It was rather odd for me to find Dr. Henry Farnham Perkins was involved in the eugenics decimation of the Abenakis of Vermont and the scientific destruction of their culture. In my family, one of the few non-Irish ancestors is my great-great grandmother who was born a Perkins, only I don't think she was one of the Mayflower descendant Perkins as Henry Farnham was. Family lore said she, and even more obviously her mother, were Penobscot, probably from around the Old Town Maine area, where the Penobscot Nation is today. I've got two photographs of her, one taken in about 1940 with her daughter and granddaughter. She was near 90 at the time, her daughter and granddaughter have snow-white hair, hers is decidedly dark brown or black (it's a black and white photo, of course) and she was definitely not the kind of woman who would have colored her hair. The other picture is from far earlier, I'd guess in the 1870s, with her first, Irish, husband. She looks decidedly not European in that photograph. Some of my quite distant relations, who I gave copies of the pictures to, said that they have a family letter in which her mother is said to be "full-blood Indian". Her father is known to have originally had the name Dana which is a Penobscot name. We figure that they changed their name when they moved to New Hampshire in the early 19th century to try to blend in, though other family members who follow these things have been unable to trace the family in records from before my great-great-great grandfather in New Hampshire. We know where they are buried but the stones are too eroded to supply any information. My "Perkins" ancestors may have been trying to hide from discrimination and genocide of a different kind than the one, that, a hundred years later another Perkins would be committing against native people in the neighboring state in the last century.
It's chilling to find out people in quaint, rural 1920s and early 30s New England, social workers, nurses, doctors.... practicing medical genocide against the native people. Thinking of what they were doing as progressive and scientific. And, as Edwin Black says, reporting what they were doing to the Nazis who kept the records that were obscured by small government bureaucratic inefficiency here. It put a pall over the holiday, what with that lie from the Declaration I noted in my morning post.
Update: Some of the documents around Dr. Perkins' eugenics activity are available online from the University of Vermont. Of course the name C.B. Davenport shouts out, from what would become infamous, his support of and from Nazis, his extreme racism and eugenics, would stain anyone who had extensive associations with him. Harry Laughlin is in the database, as well. Unfortunate, but also there, are Perkins' letters from and to Margaret Sanger, from the period in which she was active in eugenics, unfortunately associating birth control during that period, with eugenics and implications of racism. Birth control activism in the modern period certainly has left that association promoting personal choice on the basis of individual autonomy, especially that of women. It would be a disaster to fall for the attempt to turn Margaret Sanger into a millstone for the right to birth control as Darwin has become for today's evolutionary science. Both should be left to the dead past.
Update 2: Here is a May 28, 1926 letter from Perkins to Davenport that is certainly relevant to the targeting of Abenakis and other racial minorities in the Vermont eugenics program. I'm sure my great-great grandmother would have fallen under the eye of Perkins' staff on the basis of her "skin color valuation".
EUGENICS SURVEY OF VERMONT UNDER AUSPICES OF UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY DIR ECTOR, H. F. PERKINS IN CHARGE OF FIELD RESEARCH, 489 MAIN STREET HARRIETT E. ABBOTT BURLINGTON. VT. TELEPHONE 1083 May 28, 1926. Professor Charles B. Davenport, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N. Y.
My dear Sir:
I am writing to inquire whether you have any references on negro‐white matings and skin color valuations in addition to your own paper on the subject. In case you happen to have a reprint of any of your own work on this matter, I should greatly appreciate your kindness in sending me copies, and I should like to get hold of any comments, criticisms, or amplifications upon or of your work.
The Eugenics Survey of Vermont which has been under way since last September is progressing satisfactorily, and we are now very eagerly searching for some possible source of additional funds. It has been impossible for the donor of the $7500 which is supporting the work this year to continue her generous help, although she assures us that it is not for lack of interest that she is obliged to decline. I have visited the Commonwealth Fund office and those of the National Committee of Mental Hygiene, the Russell Sage Foundation, Laura Spelman Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In all cases, while the officials visited expressed genuine interest, they could not give me much assurance of assistance. It may be that you will be able to suggest some further possibilities, for we desire to leave no stone unturned to accomplish the continuance of our work. I have just had the address of the Milbank Foundation, and am going to write to them.
In addition to the above, I had hoped that we might draw on the Federal Experiment Station Fund given to the states through the Purnell Measure for rural investigation. We had thought of conducting a study on rural subnormalcy with especial reference to its hearing upon agriculture. We find that the Vermont funds are so nearly all allotted for next year that even if the project should be approved there would be an entirely inadequate sum available. We are not giving up our effort to get even a thousand dollars from that source, and I hope that I am not too optimistic in my expectation that the Mental Hygiene people will let us have two field workers, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist for a short term of service which will follow up the preliminary work that a field worker can do.
A phase of our investigation which promises fruitful results from further work is the study of the better branches of the more deficient families that have constituted the bulk of our year's investigation. There are various other aspects of subnormalcy in Vermont that I am very hopeful of going into at some future date, and it may be possible later to interest one of the big foundations in a rather wholesale project in this state. I am working upon a plan for such a composite investigation at the recommendation of Dr. Embree of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Our present Survey has included the study of the twenty most typical deficient families that we could find in Vermont. One or two of these tribes number up to three hundred individuals. There is therefore a rather formidable array of data in our files and in pedigree chart form available for further study. Our Field Worker and Clerk are proving so highly efficient that I particularly dislike the notion of having to give up our study at the end of the present summer, at which time the $7500 will be used up.
Any help that you can give us in the way of suggestions of possible sources of additional financial help will be very highly appreciated.
With very kind personal regards, I am
Faithfully yours,
[H. F. Perkins]
Friday, July 5, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
"... It's Not Even Past" Excerpts On The 4th of July
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The Declaration of Independence
Because the German and American wings collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American partners. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.
When it was finished, the journey to discover America’s eugenic history had taken me from an austere highway warehouse in Vermont, where the state’s official files are stacked right next to automotive supplies and retrieved by forklift, to the architectonic British Library, to the massive Bundesarchiv in Berlin—and every type of research environment in between. Sometimes I sat on a chair in a reading room. Sometimes I poked through boxes in a basement.
Edwin Black: War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race
Dr. Perkins drafted a new research plan for his advisory committee's approval. The Eugenics Survey would document demographic and economic trends and select representative towns in the state for a more detailed study. That the towns "in decline" selected for the study were ones inhabited by some of the "degenerate" families in the Eugenics Survey files comes as no surprise. From 1925-1928 Perkins "conducted extensive investigations on selected kinship groups in Vermont to develop ‘pedigrees of degeneracy’ among Vermont’s rural poor". Perkins released five reports during his studies of eugenics and Vermonters. Here, the term "survey" refers to a concentrated campaign of isolation, stereotyping, segregation, and sterilization. The committees of the VCCL completed their final reports in January 1931 and compiled their findings in Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future. Every chapter addressed the specific means by which the state could restore the land, culture and values to the kind of people who had colonized the state and who were most deserving of the title "Vermonter." Perkins focus fell on the 3 D's that were beginning to show up in higher numbers late in the 19th century- delinquency, dependency and mental defect. During the first three years of Perkins's project, evidence was gathered through town records, social workers, government officials, policemen, and other various informants. Significant information was gathered about families who were found to have these defects. It became clear that many were extended families and tribes.
Of all the people affected by the eugenics movement in Vermont, the people who suffered the most were the Abenaki. It was during this time period that the Abenaki were left with little choice but to go underground. The Abenaki were out in the open and the obvious targets. Many Abenaki were forced to assume other identities or hide their heritage. "It is my opinion that the "new racism" of Vermont's elite eventually permeated Abenaki society, leading to shame at being different or fear that we or our children would be "discovered" by the state of Vermont and have evil things done to them. " (The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation, pp. 147-49). The easiest route for the Abenaki to take was to fit in with the French-Canadians of Vermont. Many of the Abenaki families investigated by Perkins' social workers were institutionalized and sterilized. Eugenics measures in Vermont followed the lead of other states in providing institutions for segregation of socially or mentally handicapped persons, followed by laws permitting sexual sterilization and denial of marriage licenses to those deemed "mentally unfit" for parenthood. As progressive reformers routinely attributed social welfare problems to "feebleminded women of child bearing age," poor women, particularly unwed mothers, became the primary targets of such measures. This went on for years and was backed by the Vermont Sterilization Laws passed in 1931. There are still Abenaki women today who were sterilized by the midwives that delivered their babies. It is estimated that nearly 300 Abenaki people were sterilized.
The history of Eugenics is a sad and damaging one. What it left behind is a loss of culture and a trail of broken families. The Abenaki of Vermont were the hardest hit. Although they took personal pride in their heritage, Abenakis had been discriminated against during much of the previous two centuries and many wanted their children to grow up free from the pain of prejudice. They believed that the only way for their children to get ahead in the white man's world was to act white. They maintained traditional Indian family structures and value systems but many of the outward manifestations of Abenaki culture nearly disappeared from Vermont in the past century. To this day in Vermont, the Abenaki are suffering the effects of the Eugenics Program. When the Abenaki went into hiding, they broke their historical trail. Because the tribe has not been a continuous entity, and many show up with the ethnicity of French-Canadian, it is difficult to decipher who belongs to the tribe
From: Abenakis and Eugenics A Culture Torn Away
A young Indian woman entered Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri's Los Angeles office on a November day in 1972. The twenty-six-year-old woman asked Dr. Pinkerton-Uri for a "womb transplant" because she and her husband wished to start a family. An Indian Health Service (IHS) physician had given the woman a complete hysterectomy when she was having problems with alcoholism six years earlier. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri had to tell the young woman that there was no such thing as a "womb transplant" despite the IHS physician having told her that the surgery was reversible. The woman left Dr. Pinkerton-Uri's office in tears.
Two young women entered an IHS hospital in Montana to undergo appendectomies and received tubal ligations, a form of sterilization, as an added benefit. Bertha Medicine Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, related how the "two girls had been sterilized at age fifteen before they had any children. Both were having appendectomies when the doctors sterilized them without their knowledge or consent." Their parents were not informed either. Two fifteen-year-old girls would never be able to have children of their own.
What happened to these three females was a common occurrence during the 1960s and 1970s. Native Americans accused the Indian Health Service of sterilizing at least 25 percent of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970s. The allegations included: failure to provide women with necessary information regarding sterilization; use of coercion to get signatures on the consent forms; improper consent forms; and lack of an appropriate waiting period (at least seventy-two hours) between the signing of a consent form and the surgical procedure. This paper investigates the historical relationship between the IHS and Indian tribes; the right of the United States government to sterilize women; the government regulations pertaining to sterilization; the efforts of the IHS to sterilize American Indian women; physicians' reasons for sterilizing American Indian women; and the consequences the sterilizations had on the lives of a few of those women and their families.
The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women
Jane Lawrence
On November 6, 1976, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released the results of its investigation into similar events at four of twelve IHS areas (Albuquerque, Aberdeen, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix). Records verified that the IHS performed 3,406 sterilizations between 1973 and 1976.[iv] “Tip of the iceberg” is indeed an appropriate metaphor. Per capita, this figure would be equivalent to sterilizing 452,000 non-Native American women.[v]Albuquerque contracted out their sterilizations to local, non-IHS physicians; therefore their region inaccurately added zero procedures to the government count. Independent research estimated that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.[vi]Independent verifications were critical. The GAO did not interview a single women subjected to sterilization. The GAO also admitted that “contract” physicians were not required to comply with any federal regulations (including informed consent) in the context of these surgical procedures. Study of consent forms utilized revealed that three different forms were in use. It also appeared the “consent,” in many instances, was obtained through coercion.
