against others and the role of naming in contrastive identification has been well documented and known to exist mainly to marginalize others. Therefore, some people are commonly defined in favorable and upgrading terms and other people are defined in unfavorable and degrading terms. The most obvious example is the definition and classification of some people as lesser humans than others or inferior to those who defined them. A case in point is the Australian Aborigines and African slaves between the seventeenth and eighteenth century and now unborn humans.

The aberrant application of definition is also evident in the definition or classification of different people groups in relation to the attributes that society associates with particular colors. For example, the colors black and white have profound symbolic significance in the definition of people of African origin as “Black” and the people of European origin as “White”. The ultimate purpose of these definitions or classifications is to establish exclusive privileges based on particular pre-suppositional frameworks and to exclude some people from those privileges by virtue of their color code.

The essence of the definition of people as symbolized by the color codes of white and black was in associating those defined as white with all that is pure and good or perceived to be so and those defined as black with all that is impure and bad or perceived to be so. The purpose of this definition was to effectively establish the mechanism of exclusion, control, and domination. This same warped reasoning is now being applied to support abortion. In the era of slavery, it was first argued by those who defended and promoted the practice that Africans were not quite (or fully) humans; therefore, they could not be accorded human rights (and cannot be respected or treated as full human beings), the same recognition and rights that Europeans enjoyed.

Later on, when those who presented the argument could no longer support them in the face of mounting evidence proving the contrary, they invented another lie, which was that “Africans bred people for the same reason that Europeans and Americans bred cattle”. In the other words, people in American and Europe argued that slavery was legal, because, as they claimed, “Africans bred people intentionally to sell them into slavery or as livestock”.

Akin to this warped view, we have people all over the world making the same set of arguments in an astonishingly similar manner. First, they claim that an unborn child is not a human being—that it is, by definition, only a mass of tissue or a fetus—a euphemism for Darwin’s characterization of the human embryo as a reptilian progenitor of the human being. Of course, no one would accept that at some point during the nine months of pregnancy, he or she was a reptile or a bird or monkey; this is why the evolutionist will not present the claim as it really is.

The main rationale for abortion stems from the belief in Darwinism, and to those who support abortion, it is merely the killing of the animal resembled by the embryo at the point of an abortion, rather than the killing of a human being. By 2006, when this manuscript was completed, the number of pre-birth babies killed in the grisly business of abortion was an astounding 30 million and counting in the United States of America alone.

Darwin’s claim is that the human embryo passes through stages resembling those of the embryo of a reptile, suggesting that the stages signify closely allied species in succession. According to David Quammen, in his article in the National Geographic magazine, ‘Darwin wrote, “The embryo is the animal in its less modified state” ⁶⁶ and that state “reveals the structure of its progenitor.” ⁶⁶ This claim would imply that a particular stage in a nine-month pregnancy (e.g., one month or a trimester) is equivalent to the period (millions of years) it supposedly took a species to evolve to another. Hence, the nine months required for a human being to develop is essentially equivalent to millions of years it purportedly took for evolution (perhaps, from amphibious reptile to human) to occur. In other words, the nine-month period is essentially millions of years compressed, to a very high factorial or order of magnitude.

The argument for abortion is silly and infinitely disingenuous since we know that the only thing that determines the definition given to the unborn child is the choice the mother makes. If the mother chooses to keep the child, the “fetus” automatically becomes a baby, regardless of the stage in its development, one month or nine months, deserving love and protection. But if the mother chooses to discard the baby, then the child automatically becomes a mass of tissue, not deserving of love and protection.

The so-called choice to accept or reject people by virtue of definition is essentially a decision to exclude people from rights and privileges and by consequence render them expendable —marked for exploitation and destruction. As it was with the Jewish Holocaust in Germany, slavery and lynching of Africans in America, the rationale for abortion is baseless, a baselessness that is becoming increasingly apparent. It is hypocritical and contrary to reason. As with slavery, in which no slave owner or trader would imagine or bear the thought of being a slave, everyone engaged in the gruesome business and practice of abortion admits the abstract wrong of abortion.

This is evident in their quest for life and their great aversion to live life encumbered with any constraint or restraint, such as the responsibility of caring for a child. No abortionist or the so-called pro-choice supporters can honestly say that abortion would have been a good thing, had they been treated likewise under similar circumstances. I am yet to see anyone who would say that it would have been a good thing, had he or she been aborted by his or her own mother during pregnancy.

Hence, being more and more weary of the insincere arguments for abortion, some of the proponents are steadily changing the rationale for abortion. Now, they are increasingly accepting the fact that an unborn child is fully human. Nevertheless, they contend that the unborn child is not accorded the same legal protection as post-birth humans (humans that made it beyond the womb). They have even gone as far as claiming that this is an order established by God, purporting that they made this deranged deduction from the book of Genesis (Gen. 2:7).⁴⁹ Their “logic”, if this warped reasoning can be called that, is that since the unborn child does not breathe through the nostrils (i.e., on its own), it has no soul; therefore, it cannot be regarded as a full human being and cannot be accorded the same legal protection that God established for post-birth humans.²³¹ This notion is built on the same logical premise underlying the ruling on the Dred Scott case, in America not too long ago, in an attempt to keep Africans in indefinite slavery and exclusion.

These people believe that only the ability to breathe through the nostrils makes a person human. For them, this is the litmus test for determining who is considered human and who is not. By implication, this would suggest that people on life support and people temporarily in an unconscious state are no longer humans, since they cannot breathe on their own. It is very clear what these people are trying to do. They are trying to justify eugenics and its offshoots — abortion and euthanasia – by hijacking scriptural verses and fabricating outrageous conclusions thereof. This is an outrage and the height of reprobacy.

Aldous Huxley said, “Man does not learn from history” ²⁰⁴ and George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.²⁴⁸ Nowhere and at no time have these men been more correct than in the light of this issue and now. In spite of the lessons of the Holocaust, slavery, and the Dred Scott case, Americans and Europeans have yet to learn. Hence, they have willfully committed to walking that atrocious road again. Perhaps, fifty or a hundred years from now, it will be déjà vu all over again — the realization that an unjust and inhumane act has again been committed against other humans, leading to the loss of millions of lives.

It is flabbergasting that in order to protect the endangered species of plants people make the argument that those plants may very well hold the cure for cancer or some other diseases. They argue that, if those plants are lost, humanity may lose the only potential source of cure for such diseases. Yet, people conveniently fail to make the same argument for a pre-birth child, who may very well be the one to make such discoveries, i.e., find the cure for such diseases from said cancer-curing plant.

The aborting of an unborn child is not a valid or legitimate choice. It is analogous to bringing someone into your home to live with you for a period of time and then killing the person soon after, just because you found out that his or her presence in your home presents you with some inconveniences. The right thing to do would be to wait for the period of such visitation to be over, then send the person on his or her way. It is irrational to solve a temporary problem by a drastic and irreversible action. Moreover, the choice of killing the guest is an illegitimate one; a real choice would be choosing not to invite or bring the guest into your home in the first place, if you are not prepared to be a host.

Similarly, the choice to abort a child for the sake of convenience can never be legitimate. A legitimate choice would be not getting pregnant in the first place. For some people, my position may seem an easy one. After all, as a man I could never experience a situation that would lead to having to make such as a decision. I have to say that I have never been pregnant, so I cannot legitimately claim to know what it is like to carry a child for nine months or give birth to a child. However, as a husband and a father of three children, two of which came by unexpected or unplanned, but not unwanted, pregnancies, I have a good appreciation of how hard it is for a woman, not only in carrying a pregnancy, but also in caring for the baby after birth.

We will never know if an aborted child could have been the one to find the cure for cancer, heart disease, or other diseases that afflict humankind. Maybe that child could have been the only one to find solutions to some of the most intractable social ills that plague the world.

Recent to the time when this manuscript was written, I learned on the Oprah show, in an episode that featured Lance Armstrong and his mother, that the seven times Tour de France champion could have been aborted. Many people, including people in positions of influence, pressured his teenage mother, a single mother at seventeen years of age, to abort the pregnancy, but she chose not to do so, partly because it was illegal to do so at the time but also undeniably because she wanted to keep the baby rather than abort him. After all, many people were aborting their babies, regardless of the law. It is reasonable to expect that if she had been determined to abort Lance, she would have been able to do so, regardless of the law.

We all know what came out of her decision to choose life. Needless to say, the world is better for it. By choosing to keep her baby, many people have been inspired to do great things—whether it is becoming great athletes or beating cancer and other debilitating diseases. Who knows how many more Lance Armstrong’s have been aborted and the gifts they held in custody for the world lost permanently? It is haunting to know that they could literally and potentially be in the millions. This is not hard to imagine, since statistics show that by 2006, over 30 million babies have been aborted in the United States alone since abortion was legalized.

One could say that the essence of definition was corrupted in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve sought to redefine themselves to be what they were not and who they were not. By deception, they were led to believe that they will be “as gods”. Apparently, they liked the idea, a propensity of man that has endured ever since. Over time, people have sought to redefine themselves as the “elects of God”, as “a superior race”, and even as “gods” in some cases. It is fair to say that since the day Adam and Eve sought to redefine themselves, the essence of definition has been subjected to constant and ever-increasing abuse.

Such abuse has produced numerous philosophies that have left the world morally depleted and socially in turmoil. The last two centuries have produced some of the most dangerous ideologies in human history — Darwin’s theory of evolution, the philosophy of existentialism, and the religion of humanism. These philosophies are perhaps of equal scope to the lie by which the serpent deceived Adam and Eve, especially in the tendencies of these philosophies to corrupt the essence of mankind. These inspired the racism, which culminated in the atrocities of the Trans-Atlantic and the Trans-Sahara slavery, the Holocaust, and numerous crimes against humanity, the latest of which is infanticide.

Darwin’s racial philosophy, also known as the “theory of evolution”, claims that humans evolved from apes, and that a certain group of humans or “race” are more like their “ape ancestors” than other groups. This philosophy is the root of modern-day racism. It is the single most dangerous lie since the original lie by which, it was said in the book, the serpent deceived Adam and Eve. In his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life ¹⁴, Darwin produced a definition of mankind that is parallel to the definition the serpent presented to Adam and Eve. Darwin’s concept of biological evolution has sustained the philosophy of existentialism and is the backdrop and platform from which the contemporary philosophy of humanism has been successfully launched, promoted, and sustained.

By definition and by implication, Darwin’s philosophy sought to make gods of the so-called favored species. Darwin and his protégés believe these to be people of European ancestry. A different expression of the same definition, one symbolized by color, represents the attributes that society associates with the color white. Some of Darwin’s protégés, such as Adolf Hitler and Arthur Keith, Darwin himself, and a multitude of others regarded their placement by definition to include the role of deciding who, among the “non-favored species”, lives and who dies. This god-role was exercised to the demise of millions of people, notably people with dark skin color (Africans) and others such as the Jews, Slovaks, and Gypsies.

It is evident that Darwin usurped the classifications established by Carl von Linne and the custom of referring to the subgroups established by those classifications as “races”, in spite of the fact that the classifications of “races” as subspecies, an unrealistic and unsustainable leap from Linne’s concept of subgroups, was not in conformity with the idea of evolution by natural selection. The scientists of the day arguably willfully ignored the questions that arose to make Darwin’s claim highly improbable and indeed scientifically errant.

Dr. George Wald, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard University and a Nobel Prize winner in biology expressed the sentiments underlying the irresponsible and willful disregard and complicity of many scientists in the promotion of falsehood as science. Professor Wald wrote,

We tell this story to beginning students of biology as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontanoeus generation as a ‘philosophical necessity.’ It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.²⁵⁰

Nevertheless, more and more scientists are increasingly admitting to the falsehood of the “theory of evolution” and becoming disgusted with their complicity and duplicity in the great Darwinian hoax. Physicist and mathematician Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D., made this observation, "A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully." ²⁵¹ One of such scientists is the internationally recognized geneticist, Professor Jerome Lejeune, who literarily confessed at a lecture in Paris on March 17, 1985. He was quoted as saying,

We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain. I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it's good, we know it is bad, but because there isn't any other. Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact, which is a first approximation. . . ²⁵²

Wall and Lejeune represent many scientists, whose “scientific views” are simply scientific fraud. As Sir Fred Hoyle noted, these views stem from philosophical reasons rather than scientific reasons. It is to be expected that scientists cannot indefinitely sustain the unscientific assumptions of spontaneous life generation arising to the theory of evolution. Hoyle, Wall, Lejeune, and many scientists have long recognized that the only remaining viable explanation is the “supernatural creative act of God”, otherwise known as intelligent design. But many scientists are still not willing to accept that explanation or even to address the question. 146 But that only perpetuates the problem that Darwin created by virtue of his theory. Dr. Karl Eklund notes that “scientists could diminish the importance of these questions by not asking them, but that just meant that they remained as open as festering sores. I am convinced that out of that metaphorical pustulence, the disease of racism sprung.” ¹²⁹

The errant philosophy that Charles Darwin postulated was allowed to take hold, in fact, eagerly embraced, because of the complacency and complicity of scientists of the day, the prevailing political idiosyncrasy, and the philosophies of existentialism and humanism. Their students, who have now become scientists and professors, have taken their place in the preservation of the evolutionary faith, perpetuating this philosophy even till today. Aldous Huxley, whom I have quoted elsewhere, made this very clear in his confession of an Atheist. He wrote:

For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ¹⁴⁸

Merriam Webster dictionary defines existentialism as a “philosophical movement that embraces diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an ‘unfathomable universe’ and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for his acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad.” ¹⁶⁶ This philosophy and its progeny — behavioral and cultural relativism form the core of postmodernism, which I have also written about in my previous book (Tribalizing America: The Emerging National Identity Crisis). 68

Since the day of Adam, man has sought to redefine himself and his role. In so doing, he has made himself as a god and operated outside his domain, the consequence of which is a state of lostness that has led to a seeming endless cycle of carnage, atrocities, and helplessness in the face of the resultant intractable social problems. The emerging atheistic religion of Humanism is believed to be the direct end-result of the abuse of the essence of definition.

Some people have attributed this errancy to the so-called “doctrine of final cause”, which is in turn blamed on the idea that God gave mankind dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:28).⁴⁹ The reason for this blame is that humans have, so far, largely regarded the responsibility of tending the earth as a license to do whatever they wanted in spite of the consequences. I call this the doctrine of “name it and claim it”. In other words, the act of defining something gives the one who defines the thing the authority to determine the ultimate fate of the thing being defined. In his assessment of the origin of humanism, the religion of evolutionists and secularists, in the context of humankind’s relationship and conduct towards the environment, David Ehrenfeld, in The Arrogance of Humanism, wrote:

This doctrine, whose origins go back beyond the ancient Greeks, has flourished since the rise of science in the West in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It asserts, in one formulation, that features of the natural world—mountains, deserts, rivers, plant and animal species, climate—have all been arranged by God for certain ends, primarily the benefit of humanity. These beneficial ends can often be perceived if we look carefully: rivers provide edible fish and transportation, deserts give boundaries and limits, etc. Our responsibility is to acknowledge this gift and accept control of the planet in return, an acceptance that was urged by some Jews and Christians even in ancient times. Thus, the idea of using what Nature created for us, the idea of control, and the idea of human superiority became associated early in our history. ²²

Ehrenfeld goes on to say:

It only remained to diminish the role of God, and we arrived at full-fledged humanism. This was achieved in the Renaissance and afterwards, coincident with the great flowering of the doctrine of final causes in the religious sphere. The transition to humanism was an easy one; it could occur in steps. One only had to start with the belief that humans were created in God’s image. God could then be retired on half-pension, still trotted out at the appropriate ceremonies wearing old medals, until bit by bit He was demystified, emasculated, and abandoned. ²²

It is obvious that the religious teachings, to which Ehrenfeld refer were hijacked and subsequently perverted as with most things the humankind has been exposed to, yet he conveniently puts the blame for the malady (humanism) that followed the perversion on Jews and Christians, who have traditionally been blamed for practically everything else. Suffice to say that it is like a rebellious child blaming his father for his conduct and the consequences of those conducts. Ehrenfeld concluded thus:

The music that accompanied this process, in its later years, was the throbbing of Watt’s steam engine. “Here,” it pulsed, “is the power, power, power.” To this, the advocates of traditional religion found no satisfactory answer (although one was available, had they had the ability to understand the environmental and societal degradation that had already begun). Had they not, after all, created this godless monster, humanism, with their endless chatter about our inheritance and dominion over the earth? ²² The philosophy, which has arguably led to the wanton plundering of the earth and its resources, was even (and still is) applied to Africans and the so-called “inferior races” who were regarded as part of those resources. It is now extended to unborn humans, who are soon to become sources of human spare parts, while they are conveniently deemed less than human in order to discard them with impunity as a matter of choice, as if they are some unwanted meals. Definition has ultimately risen to the perilous state of degeneracy and meaninglessness— the rejection of the very idea that language actually refers to something or signifies an actual existing thing. There is a growing belief that the act of speaking gives reality (meaning and substance) to things and ideas, and that language is not a pure description of reality.

Hence, the meaning attached to anything then becomes a matter of subjective definition or perception. This is evident in the continued effort of evolutionists (mostly racists of European descent) to depict the so-called “ape and lesser human ancestors of mankind” with features such as dark skin, broad nose, short head hair, etc. It is also evident in the continued effort to reduce the so-called “black people” to a lower caste and relegate them to the position and consciousness of inferiority. This effort is clearly evident in the way the evolutionists portray the so-called archeological findings they turn up every now and then.

Every time some racist “white person” with the title of scientist stumbles on a set of bones, they all get abuzz, and the next thing you know, voila! They produce an artist illustration of some beast that is intentionally made to look vaguely like the so-called “black man”. The suggestive powers of those impressions are unmistakable, pernicious, and lasting.

Whether these few bones turned up in Africa, Asia, Australia, or Europe, they have always been made to look the same — something resembling a “black man”. Yet, these less than a handful of bones have never been accompanied by skin or tissue to suggest what the racist artists and impressionists are all too eager to project. How is it that none of the artist impressions of the so-called archeological findings of “ape-like or less human ancestors of humankind” ever given features that resemble the so-called “white man”?

It is clear that the primary purpose of these outrageous sacrileges is to reduce and dominate the so-called “black people”, by casting them in beasts-like images. The so-called theory of evolution has directly inspired and sustained the unrestrained carnage of abortion. It has perverted the essence of humanity, inspired the demise of morality, and weakened virtually all the pillars of modern civilization.

The great book shows that not only did God define the first man and gave him the authority to define other creations, but God also set the standard ethics and morals by which people should relate to one another. These standards could only be established through the definition by which humans relate to them and apply them. Indeed, the idea of conscience, which sets the mechanism of checks and balances in human behavior (guidance for conformity to human limitations), intrinsically derive from the definitions that established standard ethics.

Throughout history, whenever these standard ethics are breached, atrocities have always been the result. Since the days of Cain and Abel, whenever humans forget or reject these standards, they invariably forget their limitations, and act outside their domain. Acting outside of one’s domain often translates to acting in error, not only because one lacks the authority to do so, but also because one lacks the ability to make anything good or beneficial out of such illegitimate actions.

As the Egyptians caused the children of Israel to serve with rigor in hard bondage, so did the children of the occident cause the Africans to serve with rigor in hard bondage, so did the Japanese cause the Koreans and the Chinese to serve, and so do the Indian Hindus cause the “untouchables” to serve with rigor in hard bondage, and so continues man’s inhumanity to man. In the classic film The Ten Commandments, with the great and incomparable Charlton Heston as Moses, Cecil B. DeMille aptly described the perverted interpretation of Scripture and the deviation from the essence of Scripture in the film’s introduction:

And man was given dominion over all things upon this earth. And the power to choose between good and evil, but each sought to do his own will, because they knew not the light of God’s law. Man took dominion over man. The conquered were made to serve the conqueror. The weak were made to serve the strong, and freedom was gone from the world.²⁵³

We have seen this tendency even with the world’s two most prominent religions — Christianity and Islam. When the original and true essence of these religions are replaced by the quest for dominance, the result is strife, intolerance, death and destruction. By abandoning the providential and foundational essence of Christianity and Islam — faith, love, peace, and justice in pursuit of domination, believers invariably operate outside their domain. As a result, they no longer act in accordance with the faith they claim or profess—they no longer act for the sake of God.

The philosophy of “biological evolution”, popularized by Charles Darwin is the extreme case of humans willfully and flagrantly breaching the standard ethics that underlie morality. As the world knows, Darwin’s ideology has led to the worst atrocities in human history and the perpetual state of racism that has marred humanity and dogged the world. In its wake, there has sprung a set of equally deleterious ideologies, notably social Darwinism, humanism, and existentialism.

The idea and practice of defining or classifying people based on the color of skin and other superficial attributes that may vary without a reciprocal or correlational variance in the essential nature of those people, all for the purpose of establishing a system of privileges to include and exclude people, represents a deviation from the legitimate purpose of definition, which is to [...]. The motive for such a definition has been shown to be the establishment of a particular people group. It is equivalent to classifying people with blonde hair as higher human beings than people with brunette hair; that would a ridiculous proposition, wouldn’t it?

As ridiculous as it is, this sentiment does indeed prevail in some segments of the western society, which regard blonde women as “sexier” but less intelligent (“dumb blonde”) than other women, or slim women as “sexier” than full figure (“fat”) women. These notions are patently absurd yet are widely held views in spite of the pernicious implications. It reduces women to the status of objects and utility.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”²⁵⁴ Definition and classification have evolved into a subjective exercise, devoid of truth and objectivity. Definition is no longer an objective exercise based on the true essence of what or who is being defined. It is now an instrument of control, manipulation, and domination. It continues to be used to dehumanize and demonize people, consequently inspiring hatred, injustice, and an unnecessarily persistent cycle of deadly conflicts around the world.

THE PURPOSE OF DEFINITION

The late Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) said, “The human life must be governed by truth, freedom, justice, and love.”²⁰ Unfortunately, down the timeline, it would seem that as people have literally taken a cue from Adam, in seeking to illegitimately redefine themselves, they have done so with an added dimension—defining other people in order to also have dominion over them. We see this in the idea of classism, aristocracy, and royalty.

Hence, positions established by definition set kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes, duchesses, barons, baronesses, lords, emirs, chiefs, and all other rulers apart from everyone else, and often position them to dominate others who are excluded from power by such definitions. We must understand that this notion is entrenched in rulership, not leadership; it is simply the codification of privilege for the few.

Similarly, conquered people, enslaved people, other “non-favored classes”, and in recent history, those associated with the “suspect classifications”—the so-called “non-white” or “colored” (“inferior”) people, have all been positioned by definition for domination. In the early centuries, kings were regarded, by definition, as rulers created or chosen by God and ordained by God to rule over others, almost in the same manner that God created Adam to rule over all of other God’s creations. Some even defined and viewed themselves as gods or “masters of the universe”. These ruling classes sometimes defined the other classes of people in the same fashion in which Adam defined all other classes of God’s creations and by so doing exercised dominion over them.

The extreme case of perverted definition for the sake of domination is Charles Darwin’s racial philosophy (“Theory of Evolution”). The original premise of this philosophy, as Darwin intended, was the extermination of the Judeo-Christian God and Judeo-Christian morality from the consciousness of the Western society. Provine William B., Professor of Biological Sciences at Cornell University wrote, “Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.” ¹²⁵ Elsewhere, Provine also wrote, “Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.” ¹²⁵ Next to Darwin’s deleterious philosophy was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. In his review of Nietzsche’s concept, Thomas Nagel describes the Übermensch in this way:

The Übermensch is a possible successor to man—a self-created being that would culminate from bringing to consciousness all the strong and contradictory forces that lie beneath the human surface, acknowledging the omnipresence of the will of power, and revaluing all existing values, through deconstruction, the assessment of their genealogies, from the perspective of this enlarged acceptance of life. It is doubtful that anything like morality would survive for such a creature.²⁶² Nietzsche existed in the zone of the convergence between creative art and philosophy, believing that his task as “a true philosopher” was not merely to understand nature but to change it by creating something new and different. Author Rüdiger Safranski wrote in Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography that Nietzsche’s field of his creation was himself.²⁵⁵ Clearly Nietzsche viewed himself as that being, as evident in devoting his life to destroying the idea of truth and morality—a dubious distinction that he shares with none other than Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin himself and many of their protégés, such as Adolph Hitler and Aldous Huxley, both of whom would follow in the long procession of pied pipers.

Ironically, Nietzsche who in his famous phrase proclaimed that “God is dead”, sought to replace Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality, claiming that religion (i.e. Christianity) was a human creation and a myth. He turned to Ancient Greek mythical gods, Apollo (god of clarity and form) and Dionysus (the god of orgiastic ecstasy) to connect with “the deeper reality” that modern science alone as proposed by the likes of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley could not express, drawing from the detached Apollonian consciousness and the “conflicting, passionate Dionysian force of unreflective being” to create what is now known as postmodernism. Nietzsche, like Darwin, disdained the notion of standard morality espoused by the Judeo-Christian morality — “authority exercised by collective and objective norms over the individual perspectives and drives at the core of life”, wrote Rüdiger Safranski in his book.²⁵⁵ Nietzsche believed that the battle in morality boils down to the power of definition, “a question of who allows himself to be judged by whom” or rather who allows himself to be controlled by whom. The abusive application of the power of definition through the so-called ruling ideas—thought, language, politics, morality, etc., as I noted in the opening paragraph of this chapter, appealed to Nietzsche, who believed that in a world driven by the conflict of perspectives and competing wills, the desire to do as one pleases, regardless of what is done and to whom it is done should not be suppressed by the social imposition of common standards and universal ethics. Nietzsche was largely viewed as a rebel against the so-called “ruling ideas”, but he was indeed a believer in the notion of “ruling ideas”, even though he claimed that his radical ideas liberated the individual from the imposed and “repressive” norms of the community. Nietzsche attacked the notion of truth and morality in the most general terms, although he was not really saying much that was fundamentally different from what he argued against. The abuses of definition that I highlighted earlier on supposedly led Nietzsche to believe that the individualized drive or will to power underlies the claim of objectivity of standard norms of behavior. Much as he might have been correct in his observation and assessment with regards to the abuse of power through the institutions of power, Nietzsche’s claim patently contradicts many of his sentiments, such as the one noted by Rüdiger Safranski in this quote: He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and the recklessness that distinguish the strong individual.²⁵⁵ Obviously, Nietzsche, as Hitler, did not believe in universal human rights, hence his disdain for Judeo-Christian morality. Safranski wrote further of Nietzsche’s thoughts and views: The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or with his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. […] Nietzsche was not a democrat. […] he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. […] Equality […] would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the “democratic herd animal.”²⁵⁵

“Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection,”²⁵⁵ Safranski wrote. There lies the truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, about the power and purpose of definition. His agitations against truth and morality were nothing but smoke screens. By eliminating God and morality from the consciousness of the society through the power of definition as exploited by Darwin and Nietzsche, people were then free to do as they choose, without prohibition or inhibition. The late George Gaylord Simpson, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, described the new consciousness in The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man (1949). Gaylord wrote “Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind.”⁸² Simpson wrote in his The Meaning of Evolution that the human was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.⁸² Apparently, Gaylord failed to see the implication of his statement with regards to himself, which is that everything he has ever done in his professional capacity and entire life, is meaningless and of no relevance, hence his statement above is meaningless and consequently false. It is patently illogical and extremely contradictory to hold the view that human existence is purposeless and meaningless, yet life’s pursuits are directed towards one purpose or another. Everything humans do, including human inventions, has been for specific purposes, from the most basic, such as the broom, to the most complex, like the space shuttle. For example, automobiles, jet planes, telephones, boats, ships, houses, clothing, the Internet, computers, postal service, etc. all have specific purposes. In fact, everything about humans is purpose-driving and purpose-driven, whether it is eating to stay alive, taking medicine to heal an illness, getting enough sleep and exercise to stay healthy, procreation to perpetuate the human existence, talking to someone to communicate information, etc. As the engagements of life are purpose-driven, so is life itself. Something becomes meaningless or purposeless when it is misapplied or exercised incorrectly and when it fails to achieve the end for which it was intended or when that end fails to lead to a higher end. Life is only purposeless, as King Solomon learned in Ecclesiastes, when it is misapplied or exercised incorrectly—when it is lived without God. There is something innately driving humans to orderliness and purpose. In short, human life is essentially purpose-driven. How can it not be? How can the essence of life be purposeless, while every activity or pursuit of life is so purposeful, albeit temporary? Only a madman would deny the reality of his own existence. If human existence were purposeless, then everything humans do and can ever do would inevitably be purposeless. Of course, we know this not to be the case, except from an existentialist viewpoint. It is absolutely preposterous to be seated on a chair and claim that the chair has no purpose, or that the chair isn’t really there for seating purposes, or that it is not even there at all, just because you are only sitting on it temporarily and not indefinitely.

