______

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

https://youtu.be/VfqBN9iW0_Q

The Roots of Hitler’s Evil
by

Richard Weikart

Professor of History

California State Univ., Stanislaus

[This essay first appeared in Books and Culture: A Christian Review (Mar./Apr. 2001): 18-21]

What shaped the life of the man who today is the symbol of evil and brutality, but who in the 1930s was cheered by millions of Germans, most of whom claimed to be Christians? What lay at the roots of Hitler’s character and world view? This question has intrigued millions, and oceans of ink have been spilled to provide explanations, but still there are no simple answers.

My own research into the impact of Darwinian ethics on German thought in the pre-Nazi era and its ultimate influence on Hitler’s ideology led me in the summer of 1999 to the resort Herrsching on beautiful Ammersee, just a 44-minute train trip from Munich, Hitler’s early headquarters, where he began his drive to power in early 1919 when he joined the fledgling German Workers’ Party, soon renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and nicknamed the Nazi Party. (About the same distance from Munich in a different direction is Dachau, site of the Nazi’s first concentration camp, which I likewise visited). Herrsching was the home of the physician Alfred Ploetz, the founding father of the race hygiene or eugenics movement in Germany, whose goal was to improve human heredity by rationally controlling reproduction. When I visited Herrsching, Ploetz’s 87-year old son, Wilfried Ploetz, was still living in the medieval manor house bought by his father, who conducted scientific experiments on heredity there. Ploetz was no Hitler, of course. He experimented on rabbits, not on humans.

On a gray day in June I arrived in Herrsching to examine the correspondence and papers of Alfred Ploetz. After Herr Ploetz graciously picked me up at the train station, I cautiously asked harmless questions about his father. Uncertain about how he viewed his father and the movement he led, especially because of Nazi connections, I proceeded gingerly. However, Herr Ploetz unabashedly introduced the topic of Nazism, relating to me several stories about the Nazi period involving his father or him. While admitting that his father made some mistakes, he clearly tried to distance his father and other leading eugenicists–many of whom he knew personally from their frequent visits with his father–from the Nazis and Nazi racism.

Probably neither Ploetz nor most other German eugenicists would have perpetrated the evil deeds we associate with Hitler, especially the Holocaust. Ploetz even opposed the Nazis before they came to power, according to his son, and based on what I know from other sources, this is credible. However, ideas have consequences, and Ploetz’s ideas, blended with those of other eugenicists and racists into a coherent Nazi program, had disastrous consequences once they were implemented by a strong-willed leader with both the political power and a cadre of like-minded assistants to carry them out.

The Nazi eugenics program began in earnest in January 1934 when a law requiring sterilization for persons with congenital illnesses went into effect. Since this promised to fulfill the goals for which Ploetz had struggled and sacrificed, it wooed Ploetz away from his disapproval of Nazism. However, compulsory sterilization was only the first step for the Nazis. Later they would implement more radical eugenics measures in their “euthanasia” program, murdering about 70,000 mentally and physically handicapped people in 1939-41. And “euthanasia” was once again only a preliminary step toward the ultimate program of racist eugenics–the Holocaust. This was the slippery slope with a vengeance.

Because of his evil deeds, it’s not surprising that in the 1940s some viewed Hitler as the Antichrist. Daniel’s prophecy seemed fulfilled: “A king shall arise, having fierce features, who understands sinister schemes. His power shall be mighty, but not by his own power; he shall destroy fearfully, and shall prosper and thrive; he shall destroy the mighty and also the holy people [the Jews]. Through his cunning he shall cause deceit to prosper under his rule; and he shall exalt himself in his heart. He shall destroy many in their prosperity.” (Daniel 8:23-24). Of course, Hitler wasn’t THE Antichrist, but the evil he perpetrated was born out of an anti-Christian world view.

Those wanting to know how Hitler became so evil should place at the top of their reading list Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna and Ian Kershaw’s magisterial two-volume biography, Hitler. These two excellent new works on Hitler poignantly provide insight into the background, ideas, and context that made Hitler possible. Both provide a detailed portrait of Hitler’s political, social, and intellectual milieu.

Since she focuses primarily on Hitler’s formative years as an 18 to 24 year old in Vienna (1908-1913), Hamann’s work examines how and to what extent the Viennese environment shaped Hitler’s world view and political program. She deftly weaves together Hitler’s biography with a history of Vienna during his stay there, but always with an eye on the city as Hitler experienced it. The Vienna she portrays is quite different from the modernist Fin-de-Siecle Viennadescribed in Carl Schorske’s path-breaking cultural history. Hamann is fully aware of the importance of modernism in Viennese culture, but she rightly argues from the outset that this was not Hitler’s milieu. Hitler wasn’t moved–except maybe to disgust–at the work of Freud or modernist artists. But he did eagerly follow the political developments in the Viennese press, and Hamann’s work provides considerable insight into the way Hitler perceived the political process and parties in Vienna.

One gains, for instance, considerable insight into Hitler’s contempt for the parliamentary system from Hamann’s engaging description of the Austrian parliament, which Hitler visited repeatedly during his first year or two in Vienna. The Austrian parliament was often paralyzed by ethnic rivalries, which regularly produced filibusters (in a variety of languages from the multi-ethnic empire, but with no translators), as well as raucous and outrageous use of noisemakers to kill debate on contentious bills. All too often ethnic hostilities spilled over into fisticuffs on the floor of parliament.

