"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

A scintillating article appertaining to the Library Board's selection of titles for the book spines to adorn the face of the jumbo parking lot next to Kansas City's new downtown library appeared in the March 1, 2004, issue of the Kansas City Star, entitled 'Literary giants to grace new library.' Star Reporter James Hart reported that library trustee Jonathan Kemper thought that the selection process would be the most fun that many of the board trustees had ever had. Mr. Hart went on to describe the selection process that he had observed.

"Darwin and Einstein both were important scientists, but were - yawn - less than scintillating."

Wherefore Darwin and Einstein were rejected with an emphatic yawn. Now there is a professional critical criterion: "scintillating." Meaning that their work is not brilliant, does not sparkle or shine, just is not flashy enough to awaken the minds of the Library Board trustees, who are lately more interested in providing passive recreation for the community than an interactive higher education according to the foundational principle laid down in the 1906 Missouri Library Association's Handbook:

"Library workers and friends also know that the library is the only college of the masses - too often the only school after the 'three R's'.... The library should be all but as familiar as the school house, and but a short time in following it."

We recall that both Darwin and Einstein were accustomed to rejection in their day. As Einstein said so well, "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

In fact the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life, one of the world's greatest books, raised considerable sparks from hell, sparks that are still flying to this very day, for it is one of the most widely read books and is still scandalous to small minds. Of course Darwin's magnus opus is somewhat tedious if one does not bring an inquisitive mind to one of the most important subjects in the world, and his rhetoric is not the best in the world. We may prefer to read Darwin's "bulldog", T.H. Huxley, who took off his smock to spread the gospel of evolution. Darwin was a retiring sort of man, oversensitive to criticism, and he did not care for bitter controversies.

Darwin's book is indeed one of the most scintillating books every written if we are to judge by the light it has shed on natural science and religion. Master of rhetoric he was not, nor was Darwin the first to come up with the idea of natural selection, a process which has been noted here and there since the earliest times. Einstein once wrote, in a cynical vein, that "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." In fact, Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a paper which, to Darwin's astonishment, amounted to an abstract of his own theory. He gladly sent it along with his own work to the Linnean Society, where their joint communication was read and published in 1858. No, evolution was not Darwin's idea, but he marshaled the evidence, analyzed the facts, and introduced several partial explanations for evolution, thus laying out the grounds for further development of the subject. He exploded the prevailing view that species are fixed, positing instead that species vary or develop slowly over time: some variations are crushed by natural causes while some persist, hence 'natural selection' instead of the deliberate selection successfully practiced by humans when breeding their animals.

Of course Darwin's work was offensive to those whose ambiguous god was an excuse for their own arbitrary exercise of power and for the inequitable political distribution of the supreme power authoritarians worship. There is no reason why an omnipotent personal god should not do anything she wants, let alone design a divine evolutionary plan whereby creatures ascend from brutal forms to divine forms rather than fall out of heaven to be tortured below pursuant to the regressive lowbrow doctrine doctrine that brute might makes divine right. Perhaps Darwin should have entitled The Descent of Man the Ascent of Man. Darwin did not deny the existence of a one-god, by the way: he was not an atheist, but was an agnostic because what he saw in nature was a sort of muddle and not proof of a plan devised by an anthropomorphic god. On the other hand, Einstein said, "God does not play dice." Not that Einstein was a by-godder (bigot): "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death," said he. However that may be, we might suspect that the trustees of the Kansas City Public Library have some ulterior motive for "yawning" at Darwin as not scintillating enough for displaying his title, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life, on the wall of the jumbo parking garage of the new, virtually privatized library.

"There are tough questions about faith," said the Star reporter about the selection process he had observed. "Religion is part of the daily life for a lot of Kansas Citians. Shouldn't that be presented somehow? But how do you include one faith without making room for dozens of others, not to mention people who don't follow any faith?"

How? The answer is obvious: You impose your faith indirectly by excluding great secular works that might give the lie to your dogma. As library trustee Jonathan Kemper said of the selection process, "The biggest question is not what titles to select but what we want to say to the community." That is, the titles are to be displayed for their propaganda effect and not for their content. Born-again Christianity is popular in the Bible Belt and the Christian Right version of Jesus is the President's "political hero." Right-wing authoritarian governments are attractive to the masses when they are threatened; a few shots in the air will stampede the cowering herd in the right direction. But, you might object, the herd now enjoys the vestige of the trend represented by Reagan, and the ideas in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life, were the stock-in-trade of the "Social Darwinians" surrounding Reagan. Yet the Library Board is not considering Haynes Johnson's title, Sleepwalking Through History, America in the Reagan Years, from which we take this excerpt:

"These men around Reagan were a familiar American type, self-made men who espoused rugged individualism, free (that is, unfettered and unregulated) enterprise, and a belief in the survival of the fittest. They were Social Darwinists who made it out of poverty. So could others, if they were worthy. If not, then, to each his own and to each his own fate. Their maxims were simple ones - for example, the Lord helps those who help themselves.... In their minds, their interests were the best interests.... Just keep government out of my way and my business: this was the glory and genius of America. To the extent they had a philosophy of government, that was its essence. A bedrock belief in a laissez-faire approach to society's problems was shared by virtually all those who initially formed behind Reagan."