In the new existential world inspired by Darwin’s theory and insulated from the probe of conscience by the notion of “survival of the fittest”, kill or be killed”, the extermination of other humans, the so-called “non-favored species”—indigenous people across the world, particularly Africans, became a matter of selection, a necessity of nature. Clearly, by his definition Darwin classified Africans as animals, and advocated for their extermination. Paul G. Humber, in his article THE ASCENT OF RACISM, noted that Darwin spoke of the "gorilla" and the “Negro” [sic] as occupying evolutionary positions between the “Baboon” and the “civilized races of man” (“Caucasian”).¹⁴⁶ Darwin wrote,

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes [. . .] will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro [sic] or Australian and the gorilla.²⁴⁷

Darwin’s sentiment as shown in the preceding quote, as well as those of his contemporaries, was obviously a perversion of the Aristotelian distinctions between the “cultured” and the “barbaric” races. Speaking of this connection, Abraham Foxman wrote in the introduction of the Mein Kampf, “Racial theories became increasingly radical as they incorporated aspects of Darwinism, which swept the Western world in the mid to late 1800s. Applied to race, the ideas of evolution and “survival of the fittest” turned the history of humanity, as well as the contemporary world, into a story of racial conflict.”⁴⁷ Social Darwinism exists only for the sake of dominating other people, socially and politically, and to serve the most outrageous narcissistic propensities of very determined callous people, who masquerade as scientists and political leaders. Ever since Aristotle made those distinctions, they have constantly evolved through the ages and have been frequently employed to the demise of different groups at different times, an example being the colonial era.

The prejudice inspired by Aristotle’s distinction must have inspired Alexander the Great to take a position quite different or perhaps one that reaffirmed what Aristotle really meant by that distinction. Alexander was known to have said, “I do not separate people, as do the narrowminded, into Greeks and barbarians. I am not interested in the origin or race of citizens. I only distinguish them on the basis of their virtue. For me each good foreigner is a Greek and each bad Greek is worse than a barbarian.”²⁵⁶

During the age known as the Enlightenment, Aristotle’s distinctions were revived and transformed into “civilized” and “primitive”. Abraham Foxman, wrote in his introduction of Mein Kampf:

By positing that certain races were inherently “primitive,” white men of the Enlightenment were able to justify both their continued toleration of black slavery and their imperialist designs on places such as Africa. Differences between races were scientifically “proven” with techniques such as anthropometry (the collection and study of precise measurements of the human body); the races were then ranked on some arbitrary scale, with modern European man always holding the highest spot.⁴⁶

Well before Hitler's brand of evolution unfolded on the European continent, some Europeans and Americans, also prominent in their day, were already preaching the extremist message of hate and destruction espoused in Darwin’s so-called theory of evolution. Notable among them were Arthur Keith, Edwin G. Conklin, and Henry Fairfield Osborn. According to Humber’s article, Conklin was Professor of Biology at Princeton University from 1908 to 1933. He was also President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1936. Conklin wrote:

Comparison of any modern race with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types shows that all have changed, but probably the negroid [sic] races more closely resemble the original stock than the white or yellow races. Every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races, for the longer this is maintained, the greater the preponderance of the white race will be. ²⁵⁷

Humber also noted in the article cited earlier that Henry Fairfield Osborn was a professor of biology and zoology at Columbia University. For the twenty-five years between1908 and 1933, he was President of the American Museum of Natural History's Board of Trustees. Osborn wrote:

The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolians, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characteristics . . . but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old-youth of the species Homo Sapiens. ²⁵⁸

Of course, Arthur Keith’s racists views are also well documented in his writings, such as Evolution and Ethics, published in 1947. Obviously, as shown by their writings and active advocacy, these highly regarded men, who occupied very important positions in their society, whose words carried enormous weight and implication, did not even regard Africans as human beings.

These men were largely responsible for the formation of the consciousness of the white man’s supremacy that led to the atrocities committed against the so-called Negro race in America and elsewhere, which continues even today, through institutionalized racism and oppression of the so-called black people. The disdain for them has led to the devaluation and wanton destruction of their lives, which has in turn inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, much like the Civil Rights movement in the sixties.

The concept of “race” is primarily the definition of people in order to relate to them selectively and discriminatively, in the same way that humans relate to other things around them. It establishes certain criteria by which judgments are made in relation to the various classifications established by those definitions.

Since the early days of existence, humans have learned that in comparison to others, there are only two ways that a person can elevate himself above others, as to dominate. The first is when a person is truly better than others, respective to the object of comparison. The second is by demoting others and by consequence promoting oneself. This is what is often referred to as propaganda, and it is evident everywhere and in every aspect of human relationship, and it engenders psychic domination, which in turn sets the stage for physical, material, and complete domination of people by other people.

A clear but low-level representation of this malignancy is political campaign for public office, an exercise where contestants have frequently resorted to negative characterization (the so-called “negative ads”) to demote their opponents and by consequence promote themselves. It must be recognized that in doing so, the perpetrators do not necessarily establish higher standards to prove that they are better qualified than their opponents. Instead, they lower the expected standards by changing the issues and redirecting the focus. Essentially, this is an admission to the fact that they are not good enough, except in comparison to the depleted (degraded or demoted) image they have been able to create of their opponents and to which they draw attention.

Definition is like any other life-enhancing tool that God has bestowed on humankind. It enables us to relate to everything around us, whether it is the ground, the sea, space, and everything therein, or humankind and everything within them. In other words, definition is like everything else that was supposed to aid humans in making the most of life, in associating with our environment and our fellow humans. However, as with everything else, people have corrupted the essence and purpose of definition.

As an expression, definition is essentially speech— words by which people may tell the truth or tell a lie, give praise or pronounce condemnation, pronounce blessings or curses, build up or tear down, and unite or divide. It is like a knife; with it, a tumor can be removed to save the life of a person, or a throat can be slit to take a person’s life. The application and the result thereof are determined by the motives of the one that wields the tool. The evils of greed, hatred, and wickedness, which have plagued humankind since the days of Cain and Abel, have continued to manifest and wreak havoc upon humanity.

As every pure thing can only be corrupted, so is every good thing prone to perversion. The application of any idea can either be legitimate or illegitimate. The legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of an idea is established by the application of the idea. To be legitimate, the application of an idea must derive and must affirm the essential truth about humanity. The essential truth about humanity is established in the teachings of Jesus Christ—freedom for all humans. It is as the late Pope John Paul II who said, “The human life must be governed by truth, freedom, justice, and love.”

Essentially, this the law of God and the central premise of the United States Declaration of Independence, which states, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. These essential truths establish morality and constitute the essence of justice—an attribute only preexisting in God. Therefore, anything, particularly definition, which establishes unfairness or injustice is a perversion of God’s attributes of righteousness or justice. Such is the contemporary application of definition.

Simply put, the original (and legitimate) purpose of definition was to establish a library of useful information based on essential facts about something or someone, from which objective references —comparison, judgment, and inference can be made about the thing or person. In view of this, definition ought not to be established by generalizations based on preponderances. For example, the definition of an American ought to derive from the citizenship of the person and the founding ideals that established that citizenship, rather than on the preponderance of certain types of behavior or attributes in America, such as the affinity for pleasure, immorality, violence, aggression, egoism, arrogance, color of skin, etc.

Unfortunately, too many people have been conditioned to think in subjective generalizations. This is the foundation of the stereotype syndrome and the “mother” of prejudice. It is against such that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in his now famous speech at the steps of the Lincoln memorial on August 28, 1963—that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. In keeping with this just ideal, people ought not be defined by the perceived and superficial commonality or inherent superficial association with others.

You may define a person by association, be it with a group or the company he or she keeps, because there is a necessarily voluntary common interest and subscription (e.g. religion, habits, etc.) by which the company is established. On the other hand, you cannot validly define a person in view of another person’s conduct or subscriptions simply on the basis of common passive, involuntary, and superficial characteristics, such as skin color, shared space, etc. There may be some truth in the maxim, “show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”, but there is no truth in the tacit maxim that implies, “show me the color of your skin and I will tell what you are”.

A few years ago, C. Loring Brace, a scientist from the University of Michigan, stated at the Advancement of Science Convention in Atlanta, “Race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by events of recorded history, and it has no biological reality.”²⁵⁹ The article, in which the scientist was quoted, went on to say “We accept the idea of race because it’s a convenient way of putting people into broad categories, frequently to suppress them [. . .] the most hideous example was provided by Hitler’s Germany. And racial prejudice remains common throughout the world.”²⁶⁰

The definition or classification of a people into “races”, based on skin color and other superficial and environment-induced characteristics exist primarily for economic, political, and narcissistic exigencies rather than for any biological necessity. As James Baldwin said, “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.”²⁶¹ Richard T. Schaefer wrote, in the book Racial and Ethnic Groups, “[r]ace is socially constructed concept”. <⁸⁰ Dr. Karl Eklund also wrote,

“Race” is a very peculiar concept. It is one of those things that everybody thinks they understand but gets less clear the harder we look at it. We easily distinguish between “us” and “them”, and we very often find ways to make that difference seem precise. We also ascribe qualities to that difference, and it usually turns out that “we” have more of the qualities we think of as “good”. But none of this serves to characterize “race” in such a way that it will be as useful to “them” as it is to “us”. ¹²⁹

Race has many meanings for many people. Often these meanings are inaccurate and based on theories discarded by scientists generations ago. Schaefer also noted that “the idea of biological race is based on the mistaken, sometimes racist notion of genetically isolated groups.”⁸⁰ The fallacy of that notion has been evident since its introduction and has been confirmed by the findings of the Human Genome Project and other DNA (human gene) sequencing analysis. All the “indices”, including genetic resistance to diseases (e.g., malaria), fingerprint patterns, digestive capabilities for food types, blood type, etc., have failed to support or prove the notion of biologically pure and distinct races.

In spite of the failures to justify the notion of race, some so-called scientists will not stop at anything to push scientific racism and in their continued quest to maintain racial biases that have been established by the definition that instituted the notion not so long ago—the “theory of evolution”. Some have continued to conduct witch-hunts, disguised as research, to link certain personality characteristics such as violent temperament and nervous habits to certain non-Caucasian groups.

They have continued to advance the notion that body language, such as fidgeting, uneasiness at maintaining eye contact, obsequious tendencies, etc., all of which were signs of uneasiness associated with slaves who had been specifically brutalized for a very long time and subjected to crushing oppression that stripped them of spirit, hope and dignity, are all indications of inferiority--characteristics of an inferior race.

It is not surprising that these attributes have now, by definition, been tacitly ascribed to African Americans. This has been advanced even further in numerous so-called scientific studies which have sought to establish that different races have different innate levels of intelligence. The racist inclination and motivation of these people was clear for all to see, as noted by notable scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. These motives were further debunked by the eugenic policies they proposed on the basis of their so-called scientific findings.

Moreover, much of the “science” used in early physical anthropological studies on race has been discredited as highly flawed, usually from methodological standpoints. Till today many of the tests used to measure IQ only measure acculturation to Western societies, not actual latent or innate intelligence. In fact, latent intelligence has been known for centuries to be extremely difficult if not impossible to measure.

Latent intelligence is essentially potential. People have known for a very long time that potential requires certain conditions in order for it to be translated into what is often measured as intelligence. The application of culturally or environmentally specific tests to determine the IQ of a person who is not from said culture or environment is at best unfair and at worst dubious. For example, an IQ test that asks a person from Southeastern Nigeria to identify obscure American personalities, recognize peculiar cultural realities such as particular type of fruits local to American or European cultures and environment, or interpret certain local American or European parlance, is not only disingenuous and self-serving but also pointedly illogical.

In his integrationist view toward understanding the varied phenomena of nature of which humans are part, Aristotle believed that some aspects of a phenomenon could not be understood simply by the interaction of parts. For example, to focus on the atomic structure of an acorn ignores the acorn’s potential to become an oak tree. Similarly, to predicate a person’s capability on what is currently visible about the person is to ignore the person’s potential, since potential is defined as the possibility of becoming something contained in the being of that something.²⁶³

As contentious as the notion of affirmative action may be, it derives its essence from the notion expressed in the preceding paragraph. Many African Americans and other minority children because of their economic and social background are put at a disadvantage in early academic life, which causes them to perform below expectations and below their innate abilities. As affirmative action has proven repeatedly, many of these children, due to their circumstances, turn out to be “late bloomers” who became great leaders and made extraordinary contributions to society. Collin Powell, former Joint Chief of Staff of the United States and Secretary of State, who was himself a beneficiary of the program, said, “It doesn’t bother me if people say I made it with affirmative action. All that matters is what you do afterwards.”²⁶⁴

In Aristotle’s physics, potential plays a central role in what people can become; it recognizes that potential is only realized through action. The process of realizing potential involves motion or change. The acorn will actually become an oak if it germinates. In the same manner, people will only become all they can be if they are “sown” in the right environment at the right time—if they are given a fair chance.

In the late 20^th century, the notion of the superior race as determined by IQ tests were advanced by people like Arthur Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability), J. Philippe Rushton (Race, Evolution, and Behavior), Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations), and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve), among others. The latest effort by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) published in The Bell Curve concluded that 60 percent of IQ is inheritable, and that racial groups offer a convenient means to generalize about any differences in intelligence. What Herrnstein and Murray call scientific research is nothing but recycled excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In a sense, the essence of their thesis was largely plagiarizing of ideas found in Mein Kampf and other racist manuals.

Regarding the conclusions reached by Herrnstein and Murray, Richard T. Schaefer wrote:

Unlike most other proponents of the race-IQ link, the authors offer policy suggestions that include ending welfare to discourage births among low-IQ poor women and changing immigration laws so that the IQ pool in the United States is not diminished. ⁸¹

Despite the political firestorm touched off by their subjective analysis and assertions, Herrnstein and Murray were merely restating a sentiment that has existed since the days of Charles Darwin and aggressively pushed by notable academics like Edwin G. Conklin, professor of biology at Princeton University from 1908 to 1933 and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1936, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a professor of biology and zoology at Columbia University.

For twenty-five years (1908–1933), Osborn was president of the American Museum of Natural History’s Board of Trustees, T. H. Huxley (a.k.a. Darwin’s bulldog), Francis Galton (the father of eugenics, — Darwin’s cousin and bulwark), Konrad Lorenz, Hans F.K Gunther (professor of “racial science” at the University of Jena—the man Hitler and the Nazi party depended on to articulate the definition of the “superior race”), and Ernst Haeckel (chief German advocate of evolution).

Herrnstein and Murray are of the same stock as these men, whose views they merely restated in The Bell Curve. Commenting on those views, Schaefer noted, “Years later, the mere mention of ‘the bell curve’ signals to many the belief in a racial hierarchy with Whites toward the top and Blacks near the bottom.”⁸¹ Schaefer also raised the all-important question, which he also answered, i.e. the necessity of the efforts to define people by certain criteria such as IQ. He wrote:

Why does such IQ research reemerge if the data are subject to different interpretations? The argument that “we” are superior to “them” is very appealing to the dominant group. It justifies receiving opportunities that are denied to others. For example, the authors of The Bell Curve argue that intelligence significantly determines the poverty problem in the United States. ⁸¹

This sentiment has been deeply entrenched in the psyche of many of the so-called “white people”, albeit, and arguably, not of their own making. Many leaders — presidents, their advisers, and policy makers, including the best and the worst of such – have been influenced by this notion. Such an influence is clearly expressed in a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, which if true, would contradict Lincoln’s core belief expressed elsewhere—his belief in God and the notion of equality of man in the eyes of God, the creator of man. The quote is:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the Negro should be denied everything. 3

During the Nixon administration, Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s speech writer, quite possibly inspired by the scientific racism advanced by racist scientists such as Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, Samuel George Morton, and all the others mentioned previously, perhaps even by Hitler’s Mein Kampf, wrote in a memo to Nixon on August 26, 1971, apparently with regards to the notion of “black people” as an inferior race and “white people” as a superior race:

If correct, then all our efforts and expenditures not only for ‘compensatory education’ but to provide an ‘equal chance at the starting line,’ are guaranteeing that we wind up with the intelligent ones coming in first. And every study shows blacks 15 I.Q. points below whites on average. If there is no refutation, then it seems to me that a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration of blacks and whites—but even more so, poor and well-to-do—is less likely to result in accommodation, than it is in perpetual friction—as the incapable are played consciously by government side by side with the capable.²⁶⁵ Buchanan’s sentiments in this memo and elsewhere could have been inspired by Mein Kampf or the writings of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton or Herrnstein and Murray, and many others.

The same argument has been used against Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and Hispanics. Ironically, a similar argument had also been used against poor white people in seventeenth century England. It began with the now famous population theory by Thomas Malthus.60 Malthus made some recommendations based on his conclusions, which may have, perhaps arguably, led to the notion of biological evolution, social Darwinism, and eugenics—all of which are extrapolations of Malthus’ conclusions—by Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. These extrapolations culminated in the contemporary definitions of humankind and their various “races.”

As noted previously, Richard T. Schaefer raised and answered an important question with respect to the sentiment expressed by Buchanan and, more importantly, the motives behind it. Schaefer asked of Murray’s Bell Curve, “If race does not distinguish humans from one another biologically, why does IQ research seem to be so important? Well, it is important because of the social meaning that people have attached to it.” ⁸¹

In 1978, UNESCO made a declaration on race. In the declaration, this influential global body appeared to have finally broken free from the grip of the racist scientists that had exerted controlling influence on the agency since its inception, as a change proven by the first two articles of the document seemed to suggest. According to the first section of Article 1, “All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity and rights and all form an integral part of humanity.”²¹⁴Article 1 Section 4 states, “All peoples of the world possess equal faculties for attaining the highest level in intellectual, technical, social, economic, cultural and political development.” ²¹⁴ Article 1 Section 5 states, “The differences between the achievements of the different peoples are entirely attributable to geographical, historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors. Such differences can in no case serve as a pretext for any rank-ordered classification of nations or peoples.” ²¹⁴ Article 2 states “Any theory which involves the claim that racial or ethnic groups are inherently superior or inferior, thus implying that some would be entitled to dominate or eliminate others, presumed to be inferior, or which bases value judgments on racial differentiation, has no scientific foundation and is contrary to the moral and ethical principles of humanity.” ²¹⁴

As shown by the racial nature of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the extreme form of racism and racial segregation in America, apartheid in South Africa, and elsewhere, the definition of race, particularly in the context of the so-called “white race” and “black or colored races” was mainly and perhaps even totally related to proto-capitalist economic principles. Dan Hicks, in Ethnicity, Race, and Archaeology of the Atlantic Slave Trade, noted that “The new racial nature of slavery was related to more general proto-capitalist processes of alienation and commodification, and the emergence in the eighteenth century of a new nationalist language of political legitimization in Europe, which accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism and bureaucratic government.”²⁶⁶

The disingenuousness of the definition and characterization of people groups based on the so-called evolutionary principle (“racial characteristics”) was quickly manifested in the phenomenon of “Social Darwinism”. Dr. Eklund, in the paper cited earlier, described this phenomenon as, “the conversion of evolutionary ideas into a classist ideology which justified the upward-mobility of the 19th-century industrialists and the techniques of corporate capitalism as “survival of the fittest”. ¹²⁹ Elements of this social metamorphosis are all around us, evident in the way workers are treated by the government and the new aristocracy of buccaneering corporate executives. It is also seen in the way immigrants and minorities are treated. All in all, the Western society is under the influence of a large dose of the subconscious, or tacitly conscious, notion of a “superior race”, otherwise known as social Darwinism—all in spite of the UNESCO declarations on race and preponderance of evidence from modern scientific studies, such as the Human Genome Project and the HapMap Project.

Dr. Eklund noted that the notion of upward mobility in the nineteenth century turned out not to be open to everyone, clearly a characteristic of social Darwinism. The situation is still very much relevant in the twenty-first century and clearly apparent. He wrote:

The phenomenon faded away once they became established and didn’t want others to be as upwardly-mobile as they had been, but there was still a remnant of the idea that the end-product of human evolution was a wealthy northern European (or European American) so that people of color were considered “naturally” inferior. Since most evolutionary biologists were of European stock, it was difficult to get past that conditioning. ¹²⁹

The essence of the idea of racial definition, i.e., classification based on the precepts of the evolutionary theory, has two primary objectives. The first is psychic domination — mental colonization and mental slavery of those defined as inferior races. The second is the material and psychic exploitation of those defined as “inferior” races, in the same manner that humanistic philosophy has exploited nature and its resources.

In fact, the so-called inferior races, particularly “blacks” were once regarded as just another of nature’s gifts, perceived as not different from the plants and animals, resources to be subdued, controlled, dominated, and exploited. As the following excerpts from a book titled Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973 show, the attitudes of racists and the acts of inhumanity towards others stem primarily from the definitions establishing racial groups. Dr. Carl Wieland, in Evolutionary racism²³³, wrote:

In the transcript of an interrogation of a policeman during a Royal Commission of inquiry in 1861 (p. 83), we read concerning the use of force against tribal Aborigines:

‘And if we did not punish the blacks they would look upon it as a confession of weakness?’

‘Yes, that is exactly my opinion.’

‘It is a question as to which is the strongest race — if we submit to them they would despise us for it?’

‘Yes …’

Wieland wrote:

The influence of evolutionary thinking can also be seen in a transcript on page 100. The writer, also author of an 1888 book, is justifying the killing of Aborigines in the State of Victoria and wrote:

‘As to the ethics of the question, there can be drawn no final conclusion.’ He says that this is because it is ‘a question of temperament; to the sentimental it is undoubtedly an iniquity; to the practical it represents a distinct step in human progress, involving the sacrifice of a few thousands of an inferior race. … But the fact is that mankind, as a race, cannot choose to act solely as moral beings. They are governed by animal laws which urge them blindly forward upon tracks they scarce can choose for themselves.’

On page 96 of the transcript, someone also writing in an 1880 newspaper said:

‘Nothing that we can do will alter the inscrutable and withal immutable laws which direct our progress on this globe. By these laws the native races of Australia were doomed on the advent of the white man, and the only thing left for us to do is to assist in carrying them out [i.e., helping the "laws" of evolution by hastening the Aborigines’ doom — C.W.] with as little cruelty as possible … We must rule the blacks by fear …’.

As these excerpts clearly show, the sentiment behind atrocities they detail was not based on ignorance or poor judgment due to lack of choices. Rather they were clearly motivated by the kind of insensitivity that a criminal show towards his victim in the process of dispossessing his victim of his property or his life. It’s all about possession, an element of the human condition fed by the human depravity of greed and inspired by the perception of scarcity of resources or limited availability of resources. Added to this is the realization that those who possess or control more of the scarce resources invariably control those who possess less and therefore are in need of those resources.

It is believed that this consciousness, as articulated by Thomas Malthus60 in his essay on the principle of population (An Essay on the Principle of Population) in the late seventeenth century and by Adam Smith’s extreme free market economics and nested notion of the struggle of individuals competing for personal gain in an unregulated marketplace, would in some ways produce an ordered, efficient economy. In contemporary language, this is called free market economics.

It follows, supposedly, that even though nothing is guiding the so-called free market economics, it functions as though there is “invisible” guiding hand directing the system. The benefits, which also supposedly come about as an incidental side effect of this selfish struggle, are what we now know as the proceeds of capitalism. The views of Malthus and Smith were the basis of the principle postulated by Darwin, later to be known as the theory of evolution. Darwin himself wrote:

“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.” ¹²⁴ David Ehrenfeld wrote in The Arrogance of Humanism thus:

This often quoted passage reflects the significance Darwin affords Malthus in formulating his theory of Natural Selection. What “struck” Darwin in Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was Malthus's observation that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too is capable of overproducing if left unchecked. ²²

Ehrenfeld, however, noted Darwin’s perverted application of Malthus’s well-intended observation—a perversion akin to the perversion of religious teachings that led to the so-called doctrine of “final cause”, which invariable culminated in the philosophy of humanism. He wrote:

Although Malthus thought famine and poverty were natural outcomes, the ultimate reason for those outcomes was divine institution. He believed that such natural outcomes were God's way of preventing man from being lazy. Both Darwin and Wallace independently arrived at similar theories of Natural Selection after reading Malthus. Unlike Malthus, they framed his principle in purely natural terms both in outcome and in ultimate reason. By so doing, they extended Malthus' logic further than Malthus himself could ever take it. They realized that producing more offspring than can survive establishes a competitive environment among siblings, and that the variation among siblings would produce some individuals with a slightly greater chance of survival. ²²

This sentiment still resonates today, in the many popular philosophies that followed—existentialism, humanism, etc. Like classic stories, “the good ones never die; you just have to read between the lines”. As the conducts were justified then, so are they now. It is only a matter of definition.