Hamann and Kershaw both argue that Hitler had a consistent–albeit pernicious–world view. At the center of that world view was the notion that history consists of a Darwinian struggle for existence between races, and the Aryan (i.e., Germanic) race has been and still is of supreme importance as the highest race, the only race capable of creating advanced culture. For Hitler human progress depended on two factors: 1) strengthening the Aryan race through eugenics measures; and 2) winning the struggle against the non-Aryan races (necessitating a strong military). Hamann astutely observes that for Hitler, “the individual has no value other than being part of a people and a race and to help secure their survival in the battle against other peoples and races.” (p. 235)

Hamann provides numerous examples to show how pervasive Aryan racism and eugenics were in the Viennese press. Because it was so widespread it’s impossible to point to any one racial thinker, such as Adolf Lanz von Liebenfels, asThe Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas, as Wilfried Daim has argued. Hamann’s approach is commonsensical, admitting that Hitler likely read Lanz’s periodical, Ostara, but asserting that Hitler’s Aryan racism bears even more the stamp of Guido von List, the mystical writer who first introduced the swastika into Aryan racist circles. The leader of the intensely nationalistic Pan-German movement in Austria, Georg von Schönerer, also strongly influenced Hitler, who adopted the Heil greeting from him. Schönerer not only embraced racial anti-Semitism, but also promoted eugenics.

Hitler usually adopted his ideas from journalists and popularizers, some of them rather crass or even hare-brained. However, I question Hamann’s assertion that the theories Hitler preferred were “not in agreement with academic science but were the products of the idiosyncratic thought processes of private scholars who were full of contempt for established scientists.” (233) This is only partly true. List, Lanz, and Schönerer, to be sure, were outsiders to academe. However, bizarre as it may seem, many of Hitler’s racial ideas weren’t at all foreign to academic scientific discourse, even if they weren’t accepted universally. Biology, anthropology, and medicine in German-speaking lands were saturated with eugenics and racism, sometimes even anti-Semitic Aryan racism very similar to Hitler’s.

Hitler’s world view was diametrically opposed to Christianity, for which Hitler had nothing but contempt. Hitler never attended church in Vienna, and some sources note that his greatest enemy–besides Marxists–was the Jesuits. One anonymous eyewitness reported that “Hitler said [c. 1912] the biggest evil for the German people was accepting Christian humility.” (p. 250) Even though in Mein Kampf Hitler criticized Schönerer’s anti-Catholic Los-von-Rom (Free from Rome) movement, during his time in Vienna Hitler was sympathetic to it. Hitler recognized that Schönerer’s position had been a public relations fiasco, and thus a political blunder, so later he always shied away from publicly criticizing the Christian churches, despite his personal antipathy toward them.

Neither Hamann nor Kershaw pay any attention to occult influence on Hitler, and with good cause. Despite the mystical inclinations of some of the Viennese anti-Semites who influenced him (List and Liebenfels) and the neo-pagan tendencies of some of his entourage (Himmler, for instance), Hitler had little or no interest in mystical and supernatural teachings or experiences. Privately he was contemptuous of Himmler’s attempts to revive ancient German pagan rites. Alan Bullock, in one of the best scholarly Hitler biographies to precede Kershaw’s, is probably close to the truth in labeling Hitler a materialist who spurned belief in anything supernatural, despite his occasional vague rhetoric about Providence.

Hamann helps clear up a number of myths about Hitler’s early development, but the only really significant revelation concerns Hitler’s anti-Semitism during his time in Vienna. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that he became devoted to anti-Semitism while in Vienna, and although historians are incredulous about Hitler’s “reminiscences,” most have accepted this, since it seems so plausible. Vienna was a cesspool of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century. The incredibly popular mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, used anti-Semitic propaganda to further his political career, the Pan-German press (which Hitler read) was spewing forth anti-Semitism, and Vienna had a much larger and more visible Jewish population than any major German city. Interestingly, however, only one source from his Vienna days reports that Hitler was anti-Semitic at all and several vociferously deny it.

Hamann takes the side of the deniers, especially in light of the amicable relationship Hitler had with several Jews during his stay in Vienna. She admits that Hitler studied anti-Semitism in Vienna, but she argues that anti-Semitism did not become an integral part of his world view until later (by 1919 at latest, when we have his first recorded anti-Semitic utterance). Whether Hitler converted to anti-Semitism during or after his Vienna years, there can be little doubt that Viennese anti-Semitism was a crucial factor influencing him in that direction.

Reconstructing Hitler’s years in Vienna is a daunting task, as the sources are few and some are questionable or worse. Hamann shows considerable skill in analyzing the main eyewitness sources we have, for she doesn’t take any of them at face value, but assiduously tests them against each other and against a wealth of knowledge she has gleaned from other sources. She points out mistakes even in the ones she considers basically reliable (like Hitler’s roommate August Kubizek), while dismissing some as totally worthless (such as Josef Greiner). Her analysis of the sources is itself a major contribution to historiography on Hitler, and her work will be indispensable to future biographers and historians.

I only hope that if a new edition comes out it will be edited better than this one. There are numerous troublesome errors, some in translation (usually minor, like Double Alliance instead of Dual Alliance), some in footnote numbering (esp. ch. 7), and more substantively the repeated confusion of Joseph II and Franz Joseph II on pp. 112-13.

Kershaw’s biography is likewise a major contribution to historiography, and it will probably become the standard biography of Hitler for many years to come. Kershaw’s many years of research on Hitler and the Nazi era bear rich fruit in this masterful portrayal of Germany’s Führer. For Kershaw, unlike Hamann, Hitler’s environment is not merely a source for his political and social views during his formative years. Rather Kershaw is convinced that political and social structures remained important influences on Hitler’s actions throughout his entire life. It’s rather ironic that someone who forthrightly argues against the force of personality in history would so painstakingly analyze one man. Kershaw admits his discomfort with the genre of biography, but that hasn’t deterred him from producing a first-rate biographical study.

