The Descent of Inhumanity

I am told that some of you are finding this argument interesting enough to encourage me to continue it.  So I will, though it isn't my intention to make the Darwinian nature of eugenics, both in English and in German the theme of this blog.  My intention is, still, to investigate how the American liberal tradition was damaged, how it lost political power and how it can get back in power to put the traditional American liberal agenda into law, making equality and justice real through the assumption of moral responsibility a reality in the lives of every person.   And even more important than mere laws is making it the intentional and purposeful thought and action of people through their full belief in the reality and rightness of those things.

I suppose, that being the goal of this blog and my life as a political person, it is inevitable that this issue would be one that came up.   Natural selection is, as Charles Darwin, himself said, "Survival of the Fittest." The immediacy of several of his most acute readers, most notably the scientific genius Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics to think of the implications of that for the human population and its persistence as a theme of Darwinists in every generation since then proves that natural selection is an idea inevitably at odds with that American liberalism.   Darwinism insists on the inequality of living beings, individuals and, through its assignment of value on the basis of inherited traits, families, ethnic groups and entire races as well as species.  So the equality of human beings in a very real way is denied by Darwinism.   That, as well, is an idea that immediately flowed from it and has, as well, persisted among Darwinists in every succeeding generation.

It cannot be true that all people are created equal and the that Darwinian view of the human species is true, certainly not if you deny there is anything to people other than their physical bodies and that the mind is merely the chemicals and physics moving around and recombining in the physical brain, which, as well, has been a persistent holding of many, though, I will admit, not all Darwinists.  The only way for someone who believes that natural selection is the supreme law of nature to believe in the equality of all people is to assign a metaphysical quality of equality to them which can't be accounted for with science.   Something which is supernatural, above the nature that natural selection is held to be an aspect of.  There is no where else for equal rights to come from under the dogma of natural selection.  Without that, either admitted to or denied, being the nature of such Darwinist equality, natural selection is a denial of the equality of people, the right to justice and the moral obligation to treat all people justly on an equal basis.

However, even with that rare mindset posed as a theoretical possibility, I will maintain that the primary and inevitable results of a belief in natural selection in terms of politics and society will always be the devaluing of some people and the belief that that devaluation is a scientifically proven fact of life.  The literature of Darwinism, from Charles Darwin on is full of those assertions, as I've documented in the words of Charles Darwin, those colleagues of his whose work he cited, in the generation which were taught by those men, directly or through their writing and on through the generations of biologists up till today.  Once Charles Darwin made the decision to impose a Malthusian dogma onto the question of the development of speices, that was bound to be the inevitable and entirely predictable result.  That nature of Malthusian inequality was already obvious from its influence in British law and society, its critics such as William Cobbett had already blasted its inevitable effects, destroying the rights and the lives of the poor and those discriminated against already.  He said that before Charles Darwin had reached adulthood.

One of my conclusions in studying this issue is that as long as the dogma of natural selection is the required framing through which questions of evolution must be seen that it will inevitably generate the promotion of the full range of eugenics, from passive discouragement of those designated as unfit to have children from having children to the advocacy of the utilitarians to practice infanticide in the guise of charity or economic utility to those who advocate genocide as a beneficial and socially hygienic slaughter.

One of the tactics favored by dishonest discourse is to find framings of issues that will achieve their favored result instead of a result that shows the truth, when the truth is not convenient to their preferred ideology.  The framing in this issue which is often pushed is the demand that someone prove that Hitler pretty much say that he got the idea to kill the Jews directly from Charles Darwin. Which is close to the framing that the Darwin-Haeckel apologist brought up yesterday,  Robert Richards, tries to impose on this issue.  Well, that's not going to get anyone anywhere because it will not account for much.  Hitler was several things, a massive liar was one of the most obvious of those.  He is unlikely to tell the truth about anything if he found it even temporarily convenient to lie. Being the charismatic absolute dictator of a vicious and murderous group, surrounded by fanatical devotees, he, unsurprisingly, apparently felt no necessity to tell the truth or maintain any integrity in what he said.  I don't know that anyone ever traced his inconsistencies in what he said but considering the many times he and his regime lied about their real intentions for political reasons, it is stupid to allow anyone to let an argument about his motives rest on what he said.  What the Nazis did is what tells the truth.