The psychic domination or spiritual exploitation of people, as an application of definition, exist in the utilization of the victim as a backdrop for creating a sense of personal or racial superiority, to enhance the perpetrator’s self-esteem and personal worth, invariably devaluing and diminishing those of the victim. The material exploitation is in relegating the victim to the position of servitude and permanent lower class, to the extent that the victims begin to see themselves as depicted by the perpetrator. Writing about his findings, in the famous doll studies on the harmful effects of racism on “black children”, educator and psychologist Kenneth Clark wrote:

It is now generally understood that chronic and remediable social injustices corrode and damage the human personality, thereby robbing it of its effectiveness, of its creativity, if not its actual humanity. No matter how desperately one seeks to deny it, this simple fact persists and intrudes itself. It is the fuel of protests and revolts. Racial segregation, like all other forms of cruelty and tyranny, debases all human beings -- those who are its victims, those who victimize, and in quite subtle ways those who are merely accessories. This human debasement can only be comprehended as a consequence of the society which spawns it. The victims of segregation do not initially desire to be segregated; they do not “prefer to be with their own people,” in spite of the fact that this belief is commonly stated by those who are not themselves segregated. A most cruel and psychologically oppressive aspect and consequence of enforced segregation is that its victims can be made to accommodate to their victimized status and under certain circumstances to state that it is their desire to be set apart, or to agree that subjugation is not really detrimental but beneficial. The fact remains that exclusion, rejection, and a stigmatized status are not desired and are not voluntary states. Segregation is neither sought nor imposed by healthy or potentially healthy human beings.⁹

The ultimate end of racial definition or classification is to deny people freedom, exclude them from gaining access to resources, and invariably from power. It is to ensure the subjugation, domination, and exploitation of people on the low end of the scale established by such definition or classification. It is to elevate and enthrone those on the high end of that scale to a position of privilege, a position which by its nature is often predisposed to prejudice and accompanied by tyranny.

This is evident in every society. In India you have the untouchables, in Japan, in Arabia, America, and Europe you had the slaves and peasants, and even in Africa there were the slaves and untouchables. In fact, in many cases, definition is predominantly a rationalization and establishment of intent and premeditated conducts. It is intended to clear the way for preconceived actions or motives by eliminating existing inhibitions or disabling moral prohibition and arguments.

Definitions are frequently arbitrary and subjected to selective application. For example, to rationalize the rejection of God, Carl Max defined religion as the opium of the masses. Anyone who takes Max seriously, as a basis for the rejection of religion, Christianity in particular, should also apply his logic to all other temporary or “escapist” solutions, such as medical treatments for illnesses, food to abate hunger, or water to quench thirst. After all, none of these is a “lasting solution” in the here and now—people will face the same problems, time and time again, in spite of the reprieves of the solutions, as people will eventually become hungry and thirsty again, and will eventually die.

As it were, these remedies, though temporarily efficacious or abetting solutions, certainly make logical and emotional sense in the present, don’t they? After all, life itself, human existence, and human health is just as temporary, isn’t it? Even if religion is a “temporary” solution to the human condition or an escape from the reality of pain and suffering on earth, as Max contends, isn’t it foolish to reject it on the premise that it is of transient effects, while accepting all other ideas that are of even more transient effects—medicine, food, water, sleep, and indeed life itself?

The only reason for the rejection of religion, Christianity in particular, is that it demands accountability from the individual. Strangely, everyone who rejects Christianity has continued to search for an alternative to fill the emptiness and to satisfy the desire for an unchanging notion in which to anchor the essence of one’s existence or sense of being. Such people have essentially rejected one “opium of the people” but yet continue to search for another “opium of the people”, whatever that may be. This position is not only illogical; it is patently foolish.

The definition or notion of religion as an “opium of the masses” is intended as an escape from the virtue of accountability inherent in religion and particularly in Christianity, thus freeing one to do as he or she please, uninhibited. That said, everyone knows that the absence of inhibition does not mean absence of consequences. Whether this definition leads to free thinking, relativism, existentialism, etc., people cannot seem to escape the need for assurance, certainty, and therefore, God. They may not know it or accept it but that is irrelevant in the final analysis.

Hence, many people embrace rationalism and have committed to wander endlessly. Because they have ruled out the choice of returning home to morality and to God, they try to make a home wherever they have wandered, but they are not satisfied, as “there is no place like home”, as they say. There are no alternatives to truth, especially when it comes to the liberty of the soul. When you know and accept the truth, you will indeed be truly liberated, not just in body, but in mind and soul.

THE DYNAMICS OF DEFINITION

In the last two chapters, I sought to establish how definition and classification as a concept began, along with people’s tendency to misapply definition in regards to other people. In this chapter, my aim is to show the dynamics of definition. By dynamics, I mean the impacts and effects of definition on people as individuals and as a society.

Perhaps nowhere are the effects of definition more apparent and determinative than in establishing the ideology of race and nation—the two most central elements in a person’s identity. Eric D. Weitz wrote, “The ideologies of race and nation define the modern world and penetrate our consciousness so thoroughly that we can barely imagine our histories and our contemporary lives without them. But they are ideological inventions.”⁹¹

Weitz noted that the word “race” did not exist in the European languages until the late fourteenth century and did not become common until the sixteenth century. And the concept of nation or state has its origin in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The ideologies of race and nation are the soil and fields on which many deleterious ideologies have sprung, from nationalism and fascism to romanticism and racism. These dispositions place people in an instinctive mode for positioning people outside their particular “race” or “nation” for discrimination. They rob people of the sense of fairness or notion of justice and often instinctively arouse hostility towards those outside their particular classifications, instinctively perceiving such people as “outsiders”, “not one of us”, “rivals” and even “enemies”, for no reason other than the virtue of the definition that established those categories or classifications—race and nation.

It is said that he who plays the pipe sets the tone, and invariably the tune. It follows, therefore, that he who tells the story controls how the story is heard. This is equally the case with definition. Definition is like a work of art—a statue or a painting; once completed, it is impossible to start over and very difficult to make changes to the finished work. One cannot start over with the same piece of marble or canvass, because it has been transformed into something different from its original state; it is now in an altered state, so to speak.

In other words, one no longer has the original marble or canvass to recreate from, because it has essentially been destroyed, or rather transformed and cannot easily be used to create something different from the current state. Equally, one cannot recover the original material or make changes to the finished work and still retain the established characteristics thereof, because an impression has already been produced, leaving very little left of the original to bring about a new and different impression from what had been established.

Definition is like a first impression; you only get one chance at it. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Once the impression is made, it is very difficult to remake. The first impression creates the image and sets the tone. Every other impression exists only to reinforce or replace the first.

Efforts to replace an existing impression are very difficult, perhaps nearly impossible to achieve. No one knows this more than people who have been falsely accused and people who have been wrongly defined, classified, or characterized. Perhaps, no other group of people knows what I am talking about more than Africans and African Americans.

The dynamics of definition lies in the intended and unintended consequences thereof. The ills highlighted by the questions I opened with in the prologue have been philosophized, rationalized, romanticized, and legitimized in the last few centuries. Attendant to these is the unending cycle of bloodshed—man’s inhumanity to man. For the last couple of centuries or so, no one has been more influential and culpable than Charles Darwin, Sir Arthur Keith, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a few other likeminded individuals.

Of course, people have acted aggressively towards one another long before these quintessential Machiavellian men came on the world-shaping stage. However, the tendency for aggression was amplified with the establishment of the notion that war is an essential element of humanity to be embraced, cherished and advanced.

The stage that defined the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was set in the essential component of Darwin’s revolutionary publication, On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Many people may not know that the essential component of Darwin’s philosophy is the “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for Life”. Darwin and his disciples were not concerned so much about the origin of species as much as they were about who has the right to live and who has the power to decide who lives or dies.

The birth of this philosophy, in turn gave birth to a new and dangerous consciousness of racism and hatred, which over the one and a half centuries that followed,] would be relentlessly advanced and transformed into a cultural reality by many influential people, such as Sir Arthur Keith, Julian Huxley, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, Edwin G. Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, H. Huxley, George William Hunter, and Samuel George Morton, to name a few out of a very long list.

Keith’s work, perhaps more than any other aside from Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, inspired the most damning ideology and the worst devastating human ideology the world has ever known—the Nazism which culminated in the Second World War. Keith’s idea of moral codes—amity and enmity—were the basis for the aggressive and colonial mentality of Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keith wrote in his book titled Ethics (first published in 1945 as Evolution and Ethics):

“[H]e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the ‘ethical cosmos’ [the code of 'Amity'] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds, which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. These mental bonds, Darwin supposed, had been evolved from those inborn ties that link members of a family together - the love of parents for their children, of children for parents, and of children for each other. Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process; Huxley’s ‘cosmic process’ [the code of Enmity] and “ethical process” working not in opposition, but in harmony, to produce the races of the modern world.” ¹⁵⁵

Keith goes on to write:

“Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure.” ¹⁵⁵

In the preceding excerpts lies the cradle of racism. Keith preaches the ultimate sermon of hate and murder, encouraging groups to hate other groups and to actively seek their destruction, speaking of tribes and groups as primary entities that emerged unitarily. Keith seems to forget that even within tribes there are clans, families, and friends, each in the same sense an entity, “a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other.” .¹⁵⁵

Obviously, Keith failed to see the ever-narrowing concentric circle of people, which equally made each “team” a co-operative whole. Ironically, he stated this reality without realizing it. As he wrote, “I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes.” Yet his admonition is unbelievable naïve. He wrote in Ethics:

"A good tribesman clings to his fellows and tells them the truth; he repels men of neighboring tribes and tells them lies. The real problem, which faces us is this: How can the duality of human nature be explained? The evolutionist can offer an explanation which is agreeable to reason; the theologian has to appeal to superstition for an answer.” ²⁶⁷

If as Keith explained, “a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes”²⁶⁷ and such corporation could equally be a clan, a family, even a subset of a family, imagine the dynamics of Keith’s idea. The logical implication of Keith’s sermon is infinitely damning. It still resonates today, packing a deadly punch of bigotry and corrosive antipathy. Keith claims there is logic in what he proposed, but it is only the logic of a madman; after all, a madman does not view his thoughts, actions, even his conditions as anything but reasonable.

The fact is that evolution, at least as Darwin, Keith, and others proposed, is patently unreasonable, more so than anything even a fanatical theologian could ever propose. For Keith, as is typical of all evolutionists, “possibilities were assumed to add up to probability, and probabilities then were promoted to certitudes”²³, as the following excerpt from Ethics states, an excerpt that shows Keith’s position on evolution was more of an article of faith than any scientific reasoning. As the last sentence in his statement below shows, his whole thesis was based on belief system — “assumption” or supposition:

What, then, is the explanation which the student of human evolution has to offer as a final purpose for man's existence? It is not, as the Victorian scientists thought, to permit the individual man or woman to develop his latent potentialities; but to permit a closed society, be it tribe or nation, to develop its collective potentialities of brain and of body as an evolutionary unit. It is only when we make the assumption that evolution aims at the production of societies not of individuals that we come by a satisfying explanation of man's dual mentality, and the constituent elements of human nature.²⁶⁷

If as Keith wrote, “Tribalism was Nature’s method in bringing about the evolution of man the business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition,”²⁶⁷ and if as Keith further wrote, “To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes,”²⁶⁷ and if “Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space, hence the duality of man’s nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy and the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart,”²⁶⁷ and if “Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man”²⁶⁷--if all these were true as Keith said they were, then Keith either missed something very profound or he was extremely disingenuous.

What Keith seemed to forget is that it is not for him or anyone else to say when or where evolution is completed; if “Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man”²⁶⁷ and took millions of years to arrive, how did Keith know that the end had been reached, since it wouldn’t depend on man to say when the process is complete, being only a byproduct of evolution? Neither Keith nor any other human being had been around long enough; will live long enough to correctly gauge the length and breadth of evolution. If Keith’s assumptions were valid, why would humans abandon their “basic instinct” of tribalism to become detribalized by discovering agriculture, engaging in “town-building”, and beginning “the era of civilization”?

This clearly contradicts Keith’s conditions for tribal corporation necessary for achieving evolutionary fruition. One of the inconsistencies of Keith’s argument is in failing to recognize that just as something preceded tribalism, in his explanation, it is equally possible that tribalization would be replaced by detribalization. How could he be so certain that tribalization was the ultimate end of the evolutionary “machinery” he spoke of and that detribalization was not the next step in that machinery?

The contradiction in Keith’s thinking is profound. On the one hand, he vilifies detribalization as a detraction from evolution: “When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?”²⁶⁷ Yet he credits detribalization with advancing evolution, arguing that that the tribal mentality, essentially his “dual code of amity” or corporation, had been transferred to nations as a result of the amalgamation of tribes. Keith wrote: “My second theme relates to the current conception of race and of nation. Most of my colleagues regard a nation as a political unit, with which anthropologists have no concern; whereas I regard a nation as an “evolutionary unit,” with which anthropologists ought to be greatly concerned. The only live races in Europe today are its nations.” ²⁶⁸

He complimented tribalism even further by crediting it with the German “success” at the height of its might under Hitler and the Third Reich, as he wrote in his book, Ethics:

“When history raises the curtain on Germany, in the century which preceded the dawn of Christianity, we find her population divided into some forty independent tribes, warring with each other and with the outside world. No doubt the tribes, which the Romans met with, or heard of, represented federations or compulsory amalgamations of earlier smaller tribes. If Germany had been like the rest of Europe before the practice of agriculture reached her, which was late in the fourth millennium B.C., her territory must have been divided among some 150 or 200 small local tribes or communities. Thus, when our historical record begins, modern evolutionary progress, as indicated by reduction in number and increase in size of tribal units, had made a very considerable advance. In the centuries, which followed the Roman period local self-determination must have flourished, for by the seventeenth century there were 250 independent states established within the frontiers of what is now modern Germany. In the eighteenth century, under the sword of Frederick the Great, the number was reduced, mainly by the absorptive power and capacity of Prussia, so that in 1814 they numbered thirty-nine. By 1871, under Bismarck, only twenty-five states retained their independence. With the coming of Hitler and the establishment of the Third Reich, in 1933, Germany suddenly emerged as a unitary state - a single tribe or nation numbering over eighty million, with a single leader and a central government;” ²⁶⁹

Keith’s most brazen and damning influence on humanity is his fervent advocacy for war as a necessary evolutionary tool. He disdained the end of wars and human conflict, because he again saw it as detraction from evolution. He would not be satisfied until one group of people (obviously the Europeans) had subjugated or exterminated the rest of mankind in what he believed was the ultimate evolutionary end. The veiled but unmistakable glee Keith felt in the agenda of Hitler and the Third Reich is evident in his writings. He believed it validated his assumptions, when indeed his assumptions were the inspiration for Hitler and the Third Reich. Keith viewed the absence of wars as nothing but universalism and was heartbroken in contemplating the possibility.

If Keith’s logic and the theory of “tribal mentality” — amity towards group members and enmity towards outsiders—is correct, and considering the concentric circles of groups that originate from the individual and widen through the family, the clan, the tribe, and the nation, all of which would have successfully transferred the “tribal mentality” to subsequent groups, why was he so sure that any further extension of the process was a bad idea? Of course, he had felt that way from the beginning, first arguing that the evolutionarily-endowed tribal mentality precludes groups becoming unified to form nations or “larger tribes”, yet when proven wrong, he would hijack such contrary outcomes to his prior position hitherto.

Assuming evolution is at play in human dispositions, such as the innate tendency to form groups or tribes, it is very clear that groups are formed on the basis of reason, and such reason could be anything. It could be for identity (e.g. the so-called “race”), resources (e.g. financial interests), sexual preferences, political interests (e.g. political ideologies and parties), social interests and identities (e.g. social clubs, athletic clubs, etc.), religious or other ideological interests.

Particular groups or tribes that may exist are not in of themselves evolutionary imperatives. All in all, the reason for forming groups is not predetermined by evolution, as Keith and Darwin suggest but rather are developed on the basis of common interests, as groups are created when binding interests emerge and are destroyed when those interests are no longer relevant. The sentiment attached to a group, be it “amity” or “enmity”, is embedded in the definition of the group and derives from the basis of common interest for establishing the group; this common interest, this intent, precedes the definition of the group. As has been said, in definition, intent is prior to content.

Going further with this assumption, perhaps evolution has endowed humans with the instincts and cooperative ability to form and maintain groups, but most definitely, it did not and could not have formed those groups for humans on the basis of “race” alone, as Keith suggests. Going by Keith’s definition of the tribe, all groups are essentially tribes, including religions, political parties, corporations, sports teams, and fraternities would essentially constitute tribes, because they are driven by individual and common interests. Hence, a tribe is not necessarily based on the so-called “race” alone; it can also be based on intents born out of individual and common interests.

In most societies, tribes ultimately originated from the same set of parents. Through sibling rivalry for access to parental attention or other limited resources, population growth, and spatial expansion, they became disconnected and in competition for these limited resources. These are the same reasons for forming other types of groups—religions, corporate institutions, sports, and many others. Even within these latter groups, as in the prior, there are yet subgroups or subtribes, if you will, that are in cooperation within and in competition without, as I have already noted.

Keith lamented the end of wars and human conflicts, just as Alexander wept of the thought that there were no more worlds to conquer. In his sarcastic treatise, he wrote:

“What a world to look out on! The frontiers behind which sixty nations, tribes beyond number, and races are now entrenched have vanished; the earth below is as free as the sky above; among the peoples there is no longer any color bar; a common tongue has swept through the earth as in the palmy days of Babel. Tariff walls have been overthrown; there are no passports, no dues, no patriotism, for every living soul is a citizen of the world, free to come and go, free to trade as needs compel or moods suggest. There are no armies, no navies, for there is no longer any warlike spirit in human nature. Only a central airborne police to see that the one universal code of law is observed. There will be no competition, no rivalry, and hence no malice, envy, or evil ambition. Jerusalem shall take her place as the world's capital - a center of power and uplift, in touch with all communities. One state, one government, one law, and one God.” ²⁷⁰ Anyone who is still in doubt about Keith’s disdain for the absence of wars and conflicts among humans, characterizing such as universalism, should look no further, considering the following excerpts from the Ethics:

“Universalism as an ideal is as old as - nay, is probably much more ancient than - the Christian ideal. Yet see how different they are in penetrating power. Christianity has a momentum of its own which has carried it over a large part of the earth's surface; Universalism has no drive, no momentum; it is not contagious; it has behind it no missionary enthusiasm. And yet this strange fact remains: Universalism, not as an ideal but as a political practice, has been and is at work in all parts of the earth. Nowhere is Universalism welcomed and encouraged by a people; everywhere governments have forced and are forcing Universalism upon unwilling and resistant subjects. There is something in the Universalist ideal which runs against the grain of human nature. Force and fear are the driving power behind this regional kind of Universalism. Love and brotherhood have had no part in its spread.” ²⁷⁰ How could Arthur Keith, perhaps the most famous advocate for war as the essential evolutionary imperative, fail to recognize that force and fear, the same things he resents in the spread of “universalism”, are the essential elements that inspire wars and violent conflicts from generation to generation? Frequently in ramblings like the one aforementioned, Keith’s real motivation comes to the surface and is clearly narcissistic and has little to do with the usual motivations for war—fear of losing or being denied something that people consider essential to their existence or way of life. How could he blame the end of wars on universalism and at the same time accuse universalism of using force and fear to keep people from killing one another; without question, Keith was very disingenuous and duplicitous. His vacillation, if I can generously characterize his sayings as such, even extends to his idea of himself. Keith fancied himself as a civilized man, of a civilized race, and urged the “civilized race” to exterminate the “savage races”. Yet, he claims that civilization is nothing but a charade. Consider the following excerpt from his book, Ethics: “And yet as I make this statement, I recall Von Luschan's aphorism: 'There are no savages, only people whose cultures differ from ours.' It will be nearer to stark reality to say: In the world of humanity there are only savages, who differ in the degree to which they have masked their original nature in the cloak of civilization.”²⁷¹ Elsewhere in his book, Keith quoting some of his brethren of hate wrote: “Huxley condemned Universalism; it was an illusion. More than a century earlier J. J. Rousseau gave an equally unsparing verdict; ‘it was a veritable chimera.’ But the reasons they gave for their condemnation were not the same. Huxley's judgment was founded on the belief that no sooner would Universalism be established than evolution would again raise her hoary head, pitting local group against local group, and that soon mankind would reassume its evil evolutionary ways. Rousseau's reason was very different. For him nationalism was the source of all that is good: If people would be virtuous … let them love their own country … If it is a home for everyone … It is a home for no one.’ A uniform Universalist system of schools could do much in the attaining of such ideals, but the old instincts would be merely suppressed, not eliminated. To eliminate them, and so secure stability for the Universalist State, breeding and marriage must be controlled everywhere so that individuals of a warlike spirit, individuals who are evolutionary - minded - that is, competitive, combative, strong-willed, ambitious. or jealous - are prevented from handing on their qualities to the coming generation. In this way mankind could be domesticated, tamed, and made suitable subjects for a Universal state. If we desire universal peace, we must be prepared to surrender our evolutionary birthright. I for one would prefer to keep my birthright and use the gifts which Nature has given me for its maintenance, the chief of which is courage - courage and self-sacrifice.” ²⁷² If this sounds familiar, it is indeed a typical speech that Adolf Hitler would have made, perhaps an excerpt from Mein Kampf or another Nazi manifesto.

Is anyone still in doubt as to how the world got where it is today, still mired in the quandary of racism and its attendant hatred? People such as Sir Arthur Keith who advocate war and man’s inhumanity to man as a necessary part of evolution and an essential component of humanity’s “survival and progress” are patently evil. They effectively transform otherwise peaceful people into monsters and murderers, thus compelling them to “kill or be killed”, to kill in order to defend themselves when their destruction is imminent at the hands of others who have been inspired by the likes of Arthur Keith, Charles Darwin, Huxley, etc.

This induced predicament could be illustrated with a 1995 Hollywood thriller, Nick of Time, starring Christopher Walken as Mr. Smith and Johnny Depp as Gene Watson.²⁷³ After attending his ex-wife’s funeral with his daughter, Watson arrives home in Los Angeles soon after, to find that his daughter has been kidnapped. He was given a gun and a photograph and itinerary of a man and told that if he hasn’t killed the man in one hour and fifteen minutes, his daughter will be killed. The intent was, of course, to make a murderer out of a normal human being who abhors killing another human being and would not commit murder.

In his struggle to save his daughter’s life without killing the person in the photograph, Watson kills the villain Mr. Smith. Strangely, Smith delighted in the outcome, because one way or another he had achieved his goal, which was to make “a killer out of Watson”. This idea, as well as the real one that it illustrates, creates a Catch-22, in the sense that it is a means of entrapment—an illogical, unreasonable, and senseless situation that brings about what it was intended to prevent, which hitherto did not and would never have existed.

Ironically, on the issue of excessive sex, violence, and absence of morals in movies, Hollywood film producers are very quick to argue that they are merely presenting a picture of society, when in fact they are indeed shaping the society by saturating it with excessive sex and violence. It is not art imitating life that they project; it is life imitating the art that they induce. The same type of reasoning that Keith and his cohorts have offered for their own promotion of violence and conflicts is at play here. True to form, both are products of imagination that culminate in tragic realities—a sad irony indeed.

Studies consistently show that children exposed to sexually explicit and violent images on a consistent basis over prolonged periods of time are more desensitized and inclined to violence. There has been an increase in this dynamic in the last couple of decades, with the explosion of computer technology and violent video games, laced with explicit sexual content. Society continues to act like an ostrich with its head in the sand, in an attempt to hide from the reality that threatens it.

A few unscrupulous merchants only have the privilege of our airwaves at societies’ pleasure yet have no care whatsoever for the welfare of children. They act with impunity, riding rough-shod all over everyone’s better judgement. And why not; after all, lawmakers and public officials whose responsibility it is to safeguard the airwaves have all been bought by these corrupt money bags, who while corrupting our children with their filthy products are also corrupting our sacred institutions with their dirty money.

Science and human experience show that people are in large part the product of their environment. Why then, is it so hard to recognize that people are what they are, in large part because of their environments, environments that are at times, unfortunately, shaped by dangerous ideologies and the dangerous people and institutions that propagate those ideologies? Such are the likes of Darwin and his so-called theory of evolution, Keith and his theory of tribal mentality, and Hollywood’s mind-numbing putrid cesspool of decadence. Hollywood is both a product and now the prime promoter and chief beneficiary of the notions propagated by Darwin, Keith, Huxley, and company—the notion that dismisses morality on the ground that people are basically animals, acting out basic animal instincts of sex and violence.

The 1980s song by H. Smith and W. Carter, titled Dooley Jones, speaks about a boy who was marred by definition.²⁷⁴ Good people turned bad towards him, and the boy was ultimately damaged by the consequence of his definition to the extent that he lost control of his soul—the essence of his being—alongside his society. The story about Dooley is the story of every child, wife, and people-group that has been so defined. People tend to view themselves as others view them, as they have been constrained to view themselves, as they have been portrayed by those who defined, hence, control them.

This was true of African Americans during slavery and in the Jim Crow South, and vestiges of this fact still remain in the American consciousness. It is true of the “untouchables” in many parts of the world. This injustice has scarred the conscience of virtually every society in the world, and it still exists in many parts, notably Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. No one is spared, and nowhere is it more entrenched and alive than in India and North Africa, particularly in Sudan and Niger. Tom O’Neill wrote in the National Geographic:

“To be born a Hindu in India is to enter the caste system, one of the world's longest surviving forms of social stratification. Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years, the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth come the Brahmans—the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs come the Vaisyas—merchants and traders. From the feet come the Sudras—laborers. Each varna in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and sub castes with their own pecking orders.” ¹⁷⁷ “A fifth group describes the people who are achuta, or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy beings. Prejudice defines their lives, particularly in the rural areas, where nearly three-quarters of India's people live. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down.” ¹⁷⁷ The Hindu caste system has great parallel with segregation, apartheid, and slavery, only it is much older and more deeply rooted than those other experiences, as it is at the core of what had become the essence of the society. As O’Neill wrote in the National Geographic article: “Across India, members of upper castes often refuse to share water with Untouchables, convinced that any liquid will become polluted if it comes in contact with an Untouchable. In the countryside, Untouchables are often forbidden to use the same wells and ponds as upper caste villagers. Municipal governments have begun to install separate water pumps. But in most rural teashops, Untouchables still are not permitted to drink from glasses served to upper caste customers.” ¹⁷⁷

In Ghana, as in India, Nigeria, and many parts of the world until less than a hundred years ago, young girls were being condemned to sex slavery, some were even willingly offered by their parents to be “servants to the gods”, often at the behest of priests of such pagan gods. These priests claimed to act on behalf the gods, which supposedly demanded the service of those girls. These girls became “untouchables”. Unable to marry, many of them are victimized even further, by descending or being forced into prostitution.

O’Neill also wrote about a lady named Kariamma, who was dedicated by her family to become a devadasi, or "a servant of god", equivalent to the osu, which existed in the Igbo culture in eastern Nigeria until about a century or so ago:

At puberty, like most devadasis in India, she was offered sexually to upper caste patrons. Now, at age 30, Kariamma has given birth to five children, uncertain of who the fathers are. Unable to marry, many devadasis, most of them Untouchables, are auctioned off to urban brothels. Commenting on the hypocrisy of the caste system, an activist working with devadasis in the southern state of Karnataka exclaimed, “These women are Untouchable by day, but touchable by night.” ²⁷⁵ Not too long ago, another group of “untouchables”—female African slaves in America, were in like manner, “touchable by night”. ¹⁷⁷

O’Neill wrote of the Indian Untouchables, in a condition reminiscent of the seventeenth century America:

Hour after hour the Untouchables break rocks to repair a railbed in Rajasthan. They will earn one or two dollars a day. Because of their huge numbers—Untouchables now number 160 million, or 15 percent of India's people—many have had to leave their villages to seek work beyond their traditional caste occupations. Yet most Untouchable migrants merely exchange one kind of backbreaking labor for another, working in fields, construction sites, brick kilns, and stone quarries. ¹⁷⁷

History shows that such conditions would remain as long as no one did anything to change it, persisting until someone is able to stand up and seek to redefine himself or herself and, by consequence, redefine others like him or her. This was the case with Rosa Park, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, jr., and many others. It is an established maxim that evil thrives when good people choose to do nothing to stop it. Until Rosa Parks, the so-called “black people” were conditioned to accept the subjugative dictates of segregation, such as sitting at the back of the bus and giving up their seats to a “white person”, among other demeaning theatrics.

