This is political because 'secular' is a defining characteristic of Liberalism. This post is a piece in the larger puzzle of contemporary society. So....Jack London, Secularist
1. At the age of ten the boy was on the street selling newspapers to supplement the familiy's meager income. For fourteen years thereafter until his first writing success at twenty-four life was one vicious, downward cycle of toil, escape, toil, escape, toil. He became a "work beast" laboring in a cannery, a jute mill, a laundry, and shoveling coal in a power station. He worked for ten cents an hour, thirteen to fourteen hours a day, six and seven days a week. Is it any wonder that he saw life in terms of man's unending struggle against a ruthless nature?
A Short Biography of Jack London With Color Pictures
2. A best-selling author, Jack London was the best-known representative of literary naturalism, selling a secular worldview along with his art. Naturalism aligns humans with the evolutionary scheme of things, i.e., the individual does not really matter, and has no intrinsic worth beyond the single task that nature assigns every organism: to reproduce so that the species will survive. Therefore, there is no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence.
3. Humans are portrayed as common biological organisms, having no real freedom of action, chained to predetermined actions by their genetic heritage and social environment. Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo, page 144.
4. More than anyone else, Jack London integrated an evolutionary worldview into American fiction. In one tale, he wrote: It was easy. All men must die . It was the law of all flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race . The old men he had known when a boy, had known old men before them. Therefore it was true that the tribe lived, It was the same everywhere, with all things . He remembered how he had abandoned his own father on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, The Law of Life (The World of Jack London)
5. There is no morality. No care or concern for other, or for life. Nor is any required. This is the gift of the Enlightenment, with its view to replacing religion with science, with reason. Here it is today, explained not by Jack London, but by former Obama czar Steven Rattner:
Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently rationing, by its proper name the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html
6. Our brave new world isnt brave, or even new. Darwins thesis was offered in 1859, and wasnt revolutionary in that other versions had been proposed long before Darwin .but those versions had presumed God, or a Mind of some kind behind the evolutionary process, directing some goal or purpose. Instead, they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process. Seeing And Believing | The New Republic
7. Yet, in the most obvious way, we are not at all similar to other organisms.
Sir John Maddox, editor emeritus of the foremost journal of science, "Nature," wrote in a classic Time magazine essay:
How the brain manages to think is a conundrum with a millennial time scale. All animals have brains so as to be able to move about. Signals from the senses- eyes, ears, nostrils, or skin, as the case may be- send messages to the spinal cord, which moves the limbs appropriately.
But thinking involves the consideration of alternative responses, many of which have not been experienced but have been merely imagined. The faculty of being conscious of what is going on in the head is an extra puzzle. (Thinking, March 29, 1999, p. 206)
1. At the age of ten the boy was on the street selling newspapers to supplement the familiy's meager income. For fourteen years thereafter until his first writing success at twenty-four life was one vicious, downward cycle of toil, escape, toil, escape, toil. He became a "work beast" laboring in a cannery, a jute mill, a laundry, and shoveling coal in a power station. He worked for ten cents an hour, thirteen to fourteen hours a day, six and seven days a week. Is it any wonder that he saw life in terms of man's unending struggle against a ruthless nature?
A Short Biography of Jack London With Color Pictures
2. A best-selling author, Jack London was the best-known representative of literary naturalism, selling a secular worldview along with his art. Naturalism aligns humans with the evolutionary scheme of things, i.e., the individual does not really matter, and has no intrinsic worth beyond the single task that nature assigns every organism: to reproduce so that the species will survive. Therefore, there is no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence.
3. Humans are portrayed as common biological organisms, having no real freedom of action, chained to predetermined actions by their genetic heritage and social environment. Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo, page 144.
4. More than anyone else, Jack London integrated an evolutionary worldview into American fiction. In one tale, he wrote: It was easy. All men must die . It was the law of all flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race . The old men he had known when a boy, had known old men before them. Therefore it was true that the tribe lived, It was the same everywhere, with all things . He remembered how he had abandoned his own father on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, The Law of Life (The World of Jack London)
5. There is no morality. No care or concern for other, or for life. Nor is any required. This is the gift of the Enlightenment, with its view to replacing religion with science, with reason. Here it is today, explained not by Jack London, but by former Obama czar Steven Rattner:
Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently rationing, by its proper name the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html
6. Our brave new world isnt brave, or even new. Darwins thesis was offered in 1859, and wasnt revolutionary in that other versions had been proposed long before Darwin .but those versions had presumed God, or a Mind of some kind behind the evolutionary process, directing some goal or purpose. Instead, they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process. Seeing And Believing | The New Republic
7. Yet, in the most obvious way, we are not at all similar to other organisms.
Sir John Maddox, editor emeritus of the foremost journal of science, "Nature," wrote in a classic Time magazine essay:
How the brain manages to think is a conundrum with a millennial time scale. All animals have brains so as to be able to move about. Signals from the senses- eyes, ears, nostrils, or skin, as the case may be- send messages to the spinal cord, which moves the limbs appropriately.
But thinking involves the consideration of alternative responses, many of which have not been experienced but have been merely imagined. The faculty of being conscious of what is going on in the head is an extra puzzle. (Thinking, March 29, 1999, p. 206)
