Cosmology, By Marilynne Robinson

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In Marilynne Robinson’s 2012 essay “Cosmology,” Robinson presents the idea of a sort of social Darwinism as a potentially misguided embrace of human brutism birthed from an interpretation of the Darwinian conception of natural selection. This idea, Robinson contends, is most attractive to those who perceive their societal facticity as a constriction on some certain “freedom,” a freedom most akin to open hostility with others as one would expect of animals competing for resources. The irony of this sort of social Darwinism lay in its essentialism with respect to the brutism it ascribes to even modern man, not allowing for the progression of man to a higher, less baleful being. In this irony Robinson finds the sort of conception of social Darwinism