I've dealt before with the several passages in the writings of Darwin that the Darwin industry hauls out whenever someone brings up the fact that Darwin was the inspiration and an early promoter of eugenics and that he endorsed and promoted the interpretation of natural selection and its application to human populations found in Ernst Haeckel's fully developed materialist monism, including his racism, encouragement to kill the disabled and to practice systematic infanticide. One of those, a small snip of his answer to G.A. Gaskell's comparatively moderate proposal to force the "unfit" to practice birth control. That opportunistic pro-Darwin quote-mining distorts Darwin's rejection of artificial birth control because it might lead to women enjoying sex outside of marriage into some kind of refutation of his eugenics assertions. Gaskell had clearly read The Descent of Man and understood Darwin's alternative to that kind of eugenics was a bloody, violent murder of the "weaker members" of the population and allowing them to die of hunger, disease and neglect. In the full exchange of letters, which I posted, it's clear that Darwin saw the evils of women fooling around as far worse than the horrific struggle for life he proposed as inescapable.
To support that interpretation, I noted his letter to Charles Bradlaugh, the most famous British atheist of the time, saying if Darwin went to court to testify, as Bradlaugh requested him to, in the case brought against Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for distributing information on birth control, he would testify for the prosecution. Darwin sounded not much different from those who prosecuted Margaret Sanger for essentially the same crime. So much for Darwin as the champion of women's emancipation and self-determination. Not to mention 21st century notions of liberalism.
But in the Darwin Wars there is one passage that is always brought out by Darwin's champions, in cropped form, from The Descent of Man, the famous "Aid which must be given" passage. A tiny fragment of it is always taken from within a complete paragraph, always cut off before the end of the paragraph. That was done in a response to me last night. I will give the passage, as cited, and then put it in the context of the entire paragraph. Here's what "exileetleroyaume" said about it.
And you're a liar outright, with regards to Darwin, and I quote, "Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature....We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind" (Darwin, p. 182). ....
.... Don't attempt to lecture me or anyone else who has studied the evolution of the ideology of racism, of which Social Darwinism was but one of element. It is you who have proved yourself a dishonest.
Here is the entire paragraph that escape clause is found in with what immediately precedes it:
I have hitherto only considered the advancement of man from a semi-human condition to that of the modern savage. But some remarks on the action of natural selection on civilised nations may be worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W.R. Greg (9. 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 353. This article seems to have struck many persons, and has given rise to two remarkable essays and a rejoinder in the 'Spectator,' Oct. 3rd and 17th, 1868. It has also been discussed in the 'Quarterly Journal of Science,' 1869, p. 152, and by Mr. Lawson Tait in the 'Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,' Feb. 1869, and by Mr. E. Ray Lankester in his 'Comparative Longevity,' 1870, p. 128. Similar views appeared previously in the 'Australasian,' July 13, 1867. I have borrowed ideas from several of these writers.), and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. (10. For Mr. Wallace, see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
I'm going to give a fuller analysis of the passage to show just how much of a cynical ruse Darwin's life jacket, contained in it, is.
Notice, first, who Darwin cited in support of what he said. Francis Galton, specifically his book Hereditary Genius and articles published in Macmillians magazine, a book and articles which Galton said were the first of his eugenics publications [Memoir of My Life: Francis Galton Chapter. XX] Note that Darwin calls Hereditary Genius "his great work", just one such citation of that major work on eugenics available when Darwin wrote Descent of Man. He also cites W.R. Greg who is sometimes regarded as a co-inventor of eugenics, an article which is more characterized by its bigotry than its scientific documentation. Neither of those authors, purported to be science could be suspected of producing assertions contradicting eugenics from the very works in which they assert eugenics.
I have not read the citations of Wallace and Lankester so I can't comment on those. I will note, again, that Lankester was either working on or would soon begin his translation of Haeckel's Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte an even more profoundly demented assertion of the most extreme of eugenics. A book that Darwin cites with the most extreme possible praise throughout The Descent of Man. I will also note that late in his life, Wallace was a severe critic of eugenics, calling it meddlesome scientific priest-craft. I don't think he had expressed himself on the topic at the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man.
