Yesterday I criticized the scholars who take on that most dismal and so necessary of scholarly topics, the Shoah, the genocides of the Nazis, a study that is matched in grim awfulness only by the study of other genocides, especially those of the modern period. I said that they had been reticent to state the obvious fact, as obvious as the Nazis own advocacy of and elucidation of their plans, that their genocide against the Jews and others they identified as national groups was based on Darwin's theory of natural selection - in German natürliche Auslese. As I showed yesterday, in the actual documents from the Wannsee Conference in which the criminals planned the largest program of mass murder in the history of planned mass murders, they used those very words.
My criticism accused that area of scholarship of being afraid of rousing the ire of the Darwin industry and cult which mounted the post-Nazi, post-WWII fraud of the eugenics free Darwin who had nothing to do with eugenics as (what is considered, by scientists to be) science and as political policy, even though that connection between natural selection is only deniable by telling a whopper of a lie, a lie whose selling to at least the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples is a huge success in salesmanship. That sales job has been done through costume dramas on the BBC and PBS and by popular science, it has been done through the para-scientific media and it has even become a part of "liberal religion". "Darwin Sunday" is becoming a fixture in many churches, even as the people turning Darwin into some kind of Christian figure are entirely ignorant of what the man advocated and the fact that natural selection is a total and complete negation of the Gospel, the Prophets and The Law. If you want to see what a really awful thing this is, google "darwin sunday" in light of what his actual writing shows and in all of its church hall kitchiness.
I should have mentioned that in thinking about this it occurred to me that the academic suppression of the obvious Darwinism of the Nazi's genocidal thinking could have had a less craven motive, they may fear that pointing out that natural selection is a component of such genocidal thinking will empower it for that purpose. The use of natural selection to advocate removing groups from the human future predates Nazism, it started immediately after the theory was published turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton and in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself*. They may well fear exactly what I said was true, that science in the form of natural selection, can be used as a potent justification of genocide, as it, in fact was justified by scientists. They might fear that with the retention of the theory that pointing out the obvious would be used politically and legally to support genocide in exactly the same way it was used to justify lesser forms of eugenics.
That fear is not only well founded, it is absolutely founded in the history of Darwinism in real history, in real life, in real law, in everything from the forced and coerced sterilizations in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to the actual murders of the Nazis and others, which preceded the Nazis in East Africa in the first decade of the 20th century. I have looked at the documentation of English and American eugenicists, Eugen Fischer, the scientific officer of the African genocide, its Mengele, was an honored participant in English language eugenics in the 1920s and 30s, he was a professional scientist even in the post-war period when at least one person I've read advocated he be hanged along with the rest of the Nazi war criminals.
As even the academic study of the Shoah is finding, it cannot avoid the fact that those who planned, advocated and carried out the Nazi genocides were instructed on how and what to do by American and other eugenicists, it will not be able to give an accurate account of the Final Solution as planned at the Wannsee Conference without addressing its Darwinistic foundation in natural selection. Which is part of why I have come to conclude that as long as that theory has currency in science it is a real danger if not a guarantee that what was done as a result of believing it will happen again. It happened more than once already, it started happening as soon as the first actual laws based on natural selection were put into place, it happened as soon as war gave scientific officers like Fischer a chance to practice it for the advancement of science. All of that is part of the same continuum of Darwinism in real life, in real history, in the phenomenon of human thought in human culture.
It is interesting, though horribly grim, to read how the thinking of the sheer and calculating evil of Reinhardt Heydrich, the sadistic and proudly efficient murderer, the man with a "heart of iron" was confused in exactly the same way that natural selection required to be to be accepted as a scientific theory. His assertion that even those Jews who had survived the first selection, to be murdered immediately, due to their presumed lack of economic utility to Nazism (they even called Germans placed in that category "useless eaters"), even the ones of those who they could not manage to work to death, the survivors of even the program to work them to death, would have to be murdered despite their economic utility due to their survival proving they were superior - "the fruit of natural selection" - because they could be counted on to restart a Jewish race. No doubt one that Heydrich suspected would be biologically superior to the one the Nazis planned on wiping out.
What is so striking in that is that he and the Wannsee documents give the entirely human planned and artificial selection of the Nazis the status of being "natural". That is exactly what Darwin did to sell his theory of natural selection when he used the entirely artificial practice of animal husbandry in commercial animal breeding of farm animals and pets as an instance of and proof of "natural selection." There is nothing "natural" about human breeding of animals anymore than there was the genocide of the Nazis, but that basic category error is the foundation of the theory as an explanation of the evolution of species, only one of the huge problems with the theory. There is no secure means of identifying the artificial selection of human beings and their intentional choosing of animals for early slaughter and those chosen to be allowed to breed with anything that happens naturally, there was never any reason to believe that the one artificial practice was what actually happens in nature resulting in new species.
The category errors don't stop there, though, as from the time of Darwin it was also used to confuse the difference between diversity within a species with difference among different species - if "species" diverging is based on an inability to mate to produce live, reproducing offspring. Clearly the two categories have hard, biological differences of the most basic and extensive meaning.
Bad articulation almost inevitably produces bad science, that is something that has been known from the time of at least Lavoisier,
It is impossible to disassociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based, the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind, and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.