So why would the right-wing authoritarians not want to advertise Darwin's work and to simply refer embarrassing questions to the Invisible Hand or to God's Mysteries? Perhaps because Darwin's social Darwinism is not what most people think it is. His socialism is truly social. Darwin attributed man's moral improvement to social evolution, to the raising of social standards, not to individual evolution, not to the selection by nature or by the one-god of "rugged individualists." Yet his view of evolution on the whole was balanced: in 1837 he recognized three governing factors: a liberating force of variation; a conservative, hereditary force; the struggle for existence. In fine, whether one is subject to religious superstitions or not, Darwin's work does not provide good ammunition for rugged individualists who believe social progress is caused by each person's natural or divine right to kill one another or steal one another blind in order to survive according to nature's or god's plan. As for organized terrorism or large-scale violence, Einstein's scintillating words give us food for reflection on our current warmongering:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file," wrote Einstein in one of his letters, "has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." And, I thought, we should also keep these words of Einstein in mind: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Furthermore, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."

Of course social warring over moral points as a mode of human evolution was not beyond Darwin's purview. We have observed animals warring for no apparent reason, but we hopefully differ from the animals by virtue of our reasoning power. "The struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on an advance in the moral and intellectual qualities of its members," wrote Darwin in a letter. And, in Descent of Man, "No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, or treachery were common.... (A tribe) superior in patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, sympathy, mutual aid, and readiness to sacrifice for the common good" would be selected over a tribe without such qualities. Hence we might suppose that man is a dual being, evolving along, say, an amity-enmity continuum.

Darwin's propagandist, T.H. Huxley, and his socialist disciple, H.G. Wells, teaches us that genuine Social Darwinism as such is opposed to biological evolution, that man uses his reason to select or to choose what he believes is in his best interest, and that interest may be contrary to his slowly evolving animal instincts, especially when reason has devised weapons of mass destruction that might destroy his civilization if not his species. Haynes Johnson in his discussion of the Reagan years was correct about the familiar type of American who advocates what is really anarchy in the name of one-god or rugged individualism without moderation by social pluralism and, if you will, pantheism or atheism. The relatively recent advance of organized human reasoning threatens to destroy the human race, but that is not a good reason to abandon social amity in favor of individual enmity and hate-based group-love. Lester F. Ward's remarks in an article entitled 'Mind as a Social Factor', published in the October 1884 quarterly issue of Mind, comes to mind here - perhaps the Library Board might want to consider selecting one of his titles.

"It is commonly supposed that the highest wisdom of man is to learn and then follow the ways of nature.... In government , every attempt to improve the condition of the state is condemned and denounced.... In commerce and trade, absolute freedom is insisted upon. Free trade is the watchword of this entire school. The laws of trade, they maintain, are natural laws. As such they must be better than any human rules. And here again we find them insisting that regulation is injurious to trade, although it is at the same time declared to be nugatory.

"When a well-clothed philosopher on a bitter winter's night sits in a warm room well lighted for his purpose and writes on paper with a pen and ink, in the arbitrary characters of a highly developed language, the statement that civilization is the result of natural laws and that man's duty is to let nature alone so that untrammeled it may work out a high civilization, he simply ignores every circumstance of his existence and deliberately closes his eyes to every fact within the range of his faculties. If man had acted upon his theory, there would have been no civilization and our philosopher would have remained a troglodyte."

In fine, Lester Ward believed that natural selection destroys the weak, civilization protects the weak. Social progress results from the reduction of competition and the protection of the weaker individuals. The human struggle for existence is now the struggle for psychic control of nature and for the supremacy of mind over brute instinct. Man is the active factor, nature is passive. Some scintillating thinkers have opined that the personal one-god is the projection of man's active factor onto a non-existent object; that the one-god is a god in name only, a name used to justify feel-good faith and any sort of behavior. Other scintillating thinkers do not mind the community's projection providing that the object is true, good, and beautiful.

We think that the Library Powers who want to survive might want to rethink not only their collection development methodology but also their method of selecting titles to be advertised on the wall of the commercial Library District's new garage. Since Einstein's birthday is coming up, more on this might be said.