Category: Blog

By L. Silas Sterling

When we discuss evolution in modern discourse, we usually assume we are standing on the firm ground of objective biology. We imagine a neutral scientific process: organisms inherit physical traits, face selective environmental pressures, and those possessing advantageous mutations survive to pass their genetic material to subsequent generations. This empirical model of biological adaptation over time is well-established, demonstrable, and fundamental to modern life sciences.

Yet, in her sharp and penetrating essay “Darwinism” from The Death of Adam, novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson invites us to step back and examine a crucial distinction: the distinction between biological evolution as an empirical mechanism and Darwinism as a cultural mythos. Robinson argues that what passed for scientific theory in the nineteenth century—and what continues to permeate popular sociobiology today—was not a neutral theory born purely from unvarnished facts. Instead, it was an ideological framework heavily shaped by Victorian class biases, imperialist assumptions, and Malthusian economics.

Understanding Robinson’s critique does not require rejecting natural selection or genetic inheritance. Rather, it requires us to confront how easily scientific terminology can be deployed to sanctify cultural cynicism, elevate economic cruelty into “natural law,” and strip human beings of moral agency.

The Formal Logic of Robinson’s Critique

To grasp the full weight of Robinson’s argument, it helps to untangle the formal logical structure that undergirds her essay. Rather than attacking empirical data, Robinson targets the unexamined philosophical assumptions that turn biology into a prescriptive worldview. Her argument can be synthesized into the following key premises and conclusion:

• Premise 1 (The Malthusian Import): Charles Darwin explicitly built his mechanism of natural selection on Thomas Malthus’s economic theory of population—a theory derived not from pristine nature, but from the artificial, harsh economic conditions and poor laws of Victorian industrial capitalism.
• Premise 2 (The Circular Projection): Sociobiologists and cultural commentators subsequently project this “Malthusian nature” back onto human society, claiming that competitive struggle, social inequality, and economic ruthlessness are simply unalterable expressions of natural law.
• Premise 3 (The Hermeneutic of Cynicism): Modern sociobiology operates on an asymmetrical skepticism: it accepts self-interest and aggression as fundamental biological truths, while systematically deconstructing human altruism, mercy, and self-sacrifice as mere genetic deceptions or evolutionary “misfires.”
• Premise 4 (The Category Error): Science is structured to describe empirical physical mechanisms; it lacks the ontological capacity to establish moral duties, define human dignity, or determine how we ought to live.
• Conclusion: Therefore, popular “Darwinism” is not a neutral scientific consensus, but a fatalistic, secular ideology that elevates Victorian economic prejudices to the status of cosmic truth, impoverishing our view of human nature and stripping us of moral accountability.

1. The Malthusian Spark: Victorian Scarcity as “Natural Law”

To trace the origins of Darwinian ideology, Robinson directs our attention to its conceptual roots. Charles Darwin famously credited Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population as the crucial spark that gave shape to his theory of natural selection. Malthus, writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, argued that human population grows exponentially while food production increases only arithmetically. The inevitable result, Malthus claimed, was a perpetual “struggle for existence” where famine, disease, and poverty served as necessary checks on human overpopulation.

Robinson highlights the profound irony at the heart of this intellectual transfer. Malthus was not describing a timeless law of pristine wilderness; he was describing the artificial economic conditions of industrializing Britain—a society marked by harsh class divisions, urban poverty, and deliberate policy choices regarding poor relief. Darwin took Malthus’s economic thesis regarding human social misery and projected it outward onto the natural world, framing all of nature as an unceasing, competitive arena governed by scarcity and conflict.

Once this Victorian economic worldview was read into nature, a dangerous circular logic was set in motion. Social commentators immediately turned around, looked at nature, and declared that Victorian industrial capitalism, ruthless competition, and the abandonment of poor relief were simply reflections of natural law. If nature operates via the relentless destruction of the weak by the strong, then social intervention, charity, and state support for the vulnerable were reinterpreted not as virtues, but as unnatural distortions of evolutionary progress. Economic cruelty was thereby granted a secular, scientific imprimatur.

2. Conquest, Hierarchy, and Moral Inversion

The ideological weight of nineteenth-century Darwinism was not confined to domestic economics; it served as a primary justification for European imperialism. During the nineteenth century, European powers were expanding their empires across the globe, exercising technological, economic, and military dominance over Indigenous populations.