Kershaw continually reminds us that Hitler was being acted upon just as much or more than he was acting. Hitler’s ascent to power wasn’t through a triumph of the will, but was rather a product of political and economic forces over which Hitler had little control. Even after coming to power, most concrete programs were undertaken without his initiative and often without his knowledge by underlings trying to “work towards the Führer”–which Kershaw sees as the key to understanding Nazi rule. However, if Germans during Nazi rule were “working towards the Führer,” then Hitler’s views were ultimately decisive, whether or not he made all the specific decisions.
It seems to me there is sometimes tension between Kershaw’s description of Hitler and his interpretation of that description. Kershaw is aware of that tension, asserting in his preface that Hitler “is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.” (xx) Later in the preface, however, Kershaw balances this by claiming, “To explain his power, therefore, we must look in the first instance to others, not to Hitler himself.” (xxvi) Kershaw’s juggling act between these two poles may confuse some readers, but I found it stimulating and believe it makes his account more true to historical reality.
When Kershaw explains particular important events in Hitler’s life, he emphasizes Hitler’s lack of control over events. For example, the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 was driven not so much by Hitler as by developments in the Bavarian government, in Hitler’s co-conspirators on the nationalist Right, and pressure from his own stormtroopers (SA). As so often in Hitler’s life, he resisted making decisions until he had to, but once his hand was forced, he acted ruthlessly. Kershaw sees this pattern repeated again and again in Hitler’s life–pressed by outward circumstances, crises, and his own party, he would finally act after long hesitation. All too often, he would act on misinformation provided him by his Nazi colleagues. One blatant example was his ruthless executions without trial of SA leader Ernst Röhm and others in late June and early July 1934, when Hitler was convinced they were conspiring against him. No such conspiracy was underway, but Röhm’s rivals in the Nazi Party–principally Goebbels and Himmler–manufactured evidence to get rid of the troublesome SA leader.

So what produced Hitler and gave him the impetus to become dictator of Germany? Kershaw sees World War I and its aftermath as being decisive in shaping both Hitler and the German people so they would be receptive to Hitler. He agrees with Hamann that, despite the influence of Vienna, Hitler’s world view was still forming after leaving Vienna. In addition to lacking evidence of his anti-Semitism in Vienna, Kershaw points out that his army comrades also had no idea he was anti-Semitic. A few aspects of his world view, such as the importance of living space in the east, were added in the early 1920s.

Kershaw believes defeat and revolutionary turbulence in Germany (especially Munich) between November 1918 and May 1919 were decisive in preparing the ground for Hitler. To offset leftist influence in German politics and society, the German army set up propaganda units to indoctrinate the troops. Hitler became a star performer in one of these units and thus found his niche as a political speaker. His army propaganda unit sent Hitler to attend a beer-hall meeting of the tiny German Workers’ Party, which he transformed into a party devoted to him. Without the war and subsequent defeat, Hitler would likely have remained a loner, an unemployed wannabe artist wandering aimlessly through Munich’s crowded streets.

Without the disastrous defeat of World War I the German people would not have listened to the ravings of Hitler, either. But his intense nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Semitism found fertile soil in a nation feeling oppressed by the Versailles Treaty and reparations. His pledge to make Germany great again resonated especially with the nationalist Right. Not everyone on the Right liked Hitler; some even despised him. But in the final analysis, it was the nationalist Right who brought Hitler to power in two ways. First of all, Hitler drew away most of the nationalist voters from other parties during the Great Depression in 1930-32. But Hitler’s popularity with the masses, which never won him more than about a third of the votes, was insufficient to catapult him to power. Right-wing nationalist politicians, such as Franz von Papen, who had already partly subverted the Weimar constitution, wanted to use Hitler’s clout in parliament to replace the Weimar constitution with a right-wing authoritarian regime. They thought they could manipulate Hitler and keep control for themselves, but Hitler outmaneuvered them and dominated the new regime.

Kershaw ends the first volume of his biography with Hitler riding the crest of popularity from his remilitarization campaign. In a dramatic move to shore up his sagging popularity in Germany he flouted the Versailles Treaty in March 1936 by remilitarizing the Rhineland region. With each success Hitler’s self-confidence was growing, and Kershaw believes that by this point Hitler considered himself infallible. Those warning him against his risky foreign policy ventures had proven themselves timid, and his foreign opponents were spineless.

Very few in 1936 had an inkling of the misery that would come to Germany and indeed the entire world through Hitler, which Kershaw thoroughly describes in the second volume, when he covers World War II and the Holocaust. Why did so few heed the warnings of Hitler’s opponents? Even General Ludendorff, who had earlier joined forces with Hitler for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, vainly warned President Hindenburg in 1933: “I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.” (I, 427) Except for some leftists and Jews, however, most Germans ignored the warning signs. Their willingness to tolerate Hitler’s initial program of political oppression, because it was directed primarily against leftists, made them defenseless once the oppression widened to include Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, and even Christian clergy.

If Hitler had died in 1938, Kershaw claims, he would probably have gone down in history as a great German leader. No moral opprobrium would be attached to his name. Germans might have regarded him as another Bismarck. The full malevolent potential of Hitler’s regime would only manifest itself with the outbreak of World War II, especially in 1941 when he launched his war of annihilation against what he considered the twin evils of the world–Bolshevism and the Jews.

