It was one of the really eye-opening and shocking experiences I got when I started going online and reading the unfiltered, undiluted thinking of thousands more college credentialed people on the putative left the extent to which their lines of ideological assertion depend on the ignorance of those who accept them. Tens if not thousands of times more lefties than I ever could have afforded to read in print or heard on TV or the radio, many times more than ever appeared in those venues which so suddenly became quaint with the internet. While, in some ways, those ideological assertions aren't as obviously malignant as those on the right, there are plenty of them which are and plenty of them as dependent on lies and distortions and, as said, the ignorance of those they hope will accept them without fact checking.
There is absolutely no disputing Karl Pearson's Darwinist credentials, everyone I've ever read or heard on him, his work, his politics, his thinking during his lifetime and up till today have identified him as a Darwinist, one of the quintessential Darwinists, appointed as such by those who had the highest qualifications to make that identification, those who Charles Darwin said were the foremost carriers of his theory in science. Certainly Francis Galton, who was Pearson's teacher and model who chose him to carry on the leadership of his academic work, just as Galton more or less chose Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, to head British eugenics. Every other one of Charles Darwin's chosen inner circle seems to have, as well, accepted Karl Pearson, proto-Nazism and all, as an exponent of genuine Darwinism. As did British science. Karl Pearson was the fourth recipient of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1898, two years after it was given to Darwin's "bull dog" Thomas Huxley, two years before Ernst Haeckel (the "chorus leader" of Darwinism in Germany, a title Huxley gave Haeckel) was given it and four years before Darwin's second most often cited scientist, Pearson's teacher, Francis Galton was given it. And I will note, after he wrote some of the things I have cited, they knew all about his proto-Nazi theories, though as Nazism hadn't been named yet, they couldn't have called it that. It is the ideas, themselves, that carry the poison, not the name.
So, no. There is no way out of accepting that the things Pearson said in 1900 and 1904 and in 1925 which were identical to the theoretical basis of the Nazi genocides, including, as I showed yesterday, that which led directly to the gas chambers and ovens in Auschwitz and the rest of the Nazi murder industry was mainstream Darwinism coming from one of the quintessential mainstream Darwinists in the pre-war period. That is as permanent a feature of the history of Darwinism as Leonard Darwin saying in April, 1939 that the Nazi's eugenic laws were in line with his own eugenics, which he, himself, attributed to his father. There is no one who has denied that who has the standing of Leonard Darwin to make that attribution, he made it repeatedly over the course of decades when his siblings and others who intimately knew Charles Darwin were alive to refute Darwin's son, if they believed he was lying about that. None of them ever did, I have challenged Darwin idolizes to show me anyone who did deny those links in the pre-war period, I've been doing that for a decade, no one has come up with anything.
Oh, yes. This paper is behind a paywall, the friggin' JSTOR one, so I can't read it, but get the title, Karl Pearson: Socialist and Darwinist and the name of the author, I believe a variant on the name of the ass who trolls me. I would be curious to know if Bernard Semmel read the Pearson-Moul paper I wrote about yesterday and maybe someday I'll be able to afford to find out if he noted it and its consonance with Nazism.
I will say that what I've read this week tipped the scale and I have really come to the conclusion that the word "socialism" has been so damaged with associations with the Fabians, the Marxists, the fascists, the Nazis and the Darwinists that I don't think it's ever going to recover any clean and non-pathological meaning. It's time to dump the word and all of that baggage and find some new articulation of democratic economic justice. If we have got to keep distancing ourselves from the history of the word, nothing is going to get done.
I would advocate something that ties that articulation of democratic economic justice to The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel, perhaps the Qu'ran and the Dharma or other anti-materialist ideas. It will have to be something that radically rejects the old, putrefied baggage of "socialism" to that extent. I would also divorce it from atheist materialism and scientism because those are exactly what led socialism wrong in the first place. If you read the first page of Semmel's paper, you will note that Haeckel, Darwin and Huxley all saw that Darwinism was incompatible with democracy and socialism, just one of the materialist ideologies that is deadly to both democracy and socialism. And as they were Darwinists, democracy and socialism were delusions to them. As can be seen from Pearson's articulation of the alleged scientific, biological imperative to commit genocide and continual internal culling within groups, his socialism pretty much did away with both democracy and the only thing about socialism that was ever any good, anyway. Without universal economic justice, socialism does devolve into a species of Nazism. That's what also happened under Marxism, after all.
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