Sadly, many oppressed people around the world have existed in their repressive conditions for so long that they do not even know how to emerge from it. Their situation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they have become what their oppressors intended for them to become. Efforts to lead them out of bondage is proving to be painfully slow and difficult because of their deep and long history under oppression.

Since they have never known any other life, they often cannot conceive of a life different from what they have known and for so long been subjected to. In the National Geographic article about the Untouchables in India, citedearlier, the author wrote, “Weighted with some 1,500 years of bitter history, Untouchables face daunting challenges as they try to shed the burdens of caste.¹⁷⁷

Even in America, there are people who have become conditioned to believe that they can never rise above their circumstances. Many inner-city children have come to accept “ghetto life” as their culture, by internalizing all the negative stereotypes of themselves that the American media and other institutions saturate the society with, especially when those images are all they ever hear or see about themselves from the establishment. They have come to accept the low expectation which the definition they have been subjected to sought to establish.

They have assumed certain behaviors established by the definition that were intended to classify them in negative terms. By taking up behaviors associated with their definition—crime, violence, and other despair-induced irresponsible lifestyles, all of which did not exist prior to the definition that established them, these people have essentially appropriated a debilitating self-fulfilling prophecy and have thus become prone to self-destructive tendencies.

Evidently some of the so-called back people who have become successful through excellence in their endeavors, whose accomplishments are regarded by society as anomalies, their individual accomplishment obscured by the media barrage of images of the blackface and darky iconography, cannot easily escape the sentiments of these stereotype, so much so that they are tempted or compelled to succumb to it and act towards other African Americans as such. In an interview with the Washington Post, Warren Simmons, executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University recalls waiting in his car at a stoplight in downtown Washington and locking his doors when he spotted a black man approaching. In disbelieving, the man began yelling at him.

According to the interview, Simmons says, “For a moment, I found myself caught in a cultural quandary. [...] I am a black man, and I know what it is like to have people respond to me with fear. Yet I did this.”²⁷⁶ Simmons perceived that the man in this encounter assumed that his response to him was to him as an individual, but it was directed to him as part of a larger group. On the contrary, I am convinced that Simmons was wrong in his perception. I am inclined to believe that like Simmons, the man knew the action was directed to him as “a black man”.

As the blackface minstrelsy and the darky iconography of old around the world showed, racial definition created a social atmosphere which suggested that humans with obvious physical differences have corresponding mental or personality differences. In essence, the notion of race implies that groups that differ physically also possess distinctive emotional and mental abilities or disabilities. These beliefs are based on the establishment of different people-groups by definition—different “humankinds”, if you will.

Definition associates various people groups with predetermined attributes. As we have seen, the group that has been defined as the “white race” has traditionally been associated with positive attributes ranging from high IQ to civility and nobility, while those defined as the “black race” have traditionally been associated with negative attributes like low IQ, disruptive tendencies, ill-temperedness, dishonesty, and irresponsibility. These associations promote racism—the attitude that certain people-groups are inherently superior to another.

Many African American children in the inner city now believe that activities like further one’s education or dressing formally are all attributes of white people. Any aspiration for such activities, then, are regarded as “acting white”—a betrayal of the ghetto culture and identity, which has become appropriated by some as “black culture”. This has led to the crab syndrome in many inner city African American communities—an attitude that implies, “we are not going anywhere in life and so are you, because we will not let you.”

Many inner-city children have chosen or been constrained to drop out of school, preferring to join violent and drug-dealing street gangs. Some have joined as a matter of survival, as one’s belonging to a gang can give them protection from said gang as well as other rival gangs. Some terrorize and murder their peers who chose to make something of their lives, rather than join their perilous ways.

Many African American children in the inner cities of America have come to believe that their only means of succeeding in life is by pursuing sports or music, ironically another self-fulfilling prophecy that stems from another definition, an imposed limitation. Don’t get me wrong; I am not implying that those are not worthy endeavors. What I am saying is that many African American children are discouraged from other pursuits, as a consequence of negative definition.

On the other hand, many “white people” who could not achieve the high expectations placed on them by virtue of their racial definition have been led to blame others, particularly the so-called “inferior races” for their failure. Meanwhile, those who have achieved considerable measures of success tend to associate their success with the attributes established by the definition to which they have been associated. Consequently, they tend to view the condition (perceived failure) of those defined unfavorably, with the attributes established by such definition.

Ultimately, a certain perception is created: those who are perceived as “unsuccessful” or not well off are seen as incompetent and undeserving. If they happen to be of the group established by definition as an “inferior race”, then their condition is considered to be an inevitable outcome, predicted and predetermined by the attributes to which they are associated. This notion becomes the groupthink by which that perception is maintained.

Those who by virtue of definition belong to a favored group, for example the “white race” or “white people”, but are perceived to fall short of the expectation placed on that group, whether it is in being “unsuccessful” materially or in deviating from attitudes associated with their group, are regarded as aberrant members of their group.

To some of those who have been defined unfavorably, the perception that they can never make it, however much they tried and in spite of their potential, would suggest to them that there is a concerted effort to prevent them from succeeding. Whether such effort lies in nepotism, competitive advantage, or sheer coincidence is irrelevant. Such perception steals hope from people, creates despair, and drives them to crime, violence, and other despair-induced, self-destructive behaviors—a self-fulfilling prophecy which plays into and reinforces the negative definition to which its victims are associated.

Such victimization includes punitive social actions engendered by retaliatory responses to acts resulting from the aforementioned despair. Such social actions are frequently exacerbated by what some sociologists have called the “functionalist perspective”, a euphemism for social Darwinism or the survival of the fittest theory—popularized by Charles Darwin.

Very often, societies have responded to negative racial definitions by forming stereotypes from them and acting on those stereotypes. The result of such a response is the fulfillment of those false definitions, self-fulfilling prophecies. Stereotypes have similar dynamics to rumors in that they spread quickly and leave the burden of proof on the subject of the rumor. In almost all cases of deliberate rumors, the latency in proving the contrary is very high. Consequently, rumors gain credibility because they cannot be readily disproved as quickly as they spread. The more rumors spread, the more entrenched they become. Such is the case with stereotypes.

On stereotypes, Richard T. Schaefer (2002) wrote, “Labels take on such strong significance that people often ignore facts that contradict their previously held beliefs.”²⁷⁷ In the United States of America, stereotypes abound. These exaggerated generalizations impact people of all descent—African Americans, Jews, Irish people, Italians, Polish people, Arabs, etc. Common stereotypes in Western societies include the associations of Italians with organized crime or Jews with greed and duplicity, the perception of Irish people as drunks, cantankerous, and belligerent, Chinese people as sheepish and obsequious, African Americans as intellectually inferior, lazy, and dependent, Polish people as offish, Germans as mechanical, unfeeling, and sadistic, English as stiff and apathetic, French as sensual and immoral, Romans as violent and imperialistic, Arabs as bloodthirsty and dangerous, American Appalachians as hillbillies, backward moonshiners, and gun-toting white failures. Of course, the creation of stereotypes is not an activity exclusive to the West; stereotypes are in every society. In Nigeria, they are just as impactful on all people, the Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, and other ethnic groups.

The perception of Jewish people as greedy, shrewd, and exploitative, as in the image of the Jewish moneylender Shylock from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice²⁷⁸, disregards all fair-minded Jewish people and contributes to prejudice against Jews. African Americans are regularly portrayed as loud, low IQ, lazy, poor, violent, and criminal, such characterization contributing to their susceptibility to heightened suspicion and severity from citizens and civil powers alike. People who believe that all Caucasians are racists disregard the fact that many fought and still fight for the civil rights of all peoples, an assumption that denigrates those who stand against racism and have suffered and sacrificed for the good fight.

Ultimately, the collective result is the marginalization and disenfranchisement of those whose identities have been twisted by false and negative definitions. Some of these people may come to see themselves according to those damaging definitions and unconsciously acquire the attributes established by those false and deleterious definitions. A person or people group consistently described as having particular characteristics eventually begin to display the very traits attributed to them by those descriptions.

Negative self-fulfilling prophecies can and have been devastating to minority groups. Such groups often find that they are allowed to hold only menial jobs with little wages, prestige, or opportunities for advancement. A prevailing rationale of the dominant or majority group can be that members of these minorities lack the intellectual ability to perform in more respectable and lucrative positions. Training to become scientists, business executives, or physicians is often denied to members of the minority groups, locking them into society’s low wage jobs.

As a result, the false definition becomes real. The minority groups then become inferior, because they were defined as such at the onset and were prevented from rising to the levels enjoyed by the majority group. For example, only 3% of America’s scientists are Latinos and a comparable percentage applies to African Americans.²⁷⁹ Many low-performing schools in the inner cities are in neighborhoods where the population is predominantly comprised of Latinos and African Americans.

These schools perform poorly because of factors that create very complicated dynamics which marginalize the children enrolled in terms of academic performance. The inner-city schools, lacking adequate funding, are forced to make do with little or no educational resources. Whatever resources they have are either defective or substandard. On top of all that, these children often take care of themselves and others in their family, because they either are of a single parent household or have no parental care at all.

In [date], two documentaries on education in the Chicago Matters: Valuing Education series, respectively titled Flat Lined: How Illinois Shortchanges Rural Students and “The Science Sisters”, were broadcasted on the Chicago Public Radio.²⁸⁰ The documentaries featured a comparative analysis of two schools, Farragut High School, a predominantly Latino school on the city’s southwest side, and Lincoln Park High School, a school in an affluent Gold Coast neighborhood, showing the inequality that exists between schools in affluent neighborhoods and poor inner-city communities and how they affect and determine student performance and opportunities.

In the city’s science fair in 2006, as in previous years, Lincoln Park High School outperformed Farragut High School and other less affluent schools by a very wide margin, largely due to the former’s high-quality resources, first-class science teachers, cutting edge facilities, and a rich pool of high-end professionals and off-school academic resources and facilities available to them through social networks comprised of parents, friends, and neighbors.

Unfortunately, the students at Farragut High School and similar schools lacked these types of extra-curricular resources, mainly because their parents could not afford to enroll them in the schools and programs that boast these high-quality resources. Students in poor communities and low-performing schools are faced with the same problems and limitations that their parents faced during their youth, obstacles that prevented many of their parents from attaining the professional and material success that others take for granted.

Generations are caught in a vicious circle that inevitably perpetuates the problems that too many people of low social and economic status are forced to face while in their formative years. This socioeconomic situation then dubiously becomes labelled as a problem of biological heredity or genetic disposition, especially when raw facts and statistical data get thrown around in an unqualified manner or out of context, such as the statistic that only 26%, or a little over one in four, of Chicago public high school juniors met or exceeded the statewide Illinois test standard in science in 2005.²⁸⁰

Clearly Lincoln High School students have higher competitive advantages over students from Farragut High School, advantages that ultimately translated into better performances. This is the story of many schools in a nation where funding for education comes from property tax. School districts with low property bases or property values, such as those in the inner cities and rural communities, are underfunded, a factor leading to low student performance. Meanwhile, the suburban school districts and rich city school districts with high property bases and taxes enjoy adequate and even excess funding that enhances the academic performance of their students.

Unfortunately, when analysis, particularly statistical analysis, is done to support racist presuppositional frameworks, the conclusions are often that there is a correlation between a school’s academic performance and the students that attend those school. These analyses and conclusions often imply that students in poor performing schools are intellectually inferior to the students in better performing schools, as can be found in The Bell Curve and like-minded studies.

This logic gets extended to the ethnicities predominant in those underperforming schools and in their larger communities. The final implication is the culmination of notions and insinuations that support the idea of superior and inferior races and the stereotypes that have come to be associated with the so-called backwoods people (“hillbillies” or “white trash”), African Americans, and Hispanics (“inferior races”) in the inner cities.

Because of this vicious circle, a talented individual from one of these racial or ethnic minorities may come to see the worlds of entertainment and professional sports as his or her only hope for achieving wealth and fame. It is no accident that successive waves of Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American, and Hispanic performers and athletes have made their mark on culture in the United States.

That said, Schaefer points out in his writings in Racial and Ethnic Groups, “Unfortunately, these very successes may convince the dominant group that its original stereotypes were valid and may even convince those of the subordinate groups that these are the only areas of society in which they can excel.”81

In a recent program marking the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education, a teacher stated that she expected “Black students” to fare worse than “White students”. Not only did she actively seek to convey to minority students and fellow teachers that she expected black students to perform worse, but she also set out to implement strategies and plans to achieve and implant her expectation in those students.²⁸²

Many Hispanics in California and African Americans elsewhere recounted how teachers and school administrators discouraged them from pursuing professional careers in the fields of medicine, science, law, and engineering and instead encouraged to focus on becoming landscape workers, cooks, miners, athletes, and entertainers.

Many were dissuaded from seeking to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers. This effort to discourage and frustrate minorities such as African-Americans from pursuing highly regarded professional careers in STEM fields continues even in colleges, as the number of African Americans forced to drop out of college continues to grow, feeding the perception that African Americans cannot make it in academics or professions that require high scientific or mathematical skills.

A few years ago, a racist professor at the School of Pharmacy at University of Missouri in Kansas City was systematically frustrating the few pharmacy students who happened to be of a minority background with the intent to force them out of the program before they graduate. In two particularly obvious cases, two female students originally from Nigeria and India, who were at or near the top of the class with A and B averages, were tormented by the professor. Both suffered verbal and other forms of abuses that practically traumatized them and even caused them emotional and physical health problems.

The students have been constantly intimated and harassed by the professor who apparently continually sought ways to have them expelled from the pharmacy program. Her wicked efforts ranged from given incomplete exam papers in order to lower a student’s overall course grade, to ridiculously baseless accusation of plagiarism. When the African American student, whom I know personally, attempted to plead her case, she was accused of being loud and argumentative, and summarily reprimanded. This characterization is typical of the definition and perception that has been imposed on African American women as a result of some “studies” carried out by a few racist scholars.

The UMKC professor on learning from the students that they have done excellently in every other class and test, except hers told the students, “Just because you can memorize things does not mean you can apply them.” For the professor to clearly indicate that satisfying the established academic “true test” of knowledge (tests examinations) by these students was not good enough for her to recognize the students, shows her bias, hostility, and ultimate intent, especially when none of the other students who happen to be of the professor’s race not only did not problems with the professor but enjoy unprecedented encouragement and assistance from the professor.

This shows clear evidence of malice and mischief that can only come from racial hatred; the type of hatred that predisposes a person to refuse to recognize another person’s accomplishments, just because that person is not of a particular race, but belong to another “race” that ought to be denied rights and privileges by virtue of the definition that their “race” has been subjected to.

Such is the type of hatred Adolf Hitler displayed at the 1936 Munich Olympics games when Jesse Owen, another African American stereotype buster, won four gold medals in track and fields, hence busting Hitler’s ego balloons of racial superiority. Hitler refused to recognize Owens and was furious that he was allowed into the Olympic games in the first place. As has been said before, it is not a matter of competence or intellectual abilities that the so-called black people are under-represented in professional and high intellect disciplines, it is a matter of privilege and exclusion, founded on the fear of displacement by the people responsible for perpetuating the suppression of African Americans in those fields.

In many ways, those defined as “black people”, by virtue of the essence of that definition, are in a state of precarious existence. “Being a black man in America can mean inhabiting a border area between possibility and peril”, says Michael Fletcher in his Washington Post article titled “At the corner of progress and peril”.²⁷⁶ The article, which was inspired by a recent survey by Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University that “measured the attitudes of black men on a variety of issues and asked others for their views of black men”, quoted a professor at the University of Southern California, as saying “As a black man, you often think that things can go either way, …You could be that guy in the penitentiary, or you could be that guy on everybody’s television screen.”²⁷⁶

Of course, it is not the fault of many African American children—that, they have come to view themselves in the shadows of the definitions imposed on them by society. Many inner-city children have seen their parents, particularly fathers, shutout of legitimate means of enterprise. Many have seen their fathers struggle and fail to feed their families, because of racial discrimination engendered by definition, which deny them access to opportunity and a better life. They have seen their fathers and role models incarcerated and damaged for life, essentially disenfranchised by society. They have come to believe that they cannot become successful, because they are not allowed or expected to. They have come to believe that they will end up like their fathers and role models—those who have gone before them, tried and failed.

Race and class definitions are, indeed, frequently the starting point of the foundation of social engineering. The definition of people establishes how those people are perceived and treated—essentially who and what those people become, regardless of their true identity. For those who have been defined negatively, for example African Americans, the so-called “blacks”, the perception has been very negative and the treatment that followed has been a history of entrenched racial discrimination. No human being was created to be a slave or to be owned by another human being, no human being should be beholding to another for the right to life and human worth. People are not born to be slaves; people make other people slaves, just because they could—just because they have the power to do so.

The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, because the Egyptians were in a position to do so and possessed the power to do so. Africans were stolen from their lands and taken into captivity by Arabs, Europeans and Euro-Americans, to be made slaves, just because the slave traders, profiteers, and their African collaborators were in a position to do so and possessed the power to do so. Throughout history, all people who have been enslaved, had been in positions that made them vulnerable—economic weakness or military weakness.

Prior to the late seventeenth century, people conquered in wars or people who had no land possessions, could easily become slaves and many people everywhere, including Europeans, were made slaves as such. It was not until the late seventeenth century, that the race-based slavery system was developed.

Following the largest forced migration in human history—the trans-Atlantic slave trade that forcibly took at least 12 million Africans from their homeland and brought them to Europe and the Americas, the North American colonies enacted laws that redefined the African people brought to America as slaves. These laws, also known as the slave codes, defined and regulated the Africans who have been made slaves by their captors.

According to D. Noel, the slave codes established five fundamental social conditions: first, slavery was for life; second, the status was inherited; third, slaves were considered mere property; fourth, slaves were denied rights; and fifth, coercion was used to maintain the system.²⁸³ The slave codes essentially defined the low positions of those in slavery (Africans), and their enforcement established the caste system, which completely subjugated the African slaves, and shaped the mentality of the Europeans and Euro-Americans towards Africans in general.

A great deal of attention and detail were given to the education and training of the “ideal slave”. Such education and training involved a five-step process to shaping the character of a slave. The first is strict discipline; the second is a sense of inferiority; the third is belief in the master’s superiority; the fourth is acceptance of the master’s standards; the fifth is a deep sense of helplessness and dependence.

It is no surprise that, at the same time, the so-called scientists, in their witch-hunts — “scientific research”, tended to associate certain attributes that correlate with some of these imposed conditions — conditions associated with oppression and common amongst people who have been stripped of spirit, hope and dignity, which was the African American experience, as evidence of their inferiority. One reviewer in a scientific journal was quoted as saying:

“After 1859, the evolutionary schema raised additional questions, particularly whether or not Afro-Americans could survive in competition with their white near-relations. The momentous answer was a resounding no…The African was inferior—represented the missing link between ape and Teuton.” ¹⁷⁰

The period following the emancipation proclamation in 1863 proved that in spite of many centuries of the oppression of slavery and being cast as inferior to the “White man”, African Americans were intellectually as good as anyone, and in some cases, better than those who oppressed them. During the period known as the Reconstruction (1867-1877) and even as early as 1731, those defined as “black” were already proving their intellectual abilities and excelling in science and technology.

Napoleon Bonaparte, himself a man with a disadvantaged background, being that his ancestry was Corsica (a land and people that were subjugated by the French), once said, “My motto has always been: a career open to all talents, without distinction of birth”²⁸⁴ Of course, Napoleon was referring to the system of privilege in French society at the time, which effectively excluded his people from access to opportunities. One could describe the ideals of the “Reconstruction” in Napoleon’s words.

However, some believed that the expectation of many “White people” and which was why they even tacitly accepted the proposal, was that the “Black people” would not be able to thrive on their own let alone compete with the “White people”, hence “Black people would not be able to pose any economic or social threats to the “White people” and would willingly take their place in society as subordinates, expectedly subserviently to the “White man”. Needless to say, that was not and could never be the case.

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre is one evidence among thousands that prove two things. The first is that under normal circumstances, the so-called black people can be as successful as the so-called white man. The second was that the so-called white man was proven wrong and that he feared displacement on the ladder of significance by the so-called black man. The riot, also known as the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre, when mobs of white residents, many of them urged and armed by city officials, attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, slaughtered tens of African Americans and burned their homes and businesses to the ground.

It has been said that, “You can’t get blood transfusion, stop at a traffic signal, turn on a lamp, or even put on a pair of shoes without relying on technologies and devices first patented by African Americans” ²⁸⁵.

A roll call of African American inventors and industrialists would probably read like this: In the early 1700s, Benjamin Banneker, born into a family of “free black” learns reading, writing and arithmetic from his grandmother and a Quaker schoolmaster. Banneker would later teach himself astronomy and publish an almanac on his astronomical calculations.

James Derham, born a slave in Philadelphia, became the first African American physician in America. Derham was encouraged by his owner, a physician, to practice medicine. Working as a medical assistant and apothecary, he saved enough money to buy his freedom in 1783 and opened a medical practice in New Orleans. He would later build the first clock in the United States.

In 1791, Thomas L. Jennings, a tailor in New York City, became the first African American to hold a U.S. patent. In 1821, he was given patent for a dry-cleaning process. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which increased U.S. cotton planting. Ironically, his invention also produced greater demand for slave labor.

Archibald Alexander (1888-1958), born in Iowa; attended Iowa State University and earned a civil engineering degree in 1912. While working for an engineering firm, he designed the Tidal Basin Bridge in Washington, D.C. Later he formed his own company, designing Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C. and an airfield in Tuskegee, Alabama, among many other projects.

Benjamin Bradley, born in 1830, a slave, Bradley was employed at a printing office and later at the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he helped set up scientific experiments. In the 1840s he developed a steam engine for a war ship. Unable to patent his work, he sold it and with the proceeds purchased his freedom, Charles Henry Turner (1867-1923), a native of Cincinnati, Ohio; Turner received a B.S. (1891) and M.S. (1892) from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. (1907) from the University of Chicago. A noted authority on the behavior of insects, he was the first researcher to prove that insects can hear, and David Crosthwait, Jr. (1898-1976), born in Nashville, Tennessee, Crosthwait earned a B.S. (1913) and M.S. (1920) from Purdue University. An expert on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, he designed the heating system for Radio City Music Hall in New York. During his lifetime he received at least ⁴⁰ U.S. patents relating to HVAC systems.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950), born in Washington, D.C., earned advanced degrees in medicine and surgery from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, in 1933 and from Columbia University in 1940. He is particularly noted for his research in blood plasma and for setting up the first blood bank, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1856-1931), Williams was born in Pennsylvania and attended medical school in Chicago, where he received his M.D. in 1883. He founded the Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1891, and he performed the first successful open-heart surgery in 1893.

Edward Alexander Bouchet (1852-1918), born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the first African American to graduate (1874) from Yale College. In 1876, upon receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Yale, he became the first African American to earn a doctorate. Bouchet spent his career teaching college chemistry and physics. Elbert R. Robinson, who invented the Electric Railway Trolley.

Elijah McCoy (1844-1929), the son of escaped slaves from Kentucky; McCoy was born in Canada and educated in Scotland. Settling in Detroit, Michigan, he invented a lubricator for steam engines (patented 1872) and established his own manufacturing company. During his lifetime he acquired 57 patents, his inventions have wide ranging application to railroad and heavy machinery, Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941), originally from Charleston, South Carolina, attended Dartmouth College and the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. in zoology in 1916. Mr. Just's work on cell biology took him to marine laboratories in the U.S. and Europe and led him to publish more than 50 papers.

Frederick McKinley Jones (1892-1961), born in Cincinnati, Ohio, became an experienced mechanic and invented a self-starting gas engine and a series of devices for movie projectors. More importantly, he invented the first automatic refrigeration system for long-haul trucks (1935). Jones was awarded more than 40 patents in the field of refrigeration.

Garrett Augustus Morgan (1877-1963), born in Kentucky, Morgan invented a gas mask (patented 1914) that was used to protect soldiers from chlorine fumes during World War I. Morgan also received a patent (1923) for a traffic signal that featured automated STOP and GO signs. Morgan’s invention was later replaced by traffic lights.

George Washington Carver (1865-1943), born into slavery in Missouri, later earned degrees from Iowa Agricultural College. The director of agricultural research at the Tuskegee Institute from 1896 until his death, Carver developed hundreds of applications for farm products important to the economy of the South, including the peanut, sweet potato, soybean, and pecan. He developed 300 products from peanuts, 118 products from the sweet potato and 75 from the pecan.

Granville T. Woods (1856-1910) was born in Columbus, Ohio, and later settled in Cincinnati. He was mainly self-educated and was awarded more than 60 patents. One of his most important inventions was a telegraph that allowed moving trains to communicate with other trains and train stations, thus improving railway efficiency and safety. In 1903, Woods developed railway air brakes (the first safe method for stopping trains). His inventions included the trolley car, steam boiler, radiator, third rail (subway), razor-stopping device, etc.

Lewis Howard Latimer (1848-1929), born in Chelsea, Mass., Latimer learned mechanical drawing while working for a Boston patent attorney. He later invented an electric lamp and a carbon filament for light bulbs (patented 1881, 1882). Latimer was the only African American member of Thomas Edison's engineering laboratory.

Madame C.J. Walker (1867-1919), widowed at 20, Louisiana-born Sarah Breedlove Walker supported herself and her daughter as a washerwoman. In the early 1900s she developed a hair care system and other beauty products. Her business, headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, amassed a fortune, and she became a generous patron of many African American charities.

Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894), born the son of a French planter and a slave in New Orleans, Rillieux was educated in France. Returning to the U.S., he developed an evaporator for refining sugar, which he patented in 1846. Rillieux's evaporation technique is still used in the sugar industry and in the manufacture of soap and other products.

Rebecca Cole (1846-1922), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cole was the second African American woman to graduate from medical school (1867). She joined Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first white woman physician, in New York and taught hygiene and childcare to families in poor neighborhoods.

Roger Arliner Young (1889-1964) born in Virginia and attended Howard University, University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a Ph.D. in zoology in 1940. Working with her mentor, Ernest E. Just, she published a number of important studies.

Indeed hundreds, perhaps, thousands of inventions that transformed the world and brought about modern way of living, were made by African Americans. Prior to Reconstruction and during the Jim Crow era, Africans (slaves and freemen) were denied formal education by law and other efforts to subjugate them and reduced them to functionally subservient roles in society. These efforts completely shut out Africans America from quality education, vocational training, and ultimately professional occupation, thus establishing the drought of African American in science, technology, medicine, legal, and academic professions, among others.

