Ideas matter. They have consequences. Why did some of the most intelligent educators in America conspire to destroy the brain power of the American people? It doesn’t make sense until you begin to delve into the ideas that formed the basis of their decisions. These ideas swept over them like a giant intellectual tsunami, wiping out their beliefs in the Biblical traditions that had held American society together since its founding. Indeed, it gave them the godlike right, the duty, to transform America into something quite alien from its founding principles.
All of these ideas came out of mid-nineteenth century Europe: Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection; Hegel’s pantheist, pagan idea of divinity; Marx’s idea of Dialectical Materialism; and Wundt’s idea of man as a soulless animal to be investigated scientifically.
Naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the source of perhaps the most pernicious influence of all. According to Wikipedia, “He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.” His seminal book, first published in November 1859, was entitled: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The process of Natural Selection also included the natural disappearance of unfit species.
This latter idea of favored races was further developed by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), who developed his own pseudo-science of Eugenics, or scientific racism, a form of unnatural selection. Why leave the process of selection only up to nature? His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.
It was James McKeen Cattell’s experiments on response-time reaction in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory at the University of Leipzig which led to the formulation of a scientific rationale for teaching children to read by the sight, or whole-word, method. Cattell also became a disciple of Galton’s and spread the idea of favored races, which later influenced Congress to impose new immigration policies. He influenced Edward L. Thorndike, who considered Negroes to be an inferior race and required a curriculum fit for their inferiority. These racist ideas became part and parcel of the Progressive education movement and contributed to the creation of a black underclass.
The importance of Darwin is that he kicked man off his pedestal as being made in the image of God, according to the Bible, and relegated the human being to animal status, no better than any other animal. Galton further believed that human beings could be bred like animals to produce a stock of geniuses. Behavioral psychologists developed the I.Q. tests so that they could identify individuals of superior intelligence. And Thorndike developed his new teaching method of stimulus-response based on the techniques of animal training. He wrote in 1928:
Our experiments on learning in the lower animals have probably contributed more to knowledge of education per hour or per unit of intellect spent, than experiments on children…. The best way with children may often be, in the pompous words of an animal trainer, “to arrange everything in connection with the trick so that the animal will be compelled by the laws of his own nature to perform it.”
Wundt’s psychology, which investigated man in terms of his animal nature, was further developed by Thorndike and John Watson into what became behavioral psychology, in which consciousness, or the soul, is considered irrelevant in the study of man. As Watson wrote in his book Behaviorism,
Human beings do not want to class themselves with other animals. They are willing to admit that they are animals but “something else in addition.” It is this “something else” that causes the trouble. In this “something else” is bound up everything that is classed as religion, the life hereafter, morals, love of children, parents, country, and the like. The raw fact that you, as a psychologist, if you are to remain scientific, must describe the behavior of man in no other terms than those you would use in describing the behavior of the ox you slaughter, drove and still drives many timid souls away from behaviorism.
Another pernicious idea that influenced these educators was Hegelianism, a pantheistic philosophy concocted by German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) aimed at undermining Biblical religion. To Hegel all the universe was nothing more than God’s mind, or world spirit, in the process of achieving its own perfection through an evolutionary process known as the dialectic. This concept spread throughout the Western world like an intellectual disease. It was brought to the United States by a French philosopher, Victor Cousin, whose study of Prussian education became the model for America’s public school system. The Harvard elite found Hegel’s pantheism particularly attractive.
At Harvard, the Unitarians had produced an effete Christianity devoid of the strong emotional ties that linked Calvin’s God with a sinful humanity. Pantheism, on the other hand, elevated humanity to an entirely new and godlike stature in which humanity was advancing toward perfection by way of the dynamic Hegelian dialectic. This is how the dialectic works: A thesis (the political status quo) is engaged in a prolonged struggle with an antithesis (a revolutionary change) which leads to a compromise known as the synthesis. The synthesis, which has advanced humanity toward perfection, then becomes the new thesis, in conflict with a new antithesis, and the struggle continues until “perfection” is reached. Communism, or dialectical materialism, was supposed to reach perfection by this method. But all it led to was greater tyranny and poverty. It took the Russians 75 years to get rid of it.