Germans made Hitler possible, but they were not privy to his ultimate plans. Both at home and abroad many misread his intentions, supposing that he was merely trying to throw off the shackles of the Versailles Treaty and return Germany to its pre-World War I status. They did not take into account the fanatical devotion of Hitler to his world view, which “saw racial struggle and the survival of the fittest as the key determinants in human history.” (II, xxvii) Again and again during the war, Hitler justified his aggression–especially against the Soviet Union–with Social Darwinist arguments, claiming that the war was a struggle for existence that would decide the fate of the Aryan race. They must either triumph or perish.

Since he considered Jews the archenemy of Aryans, often describing them as disease-causing bacillus, they were the special targets of his wrath. His irrational fixation on Jews and their alleged conspiracy to dominate the world conjured up in his mind the most bizarre associations. Not only were Jewish communists masterminding the Bolshevik takeover of Europe, but Jewish capitalists were the driving force behind Churchill and Roosevelt. His fear of a fifth column of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territories, together with his desire to open up more living space (Lebensraum) for Germans in Eastern Europe, helped accelerate plans to exterminate the Jews.

Kershaw argues, however, that although Hitler’s ultimate goal was extermination of the Jews, he did not have concrete plans for it even after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Indeed, Hitler never really planned it at all. The death camps came about more spontaneously, driven by events and by lower-level Nazi leaders. But Kershaw by no means exonerates Hitler; he clearly argues that without Hitler there would have been no genocide. His underlings were “working towards the Führer,” knowing that he approved of their genocidal policies. Kershaw probably minimizes Hitler’s role in the planning and direction of the Holocaust too much, and I’m even less convinced by his downplaying of Himmler’s role in its planning.

So, to return to our original question, what accounts for the intensity of evil in Hitler and his Nazi regime? Is it a manifestation of human depravity lurking inside us all, or perhaps an outburst of the human lust for power that we all share? I don’t deny that these factors played an important role, and in fact, I wonder if we are often too quick to distance ourselves from Hitler, Stalin, and other ogres of their ilk, as though WE would never–even with unlimited power at our disposal–oppress or harm a fellow human being. Many “ordinary Germans” (and even many foreigners) assisted Hitler, after all, in carrying out his atrocities. He didn’t act alone, as Kershaw continually reminds us.
But there are, of course, other factors to consider in explaining Hitler’s evil. First of all, Hitler embraced a world view that denied any personal God or transcendent moral standards. Rather the cosmos and human history were products of an impersonal Fate, Providence or Destiny, which were synonymous with natural laws. The emptiness of the cosmos was reflected in his personal life, for Kershaw points out that Hitler had no real friendships or close relationships with anyone, not even his mistress Eva Braun. He refused to marry (until the day before he committed suicide) because of his devotion to the German people, but for him the German people was always an abstraction. Even during the war, he never visited hospitals or injured troops or bombed cities. He lacked all empathy with real people, and he even criticized those who allowed sympathy to influence their political decisions.

Secondly, since Hitler believed that nothing exists beyond nature, he tried to find his purpose in life in obeying the iron laws of nature. Darwinian biology was especially significant in this regard, as he tried to apply its lessons to politics and society. Darwinism–especially forms of it often disparagingly called Social Darwinism today–taught him that life is a constant struggle for existence leading to biological progress. Hitler embraced eugenics and racial extermination of allegedly inferior races as means to improve the human species and foster progress.

Finally, while spurning traditional moral standards, Hitler exalted evolution itself to the status of a moral absolute–everything that advances evolution is morally good and everything that hinders it is immoral. Since he viewed the Aryan race as the most advanced race on the earth, indeed the only race capable of creating civilization and a higher culture, this came to mean that whatever promotes the expansion of the Aryan race was good and whatever hindered their expansion was evil. Hitler sincerely believed that his policies and decisions were good and beneficial. His pursuit of a “noble ideal” to benefit abstract humanity in a universe without God, without morality, and without human rights, produced intense suffering, horror, and destruction for real people.

As the war that he launched–allegedly to benefit his people–turned into defeat, Hitler never came to grips with reality. He persisted almost to the end to believe that somehow the war could be won, that through his strength of will he could turn back the combined strength of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the British Empire arrayed against him. Any general telling him otherwise or advocating retreat he sacked. To the bitter end he refused to admit any fault, fuming that Germany’s defeat had been brought on by the treachery, betrayal, and incompetence of his army staff. It’s almost incomprehensible, but true, that throughout his career and even in his final testament Hitler expected to go down in the pages of history as a great hero. Such is the delusion of wickedness.

For further discussion of this topic, see my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004).
This webpage last revised by Richard Weikart on 4 September 2004.

Related posts:

____

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

_______________________________________________

The clip above is from episode 9 THE AGE OF PERSONAL PEACE AND AFFLUENCE

___________

Related posts:

__________

______

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

https://youtu.be/VfqBN9iW0_Q

Does Darwinism Devalue Human Life?
by Richard Weikart

Professor of History

California State Univ., Stanislaus

For more information on this topic, see my book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
[Note: This article first appeared in The Human Life Review 30, 2 (Spring 2004): 29-37.]
A number of years ago two intelligent students surprised me in a class discussion by defending the proposition that Hitler was neither good nor evil. Though I kept my composure, I was horrified. One of the worst mass murderers in history wasn’t evil? How could they believe this? How could they justify such a view?

They did it by appealing to Darwinism. Their pronouncement on Hitler occurred while we were discussing James Rachels’ book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford University Press, 1990). Darwinism, these students informed us, undermined all morality. This was not the first time I had heard such a view. In fact, at that time I was in the beginning phases of a research project on the history of evolutionary ethics, and I had already reviewed the work of some scientists and social scientists who believed that Darwinism undermined human rights and equality.

