The American Spectator

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Another Perspective

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In short, the language of sociobiology doesn't comprehend what humans consider most important -- like the heroism of Holocaust survivor and Professor Liviu Librescu, who gave his life that others might live. To reduce the poignant irony of Librescu's sacrificial act to a function of genetic compulsion is to embrace a blindness as great as the blindness that confuses being alive with the purpose of living.

Brooks declares that Darwin has replaced Freud, Marx, and earlier, the Bible, as a unifying Western cosmology. Like Marx and Freud, however, Darwin has no language that takes seriously individual acts of good and evil. Instead, good and evil become epiphenomena generated by impersonal forces that lie beyond good and evil. This fatal flaw trivializes, and continues to spawn, acts of horror in Brooks's "postmodern" West.

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