William Lay, Patrick Knott, and Parth Goenka

Professor McClelland
Writing the Essay - Science
Oct. 26, 2016

Marilynne Robinson Cosmology Textual Representation

Election years often result in strong ideological criticism and conflict. In an excerpt from
her 2012 essay Cosmology, Marilynne Robinson, in response to highly politicized
issues of the financial crisis and concealed/open carry legislation, describes and critiques
the basis of the western conservative worldview. She characterizes it as a belief that
humans are, deep down, the brutes we always were; governed by base drives and
generally incapable of selflessness. She describes the fundamental basis of this view as a
reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions. This implies
a fundamental irony between those who deny Darwins ideas of evolutionary change
both in science and in ethics, but who emphatically apply his concept of survival of the
fittest to their ethics. Further emphasizing her distaste for this ideology Robinson calls it
the regressive embrace of essential beastliness that appreciates and promotes the
essential Nietzschean ideal of might making right. By criticizing the basis of the
conservative ideology, Robinson is likely trying to influence potential voters in 2012, an
election year, to vote more liberally.