It’s been so illuminating to me, dealing with Darwinists all the time on this blog — cleaning up after them (unpublishing their rude comments, personal insults, etc.). Their purpose is intimidation. Normal people don’t enjoy dealing with rudeness, so they are understandably reluctant to enter into the comment thread discourse. Do you not find this to be true?
What you have to understand about these people — I mean, those committed to Darwinism — is that many operate in a world of academics, would-be academics, and failed academics. The last is most common of all, I’d bet. Others are, quite simply, unemployed, which poses its own challenges. Such dynamics set the tone with these folks.
In university life, the pinnacle is tenure, where you are thenceforth free to be a jerk to people because you have a guaranteed job. That’s the ideal! Everything leading up to it consists of a ruthless scrabble for preference. It’s all terribly destructive.
In the real world, of course, there is always a built-in and very practical reason to learn to play nicely even if you don’t agree with someone, even if you don’t like him: Your job may depend on it. So to the extent that Darwinism is the creation of an academic Guild — and that extent is about 97 percent — you are going to find that its defenders are challenged when it comes to being civil.
My commitment is to keep trying to keep things clean here so that an interesting public discussion may proceed. They will call that “censorship.”
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