Charles Darwin succeeded in foisting bad science upon the world only because bad science was preferable to the truth that God really is God and we have to stand accountable before him. Being a smart monkey is a better deal to sinful man than admitting he’s sinful. Grow a tail, lose a soul. Nice trade.
The outworking—effluence actually—of Darwin’s theories culminated in a modern vanity called communism, that state of perfection a society achieves after socialism has worked its magic. Vladimir Lenin promised, in fact, that within two generations he would produce a perfect state, a “worker’s paradise,” where the only government necessary would be a few administrative clerks, and where the public urinals would be made of solid gold. Ah, yes, gold: But would they flush?
That’s the big problem with collectivist praxis: Nothing works, or at least not for long. Why? Because being God is too big a job for anyone except, well, God. In fact, adding more bureaus to the bureaucracy only clogs the hopper even worse than it already is, and makes the beast churn out more of what he’s already too full of. As one historian has noted, free men write books; bureaucrats fill out forms in triplicate and then shuffle papers all day.
One of my friends in the erstwhile Soviet Union served two prison terms in the 1980s, both times for fictional crimes. I asked him later how the KGB found it so easy to take him. “We have a joke,” he said, “that Soviet law is so marvelous that it contains something for everyone. You see, we have so many laws that I cannot keep one without breaking another. There are always grounds to get me for something.”
Just as printing too many dollars makes money worth less (and eventually worthless), so writing too many laws only breeds lawlessness. Such irony was not lost on the average Russian in the mid-80s. That’s why they referred to their oversized union as a land of “unlimited impossibilities,” and called Moscow, the capital of Absurdistan (it’s the same word in both Russian and English).
After the official dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, the locals didn’t know how to govern cooperatively. How could they? They had only known totalitarianism. Freedom, they assumed, must be the opposite, which is to say that the answer to bad government must be no government. Chaos reigned.
Moscow’s bureaucrats, who never left office but simply declared themselves reformers, began making rules on their own. What once had been micromanagement from the Kremlin now became a regulatory peeing contest. One guy levied a ten percent tax on business, so his comrade down the hall levied an additional eleven percent burden on the same business. And so on.
Eventually Muscovite businesses were being taxed at more than one hundred percent of gross revenues, so nobody paid much of anything. And what’s more, the pencil pushers upstairs didn’t really expect payment. Everybody understood that if you want a little juice you’ve got to squeeze the whole lemon. If you want to collect twenty percent, go for a hundred-twenty. But such a philosophy assumes you won’t run out of lemons.
What Russia had immediately after Gorbachev wasn’t true freedom any more than a recently beheaded chicken’s flopping around the farm yard is dancing. It was simply the absurd death waltz of statism.
My question is: Why do so many lefties like Bernie Sanders, and the Party he crashed in 2016, keep lining up for a turn with the chicken?
Why, after Soviet communism failed, did Europe’s socialists take off their red coats and dye them green in the name of environmentalism?
Why do tenured American professors and congressional “progressives,” none of whom have ever had to live with socialism, keep pressing for a way of governance that so recently failed so spectacularly?
Because so many people think they’re better dancers, that’s why.
Both socialism and communism would have been abandoned world-wide by now, were it not for one particularly evil conceit: “We can do it better.” Time after time around the globe new pretenders connive or shoot their way to power in the name of doing it better, and then bring their various societies to ruin.
As PJ O’Rourke once quipped, “Socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad people. And liberals want us all to go to hell because it’s warm there in the winter.”
Thank God, when the Berlin Wall broke to pieces like a tired dam on November 9, 1991, Darwin’s monkey died in the rubble. The Modern Era was done at last. Some might argue for an earlier or later date, but in front-page terms, what better headline is there? Everything else, including the Soviet implosion, was aftershock. The quake that brought the house down happened on that chilly autumn day in Berlin.
Of course the dawn of the Post-Modern era doesn’t mean an end to chaos, just Darwin’s particular subspecies of chaos. Today’s Post-Mods have mostly traded V.I. Lenin for John Lennon. “Imagine no religion.” But at least they’re willing to sing a different song. They don’t yet know who they are, so in the meantime they’re just Post-something else, and are presently flirting—yet again—with socialism, even though they cannot define it. In other words, Post-Modernism is a vacuum, not a presence. Which makes for great opportunity if the Gospel is what it claims to be. If we’ll work to win the culture instead of fighting the culture war.
And that, dear reader, will be so much more fun without that danged monkey.