After Darwin gives as scientific citations in support of what he is about to say, he begins to present what he clearly intends the reader to take as very well supported science. It is, indisputably, a presentation of the premise of eugenics:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
"Savages" either kill off or allow "the weak in body or mind" to die. The "savages" do that "soon", not later. If Darwin expected his readers to imagine those "savages" as white, Northern Europeans, I very much doubt. Though, given the citation of Greg's article, and Darwin's further use of it in Descent of Man, he clearly would have excluded the Irish from the "civilised".
Darwin then goes on to assert that "those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health". He clearly asserts that the survivors of this culling of a human herd results, somehow, in an improved state of health for those who do or allow the culling. This was clearly based on his mention of commercial animal breeding operations later in the passage, which is rather outrageous for anyone who grew up among farmers, as Darwin had, who would know that those selected as inferior stock would be marked for early slaughter. If Darwin hadn't meant for that implication to be read into his passage he wouldn't have included the mention of animal breeding. If he didn't mean that it is his fault for including it. I am not the first person to have drawn that meaning from his analogy.
I will note that just how "those that survive" would be of enhanced health is not explained. Killing off the "weak" wouldn't do anything to change the bodies of those who did the killing. Slaughtering a weaker calf wouldn't make the survivor anything other than it already was, after all.
Darwin immediately turns to the crux of the eugenicist argument, "We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind."
Sounding like the most extreme of contemporary conservatives, fans of ruthless competion of the Anglo-American sort, virtually everything that has been instituted to alleviate human misery, including THE DICKENS ERA POOR-LAWS AND ASYLUMS AND VACCINATION, is responsible for a crisis of breeding of the "weak members" of society, drgging the "vigorous in health" down. Instead of allowing "weak members" to die before they reached the age when the could have children, they were kept alive by charity and the results were that "civilised societies" were overrun with degenerate stock.
Again, no actual scientific data from scientific observation of humans is provided to support this contention, in its place Darwin makes reference to what happens in the artificial manipulation of farm animals. "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
Given, as I noted in the beginning of this post, Darwin's rejection of artificial birth control as a means of preventing the "weaker members" of the population from "breeding" the only alternative to preventing that happening is either allowing them to die from starvation, disease or neglect or to actively kill them. Given his repeated, glowing and unreserved endorsement of Haeckel's book,
Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte in which Haeckel explicitly calls for infanticide of those deemed "inferior" and the killing of the disabled, a book that Darwin obviously had read with enough understanding to cite it as reliable science, a book in which Haeckel credits Darwin with the final triumph of his monism, the font of those calls for murder, that rejection of the relatively moderate proposal for mandatory birth control is positively damning. An author of a scientific book doesn't give glowing citations expecting no one will look at those and read what is there to be seen.
Darwin obviously warns that providing the stingiest of means to the poor, the destitute and the disabled, such as was given in Victorian Britain, would inevitably lead to disaster. He knew enough of British politics to know that the ancient poor-laws, which essentially outlawed being poor, was "reformed" by those following the great and "enlightened" ideas of Parson Malthus, who was also Darwin's great inspiration for his claim to fame, natural selection. He obviously knew that vaccination against small pox had hardly been effective in preventing the disease even in Britain, never mind among those "savages" whose early deaths he presented as a sort of ideal situation. He had traveled among such "savages".
As an aside, I would like to know if Darwin had been vaccinated against small pox and if he, a famous valetudinarian, looked to his large family as an example of the dysgenesis he warned of if the "weaker members" "bred". I've seen no evidence of the Darwin-Wedgewood families foregoing vaccination of their children, subjecting them to the natural culling that their most famous member recommended. I have no reason to believe that, as members of the economic elite, Darwin's own children and grandchildren went unvaccinated, not even those of his four eugenicist sons or other Darwins deeply involved in British eugenics. I've seen no account of small pox in subsequent generations of Darwins, or of the families of any of his eugenics oriented followers, for that matter.