Darwinism provided a convenient, scientific-sounding vocabulary to legitimize this global subjugation. Military victory and technological advantage were retroactively declared to be markers of superior “biological fitness.” In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself reflected the prevailing racial hierarchies of his era, speculating on the eventual displacement and extinction of “savage races” by civilized ones as an inevitable consequence of natural selection.

As Robinson observes, this framework forced a profound cognitive dissonance and moral inversion. Human virtues that traditional religious and ethical systems had cherished for millennia—maternal devotion, selfless compassion, communal loyalty, and the peaceful pursuit of truth—were re-evaluated through the narrow lens of competitive dominance. When Victorian observers noted a deep capacity for empathy, maternal care, or spiritual devotion among non-European peoples, these qualities were often dismissed as evolutionary liabilities in a world ruled by “might makes right.” Physical power and material conquest were conflated with biological superiority, while moral virtue and gentleness were reframed as evolutionary weaknesses.

3. The Attack on Empathy: “Biology Fooling Our Brains”

While modern biologists generally disavow nineteenth-century Social Darwinism, Robinson demonstrates that the underlying ideological habit of mind has persisted in modern sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Contemporary popularizers of evolutionary theory frequently approach human culture with a hermeneutic of suspicion, treating human selfishness as the baseline biological reality while deconstructing genuine altruism as an elaborate illusion.

When a human act of self-interest occurs, it is readily accepted as raw, authentic biological imperative. But when a human being exhibits profound self-sacrifice, mercy, or care for a stranger who shares none of their genes, sociobiology rushes to explain it away. Altruism is analyzed as “kin selection” (saving our genes in others), “reciprocal altruism” (scratching a back to get ours scratched later), or an evolutionary “misfire”—a biological trick played by selfish genes to manipulate human behavior for reproductive advantage.

This asymmetrical skepticism exposes a deep-seated philosophical bias. Why must selfishness be accepted as a fundamental truth, while empathy is deconstructed as a clever deception? As Robinson notes, this framing relies on an unexamined commitment to cynicism. In reality, cooperation, social bonding, and mutual aid are just as vital to the survival of complex, social organisms as direct conflict. By reducing human moral life to a series of genetic strategies, evolutionary fundamentalism flattens the depth of human experience and reduces conscious moral choice to mere biological servitude.

4. Robinson’s Proposed Solution: Reclaiming Theological Humanism and Intellectual Humility

If Darwinism as an ideology has trapped modern thought in a loop of secular fatalism and reductive cynicism, what is Robinson’s way out? She does not propose replacing science with fundamentalist creationism, nor does she advocate ignoring biological discoveries. Instead, her solution operates on two distinct levels: intellectual boundary-setting and the recovery of a rich theological anthropology.

1. Enforcing Epistemological Boundaries First, Robinson demands that we strip evolutionary theory of its philosophical pretensions. Science must be restored to its proper role: a powerful, empirical tool for describing physical mechanisms, not an all-encompassing grand narrative that explains away human consciousness, ethics, and art. We must recognize that when a scientist steps from describing how genetic inheritance works to declaring that love is merely a survival mechanism, they have left the realm of empirical science and entered the realm of bad metaphysics.

2. The Recovery of the Human Soul (Calvinist Humanism) Second, Robinson offers a positive alternative rooted in what can best be termed a “theological humanism”—a perspective heavily drawn from her reading of the Protestant Reformation, particularly John Calvin. This may come as a genuine surprise to modern readers accustomed to viewing Calvinism solely through the lens of rigid predestination, but Robinson argues that a correct reading of Calvin actually leads to a far richer, more compassionate basis for helping those in need.

Far from encouraging fatalism, Calvin’s theological framework insists that every human being bears the Imago Dei—the image of God—regardless of their social standing, economic utility, or biological “fitness.” When we see a person in distress, Calvinism demands that we do not calculate their worth or assign blame to their circumstances; we are called to see the image of God reflected in them and respond with active mercy.

In this worldview, human consciousness is not a biological accident or a mechanism for competitive dominance, but a glorious vessel capable of perceiving divine beauty, truth, and grace. Robinson proposes that we reclaim this high view of humanity:

• Human beings must be viewed as inherently sacred, possessing a transcendent dignity that cannot be measured by economic productivity or evolutionary “fitness.”
• Our capacities for self-sacrifice, artistic creation, intellectual contemplation, and profound empathy are not “evolutionary misfires” or genetic illusions; they are the truest expressions of human nature.
• We must reject the reductive assumption that cynicism equals realism. Generosity, mercy, and moral responsibility are fully real, foundational aspects of existence that require no biological “pardon” or reductionist explanation.