In the Hegelian scheme of things, man’s mind is a microcosm of the divine mind. The State, which represents man’s collective power, becomes God walking on earth. Hegel wrote that the State “has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.” This idea of the supremacy of the State is totally contrary to the American concept of government. Hegel considered the State divine because, in the context of the world spirit, the state represented the divine mind in man’s collective power. But to the Founding Fathers, individuals formed governments to secure their God-given rights. There was no such thing as a divine state.
Hegel’s pantheism was a form of paganism, and therefore fundamentally anti-Biblical. But it gave the intellectuals and academic elite a pseudo-religion that promoted statism and therefore reinforced the idea of government-controlled compulsory public schooling.
Karl Marx considered the dialectic as the way history moved forward, but he was an atheist. He saw no divine purpose behind this dialectical process, and thus formulated the doctrine of Dialectical Materialism, which was in conformity with Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution, which Marx saw as “a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” Darwin had removed God from organic creation, which suited any despot, like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Castro, who wanted to play God and impose the tyranny of unnatural selection over other human beings.
Paul Johnson writes in his new biographical study of Darwin:
The delight with which Engels and Marx pounced upon the Origin the week of its appearance was succeeded by a continuing interest among leading Communists, from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, in Darwin’s theory of natural selection as justification for the class struggle. It was essential to the self-respect of Communists to believe that their ideology was scientific, and Darwin provided stiffening to the scaffold of laws and dialectic they erected around their seizure and retention of power. Stalin had Darwin’s “struggle” and “survival of the fittest” in mind when dealing with the Kulaks and when relocating the minorities of Greater Russia: extermination of groups was a natural event if the party, redefined as the elite of the politically “fit,” was to survive.
One can also see how Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest justified the decisions made by John Dewey, James McKeen Cattell, Edward Thorndike, and other Progressives in their struggle to transform America from a Biblically based society into one based on Darwin, Hegel, and Marx. That is why we have atheist public schools, a burgeoning black underclass, widespread functional illiteracy, a dumbed-down public, a White House controlled by dialectical materialists, and a president who enjoys his dialectical struggle with Republicans.
Atheist public schools have contributed to the moral degeneration of American youth. The breakdown of the American family, and particularly the black family, is the result of the new moral relativism and the rejection of Biblical moral standards. That is why the left fights so hard to keep the Ten Commandments out of the public square. Evolution reigns supreme in our sciences, thus perverting the very nature of science which must recognize the spiritual as well as the material in human life.
It is significant that Hitler applied unnatural selection to the extermination of the Jews, the primary purveyors of Biblical religion. He applied Galton’s idea of breeding a superior race — a Master Race — that would rule the world. It took a World War and the destruction of Germany to get rid of him and his demented racism.
It is also significant that John Dewey — a Darwinian, Hegelian, atheist philosopher — targeted the teaching of reading as the most effective way of transforming American society. His essay, “The Primary Education Fetish,” was a brilliant analysis of the social cement — high literacy — that held the capitalist, free-enterprise, Biblically based American society together. He identified and isolated the American cultural keystone — high literacy — that could be covertly and cleverly removed to bring down the entire edifice based on Biblical religion.
And he had the help of such brilliant intellectual minds as James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall, William Russell, Charles Judd and other members of the Darwin-Hegel-Marx club. They took over American education lock, stock, and barrel and made it into the dysfunctional mess it is today.
Fortunately, there still are in America a large number of people who still adhere to Biblical religion, its traditions, and the original form of American government based on it. And all of it is encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence, which states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the Founding Fathers’ concisely stated philosophy of government. But if you accept the atheist idea of evolution, the Declaration becomes an unscientific exercise in mysticism. It becomes an antique idea no longer relevant in our modern world. And yet, what has evolutionary atheism given the world? The racist tyranny of Nazi Germany and the nightmares of Communist terror. And there are lots of Americans who actually believe in socialism, or dialectical materialism, without even knowing it.
In other words, our struggle to remain a free people is a philosophical struggle that can only be won by conservatives restoring and maintaining the traditions and philosophy of government derived from Biblical religion. The atheist imperative to destroy the influence of the Bible in America must be met with an equally vigorous defense of our Biblically-based way of life. And we must start by taking back the schools from the atheists. There is no law that says that only atheists can control our public schools. The schools must represent the basic philosophy of our nation as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
The dumbing-down of America must be stopped. And only an awakened America can stop it.