Yet, despite tremendous obstacles, many African Americans managed to somehow, mainly through self-education, generosity of abolitionists, such as Anthony Benezet, etc., obtained education. Through their exceptional abilities and amazing life’s work, they excelled and made immense contributions to America and the world, in the fields of science and technology; they were scientists and inventors. The Table 1 below lists just a few of them, including those included in the previous “roll call”, in alphabetical order.²⁸⁵

In an era when they were downtrodden and systematically denied the most basic human prerogative to the freedom of intellectual pursuit and expression, their ingenuity constituted a threat to their oppressors’ way of life, oppressors who saw their position of supposed “supremacy” challenged and threatened. As Abraham Lincoln said, “With some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labor.”²⁸⁶ The issue was no longer a question of competence, potential, or intellectual ability; rather it became an issue of privilege. By definition, the “Black people” were excluded from the privilege of intellectual exercise and free enterprise.

Since slaves were forbidden from engaging in any form of intellectual pursuit and free enterprise, many of them could not patent their inventions and had to sign them away. Others were constrained to sell their inventions for little or nothing to buy their freedom, all while many slave owners and associates simply took the credit for inventions made by slaves. For example, Garrett Augustus Morgan invented the gas mask (see Table 1) but a “White man” was credited for the invention. In 1908, eighteen “white” workmen trapped in a fire and smoke-filled underground facility in Cincinnati were rescued by Morgan, with the aid of the gas mask he had invented. ²⁸⁷

Morgan, who was awoken from sleep, single-handedly rescued the trapped workmen, barefoot and in his pajamas. But Henry Blake got the credit for Morgan’s invention and heroism. A foundation based in New York gave Blake an award that should have gone to Morgan, all because Morgan, a “Black man”, was deemed unworthy of the honor. Nevertheless, the gas mask, which Morgan later patented in 1914, was used to protect soldiers from chlorine fumes during World War I.

Morgan’s case is a classic example of how the rational for excluding the Black people from intellectual pursuits, free enterprise, and participation in honorable exercises was quickly changed from a narrative of an inferior race of people, lacking intellect and cognitive competence, to one of privilege and exclusion from it. The “Reconstruction” era in America quickly ended for the same reason. White people according to the likes of Jim Crowe and his followers, all who owe their status in society to the definition that established them as members of a privileged class rather than on the basis of individual ability, felt threatened by the fact that many Black people, members of the so-called inferior race, were by no means inferior and indeed better than many of them in skill and ability.

It quickly became obvious that when a person’s place in society is determined by individual talent rather than by definitions made to include some and exclude others, many of those defined and excluded as inferior would indeed achieve the expectations reserved for those defined as superior people. In the same vein, many of those defined as superior would indeed manifest the so-called “characteristics of inferiority” established by the definition ascribed to the so-called “Black people”.

In the 1920s, African Americans were not only actively denied social opportunities such as employment and housing in many parts of the country, they were also denied the freedom to shop in many stores and were not allowed to live or purchase houses in most areas, not because they could not afford such commodities but because they were by definition excluded from such rights and privileges. Companies like General Motors and makers of many household appliances did not want some of their products to be associated with African Americans because it was thought that the perceptive value of those products would be diminished and they would lose many White buyers who would not want their class status compromised by the few African Americans who could afford those products.

And so, even though many African Americans desired and had the purchasing power to acquire goods like the Cadillac, they were prevented from doing so. To acquire these symbols of the American Dream, African Americans had to hire White men to purchase such items on their behalf, only to then be harassed and intimidated by police officers who further victimized them by effectively denying them the basic rights of enjoying their possessions.

GM and the other American companies that engaged in the practice of racial discrimination claimed that they did not market their products to “Blacks” because they lacked the purchasing power to acquire them. Of course, even when some African Americans demonstrated the financial ability to purchase those items, they were systematically prevented from purchasing them for no apparent reason other than exclusion from rights and privileges offered to any other first-class citizen— exclusion from the American Dream, a form of redlining, akin to the refusal to grant home loans, insurance, or sale homes to African Americans in certain neighborhoods.

During the Jim Crow days, many African Americans could not attend schools of their choice, not because they could not learn, but because they were excluded from the right and privilege to do so. African Americans were prohibited from participating in the game of baseball, America’s pastime, not because they lacked the ability to play the game, despite that being presented as the basis for their exclusion; it was simply a matter of privilege.

Until less than a decade or so ago, African Americans were excluded from holding coaching positions in major sports and leadership positions in sports teams. African Americans were excluded from the quarterback positions in football because those positions were regarded as “high-intellect” positions, which by definition could only be held by “white men”, and not by “black men”. As with other attempts to exclude African Americans by virtue of definition and the perceptions engendered by said definitions, these notions too have turned out, not surprisingly, to be false.

In an apparent state of denial syndrome and desperation to cling to notions of superior and inferior races, the “one-drop rule” has been turned upside down. It used to be that a drop of “black blood” made a person completely “black” and completely excluded from recognition in any sport. Now, a new “one-drop rule” is tacitly emerging. A drop of “white blood” is increasingly regarded as the reason for the success of African Americans of “mixed blood” in the so-called “intellectual endeavors”.

Not surprising, this new rule is driven by the same narcissistic motives as the one that preceded it, in that the motive is still deeply rooted in the notion of a superior race. It is an attempt to claim the achievements of Black people, by attributing their success to the “single drop” of “white blood” in them. This claim has been extended to people like Justice Turgood Marshall, Tiger Woods, and Barrak Obama, to name a few. Perhaps as much as segregation, this notion stems from the same idea articulated in the scientific racism that preceded and inspired Hitler’s Mein Kampf 47 and advanced through the applications of scientific racism that followed.

The 1936 Munich Olympics was intended to serve a full dose of Nazi idiosyncrasy to the world. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party expected Germans to dominate in every category. Their intention was to prove to the world that Germans were the “Master Race”. The propaganda leading up to the game robbed Hitler and the Nazis of every sense of objectivity. It led them into a false sense of superiority, born in a frenzied and delusional self-assurance, an irrational figment of certainty of their own deranged manufacture. After Jesse Owens beat the Germans and all the others to win four gold medals, Hitler’s reaction was unsurprising; he was not only disappointed but extremely offended and angry at the fact that a “black man”, a member of the “most inferior race”, was allowed to compete in the game meant for the privileged.

There again, when it once again became obvious that a “black man” on his own individual merit could achieve and surpass the expectations reserved for the “superior race”, the issue was no longer one of individual ability but one of privilege. Hitler had come to realize what Jim Crowe and his followers realized following the American Reconstruction.

Many white people who subscribe to the philosophy of racism and the discrimination that accompanies it only do so to protect a way of life—a position of apparent privilege, established by definition. They simply believe that their way of life as masters of others is threatened. Their inclination to racism is only a logical reaction to that perceived threat. It should be noted with equal importance, though, that as much as many white people had this ugly sentiment, it was hardly a universal one, as there were many other white people who did not share it.

Richard T. Schaefer wrote: Slavery seems far removed from the debates over issues that divide Whites and Blacks today. Both contemporary institutional and individual racism, however, which are central to today’s conflicts, have their origin in the institution of slavery. Slavery was not merely a single aspect of American society for three centuries; it has been an essential part of our country’s life. For nearly half of this country’s history, slavery was not only tolerated but legally protected by the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. ⁷⁹

The United States Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even the American churches played active and passive roles in the defining of the African slaves and the perpetuation of slavery in America. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, many of whom owned slaves, recognized and legitimized slavery. The Constitution even allowed slavery to increase Southern political power, as a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, in determining population representation in the House of Representatives.

The Bible was frequently abused by the so-called “Christian” churches, its passages perverted to further subjugate the slaves. Such teachings emphasized complete obedience and absolute acquiescence of slaves to their masters’ wishes, as the will of God, which will bring great rewards in heaven—salvation and everlasting happiness. “Because the institution of slavery was so fundamental to our culture, it continues to influence Black-White relations as we begin the twenty-first century.” ⁷⁹

Discrimination has been defined as “the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups because of prejudice or for other arbitrary reasons.”²⁸⁸ Such prejudice or arbitrary reasons are nearly always established by definition. Discrimination leads to deprivation, and in the past, particularly during slavery and segregation, this deprivation was absolute. Although the absolute deprivation which was common in the era of slavery and segregation has reduced significantly as a result of the abolition, civil rights movements, and the legislative actions that came to be as a result of those movements, relative deprivation still abounds, often in place of the absolute deprivation that once was.

In fact, relative deprivation is a direct consequence of the absolute deprivation that once existed. For example, most African Americans of today suffer relative discrimination and deprivation because their ancestors suffered absolute deprivation. The absolute deprivation suffered by their ancestors caused them to be at a disadvantage, which in turn constitutes the relative deprivation of African Americans living in 20th and 21st century. Conversely, many White Americans are prosperous because their ancestors benefited directly and exclusively from the absolute discrimination and deprivation of other people, particularly African Americans.

Therefore, these “White Americans”, by virtue of their advantage as beneficiaries of the supposed “bygone” absolute discrimination and deprivation, are now, perhaps unwittingly or unintentionally, perpetuating relative discrimination and deprivation. These forms of discrimination also prevent those whom they afflict from advancing economically, politically, and socially. This has been defined as “past-in-present” discrimination—discrimination that exists as a result of conditions created by past discrimination. In other words, this type of discrimination is created when apparent non-discriminatory practices produce negative effects because of prior intentional biased practices.

This is evident in social elements such as the hypocritical and so-called equal opportunity and equal access rules, which demand the same requirements, such as capital, education, work history, and other details while ignoring the position of advantage held by those who have benefited exclusively from absolute discrimination and the deprivation of others and the position of disadvantage of those who have suffered as result of that same absolute discrimination and deprivation.

The expectations of the so-called equal opportunity and equal access rules would be fair, as has been argued, only if it existed under normal or identical circumstances. But it is unfair when it ignores the conditions that established inequalities in the essentialities necessary to satisfy the equal opportunity and equal access rules in relation to the two groups.

The apparent sense of fairness conveyed by the equal opportunity and equal access rule, particularly in the way that it is presented, is the main thrust of the argument that has frequently been made against Affirmative Action and similar programs. This argument consistently ignores the real sense of fairness, which would fully consider the circumstances that established the fundamentally disparate positions and conditions of the groups concerned.

By way of analogy, it would be fair to give equal tasks to two individuals, but it is unfair to ignore the fact that one individual has been provided with more and better tools while the other has been denied tools with which to accomplish the task. It is analogous to requiring one individual with a bucket and another with nothing but his bare hands to fulfill the task of filling a swimming pool with water and expect the same results from both, just because they have been assigned the same apparent tasks.

Or imagine, in another case, holding back the first three runners of a team in a 4 by 400 meters relay while allowing the other teams to run the first three laps of the race unimpeded, only to then, in the final lap, release the starting runner of the impeded team and expect him to run the entire race. This is the misguided understanding of fairness that Affirmative Action seeks to remedy.

Affirmative action was designed purely to give temporary and limited provisions to people who because of their disadvantage would otherwise not have access to employment and educational resources and opportunities. This disadvantage is the direct consequence of the actions taken by the ancestors of the people who now oppose affirmative action in all its forms, people who possess and enjoy exclusive advantage through inheritance from their ancestors.

Without taking into consideration the past situation which obviously led to the circumstances that necessitated affirmative action, remedial efforts like affirmative action will always be perceived to be unfair. Sometimes, righting a wrong requires making temporary concessions and sacrifices, some sort of restitution, if you will. In the final analysis, people must be willing to see and address the issues objectively, and in the right perspectives, with the ultimate desire and determination for fairness, do to others as you would want done to you.

Having said that, I must also say that history cannot be read backwards; I cannot blame or judge the so-called “white people” of today for the mistakes or sins of their ancestors, even though they benefit from those very sins. I can only judge them by their own actions and blame them for their own mistakes or sins, by how they treat other people and how they relate to the minorities of today. So long as the descendants of those who oppressed the ancestors of African Americans and other minorities are making a genuine, good faith effort to right that wrong, they should not be held accountable for the sins of their ancestors. To so would be to lose the moral ground to seek and demand justice.

Psychic domination is the culminating dynamic of negative definition, and it requires a physical channel to deliver its potency. It often begins with the denigration of the physical features characteristic of those defined as inferior, a cultural defamation of such traits that has led to a mad endeavor to suppress or eliminate such physical features.

For example, the association of dark skin, “kinky hair”, thick lips, and broad nose with a particular pejorative definition is perhaps the reason for the obsession that many “black people” have with altering their hair and skin color to resemble the physical features associated with a more favorable definition, be it straight hair or fairer skin. Princeton University professor, and former Harvard University professor Cornell West wrote in his bestseller Race Matters, “The fundamental crisis in black America is twofold: too much poverty and too little self-love. The urgent problem of black poverty is primarily due to the distribution of wealth, power, and income—a distribution influenced by the racial caste system that denied opportunities to most “qualified” people until two decades.” ⁹³

Another dynamic of racial definition is that those defined as “White” perceptively became synonymous with everything good, and those defined as “Black” became perceptively synonymous with everything bad. This dynamic at its inception completely altered the psyche of the former who have defined the latter and their perception of the people they have defined. Over time, to some extent, the definition also altered the psyche of those who have been defined and their perception of themselves and that of those who defined them. To the former, unjust acts committed by some of those defined as “White” against those defined as “Black” could only be viewed in the context of the struggle of good versus evil, the “civilized” against the “uncivilized”, the “superior” versus the “inferior”. This notion created a condition that subjugated the conscience of those who rationalized the mistreatment of those they had defined.

The sentiments attached to this notion of good and evil were frequently expressed in language, arts, literature, religion, and personal relationships. For all intents and purposes, the word “black” when used as an adjective becomes a negative qualifier that exists essentially to condemn the thing it qualifies. This is evident in expressions such as blackleg, black eye, blacklist, black market, blackmail, black sheep, black hand, black plague, black horse, black widow, black day, black magic, black humor, black man, all of which, perhaps, unwittingly or purposefully, subconsciously cast the so-called “black people” in the light of the moral and spiritual connotation of those expressions. On the other hand, expressions such as white lie, white magic, white crime, etc., portray immoral behavior or evil acts as “good evil” or “mild evil”. Criminals such as serial bank robbers, serial murders, corporate crooks, and corrupt public officials, typically “White men”, are glorified as “white collar” criminals. Because, the crimes they are associated with have all been defined as sophisticated crimes which require high intellect, they often receive high publicity, painted as an extraordinarily intelligent individual whose giftedness and intelligence should not be wasted in prison. Before long, books and movies are written about them. They become celebrities with dedicated followings, fetishes with fervent copycats seeking infamy of their own. Take the case of Robert Charles Brown who confessed to murdering 48 people in an intercontinental killing spree, from South Korea to nine or ten cities in the United States, all over a 36-year period. One of the law enforcement officials interviewed on CNN in 2006 said, in a typical parlance, as if reading from a script, “Robert is what I will describe as a very intelligent individual,”²⁸⁹ when in truth, this monster of a man and many others are unstable individuals of marginally average intelligence whom law enforcement fail to stop due to entrenched incompetence stemming from a flawed police culture. The same assessment was made of Gary Ridgway, Seattle’s Green River Killer, who in 2003 became the nation's deadliest convicted serial killer, admitting to 48 murders. And so it was with Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and many others.

Law enforcement and news media frequently present exalting profiles of these criminals. Such profiles are usually spruced with glorious attributes, such as: “this criminal is highly intelligent”, “well educated”, “a white male”, etc. This glorification of crime and criminals has created a new class of fame, occupied by the likes of John Dellinger, Al Capone, John Wayne Gacey, Ted Bundy, and Jeffery Darmer —all of whom have been turned into legends on account of their macabre deeds. In a society driven by personal significance purchased by fame and fortune, there is no shortage of copycats to follow in the evil footsteps of these celebrity criminals, murderers, sadists, and cannibals.

That all said, the definition that established the notion of superior and inferior races could not have succeeded as it has without the implicit or tacit approval of the religious institutions. Religious arts and artifacts depicting angels in white apparels and with fair complexions and demons with dark or black skin color legitimized the notion established by the definition of the two “races”. By ascribing or associating the essence of those dark depictions with those defined as black, it essentially reinforced the belief established by the definition and its content. It effectively put the face of “Black people” on every social malady, from poverty, crime, and ineptitude to dishonesty, ugliness, and low self-esteem, to mention a few.

The classification or characterization of people by color gradient, in association with good and bad behavior, is so inescapably pervasive and deeply entrenched in the world. It is constantly around us and so deeply embedded in the social consciousness that it has become second nature to unconsciously assume. From the moment of cognizance during childhood and onward, it is constantly burned into our very being. It is so deeply rooted, infinitely corrupting, and damningly ravaging to the soul—the very essence of a human being.

Some years ago, I was horrified to learn that my son, who has been six years old at the time, had been influenced thusly by his environment, even though he had not been exposed to overt indoctrination on the association of complexion with positive and negative character. Apparently, from the incessant depiction of good behavior and good people in fairer tones, and bad behavior and bad people in darker shades in films, books, computer games, and other media, he, at his very tender age, had unconsciously absorbed the characterizations established by the skin color codes and expressed his internalized understanding of them one Sunday afternoon.

Upon returning from church, he diligently went about completing the Sunday school project he brought home from his Sunday school class. The project, based on the story of David and Goliath, required him to identify the things that should not be in the picture. He decided to also paint the two characters in the story—David and Goliath. He painted David’s skin with an apricot colored crayon and Goliath’s with a brown crayon. He also painted Goliath’s hair, mustache, and beard with a black crayon.

Excitedly, he ran to me and showed me his proud work. I asked him why he had painted Goliath’s “shade” with black and brown colors and David’s skin with the apricot color. He said, “because Goliath is African American and David is Caucasian.” I asked him why he thought so. He said, “Because, Caucasian shade is better.” I asked him still; why he thought that the Caucasian shade was better than that of the African American. In the simple logic of a six-year-old child, he replied, “because Goliath is bad, and David is good.” I said to him, “but your shade is brown, are you bad?” He became downcast and said no. I asked him why he felt that Caucasian shade is better than African American shade. He said, “Because it is lighter and I want my shade to be Caucasian shade, because David’s shade is Caucasian shade.”

I was horrified and devastated. It was as though I had been stabbed in the heart or punched in the gut. I had on a previous occasion explained to my son that no one is black, just as no one is white, after he was confused because his kindergarten teacher had referred to African Americans as “black people” and Caucasians as “white people”, terms I had made a point of disusing in my household. I asked him if had ever seen someone whose skin color is the same as the color of our wall or the pages of his notebook, to which he had laughed and answered no. I asked if he had ever seen someone whose skin is like the black-colored front of our dishwasher. He again laughing, replying once more in the negative. I then said to him, when next his teacher used those terms to refer to people, he should tell her that his dad said that no one is black and no one is white. Lo and behold, a few days later, his teacher used those terms, and surely as I had instructed him, he promptly challenged his teacher with my instructions — “that no one is black, and no one is white”.

Surprised, his teacher had defensively told him that she did not mean their “shade” or complexion but that some people are called “black” and some people are called “white”. Of course, knowing his teacher, I doubt she intended to convey the entrenched content of that definition to the children in her tutelage. But unintentionally, she was inculcating a certain perception and inadvertently advancing the agenda espoused by those definitions. Like many good people, she was constrained by her society to express herself with loaded terminologies established by vicious definitions that long preceded her. However, there is no doubt that with these definitions comes associations with positive and negative qualities, perhaps not overtly but potently distorting and destructive, all the same.

I later found out that two of my son’s favorite movies—Disney’s The Lion King and Goodtimes’ David and Goliath, both depicted good characters in lighter skin tones and bad characters in darker skin tones. In the Lion King movie, the good lions—Mufasa and Simba were all caste in lighter skin color and the evil lion—Scar and hyenas were caste in darker skin colors. In the story of David and Goliath, the good guy—David was cast in lighter skin color and Goliath—the bad guy, was cast in darker skin color.

Till today, Christian churches and missionaries all over world continue to teach that black symbolizes sin and white symbolizes holiness, as I witnessed in a 2006 missions convention at my local church in Illinois—a multi-ethnic church, I should add. A couple of missionaries from my church serving in Peru came to talk to a class of 1st graders whom I taught in Sunday School, speaking about their experiences and the Peruvian culture. They again illustrated to my Sunday school class that the color black symbolized sin, red symbolized the blood of Jesus Christ that washes away sin, and that white symbolized holiness, the result of the cleansing by the blood. Now, my class had been comprised of Caucasian-American and African-American children who are traditionally, and even in a classroom exercise administered that same day, were referred to as “White” and “Black”. Imagine the notion that could be imprinted in the minds of these children by the symbols of good and evil chosen by these missionaries.

My question to the missionaries later was how can they, in the same breath with which they identify some of the children as black and others as white, identify sin as black and holiness as white and not expect that their definition could have some negative effects on the children. As would be expected, they apologized, stating that the thought never occurred to them and thanked me for pointing it out. A few months later, in a conversation with a friend of mine who lives in New Zealand, I learned that he had the exact same experience at his church in New Zealand, quite literally on the opposite side of the planet; no doubt the same is also going on in other places.

Of course, I neither believe nor am not suggesting that the missionaries were implying that the so-called “Black people” are evil or more sinful than the so-called “White people”, but they tend to leave that impression, unwittingly or not, especially in the minds of children, who are not yet quite capable of analogical reasoning or rationalization. It highlights the point I have made elsewhere in noting that in many cases, it is more a problem of contextual communication than anything else, the result of society’s language constraints or lexical limitations stemming from prior definitions and the institutionalization of those definitions.

The manifestation of the damage done to young and impressionable children by the racist culture they dwell in, and the pervasiveness of the ideology of racism in popular culture, as I experienced firsthand with my son, is not new. In the early 1950s, educator and psychologist Kenneth Clark in the famous doll studies on the harmful effects of racism on African American children had already discovered the terrible impact of racism on young African American children—a discovery that was instrumental in the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

However, the striking thing in my son’s case is that he had never been exposed to inner city conditions or experienced any attributes of the “ghetto” environment or any direct discrimination that we were aware of. He lived in a multiracial middleclass community in the western suburb outside Chicago, attended a private Christian school in Naperville with his sister where their kindergarten class was comprised of a good mix of children from various ethnic backgrounds. He has friends of different ethnic backgrounds, yet he experienced something very similar to the experience of children in the era of segregation. That this would be the case, although the two underlying environments are literarily a world apart, shows how entrenched racism has become in our society.

In my son’s case, his perception of what the Caucasian skin color and African American skin color symbolized was shaped by the media, including Christian media. Whereas the perpetuation of racism during segregation was overt, socially and economically depriving, physically brutal, and politically and socially sanctioned, it is now covert, subtle, heavily veiled, and deeply institutionalized. Nevertheless, the impact has not diminished; the result remains about the same, perhaps worse now than when Kenneth Clark carried out his study. This reality is critical and must be taken seriously by society, particularly policy makers, media content providers and consumers.

As I have written elsewhere, I believe that the definition of the “black man” is the primary reason for the victimization and disdain for people with dark skin in America, and indeed all over the world. In Europe, America, and Asia, the term “black people” implies an inferior race and an oppressed race. In the Arab world the word “black” (abid in Arabic) simply implies “slave”. This is the quiet presupposition and tacit notion that the lighter the skin color, the better the people, a stump of the old idea that the so-called “Caucasian race” was superior to the so-called “Mongolian race” which in turn was superior to the so-called “Negroid race”.

To escape this plight, some of the so-called “black people” would do anything to lighten their complexion, with the belief and hope that it would make them more acceptable to the society. Even people who are not technically included in the definition “black” but have somewhat dark skin engage in this despicable exercise, it is true in America, Africa, India, Arabia, and many other places. To my utter amazement and disappointment, an Indian friend and colleague once lamented that her newly born son was ugly, because he not fair-complexioned enough.

As long as society continues to represent groups of people by the color codes of black and white, all while associating attributes of virtues and vice to those colors, society will continue to draw contrasts between those groups, by virtue of the definition and attributes associated with those colors and the implicit application of the symbolisms that underlie white and black colors. That implicit symbolic application will perpetually weigh on the people represented by those colors until, as the reggae superstar Bob Marley said, “the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes.”²⁹⁰

In concluding this chapter, I recognize the frequent references to the racial terms “white” and “black”, so I wish to reemphasize that this book is not primarily about race. Everyone knows that most “white people” have nothing to with the definition that established them as “white people”, just as all “black people” have nothing to do with the definition that established them as “black people”. People cannot be justly held accountable for an act they did not commit. However, in the reality of collective responsibility, people who choose to do nothing to overturn acts of injustice committed in their name or against them will at some point become culpable in those acts.

“In this life, of inevitable recompense, of inescapable accountability, for collective responsibility, indifference to injustice is not an option; an epitasis, it is, in the metaphoric epic drama; life.” ¹⁷⁶

SCIENCE IN DEFINITION

“It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really saying anything—or at least they are not science.” —George G. Simpson.

Following its designation as the sole arbiter of facts and “truth”, science was quickly turned into an oracle, and it became unfashionable, even deplorable not to consult the “oracle” for discernment and validation in all matters. Not only has science become the sole arbiter of facts and the universal oracle, but scientists have essentially become priests, who interpret and speak for the oracle.

Hence, phenomena, things, and people become whatever scientists, speaking for “science”, say they are, regardless of whatever the case may be. One need not search for evidence of this disposition, as we have all become accustomed to the abundance of “scientific” claims and counter claims by interest groups to promote their agendas. The dairy industry, genetically modified food industries, nutritional supplement industries, pharmaceutical companies, chemical industries, petroleum industries, environmental polluters, politicians, abortionist, racists, perverts, lawyers, criminals, and everyone else all use science to advance individual vested interests.

In fact, in a certain sense, science has been made a god, fully bequeathed with an infallible status. To declare a claim scientific is to render it unquestionable, which to some essentially makes it infallible. As with any god, science has also acquired power, and the scientists understand the extent of that power and how to wield it. As with any power, abuse was inevitable; it was only a matter of time. As would be expected, people with vested interests have committed to exploit and manipulate that power. At no time in the history of man has that power been more evident and prone to manipulation than in the present age.

In this age, no one is beyond the reach of the power of science. Most often, this power is applied correctly. To deny the immense contributions of science to the welfare of humankind would be disingenuous and foolish. Yet incredibly awful things have also been done in the name of science. Science has been increasingly subjected to exploitative and abusive applications. The most flagrant abuse and deleterious application of science is scientific racism — “racist propaganda disguised as science.” ²⁴³

Since, the 19th century, historical racist propaganda about the supposed inferiority or superiority of certain races has been peddled as science. People like Arthur Gobineau's, the author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, along with likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Vacher de Lapouge, and Johann Gottfried Herder, created the political atmosphere and laid the racist ideological foundation on which Charles Darwin’s racist postulation was conceived and ferociously promoted as science, in spite of the abundance of evidence contradicting both Darwin’s methods and conclusions.

The wholesale acceptance of Darwin’s “theory of evolution” by the elites of the day made many racists to become aware of the potential power of science and how that power can be manipulated to validate prevailing racist preconceptions and establish certain socio-political idiosyncrasies.