Antoine Lavoisier, 1789
And when one word is used to portray different phenomena, the results are not a representation of reality. That leads to confusion but it can lead to entirely more horrible things than mere confusion. Especially when science is granted such omnipotence on the basis of its presumed omniscience. It can even be used to justify mass murder. It was used to justify the French Revolution cutting off Lavoisier's head in the name of reason. Bad science has real life consequences.
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The word "antisemitism" is a fairly new word, having been invented in the 19th century, in German, in one of the more enormous of contemporary ironies, by a raging antisemite, Wilhelm Marr, to give sciency cachet to his hated of Jews and to his political program using hatred of Jews to gain power and to harm Jews.
And the ironies never seem to end with Marr, all three of his wives had Jewish ancestry even as he developed one of the pillars of Nazi ideology, the biological impossibility of Jews becoming Germans.
I am going to spend a little time with Marr, the inventor of the word "antisemitism" to illustrate one of the really big problems with the way the word is used. It is used to describe everything from a desire by Christians to convert Jews to Christianity, a desire by some Christians who believe being Christian is essential for salvation, for Jews to be saved and it is used to describe those who hate Jews and want do destroy them in the most horrific of tortures, to obliterate them on the basis of their biological identity. And it is a word used to describe everything between those two opposite ends and so much more beside that. It is used to describe Jews who criticize the policy of the Israeli government but who, nevertheless, support the existence and flourishing of Israel.
In one of Marr's antisemitic pamphlets, The Victory of Judaism Over Germany: From a nonreligious point of view,** Marr identifies Christians as "new-jews" attributing to them one of the most vicious of perennial attributes given to Jews.
The Roman world of the day as well as all of classical antiquity was in the throes of disintegration at the time the Jews were imported. Semitism therefore encountered fertile ground for its realistic approach and already in Constantine’s days the “new-Jews” (Christians) were the power behind the money.
All the nations of antiquity, including the trading Phoenicians and Carthaginians, did not think well of engaging in, what we now call dotage, profiteering and usury. If in the Middle Ages we encounter a “Mr. Moneybag” he was a Jew. Jews were made use of but despised. This attitude is similar to its modern form, in which traitors are met with contempt while their treason may be welcome.
The abstract realism of Judaism had thus been forcibly imported into western society by the Romans. Times and circumstances proved favorable for Judaism’s development and proliferation. Judaism had turned into the realistic helper in history and encountered a more fertile ground for its indolent and speculative realism in the West than it ever possessed in Palestine.
This, of course, provoked envy among the peoples of the West and since the mob has always preferred to use religion as a cover for its ends, so the spread of Christianity was accompanied by the spread of an (apparent) religious hatred of Jews in the Occident.
I am not a student of Marr's writing so I have not looked for confirmation of this being a feature of his, the coiner of the term's, antisemitism, an equation of Christianity with Judaism, any Christian hatred of Jews covering up the fact that Christianity is how Judaism spread and, in Marr's assertion, was victorious over Germany. I haven't but will be looking into that, I'm sure, though I don't have the time to, right now.
It does, though illustrate how fraught with ambiguities and contradictions and ideological opportunities that badly defined words, especially neologisms intended to be scientific can be. The present program to come up with an international definition of "antisemitism" is full to the top with all three, the desire being to use the word to describe entirely different things and to associate all of those things, everything from wanting Jews to achieve salvation through conversion (not something I think is necessary for Jews to be saved, by the way) with the Nazi genocide and those who would like to do that again, to those who are critical of Israeli military and domestic policy. That present day project is bound to only make things worse because, though the idea of fixing on a definite definition for the term might be a good one, they want to reproduce all of the problems with the word within their definition and many of them want to do so for ideological purposes instead of lexicographical clarity.
* It infact predates Nazism, turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, or, at any rate, expressed with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton. And in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself. Not to mention the sons of Charles Darwin, George and Leonard as well as others in the direct line of scientific and quasi-scientific-political Darwinism.
** In researching this post the ironies came on fast and hard. Note who this translated version of the pamphlet comes through, one of the most noted of scientific antisemites, the man David Irving called on to be his scientific witness in his lawsuit to shut-up the fine scholar of the Shoah, Deborah Lipstadt, Kevin Macdonald. I can only wonder at his motives in posting the translation of Marr but I am pretty sure it is not my motive in citing it. Macdonald is a proponent of the ultra-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology, a man who published peer-reviewed antisemitism as science in reviewed journals and who was honored by late 20th, early 21st century science based in California, the state which wrote the eugenic law the Nazi used as the model for their eugenics laws. I wouldn't be surprised if Macdonald takes it down if he finds out about this post.
Update: If what I wrote wasn't provocative enough, already, I will note that I've never seen, anywhere, that along with the categories of "war criminal", those who committed "cries against humanity" I've never seen anyone propose categorizing those who committed atrocities in the name of science as having committed "crimes against science" or even "crimes against intellectual decency". By agreement and out of utilitarian expediency those last two areas have been exempted from considerations of morality. I think that when they are granted an assumption of omnipotence on the basis of presumed omniscience along with that exemption, they are bound to become fruitful generators of murderous depravity for which the perpetrators will be granted an exemption by reason of science. The history of post-war Nazi scientists, even those who produced some of the most potent excuses for mass murder and whose work was part of that industrialization of human lives and bodies demonstrates that that suspicion is, as well, securely founded.
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