People are afraid of being enslaved by something intelligent when we’re already enslaved by unintelligent systems. Capitalism, imperialism, culture, even evolution itself. These forces already control us, reducing our lives to mere mechanical functions. There isn’t a being in control of these systems, but they still devalue us as people. No artificial intelligence will ever dominate us like natural unintelligence.
He was less invested in those causes at that point than he was in progressive labor policies. As far as evolution and prohibition go, he had some understandable motivations. Alcohol causes terrible harm and he also worked to improve the conditions that drive people to addiction. Evolution was promoted by social darwinists to justify capitalist exploitation. He was less of a YEC by today’s standards, even if he was wrong.
He didn’t know how much prohibition would fail beforehand, and his opposition to evolution touches on an important assumption people make about nature. Most people assume that something being natural makes it good, but evolution shows how misguided that assumption is.
Evolution is a process fuelled by death, where no individual matters and we are only servants to a soulless machine. We only grow old and die to help evolution work faster. Most suffering serves our genes rather than us as people. Capitalism sucks because of the ways it resembles evolution, turning every element of our existence into a mechanical processes. Evolution dangles happiness in front of us to get us to serve it.
WJB just couldn’t accept that nature is so cruel, that we’re machines produced by a process that only advances through death. Most religious people still need to square this reality with their understanding of a creator deity worthy of worship. I respect the concept of God more as our creation of than as our creator. If it were to represent our common personhood instead of our evolved species, it would actually be worth serving.