What may be the most disturbing aspect of the investigations followed: it was physicians and healthcare professionals in the IHS who coerced these women. It was they who abandoned their professional responsibility to protect the vulnerable through appropriate, non-eugenic indications for surgery and informed consent prior to the procedures. On a Navaho reservation alone, from 1972-1978, there was a 130% increase in abortions (a ratio of abortions per 1000 deliveries increasing from 34 to 77).[vii] The same study demonstrated that between 1972 and 1978, sterilization procedures went from 15.1% to 30.7% of total female surgeries on that one reservation. Healthcare professionals’ coercive tactics included the threat of withdrawing future healthcare provisions or custody of Native American children already born—if consent for sterilization was withheld.[viii] The scandal of this replay of earlier twentieth century eugenic programs and genocidal tactics led to a congressional hearing (Senator James Abourzek, Democrat, South Dakota), but little else in terms of publicity, justice, or public outcry. It has also not been scrutinized from a careful bioethical perspective.
Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies
The Declaration of Independence
Because the German and American wings collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American partners. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.
When it was finished, the journey to discover America’s eugenic history had taken me from an austere highway warehouse in Vermont, where the state’s official files are stacked right next to automotive supplies and retrieved by forklift, to the architectonic British Library, to the massive Bundesarchiv in Berlin—and every type of research environment in between. Sometimes I sat on a chair in a reading room. Sometimes I poked through boxes in a basement.
Edwin Black: War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race
Dr. Perkins drafted a new research plan for his advisory committee's approval. The Eugenics Survey would document demographic and economic trends and select representative towns in the state for a more detailed study. That the towns "in decline" selected for the study were ones inhabited by some of the "degenerate" families in the Eugenics Survey files comes as no surprise. From 1925-1928 Perkins "conducted extensive investigations on selected kinship groups in Vermont to develop ‘pedigrees of degeneracy’ among Vermont’s rural poor". Perkins released five reports during his studies of eugenics and Vermonters. Here, the term "survey" refers to a concentrated campaign of isolation, stereotyping, segregation, and sterilization. The committees of the VCCL completed their final reports in January 1931 and compiled their findings in Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future. Every chapter addressed the specific means by which the state could restore the land, culture and values to the kind of people who had colonized the state and who were most deserving of the title "Vermonter." Perkins focus fell on the 3 D's that were beginning to show up in higher numbers late in the 19th century- delinquency, dependency and mental defect. During the first three years of Perkins's project, evidence was gathered through town records, social workers, government officials, policemen, and other various informants. Significant information was gathered about families who were found to have these defects. It became clear that many were extended families and tribes.
Of all the people affected by the eugenics movement in Vermont, the people who suffered the most were the Abenaki. It was during this time period that the Abenaki were left with little choice but to go underground. The Abenaki were out in the open and the obvious targets. Many Abenaki were forced to assume other identities or hide their heritage. "It is my opinion that the "new racism" of Vermont's elite eventually permeated Abenaki society, leading to shame at being different or fear that we or our children would be "discovered" by the state of Vermont and have evil things done to them. " (The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation, pp. 147-49). The easiest route for the Abenaki to take was to fit in with the French-Canadians of Vermont. Many of the Abenaki families investigated by Perkins' social workers were institutionalized and sterilized. Eugenics measures in Vermont followed the lead of other states in providing institutions for segregation of socially or mentally handicapped persons, followed by laws permitting sexual sterilization and denial of marriage licenses to those deemed "mentally unfit" for parenthood. As progressive reformers routinely attributed social welfare problems to "feebleminded women of child bearing age," poor women, particularly unwed mothers, became the primary targets of such measures. This went on for years and was backed by the Vermont Sterilization Laws passed in 1931. There are still Abenaki women today who were sterilized by the midwives that delivered their babies. It is estimated that nearly 300 Abenaki people were sterilized.
The history of Eugenics is a sad and damaging one. What it left behind is a loss of culture and a trail of broken families. The Abenaki of Vermont were the hardest hit. Although they took personal pride in their heritage, Abenakis had been discriminated against during much of the previous two centuries and many wanted their children to grow up free from the pain of prejudice. They believed that the only way for their children to get ahead in the white man's world was to act white. They maintained traditional Indian family structures and value systems but many of the outward manifestations of Abenaki culture nearly disappeared from Vermont in the past century. To this day in Vermont, the Abenaki are suffering the effects of the Eugenics Program. When the Abenaki went into hiding, they broke their historical trail. Because the tribe has not been a continuous entity, and many show up with the ethnicity of French-Canadian, it is difficult to decipher who belongs to the tribe
From: Abenakis and Eugenics A Culture Torn Away
A young Indian woman entered Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri's Los Angeles office on a November day in 1972. The twenty-six-year-old woman asked Dr. Pinkerton-Uri for a "womb transplant" because she and her husband wished to start a family. An Indian Health Service (IHS) physician had given the woman a complete hysterectomy when she was having problems with alcoholism six years earlier. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri had to tell the young woman that there was no such thing as a "womb transplant" despite the IHS physician having told her that the surgery was reversible. The woman left Dr. Pinkerton-Uri's office in tears.
Two young women entered an IHS hospital in Montana to undergo appendectomies and received tubal ligations, a form of sterilization, as an added benefit. Bertha Medicine Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, related how the "two girls had been sterilized at age fifteen before they had any children. Both were having appendectomies when the doctors sterilized them without their knowledge or consent." Their parents were not informed either. Two fifteen-year-old girls would never be able to have children of their own.
What happened to these three females was a common occurrence during the 1960s and 1970s. Native Americans accused the Indian Health Service of sterilizing at least 25 percent of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970s. The allegations included: failure to provide women with necessary information regarding sterilization; use of coercion to get signatures on the consent forms; improper consent forms; and lack of an appropriate waiting period (at least seventy-two hours) between the signing of a consent form and the surgical procedure. This paper investigates the historical relationship between the IHS and Indian tribes; the right of the United States government to sterilize women; the government regulations pertaining to sterilization; the efforts of the IHS to sterilize American Indian women; physicians' reasons for sterilizing American Indian women; and the consequences the sterilizations had on the lives of a few of those women and their families.
The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women
Jane Lawrence
On November 6, 1976, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released the results of its investigation into similar events at four of twelve IHS areas (Albuquerque, Aberdeen, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix). Records verified that the IHS performed 3,406 sterilizations between 1973 and 1976.[iv] “Tip of the iceberg” is indeed an appropriate metaphor. Per capita, this figure would be equivalent to sterilizing 452,000 non-Native American women.[v]Albuquerque contracted out their sterilizations to local, non-IHS physicians; therefore their region inaccurately added zero procedures to the government count. Independent research estimated that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.[vi]Independent verifications were critical. The GAO did not interview a single women subjected to sterilization. The GAO also admitted that “contract” physicians were not required to comply with any federal regulations (including informed consent) in the context of these surgical procedures. Study of consent forms utilized revealed that three different forms were in use. It also appeared the “consent,” in many instances, was obtained through coercion.
What may be the most disturbing aspect of the investigations followed: it was physicians and healthcare professionals in the IHS who coerced these women. It was they who abandoned their professional responsibility to protect the vulnerable through appropriate, non-eugenic indications for surgery and informed consent prior to the procedures. On a Navaho reservation alone, from 1972-1978, there was a 130% increase in abortions (a ratio of abortions per 1000 deliveries increasing from 34 to 77).[vii] The same study demonstrated that between 1972 and 1978, sterilization procedures went from 15.1% to 30.7% of total female surgeries on that one reservation. Healthcare professionals’ coercive tactics included the threat of withdrawing future healthcare provisions or custody of Native American children already born—if consent for sterilization was withheld.[viii] The scandal of this replay of earlier twentieth century eugenic programs and genocidal tactics led to a congressional hearing (Senator James Abourzek, Democrat, South Dakota), but little else in terms of publicity, justice, or public outcry. It has also not been scrutinized from a careful bioethical perspective.
Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Addendum
Here is more of how his devoted friend and private secretary, Francis Biddle, wrote of the imagined hero of liberals today, Justice Holmes:
He was an aristocrat and a conservative. He did not prefer, he said, a world with a hundred million bores in it to one with ten. The fewer people who do not contribute beauty or thought, the better. He had little sympathy with the sufferings and failures of mankind; and no urgent desire to change their lot. He thought that in the last analysis man rightly preferred his own interest to that of his neighbor, and did not believe in the Christian precept of love thy neighbor as thyself, which was the test of the meddling missionary: if men thought more about their jobs and less about themselves and their neighbors, they would accomplish more in the world.
He shared the general ideas that had been current when he was young, and he did not abandon them as he grew older. These made him skeptical of much of the social and economic legislation adopted after he came to Washington at the beginning of the twentieth century. He clung, for instance, to the argument of Malthus, the British curate who believed that population, unchecked by disease, war and poverty, would forever outdistance its means of subsistence, and remained pessimistic of possibilities of the future progress of mankind. Holmes wrote to Pollock in the summer of 1914 that he had been reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes, Berkeley, Ricardo and Malthus. Malthus both pleased him immensely, and left him sad: “ A hundred years ago he busted fallacies that politicians and labor leaders still live on . . . Exposures amount to nothing when people want to believe.”
In that last sentence, I finally find something to agree with him on, though his means at arriving there are degenerate in the extreme.
Any liberal who can read that and not question a liberalism that could hold Holmes as a great liberal hero, is no liberal. The liberalism that hold Holmes in such high esteem is a pantomime of liberalism, libertarian but not liberal. As can be seen in the failure of liberalism in the period after its highest point in the mid-1960s, that kind of liberalism is a political loser.
Biddle mentions Nuremberg once in the book that I've found and it and the lecture it appears in are well worth considering. He doesn't mention the use of his mentor and hero by the Nazis on trial in so far as I've been able to find it. I might look for that possible information later, though I now doubt it exists.
He was an aristocrat and a conservative. He did not prefer, he said, a world with a hundred million bores in it to one with ten. The fewer people who do not contribute beauty or thought, the better. He had little sympathy with the sufferings and failures of mankind; and no urgent desire to change their lot. He thought that in the last analysis man rightly preferred his own interest to that of his neighbor, and did not believe in the Christian precept of love thy neighbor as thyself, which was the test of the meddling missionary: if men thought more about their jobs and less about themselves and their neighbors, they would accomplish more in the world.
He shared the general ideas that had been current when he was young, and he did not abandon them as he grew older. These made him skeptical of much of the social and economic legislation adopted after he came to Washington at the beginning of the twentieth century. He clung, for instance, to the argument of Malthus, the British curate who believed that population, unchecked by disease, war and poverty, would forever outdistance its means of subsistence, and remained pessimistic of possibilities of the future progress of mankind. Holmes wrote to Pollock in the summer of 1914 that he had been reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes, Berkeley, Ricardo and Malthus. Malthus both pleased him immensely, and left him sad: “ A hundred years ago he busted fallacies that politicians and labor leaders still live on . . . Exposures amount to nothing when people want to believe.”
In that last sentence, I finally find something to agree with him on, though his means at arriving there are degenerate in the extreme.
Any liberal who can read that and not question a liberalism that could hold Holmes as a great liberal hero, is no liberal. The liberalism that hold Holmes in such high esteem is a pantomime of liberalism, libertarian but not liberal. As can be seen in the failure of liberalism in the period after its highest point in the mid-1960s, that kind of liberalism is a political loser.
Biddle mentions Nuremberg once in the book that I've found and it and the lecture it appears in are well worth considering. He doesn't mention the use of his mentor and hero by the Nazis on trial in so far as I've been able to find it. I might look for that possible information later, though I now doubt it exists.