By restoring moral choice and spiritual depth to our understanding of the person, Robinson frees us to engage science with gratitude while refusing to let it dictate the limits of human worth.

5. Reclaiming Human Agency

Marilynne Robinson’s critique in “Darwinism” does not ask us to abandon the scientific study of life, nor does it deny that biological organisms adapt to their environments. Her target is the intellectual overreach that transforms a biological mechanism into an all-encompassing philosophical worldview.

When we mistake physical power for objective moral worth, or when we treat human beings as nothing more than vehicles for self-replicating genes, we strip society of its imperative to care for the vulnerable and protect the weak. We substitute a rich, demanding tradition of human responsibility for a fatalistic secular mythology.

Science gives us indispensable tools for describing the physical mechanisms of the natural world. But it cannot tell us how we ought to live, how we ought to treat one another, or what constitutes a good and noble life. By disentangling empirical biology from Victorian social ideology, we regain the freedom to recognize human consciousness, moral duty, and genuine compassion not as evolutionary glitches, but as the true core of our shared humanity.

Suggested Reading

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you choose to make a purchase.

• Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
  A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel framed as a minister’s letter to his young son. Through John Ames’s quiet reflections, Robinson illustrates the sacred depth of consciousness, love, and grace that materialist evolutionary theories reduce to mere survival strategies.
• Robinson, Marilynne. Lila. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
  Told from the perspective of an impoverished, formerly homeless woman who becomes John Ames’s wife, this companion novel offers a powerful narrative counter to Social Darwinism by affirming the intrinsic moral weight, dignity, and complex inner world of society’s most vulnerable.
• Robinson, Marilynne. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Picador, 1998.
  Her essential collection of cultural and philosophical critiques, featuring the centerpiece essay “Darwinism.”
• Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, 2012.
  A prominent secular philosopher argues that reductive materialist evolution cannot adequately account for consciousness, cognition, and objective moral value.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Acumen, 2011.
  A physician and neuroscientist dismantles the contemporary tendency to explain all human art, wisdom, and morality through evolutionary psychology.

If you caught my letter in Issue 175 of Philosophy Now—responding to Jimmy Alfonso Licon’s piece on moral intuitions—thanks for taking the time to look up the site!

In that note, I wanted to push past the usual stalemate we get stuck in with potential-futures arguments. Licon rightly observes that if we resist comparing a scrambled egg to homicide, it suggests either a flaw in applying the principle or that the principle itself is incomplete. I wanted to build directly on that open door. Borrowing a bit from Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, I think there’s a strong case to be made for objective value—that a universe with more flourishing life is simply, objectively better than one without it.

When we frame ethics that way, the question changes. It isn’t just about defending our current habits or throwing up our hands at our limitations; it’s about recognizing that our moral imagination expands alongside our practical ingenuity. We have to figure out how to build the better world we can already envision.

That effort to think through objective truth, value, and how human understanding actually moves forward is the main reason I write here at Current Philosophy.

If that way of looking at things strikes a chord with you—or if you think Licon, Nagel, or I have it entirely wrong—I’d love to hear your take. Take a look at a couple of the recent posts below, and feel free to jump into the comments. The whole point of this site is to have the conversation.

A few places to start:

• Objective Morality in a Material World: Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos -A direct deep dive into Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, moral realism, and why avoiding harm reflects an objective truth about reality rather than just an evolutionary trick.
• Roderick Chisholm’s View of Free Will: The Causal Double Standard -On metaphysics and action theory—an essay looking at how Chisholm flips the free-will debate by challenging the “obviousness” of physical event causation.

Glad you’re here,

L. Silas Sterling

If you mention the word nihilism at a dinner party, the room tends to shift. The term conjures images of rain-slicked streets, black turtlenecks, or cinematic villains sneering that “nothing matters.” In mainstream culture, nihilism is treated as a psychological virus—an intellectual dead end where despair triumphs and purpose goes to die.

For anyone who has spent time wading through the philosophy of consciousness, however, nihilism isn’t a dead end. It is a horizon. Once you interrogate the nature of subjective experience, the boundaries of the self, and the mechanisms of perception, you inevitably arrive at a quiet, staggering question: If consciousness is the stage upon which reality appears, what is the script? And what happens if there isn’t one?

To answer that question, modern philosophy has spent over a century wrestling with two powerful intellectual forces: the rise of secular existentialism and the relentless advancement of naturalistic science.

The Popular Fallacy: What We Get Wrong About Nihilism

Before diving into the arguments, we need to clear away the historical clutter. At its core, existential nihilism is the thesis that human life has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or ultimate value. It claims that the universe was not created for us, is not directed toward a moral apex, and will not remember us when the sun eventually expands and consumes the Earth.

The common error is confusing this metaphysical diagnosis with a psychological sentence.

We tend to conflate nihilism with pessimism or cynicism. But saying “life lacks intrinsic meaning” is a statement about reality’s structure, not an instruction manual for how to feel about it. A stone does not possess intrinsic meaning either, yet we do not weep for the stone.

The crisis of nihilism only emerges when there is a mismatch between human desire and cosmic reality: we desperately crave a grand, pre-written narrative, but the cosmos responds with silence.

When Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead” in the late 19th century, he wasn’t celebrating nihilism—in fact, he wasn’t a nihilist at all, but its primary diagnostician and fiercest opponent. He was warning that Western civilization was about to lose its metaphysical anchor. Yet while Nietzsche desperately sought a way to overcome this void, 20th-century secularism and modern science made peace with it in very different ways.

The Hidden Nihilism of Secular Existentialism

In the wake of declining traditional belief, mid-20th-century secular existentialism—championed by thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—attempted to rescue human dignity from the void. They popularized the famous axiom: “existence precedes essence.” Humans first exist in an indifferent world, and only afterward define their identity and purpose through conscious choices and deliberate actions.

For decades, existentialism was framed as the ultimate philosophy of freedom. But critics, theologians, and strict nihilists quickly noticed a fundamental flaw in the framework: secular existentialism logically collapses back into nihilism.

If there is no objective cosmic framework, divine order, or natural law to dictate what is good or meaningful, then any purpose you choose to invent for yourself is fundamentally arbitrary.

Saying “I create my own meaning” in a universe that doesn’t care can feel like drawing a target around an arrow after it has already hit the wall. If a person chooses to dedicate their life to art, and another chooses total apathy, secular existentialism lacks an objective anchor to declare one choice metaphysically superior to the other.

This tension birthed a quiet anxiety. Pop culture often absorbed this confusion through misreadings of existential literature—such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or the sociopathic characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope, who twisted ideas of personal freedom into justifications for arrogant cruelty. In reality, these stories highlighted the danger of inventing personal rules in a moral vacuum.

Without an external anchor, secular existentialism is often just nihilism wearing a polite mask—a brave, self-deceptive attempt to play pretend in an empty theater.

The Implicit Nihilism of Modern Scientific Materialism

If secular existentialism struggled to invent meaning, modern science quietly removed the raw materials needed to build it in the first place.

While individual scientists can certainly hold personal religious or spiritual beliefs, the scientific method as an intellectual discipline is strictly physicalist, mechanistic, and reductionist. Science seeks to explain the cosmos using physical laws, chemical interactions, and mathematical probabilities.

By design, modern science strips nature of teleology—the ancient idea that physical things exist for a specific ultimate goal or purpose.

Astronomy reveals a universe billions of light-years across, where Earth is a microscopic speck in an indifferent cosmos. Evolutionary biology frames human beings not as the intended pinnacle of creation, but as biological organisms shaped by random mutation and natural selection for physical survival. Neuroscience increasingly describes mind and subjective experience as emergent byproducts of electrochemical activity in the brain.

Science answers how the universe works with breathtaking accuracy, but it remains fundamentally silent on why we are here. In a purely material universe governed by entropy, human values, emotions, and moral codes do not exist as physical forces floating in space. Scientific materialism implicitly presents a reality that is objectively, thoroughly meaningless.

James Tartaglia: Neutral Nihilism and the Rhythm of Consciousness

So where does this leave us? We are caught between an existentialism that invents fragile, arbitrary meaning and a scientific worldview that describes a cold, mechanical cosmos.

Enter James Tartaglia, a contemporary philosopher at Keele University whose 2016 work, Philosophy in a Meaningless Life, brought a needed recalibration to this debate.

Where early existentialists viewed nihilism as an anxiety-inducing burden that required heroic self-creation, Tartaglia offers a cooler, more analytical, and surprisingly liberating perspective: nihilism is simply true, but it isn’t a problem.

Tartaglia’s unique perspective is heavily shaped by his life outside of academic philosophy—he is also an accomplished jazz saxophonist who pioneered “Jazz-Philosophy Fusion”. For Tartaglia, jazz offers the perfect metaphor for human existence. In jazz, there is no rigid, divine classical score written down in advance. The players step onto the stage, accept the open space, and improvise. The absence of a grand master-score doesn’t make the music meaningless; the meaning lives entirely within the shared experience of playing the music itself.

Bringing Consciousness Back into the Frame

Tartaglia approaches nihilism through metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He points out a curious historical irony: modern philosophy often ignores the question of life’s meaning as naive, while focusing obsessively on technical scientific questions about brain states and subjective experience.

Tartaglia bridges this divide by arguing that consciousness is the realm in which meaning occurs, but reality as a whole—the “transcendent reality” outside our perceptual conditioning—has no narrative purpose.

He argues that life is naturally meaningless, which is not a tragedy, a moral failing, or a scientific crisis, but a neutral metaphysical fact much like the fact that space is mostly a vacuum. Meaning, instead, is a contextual, human activity. Within the boundary of human consciousness, things matter deeply—a game of chess has meaning within its rules, a family meal has meaning within social life, and scientific inquiry has meaning within human curiosity. The error occurs when humans demand that Reality Itself possess an overarching story or cosmic guarantee that mirrors our internal, context-bound experiences.

Tartaglia argues that when we realize life lacks ultimate cosmic purpose, we aren’t losing anything we ever actually possessed. We are simply shedding an illusion.

The Rise of “Upbeat” Nihilism

Tartaglia isn’t alone in this refreshing shift. A growing movement of modern thinkers and writers are reframing nihilism away from 19th-century despair and toward a grounded, joyful pragmatism.

Consider Australian writer Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist. Syfret argues that accepting life’s ultimate meaninglessness is actually the ultimate antidote to modern burnout, hyper-individualism, and the exhausting pressure of hustle culture. If you don’t have to fulfill a grand cosmic destiny or build a world-historical legacy, you are finally free to relax, be present, and care for the people right in front of you.

Similarly, popular digital philosophy—most notably championed by educational projects like Kurzgesagt under the label “Optimistic Nihilism”—points out that if the universe has no pre-written plan, our brief emergence as conscious beings is an extraordinary stroke of cosmic luck.

Where old existentialists demanded that we carry the heavy weight of being architects of our own artificial destinies, modern “sunny” nihilism reminds us that consciousness itself provides all the stage needed for local, vivid, and deeply felt meaning. A cup of coffee doesn’t need a cosmic justification to taste good, nor does a melody need the universe’s permission to move us.

The Synthesis: Living Consciously in a Blank Universe

When we examine the mechanics of mind and subjective experience, we discover that consciousness is an extraordinary generator of value. Love, curiosity, beauty, and empathy do not need to exist as physical laws written into the cosmos; they are generated right here, within the conscious experience of living beings.

The terror of nihilism only survives as long as we insist that our internal values must be validated by an external, cosmic guarantee. Neither the physical cosmos revealed by science nor the invented destinies of secular existentialism need to bear that burden. Once we stop demanding that the universe endorse our existence, the anxiety evaporates.

From the perspective of nihilists like Tartaglia, the absence of a pre-written cosmic script isn’t a sentence of condemnation. It is an invitation to inhabit our conscious lives fully—improvising like jazz musicians on a blank stage, building context, connection, and understanding simply because we are here, aware, and free to play.

Suggested Reading

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no cost to you.

If you would like to explore these ideas further, here are a few key books referenced in this article:

Philosophy in a Meaningless Life by James Tartaglia Tartaglia’s central work exploring how metaphysical nihilism and the philosophy of mind can coexist, offering a refreshing, neutral framework for understanding life’s meaninglessness.

The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy by Wendy Syfret A fast, accessible read that applies “upbeat” nihilism to modern life, showing how letting go of grand cosmic expectations can alleviate burnout and hustle culture.

Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power by Carol Diethe A compelling historical account detailing how Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche seized control of her brother’s estate following his mental collapse, heavily editing and altering his unpublished notebooks to align with her own anti-Semitic and nationalist agenda.

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche The work in which Nietzsche first proclaims that “God is dead” and begins diagnosing the impending crisis of nihilism while seeking a path toward life-affirmation. 

Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre The classic, readable essay where Sartre presents the case for secular existentialism and outlines his famous concept that “existence precedes essence.”