Many racists, who masqueraded as scientists, seized this newfound power and ruthlessly applied it to subjugate the conscience of their largely “Christian” societies. With the new racist consciousness ushered in by Darwin’s philosophy, inhibitions to human cruelty were dismantled and lost from the society. The grisly industry of gathering specimens of “sub-humans” was born.

Darwin and his contemporaries and all those who would become their disciples regarded the so-called “Negro race” as occupying an evolutionary stratum between the chimpanzee and the Caucasian, as the following image, an artist impression, depicts.

Scientific racism became the basis for national and international policies. In America, policies such as the Jim Crowe laws establishing segregation and forbidding “miscegenation” were enacted on the basis of the views of racist “scientists” like Edwin G. Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, H. Huxley, George William Hunter, and Samuel George Morton.

The same group of people and their racists counterparts in Europe, wielding controlling influence on UNESCO, essentially advanced scientific racism through this global body, in the 1950 UNESCO declaration, stating that “A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens,”²¹⁴ meaning the so-called Negroid, Mongoloid, and the Caucasoid “divisions”, established by the Darwinian theory of evolution.

This declaration reinforced the long existing presupposition of racial superiority and inferiority and validated the teaching of evolution as science in schools.

Disguised as anthropology and anthropometry, ethnographic exhibitions became important means of advancing “popular racism”. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is believed to still hold the remains of 15,000 individuals of various races that were part of the “human zoos” or “ethnographic exhibitions.”

The gruesome trade in “missing link” specimens flourished, resulting in the wanton slaughter of Australia’s Aboriginal people. In fact, evidence shows that perhaps 10,000 dead bodies of Australia’s Aboriginals, mostly of people deliberately killed to provide “specimens” for evolutionary research, were shipped to British museums in a frenzied attempt to prove the widespread belief that they were the “missing link.”

The Australian Aborigines, for example, were considered the missing link between an ape-like ancestor and the rest of humankind. This notion resulted in horrible prejudice and unspeakable atrocities committed against the Australian Aborigines and Africans. Racist attitudes, primed by evolutionary thinking, were responsible for the Holocaust, the massacre by Belgians of Africans in Congo, and the enslavement of Africans in Europe, America, and Arabia. The display of “Ota Benga,”291 an African man, a so-called “pygmy” from Congo, along with an orangutan in a cage in the New York Bronx Zoo and the dehumanizing exhibition of Saartjie Baartmen292 and other Khoisan (Khoikhoi) women from South Africa as “freak of nature” sideshow attractions and scientific specimens in 19th century England under the name “Hottentot Venus” are all inspired by Darwin’s philosophy or the pre-suppositional framework that inspired it. Benga had survived the slaughter of much of his village by the Force Publique, an army of King Leopold II of Belgium, and Baartmen had suffered similar fate at the hands of the Dutch settlers in South Africa.

Saartjie was later sold to a French animal trainer, who took her to France and exhibited her for fifteen months. She was subjected to “scientific studies” conducted by the French scientists, including anatomist Georges Cuvier and many French naturalists, and she was the subject of several “scientific paintings” at the French Jardin du Roy. She died suspiciously about fifteen months after arriving in France.

Many believe that Saartjie was killed for “scientific experimentations” in an era when scientific racism was commonplace.

Clearly, what Darwin presented was not a scientific theory. It was not even a scientific hypothesis. It was a philosophical assumption based on conjectures. Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University professor and pioneer in glaciation, has been quoted as saying, “The theory of evolution is a scientific mistake.” ²⁹³ Elsewhere, Agassiz was quoted as also saying, “[In Darwin's writings] possibilities were assumed to add up to probability, and probabilities then were promoted to certitudes.”²³ Ken Ham succinctly drew a clear contrast between science and the concept of evolution as Darwin and Darwinists postulate. In his book, the Lie, Ham wrote, Science, of course, involved observation, using one or more of our five senses (taste, sight, smell, hearing, touch) to gain knowledge about the world and to be able to repeat the observations. Naturally, one can only observe what exists in the present. It is an easy task to understand that no scientist was present over the suggested millions of years to witness the supposed evolutionary progression of life from the simple to the complex. No living scientists [sic] was there to observe the first life forming in some primeval sea. No living scientist was there to observe the Big Bang that is supposed to have occurred 10 or 20 billion years ago, nor the supposed formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago (or even 10,000 years ago!). No scientists [sic] was there--no human witness was there to see these events occurring. They certainly cannot be repeated today. ⁴³

Webster’s Dictionary defines science as “systematized knowledge derived from observation, study, and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied.” ¹⁶⁵ This definition clearly implies that scientific conclusions are made on the basis of evidence derived from actual observation and experimentation (i.e. empirical evidence). In other words, a conclusion cannot be scientific, even if it is presented as such, except it is based on active primary observation (i.e. observation of natural occurrences) and secondary observation or confirmatory observation (i.e. experimentation).

The key point to be made here is that for a “scientific conclusion” or induction to be valid, not only must it be based on actual observation, the observation must also be factual, complete, and verifiable. Valid scientific conclusions cannot be derived from indices or activity footprints alone. Indices must be secondary evidence or supportive evidence to actual observations. More importantly, scientific conclusions cannot be derived from contemplation or speculation.

Out of the analysis of scientific studies (i.e. observations) and experimentation to confirm (or correlate) those observations, fact-based explanations (theories) are synthesized. For example, through observation, we know that it takes about nine months for a child to fully develop in the mother’s womb, after which the child will (expectedly) be born. Based on this observation, many “scientific” conclusions may be made as to why the human gestation period is nine months.

However, those conclusions may or may not be accurate. Some may be partly correct, some may be correct, and others may be false. It would all depend on the amount and accuracy of information available, and how correctly those facts are interpreted. In 1905, Albert Einstein, by discovering that light consisted of localized particles and not a continuous wave, disproved the “established incontrovertible fact” —the generally accepted view that light consists of smoothly oscillating electromagnetic waves (electromagnetic radiation). ¹⁴²

Not too long ago, there existed the idea or “theory” that “an atom is an indivisible particle of an element”. Now, that theory is no longer true. It has been replaced by the notion (“theory”) that an atom is indeed divisible and is made up of even smaller particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons.

The limitations of scientific conclusions are not limited to only basic principles, such as the nature of the atom or the nature of matter. It is indeed far reaching and extends into every aspect of modern life, from the Metric system to the drugs designed to cure human ailments. A case in point is the “blockbuster” arthritis medicine called Viox, made by the pharmaceutical company Merck. A few years ago, the medicine was pulled off the market after it had caused 85,000 heart attacks in five years, 38,000 of which were fatal.²⁹⁴

During the same period, there was increasing evidence to suggest that the popular ADHD medicine, Ritalin, has serious health side effects in children, particularly induced psychotic behavior that resulted in teen suicides in many cases. Of course, there were also problems associated with leaking silicone breast implants and hormone replacement therapy in women.

It is a well-known fact that every synthetic chemical and every drug has some potential negative side effects, some of which are known and some unknown. Even of the known side effects, the dynamics thereof are not fully known. When they were invented, Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), DDT, Asbestos, Hydrogenated fat, silicon breast implant, and numerous other scientific and technological “breakthroughs” were promoted as the best things to happen to mankind yet, on account of science. Obviously, the scientists did not know all that can and was to be known about their own inventions, let alone foresee the full impacts of their inventions on the body and the environment; there is no way they could possibly do that, even if they had wanted to, and perhaps sought to. Meteorologist Eric Kraus explains the reason for this apparent limitation of science as follows:

All science involves simplifications. There is an inevitable discrepancy between our scientific models and the much more richly textured world of everyday experience. …This means that the model does not contain all the information, which would be needed to simulate a process as it really occurs. The resulting uncertainty grows with time—like any other uncertainty… ²²

Even in the “certitude” of scientific conclusions there lies a great deal of uncertainty that is magnified with time. This uncertainty stems from the handicapped condition in which one finds himself when trying to explain something he did not do or create, such as nature.

This is where statistics become crucial in determining what is acceptable and what is not. With this comes the human tendency to manipulate observations and even engage in magical thinking, in order to reach predetermined “scientific” conclusions intended to satisfy or support, sometimes narcissistic, preconceptions. Benjamin Disraeli is often credited for having said, “There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics.”²⁹⁵ Such lies that readily come to mind are Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross. ²⁶

For readers who may not be familiar with Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross, it is a two-volume “study” in cliometrics (econometric history or scientific history), which examined the economics of American Negro slavery and concluded that slavery in the antebellum south was not as bad as it has been portrayed. For all intents and purposes, Fogel and Engerman had only one aim: to advance the same sentiments articulated in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, ⁴⁷ cloaked as science.

Relying on highly subjective data, highly controlled equations, and highly subjective statistical analysis, rather than actual historical evidence, Fogel and Engerman concluded that, contrary to actual historical evidence, “blacks” were all too eager to engage in slave labor; in other words, they were all too happy to be slaves.

Fogel and Engerman’s conclusion was based on their “discovery” that large slave plantations were 34 percent more efficient than “free farms” in the South, and 35 percent more efficient than farms in the North. They also “discovered” that more than 70 percent of slave overseers were themselves “black”, that slaves were rarely whipped, rarely sold, and that when sold, families were hardly ever broken up by the sale.

They “discovered” that only 12 percent of the value of the income produced by slaves was expropriated by their masters, that slavery was promoting rather than regressing southern economic growth prior to the war, and that prostitution and sexual abuse by “whites” was rare for female slaves.

It is to be expected that soon, cliometrics would similarly be employed to rewrite the history of the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany in the devious effort to diminish the real truth about that shameful aspect of human history, just as Fogel and Engerman have sought to do with regards to the history of slavery in American. Perhaps such an effort would attempt to show that Jews eagerly went to the concentration camps.

It may even claim that the condition at Auschwitz and other death camps wasn’t so bad, or that many of the guards at those death camps were themselves Jews. Perhaps, such “study” would claim that Jews in those slave camps were productive because they enjoyed the work and the working conditions and were only too eager to work. Such study may even claim that families were rarely broken up as they were taken to the concentration camps.

In the meantime, it is somewhat reassuring to know that many scientists, even cliometricians, have dismissed Fogel and Engerman’s conclusions in the Time on the Cross, for what it is: a falsehood of scientific racism, nothing more than fallacious and malicious invectives. Commenting in The New York Review of Books on Thomas Haskell’s article on the Time on the Cross, David Ehrenfeld wrote,

Fogel and Engerman’s major conclusions are derived from an astounding hash of bad and misinterpreted census data, careless analogies, inappropriate applications of equations, and masses of unwarranted assumptions everywhere. ²²

Undoubtedly, the intent of Fogel and Engerman was not honest scientific investigation; rather it was to redefine essential aspects of history and the products thereof. It seems apparent that Fogel and Engerman were driven by presuppositions and were more concerned with making a certain racist statement to affirm those presuppositions than with the validity and accuracy of their conclusions.

As their predecessors and mentors had done, Fogel and Engerman have chosen to ride the prestige of science to misinform society. This prestige or pedestal has been frequently employed to deceive the public. It has essentially bequeathed too many so-called scientists with the power of relative thinking or better still, magical thinking, where what is clearly an assumption is presented as “scientific fact.”

In this dispensation, assumptions, reasonable and otherwise, quickly and easily become convictions. When this happens, as it frequently does, we lose the essential locus of objectivity and reality.

In fact, there is a growing fusion between science and art. Nowhere is this fusion more apparent than in evolutionary science. Hence, it is growing increasingly difficult to know where science stops and art begins. Case in point is the general depiction of ancient organisms, including the dinosaur and the so-called primitive human ancestors. Much of what the public knows about the so-called archeological finds (which by the way are nothing more than a few bones) is shaped by artist impressions of what dinosaurs and the so-called primitive human ancestors looked like.

We no longer can be sure whether evolutionary scientists extrapolated their conclusions from artist impressions or whether the artist impressions are extrapolations from scientific evidence. But, to any reasonable mind, it is clear that the former is more likely, and the latter is very unlikely. This is clear evidence of the syndrome of magical thinking that has gripped the endeavor of evolutionary science, behavioral science, and sadly much of biological sciences in general.

This is true in race definition as it is in diagnosing a condition prevalent among people-groups. In addition to this malignancy of science, there is an entrenched arrogance and attendant state of alter ego that is creating a de facto system that I call “autocratic –scientocracy”. Ecologist David Ehrenfeld explains this conduct unbecoming in science, as follows:

“Whenever a particular bit of scientism is proven ridiculous, it reverts to “pilot project” status and is used as justification for the next nonsensical fabrication of its type. Unworkable ideas are never discarded, just reclothed like the Emperor in a fresh imaginary suit of many colors.” ²²

Science has become the most potent instrument of definition and domination—the definition of the attributes of nature. This makes science a very powerful and controlling instrument. Hence, whoever controls science, by virtue of its definition and prestige, controls the application and influence of science. This realization has led some people to seek to redefine science.

Such definitions seem to align with the philosophy of “materialism” or “naturalism” and are propelled by humanism, an even deeper and ever-growing philosophy. Typically, this definition of science maintains that matter is the only true reality in the universe and that everything therein can be explained only in terms of matter—a notion that the natural world contains everything that is real and of value, meaning that nothing else is of value and as such matters none.

Some believe that out of this definition came the Darwinian “theory” of evolution. Others believe the role to be reversed. They are of the view that the Darwinian theory of evolution conveniently serves the purpose of this definition of science. As everyone probably knows by now, Darwin’s “theory” of evolution claims that all forms of life evolved from earlier simpler, single-celled forms of life.

Based on this claim, Darwin concluded, in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, that different groups or “races” of people evolved at different times and rates—a notion that inspired the modern-day racism and the essential foundation of racism as we know it today.

Evidently, Darwin developed his “theory” out of a recalcitrant, almost belligerent attitude towards God and Christianity, following the death of his beloved daughter Annie and the racial assumption that was prevalent during his day and in his circle. According to Ernst Mayr, Darwin’s evolutionary thinking rests on a rejection of essentialism, which assumes the existence of some perfect, essential form for any particular class of existence and treats differences between individuals as imperfections or deviations away from the perfect essential form. ²⁹⁶

Based on written accounts by his peers, two things were clear about Darwin by that time: he had a compelling craving for the spotlight, and he was devastated by the death of his beloved Annie. Apparently, with the death of his daughter, Darwin, who once a devout Christian ultimately lost whatever vestige of faith in God that he might have had left at the time.

Many believe that out of the despondency and resentment engendered by his loss, Darwin was freed from the moral underpinning he once had. Reasoning out of the racial pre-suppositional framework, Darwin sought to lay a “scientific” basis for humans to do as they pleased, particularly those who could, hence the notion of the “superiority” of the white Europeans over the other peoples of the earth, knowing fully that it would guarantee him the spotlight he so desperately sought. He evidently got that spotlight, as historian of science Peter J. Bowler would write:

Many of the “implications” attributed to Darwinism had little to do with Darwin's theories themself. Many of the so-called “Darwinists” of the late-nineteenth century, such as Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, were actually very non-Darwinian in many aspects of their thought and theory, and even the biggest supporters of Darwin, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, were suspicious that natural selection was really what caused evolution. Nevertheless, Darwin became quickly identified with evolution in general and was hailed as the figurehead of many conceptual changes in both science and society, whether or not all of these ideas were stated explicitly or at all in Darwin's work itself.6

One could say that Darwin rode the waves of the emerging rejection of the Judeo-Christianity morality by a very few but determined scientists, as Aldus Huxley wrote later. Darwin also rode the racial assumption prevalent in those days to stardom. Evidence abounds to suggest that Darwin, who has been described by peers as frequently “inventing deliberate falsehoods as a regular method of seeking the spotlight”¹²⁴ and a teller of tall tales about natural history, based his “theory of evolution” on assumptions and misinformation. Nevertheless, it sufficed to validate those radical anti-moral impetuses and racial sentiments, because it was presented as “science”. Darwin proved to possess what his society needed, and for that, he secured the spotlight he sought. Ernst Mayr noted that essentialism, believed to be an influence of the Judeo-Christian morality, had dominated Western thinking for two thousand years, and that Darwin's theories thus represent an important and radical break from traditional Western philosophy.

In fact, the influence of Darwin’s thought can now be seen in fields such as economics and complexity theory, suggesting that Darwin’s influence extends well beyond the field of biology. This explains why Darwin has been and still is so celebrated; he offers the liberation that Aldous Huxley148 wrote about—the simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality: the Judeo-Christian morality that interfered with their sexual freedom and abhorred greed and wickedness.

In Where Did the ‘Races’ Come From, Dr. Carl Wieland, Ken Ham, and Dr. Don Batten, wrote:

As a result of Darwinian evolution, many people started thinking in terms of the different people groups around the world representing different ‘races’, but within the context of evolutionary philosophy. This has resulted in many people today, consciously or unconsciously, having ingrained prejudices against certain other groups of people. 44

Inspired by Darwin’s work, George William Hunter, author of the biology textbook Civic Biology, a source written in 1914 and used at the “Scope’s Monkey Trial” of 1925, espoused the “scientific racism” of his day. He believed, in support of Darwin, that humans appeared as a progressive result of the evolutionary process, with the Caucasians as the final product, superior to all others. Today, the likes of George W. Hunter and Thomas H. Huxley abound and children are still taught the principles of evolution at every level of education. Yet societies wonder why racial hatred persists.

Even though Darwin’s conclusion was not based on actual, factual, complete, and verifiable observations, hence an un-scientific conclusion, it remains the most popular view held by many scientists and has tragically become the backdrop of most scientific endeavors. Right from its introduction, many people in the scientific community embraced the idea, despite its high improbability. Rather than challenge and scientifically verify the claim, they increasingly engage in false science, reasoning from a previous assumption to a conclusion in order to prop up evolution as opposed to engaging in real science based on reasoning from the empirical evidence to a conclusion to prove or disprove the “theory”. In the least, they could have very easily examined what was being presented as facts, subsequent to Darwin’s “theory”. Many scientists agree that it would have been very easy to disprove Darwin’s “theory”, or at least force it to be re-presented as a hypothesis. Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.” ²⁹⁷ In the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton, in recognition of the absence of factual evidence to support Darwin’s “theory” and the counter intuitive fashion in which his claim was embraced by the scientific community, wrote: The fact is that the evidence was so patchy one hundred years ago that even Darwin himself had increasing doubts as to the validity of his views, and the only aspect of his theory which has received any support over the past century is where it applies to micro-evolutionary phenomena. His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe. ¹⁶ The apparent lack of intrinsic and confirmatory evidence yielded by experimentation strongly suggested that Darwin’s so-called “theory” was not based on science. As George G. Simpson wrote, “It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really saying anything—or at least they are not science.” 82 Even Darwin himself acknowledged the philosophical and speculative nature of his postulation. In a letter to Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of biology, Darwin wrote, “I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.”[source] The speculative nature of Darwin’s “theory” was all too clear for any scientists to see. According to L. Merson Davies, “It has been estimated that no fewer than 800 phrases in the subjunctive mood (such as `Let us assume,' or `We may well suppose,' etc.), are to be found between the covers of Darwin's Origin of Species alone”. ²⁹⁸ Given that the concept of evolution has failed every basic principle of science, from observable process to reproducible evidence, it cannot be legitimately regarded as science. Of course, Darwinists would and have been quick to label anyone who dares to do so as non-scientists. Yet evolutionists often begin their arguments with “we believe” and rarely with “we know”, except for the few that are so full of them themselves that they are practically playing God as to claim that they know when and how the “leap” from amphibious to terrestrial life forms occurred in the evolutionary process millions of years ago. Evolution overwhelmingly relies on faith more than factual evidence—the same reason for dismissing religion and philosophy in scientific discussions. It is a classic case of “the more you look the less you see, the less you look the more you see”. Evolution is a philosophy, indeed a religion; even Darwin and Huxley said so. Every serious evolutionist, as Sir Arthur Keith here notes, knows this to be true. Keith wrote in Darwinism and Its Critics, “A Belief in Evolution is a basic doctrine in the Rationalists' Liturgy.” ²⁹⁹

The Webster Dictionary defines philosophy as “a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means, an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs”. ¹⁶⁶ It also defines science as “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths, or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method”. ¹⁶⁶ A comparison of these two definitions clearly shows where the “theory of evolution” fits. About the scientific method, the dictionary defines it as “principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses”. ¹⁶⁶

We know the hash that has been presented as evidence of evolution, but none of the so-called “facts of evolution” were observed. None have been reproduced. They are unproven and cannot be legitimately regarded as scientific facts. The so-called theory of evolution, which in fact is merely a hypothesis, is maintained by the continuity created by faith and imagination. From the beginning, the concept of biological evolution has been sustained by historical arguments, consistently built on the so-called historical evidence or activity indices. Science cannot be based on historical evidence alone. No one was there to see the process of evolution take place, and no one has been able to reproduce that process. The argument: “just because we didn’t see it happen or just because we cannot reproduce the process, does not mean it didn’t happen” is patently an unscientific and unacceptable argument. Loren Eisley wrote in The Immense Journey:

With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins, which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the inevitable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely the assumption that what could not be proven to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past. 128

Religion often demands or requires belief without physical or material evidence, and so does evolution. Religion has some historical argument; some can even present physical or material evidence, albeit historical, to support its claim, and so does evolution. The difference is that unlike the claims about evolution, in the case of Christianity, there were eyewitness accounts to validate the veracity of fundamental claims about the religion. The point to be made here is that science deals with the present, things we can see, hear, touch, taste, and feel along with processes we can observe and reproduce. Evolution does not meet any of those criteria and cannot be legitimately regarded as science.

The implication of the scientific paradigm established by Darwinists in their unrestrained zeal and irrational disposition to support Darwin’s theory of evolution is that it has corrupted science and continues to do so. L.H. Mathews wrote, “In accepting evolution as fact, how many biologists pause to reflect that science is built upon theories that have been proved by experiment to be correct or remember that the theory of animal evolution has never been thus approved.” ³⁰⁰ Alluding to “group-think”, once considered anathema in science but has now become pervasive and fashionable in the last one and half hundred years, Ronald Brady wrote in Dogma and Doubt,

What is at stake is not the validity of the Darwinian Theory itself, but of the approach to science that it has come to represent. The peculiar form of consensus the theory wields has produced a premature closure of inquiry in several branches of biology, and even if this is to be expected in ‘normal science,’ such a dogmatic approach does not appear healthy. ³⁰¹

Harvard professor Steven Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science who was regarded as the leading intellectual authority on evolution, lamented the apparent actualization of Brady’s premonition. Gould wrote in The Panda’s Thumb: Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. 37

The reason for the “conduct unbecoming” attitude of scientists towards science on account of evolution lies in the essential elements of Darwin’s “theory”, i.e. “the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” and the philosophy that matter is the only reality. The second element justifies the first, because it established the platform on which the first is executed. It denies that the creation of nature involved planning, purpose, and a creator. The implication of this is that morality has been discarded, since in the absence of a predetermined purpose and the absence of a creator (God) or a moral lawgiver, morality is unjustifiable. I used the military term “conduct unbecoming” to describe the conduct of these renegade scientists, because the penalty thereof or its equivalent ought to apply to these dishonorable scientists for betraying the public trust and raping the conscience of the society. Rejecting the existence of God and the notion that nature is a product of pre-planned process, of which God is the planner, is necessary to create a new religion—one that is purposeless and permits all excesses hitherto prohibited by the set of moral principles founded on the Judeo-Christian religion. The elimination of moral restraints is the perceived benefit to the masses. In the words of H. Lipson, “[i]n fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it, and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.” ¹⁶³

Aldous Huxley, one of the most influential liberal writers of the 20th century, came from an impressive ancestry with regards to unmatched generational dedication to the cause of evolution and the promotion of the concept of evolution. He is the grandson of evolutionist Thomas Huxley, Darwin's closest friend and arch promoter affectionately known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” and brother of evolutionist Julian Huxley. He made no pretense about the reason for the complete and irrational embrace of Darwin’s postulate by scientists in his Confessions of a Professed Atheist. Huxley wrote,

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption …The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do…For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. 148

For the reason that Aldous Huxley shamelessly and unreservedly presented, many scientists have subjugated their intellectual conscience and betrayed the cause of science. Theodore Roszak in the Unfinished Animal wrote, “The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity—omnipotent chance.” 77 R. Kirk, in The Rediscovery of Creation, wrote:

Darwinism is a creed not only with scientists committed to document the all-purpose role of natural selection. It is a creed with masses of people who have at best a vague notion of the mechanism of evolution as proposed by Darwin, let alone as further complicated by his successors. Clearly, the appeal cannot be that of a scientific truth but of a philosophical belief, which is not difficult to identify. Darwinism is a belief in the meaninglessness of existence. 158

The philosophical belief that Kirk alludes to in the preceding quotation has been clearly identified by Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton. Denton wrote in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis:

It was because Darwinian Theory broke man's link with God and set him adrift in a cosmos without purpose or end that its impact was so fundamental. No other intellectual revolution in modern times …so profoundly affected the way men viewed themselves and their place in the universe. 16

The idea of an unplanned universe and a purposeless existence is liberating to some, as Aldous Huxley brazenly stated; it presents them with a ticket or passage to unaccountability to anyone (especially God) for their actions, freeing them to do whatever they want and can, just because they can, even if it is enslaving, exterminating, or oppressing other humans.

According to Harvard University professor, Stephen Jay Gould, Darwin’s theory is inherently anti-plan, anti-purpose, and anti-meaning. He also noted that Darwin clearly intended it to be so. Darwin’s intent was to “explain” the teleological character of nature (the apparent design), which is clearly and undeniably visible about nature, by excluding a designer, hence the reductionism that is known as the “theory of evolution”—the effort to explain all biological processes by the same explanations.

Another reason for the wholesale acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution by scientists is that it provided a means to explain the unexplained and the unexplainable. There is a certain ego that goes with every reputation. The desire to feed the ego induced by the respect bestowed on scientists led many to begin to think too highly of themselves and less of the essence of the science—their ego was more important to them than scientific virtue and it ultimately undermined the tradition of good science.

They became like the comedian who insisted that his jokes were funny and implored his audience to laugh, in spite of the obvious. The comedian had come to believe that since he was the one telling the jokes, it had to have been funny and the audience has to find them funny, regardless of evidence to the contrary. As a famous comedian once said, it is okay when people think highly of you, but when you become fixated on that perception as to think too highly of yourself, you have got a problem; this is the precise diagnosis for what is ailing many scientists and afflicting the endeavor of science.

Canadian scientist, W.R. Thompson, in Introduction to Charles Darwin's, Origin of the Species, wrote, “the success of Darwinism was accomplished by a decline in scientific integrity.” ⁸⁹ This decline produced the “atmosphere” that allowed the complete embrace of an unscientific idea by the scientific community. Australian molecular biologist, Michael Denton, in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, wrote: The hold of the evolutionary paradigm [theoretical system] is so powerful that an idea, [sic] which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists. 16 The decline in scientific integrity that Thompson spoke about culminated in the wholesale embrace of the evolutionary principle, because the idea provided a convenient escape from the hard work of science and provided a means to feed a growing ego. As David C.C. Watson, in The Great Brain Robbery, succinctly put it: One of the determining forces of scientism was a fantastic accidental imagination which could explain every irregularity in the solar system without explanation, leap the gaps in the atomic series without evidence [a gap required by the Big Bang theory], postulate the discovery of fossils which have never been discovered, and prophesy the success of breeding experiments which have never succeeded. Of this kind of science, it might truly be said that it was ‘knowledge’ falsely so called. ⁹⁰

Think about the central premises of Darwin’s theory — an “unplanned” and purposeless process, a series of fortuitous mutations leading to very complicated and extremely organized systems. Part of such systems, the human body, is the brain—a very complex and highly efficient organ that is capable of extraordinary functions ranging from extremely complex memory functions to highly complex mathematical capacity. The notion that extremely chaotic processes and unintelligent agents peradventure produced extremely ordered, logical, and intelligent systems is not only highly improbable; it is simply absurd.