Before reading Rachels’ book, however, I hadn’t thought much about whether or not Darwinism devalued human life itself. Rachels, a philosopher at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, best known for his contributions to the euthanasia debate, argues that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of human life. The title of his book comes from an observation Darwin makes in his 1838 notebooks, “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.” Rachels assumes the truth of Darwinism and uses it as a springboard to justify euthanasia, infanticide (for disabled babies), abortion, and animal rights. Stimulated by his book, I continued my research on evolutionary ethics, but now with two new questions in mind: Does Darwinism undermine the Judeo-Christian understanding of the sanctity of human life? Does it weaken traditional proscriptions against killing the sick and the weak?

As I read more about the development of evolutionary ethics, I discovered that many scientists, social thinkers, and especially physicians in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany did indeed use Darwinian arguments to devalue human life. In the second edition of his popular book, The Natural History of Creation (1870), Ernst Haeckel, the leading Darwinist in Germany, became the first German scholar to seriously propose that disabled infants be killed at birth. Darwinists were in the forefront of the eugenics movement, which often taught that disabled people and non-Europeans were inferior to healthy Europeans. They argued that Darwinism implied human inequality, since biological variation has to occur to drive the process of evolution. Haeckel even suggested that Darwinism was an “aristocratic” process, favoring an aristocracy of talent (not the traditional landed aristocracy, for which Haeckel had no sympathy). Since Darwinism provided a naturalistic explanation for the origin of ethics, many of its adherents dismissed human rights as a chimera.
Darwin expressed incredulity when critics assailed him for undermining morality. In his Autobiography, however, Darwin rejected the idea of objective moral standards, stating that one “can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.” (1) Friedrich Hellwald, an influential ethnologist, promoted a Darwinian view of social evolution in his major work, The History of Culture (1875). Hellwald was quite radical in exalting the Darwinian process of the struggle for existence above all moral considerations. “The right of the stronger,” he insisted, “is a natural law.” (2) He clarified this idea further:

In nature only One Right rules, which is no right, the right of the stronger, or violence. But violence is also in fact the highest source of right, in that without it no legislation is thinkable. I will in the course of my portrayal easily prove that even in human history the right of the stronger has fundamentally retained its validity at all times. (3)

This Darwinian undermining of human rights would be fateful for the Judeo-Christian vision of the sanctity of human life.

Besides stressing human inequality, Haeckel and many of his fellow Darwinists devalued human life by criticizing Judeo-Christian conceptions of humanity as “anthropocentric.” Rather than being created in the image of God, they argued, humans were descended from simian ancestors. They blurred the distinctions between humans and animals, alleging that characteristics that had been traditionally considered uniquely human–rationality, morality, religion, etc.–were also present in animals to some degree. In Darwin’s own words, the difference between humans and animals is quantitative, not qualitative.

Darwin’s explanation that all human characteristics that previously had been associated with the human soul were not qualitatively distinct from animals also undermined the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of body-soul dualism, which endued humans with greater moral and spiritual significance than other organisms. (4) Many Darwinists understood the implications of this, including Haeckel, who founded the Monist League in 1906 specifically to combat all dualistic religions and philosophies, especially Christianity (but also Kantianism). One prominent member of the Monist League, August Forel, a world famous psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, described his initial encounter with Darwinism as a kind of conversion experience. He explained that Darwinism had convinced him that body-soul dualism was no longer tenable and that humans have no free will. Based on his view that heredity accounts for almost all character traits (and most mental illness), Forel became one of the most influential figures in the German eugenics movement, preaching the need to eliminate “inferior” races and handicapped infants, and recruiting Alfred Ploetz, who founded the world’s first eugenics organization and journal.

Another element of Darwinism that contributed to the devaluing of human life was its stress on the struggle for existence. Based on the Malthusian population principle, Darwin pointed out that offspring are produced at much higher levels than can survive. Therefore multitudes necessarily perish in the struggle for existence. While Malthus saw this tendency toward overpopulation as the cause of misery and poverty, Darwin explained that it was really beneficial. In the conclusion of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” (5) For Darwin death–even mass death–was not only inevitable, necessary. As Adrian Desmond explained in his biography of T. H. Huxley (the foremost Darwinian biologist in late nineteenth-century Britain, who earned the nickname, “Darwin’s bulldog”), “only from death on a genocidal scale could the few progress.” (6) Hellwald expressed the same idea in The History of Culture, claiming that evolutionary progress would occur as the “fitter” humans “stride across the corpses of the vanquished; that is natural law.” (7)

Indeed, many leading Darwinists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed that in order to foster evolutionary progress, the less valuable elements of humanity, generally defined as the disabled and those of non-European races, had to be eliminated. They feared that Judeo-Christian and humanitarian ethics, together with the advances of modern civilization–especially medicine and hygiene–would produce biological degeneration, since the weak and sick would be allowed to reproduce. Though many focused on methods to restrict reproduction, a surprising number of leading Darwinists–and not only Haeckel and Forel–actually promoted killing the “unfit” as a means to bring biological progress. Racial extermination and infanticide were integral components of their Darwinian program for biological rejuvenation.