As mentioned above, Darwinism isn't a singular ideology, it is a development of the dogmas of Malthus, if you wanted to look at it biologically, it has a genus as well as a species.  The belief in the inequality of individuals and groups is one of the traits of both of those species, which is not a surprise in that Darwinism is the child of Malthusianism.  And, taking this, what might be deemed very appropriate, biological framing further, any ideas that are descended from the son of Malthus will also share the essential traits of the parent.  Eugenics is certainly the child of Darwinism, sharing its features of holding the inequality of individuals.   It is noteworthy that when Galton was inventing eugenics he first focused on the families of famous and, let it not be forgotten, generally rich people, especially those in the Britain that all of the men inventing those ideas sprang from.  I will, for the time being, pass up another opportunity to develop the observation that these ideas were to the practical economic advantage of the class that these men belonged to, the British elite, though I think anyone who doesn't think that had an effect on the coloration of this genus of ideas is rather willfully blind to that fact. A fact which was certainly an important aspect of all of them taking such rapid hold and gaining such immediate influence in politics and economics as well as the science which was, as well, in the hands of the elite members of societies.

To continue with the biological classification of the family of ideas the various forms of eugenics shared in the trait of assigning unequal value to different people, individually, in families, in ethnicity and in races.  That is a persistent trait in these biological strains of Malthusian thought.  A belief which, with Darwin, gained the faithful belief of those who were told it had the total reliability of scientific fact, taught that in schools, in fact, because eugenics very quickly became an established academic subject with textbooks published and school children taught those ideas, it became a topic in high school textbooks and even in those written for younger readers.

And what was true in English was as true in German certainly on the university level AND AS A MATTER OF POLITICAL AND LEGAL THINKING.   As early as July of 1872 Charles Darwin was corresponding with the German lawyer, jurist and law professor Heinrich Fick, discussing the implications of natural selection in the law, the same year he gave his effusive and highest praise to Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte which also contained ideas for applying the wisdom gained from natural selection in society, notably the Spartan practice of, not only legal, but mandatory infanticide.

It appears of interest here to remark that not only natural selection, but also artificial selection exercises its influence in many ways in universal history. A remarkable instance of artificial selection in man, on a great scale, is furnished by the ancient Spartans, among whom, in obedience to a special law, all newly-born children were subject to a careful examination and selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. By this means, the Spartan race was not only continually preserved in excellent strength and vigour, but the perfection of their bodies increased with every generation. No doubt the Spartans owed their rare degree of masculine strength and rough heroic valour (for which they are eminent in ancient history) in a great measure to this artificial selection.

In The Descent of Man, in which he heaped so much praise on Haeckels' book, Darwin echoed this passage:

No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from somehow excelling in utility to their masters. Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers and their tall wives. In Sparta, also, a form of selection was followed, for it was enacted that all children should be examined shortly after birth; the well-formed and vigorous being preserved, the others left to perish. (13. Mitford's 'History of Greece,' vol. i. p. 282. It appears also from a passage in Xenophon's 'Memorabilia,' B. ii. 4 (to which my attention has been called by the Rev. J.N. Hoare), that it was a well recognised principle with the Greeks, that men ought to select their wives with a view to the health and vigour of their children. The Grecian poet, Theognis, who lived 550 B.C., clearly saw how important selection, if carefully applied, would be for the improvement of mankind. He saw, likewise, that wealth often checks the proper action of sexual selection.

Underlining, by me for my critics who are apparently unaccustomed to careful reading. 

Of course, Darwin, being a member of the genteel British upper class was understated in what the clear implications of this idea of the beneficial murder of children were.  However,  Haeckel, applying natural selection in the German academic mode didn't feel so constrained.  Not long after that first passage in his Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte , he advocated it be practiced today.

If any one were to venture the proposal, after the examples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, our so-called “humane civilization” would utter a cry of indignation. But the same “humane civilization” thinks it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of civilized life, and in the continual development of standing armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles. The same “humane civilization” at present praises the abolition of capital punishment as a “liberal measure!” And yet capital punishment for incorrigible and degraded criminals is not only just, but also a benefit to the better portion of mankind; the same benefit is done by destroying luxuriant weeds, for the prosperity of a well cultivated garden. As by a careful rooting out of weeds, light, air, and ground is gained for good and useful plants, in like manner, by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the struggle for life among the better portion of mankind be made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting their injurious qualities by inheritance would be taken from those degenerate outcasts.

In nothing I have ever read from Charles Darwin nor in any of those scientists closest to Charles Darwin, those cited by him as reflecting his own thinking, have I ever come across any disagreement with this idea.  Nor do I think, could anyone fault it on the basis of natural selection as proposed by Darwin.  The idea of natural selection would inevitably lead to the idea of the deaths of those seen as biologically inferior was a good thing and, if it could be done cleanly, in a manner not to excite emotional damage to the ones killing them, the results could only be for the good.   That is a trait that defines the line of thinking of this family of ideas, it is one which Darwin introduced from the economics of Malthus into biological science and, once established as the ruling idea in biology, had consequences in the thinking of scientists and anyone who regarded their science as reliable information.  The speed with which those ideas took hold is rather breathtaking.  It was less than a decade between the publication of Origin of Species and the publication of Galton's first articles and book initiating eugenics, it was less than a year after that which saw the publication of Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, and within a year Darwin was both publishing his own glowing support of both Galton and Haeckl and entertaining ideas of British and German jurists and politicians for putting those ideas into the law.   Clearly that germ line was established and those who carried it on attributed it to Charles Darwin.