To simply argue that evolution took millions and billions of years to come about and that millions and billions of years are needed to produce the evidence is nothing but fraud. It is only convenient to make this argument, because it is obvious that asking someone to wait millions of years for the proof of a claim is essentially saying there is no evidence. Since no one can live that long, we will never see the so-called evidence. G.A. Kerkut wrote in the Implications of Evolution: “Biogenesis” is the theory that life originated from nonlife one day when some sand and seawater changed itself into a living being. It is accepted by faith, for there is no evidence to support such an idea. It is therefore a matter of faith, on the part of the biologist, that biogenesis did occur, and he can choose whatever method of biogenesis happens to suit him personally; the evidence of what did happen is not available. ⁵³

Just think of it, every complex system that humans have invented is a product of the intellect—purpose, design, order, and intervention. None was left to chance, and none came about by chaotic processes. You can wait a billion years, the refrigerators, automobiles, wristwatches, computer networks, and airplanes could never come about by chance. Is it likely that such an intrinsically intelligent entity as the human being, with its extremely complex and ordered systems, came about otherwise? Sir Fred Hoyle, a well-known British mathematician, astronomer and cosmologist has been quoted as saying:

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate....It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ...higher intelligences...even to the limit of God...such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific. ³⁰²

Evolutionists are basically duplicitous, because they claim that nature in general (of which they are part) is a product of purposeless or accidental events. Yet, they cannot escape or bear the implication of their claim, which is that their own existence is purposeless and without meaning, hence everything they have done or do in life is invariably purposeless and meaningless. If that is the case, then their claim and the statement establishing it is by consequence meaningless—nothing but expulsion of hot air.

Since a claim cannot be true and false at the same time, the evolutionist contradicts himself, because his views or actions cannot be meaningful and purposeful while his existence is meaningless and purposeless. It is preposterous to claim that evolution is non-teleological or even that the end product has suddenly taken on a teleological existence (Neo-Darwinism) without any idea of what the telos or the ultimate end is.

How plausible is that an unplanned, meaningless self-directed product of matter predisposed humans to become inherently plan-oriented and perpetually in search of telos or meaning? Consider the implied logic and draw your own conclusions. R.E.D. Clark wrote in the Victoria Institute, “If complex organisms ever did evolve from simpler ones, the process took place contrary to the laws of nature and must have involved what may rightly be termed the miraculous.” ¹¹¹

Even the New Age religion has considered the implied logic of nature being “unplanned, meaningless self-directed product of matter” and has concluded that evolution is a hoax. Judith Hooper, in Perfect Time, published in the New Age Journal, Vol. ¹¹, December 1985 wrote, “Given the facts, our existence seems quite improbable—more miraculous, perhaps, than the seven-day wonder of Genesis.”³⁰³ The truth however is that evolution is not a miracle; it is a misconception, whereas the “seven-day wonder of Genesis” is a miracle.

Right from the beginning, evolutionists realized the futility of their argument, and it only grew with time. But the philosophical liberation it offered was too alluring and powerful to give up. So since then, efforts have been underway to repackage the theory, with the essential elements wrapped in more plausible and acceptable interpretations. According to the Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia,

“From the 1860s up until the 1930s, Darwinian “selectionist” evolution was not universally accepted by scientists, while evolution of some form generally was (a variety of evolutionary theories competed for scientific approval, including Neo-Darwinism, neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, and mutation theory). In the 1930s, the work of several biologists and statisticians (especially R. A. Fisher) created the modern synthesis of evolution, which merged Darwinian selection theory with sophisticated statistical understandings of Mendelian genetics. ³⁰⁴

This fusion of the Darwinian selection theory and statistics culminated in what is sometimes referred to as Neo-Darwinism or “synthetic theory”. The emerging or newly emerged theory has itself sometimes been defined as “a theory of deferential survival and not one of origin”. Nevertheless, they are all euphemisms for the same errant “theory” that cannot be proven. The surest way to make truth of a lie is bringing statistics to bear on the lie. In the fusion that created Neo-Darwinism, statistics are essentially that proverbial lamp posts that Andrew Lang spoke of in the famous quote that we all know, in that the evolutionist use “statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.”³⁰⁵

In order to “prove” an improbable scientific assumption that could only be legitimately proven scientifically through observation or conclusive evidence, they resorted to mathematical extrapolations to arrive at projected or predetermined conclusions. Everyone knows that anything can be proven statistical, as George Gallup said, “I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone - the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.”³⁰⁶ But as William W. Watt admonished, “Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”³⁰⁷

In the National Geographic Magazine of November 2004, David Quammen, in his ridiculously biased, perhaps patronizing article, in defense of Darwin and Darwinism, and in a manner typical of the emerging redefinition of the “theory”, wrote:

He was right about evolution, that is. He wasn’t right about everything. Being a restless explainer, Darwin floated several theoretical notions during his long working life, some of which were mistaken and illusory. He was wrong about what causes variation within a species. He was wrong about a famous geologic mystery, the parallel shelves along a Scottish valley called Glen Roy. Most notably, his theory of inheritance—which he labeled pangenesis and cherished despite its poor reception among his biologist colleagues—turned out to be dead wrong. Fortunately for Darwin, the correctness of his most famous good idea stood independent of that particular idea. Evolution by natural selection represented Darwin at his best—which is to say, scientific observation and careful thinking at its best. ⁶⁶

Nothing could be further from the truth, than this imploring ‘treatise’ of Darwin and his tall tale, designed to induce a sense of wonder and pleasant surrender in the reader, and sweep the reader into a state of acquiescence, akin to a religious experience.

Many serious observers and scientists have noted the increasing desire and tendency of evolutionists to see purpose and plan, typically dubbed “progress”, in the planlessness of evolution. In a powerfully revealing statement about this realization and the shift in emphasis by the Darwinian evolutionists, Carl Wieland says:

If the evolutionary scenario is true, then man’s arrival on the scene has come only at the end of an unspeakably long chain of events. For example, it would have taken 99.999% of the history of the universe to get to man. After life appears, two-thirds of its history on earth doesn’t get past bacteria, and for half of the remainder it stays at the one-celled stage! In order to escape the obvious (which is that in such an evolutionary universe, man has no possible significance, and just happened to come along), our culture has had to view these vast ages as some sort of preparation period for the eventual appearance of man. This works if the idea of progress is clung to. The universe, then organisms, just got ‘better and better’, till finally we came along. ³⁰⁸

The redefinition of the theory of evolution, which seeks to portray the concept as progress, is accompanied by the tendency of evolutionists to quickly present a list of benefits derived from evolution. One defender of evolution claims that, “The many subdisciplines of evolutionary biology have innumerable contributions to meeting societal needs.” ³⁰⁹ Obviously, her claim highlights the remarkable metamorphosis of the Darwinian evolutionary theory into the emerging, and perhaps already emerged, definition of evolution. This emerging definition has established evolution as a definition from which all other definitions derive—reductionism. Increasingly, we see all branches of science employed to explain evolution, perhaps vice versa, in the never-ending quest to justify a failed “theory”. In this dispensation, scientific findings are frequently superimposed against the backdrop of the evolutionary “theory” in a bend-over fashion to make a lie a truism. Pierre P. de Grasse, former President of the French Academy of Science wrote in The Evolution of Living Organisms that “Present-day ultra-Darwinism, which is so sure of itself, impresses incompletely informed biologists, misleads them, and inspires fallacious interpretations.”⁴⁰ Elsewhere, he wrote, Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case.⁴⁰

Pierre-Paul de Grasse has called for the theory of evolution to be destroyed, lest it destroys us all. Here is what he wrote,

Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon, which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. ... The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs. ⁴⁰

One could only hope that the scientific community will grasp the great import in the admonition by I.L. Cohen and cast off the spell that has bewitched it for so long. Cohen, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America’s admonition wrote: Any suppression which undermines and destroys that very foundation on which scientific methodology and research was erected, evolutionist or otherwise, cannot and must not be allowed to flourish […] It is a confrontation between scientific objectivity and ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion - between fact and fiction […] In the final analysis, objective scientific logic has to prevail - no matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honoured idols have to be discarded in the process […] After all, it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of evolution and stick by it to the bitter end -no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers […] If in the process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside intelligence is the solution to our quandary, then let’s cut the umbilical cord that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us back ... Every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically established probability concepts. Darwin was wrong... The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science. ¹¹ H. Lipson, in A Physicist Looks at Evolution, noted the ubiquitousness and elusiveness of the definition of evolution, established by the redefinition of evolution. He wrote, I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of its ability to account for any property of living beings (the long neck of the giraffe, for example). I have therefore tried to see whether biological discoveries over the last thirty years or so fit in with Darwin's theory. I do not think that they do. To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all. ¹⁶³ Many scientists agree with Lipson’s conclusion. For example, Sir John Ambrose Fleming, President of the British Association for Advancement of Science, is quoted as saying, in The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought, that “Evolution is baseless and quite incredible.” Norman Macbeth, in Darwin Retried, wrote, Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses. ¹⁶⁴

Evolutionists have successfully wrapped genetic science around the foundational theory of evolution. In the least, they have effectively positioned genetic science in front of the Darwinian evolutionary philosophy. As the biologist Denton commented, The over-riding supremacy of the myth [of evolution] has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago and that all subsequent biological research—paleontological, zoological and in the newer branches of genetics and molecular biology—has provided ever-increasing evidence for Darwinian ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. 16

This is exactly what the Darwinians want everyone to remember about evolution: the perceived benefits, by way of the applications of genetic science, not the essence of the evolutionary theory. It is analogous to claiming to be somebody else just because the shadow of the person you’re claiming to be happened to fall over you. In one sense, it is similar to a person seeking recognition or claiming credits at the expense of someone else’s merits, just because both happen to have been in the same place or gone to the same school or ridden in the same vehicle.

In another sense, it could be compared to a pirate or drug dealer giving some of the proceeds of his illicit enterprise to charity and drawing attention to that supposed “good deed” to divert attention from his reprehensible actions and as a way to influence public opinion and acquire legitimacy or rationalize a heinous conduct. Naturally, he prefers to be remembered for his “philanthropy” and not for his criminal background. As noted in my previous book Tribalizing America: The Emerging National Identity Crisis, the best way to rationalize or legitimize an unconscionable idea or bad conduct is to associate it with a good or popular cause or by embedding it with a good or popular end.⁶⁸

Apparently, the notion established by the two essential elements of Darwin’s theory is a very appealing concept to many scientists, as members of “the Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. Since, its inception, science has been frequently coerced and co-opted for political ends, the worst of which was the German experience and the Holocaust that followed. According to an article published on the Science Page of the ABC News website, we accept the idea of race because it’s a convenient way of putting people into broad categories, frequently to suppress them.²⁶⁰ Obviously, I don’t have to tell you that racial prejudice remains common throughout the world for you to know that.

Evolution offers a convenient and effective argument for the oppression of people by others, injustices, immorality, and aversion for accountability. It is a form of escapism, because it frees or exonerates people from moral accountability for their actions. Evolution has been presented as science and increasingly it has been used to “explain” everything, even though it cannot itself be explained scientifically.

The problem with evolution is that it is unable to answer the questions raised by the claims it makes. For example, the claims made by Darwin’s “theory” of evolution suggest that evolution is a process. The fundamental question that arises from this notion is whether that process has been completed or continuing. As touched on in the previous chapters, the most ardent evolutionists say that the process was completed, thousands of years ago, with the advent of the Caucasians, which they argue is the “highest level of biological evolution”. This group or school of thought includes people like Darwin himself, Thomas H. Huxley (a.k.a. “Darwin’s Bulldog”), George William Hunter (of the “Scope’s Monkey Trial”), Edwin G. Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, Samuel George Morton, and Richard Dawkins, to mention a few.

Others say that evolution is still a continuing process. They have essentially redefined evolution midstream to imply “certain observable small variations, very limited in scope, which occur over a period of time as a species adapts to its surroundings”. And they are always eager to cite the Galapagos tortoise, the “peppered moth”, the fact that the beaks of the “Galapagos finches” appear to have changed over a period of time, and the fact that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, as indications that the process of evolution is continuing. These claims, which have all been dismissed as fraud by serious scientists, continue to be presented as evidence to “prove” the theory of evolution.

Darwin did not get his idea from the Galapagos finches during his famous voyage on the Beagle. His theory is clearly an adaptation of the economic theories propounded by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith that preceded it. In fact, Stephen Jay Gould says that Darwin did not even know that his famous Galapagos finches were finches. About the Galapagos tortoises, Gould also said that Darwin “missed that story also and only reconstructed it later.” ³⁰⁸ Peter Bowler wrote in the Nature (vol. 353, October 24, 1991, p. 713) that “many now accept that Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection was a product of hindsight.” ³⁰⁸

Everyone knows that as animals and humans adapt to their environments over time, limited observable adaptational variations take place. However, these are all lateral changes, not vertical changes that would suggest transmutation of species—the scaffolding or supporting framework for the evolutionary philosophy. Even Darwin himself admitted that it couldn’t be proven that any of the species has ever changed vertically—an admission that contradicts his “theory of evolution”.

If the change in the beaks of the Galapagos finches is an evolutionary process, wouldn’t it suffice to say that the slight variations between parents and their offspring are also a result of small but tangible evolutionary processes? Or that the calloused hands of a peasant or construction worker or people who do hard physical work with their bare hands are evolutionary indicators? After all, the notion is no more absurd than the notion of the Galapagos finch as an evolutionary activity.

A.J. Hughes and D. Lambert, in their paper titled “Functionalism, Structuralism, ‘Ways of Seeing’”, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (1984), expose the substitutional arguments often made by evolutionists who present variation or adaptation as evolution. Here is what they wrote: We are certainly not arguing here that differential survival of whole organisms does not occur. This must inevitably happen [i.e. some species become extinct]. The question that we must ask is, does this represent the controlling dynamic of organic evolution? Cannot a similar argument be equally well-constructed to ‘explain’ any frequency distribution? For example, consider rocks, which vary in hardness and also persist through time. Clearly the harder rocks are better ‘adapted’ to survive harsh climatic conditions. As Lewontin points out, a similar story can be told about political parties, rumors, jokes, stars, and discarded soft drink containers. ³¹⁰ The views of each of these schools of thought, those who believe evolution competed thousands of years ago and those who argue that it continues, raise some fundamental questions which evolutionists cannot provide correct answers for. The problem with the notion that the process of evolution is completed is that it suggests that the “theory” can never be proved. This implies that the process can never be repeated will never again occur naturally. It also suggests that the process can never be replicated or reproduced by experimentation. Since, any theory or hypothesis that cannot be scientifically proven cannot be regarded as a valid scientific conclusion, evolutionists don’t like to present this definition or claim openly and frequently, because it would be apparent that the notion of evolution is nothing but an article of faith, suggesting that evolution is a religion (which it is), rather than science. Mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, alluding to this, has been quoted as saying that “the hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith.”³¹¹

The fact that the “theory of evolution” is indeed not a true theory and more so not scientific has been made clear by many scientists and observers. For example, in The Human Side of the Physiologist, Prejudice and Poetry, the author (Burton), wrote,

The facts must mold the theories, not the theories the facts …I am most critical of my biologist friends in this matter. Try telling a biologist that, impartially judged among other accepted theories of science, such as the theory of relativity, it seems to you that the theory of natural selection has a very uncertain, hypothetical status, and watch his reaction. I’ll bet you that he gets red in the face. This is ‘religion,’ not ‘science,’ with him. ³¹²

Even an ardent anti-creationist science writer, Boyce Rensberger agrees with this observation. Rensberger wrote,

Unfortunately, many scientists and non-scientists have made Evolution into a religion, something to be defended against infidels. In my experience, many students of biology - professors and textbook writers included - have been so carried away with the arguments for Evolution that they neglect to question it. They preach it ... College students, having gone through such a closed system of education, themselves become teachers, entering high schools to continue the process, using textbooks written by former classmates or professors. High standards of scholarship and teaching break down. Propaganda and the pursuit of power replace the pursuit of knowledge. Education becomes a fraud. 75

Colin Patterson, former Director of American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), was quoted as saying in an address at the American Museum of Natural History on November 5, 1981:

“I feel that the effect of hypotheses of common ancestry in systematics has not been merely boring, not just a lack of knowledge; I think it has been positively anti-knowledge… Well, what about evolution? It certainly has the function of knowledge, but does it convey any? Well, we are back to the question I have been putting to people, ‘Is there one thing you can tell me about?’ The absence of answers seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge.” ³¹³

The other variation in the duplicitous argument for the theory of evolution is the notion of a continuing process. The problem with the claim that evolution is a continuing process is that evolutionists also claim that it took millions of years to come about. Therefore, any demands for proof are promptly met with a response that suggests that we will have to wait for millions of years for that proof, because that’s how long it would take to produce such proof. Since, none of us can wait for millions of years to see the proof, we will have to take their word for it, won’t we? This explanation is the favored claim, which is often presented to the public, because it offers the evolutionist a convenient escape from having to produce evidence based on actual, factual, observable, and verifiable claims. This notion emerged from the redefinition of the “theory of evolution” and is what they affectionately describe as progress and Neo-Darwinism. This convenient escape is made clear by L.C. Birch and P. Ehrlich in the journal Nature, published on April 22, 1967. An excerpt from their writing states:

Our theory of evolution has become…one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it…No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas wither without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.³¹⁴ Another problem with the explanation presented by evolutionists is with the concept of random natural selection, a key element of the original theory. This problem lies in the rapidity and orderliness of the evolution of racial characteristics, which does not fit the modality of evolution as established by the theory (i.e. millions of years of random, undirected activities). Dr. Karl Eklund, in his paper cited previously, presented that problem thusly: The other problem was that the rapidity of the evolution of racial characteristics was more typical of the purposeful breeding of domestic animals than the results of random natural selection. Only the domesticated dog has as wide a range of appearances as homo sapiens. That provided a question that scientists were afraid to ask: if racial characteristics have come about by some other process than natural selection, a process more like the selection that leads to “breeds” in cattle and dogs, who did the selecting? The scientists were afraid that their inability to answer would lead others to propose that some God or extraterrestrial being selectively breed humans into “races”, perhaps in an effort to create us as domesticated cattle. ¹²⁹ Science is about discovery.

When a scientist or an investigator sets out to discover sometime that is previously unknown, there are three possibilities or outcomes open to the investigator. The first and rarest is that he or she can discover everything about the object of the investigation, depending on the complexity of the object and the availability of evidence about it. The problem here is that there is no way of knowing that one has discovered or knows everything there is to know about something he did not create or wasn’t there when it was created, hence the constant revision of “scientific claims”. Ken Ham, in the Lie: Evolution, described this dilemma thus, “The only way one could always be sure of arriving at the right conclusion about anything, including origins, depends upon one’s knowing everything there is to know. Unless he knew that every bit of evidence was available, he could never really be sure that any of his conclusions were right. He would never know what further evidence there might be to discover and, therefore, whether this would change his conclusions. Neither could a person ever know if he had reached the point where he had all the evidence.” ⁴³ The second possibility open to the scientist or the investigator is the most common, and it is that one can discover something or some things about the object of the investigation. The proportion of what is discovered in relation to the whole and the particularity and criticality of what is discovered is very important in establishing a valid conclusion. Nevertheless, there remains the dilemma of not knowing the proportion of all there is to know, as represented by what is discovered. The third possible outcome is that the investigator is unable to discover anything about the object of the investigation. On the National Public Radio (NPR) research news that aired on May 13, 2005, NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce interviewed some scientists about a new exhibit of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the scientists said, “There are no real truths in science, it is just the best answers you can come up with, based on the best evidence available.”³¹⁵ Unfortunately, such evidence is frequently manipulated or manufactured to produce guesses which are presented and accepted as facts and often equal, in effect, to truths. In November of 1985, the National Geographic Society, which in my opinion is one of the foremost racist institutions in the world, put up an exhibition of “4,000,000 years of bipedalism” in its magazine, in which nine “hominids”, strongly suggestive of evolutionary development, were drawn from Australopithecus-afarensis down through to modern Homo sapiens. The first five in the sequence had a darker skin tone; the last four had lighter skin tones. The National Geographic magazine editors acknowledged that the skin color is speculative, but in the March 1986 issue of the National Geographic, they said, “since the three H. sapiens variations depicted were based on fossil evidence in Europe, Mr. Matternes gave them a lighter tone.” ⁶³

Paul G. Humber of the Institute for Creation Research commented on the misleading nature of the National Geographic magazine display, noting that one of the last four sequences in the exhibition which had lighter skin, the supposed modern Homo sapiens, was based on fossils found in Kenya, Africa.¹⁴⁶ Why then didn’t Mr. Matternes depict this sequence in question with a darker skin tone, just as he did with the fossils found in Europe? The reason is because it is one of their so-called “modern Homo sapiens”; it had to be given a lighter skin tone, regardless of its origin. It is very clear that when it comes to homo sapien fossils deemed modern or advanced, Mr. Matternes and his gang of racist “scientists” would most assuredly depict them with lighter skin color, regardless of the origin of such “evidence”, and when it comes to fossils deemed primitive or closer to the Australopithecus or Neanderthal, Mr. Matternes and his immoral gang would most assuredly depict them in darker skin tone and with body features closely resembling those of Africans. Everyone knows what side of the debate The National Geographic magazine was on, but even in its one-sided feature on Darwin's theory in the November 2004 edition, a highly skewed article by David Quammen admits that science does not and cannot offer absolute truth because there is no way of knowing that. Quammen speaking of scientific theory in general, said: “Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally-taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.” ⁶⁶ Quammen was essentially restating the Kuhnian philosophy but with a twist. The Kuhnian philosophy was perhaps responsible for the priori pursuit (reasoning from a previous assumption to a conclusion) that has become of science since Darwin’s publication of his evolutionary theory. Thomas Samuel Kuhn, American historian and philosopher of science, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 that portrayed the development of the basic natural sciences as an innovation. Kuhn’s theory contends that “the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method,”⁵⁵ hence the increasingly vanishing distinction between art and science and the rise in magical thinking in science. According to Kuhn, there are two fundamentally different phases of scientific development in the sciences. In the first phase, scientists work within a paradigm or set of accepted beliefs—from pre-suppositional frameworks, in other words. Such is the case with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was a conclusion drawn from preconceptions than from actual observation. When the foundation of the paradigm weakens and new theories and scientific methods begin to replace it, the next phase of scientific discovery takes place, Kuhn says. In a reasoning that appear to have been inspired by the evolutionary paradigm, the belief that series of unplanned, illogical, purposeless, fortuitous events culminated in an ordered, logical and purposeful outcome, Kuhn believes that scientific progress, i.e. progress from one paradigm to another or from one set of beliefs to another, has no logical reasoning.⁵⁵ Ironically, it could not be said any better; that science has serious limitations and cannot be relied on absolutely.

In fact, science can and has been very wasteful of resources and of lives, when conducted recklessly. It is only a tool, one of many tools, for determining truth or truism. In the reality of the far-reaching implications of scientific claims, a provisional truth is not good enough; it is highly variable and unreliable. Invariability and reliability are the essential character of truth, without which a claim cannot be true or regarded as truth. Facts should not be substituted for truth or truism. As many people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes or misdiagnosed of diseases know, provisional truth can be dangerous. A fallacy erroneously regarded as truth, could never be truth, regardless of how long the belief persists, and even in retrospect. Speaking of one of the elements in the Natural History exhibits, NPR noted, in a story concerning depictions of how the Tyrannosaurus Rex might have walked, that “scientists use computerized versions of dinosaurs to gain insight into how they really moved.”³¹⁶ The trouble with every such exhibit is that the distinction between science and art is increasingly disappearing. The fusion of science and art in these ambitious exhibits is making it difficult to know where science ends and art begins, or perhaps where art ends and science begins. What is salient about the admission by the scientists on the NPR program is the fact that opinions, even professional or informed opinions, do not necessarily equate to facts, let alone truths or truism. For a claim to be true, it must be absolute and unchanging. By their own admission, scientists agree that, at best, their conclusions are only provisional. Therefore, something regarded as truth today can become fallacy or falsehood tomorrow. An even more troubling thing about many scientists is their postmodern worldview and how it is influencing their practice of science.

Many scientists, particularly those in the field of natural history, are comfortable with relative truths in drawing “scientific” conclusions. Scientists can discover aspects or attributes of an absolute truth, even without knowing the “whole truth” or acknowledging the existence or the validity of the absolute truth. This shows the serious limitations of science in explaining an absolute truth—a limitation that scientists have vehemently denied and disregarded, claiming that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The problem with some scientists is that they are inclined to fill-in or make substitutions for what they could not discover or don’t know. In fact, this crop of scientists present similar arguments that have been made by racist and overzealous law enforcement officials; we have all heard the argument, “just because we can’t or couldn’t prove that he did, does not mean that he is not guilty.” They have transformed science, especially biological science, from an endeavor of objective critical investigation to understand nature and prove or disprove claims about nature to a subjective, interest group-driven exercise to support preconceived notions. Hence, any evidence contrary to favored preconceptions is summarily dismissed and discarded or deliberately and systematically manipulated and misinterpreted to support those preconceptions. In the “Introduction,” to Everyman’s Library issue of Charles Darwin’s, Origin of Species, W.R. Thompson wrote, This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us, is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion. ⁸⁹

Evolutionists like to give the impression or lead people to believe that all the historical evidence for evolution lies in the age of fossils, extrapolated from the results of radiocarbon dating or the radiometric dating method. As everyone knows such time frame is usually in millions and billions of years, which cannot be reliably determined by radiometric dating method. Officially, the maximum radiocarbon age limit is about 60,000 years, but many scientists believe that radiocarbon dating methods become very unreliable for determining the age of materials beyond ten thousand years. Even with the augmentation of the radiometric dating with mass spectrometry to find the composition of fossil samples, i.e. generating a mass spectrum that represents the masses of fossil components, the fact remains that the technique relies on knowledge of the decay rates of naturally occurring elements and isotopes. The millions and billions of years that are attendant in the biological evolution discuss are merely mathematical extrapolations. But who can say at what point such extrapolations become inapplicable for the intended purpose? Moreover, fossilization is a function of time and natural processes— decay rates of naturally occurring elements.

