I am accused of the unpardonable sin among the college-credentialed class of the English speaking people of having read of the forbidden fruit, I'm accused of having read and been influenced by the historian Richard Weikart to which I answer, of course I have read him. That doesn't mean we agree on everything, we certainly don't. It doesn't necessarily mean we agree on much of anything. I treat Weikart the same way I do every single other secondary and tertiary source in polemical discourse - I CHECK THEIR CLAIMS AGAINST THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION THEY CITE and any I know they may not have cited.
I would note that if anyone could be discredited by what they've read maybe the rule should work in reverse and authors read by the disreputable, such as myself, should share in that disrepute, in which case count in Richard Weikart's sometimes foe Robert Richards of the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago, would-be rehabilitator of that moral cess pool Ernst Hackel and defender of the faith in St. Charles Darwin. I've also read of him, though I am not as impressed with his handling of primary documentation as I am with Weikart, and that's not because I don't have disagreements with Weikart. I'm not sure he can read German as well as Weikart, can. I'm not even sure he reads English as well.
In this part of his long review of one of Richard's books, I would go a lot farther than Weikart has in attributing proto-Nazi concepts to Charles Darwin, though, except in one fleeting mention in one letter, I would not think a charge of antisemitism could be justified in what I've read (I doubt anyone has read every letter and essay and paper and book the interminable scribbler wrote) I am tempted to think that might be attributable to Benjamin Disraeli's heritage making it somewhat unfashionable in some circles to express that particular sentiment. I think that has more to do with social propriety in his Britain than any firm moral conviction. Darwin (and so his wife, Emma) seems to have switched his position on Irish home rule on the power of his having been honored by a visit from Gladstone. I've read that after her husband died, Emma felt free to revert to the anti-Irish position she and, apparently her husband, had held before. It certainly didn't stop Charles Darwin from expressing a rather disgusting claim of biological degeneracy in the Irish, a position he adopted from one of the most vulgar and putrid of the founding generation of eugenicists, W. R. Greg, though Darwin cherry picked and pruned Greg's original, an instance of convenient elision or distortion that isn't unique in Darwin's scientific writing.
I have noted that any such reticence in the British disciples of Darwin had certainly evaporated by the 1920s, the period of the rise of Nazism, as I've noted his biological grandson, as it were, Karl Pearson was writing papers warning about the dysgenisis that could come to Britain by letting what he scientifically asserted to be degenerate Polish and Russian jewery emmigrate to and live in Britain. I'd love to know if his 1925 paper appears as a citation or is quoted in Nazi literature, we know some of them were aware of Pearson's work, he helped some of them in excluding some from being "Aryans."
But as Weikart, rightly, points out that Darwin didn't express antisemitic racism and so Hitler's antisemitism is cannot be attributed directly to Darwin, Darwin did express some of the most vicious of racist-genocidalist claims as being founded in science, he did so repeatedly in The Descent of Man and in positively Hitlerean terms in letters such as his correspondence with Gaskell. That Darwin had a different list of which "races" their superiors were to murder, cutting them off from the future than Hitler did, doesn't improve his moral status. Every genocidalist has at least one group it leaves off their kill list, their own.* That doesn't change the fact that Hitler's conception of genocide rendering the survivors superior is an idea that Charles Darwin inserted into the mainstream of science. Anyone who denies that is either entirely ignorant of Darwin's own writing or they are lying about what he said, as science, with citations of his disciples such as Haeckel and Greg and in one case falsely claiming another eminent scientist of his time made supporting statements of the most appalling genocidal triumphalism.
As I pointed out, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second in command, in many respects, defined Nazism as "applied biology." In Germany, in the 1920s and 30s, that biology was thoroughly Darwinian saturated in concepts of natural selection and its application in legal, social and military policy, something which has confirmation, among other places, in the findings of the eminent Darwinist biologist, the American, Vernon Kellogg as he talked to his fellow scientists who were also members of the German military during the First World War. We also know the one biology text that we know Hitler was relying on as he was in prison ranting out his Mein Kampf to be taken down in dictation by, guess who, RUDOLF HESS, the thoroughly Darwinist Grundrisses der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene.
