During today’s class we spoke about our reading for “Interdisciplinary” that we had for this weekend which spoke heavily on the idea of social darwinism. As described in “Interdisciplinarity” social darwinism is the concept that society adheres to the same, seemingly random rules of natural selection in nature. This prompted a discussion in class and one of the students, Jacob, brought up the question of whether we attribute too much too science. Although this was just a passing statement made in class it made the wheels in my mind turn quite a bit. The law of darwinism works in nature because animals aren’t as evolved enough as us emotionally as humans so personally I believe that if we have evolved to the point of gaining so many other additive traits then we should stop using rules like that which exist within nature as excuses for us. It seems that we have begun moving away from personal responsibility and instead blaming things on our “baseline instincts” which I believe is detrimental to our society and honestly, that we are forcefully creating limits in our minds, de-evolving. We should tap deeper into our own minds and stop justifying actions that are harmful towards others and ourselves simply because lower lifeforns show the same characteristics; we need to begin to start taking responsibility for all our actions, only then can we truly begin to change.
English Majors Practising Criticism