In retrospect, the connection between these Darwinian ideas and Hitler’s ideology are obvious. Interestingly, however, when I began my research on evolutionary ethics, Hitler was not even on my radar screen. I was wary of connecting Darwin and Hitler because of Daniel Gasman’s failed attempt to draw a direct line from Haeckel to Hitler in The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, a book with which most historians rightly find fault. However, the title of my book–From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)–indicates that I made the connection nonetheless, though in quite a different manner from Gasman. Indeed, the more I studied books and articles on evolutionary ethics by German scientists, physicians, and social thinkers, the more I discovered that I could not avoid the parallels between German Darwinist discourse and Hitler’s ideology. This should not come as a complete surprise, however, since just about all of Hitler’s biographers have noted the strong social Darwinist elements in his ideology, as Ian Kershaw does recently in his magisterial two-volume biography.

Hitler was strongly influenced by the Darwinian ideology of the eugenics movement, and his writings and speeches clearly reflect it. In Mein Kampf Hitler asserted that his philosophy

by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the ETERNAL WILL THAT RULES THIS UNIVERSE, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals. . . . But by no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea existing, if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethic. (8)

Thus Hitler justified his racial views by appealing to Darwinian science. Because Hitler’s racial views were so obviously flawed, some scholars call Hitler’s views pseudo-scientific or a “vulgar” form of Darwinism. However, this is to judge Hitler by later standards of scientific thought. Many leading scientists and physicians embraced eugenics and scientific racism in Hitler’s day, and indeed Fritz Lenz, the first professor of eugenics at a German university, crowed in 1933 that he had formulated the essentials of Nazi ideology even before Hitler began his political career.

Hitler’s genocidal program was not the only adverse consequence of Darwinism’s devaluing of human life, and Germany was not the only country impacted. Much work on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere suggests that scientific and medical elites in many parts of the world imbibed the Darwinian devaluing of human life. Though it did not lead to genocide in these countries, it did lead to other injustices, such as the compulsory sterilization of thousands of people classified as “less fit,” based on their hereditary condition (sometimes based on very tenuous evidence, leading to many cases of misdiagnosis). Social Darwinist and eugenics ideology also played an important role in the budding movement to legalize abortion in the early twentieth century.

Further, recent confirmation of my findings about the Darwinian devaluing of human life have come from Ian Dowbiggin’s and Nick Kemp’s important new studies on the history of the euthanasia movements in the United States and Britain, respectively. Both emphasize the role of Darwinism in paving the way ideologically for euthanasia. According to Dowbiggin, “The most pivotal turning point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America.” (9) This held true in Britain, as well, for Kemp informs us: “While we should be wary of depicting Darwin as the man responsible for ushering in a secular age we should be similarly cautious of underestimating the importance of evolutionary thought in relation to the questioning of the sanctity of human life.” (10) The worldview of most early euthanasia advocates was saturated with Darwinian ideology, and they forthrightly used Darwinian ideas to combat the Judeo-Christian concept of the sanctity of human life.

Thus, historical evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries overwhelmingly supports the thesis that Darwinism devalued human life. Whatever one thinks philosophically about this issue–and, of course, some Darwinists are embarrassed by the link and try to deny it–historically Darwinism has contributed to a devaluing of human life, thereby providing impetus for euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.

The question now emerges: Is this all just of historical interest? Haven’t we learned a lesson from Nazism not to use social Darwinism to devalue humans? Haven’t we abandoned biological racism and rabid anti-Semitism, integral components of Nazi ideology?

Yes, indeed, we have learned much from the Nazi past, and I don’t think it is fair to compare our present situation with Nazi Germany, as though they are completely the same. We don’t live in a murderous dictatorship, and racism is on the defensive, at least in academic circles. For this we can be thankful. Still, in some respects, I wonder if we have learned enough, especially when I see big-name Darwinists, evolutionary psychologists, and bioethicists using Darwinism today to undermine the sanctity of human life. Whether Darwinism does actually devalue human life or not, there are certainly many people who think it does, and they are not intellectual featherweights.

First of all, the position that Rachels stakes out on issues of life and death are strikingly similar to that of the Australian bioethicist, Peter Singer, whose appointment a few years ago to a chair in bioethics at Princeton University stirred up vigorous controversy. Singer is renowned–or notorious, depending on one’s point of view–for promoting the legitimacy of infanticide for handicapped babies and voluntary euthanasia, as well as for defending animal rights. Darwinism plays a key role in Singer’s philosophy, underpinning his views on life and death. Singer claims that Darwin “undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe.” It stripped humanity of the special status that Judeo-Christian thought had conferred upon it. Singer complains that even though Darwin “gave what ought to have been its final blow” to the “human-centred view of the universe,” the view that humans are special and sacred has not yet vanished. Singer is now laboring to give the sanctity-of-life ethic its deathblow. (11)

Singer and Rachels are not the only prominent philosophers arguing that Darwinism undermines the sanctity of human life. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that Darwinism functions like a “universal acid,” destroying traditional forms of religion and morality. In confronting the issue of biomedical ethics, Dennett asks, “At what ‘point’ does a human life begin or end? The Darwinian perspective lets us see with unmistakable clarity why there is no hope at all of discovering a telltale mark, a saltation in life’s processes, that ‘counts.'” Because of this, Dennett argues, there are “gradations of value in the ending of human lives,” implying that some human lives have more value than others. After using his Darwinian acid to dissolve the sanctity-of-life ethic, Dennett wonders, “Which is worse, taking ‘heroic’ measures to keep alive a severely deformed infant, or taking the equally ‘heroic’ (if unsung) step of seeing to it that such an infant dies as quickly and painlessly as possible?” Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is apparently especially toxic to disabled infants. (12)

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, also draws connections between Darwinism and infanticide. After some high-profile cases of infanticide occurred in 1997, Pinker wrote an article purporting to explain its evolutionary origins. Since Pinker believes “that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence,” of course he tries to explain infanticide as a behavior that somehow confers reproductive advantage. He argues that a “new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.” (This is outrageously speculative; no new mother I have ever met has “coolly assessed” her infant, and it seems to me that those who commit infanticide are not “coolly assessing” the survival prospects for their infant, either–more likely they are desperate). According to Pinker, the mother’s love for her infant will grow in relation to the “increasing biological value of a child (the chance that it will live to produce grandchildren).” Pinker specifically denies that infants have a “right to life,” so, even though he doesn’t completely condone infanticide, he thinks we should not be too harsh on mothers killing their children. (13) Pinker’s view of infanticide is by no means unusual among evolutionary psychologists. In a leading textbook on evolutionary psychology, Evolution and Human Behavior: Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature (2000), John Cartwright provides basically the same Darwinian explanation for infanticide as Pinker’s.