Anyone in the post-war period who wants to distance Charles Darwin from the Nazi eugenics program (something I have yet to find done before WWII) also faces the daunting task of refuting those connections made by someone who knew Charles Darwin better than they ever will, no matter how much of him they read, his own son Leonard Darwin who repeatedly, over decades, and even up to the months before the start of World War Two, months before the start of Hitler's genocides in the T4 murders of the disabled linked his father to eugenics and, specifically, Nazi eugenics. No one today and probably no one else in April 1939 knew the thinking of Charles Darwin better than Leonard Darwin did. He had access, not only to what we have today, he knew the man as intimately as a child will know their own father, having heard his candid, off the record thoughts. Charles Darwin may have died seven years before Hitler was born but that doesn't mean Hitler wasn't following a Darwinian prescription, a rather conventional Darwinist.
* That is if you don't count their own poor, their own disabled, Hitler and Darwin were of one mind in the benefits that would come with the elimination of even their fellow Englishmen and Germans such as those people. I think that, especially in relation to the poor, the exact opposite in the Law of Moses and the Gospel was and is one of the primary motivations for the hostility to that religious orientation.
Update: I had a few minutes as the Republicans were lying in the House Impeachment debate, so I looked up online to find out if I could find Nazi science citing Karl Pearson's 1925 paper in which, using Darwinian arguments, he claimed the scientific determination of the inferiority of Polish and Russian Jews and the catestrophic results if they were allowed to live in Britain, and, wouldn't you know, I found it cited by no other than the trio of scientists who wrote the one book on biology we know Hitler was reading as he was codifying his theory.
I don't have time to find my program for easily typing out German and doing it so I'm copying from the automated text generation at Archive.org for Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene - Band 2 (1932)
Die Einwanderung fremder Rassenelemente nach England
sucht man natürlich möglichst zu verhindern. In Betracht kommt
hier hauptsächlich die Einwanderung von Ostjuden; man scheut
sich aber, diese bloß wegen ihrer Rassenfremdheit als uner-
wünscht zu bezeichnen. Pearson 1 ) hat daher versucht, durch
Untersuchungen an ostjüdischen Kindern zu zeigen, daß diese un-
günstiger veranlagt seien als die Kinder angelsächsischer Abstam-
mung; die Judenmädchen sollen danach auch intellektuell unter
dem Durchschnitt der englischen Bevölkerung stehen, was indes-
sen nicht gerade überzeugend ist. Jedenfalls aber hat Pearson
recht, wenn er sich auf den Standpunkt stellt, daß nur die Zu-
lassung von solchen Einwanderern in ein dichtbevölkertes Land
ratsam sei, die im Vergleich mit der eingesessenen Bevölkerung
überdurchschnittlich veranlagt seien.
Für Deutschland ist das Problem der östlichen Einwanderung . . noch brennender.
*) Pearson, K. und Moul, M. The problem of allen Immigration
into Great Britain etc. Annais of Eugenics. Bd. i. H. i. und 2. 1925. S. 5 ff
Imperfect as the transfer may be, if you can read that without being chilled, you are a Nazi.
I'll warn you that the Google translation of this is likely deceptive, though if you continue with it onto the next page, it confirms that the conventional British Darwinism of Karl Pearson, seven short years later, directly informed Nazi eugenics on the "Jewish Question" especially in regard to the Jews the Nazis first targeted for genocide, as part of their "Problem der östlichen Einwanderung," that they considered "noch brennender" their elucidation of their scientific conclusions dragging in exported American anti-Black racism as well as "eastern Jews". I wouldn't make too much of their claim that their warning off allowing them to "mix" with native German Jews as exculpation. The SS and the Einsaztz Gruppen found that their trained mass murderers found it easier to murder Jews who didn't appear to be too German, but they overcame that feeling rather fast.
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