The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made what might be the most infamous declaration on eugenics made in the United States, it may be his most well known quote.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The fuller reading of the paragraph, near the end of his decision in the Buck v Bell case, is even worse:
The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck
"is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"
and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
If I had the time, I'd go through Holmes' famous dissents in matters of prior restraint in printed matter, even, as in the Gitlow case, against the restraint of publishing incitements to violent insurrection and revolution, even as Holmes contemplated that sufficiently eloquent incitements might succeed in that incitement. I see his approval of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was a "prior restraint" on her ability to have another child. Leaving aside Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the case, in which he quite conclusively shows that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter were, actually, of below normal intelligence, Holmes clearly saw the danger of her having another child as being a greater danger to "the state" than a possibly successful insurrection overturning the government. In the Gitlow case, when it was merely the mode of expression and its contents that were at stake, he said:
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.
However, clearly, in Buck v Bell, Holmes considered that people, their right to have children, the right to the ownership of their own body, was less important compared to the right of words.
-----------
It would be possible to go through the decision and make point by point comparisons with what the great Holmes said and what such infamous figures as Galton, Haeckel, and their colleagues now considered less disreputable said and find who Holmes was very likely paraphrasing. In fact, on the other end of the history of the first eugenics era, the defense of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg cited Holmes' decision as well as other American documents in their defense. You have to wonder what that felt like for Francis Biddle, the chief judge at those trials, given that he had been Holmes' private secretary.
His familiarity with Holmes gives Biddle's analysis of the effect that Holmes' thinking and reading a particular credibility that could stand alone as evidence of how he came to decide what he did. In a series of lectures Biddle gave, which were published in 1960 he said.
All society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality
of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform— although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol.
... He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for an antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . .
The vista of which Biddle spoke was provided by Holmes' reading of Charles Darwin. Biddle continued:
This approach is characteristic of Holmes, and constantly reflected in his opinions— to keep the law fluid and the doors of the mind open. For pedestrian lawyers it was often unsatisfactory— they wanted everything defined and settled and turned into everlasting precedents.
Darwin's influence was strong on Holmes, and his theory of the survival of those who were fit to survive must have been constantly and passionately discussed in Dr. Holmes's house when
Wendell was a growing lad and young man. On the Origin of Species had appeared when he was eighteen, and The Descent of Man in 1871, when he was thirty. Darwin led to Herbert Spencer,
whom Holmes thought dull, with the ideals of a lower middle-class British Philistine, but who, with Darwin, he believed had done more than any other English writer to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe. All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does.
Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths, Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles" having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.
Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life. There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction. Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".
Since he lived until 1935, Holmes saw eugenics activity in the United States increase enormously after his decision, responsible for the forced and involuntary sterilization of scores of thousands of people. He also lived to see the rise of fascists in Europe, the Nazis, he lived long enough and could have been quite aware of the Nazis eugenic laws, the first in Germany, in July of 1933, laws which were justified by the Nazis and their supporters by citing the eugenics laws in the United States, both at the beginning and, as mentioned before, after the fall of the Third Reich. I don't know if he is recorded as ever having said anything about that, other than his declaration that he felt he was getting at "the first principle of real reform" in his decision, I haven't yet found anything he said in its wake. I would suspect there is something, I just haven't found it yet.
----------
David A. Hollinger, in an interesting essay, "The Tough-Minded Justice Holmes" gives more insight into what almost certainly influenced Holmes to write his most famous decision. He notes the influence of Charles Darwin and his circle and how William James tried to broaden his friend, Holmes' views and lead him to be less unquestioningly accepting of them.
This is not to claim that James developed his categories with Holmes in mind, but there is no doubt that this particular map of intellectual alternatives was suggested to James by a circle of mid-nineteenth-century British secular intellectuals with whom Holmes strongly identified himself and against whom Jame's own career as a philosopher was directed. The members of this circle were often called “scientific naturalists” or, less helpfully, “positivists”; they included Herbet Spencer, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, W.K. Clifford, Henry Buckle and – although his reticence in philosophical and religious matters made his position in this movement ambiguous – the great Charles Darwin Himself. To James, these “knights of the razor,” as he called them sardonically, were anathema on account of their parochial misunderstanding of science and their extraordinary ability to intimidate people who would prefer to make a more generous view of religious experience and individual volition. While James mocked the pretensions of Popular Science Monthly – the major American medium for the dissemination of the views of this circle, Holmes so rejoiced in its influence that he sent a fan letter to its militant editor, E. L. Youmans. Holmes celebrated the triumphs of this truly “scientific,” reality-facing, ostentatiously stoic cadre over the sentimentalism he associated with his own father. While James thought his friend Holmes was making rather a spectacle of himself by representing his marks of toughness the scars worn by the sword-fighting duelists in German universities, Holmes seemed convinced that the battle against sentimentalism was never won.
The idea that Holmes' "tough-mindedness", an attribute given him by James, could have been reacting to the "sentimentalism" of his father, the poet, is interesting. It's almost tempting to see Holmes as an example of that turn from 19th century liberalism of the kind that produced the reform movements of abolition, women's rights, temperance, various reforms to protect workers and consumers, etc. into a more "scientific" liberalism that still distorts, denatures and defeats liberals today. But I think the case is that such denatured liberalism was unable to make the distinction between a mythical, liberal Holmes and the reality of his products. Is it his "free speech" language that deceives liberals? Liberals go all soggy when someone says those words. Free speech, with its potential to incite violent struggle can be seen as a useful motivator of natural selection as much as it is a vital component of liberal reform. In the hands of the rich and powerful it has that effect, often to the detriment of genuine liberalism, as our freest press ever proves 24/7/365. In the beginning of his essay, Hollinger points out:
.....that a major folk hero of the liberal intelligentsia is a man who has been plausibly described by Grant Gilmore as “savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak. The two issues are largely distinct from one another, but they do connect through the utility of a “scientific” persona held for proponents of a genuinely secular, de-Christianized liberalism for the public culture of the United States.
This is what I meant by the wrong turn that liberalism took as it attempted to become more "tough-minded", more "scientific", less "sentimental". Such liberalism equates whatever is held to be science with hard reality and whatever can be associated with the "sentimental" as being an illusion, including religion, including vast stretches of morality which comprise the genuine substance of liberalism. This is how it mistakes Holmes for a liberal when he was no such thing, it's how eugenics, the negation of everything that liberalism comprises, came to be associated with liberalism.
Post Script: I can't say it any better than the atheist and materialist and friend of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, did in his Essay: Billions and Billions of Demons
The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education.
This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.
Lewontin's is about the most realistic, most informed and most sophisticated analysis of the this struggle in the United States which I've read.
In a struggle that produces far more than its share of ironies, it is remarkable that as the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists who have made the best use of the history of American Eugenics, the eugenics history of Charles Darwin and his inner circle and the waves emanating from them as present day liberals are obsessively protecting the inspiration of eugenics, the lassie-faire capitalist, supporter of the 19th century British class system, anti-contraceptive, racist, flagrant bigot, etc. Charles Darwin on behalf of his science, which is long superseded by better explanations of the fact of evolution.
How Darwinism became the great cause celebre of liberalism when it has nothing to do with a genuine liberal political agenda and, in the genuine history of Darwinism is antithetical to liberalism, is worth asking. The separation of church and state is worth supporting but, frankly, if we've got to buy Darwinism to do it, it's not going to lead to liberalism. I don't think liberalism has to make that deal. At the very least it should face the real Charles Darwin and throw him off the sled. Liberal struggle requires that.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Vernon Kellogg Encounters German Darwinism During The Great War
Vernon Kellogg was a distinguished American biologist of the early 20th century. He is most remembered today for "Headquarters Nights," his memoir of a sort of peace mission-fact finding trip he made before the United States entered the First World War, especially for what he found out about the beliefs of the German military. What he discovered about their motives and beliefs shocked him so much that he abandoned his fully believed in pacifism and came back advocating that the United States enter the war because he became convinced that Germany, under the influence of prevailing thinking, was extremely dangerous.
Of course, with what I've been posting lately, Darwinism figured into that. Kellogg was no opponent of evolution or of Darwin, he cited Darwin very favorably in a number of his books and papers and wrote what was probably one of the more serious texts on evolutionary biology at the time. There is no way to paint his horror of what he already called "neo-Darwinism," as being opposed to either evolution or even natural selection. Though, as can be seen, since both Darwin and Huxley gave their full endorsement of Haeckel's and other originators of the ideas that shocked Kellogg, there was nothing "neo" about it. All of the things Kellogg recounts as having been said by his pseudonymous colonel-professor von Flussen were present in Haeckel by 1870, certainly by the time of Haeckel's somewhat ironically named, "Freedom in Science and Teaching" which both Darwin and Huxley gave their fullest endorsement.
Haeckel was still alive at the time of Kellog's trip and, from what I've read, still the most influential voice in matters Darwinian, in Germany. By this time the influence of his students, such as Plotze and Rudin and also such people as Schallmeyer were also important. I believe both Haeckel and Schallmeyer died in 1919. Any "neo-Darwinism" that Kellogg encountered in the German establishment would certainly have been influenced by them, though Darwin was also widely read and his natural selection was the basis all of it, directly taken from him or not.
Well, I say it dispassionately but with conviction: if I understand theirs, it is a point of view that will never allow any land or people controlled by it to exist peacefully by the side of a people governed by our point of view. For their point of view does not permit of a live-and-let-live kind of carrying on. It is a point of view that justifies itself by a whole-hearted acceptance of the worst of Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural selection applied rigorously to human life and society and Kultur.
Professor von Flussen — that is not his name — is a biologist. So am I. So we talked out the biological argument for war, and especially for this war. The captain-professor has a logically constructed argument why, for the good of the world, there should be this war, and why, for the good of the world, the Germans should win it, win it completely and terribly. Perhaps I can state his argument clearly enough, so that others may see and accept his reasons, too. Unfortunately for the peace of our evenings, I was never convinced. That is, never convinced that for the good of the world the Germans should win this war, completely and terribly. I was convinced, however, that this war, once begun, must be fought to a finish of decision — a finish that will determine whether or not Germany's point of view is to rule the world. And this conviction, thus gained, meant the conversion of a pacifist to an ardent supporter, not of War, but of this war; of fighting this war to a definitive end — that end to be Germany's conversion to be a good Germany, or not much of any Germany at all. My 'Headquarters Nights' are the confessions of a converted pacifist.
In talking it out biologically, we agreed that the human race is subject to the influence of the fundamental biologic laws of variation, heredity, selection, and so forth, just as are all other animal — and plant — kinds. The factors of organic evolution, generally, are factors in human natural evolution. Man has risen from his primitive bestial stage of glacial time, a hundred or several hundred thousand years ago, when he was animal among animals, to the stage of to-day, always under the influence of these great evolutionary factors, and partly by virtue of them.
But he does not owe all of his progress to these factors, or, least of all, to any one of them, as natural selection, a thesis Professor von Flussen seemed ready to maintain.
Natural selection depends for its working on a rigorous and ruthless struggle for existence. Yet this struggle has its ameliorations, even as regards the lower animals, let alone man.
There are three general phases of this struggle: —
1. An inter-specific struggle, or the lethal competition among different animal kinds for food, space, and opportunity to increase;
2. An intra-specific struggle, or lethal competition among the individuals of a single species, resultant on the over-production due to natural multiplication by geometric progression; and,
3. The constant struggle of individuals and species against the rigors of climate, the danger of storm, flood, drought, cold, and heat.
Now any animal kind and its individuals may be continually exposed to all of these phases of the struggle for existence, or, on the other hand, any one or more of these phases may be largely ameliorated or even abolished for a given species and its individuals. This amelioration may come about through a happy accident of time or place, or because of the adoption by the species of a habit or mode of life that continually protects it from a certain phase of the struggle.
For example, the voluntary or involuntary migration of representatives of a species hard pressed to exist in its native habitat, may release it from the too severe rigors of a destructive climate, or take it beyond the habitat of its most dangerous enemies, or give it the needed space and food for the support of a numerous progeny. Thus, such a single phenomenon as migration might ameliorate any one or more of the several phases of the struggle for existence.
Again, the adoption by two widely distinct and perhaps antagonistic species of a commensal or symbiotic life, based on the mutual-aid principle — thousands of such cases are familiar to naturalists — would ameliorate or abolish the interspecific struggle between these two species. Even more effective in the modification of the influence due to a bitter struggle for existence, is the adoption by a species of an altruistic or communistic mode of existence so far as its own individuals are concerned. This, of course, would largely ameliorate for that species the intra-specific phase of its struggle for life. Such animal altruism, and the biological success of the species exhibiting it, is familiarly exemplified by the social insects (ants, bees, and wasps).
As a matter of fact, this reliance by animal kinds for success in the world upon a more or less extreme adoption of the mutual-aid principle, as contrasted with the mutual-fight principle, is much more widely spread among the lower animals than familiarly recognized, while in the case of man, it has been the greatest single factor in the achievement of his proud biological position as king of living creatures.
Altruism — or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much consciousness in it — is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly self-regarding, exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors.
Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the Allmacht of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema. The mutual-aid principle is recognized only as restricted to its application within limited groups. For instance, it may and does exist, and to positive biological benefit, within single ant communities, but the different ant kinds fight desperately with each other, the stronger destroying or enslaving the weaker. Similarly, it may exist to advantage within the limits of organized human groups — as those which are ethnographically, nationally, or otherwise variously delimited. But as with the different ant species, struggle — bitter, ruthless struggle — is the rule among the different human groups. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its desirable natural evolution. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage as regards internal organization and form of social relationship is best, and should, for the sake of the species, be preserved at the expense of the less advanced, the less effective. It should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization — its Kultur — on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them.
This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters - argument logically constructed on premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter — by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.
Of course, Kellogg's hope that Germany could be defeated and converted to giving up neo-Darwinism was shattered by the falling of the Weimar government, the rise of the Nazis, the adoption of eugenics and its extension into industrial scale murder of the kind that what can only be called degenerate intellectuals had been fantasizing about since the beginning of the century. All of that began in the imaginations of people, the belief in a biological elite, the danger to it of a biological underclass, both defined by class and ethnicity, and the right of the superior to keep them from, first breeding, and then living. All of that was present in Darwinian terms by the turn of the century, beginning with Haeckel in Germany and much of it even in such Darwinians as Galton and Huxley by the 1870s. Darwin added his voice with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1872. Whatever excellence Kellogg found in the papers of Darwin on entomology and other topics - he seems to cite mostly Darwin's papers - he must have been aware of his second most important book. Why he overlooked that, I don't know but scientists and intellectuals who don't agree with it have been overlooking it consistently since, now, the 1910s.
Update: From Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching: English translation, 1879
"Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats.
"That tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist." And this was a book that Thomas Huxley wrote a preface and Darwin wrote to Haeckel, praising it and saying that he agreed with all of it. Note Haeckel's pretty disgusting turn around of the concepts democracy and aristocracy at the end of the paragraph. It's no wonder that by the time of Kellogg's trip the German elite was already giving people reason to worry in this way.
Of course, with what I've been posting lately, Darwinism figured into that. Kellogg was no opponent of evolution or of Darwin, he cited Darwin very favorably in a number of his books and papers and wrote what was probably one of the more serious texts on evolutionary biology at the time. There is no way to paint his horror of what he already called "neo-Darwinism," as being opposed to either evolution or even natural selection. Though, as can be seen, since both Darwin and Huxley gave their full endorsement of Haeckel's and other originators of the ideas that shocked Kellogg, there was nothing "neo" about it. All of the things Kellogg recounts as having been said by his pseudonymous colonel-professor von Flussen were present in Haeckel by 1870, certainly by the time of Haeckel's somewhat ironically named, "Freedom in Science and Teaching" which both Darwin and Huxley gave their fullest endorsement.
Haeckel was still alive at the time of Kellog's trip and, from what I've read, still the most influential voice in matters Darwinian, in Germany. By this time the influence of his students, such as Plotze and Rudin and also such people as Schallmeyer were also important. I believe both Haeckel and Schallmeyer died in 1919. Any "neo-Darwinism" that Kellogg encountered in the German establishment would certainly have been influenced by them, though Darwin was also widely read and his natural selection was the basis all of it, directly taken from him or not.
Well, I say it dispassionately but with conviction: if I understand theirs, it is a point of view that will never allow any land or people controlled by it to exist peacefully by the side of a people governed by our point of view. For their point of view does not permit of a live-and-let-live kind of carrying on. It is a point of view that justifies itself by a whole-hearted acceptance of the worst of Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural selection applied rigorously to human life and society and Kultur.
Professor von Flussen — that is not his name — is a biologist. So am I. So we talked out the biological argument for war, and especially for this war. The captain-professor has a logically constructed argument why, for the good of the world, there should be this war, and why, for the good of the world, the Germans should win it, win it completely and terribly. Perhaps I can state his argument clearly enough, so that others may see and accept his reasons, too. Unfortunately for the peace of our evenings, I was never convinced. That is, never convinced that for the good of the world the Germans should win this war, completely and terribly. I was convinced, however, that this war, once begun, must be fought to a finish of decision — a finish that will determine whether or not Germany's point of view is to rule the world. And this conviction, thus gained, meant the conversion of a pacifist to an ardent supporter, not of War, but of this war; of fighting this war to a definitive end — that end to be Germany's conversion to be a good Germany, or not much of any Germany at all. My 'Headquarters Nights' are the confessions of a converted pacifist.
In talking it out biologically, we agreed that the human race is subject to the influence of the fundamental biologic laws of variation, heredity, selection, and so forth, just as are all other animal — and plant — kinds. The factors of organic evolution, generally, are factors in human natural evolution. Man has risen from his primitive bestial stage of glacial time, a hundred or several hundred thousand years ago, when he was animal among animals, to the stage of to-day, always under the influence of these great evolutionary factors, and partly by virtue of them.
But he does not owe all of his progress to these factors, or, least of all, to any one of them, as natural selection, a thesis Professor von Flussen seemed ready to maintain.
Natural selection depends for its working on a rigorous and ruthless struggle for existence. Yet this struggle has its ameliorations, even as regards the lower animals, let alone man.
There are three general phases of this struggle: —
1. An inter-specific struggle, or the lethal competition among different animal kinds for food, space, and opportunity to increase;
2. An intra-specific struggle, or lethal competition among the individuals of a single species, resultant on the over-production due to natural multiplication by geometric progression; and,
3. The constant struggle of individuals and species against the rigors of climate, the danger of storm, flood, drought, cold, and heat.
Now any animal kind and its individuals may be continually exposed to all of these phases of the struggle for existence, or, on the other hand, any one or more of these phases may be largely ameliorated or even abolished for a given species and its individuals. This amelioration may come about through a happy accident of time or place, or because of the adoption by the species of a habit or mode of life that continually protects it from a certain phase of the struggle.
For example, the voluntary or involuntary migration of representatives of a species hard pressed to exist in its native habitat, may release it from the too severe rigors of a destructive climate, or take it beyond the habitat of its most dangerous enemies, or give it the needed space and food for the support of a numerous progeny. Thus, such a single phenomenon as migration might ameliorate any one or more of the several phases of the struggle for existence.
Again, the adoption by two widely distinct and perhaps antagonistic species of a commensal or symbiotic life, based on the mutual-aid principle — thousands of such cases are familiar to naturalists — would ameliorate or abolish the interspecific struggle between these two species. Even more effective in the modification of the influence due to a bitter struggle for existence, is the adoption by a species of an altruistic or communistic mode of existence so far as its own individuals are concerned. This, of course, would largely ameliorate for that species the intra-specific phase of its struggle for life. Such animal altruism, and the biological success of the species exhibiting it, is familiarly exemplified by the social insects (ants, bees, and wasps).
As a matter of fact, this reliance by animal kinds for success in the world upon a more or less extreme adoption of the mutual-aid principle, as contrasted with the mutual-fight principle, is much more widely spread among the lower animals than familiarly recognized, while in the case of man, it has been the greatest single factor in the achievement of his proud biological position as king of living creatures.
Altruism — or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much consciousness in it — is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly self-regarding, exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors.
Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the Allmacht of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema. The mutual-aid principle is recognized only as restricted to its application within limited groups. For instance, it may and does exist, and to positive biological benefit, within single ant communities, but the different ant kinds fight desperately with each other, the stronger destroying or enslaving the weaker. Similarly, it may exist to advantage within the limits of organized human groups — as those which are ethnographically, nationally, or otherwise variously delimited. But as with the different ant species, struggle — bitter, ruthless struggle — is the rule among the different human groups. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its desirable natural evolution. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage as regards internal organization and form of social relationship is best, and should, for the sake of the species, be preserved at the expense of the less advanced, the less effective. It should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization — its Kultur — on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them.
This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters - argument logically constructed on premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter — by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.
Of course, Kellogg's hope that Germany could be defeated and converted to giving up neo-Darwinism was shattered by the falling of the Weimar government, the rise of the Nazis, the adoption of eugenics and its extension into industrial scale murder of the kind that what can only be called degenerate intellectuals had been fantasizing about since the beginning of the century. All of that began in the imaginations of people, the belief in a biological elite, the danger to it of a biological underclass, both defined by class and ethnicity, and the right of the superior to keep them from, first breeding, and then living. All of that was present in Darwinian terms by the turn of the century, beginning with Haeckel in Germany and much of it even in such Darwinians as Galton and Huxley by the 1870s. Darwin added his voice with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1872. Whatever excellence Kellogg found in the papers of Darwin on entomology and other topics - he seems to cite mostly Darwin's papers - he must have been aware of his second most important book. Why he overlooked that, I don't know but scientists and intellectuals who don't agree with it have been overlooking it consistently since, now, the 1910s.
Update: From Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching: English translation, 1879
"Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats.
"That tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist." And this was a book that Thomas Huxley wrote a preface and Darwin wrote to Haeckel, praising it and saying that he agreed with all of it. Note Haeckel's pretty disgusting turn around of the concepts democracy and aristocracy at the end of the paragraph. It's no wonder that by the time of Kellogg's trip the German elite was already giving people reason to worry in this way.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Haeckel's Racism That Darwin Endorsed
The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said.
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man
There has been an objection to my characterization of Haeckel's book, The History of Creation, which Darwin said was a confirmation of his ideas, as containing some extremely racist content presented as science. Here, from volume 2
Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men (the Austral Negroes, Bushmen, and Andamans, etc.), on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and elephants, and on the other hand, with the most highly developed men—Aristotle, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Lamarck, or Goethe—we can then no longer consider the assertion, that the mental life of the higher mammals has gradually developed up to that of man, as in any way exaggerated. If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals. This is, in fact, the opinion of many travellers, who have long watched the lowest human races in their native countries. Thus, for example, a great English traveller, who lived for a considerable time on the west coast of Africa, says: “I consider the negro to be a lower species of man, and cannot make up my mind to look upon him as ‘a man and a brother,’ for the gorilla would then also have to be admitted into the family.” Even many Christian missionaries, who, after 366 long years of fruitless endeavours to civilize these lowest races, have abandoned the attempt, express the same harsh judgment, and maintain that it would be easier to train the most intelligent domestic animals to a moral and civilized life, than these unreasoning brute-like men. For instance, the able Austrian missionary Morlang, who tried for many years without the slightest success to civilize the ape-like negro tribes on the Upper Nile, expressly says: “that any mission to such savages is absolutely useless. They stand far below unreasoning animals; the latter at least show signs of affection towards those who are kind towards them, whereas these brutal natives are utterly incapable of any feeling of gratitude.”
Now, it clearly follows from these and other testimonies, that the mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest men; and if, together with this, we take into consideration the fact that in every single human child mental life develops slowly, gradually, and step by step, from the lowest condition of animal unconsciousness, need we still feel offended when told that the mind of the whole human race has in like manner gone through a process of slow, gradual, and historical development? Can we find it “degrading” to the human soul that, by a long and slow process of differentiation and perfecting, it has very gradually developed out of the soul of vertebrate animals? I freely acknowledge that this objection, which is at present raised by many against the pithecoid theory, is quite incomprehensible to me. On this point Bernhard Cotta, in his excellent “Geologie der Gegenwart,” very justly remarks: “Our ancestors may be a great honour to us; but it is much better if we are an honour to them!”(31)
Another passage
Comparative philology seems especially to be becoming an authority in this matter. In the latest great work on the races of men, which Friederich Müller has published in his excellent “Ethnography,”(42) he justly places language in the fore-ground. Next to it the nature of the hair of the head is of great importance; for although it is in itself of course only a subordinate morphological character, yet it seems to be strictly transmitted within the race. Of the twelve species of men distinguished on the following table (p. 308), the four lower species are characterised by the woolly nature of the hair of their heads; every hair is flattened like a tape, and thus its section is oval. These four species of woolly-haired men (Ulotrichi) we may reduce into two groups—tuft-haired and fleecy-haired. The hair on the head of tuft-haired men (Lophocomi), Papuans and Hottentots, grows in unequally divided small tufts. The woolly hair of fleecy-haired men (Eriocomi), on the other hand, in Caffres and Negroes, grows equally all over the skin of the head. All Ulotrichi, or woolly-haired men, have slanting teeth and long heads, and the colour of their skin, hair, and eyes is always very dark. All are inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere; it is only in Africa that they come north of the equator. They are on the whole at a much lower stage of development, and more like apes, than most of the Lissotrichi, or straight-haired men. The Ulotrichi are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United States of308 North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important “history.”
And in contrast:
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man (Homo Mediterraneus), has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect. It is generally called the Caucasian race, but as among all the varieties of the species, the Caucasian branch is the least important, we prefer the much more suitable appellation proposed by Friedrich Müller, namely, that of Mediterranean, or Midland men. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. The former area of the distribution of this species is expressed by the name of “Indo-Atlantic” species, whereas at present it is spread over the whole earth, and is overcoming most of the other species in the struggle for existence. In bodily as well as in mental qualities, no other human species can equal the Mediterranean. This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilization which seems to raise man above the rest of nature.
Those are just a sample of the racism in the book, of which Darwin said,
If this work had appeared before my essay [The Descent of Man] had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
By force of his endorsement of the book and its contents, whatever Darwin says that is in line with passages such as those, unless he explicitly specified otherwise, and I can't recall anyplace he did, those groups discussed in such terms must be taken to comprise those Darwin abbreviates into the term "savages". It is almost as clear that when he said "civilised men", he was referring to "caucasians". I have read all of Haeckel's book, as I have Darwin's Descent of Man, the correspondences between the two books are concealed only by Darwin's somewhat more genteel expression of them. These are hardly the only examples that could be cited to support what I said.
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man
There has been an objection to my characterization of Haeckel's book, The History of Creation, which Darwin said was a confirmation of his ideas, as containing some extremely racist content presented as science. Here, from volume 2
Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men (the Austral Negroes, Bushmen, and Andamans, etc.), on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and elephants, and on the other hand, with the most highly developed men—Aristotle, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Lamarck, or Goethe—we can then no longer consider the assertion, that the mental life of the higher mammals has gradually developed up to that of man, as in any way exaggerated. If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals. This is, in fact, the opinion of many travellers, who have long watched the lowest human races in their native countries. Thus, for example, a great English traveller, who lived for a considerable time on the west coast of Africa, says: “I consider the negro to be a lower species of man, and cannot make up my mind to look upon him as ‘a man and a brother,’ for the gorilla would then also have to be admitted into the family.” Even many Christian missionaries, who, after 366 long years of fruitless endeavours to civilize these lowest races, have abandoned the attempt, express the same harsh judgment, and maintain that it would be easier to train the most intelligent domestic animals to a moral and civilized life, than these unreasoning brute-like men. For instance, the able Austrian missionary Morlang, who tried for many years without the slightest success to civilize the ape-like negro tribes on the Upper Nile, expressly says: “that any mission to such savages is absolutely useless. They stand far below unreasoning animals; the latter at least show signs of affection towards those who are kind towards them, whereas these brutal natives are utterly incapable of any feeling of gratitude.”
Now, it clearly follows from these and other testimonies, that the mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest men; and if, together with this, we take into consideration the fact that in every single human child mental life develops slowly, gradually, and step by step, from the lowest condition of animal unconsciousness, need we still feel offended when told that the mind of the whole human race has in like manner gone through a process of slow, gradual, and historical development? Can we find it “degrading” to the human soul that, by a long and slow process of differentiation and perfecting, it has very gradually developed out of the soul of vertebrate animals? I freely acknowledge that this objection, which is at present raised by many against the pithecoid theory, is quite incomprehensible to me. On this point Bernhard Cotta, in his excellent “Geologie der Gegenwart,” very justly remarks: “Our ancestors may be a great honour to us; but it is much better if we are an honour to them!”(31)
Another passage
Comparative philology seems especially to be becoming an authority in this matter. In the latest great work on the races of men, which Friederich Müller has published in his excellent “Ethnography,”(42) he justly places language in the fore-ground. Next to it the nature of the hair of the head is of great importance; for although it is in itself of course only a subordinate morphological character, yet it seems to be strictly transmitted within the race. Of the twelve species of men distinguished on the following table (p. 308), the four lower species are characterised by the woolly nature of the hair of their heads; every hair is flattened like a tape, and thus its section is oval. These four species of woolly-haired men (Ulotrichi) we may reduce into two groups—tuft-haired and fleecy-haired. The hair on the head of tuft-haired men (Lophocomi), Papuans and Hottentots, grows in unequally divided small tufts. The woolly hair of fleecy-haired men (Eriocomi), on the other hand, in Caffres and Negroes, grows equally all over the skin of the head. All Ulotrichi, or woolly-haired men, have slanting teeth and long heads, and the colour of their skin, hair, and eyes is always very dark. All are inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere; it is only in Africa that they come north of the equator. They are on the whole at a much lower stage of development, and more like apes, than most of the Lissotrichi, or straight-haired men. The Ulotrichi are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United States of308 North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important “history.”
And in contrast:
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man (Homo Mediterraneus), has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect. It is generally called the Caucasian race, but as among all the varieties of the species, the Caucasian branch is the least important, we prefer the much more suitable appellation proposed by Friedrich Müller, namely, that of Mediterranean, or Midland men. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. The former area of the distribution of this species is expressed by the name of “Indo-Atlantic” species, whereas at present it is spread over the whole earth, and is overcoming most of the other species in the struggle for existence. In bodily as well as in mental qualities, no other human species can equal the Mediterranean. This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilization which seems to raise man above the rest of nature.
Those are just a sample of the racism in the book, of which Darwin said,
If this work had appeared before my essay [The Descent of Man] had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
By force of his endorsement of the book and its contents, whatever Darwin says that is in line with passages such as those, unless he explicitly specified otherwise, and I can't recall anyplace he did, those groups discussed in such terms must be taken to comprise those Darwin abbreviates into the term "savages". It is almost as clear that when he said "civilised men", he was referring to "caucasians". I have read all of Haeckel's book, as I have Darwin's Descent of Man, the correspondences between the two books are concealed only by Darwin's somewhat more genteel expression of them. These are hardly the only examples that could be cited to support what I said.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
On Piling it on
I have been looking at some new material in this case and I'm finding it important enough for me to understand it before I post more updated versions of what I wrote last year. I'll be posting the rest of that every few days instead of every day. Our mother is out of the hospital and I won't be tied to my computer quite as much as I have been this past week. She's in better shape than I am this morning, though we'll have to stay with her overnight again, for a time.
When I first posted this series, it was longer than what I'm presenting here, this is sort of the concentrated version, stronger because I've had nearly a year of added research and it's made me realize that the case is even stronger, the exculpation attempt more dishonest and the need to expose Darwin's dark side even more serious.
This series has two major hurdles to overcome, other than finding and assembling the evidence to make the case. There is the extremity of the anti-evolution use of the same material from Darwin's record that I'm using here, sometimes, though not always, distorting the evidence and fabricating other factoids. And that doesn't get to the totally dishonest pop version of that case which frequently does without real evidence at all. Evolution is a fact established independently of Charles Darwin's great claim to fame, which is natural selection, not evolution. Even the total demolition of the myth of Charles Darwin will not demolish the scientific evidence of evolution.
The other hurdle is the c. 60 year old effort on the pro-evolution side to fabricate the phony, eugenics free, Haeckelless Charles Darwin who has no relation to some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. That side is, frequently, more dishonest about the facts of what Darwin said, though it is often, generally, right about one thing, that evolution happened. A small part of the Darwin Industry is a well meaning but misguided effort to promote science and to keep science teaching in public schools behind the wall of separation of church and state. Their goals are good, though their means often lead them into folly and even, on occasion, into falsification and fabrication of factoids as much as their political opponents.
Allied with the pro-evolution side is the larger, ideological, anti-religious campaign that has turned Darwin into an atheist saint as phony as any of those dropped from the Catholic calendar due to their never having existed. That ideological effort is the primary strength behind the Darwin Industry and cult. The plain, anti-religious content of it betrays that fact at every turn.
As someone who accepts both evolution and the definitive power of the historical record as left by Darwin, his family and closest associates, there is an enormous mountain of built up lore and mythology to overcome. The facts must be revealed without ideological, political or opportunistic distortion. Not to mention active, intentional and ideologically motivated lying and smearing which has accompanied this effort. That is necessary to pretend that record isn't there and what it is.
Before the Second World War the pro-Darwin side hardly ever tried to cover up what he said. Back when eugenics was respectable within the affluent, political, legal and academic establishments, no one seems to have tried to distance Charles Darwin from his role in its origins and early history. Eugenicists openly claimed to be the upholders of his legacy and neo-eugenicists still do, in the form of natural selection when not explicitly owning Darwin for their cause . Natural selection is the absolutely required base of eugenics, eugenics couldn't exist without the assumption of the beneficial effects of natural selection and the belief that keeping those deemed "unfit" alive so they can have children will cause a disaster. And Charles Darwin is inseparable from natural selection. He would have been an obscure 19th century quasi-dilettante natural philosopher without it, such as so many of those you could see in that collection of the Anthropological Review I linked to below.
If the case seems repititious, I can't be sure people are reading all of the posts in this case. A blog is not a book, people seldom read all of the pages of a blog. Repeating important points is also essential to make what I'm saying clear. Repetition is also needed because the same material supports several different points that need to be made. The malignant effects of what Darwin said are rather large. Considering that essentially everything all of them said is a repetition of the two ideas that are the basis of eugenics, you can't avoid repetition in presenting this topic.
In the end, I'd like people to leave Charles Darwin in the past just as they have most other figures in science. His usefulness in non-scientific, ideological matters has prevented that natural progression as his ideas, many of which have been abandoned within science, are superseded by other ones. Natural selection as it is constructed in 2013 is far, far removed from what Charles Darwin published in 1859, not to mention in later editions which were already modifying that. I look at it and see a strong case for evolution and a far weaker one for natural selection. In researching this issue, I've come to conclude that natural selection is not a real force of nature or even particularly good as a law of science. I've come to conclude that natural selection is, at its most basic level, a habit of thought, a paint-by-number that people fit evidence into. It is vague enough, with blurry outlines so that many things can be fit into that frame. Quite often natural selection is an article of faith, as required of biologists and of respectable members of the so-called intelligentsia just as surely as mouthing belief in the 39 Articles used to be required of faculty members in English universities.
I would like to see evolutionary science look at physical evidence and evaluate it without the need to uphold an idea of that sort. I would like to see public school science classrooms concentrate on a practical curriculum that gives the general run of students important information to maintain their and their families' health and to make intelligent, informed, responsible decisions as citizens and as decent human beings. I would like to see both sides in the Darwin Wars shunted to the side and segregated from science and public life, I would like Charles Darwin to be a moot point in political and civic life.
I will post again on Tuesday or Wednesday, the topic will be Democracy.
When I first posted this series, it was longer than what I'm presenting here, this is sort of the concentrated version, stronger because I've had nearly a year of added research and it's made me realize that the case is even stronger, the exculpation attempt more dishonest and the need to expose Darwin's dark side even more serious.
This series has two major hurdles to overcome, other than finding and assembling the evidence to make the case. There is the extremity of the anti-evolution use of the same material from Darwin's record that I'm using here, sometimes, though not always, distorting the evidence and fabricating other factoids. And that doesn't get to the totally dishonest pop version of that case which frequently does without real evidence at all. Evolution is a fact established independently of Charles Darwin's great claim to fame, which is natural selection, not evolution. Even the total demolition of the myth of Charles Darwin will not demolish the scientific evidence of evolution.
The other hurdle is the c. 60 year old effort on the pro-evolution side to fabricate the phony, eugenics free, Haeckelless Charles Darwin who has no relation to some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. That side is, frequently, more dishonest about the facts of what Darwin said, though it is often, generally, right about one thing, that evolution happened. A small part of the Darwin Industry is a well meaning but misguided effort to promote science and to keep science teaching in public schools behind the wall of separation of church and state. Their goals are good, though their means often lead them into folly and even, on occasion, into falsification and fabrication of factoids as much as their political opponents.
Allied with the pro-evolution side is the larger, ideological, anti-religious campaign that has turned Darwin into an atheist saint as phony as any of those dropped from the Catholic calendar due to their never having existed. That ideological effort is the primary strength behind the Darwin Industry and cult. The plain, anti-religious content of it betrays that fact at every turn.
As someone who accepts both evolution and the definitive power of the historical record as left by Darwin, his family and closest associates, there is an enormous mountain of built up lore and mythology to overcome. The facts must be revealed without ideological, political or opportunistic distortion. Not to mention active, intentional and ideologically motivated lying and smearing which has accompanied this effort. That is necessary to pretend that record isn't there and what it is.
Before the Second World War the pro-Darwin side hardly ever tried to cover up what he said. Back when eugenics was respectable within the affluent, political, legal and academic establishments, no one seems to have tried to distance Charles Darwin from his role in its origins and early history. Eugenicists openly claimed to be the upholders of his legacy and neo-eugenicists still do, in the form of natural selection when not explicitly owning Darwin for their cause . Natural selection is the absolutely required base of eugenics, eugenics couldn't exist without the assumption of the beneficial effects of natural selection and the belief that keeping those deemed "unfit" alive so they can have children will cause a disaster. And Charles Darwin is inseparable from natural selection. He would have been an obscure 19th century quasi-dilettante natural philosopher without it, such as so many of those you could see in that collection of the Anthropological Review I linked to below.
If the case seems repititious, I can't be sure people are reading all of the posts in this case. A blog is not a book, people seldom read all of the pages of a blog. Repeating important points is also essential to make what I'm saying clear. Repetition is also needed because the same material supports several different points that need to be made. The malignant effects of what Darwin said are rather large. Considering that essentially everything all of them said is a repetition of the two ideas that are the basis of eugenics, you can't avoid repetition in presenting this topic.
In the end, I'd like people to leave Charles Darwin in the past just as they have most other figures in science. His usefulness in non-scientific, ideological matters has prevented that natural progression as his ideas, many of which have been abandoned within science, are superseded by other ones. Natural selection as it is constructed in 2013 is far, far removed from what Charles Darwin published in 1859, not to mention in later editions which were already modifying that. I look at it and see a strong case for evolution and a far weaker one for natural selection. In researching this issue, I've come to conclude that natural selection is not a real force of nature or even particularly good as a law of science. I've come to conclude that natural selection is, at its most basic level, a habit of thought, a paint-by-number that people fit evidence into. It is vague enough, with blurry outlines so that many things can be fit into that frame. Quite often natural selection is an article of faith, as required of biologists and of respectable members of the so-called intelligentsia just as surely as mouthing belief in the 39 Articles used to be required of faculty members in English universities.
I would like to see evolutionary science look at physical evidence and evaluate it without the need to uphold an idea of that sort. I would like to see public school science classrooms concentrate on a practical curriculum that gives the general run of students important information to maintain their and their families' health and to make intelligent, informed, responsible decisions as citizens and as decent human beings. I would like to see both sides in the Darwin Wars shunted to the side and segregated from science and public life, I would like Charles Darwin to be a moot point in political and civic life.
I will post again on Tuesday or Wednesday, the topic will be Democracy.
The Lives and Deaths of Millions of People: Darwin and Haeckel 2
This last naturalist, besides his great work, 'Generelle Morphologie' (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edition in 1870), published his 'Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte,' in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine. Wherever I have added any fact or view from Prof. Haeckel's writings, I give his authority in the text; other statements I leave as they originally stood in my manuscript, occasionally giving in the foot-notes references to his works, as a confirmation of the more doubtful or interesting points.
Charles Darwin: Introduction, The Descent of Man
While arguing about the role Charles Darwin played in the beginning of eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany, I was accused of cribbing from creationists. My answer to that is there is no better road map to the sources proving my case than the citations of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man with confirmatory material found in the letters and elsewhere. Almost everything I've used here, other than the material his sons provided, is either directly taken from Charles Darwin or other works he cited as reliable science.
There can be no plainer declaration made by Charles Darwin than that he was in agreement with what Ernst Haeckel said than this:
Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
Haeckel confirmed Darwin's conclusions in the Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, and Darwin granted him superior knowledge on many points.
Darwin went much farther than that in his endorsement of what Haeckel said in his book, Darwin said if he hadn't been far into writing The Descent of Man when Haeckel's book was published, he'd have abandoned his own, second major book on the topic of evolution. That is a pretty strong endorsement from the biggest name in evolution in the 1870s and rather shocking considering what Haeckel said in the book, which is saturated by some of the most racist assertions purported to be science, which I've ever read, endorsements of frequent and widespread infanticide, the murder of a list of named groups deemed to be inferior, of warnings of the danger to the human population of the unchecked breeding of them and especially the risk to those populations he explicitly lists as the crowing glory of the human species. Just about every assertion that makes Haeckel so controversial was present in his writing cited by Darwin, quite a bit of it fully developed, in this book.
Yet Darwin gave Haeckel's Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte the highest praise and recommendation of any book he cited. I can't recall Darwin praising any other book in higher terms. If anyone takes Haeckel as speaking for Darwin in that book, they can justify that assumption from that endorsement. If Darwin wanted to distance himself from Haeckel's book, he would have chosen different words. By what he said, Darwin owns it.
[Note: I will be using the translation of Naturliche Sschopfungsgeschichte, "The History of Creation", translated by E. Ray Lankester , first published in 1876. Most of the material relevant to this discussion is contained in chapters 22 and 23, about the origin of human beings. Haeckel's division of people into races and ranking those supposed races by ascending rank from lowest to highest, largely based on skin color and ethnicity. I will refer to the book as "The History of Creation" that name instead of the German from here on, though in his book Darwin always used the German title. It is certain that Darwin knew this translation.]*
By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, even what would become infamous as Haeckel's weird materialistic "mysticism", his brand of monism is there, fully developed. And he attributes that to Charles Darwin in his first chapter, calling the "triumph" of "monism" "the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin."
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Any assertion that Darwin wouldn't have noticed that sentence, early in the book, is not credible. Nor is it credible that he could have misunderstood what Haeckel meant by it. Later in the book, Haeckel went into considerable detail about what this monism he attributes to Darwin is and what it means in human life. Which is important but other than to point out that Haeckel's ideas that would be expressed for the rest of his life and which have made his name infamous were present in the book Darwin endorsed, I will not go into it in this post, though the idea included Haeckel's depraved version of the "struggle for life" and the desirability of what he deemed the superior parts of the human species subdued those he deemed lesser. That was one of the major planks in his monist ideology. When monism is what is being asserted, no conclusion reached can possibly not be included as part of it. Monism is a universal ideological position which rejects the possibility of anything existing which is proposed to be external to it.
The political effect of that situation today is explosive. Direct quotes from Charles Darwin might be able to slightly mitigate his responsibility for promoting Haeckel and the book in which he said these things and the ideas contained in it, I have yet to find such quotes. And to have sufficient strength to exonerate Darwin of being Haeckel's inspiration, of encouraging him that he was representing Darwin's ideas, of the public SCIENTIFIC promotion of what Haeckel said. Only the repudiation of Haeckel in as serious and public a venue would suffice. Private declarations would not be enough to do that. His supporters' thousand and one excuses can never overcome this, at least not if the facts of the evidence are at issue instead of mythological smoke screens. Since his endorsement was in his second most substantial book purporting to be science, I don't think anything short of a similarly grave repudiation of that endorsement suffices to get him off the hook for having made it.
Instead, I will cite a few of the statements directly related to Darwin's endorsement of what Haeckel says about "the genealogy of man" and issues related to The Descent of Man in this and other posts. Note that in the translation of the book, the word "species" is frequently used to mean what is commonly referred to as "race" today. This can be a little confusing to a modern reader but I will give the text as Lankester translated it.
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man (Homo Mediterraneus), has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect. It is generally called the Caucasian race, but as among all the varieties of the species, the Caucasian branch is the least important, we prefer the much more suitable appellation proposed by Friedrich Müller, namely, that of Mediterranean, or Midland men. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. The former area of the distribution of this species is expressed by the name of “Indo-Atlantic” species, whereas at present it is spread over the whole earth, and is overcoming most of the other species in the struggle for existence. In bodily as well as in mental qualities, no other human species can equal the Mediterranean. This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilization which seems to raise man above the rest of nature.
Haeckel History of Creation
Given his endorsement of the book, it's not unfair to compare this with Darwin's statements about "Caucasians", especially in relation with other racial groups in The Descent of Man. But, to save time, here is more of what Haeckel said, mixing his racial hierarchy with assumptions of natural selection:
Within the tropical regions, Negroes, Kaffres, and Nubians, as also the Malays and Dravidas, are in some measure protected against the encroachments of the Indo-Germanic tribes by their being better adapted for a hot climate; the case of the arctic tribes of the polar regions is similar. But the other races, 325 which as it is are very much diminished in number, will sooner or later completely succumb in the struggle for existence to the superiority of the Mediterranean races. The American and Australian tribes are even now fast approaching their complete extinction, and the same may be said of the Papuans and Hottentots.
Haeckel History of Creation
Reading those passages, it's impossible not to remember one of the most infamous passages in The Descent of Man:
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae—between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Some of Darwin's defenders will be quick to eagerly read that to mean that Darwin is looking forward to an inconvenient gap in the fossil record being filled by the extinction of "the savage races" and the "antropomorphous apes", and not merely that, " The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." Which doesn't exactly cohere with what Darwin said but, then, few of these salvage operations of the pure and innocent Darwin do.
Whether or not there's much of a difference between whether Darwin's hope is hoped for because it will add weight to natural selection or because he favors the anticipated further demarcation between species he and probably most other scientists already held were absolutely separated, might be a question worth considering. In either one he eagerly anticipated the extinction of "savage races" which would benefit "the civilised races of man" who will be the one doing the exterminating. That certainly sounds familiar to anyone with an education today, it describes the premise of Nazi racism and "racial hygiene". There is no other way to say it. Darwin frequently hides behind a general term "savage," only infrequently identifying what people he actually meant, but there can be little doubt that those seldom were white, Northern Europeans. He ranked them by class instead of by race.
Getting back to the dodge mentioned in the preceeding paragraph, If one is better than the other, it's not by much. Especially as Darwin presents all of the extinctions as a scientifically determined outcome, not to be avoided. I've been unable to find Schaaffhausen's article so I don't know if it addressed that situation or if he merely merely talked about the future extinction of the great apes, as it would seem from where Darwin places the citation. If including entire races into this extinction prophesy was Darwin's doing seems to be a question in need of an answer. As is the similarity between Darwin's prediction and Haeckel's [N.B. see yesterday's post, I may have found it. If I did that blows the lid off of Darwin's assertions and the effort to try to mitigate the true evil of what he said.]
In other places Darwin presents the extinction of entire races of humans with stunning easiness. A section of Chapter Seven is named "On the extinction of races". The account of the genocide by the English of the Tasmanians is among the most horrifyingly repulsive examples of this, Haeckel explicitly lists Australians as among the most primitive, ape like of humans and Darwin doesn't seem to take their mass murder as an especially serious matter:
When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted only of 120 individuals (37. All the statements here given are taken from 'The Last of the Tasmanians,' by J. Bonwick, 1870.), who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island. This island, situated between Tasmania and Australia, is forty miles long, and from twelve to eighteen miles broad: it seems healthy, and the natives were well treated. Nevertheless, they suffered greatly in health. In 1834 they consisted (Bonwick, p. 250) of forty-seven adult males, forty-eight adult females, and sixteen children, or in all of 111 souls. In 1835 only one hundred were left. As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania. They then consisted (Dec. 20th, 1847) of fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children. (38. This is the statement of the Governor of Tasmania, Sir W. Denison, 'Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' 1870, vol. i. p. 67.) But the change of site did no good. Disease and death still pursued them, and in 1864 one man (who died in 1869), and three elderly women alone survived. The infertility of the women is even a more remarkable fact than the liability of all to ill-health and death. At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, they told Mr. Bonwick (p. 386), that only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children!
With respect to the cause of this extraordinary state of things, Dr. Story remarks that death followed the attempts to civilise the natives. "If left to themselves to roam as they were wont and undisturbed, they would have reared more children, and there would have been less mortality." Another careful observer of the natives, Mr. Davis, remarks, "The births have been few and the deaths numerous. This may have been in a great measure owing to their change of living and food; but more so to their banishment from the mainland of Van Diemen's Land, and consequent depression of spirits" (Bonwick, pp. 388, 390).
Note the transition from the extermination of an entire population by intentional murder "the famous hunt**" to the genocide being presented as if it was a description of the natural decline of a rare species. "As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania". It is a passage that it would be hard to top for depravity with anything I've read by Haeckel. If it is different in tone or content from Haeckel it is a difference too subtle for me to see. Darwin goes on to report on the Maoris and other existing human populations in the region as dispassionately. Where I'd expect most people to note the effects of invasion, murder, enslavement, intentional genocide, the theft of lands and the displacements to uninhabitable regions - until something valuable is discovered there as well, Darwin sees all of that as the action of nature, determined, inevitable. As Darwin begins that section:
"When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race."
One or two instances of such statements would be enough to forever damage the reputation of any other figure in history and Darwin said such things far more often than that. Only with Darwin, he is continually excused from his own words and his own publication record, even in what he presented as science, which is held up as the most serious and controlled of all possible expressions of thought.
Given the seriousness of these issues, the lives and deaths of people, individually and in the millions, given the fact that making Darwin the trademark, the brand name and the figure head of evolutionary science, it will have to eventually face that record which will never go away. The impunity given him by the post-war cover up of his own words will not hold. If political liberals leave the truth about Darwin to conservatives, we will pay a price for repeating the obvious lie that he was innocent. If evolutionary science continues to cave to the ideologues who mount the false front for Charles Darwin, it too will suffer for it. I believe it already has. Charles Darwin's record, which I have always looked at from the foundation of my accepting the fact of evolution, will always be there. Its meaning is as clear as his own famously lucid writing. His full endorsement of Haeckel's worst ideas is absolute fact, far clearer fact than that with which supports the fact of evolution, far more than supports his theory of natural selection. There is no reasonable denial he meant what he said and no ambiguity in it. No room for honestly saying he didn't say what he clearly did.
Any group which Darwin identified as "savages," any group targeted in passages he wrote or endorsed from Haeckel and other writers, have a continuing interest in condemning them all. That will not go away, we will not die out as they obviously hoped. We will be here to witness to the things said about us, our ancestors and our children. When it's someone expressing your inherent inferiority, your irretrievably degenerate state, giving scientific reasons for your receiving second rate treatment, and even eagerly anticipating your extinction, you have every right to notice it and reject what is said.
What Darwin, Haeckel and others said in the 19th century had real effects in the world, the link between them and the political and legal expression of what they said is as clear as those who endorsed what they said as they put their scientific claims into applied use. In some cases, just as Darwin and Haeckel called for.
* Lankester was a naturalist, a long time member of Darwin's circle, a correspondent during that period, someone Darwin lobbied to get into the Linnean Society during the time Lankester was translating and publishing his translation, and a close associate of Thomas Huxley. I'm certain that translation would have been known to and certainly read by Darwin, who clearly read the material he cited from the German original. As a close associate of Darwin as Lankester was, if there was anything questionable mentioning Darwin in Haeckel's book, I am certain he would have drawn Darwin's attention to it, seeking confirmation of the accuracy of his translation.
Most of the material relevant to this discussion is contained in chapters 22 and 23, about origin of human beings, Haeckel's division of people into races and ranking those supposed races by ascending rank from lowest to highest, largely based on skin color and ethnicity.
** Why not even "the infamous "hunt"? The admirers of Charles Darwin are always presenting him as a great humanitarian but, other than a few instances that could fall into the category of noblesse oblige, he seems remarkably callous and indifferent to human suffering and death in the majority of the population. Contrast his tone in those passages to his at times gushy concern for the work of Haeckel, Galton and other professional associates. The answer to why he doesn't criticize Haeckel for his excesses would lie in those passages in which he calmly, coolly, contemplates the alleged benefits of countless people dying as children and where he talks about things like that with studied indifference.
I'm not pretending I don't see what's on the page right in front of me.
Note: It is a general assumption in literary and intellectual analysis that when an author repeats ideas and expressions of an author they've read, they got what they said from the original author. Scholars studying such things generally honor the person who originated the idea and honor the original author on that point. When other people repeat those ideas from books and authors they are known to have read, even without citation, they are assumed to be influenced by the things they read. Only, when it comes to Darwin and, now, Haeckel and those who read them, that obvious intellectual chain of origination is required to be denied.
There is a recently begun campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Ernst Haeckel. I suspect it is a mop up operation of those who want to falsify the record of Charles Darwin. Darwin made it impossible to pretend that he disapproved of what Haeckel was saying up into the early 1880s and by then Haeckel had said much of what associates him with Nazism, saying what many of the most infamous Nazis said more than a half century before they said it. The more I look at Haeckel's influence, through his students, such as Alfred Ploetz, who were directly involved in Nazi eugenics and through many of the intellectuals who supported and, in many cases joined the Nazi party, he can only be deNazified by willfully lying about the actual history of where they got those ideas which led to laws and policies and the murders of millions of people. Many of those people also read Darwin - it is absurd to believe that they could not have been influenced by Haeckel - second only to Darwin in Germany on these subjects - and not have been influenced by the man he credits as the founder of his monistic system. They could not have avoided reading Haeckel's continual citation of Charles Darwin to support his contentions and Darwin's support of what Haeckel said, right up till the end of his life. Haeckel continually noted the open and private support of Darwin for his own ideas. Those contentions he was making into the 20th century were largely present in books which Darwin had cited publicly and praised privately in the existing letters he sent to Haeckel, in Haeckel's reports of private conversations with Darwin and in Darwin's public citations of him. The rehabilitation of Haeckel depends on lying about what he said, repeatedly, in his books beginning in the 1860s, before Nazis said the same things, just as the rehabilitation of Darwin depended on separating him from his own words, pretending his own citations and endorsements don't exist. And also in defending him from the testimony of his own family and colleagues who knew him better than anyone else then and everyone else now.
The University of Chicago historian Robert J. Richards seems to be the central figure in the Haeckel rehabilitation effort, which is being championed by the pro Darwin industry as well.
Charles Darwin: Introduction, The Descent of Man
While arguing about the role Charles Darwin played in the beginning of eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany, I was accused of cribbing from creationists. My answer to that is there is no better road map to the sources proving my case than the citations of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man with confirmatory material found in the letters and elsewhere. Almost everything I've used here, other than the material his sons provided, is either directly taken from Charles Darwin or other works he cited as reliable science.
There can be no plainer declaration made by Charles Darwin than that he was in agreement with what Ernst Haeckel said than this:
Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
Haeckel confirmed Darwin's conclusions in the Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, and Darwin granted him superior knowledge on many points.
Darwin went much farther than that in his endorsement of what Haeckel said in his book, Darwin said if he hadn't been far into writing The Descent of Man when Haeckel's book was published, he'd have abandoned his own, second major book on the topic of evolution. That is a pretty strong endorsement from the biggest name in evolution in the 1870s and rather shocking considering what Haeckel said in the book, which is saturated by some of the most racist assertions purported to be science, which I've ever read, endorsements of frequent and widespread infanticide, the murder of a list of named groups deemed to be inferior, of warnings of the danger to the human population of the unchecked breeding of them and especially the risk to those populations he explicitly lists as the crowing glory of the human species. Just about every assertion that makes Haeckel so controversial was present in his writing cited by Darwin, quite a bit of it fully developed, in this book.
Yet Darwin gave Haeckel's Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte the highest praise and recommendation of any book he cited. I can't recall Darwin praising any other book in higher terms. If anyone takes Haeckel as speaking for Darwin in that book, they can justify that assumption from that endorsement. If Darwin wanted to distance himself from Haeckel's book, he would have chosen different words. By what he said, Darwin owns it.
[Note: I will be using the translation of Naturliche Sschopfungsgeschichte, "The History of Creation", translated by E. Ray Lankester , first published in 1876. Most of the material relevant to this discussion is contained in chapters 22 and 23, about the origin of human beings. Haeckel's division of people into races and ranking those supposed races by ascending rank from lowest to highest, largely based on skin color and ethnicity. I will refer to the book as "The History of Creation" that name instead of the German from here on, though in his book Darwin always used the German title. It is certain that Darwin knew this translation.]*
By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, even what would become infamous as Haeckel's weird materialistic "mysticism", his brand of monism is there, fully developed. And he attributes that to Charles Darwin in his first chapter, calling the "triumph" of "monism" "the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin."
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Any assertion that Darwin wouldn't have noticed that sentence, early in the book, is not credible. Nor is it credible that he could have misunderstood what Haeckel meant by it. Later in the book, Haeckel went into considerable detail about what this monism he attributes to Darwin is and what it means in human life. Which is important but other than to point out that Haeckel's ideas that would be expressed for the rest of his life and which have made his name infamous were present in the book Darwin endorsed, I will not go into it in this post, though the idea included Haeckel's depraved version of the "struggle for life" and the desirability of what he deemed the superior parts of the human species subdued those he deemed lesser. That was one of the major planks in his monist ideology. When monism is what is being asserted, no conclusion reached can possibly not be included as part of it. Monism is a universal ideological position which rejects the possibility of anything existing which is proposed to be external to it.
The political effect of that situation today is explosive. Direct quotes from Charles Darwin might be able to slightly mitigate his responsibility for promoting Haeckel and the book in which he said these things and the ideas contained in it, I have yet to find such quotes. And to have sufficient strength to exonerate Darwin of being Haeckel's inspiration, of encouraging him that he was representing Darwin's ideas, of the public SCIENTIFIC promotion of what Haeckel said. Only the repudiation of Haeckel in as serious and public a venue would suffice. Private declarations would not be enough to do that. His supporters' thousand and one excuses can never overcome this, at least not if the facts of the evidence are at issue instead of mythological smoke screens. Since his endorsement was in his second most substantial book purporting to be science, I don't think anything short of a similarly grave repudiation of that endorsement suffices to get him off the hook for having made it.
Instead, I will cite a few of the statements directly related to Darwin's endorsement of what Haeckel says about "the genealogy of man" and issues related to The Descent of Man in this and other posts. Note that in the translation of the book, the word "species" is frequently used to mean what is commonly referred to as "race" today. This can be a little confusing to a modern reader but I will give the text as Lankester translated it.
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man (Homo Mediterraneus), has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect. It is generally called the Caucasian race, but as among all the varieties of the species, the Caucasian branch is the least important, we prefer the much more suitable appellation proposed by Friedrich Müller, namely, that of Mediterranean, or Midland men. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. For the most important varieties of this species, which are moreover the most eminent actors in what is called “Universal History,” first rose to a flourishing condition on the shores of the Mediterranean. The former area of the distribution of this species is expressed by the name of “Indo-Atlantic” species, whereas at present it is spread over the whole earth, and is overcoming most of the other species in the struggle for existence. In bodily as well as in mental qualities, no other human species can equal the Mediterranean. This species alone (with the exception of the Mongolian) has had an actual history; it alone has attained to that degree of civilization which seems to raise man above the rest of nature.
Haeckel History of Creation
Given his endorsement of the book, it's not unfair to compare this with Darwin's statements about "Caucasians", especially in relation with other racial groups in The Descent of Man. But, to save time, here is more of what Haeckel said, mixing his racial hierarchy with assumptions of natural selection:
Within the tropical regions, Negroes, Kaffres, and Nubians, as also the Malays and Dravidas, are in some measure protected against the encroachments of the Indo-Germanic tribes by their being better adapted for a hot climate; the case of the arctic tribes of the polar regions is similar. But the other races, 325 which as it is are very much diminished in number, will sooner or later completely succumb in the struggle for existence to the superiority of the Mediterranean races. The American and Australian tribes are even now fast approaching their complete extinction, and the same may be said of the Papuans and Hottentots.
Haeckel History of Creation
Reading those passages, it's impossible not to remember one of the most infamous passages in The Descent of Man:
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae—between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Some of Darwin's defenders will be quick to eagerly read that to mean that Darwin is looking forward to an inconvenient gap in the fossil record being filled by the extinction of "the savage races" and the "antropomorphous apes", and not merely that, " The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." Which doesn't exactly cohere with what Darwin said but, then, few of these salvage operations of the pure and innocent Darwin do.
Whether or not there's much of a difference between whether Darwin's hope is hoped for because it will add weight to natural selection or because he favors the anticipated further demarcation between species he and probably most other scientists already held were absolutely separated, might be a question worth considering. In either one he eagerly anticipated the extinction of "savage races" which would benefit "the civilised races of man" who will be the one doing the exterminating. That certainly sounds familiar to anyone with an education today, it describes the premise of Nazi racism and "racial hygiene". There is no other way to say it. Darwin frequently hides behind a general term "savage," only infrequently identifying what people he actually meant, but there can be little doubt that those seldom were white, Northern Europeans. He ranked them by class instead of by race.
Getting back to the dodge mentioned in the preceeding paragraph, If one is better than the other, it's not by much. Especially as Darwin presents all of the extinctions as a scientifically determined outcome, not to be avoided. I've been unable to find Schaaffhausen's article so I don't know if it addressed that situation or if he merely merely talked about the future extinction of the great apes, as it would seem from where Darwin places the citation. If including entire races into this extinction prophesy was Darwin's doing seems to be a question in need of an answer. As is the similarity between Darwin's prediction and Haeckel's [N.B. see yesterday's post, I may have found it. If I did that blows the lid off of Darwin's assertions and the effort to try to mitigate the true evil of what he said.]
In other places Darwin presents the extinction of entire races of humans with stunning easiness. A section of Chapter Seven is named "On the extinction of races". The account of the genocide by the English of the Tasmanians is among the most horrifyingly repulsive examples of this, Haeckel explicitly lists Australians as among the most primitive, ape like of humans and Darwin doesn't seem to take their mass murder as an especially serious matter:
When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted only of 120 individuals (37. All the statements here given are taken from 'The Last of the Tasmanians,' by J. Bonwick, 1870.), who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island. This island, situated between Tasmania and Australia, is forty miles long, and from twelve to eighteen miles broad: it seems healthy, and the natives were well treated. Nevertheless, they suffered greatly in health. In 1834 they consisted (Bonwick, p. 250) of forty-seven adult males, forty-eight adult females, and sixteen children, or in all of 111 souls. In 1835 only one hundred were left. As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania. They then consisted (Dec. 20th, 1847) of fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children. (38. This is the statement of the Governor of Tasmania, Sir W. Denison, 'Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' 1870, vol. i. p. 67.) But the change of site did no good. Disease and death still pursued them, and in 1864 one man (who died in 1869), and three elderly women alone survived. The infertility of the women is even a more remarkable fact than the liability of all to ill-health and death. At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, they told Mr. Bonwick (p. 386), that only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children!
With respect to the cause of this extraordinary state of things, Dr. Story remarks that death followed the attempts to civilise the natives. "If left to themselves to roam as they were wont and undisturbed, they would have reared more children, and there would have been less mortality." Another careful observer of the natives, Mr. Davis, remarks, "The births have been few and the deaths numerous. This may have been in a great measure owing to their change of living and food; but more so to their banishment from the mainland of Van Diemen's Land, and consequent depression of spirits" (Bonwick, pp. 388, 390).
Note the transition from the extermination of an entire population by intentional murder "the famous hunt**" to the genocide being presented as if it was a description of the natural decline of a rare species. "As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania". It is a passage that it would be hard to top for depravity with anything I've read by Haeckel. If it is different in tone or content from Haeckel it is a difference too subtle for me to see. Darwin goes on to report on the Maoris and other existing human populations in the region as dispassionately. Where I'd expect most people to note the effects of invasion, murder, enslavement, intentional genocide, the theft of lands and the displacements to uninhabitable regions - until something valuable is discovered there as well, Darwin sees all of that as the action of nature, determined, inevitable. As Darwin begins that section:
"When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race."
One or two instances of such statements would be enough to forever damage the reputation of any other figure in history and Darwin said such things far more often than that. Only with Darwin, he is continually excused from his own words and his own publication record, even in what he presented as science, which is held up as the most serious and controlled of all possible expressions of thought.
Given the seriousness of these issues, the lives and deaths of people, individually and in the millions, given the fact that making Darwin the trademark, the brand name and the figure head of evolutionary science, it will have to eventually face that record which will never go away. The impunity given him by the post-war cover up of his own words will not hold. If political liberals leave the truth about Darwin to conservatives, we will pay a price for repeating the obvious lie that he was innocent. If evolutionary science continues to cave to the ideologues who mount the false front for Charles Darwin, it too will suffer for it. I believe it already has. Charles Darwin's record, which I have always looked at from the foundation of my accepting the fact of evolution, will always be there. Its meaning is as clear as his own famously lucid writing. His full endorsement of Haeckel's worst ideas is absolute fact, far clearer fact than that with which supports the fact of evolution, far more than supports his theory of natural selection. There is no reasonable denial he meant what he said and no ambiguity in it. No room for honestly saying he didn't say what he clearly did.
Any group which Darwin identified as "savages," any group targeted in passages he wrote or endorsed from Haeckel and other writers, have a continuing interest in condemning them all. That will not go away, we will not die out as they obviously hoped. We will be here to witness to the things said about us, our ancestors and our children. When it's someone expressing your inherent inferiority, your irretrievably degenerate state, giving scientific reasons for your receiving second rate treatment, and even eagerly anticipating your extinction, you have every right to notice it and reject what is said.
What Darwin, Haeckel and others said in the 19th century had real effects in the world, the link between them and the political and legal expression of what they said is as clear as those who endorsed what they said as they put their scientific claims into applied use. In some cases, just as Darwin and Haeckel called for.
* Lankester was a naturalist, a long time member of Darwin's circle, a correspondent during that period, someone Darwin lobbied to get into the Linnean Society during the time Lankester was translating and publishing his translation, and a close associate of Thomas Huxley. I'm certain that translation would have been known to and certainly read by Darwin, who clearly read the material he cited from the German original. As a close associate of Darwin as Lankester was, if there was anything questionable mentioning Darwin in Haeckel's book, I am certain he would have drawn Darwin's attention to it, seeking confirmation of the accuracy of his translation.
Most of the material relevant to this discussion is contained in chapters 22 and 23, about origin of human beings, Haeckel's division of people into races and ranking those supposed races by ascending rank from lowest to highest, largely based on skin color and ethnicity.
** Why not even "the infamous "hunt"? The admirers of Charles Darwin are always presenting him as a great humanitarian but, other than a few instances that could fall into the category of noblesse oblige, he seems remarkably callous and indifferent to human suffering and death in the majority of the population. Contrast his tone in those passages to his at times gushy concern for the work of Haeckel, Galton and other professional associates. The answer to why he doesn't criticize Haeckel for his excesses would lie in those passages in which he calmly, coolly, contemplates the alleged benefits of countless people dying as children and where he talks about things like that with studied indifference.
I'm not pretending I don't see what's on the page right in front of me.
Note: It is a general assumption in literary and intellectual analysis that when an author repeats ideas and expressions of an author they've read, they got what they said from the original author. Scholars studying such things generally honor the person who originated the idea and honor the original author on that point. When other people repeat those ideas from books and authors they are known to have read, even without citation, they are assumed to be influenced by the things they read. Only, when it comes to Darwin and, now, Haeckel and those who read them, that obvious intellectual chain of origination is required to be denied.
There is a recently begun campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Ernst Haeckel. I suspect it is a mop up operation of those who want to falsify the record of Charles Darwin. Darwin made it impossible to pretend that he disapproved of what Haeckel was saying up into the early 1880s and by then Haeckel had said much of what associates him with Nazism, saying what many of the most infamous Nazis said more than a half century before they said it. The more I look at Haeckel's influence, through his students, such as Alfred Ploetz, who were directly involved in Nazi eugenics and through many of the intellectuals who supported and, in many cases joined the Nazi party, he can only be deNazified by willfully lying about the actual history of where they got those ideas which led to laws and policies and the murders of millions of people. Many of those people also read Darwin - it is absurd to believe that they could not have been influenced by Haeckel - second only to Darwin in Germany on these subjects - and not have been influenced by the man he credits as the founder of his monistic system. They could not have avoided reading Haeckel's continual citation of Charles Darwin to support his contentions and Darwin's support of what Haeckel said, right up till the end of his life. Haeckel continually noted the open and private support of Darwin for his own ideas. Those contentions he was making into the 20th century were largely present in books which Darwin had cited publicly and praised privately in the existing letters he sent to Haeckel, in Haeckel's reports of private conversations with Darwin and in Darwin's public citations of him. The rehabilitation of Haeckel depends on lying about what he said, repeatedly, in his books beginning in the 1860s, before Nazis said the same things, just as the rehabilitation of Darwin depended on separating him from his own words, pretending his own citations and endorsements don't exist. And also in defending him from the testimony of his own family and colleagues who knew him better than anyone else then and everyone else now.
The University of Chicago historian Robert J. Richards seems to be the central figure in the Haeckel rehabilitation effort, which is being championed by the pro Darwin industry as well.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
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