What do Darwinian biologists have to say about all this? Some think Singer and company are on the right track. In 2001 Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous Darwinian biologist in the world today, made an impassioned plea for using genetic engineering to create an Australopithecine (whose fossil remains are allegedly an ancestor to the human species). Producing such a “missing link” would, according to Dawkins, provide “positive ethical benefits,” since it would demolish the “double standard” of those guilty of “speciesism.” Dawkins specifically claims that producing such an organism would demonstrate the poverty of the pro-life position, because it would show that humans are not different from animals. In the midst of this acerbic attack on the sanctity of human life, Dawkins expresses the hope that he will be euthanized if he is ever “past it,” whatever that means (some people already think that Dawkins is “past it,” but fortunately for Dawkins, I suspect that most of them still uphold the sanctity-of-life ethic that Dawkins rejects). (14)

Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning pioneer of sociobiology and Harvard professor whose entire view of human nature revolves around Darwinism, also exemplifies this devaluing of human life, though he is more subtle about it. In his book Consilience (1998) he argues that his empiricist world view “has destroyed the giddying theory that we are special beings placed by a deity in the center of the universe in order to serve as the summit of Creation for the glory of the gods.” In one passage in his autobiography he compares humans to ants, informing us that we humans are too numerous on the globe, while ants are in a proper population balance. “If we were to vanish today,” Wilson explains, “the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion.” But if ants were to disappear, thousands of species would perish as a result. The implication seems to be: ants are more valuable than humans, and biodiversity takes precedence over human life.

Many biologists, of course, disagree with Singer and Dawkins. From the late nineteenth century to today they have assured us that Darwinism has no implications for morality. They allege that those trying to apply Darwinism to morality are committing the “naturalistic fallacy” by deriving “ought” from “is.” Darwin’s friend and defender, Thomas Henry Huxley, vigorously opposed the attempts of his contemporaries to seek ethical guidance in natural evolutionary processes. More recently, Steven Jay Gould often butted heads with evolutionary psychologists, arguing that morality was a separate realm from biology. In his view Darwinism has nothing to say about how humans should act.

Gould, However, did not really divorce science and morality as much as he claimed. While vociferously arguing that Darwinian science on the one hand and religion and morality on the other are “non-overlapping magisteria,” separated as far as the east is from the west, he persisted in drawing conclusions from his Darwinian science that are suspiciously laden with religious and moral implications. In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989), the whole point of his book is to use the Burgess Shale–a fossil-laden outcropping of rock in Canada teeming with many extinct, ancient forms of life–as an example of the contingency of history, to demonstrate that there is no real purpose to human existence. “Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.” His view of the contingency of human creation in the evolutionary process clearly affects the way he views the nature and status of humanity, for he informs us that “biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.” The closing words of this book are remarkable for someone who claims to keep science and religion in non-overlapping compartments:

And so, if you wish to ask the question of the ages-why do humans exist?-a major part of the answer, touching those aspects of the issue that science can treat at all, must be: because Pikaia [a Burgess shale chordate] survived the Burgess decimation. This response does not cite a single law of nature; it embodies no statement about predictable evolutionary pathways, no calculation of probabilities based on general rules of anatomy or ecology. The survival of Pikaia was a contingency of ‘just history.’ I do not think that any ‘higher’ answer can be given, and I cannot imagine that any resolution could be more fascinating. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes-one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. (15)

Does Gould really think this conclusion has no religious or moral implications? Does he really believe that his claim that biology demotes humans from the image of God to a naked ape is a purely scientific statement that has no bearing on moral issues, such as abortion and euthanasia?

In light of all this, does Darwinism really devalue human life? I think I have shown conclusively that historically Darwinism has indeed devalued human life, leading to ideologies that promote the destruction of human lives deemed inferior to others. Those on the forefront in promoting abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and racial extermination often overtly based their views on Darwinism. Also, as I have shown in this essay, those favoring a Darwinian dismantling of the sanctity-of-life ethic have a good deal of intellectual firepower, and the idea is becoming rather widespread in academic circles today. There are, of course, various religious and philosophical moves that one can make to evade these conclusions, and some Darwinists have in the past and will continue in the future vigorously to oppose such developments (for this we can be thankful), construing them as faulty extrapolations by overzealous Darwinian materialists. However, it seems to me that there is an inherent logic in the move by Darwinists to undermine the sanctity-of-life ethic, which makes it so alluring that I doubt it will ever disappear as long as Darwinism is ascendant. In any case, it is certainly safe to say that in modern society Darwinism has contributed mightily to the erosion of the sanctity-of-life ethic. Darwinism really is a matter of life and death.