I will mostly skip over, for now, the intervening years in which that line of thinking developed in Germany, thought the lines of descent are fairly clear in the students of Haeckel, such as Alfred Ploetz, in their students and colleagues, such as Ernst Rüdin (both of whom were active and prominent Nazis) and in those who received those ideas indirectly through reading Darwin in translation, such as the founder of formal eugenics in Germany Wilhelm Schallmeyer.  Schallmeyer came to prominence through winning the Krupp competition of 1900, with his book answering the sponsor's question,  "What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political development and state legislation?"  Yes, Krupp, of the firm which would profit from the application of such thoughts in the form of slave labor in the next four decades.

Anyway, the point of this is because that idea of Ernst Haeckel survived in the family of ideas in Germany and was repeated rather infamously.

Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

by Adolph Hitler in his "Second Book" and is known to have paraphrased the idea in speeches.

The demand that someone produce the smoking gun of Hitler attributing his inspiration to kill anyone he deemed unfit to a Brit like Darwin is certainly a ridiculous one, especially as he knew he would be at war with them.  It's an especially ridiculous demand to make that he had said that while he was implementing his genocide as he was already at war with Britain.  Even if he had taken the idea that murdering the unfit was a benefit to the survivors directly from Darwin's most blatant assertion of that in The Descent of Man, even if he'd been able to read it in the original English, he's unlikely to have, on the eve of war with Britain to prove German supremacy have acknowledged his debt to a Brit.    He wasn't notably willing to acknowledge that his thoughts hadn't sprung full grown from what his own self-instigated personality cult insisted was his supreme mind but were attributable to others.  But that doesn't change the nature of the thought, its identification as a trait.  Biologists identify traits in animals without their agreement as to the nature of those traits and their origins and its entirely possible to identify the origin of ideas without those expressing them acknowledging their origin by citation.  Failure to give credit would have been as of nothing in the catalog of the sins of Adolph Hitler.  That demand that such citations be produced from academics, today, should definitively impeach the seriousness and, even more so, the honesty of their intent.

Nazi eugenics was an early 20th century variety of eugenics, it was certainly a development from the marriage of theoretical German eugenics with the up and running eugenics programs in America* which had their origin years before the Nazi party ever formed and the people pushing those ideas as the young Hitler was still trying to be an artist.  Those varieties of eugenics were up and proposing changes in the law before Hitler was born, seven years after Charles Darwin died.   Those proposed restrictions on freedom on the basis of inequality were being asserted during Charles Darwin's lifetime, notably by his son, George Darwin, who, with his support, had proposed such laws in an article blatantly entitled On Benefical Restriction to Liberty of Marriage, which included the involuntary and permanent dissolution of marriages on the basis of illness.  Considering the advocacy his father had made for the benefits of far more serious violations of rights in The Descent of Man the year before, it's clear where he got such ideas from.

*  I will remind you that it was American eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and British eugenicists such as Leonard Darwin who were promoting eugenics in Germany in the 1920s and that it was American philanthropic foundations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations which were funding German eugenics and even building its central academic and records keeping institutions.  Every one of the American eugenicists I've ever looked into acknowledged the pedegree of their thinking as founded on Darwin's ideas in the Origin of Species and  The Descent of Man.

Update:  I didn't post your comment, Skepsy, because a. you never addressed any of the answers I gave you and b. there is a problem of translation that I didn't want to get involved in with someone who obviously doesn't know any German, at all.  The problem with your claim is that in his book of Haeckel apologitics, The Tragic Sense of Life, pg. 504 Appendix Two,  your chosen expert Robert Richards, points out that several of the most prominent Nazis, he concentrates on Heinz Brucher, justified their work for the Nazis by citing Haeckel.   He specifically cites Brucher's "Ernst Haeckels Blut-und Geistes Erbe" [Ernst Haeckel's Racial an Spiritual Legacy] of 1936, though Richard's citation, as several of those of things I've read, is so partial and such a perfect example of quote mining and cherry picking that that, also, would involve me in writing at least one long post to point that out.  He could have noted a large number of the Nazi's top experts who were justifying the Nazis racial and social policies and lying the groundwork for the mass slaughters which would begin in the next few years, many of whom were either students of Ernst Haeckel or whose previous publications and some subsequent ones would cite his writings, right up to the fall of the Nazi government.   Not to mention, as I do, above, the uncredited repitition of ideas obviously taken either directly or at second hand from Haeckel.

Only, as you have not once demonstrated, you have to actually read things to know what's wrong with both your claim and Richards' claims.