Wilson: Government is a Living Thing that Obeys Darwin and Evolution

Woodrow Wilson in The New Freedom, 1913 (ISBN: 978-1-947844-89-6):

The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,—the best way of their age,—those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of “the laws of Nature,”—and then by way of afterthought,— “and of Nature’s God.” And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery,—to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

2 comments

    • Rena Havens on October 19, 2020 at 4:14 am
    • Reply

    Stephen J Gould was on NPR radio years ago. They said he was an anthropologist so I called in and said that there was no transitional species. He smugly said ,what about Lucy. I said Lucy was a put together specimen. He told me that all specimens are put together .I said Lucy was part human and animal bones.Lucy was a fraud. He went apoplectic and Christopher Lydon.quickly broke in for commercial. I listened through commercial and when they came back Lydon said Rena called back and said she meant Piltdown man. I didnt call back.and didnt even know Piltdown man. I called his office at Harvard and told Gould’s secretary that was a lie and that I didnt call back and not to share this lie. She was nice and then I gave it to the Lord

    • Brad Blinstrub on September 12, 2021 at 2:49 am
    • Reply

    All this from one of the biggest presidential frauds in American history. There is no Piltdown man. And there was no good reason to enter WWI and obey the bankers of England who were losing their empire of Anglo Myths to the German U-Boats and superior soldiers of the Kaiser. So we loaded our passenger liners with munitions and finally the Lusitania got a torpedo. The English loved it. The war propagandists were vindicated. We also got the Federal Reserve and London Inter-Bank Offered Rates. In other words, we got controlled by foreign interests. All this under the Calvinist Zionist called Woodrow the Idiot. By 1919 and a hundred thousand lives later our troops were all home and we got Influenza. A real pandemic. Yes. Woodrow sure believed in eugenics.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.