ENDNOTES

1. Charles Darwin, Autobiography (NY: Norton, 1969), 94.
2. Friedrich Hellwald, Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart (Augsburg, 1875), quote at 27, see also 278, 569.
3. Ibid, 44-45.
4. On the connection between dualism and bioethics, see J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL, 2000).
5. Darwin, The Origin of Species, (London: Penguin, 1968), 459.
6. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, MA, 1997), 271.
7. Hellwald, Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung, 58, 27; “Der Kampf ums Dasein im Menschen- und Völkerleben,” Das Ausland 45 (1872): 105.
8. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. in 1 (Munich, 1943), 420-1. Emphasis is mine.
9. Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (Oxford, 2003), 8.
10. N. D. A. Kemp, ‘Merciful Release’: The History of the British Euthanasia Movement (Manchester, 2002), 19. For more information on Dowbiggin’s and Kemp’s works, see my review essay, “Killing Them Kindly: Lessons from the Euthanasia Movement,” in Books and Culture: A Christian Review (Jan./Feb. 2004), 30-31.
11. Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York, 2000), 77-78, 220-21.
12. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (NY, 1995), ch. 18.
13. Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine (November 2, 1997).
14. Richard Dawkins, “The Word Made Flesh,” The Guardian (December 27, 2001).
15. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (NY, 1989), quotes at 14, 323; for his views on the compartmentalization of science and religion, see “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History106 (March 1997): 16-22.

Webpage last modified by Richard Weikart on 16 August 2004.

Related posts:

__

James Watson is Not a Racist; He’s a Darwinist!

In a recent interview with London’s The Sunday Times, noted scientist, James Watson set off an international firestorm when he was quoted as saying that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours…” Watson then added that he would like for everyone to be equal, but “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”

Watson is not being bigoted in the sense that he is expressing a personal prejudice against black people. In fact, he is being quite “reasonable” given his evolutionary beliefs about the nature of man and reality. According to Watson, “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.” (James D. Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, Knopf, 2007)

James Watson is not some marginal quack operating on the fringes of the scientific community. In 1953, he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA—one of the single most important discoveries of the 20th century for which they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize. The fact is Watson is one of the most important scientists of our age and what he inadvertently revealed is Darwinism’s dark secret: evolutionary ethics.

The fact is, if nature is the ultimate and final reality and there is no God then Watson is absolutely correct in his condemnation of what he believes are lesser evolved peoples. What few evolutionists are willing to admit is that if time and chance are the truth of human existence and reality, then everything that we have come to believe about morality and ethics is completely wrong. Darwinism places all human phenomena, including ethics and morality, under the sway of the laws of nature.

Early advocates of evolution clearly understood the profound moral implications of Darwin’s theory. Robby Kossmann, a German zoologist who later became a medical professor wrote in an 1880 essay:

The Darwinian worldview must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of the life of a human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human state … must reach an even higher level of perfection, if the possibility exists in it, through the destruction of the less well-endowed individual, for the more excellently endowed to win space for the expansion of its progeny. … The state only has an interest in preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less excellent.

As repugnant as these statements may be, they were nonetheless the consensus among those who understood and embraced Darwin’s new idea. By the early 20th century, these ideas were wildly popular throughout Europe and America.

In fact, the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island where Watson served as the past director and current chancellor is described as one that has “deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by.” A report states that, “Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites.”

Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin and founder of the eugenics movement wrote:

This is precisely the object of eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being … The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit…
Following discovery of Nazi Germany’s monstrous eugenics program carried out at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka, the public’s support for social Darwinism and the eugenics movement dropped dramatically. However, it did not disappear; it merely retreated back into the world of academia and elsewhere where it still remains a dominant view among the so-called intellectual elite. The most obvious expression of this today is found in such programs as the United Nation’s population control efforts that are focused almost exclusively on the underdeveloped African nations.

However, in light of evolutionary theories these views cannot be dismissed as moral aberrations. These views are perfectly consistent with Darwinism in which the highest moral good becomes, by necessity, evolutionary progress. Therefore anyone thought not to represent the height of human evolution is deemed inferior or unequal. We find racism loathsome because it violates the Judeo-Christian conception of human dignity. Racism is a meaningful moral concept only when it is placed within the Christian worldview. However, if human beings are merely products of time and chance then the Judeo-Christian conception of human dignity is not only “unnatural,” it actually runs counter to evolutionary principles.    

According to the theories, there are significant evolutionary differences between the races, and essentially the race that was closer to apes (Blacks, according to Darwin) was less intelligent and inherently inferior to whites. Darwin stated, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Of course this ignores decades of research suggesting that race is not a meaningful concept and that there is no biological basis for race. This underscores the biblical position of only one race, the human race.

The aforementioned is often referred to as “scientific racism”—a term intended to convey the idea that such interpretations of Darwinism are obsolete—however, from an evolutionary perspective, it is no more racist than regarding an ape as being superior to slug. Since evolutionists regard all human distinctions, intellectual or otherwise, as purely biological, these are simply two species on different rungs of the evolutionary ladder. If you believe in evolution, you simply cannot think otherwise and remain logically consistent with the evolutionary explanation of reality.

However, if you accept the truth of our origins as revealed in Scripture then you have a moral and ethical system in which all human life is equally valuable regardless of our differences. You simply cannot deny the Creator and keep the Creator’s morality. You cannot eliminate God and hope to maintain intrinsic human rights to life and equality. As one Darwinian ethicist put it, “An ethic consistent with Darwin’s theory knows no natural or innate rights…”

© 2007 by S. Michael Craven

Comment on this article here

Subscribe to Michael’s weekly commentary here

Subscribe to Michael’s podcast here

S. Michael Craven is the President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal and discipleship within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit:www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FZgLZ5_CU

Related posts: