Dangerous Darwinism

We are concerned with a particular rhetorical narrative that appeared in the early stages of the Darwin debate but that has been fiercely resurgent in the past two decades. Freud wrote of Darwin's theory as one of three major blows to which human vanity had been submitted at the hands of science. Assertions that "Darwin's dangerous idea" came as a horrible shock to the Victorians and that it is still a profound psychological threat, and therefore widely resisted, remain current. When such assertions are offered as the premise on which Darwin is to be approached by the general reader, they call for some detailed scrutiny, with regard both to the bases on which they are made, and the effect they have on the terms of public debate. This paper offers a critique of the culture-shock myth based on a re-examination of Victorian reactions to Darwin's work, and on an analysis of the ways in which the myth functions as a rhetorical strategy in our own time.