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It is only after that passage, so extravagantly provided with "scientific" citations to support Darwin's dire warning of the results of Victorian era charity, he provided himself with his escape clause in case anyone brought him up on what he'd just said and what he would repeatedly assert to support that passage in the rest of that long book. Here it is.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
The first thing to notice is that, in contrast to his exposition of the premise of eugenics, Darwin's turn around to contradict what he'd just said has no scientific citations to support it. A reader could ask just on what he bases his assertions calling for "aid to be given" in exactly the way he had just said would lead to a catastrophe for humanity. His assertions about the origin of charity as merely "an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy" has no scientific support.
And, especially in the context of what Darwin had just given as highly supported science, a reader of the entire passage might note that Darwin continually said that giving such "aid" would be catastrophic AS HE IS PRETENDING TO RECOMMEND GIVING SUCH "AID". He presents the origin of charity in purely naturalistic terms, calling it "an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts." I'd have welcomed a scientific citation in support of that notion, a citation oddly missing in a book full to the gills in citations. Why something he is about to assert the necessity of, irrationally and in total contradiction to the severe "scientific" warning he'd just given, is presented as merely "incidental" is suggestive but it is not as telling as his continual undermining of his U-turn.
Darwin says, "Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature." Darwin says, explicitly, that the impulse to sympathy is in opposition to "hard reason". In a scientific book he is arguing, irrationally, for going against "hard reason" to satisfy a mere incidental feeling, merely "a part of the social instinct". How a scientist can urge a violation of "hard reason" is interesting.
Even more bizarre is the next sentence, "The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil."
Darwin is comparing "the weak and helpless" to what a surgeon would remove to save the patient and, incredibly, recommending leaving the tumor or potentially gangrenous tissue in place. The entire sentence is self contradictory and irrational. "The patient" is clearly the human population, Darwin is pretending to call for putting the entire population at risk by preserving the "weak and helpless". The negligence of leaving the "weak and helpless" to breed is clearly being called to be left in place, risking a catastrophe for what "could only be a contingent benefit". Considering the "scientific" assertion in the preceding paragraph, carrying a scientific guarantee of that catastrophe, one that Darwin would go on to support in the rest of the book, the "contingency" of that benefit is presented, by Darwin, himself, is virtually nonexistent. The "overwhelming present evil", the death of the "weak and helpless" through such means as he'd already positively admired among "savages" was one that Darwin was seeing inacted by law during the same period he was writing his book. He had every reason to know that his bleated, half-hearted, cynical plea would be drowned out by his warnings of the alternative.
And he goes on to undermine his call for charity again, and again. "We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected."
"We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind". THE UNDOUBTEDLY BAD EFFECTS. This comes immediately after the passage just analyzed. If they are undoubtedly bad effects, he just completely impeached what he'd just said about "a contingent benefit". Did I mention that this passage is an exercise in cynicism?
What he says about the prospect of "the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage" is even more cynical double-talk considering what he'd said in the complete passage*. Even Darwin doesn't believe it at all because he finishes, "this is more to be hoped for than expected".
The entire "aid" passage is an exercise in cynical dishonesty. If you read The Descent of Man you will find at least one other, comparable example in Darwin's condescending answer to "Miss Cobbe" in relation to his and Haeckel's assertions of the beneficial effects of infanticide. As can be seen in Darwin's exchange of letters with Gaskell I link to at the beginning of this post, you can see that as one who had obviously read the entire book, Gaskell didn't buy Darwin's escape clause. You can see in my analysis of Darwin's answer to Gaskell's clear understanding of Darwin's thesis in the book, he reached for his escape clause, weakly asserting that he'd written it, though he could see in Gaskell's letter that even such a Darwinist as he was saw through the ruse. So did every single other major figure in Darwinism during Darwin's lifetime and those after who I have read. The escape clause emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War to figure, in radically "quote-mined" form, in the creation of a more palatable Darwin than a full reading of him provides.
* Darwin, in his letter to Gaskell, undermines the prospect of enacting marriage restrictions on the "unfit".
With respect to your third law, I do not know whether you have read an article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be matched.
I have lately been led to reflect a little (for now that I am growing old, my work has become merely special) on the artificial checks to increase, and I cannot but doubt greatly, whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future.
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