| |
I think anyone who wants to discuss Darwinism needs to read this book and
not let the loudmouths defendiing the Paradigm scare them away. First: the
brouhaha a while back from Darwin defenders was obviously generated by many
who had barely read the book. They must have misread the title and opened
fire. The endless vituperative denunciations of Weikart for blaming Darwin
for Hitler were uttered by people who clearly hadn’t read the book. Weikart
was very careful in what he said.
The title is, From Darwin to Hitler, and the discussion follows the title: a
history of social darwinist thought from Darwin to Hitler,with one short
chapter on Hitler, and his eugenic thinking. And it is a sobering tale.
Clearly the Darwin establishment is afraid of people reading this book, not
because it has much about Hitler, but because it shows how so many
intellectuals and academics were rank eugenicists and social Darwinists. And
it brings out the confusions of theory, the inability to get straight the
issues of ethics, and much else, including the obvious influence of
Darwinism on the racial extermination policies of many colonialists. There
is no escaping that charge, given the subtitle of Darwin’s book.
We need to be wary of those who, with liberal good intentions, wish to
sanitize Darwinism, and make us forget how the theory was taken in the
generations after Darwin.
Here is a short scanned passage from Weikart’s book. It gives the flavor of
the book, with a few remarks about Hitler tacked on at the end.
Those Darwinists who made the evolutionary process the new criteria
for morality radically altered the way that people thought about
morality. Since they generally affirmed
that good health and intelligence were key factors in the upward march
of evolution, improving physical vitality and mental prowess–especially
of future generations-became the highest moral virtue. The greatest sin
was ro contribute in some way to the decline of physical life or
intellectual ability. This kind of evolutionary ethics flew in the face
of Christian morality, in which one’s health, vitality, and mental
faculty play no role in determining moral or immoral behavior. While
Christian morality demands a relationship of love toward God and one’s
neighbor, which involves self-sacrifice, evolutionary ethics focussed on
breeding better humans, even if it meant sacrificing other people in the
process. In some places the old and new morality might intersect, and
indeed many proponents of evolutionary ethics carried a lot of baggage
from traditional ethics into their “new morality.” However, the
foundations had shifted. This new stress on evolutionary progress and
health as the norm for behavior spawned the eugenics movement around the
turn of the twentieth century, which was overtly founded on Darwinian
principles.
Darwinism also contributed co a rethinking of the value of human life in
the late nineteenth century. In order to make human evolution plausi¬ble,
prominent Darwinists argued chat humans were not qualitatively different
from animals. Also. the significance of the individual life did not seem
all that great considering the mass death brought on by the Darwinian
struggle for existence. Multitudes necessarily died before repro¬ducing,
and this was the key ro evolutionary progress. Death was no longer a
foe, as Christianity caught, bur a beneficent force. Also, Darwinism
stressed biological inequality, since evolution could not occur without
significant variation. Humans were no exception, argued many Darwinists,
so egalitarianism must be misguided.
These views on human inequality, the primacy of evolutionary progress,
and the beneficence of death in furthering that process produced a
world¬view that devalued human life. Many used Darwinian arguments to
assign some humans to the category of “inferior” or degenerate.
Generally they considered two main categories of people “inferior”: the
handicapped and non-European races. Since they were “inferior,” and
since the death of the less fit in the struggle for existence will
result in biological improvement, why not help evolution along by
getting rid of the “inferior”?
To be sure, some Darwinists and eugenicists retained enough moral
influence from their upbringing to resist the move to kill the
“inferior.” Instead, they often promoted a variety of measures of
reproductive control to achieve their ends. Eugenicists could not agree
on the best concrete reforms co improve the biological health of future
generations, but they generally agreed that Christian sexual morality
must be abandoned. Some proposed marriage reforms, others preferred free
sex, while a few even supported polygamy. They agreed, however, that
sexual morality must be subservient to the goal of increasing biological
health and thus promoting evolution.
Following the lead of Haeckel, a number of Darwinists and eugenicists
cook these ideas in even mote radical directions. They forthrightly
promoted the killing of the handicapped and those of “lower” races. They
rejected the dominant Christian attitude that placed value on the lives
of the weak, the sick, and the handicapped. They denied that “lower”
races could be elevated to the status of civilized people. Rather than
allowing such people to drain the precious, limited resources of the
earth, it would be better co kill them to make space for the healthy,
vigorous, and intelligent co flourish.
Many Darwinists also believed that moral characteristics were
heredi¬tary. They thought normal Europeans were not only physically and
mentally, but also morally, superior to the handicapped and
non-Europeans. Thus ridding the world of these “inferior” people would
actually result in the advancement of morality. Of course, they failed
to notice that Darwinism offered no criteria by which morality could be
judged, but they nonetheless affirmed the superiority of European
morality (while ironically rejecting the very basis of that morality).