The natural process of decay is bound by the function of environmental dynamics as much as they are by the function of time. The application of the radiocarbon dating method in determining the age of fossils relies completely on the calculation of time, but the outcome of that calculation is completely dependent on the processes of decay that lead to fossilization. Since those processes cannot be reliably predicted retroactively, due to the unpredictability of environmental conditions over very long periods and distant points of time, the radiocarbon dating method becomes very unreliable in determining the age of an object in the very distant past and over very long periods of time. This is because natural processes involve change and change being a function of time, the longer the time in the past, the less predictable it will be. Economist E.F. Schumacher wrote, “In fact, all long-term forecasting is somewhat presumptuous and absurd, unless it is of so general a kind that it merely states the obvious.”³¹⁷ Even though his argument was based on the unpredictability of human nature, specifically individual human decisions, it has direct application to nature, specifically the environmental behavior of nature. Meteorologist Eric Kraus noted the unreliability, perhaps impossibility of long-term prediction of even inanimate processes. He wrote:

First, we can never know the present completely; second, we are not able to make errorless deductions from what we know; and third, our limited imaginations may prevent us from asking the right questions. Depending on the complexity of the system with which we are concerned, we always arrive—sooner or later—at a cutoff point beyond which reliance on scientific analysis becomes superstition because it can tell us no more than intuition or reliance on chance. ²² Ecologist David Ehrenfeld, in the Arrogance of Humanism, wrote “Human history, including as it does most of the living and non-living processes that take place or impinge on or near the surface of the earth, represent the most complex of all systems, and therefore has the lowest predictability.” ²² Evolutionists are quick to justify fabrications with the results of subjective statistical analysis, and they simply and frequently take advantage of whatever public sentiment that happens to abound and be in need of a presuppositional outcome or scientific validation. This inclination is dictated by several factors, including political idiosyncrasy, narcissism, economic motivation, etc. It is true of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has become the “scientific” validation for perversions such as fluid sexual behavior, abortion, euthanasia, and racism.

Many other “scientific” studies and conclusions build on the notion of evolution to advance these aberrant human inclinations. It is ironic that all evolutionists don’t even know much of what happened in their own lives and times, going back a few years, and can hardly remember the details of all that happened last year, even the things they did, yet they claim to know and are able to give details of what happened millions and billions of years ago. Who is fooling who? Are they fooling the rest of us or fooling themselves, or is it both possibilities? Unfortunately, it is very easy to fool a great number of people, as has been the case all through human history, and sadly all too often to catastrophic ends. There is no doubt that most people would rather have someone else do the thinking and would readily acquiesce to the views presented by those who do the thinking, the so-called “intellectuals”, “experts”, “leaders”, etc. The problem with telling a lie is that it compels one to tell more lies to prop up the first lie. Sometimes, those lies contradict one another, because it is difficult to remember every lie, in the right sequence and in the proper context, over a very long time. Since subsequent lies are developed “as you go”, they are bound to vary in consistency and context, because they are not anchored or fastened to truth, i.e. an unchanging reference point). However, such liars also rely on people’s tendency to forget or lose track of facts and the sequence of facts over time. In defense of the lies that prop up evolution, some of the people that present and defend evolution have even argued that evolution is real science because evolutionists were prepared to continually change their theories as they found new data. Despite its fundamental unscientific nature, evolution is and remains the single “scientific” basis for the definition of race and racial characteristics.

Karl Eklund, Ph.D., in a paper presented before the regional planning agency, pointed out the improbability that is evident in the rapidity of the evolution of “racial characteristics.” The improbability Eklund spoke of, suggests that the developmental rapidity of the so-called racial characteristics was more typical of an intelligent and intentional action akin to “purposeful breeding of domestic animals than the results of random natural selection.” This raises the question of who was behind the intelligent and purposeful action. He wrote: That is the kind of question that scientists not only can't answer, they are afraid even to ask it for fear that religious groups with powerful political connections will eviscerate their budgets. When faced with creationists they insist on natural selection as an article of dogma, even though they know it doesn't work the way they say it does. The result is that the origins of “racial” characteristics in human beings are still a dark mystery to those who don't subscribe to racist dogmata, and they are simply wrong. ¹²⁹ Despite the massive and continuing effort to validate the idea of race by Darwin’s “theory” of evolution, the concept still does not fit the suggestions of natural selection. At its inception, the effort raised numerous questions, which should have warranted the claim to be critically examined and expectedly discarded.

A logical interrogation of the “theory” and its premises quickly shows the discrepancy in the proposed various stages; rendezvous, as Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor’s Tale, likes to call it and the expected sequential character of the process established by the theory. Ironically, Dawkins couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate title for his book, which is essentially, as the title suggests, nothing but just a tale. For example, why did the “races” evolve in a short time compared to “normal” evolutionary process (millions of years to walk upright, thousands to develop “races”)? Why were “races” localized while the “human species” spread wherever it could? Why were there almost as many languages? — Karl Eklund, Ph.D., asked. Many supporters of evolution, such as Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the Third Chimpanzee) and Steven J. Gould (Ontology and Phylogeny), have attempted to present an explanation, but those explanations are all flawed, primarily because they are all using the same set of incomplete and insufficient data to explain the notions established by the same set of data—a quantum leap to logical extrapolations based on dubious statistical models. Moreover, those data did not originate from actual, factual, and complete scientific observation. If roles were reversed, evolutionists would dismiss these claims and the explanations they frequently present to support them as silliness or nonsense. They will ridicule and hound those who present such argument, portraying them as dimwits and religious fanatics. However, since they are the ones making these ridiculous claims, it must be accepted as unquestionable truth. After all, they are “scientists”; therefore, everything they say must be unquestionably accepted by everyone. Anyone who does not is dismissed as ignorant and incapable of grasping or comprehending the subject or the concepts that underlie it.

They have arrogated to themselves the position of gods or custodians of knowledge and wisdom. They have come to see the rest of the people as intellectually passive, since many people have abandoned the responsibility of critical thinking, an essential component of rational and socially conscious people. People have essentially become minions to these charlatans and pseudo-scientists, eager to accept every ridiculous claim they present without question.

Considering the frequency of error and the number of times claims have been revised or replaced, I am astounded at the apparent gullibility with which the majority of the people accept the nonsense frequently put forward by these so-called “scientists”. Let me again emphasize that the issue is not with authentic science, and I do not, by any means, question or fault true science; in fact, I am a firm believer in true science and respect true scientists. Science is a God-given tool to discover truths about nature and the one who made nature, and all such truths have fidelity or conformity with the original truth. Virtually all the greatest scientists agree. Sir Isaac Newton, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, etc., all recognized the true essence of science and operated in the purity of science. Einstein once wrote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity… Never lose a holy curiosity”. ¹²⁷ Note the operative phrase “holy curiosity” in Einstein statement above. Those who disingenuously seek “truth” never find truth. It’s all about motive; there are sincere and insincere questioning.

The former could lead one to truth and the latter can never lead one to truth. The disappearing purity of science, that is evident in the concept of evolution which has come to underlie scientific pursuits, was articulated by G. Salet, in Hasard et Certitude: Le Transformisme devant la Biologie Actuelle. Salet wrote, The problem of the origin of species has not advanced in the last 150 years. One hundred and fifty years have already passed during which it has been said that the evolution of the species is a fact but without giving real proofs of it and without even a principle of explaining it. During the last one hundred and fifty years of research that has been carried out along this line [in order to prove the theory], there has been no discovery of anything. It is simply a repetition in different ways of what Darwin said in 1859. This lack of results is unforgivable in a day when molecular biology has really opened the veil covering the mystery of reproduction and heredity …⁷⁸ What Salet is saying is that if there was any truth to the claim evolutionists make, we have had the time and now the tools and the means to find it, at least to be close to finding it. The fact that we are not finding anything to substantiate these claims, despite the time and resources that have been devoted to the effort, and more so considering the means that have become available, is simply because it does not exist. Salet concluded, by emphasizing the purity of science, which is that scientific conclusions should be posteriori (after the facts have been established), not priori (before the facts are known); they should not mold the facts. In keeping with that ideal and only legitimate principle of scientific investigation, he concluded, about the central theme of evolution, Finally, there is only one attitude which is possible as I have just shown: It consists in affirming that intelligence comes before life. Many people will say this is not science, it is philosophy. The only thing I am interested in is fact, and this conclusion comes out of an analysis and observation of the facts. ⁷⁸

Another scientist wrote in the Encyclopedie Francaise, Vol. 5 (1937), p. 6. The theories of evolution, with which our studious youth have been deceived, constitute actually a dogma that all the world continues to teach; but each, in his specialty, the zoologist or the botanist, ascertains that none of the explanations furnished is adequate …It results from this summary, that the theory of evolution is impossible. ⁵⁷

The pioneers of science, some of whom I have mentioned previously, are particularly great because they recognized the goal and essence of science. Only a fool or someone highly disingenuous would deny the significance of true science and dismiss the contributions it has made to the wellbeing of humankind. The issue, however, is with false science, particularly evolutionary science and those that engage in it for socio-political agenda. Evolution is the backdrop and launchpad for most major self-inflicted calamities that have befallen the human race—from the enslavement of Africans to apartheid and the destruction of the Australian Aborigines to racism, debauchery, and the wanton destruction of unborn babies by abortion.

Arguably no other institution beside religion has had such profound influence on the human race as science, particularly in the last century and a half, and no other ideology has been particularly deleterious to the human race as much as the theory of evolution. The combined power of the institution of science and the ideology of evolution is unimaginably far reaching, especially in establishing definitions to which people are subjected and the perceptions instituted by those definitions.

Elsewhere, it has been written that Darwin's theory changed the way humans saw themselves and their world. If one accepted that humans were descended from animals, it became clear that humans also are animals. The natural world took on a darker tinge in the minds of many, as animals in the wild are understood to be in a constant state of deadly competition with one another. The world was also seen in a less permanent fashion; since the world was apparently much different millions of years ago, it dawned on many that the impact of human beings would lessen and perhaps disappear altogether over time.²⁴²

This double barrel assault on the essence of humanity transformed the world into a racist and existentialist mindset. After all, since humans are essentially beasts by Darwin’s definition, they could not be accountable for their “animalistic tendencies and actions”, because as animals, humans are only existential in nature. But, in actuality, the “animalistic tendencies and action” were inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection or survival of the fittest.

As I wrote in my book Tribalizing America: The Emerging National Identity Crisis, the concept of evolution changed the world for the worse by inspiring the worldwide racism that continues to plague people everywhere. Darwin’s legacy and that of his followers have continued to inspire generations of racists, who continue to perpetuate the ideology and the injustice it generates.

The Darwinist philosophy and racism by implication is the true “axis of evil”, which has created a social mutation that endows, indeed predisposes, some humans with an infinite propensity and capacity to commit evil acts against other humans. This is the foundational and perhaps the most dangerous manmade threat facing humanity today and in the foreseeable future. Sadly, but true, science is as culpable as any other for this malignancy in acquiescing to racist and anti-moral socio-political idiosyncrasies.

Today, many scientific organizations such as the National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institute, Scientific America, and many academic institutions still promote views intrinsic in Darwin’s “theory of evolution”. These “scientific” organizations are incessantly saturating the consciousness of the society with fallacious interpretations of “discoveries”.

Many of these interpretations and the conclusions they lead to are no more than mere conjectures and fabrications based on historical arguments that consistently lack proven historical evidence. They engage in veiled propaganda, conducted through innuendoes and insidious arguments to portray Africans as an inferior race and Caucasians as a superior race.

To many Westerners, Africans and perhaps indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, the so-called uncivilized people or savages, are frozen in time. Hence, there is a certain tendency in the Western mind that for something to be authentically African, it must be of primitive or of pre-modern standards. Whenever an image of Africa is projected to the world, it is usually the worst possible aspects, images of starving, poorly clad, and dirty looking children.

However, when an image of the West is projected to the world, it is usually its best aspects that are projected. Of course, I am not saying that these images are not evidence of real conditions; however, the way they are used in depicting the respective societies is tantamount to misinformation that approaches the bounds of propaganda.

I don’t, by this assertion, question the motives of people from Western societies who engage in philanthropic work to help poor rural Africans with education, medical care, cottage industry, and general development; in the grand scheme of things, motives are not a big concern. Regardless of their motives, what matters is that they are doing something significant to help poor Africans. Nevertheless, along with the satisfaction that come from doing good deeds for their fellow men, who may happen to be less fortunate people, there is a certain dubious kick derived from knowing how better off they are compared with those they are helping.

I have been in meetings for philanthropic initiatives and church missions where people relished drawing out the sordid details of the retched living conditions and “primitive” cultures of rural Africans, not because such details were necessary or relevant, but for amusement or some perverse gratification of being better off or superior to the people they claim to help. I can confidently tell you that I am not alone in this experience.

To validate the racist mindset of many western societies, Western scholars (scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) who come to Africa to carryout “research” tend to have already decided on what they are looking for, not what they might find from fair, objective, and honest investigation. Almost exclusively, what they look for are things that would tend to support the stereotype and preconceptions prevalent in the West—one that depicts Africans as a primitive people.

The result of this portrayal is quite evident in the way Africa and Africans are regarded. Since the so-called Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted and popularized, the expectation of those who advance this “theory” is that Africans are a dying race, destined to die off sooner or later. Since then, efforts have been made to hasten the perceived “natural process” towards the realization of that presupposition and the expectations that accompany it.

This expectation may very well come to pass, not as a realization of truth or destiny, but as a self-fulfilling prophecy, induced by Africa’s culture and attitude of self-absorption and implicit low expectation resulting from the refusal to think and view itself in global terms.

As long as Africa is unable or unwilling to prove the world wrong by rising up and moving herself forward on her own merit to a respectable position in the eyes of the world, the perception and expectation instituted by the definition of Africans will continue to hinder Africa and undercut the esteem of Africans all over the world, pushing them further into permanent obscurity and displacement.

The perception and expectation of low worth placed on Africans as a result of the philosophy of evolution, coupled with Africa’s seemingly near complete dependence on the West and the inadvertent acquiescence to that perception, perhaps explains the attitude of the powers that be—the Western world and the United Nations (also dominated and controlled by the West)—towards Africans in the homeland and in the Diaspora.

The fact that none of the Western countries that committed atrocities against Africans have apologized or are willing to apologize for their wrongs is only indicative of this perception.

Could it be that the same reason for those crimes—the presupposition that Africans are “not fully humans” or are “lesser humans”—still preclude the Western countries responsible for admitting to their guilt? After all, the relationship the West has with Africa is still largely one of master and servant in the sense that African leaders, who are hopelessly corrupt and lacking in idealism, and the nations they continue to lead into peril are nearly completely dependent on Western handouts.

Comments made by the British Exchequer several years ago and the British Government in response to revelations by a Harvard University historian who uncovered systematic abuse and killing of Kenyans during their struggle for independence leaves no doubt as to the inclination of the West towards Africans.³¹⁸ Beggars get handouts, not honor, and so it is with Africa and Africans, until Africans prove to the world that they are as good as anyone in vision, initiative, and enterprise.

The British Exchequer in their response said that Britain has nothing to apologize for, while the official British Government’s statement was “we don’t look to the past; we look to the future”. Both responses are indicative of an arrogant, unrepentant, insensitive attitude that is characteristic of the absence of respect.

The attitudes of the West towards calamities that have befallen Africa, particularly the scourge of HIV/AIDS and the civil conflicts that have led to ethnic cleansing and genocides in Africa, are equally suggestive. Several years ago, in an address to the United States Congress, Committee on Foreign Relations, the Director of the USAID, Andrew Nacios appeared to discourage United States intervention in Africa in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He portrayed Africans as primitive people who could not be helped. He said “if you have been to Africa, you will know that they have no inkling of Western way of life. Africans don’t have wrist watches, they don’t tell time like we do, they tell time by the sun.”³¹⁹

Nacios goes on to say that it was impossible to administer antiretroviral drugs to patients in Africa because there were no roads, no infrastructure, and that the people were too primitive to follow the treatment regimen. What he was essentially saying was that Africans infected with HIV/AIDS did not deserve to be helped because, in his view, they were not worth the effort; to him the lives of Africans infected with HIV/AIDS were worthless.

Today in America and perhaps in many western countries, “black men” are murdered almost daily by the police in a manner that shows that their lives are mean little to those who should be protecting them.

The West did nothing to stop the genocide that took place in Rwanda and Sudan but were quick to act forcefully in Bosnia and Kosovo. Africa has become the dumping ground for small arms and light weapons, weapons that have become catalysts for the numerous violent civil conflicts that plague Africa.

Citing the Small Arms Survey in a sobering assessment of the human impacts of war in the twentieth century and the role of small arms and light weapons in conflicts around the world, the Wounds of War by Julie M. Lamb, Marcy Levy, and Michael R. Reich noted that “Around the world, their proliferation has exacerbated inter- and intra-state conflicts, undermined political and economic development, destabilized communities, contributed to human rights violations, and devastated the lives of millions of people.” ⁵⁶

Nowhere is the scourge induced by small arms and light weapons more evident than in the continent of Africa. From Southern Africa to Central Africa, West Africa to East Africa, the devastation is of calamitous proportion. Added to this dire condition is the turning of Africa into the world’s dumping ground for dangerous and rejected goods, from used clothing to expired foods and medicines, experimental drugs to toxic industrial and nuclear wastes.

There are developing and growing resurgent colonial sentiments in the industrialized world in response to the dwindling global natural resources, the huge and growing appetite of the industrialized world, particularly the United States and China, for those resources, and the inability of the indigenous inhabitants of the so-called “Third World” to harness the natural resources within their land as to improve their own lives and contribute substantially to the global economy (GDP). These sentiments are fueled by the fact that many indigenous people, particularly Africans, are still largely dependent on economic aid from the more industrialized countries.

Such sentiments have inspired an interest in and the revival of the idea of depopulation of the Third World. I am afraid that I foresee a future where resource ownership or entitlement will no longer be determined by ancestral and historical possession by inhabitants of a land, such as indigenous peoples, but by the ability to extract and utilize those resources in the most efficient manner. The logic driving this emerging worldview has been made in the spirit of globalization and is that, if the inhabitants of “Third World” countries continue to depend on the industrialized countries for handouts, in spite of the huge resources that abound on their soil, they might as well relinquish the resources which would otherwise go unutilized and settle for the handouts, rather than deny the global community the benefits of such resources. There is evidence to suggest that there is ongoing research in population control to prevent future births; these studies are mainly conducted by universities and biotech companies in the United States and Europe, often collaboratively and perhaps as an extension of previous forays into population control (notably eugenics) made by Western governments in times past. It is not a secret that many Western leaders, policymakers and national security agencies have for a considerably long time considered the depopulation of the so-called “Third World” a top foreign policy goal and national security strategy. I read in an article that in a National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled “Implications of worldwide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests,” says,

Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that ‘depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.’ He quoted reasons of national security, and because ‘(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries… Where a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S.³²⁰

The article notes that “Depopulation policy became the top priority under the NSC agenda, Club of Rome (which preceded the Paris Club), and the U.S. policymakers like Gen. Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie and Kissinger.”³²⁰

In some cases, the studies are believed to be efforts to create genetically modified crops like wild corn, which when consumed render the sperm sterile and males unable to reproduce. In a scientific paper titled Transgenic DNA introgressed into tradition maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico and published in the scientific journal Nature in November 2001321, Dr. Ignacio H. Chapela, an ecologist at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered that there is evidence showing that wild corn in remote parts of Mexico have been altered with bio-engineered DNA, a discovery that made him a target of the biotech industry and their accomplices in policy-making bodies and ultimately led to him being denied tenure.

It has been suspected for some time now that experimental GM foods, making their way through food aid into famine and war-stricken Africa, are being tested on Africans, who are essentially viewed as human guinea pigs in similar fashion to the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiment on African America men in the United States in 1932.

I am aware that the observable Western double standard with regards to Africa has been denied, at least contested, and that ultimately Africans are responsible for their own well-being and advancement, yet the apparent double standard evident in dealing or relating with the people at the extremes of the human-skin-color gradient that symbolize race and racism must be highlighted to make an obvious point.

However, the blame rests completely on Africans, who must awaken from their collective stupor and shake off the culture of low expectation and the attendant hopeless. Africans must realize that the inability of African countries to overcome tribal sentiments, the conflicts which such sentiments breed, and the seemingly unending and unspeakable carnage on themselves will continue to perpetuate the stereotype of Africans as barbaric savages and a primitive people doomed for extinction in the “natural process of evolution”.

Africans stood by and even aided the destruction of their own people—the capture and enslaving of their kin by Arabs and Europeans. Today, Africans still stand by while Arabs and Africans themselves are destroying other Africans in Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, etc. I am hard pressed to find such happening to Arabs, Caucasians, or any other group without people rising from within and without to stop it.

As long as Africans continue to wallow in self-absorption and low expectation, they will fail to realize that how one African is viewed is how all Africans will be viewed. If one African is mistreated and the rest did nothing about it, it sends the message that all Africans can be mistreated, and none will do anything about it.

Worse still is the fact that many Africans, as I have witnessed at the American Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria and International airports across the United States and Europe, often show so little value for fellow Africans, in that they continue to mistreat other Africans to impress their “White” bosses in an implicit notion of subservience or inferiority complex.

Barely 400 years ago, many Africans stood by while other Africans were captured and sold off into slavery in Europe and Arabia; some Africans even aided in kidnapping and selling fellow Africans into slavery. Evidence shows that without the role Africans played in the slave trade, it would not have succeeded to the degree that it did.

Yet, as Europeans seek to atone for the atrocities committed against Africans in the slave trade, Africans themselves are largely silent and have not taken responsibility for their roles in those atrocities, frequently playing the game of victimhood and projection.

Even today, Africans still lack remorse for their actions and inaction in a crime committed against their brothers and sisters, largely under their own auspices. Africans all over the world are still standing by while the Sudanese Arabs torture, rape, maim, kill, and enslave indigenous Africans for no other reason than the perception that has been created about people with dark skin color.

As I have said before, people who fail to define themselves ultimately become defined by those who wish them ill. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The greatest sin of our time is not with the few that have destroyed, but with the great majority who have sat idly by”³²²—those who would not act to stop evil, those who by their inaction essentially aid evil.

It is very clear that Africa is not respected in the world, particularly in the Western world, because it appears Africa has not proven to be good at anything that could constitute a challenge to the West. It is an accepted maxim that whatever you do, be good at it and you will be respected for it. As Bob Dylan said, “All you can do is do what you must. You do what you must do, and you do it well.”

In the last twenty years, we have seen how the West suddenly developed respect and admiration for Asian countries, beginning with Japan, then South Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and now India.

This change in attitude was inspired, perhaps compelled, by the emergence of these countries as regional economic powers in rivalry with the West on the world stage. They suddenly became of strategic interest to the West. Whether that interest was driven by commerce and a desire for a piece of the action or by fear of losing dominance on the global stage is a matter of debate or choice of opinion.

What matters, however, is that Asia is respected, and perhaps feared in some respect, for the competition and placement challenge it has presented to the West on the global economic arena.

Now, the Middle East has captured the attention of the West, albeit for a different reason, perhaps not economic rivalry, but fear borne out of the power to destroy the very essence of the Western ideal—freedom, openness, and economic stability. This Middle East attribute is hardly admirable, but it is nonetheless powerful enough to get the attention of the West.

You could say that they are good at destroying what the West value most. This must have earned the Middle East some respect and attention from the West, albeit one of notoriety; for without respect, there can be no attention given to friend or foe.

It follows that the attention now being given to the Middle East, so much so that America and many European countries would spend hundreds of billions of dollars and sacrifice the lives of thousands of young men and women to reshape the region, all in an effort to stave off the threat it poses to the West, is in recognition of the significance and relevance of the Middle East, albeit significance and relevance borne of infamous and deplorable dispositions.

Over and over, we hear Western leaders declare that Africa is not in their strategic interest. So, what constitutes strategic interest? Apparently, they are economic opportunity and rivalry in Asia and threats to Western economic and civil stability in the Middle East. Africans must realize that in the scheme of global affairs, nations and peoples without something to challenge the dominance of the powers that be will have no relevance or respect in the world.

Mediocrity and respect are incompatible and are seldom found together. Africa cannot afford to continue to be the perennial sick and unwanted sibling to the rest of the world. As others have done, all that Africa must do and can do is do what it must do and do well. Africa must look within itself to redeem itself; otherwise, it will continue to slide into irrelevance and eventual demise.

As an African born and raised in Africa and now living in the United States of America, and one who is actively and deeply concerned about the bad situations with which Africans all over the world are confronted, the perception of irrelevance that the world has of Africans, I must say that Africans at home and in Diaspora must move past whatever they might have suffered at the hands of Europeans. We must not be caught in a perpetual mode of feeling sorry for ourselves and having others feel sorry for us. Constantly blaming the “White man” where we are will not get us where we need to be. We must move away from the deceptive comfort of “victimhood” that keeps us looking backwards rather than looking forward.

Our history is important and must remain relevant. We must never forget our history and must not allow it to be revised or truncated, but we cannot and should not read history backwards. Our history should not hold us back; it should ever more urge us forward, reminding us of where we have been as a people and that we must never allow ourselves to be taken there again. We cannot be the people we ought to be if we only engage in the psychology of projection. We cannot perpetually attribute our failures or externalize the blame for our problems, most of which are self-imposed. In a debate with a friend of mine, a physician, he argued that the reason Africa can’t seem to get unstuck from mediocrity — political instabilities, corruption, poor economies despite the massive amounts of natural resources, low cultural expectation, insignificant contribution to the global GDP, lack of vision, etc. — and get ahead on the global stage is because of the “crippling” effect of colonialism. Frankly, I am tired of this worn-out excuse; it is nothing but projection. After all, Africans were not the only people that were colonized. Of course, there is no denying that colonialism took place and had primarily negative intent towards those colonized, but it is high time Africans looked around and moved beyond this inhibitive notion.

I believe it was Alexander the Great who said, “give me a place to stand and I will change the world”, until he realized that if he waited to be given a place, he would never change the world. Africans must realize as Alexander did that no one will give us a place to stand on. We must earn and take our rightful place in the world. Africans must overcome the limitation of seeing themselves as defined by others — “black people” or “colored people” — and escape the implications of those definitions. Africans must see themselves as people equal in potential to any other group of people; Africans must learn to think and act in global terms and view themselves to be in competition with people all over the world, not just among themselves and within Africa.

As it was for Africans in the days of Darwin with the missing link and slavery, so it is today with unborn babies; science is once again co-opted to validate and popularize yet another pre-suppositional framework and socio-political idiosyncrasy that has led to the definition of humans in gestation as non-human, less than human or not quite human. This definition has been responsible for the subjugation of conscience and the destruction of millions of unborn children by societies.

A hundred and fifty years after the emergence of Darwin’s “theory of evolution”, the long-suppressed truth about Africans could not be suppressed any longer. Africans are just as human as Caucasians and any other group of people. One hundred years from now when the truth about unborn babies cannot be suppressed any longer, when unborn babies are no longer regarded as nonhuman, less than human, or not quite human, how would society and science rationalize and justify yet another atrocity?

Given the enormous power reposed on science and by implication on “scientists” and considering the pains that have been brought to bear on society by the ideological and political demagogues who frequently co-opt science to usurp that power, society must endeavor to hold scientists more accountable, cautiously embrace “scientific” conclusions, and critically examine the arguments presented to support those conclusions. This is the responsibility of every rational human being. The best way to know and preserve the truth, as it is with freedom, is to be vigilant.