Some might object that Darwinism was not the sole factor producing this
change of attitudes about morality and the value of human life. To this
I heartily agree. Indeed, it is difficult to know what contributed most
to the devaluing of human life-the naturalistic world view in general or
biolog¬ical evolution and Darwinism in particular. One could make a
persuasive argument that it was philosophical materialism and monism
that devalued human life rather than Darwinism. After all, the
eighteenth-century French materialist Julien de La Mettrie called man a
machine long before Darwin arrived on the scene.
However, why do we need ro choose between Darwinism and philo¬sophical
naturalism to explain the devaluing of human life? Surely both’ were
influential. The thinkers we have examined in this work saw Darwinism as
an integral-indeed often as the foundational-aspect of their entire
worldview. Certainly their view of the human condition relied heavily on
their Darwinian understanding. Further, Darwinism played an integral
role in the rise of materialism and positivism in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
This study is important, not only because it shows the intersection of
Darwinian biology and ethics in the past, especially the way that
Darwinism influenced thinking about the value of human life, but also
because these debates are still with us today. In the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
are making similar claims about the implications of Darwinism for ethics
and morality. Often these scientists and philosophers seem oblivious to
the many earlier attempts to wed Darwinism to ethics. Also, many
bioethicists today are articulating positions quite similar to the views
of the figures in this study. Peter Singer and James Rachels, for
example, are contemporary philoso¬phers who argue that Darwinism has
effectively undermined the Judeo¬-Christian doctrine of the sanctity of
human life, thereby making involuntary euthanasia permissible in some
circumstances, such as in the case of a severely handicapped infant.
Another reason this study is so important is because it gives further
insight into the roots of Hitler’s worldview and his genocidal
mentality. It also helps explain why so many educated Germans would
cooperate with the Nazis and participate in the Holocaust, including
many medical per¬sonnel. When he embraced eugenics, involuntary
euthanasia for the hand¬icapped, and racial extermination, Hitler was
drawing on ideas that were circulating widely among the educated elites.
Klaus Fischer has rightly stated, “Adolf Hitler’s racial image of the
world was not simply the product of his own delusion but the result of
the findings of ‘respectable’ science in Germany and in other partS of
the world, including the United States.”] These ideas were not dominant
in German society, but they were reputable and mainstream in scholarly
circles, especially among the medical and scientific elites.
It would be foolish to blame Darwinism for the Holocaust, as though
Darwinism leads logically to the Holocaust. No, Darwinism by itself did
not produce Hitler’s worldview, and many Darwinists drew quite different
conclusions from Darwinism for ethics and social thought than did
Hitler. Eugenics and scientific racism were prominent in scholarly
circles in many European countries and also in the United States, but
obviously in none of them did Darwinism lead to the Holocaust. It did
lead, however, to the compulsory sterilization of hundreds of thousands
in the United States, Sweden, and other countries in the mid-twentieth
century. As a result of the resurgence of eugenics in the late twentieth
century, China passed the Maternal and Infant Health Law, which required
premarital health exams and strongly encouraged sterilization for those
deemed unfit to reproduce (while the sterilization measure was
theoretically voluntary, Dikotter points out that in practice the
Chinese government usually gets its way).2 Darwinism also spawned debate
on euthanasia and infanticide, and even though these are still illegal
in most countries (the biggest exception is the Netherlands), they are
practiced more widely than many suspect.3
To deny the influence of Darwinism on Hitler would also be foolish,
however, especially since almost all scholars of Nazism acknowledge it.
Richard J. Evans highlights the importance of social Darwinist discourse
not only for Hitler, but also for those cooperating with
Hitler took .u~ this rhetoric and used his own version of the language
of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of
extermi¬nation …. The language of social Darwinism in its Nazi variant
had come to be a means of legitimizing terror and extermination against
deviants, opponents of the regime, and indeed anyone who did not appear
to be wholeheartedly devoted to the war effort. The language of social
Darwinism helped to remove all restraint from those who directed the
terroristic and exterminatory policies of the regime, and it legitimized
these policies in the minds of those. who practiced them by persuading
them that what they were doing was Justified by history. science. and
nature.4
Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without
Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics permutations,
whether Hitler or his Nazi followers would have had the necessary
scien¬tific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators
that one of the. world’s greatest atrocities was really morally
praiseworthy. Darwinism-or at least some naturalistic interpretations of
Darwinism¬succeeded in turning morality on its head.
|
|
