Arnhart on Hitler’s Ethic 9 Sep 2009 Larry Arnhart has a pretty solid review of Richard Weikert’s latest anti-Darwin guilt-by-association text linking Darwin to Hitler. However, I think he gives too much away. Weikert links Darwin to Hitler by way of the shared ideas of struggle and racial purity. Wait, what now? Where does Darwin ever talk about racial purity? If you read the Nazi rhetoric, and ask what the scientific foundations or sources for their ethic are, they are not Darwin: they are Pasteur and Galton, or in more general terms, the sciences of infectious disease and of genetics. So don’t base your ethics on these sciences. In fact believe them to be false because they have bad consequences. There’s a fallacy about that, which I am struggling to recall… The distal sources of Hitler are animal husbandry, as all eugenics have been since Plato’s Republic and the Spartans (and probably somewhere in the Indus Valley and the Egyptian royal lineages) through the European medieval and later marriages of “good blood” and “breeding”; and the notion that infection is a malady of degeneration, leading to the idea that Jewish and Slav genes will infect the Aryan purity. There’s nothing of Darwin in any of this. Read the speeches and the books. Look at what is being appealed to here. Almost nothing is based on anything resembling survival of the fittest even if that were the right way to characterise Darwinian thought. And Haeckel is overly assimilated into the Nazi canon, just as Nietzsche was (but not Wagner; he was a malignant little pimple with a turn for a tune). Nationalism? Been around for ages before Darwin and still is, from sources that have nothing to do with evolution and biology. Eugenics? Horse breeding. Authoritarianism? Read Robert Filmer’s 1680 Patriarcha sometime. Antisemitism? Well that goes back to the English in King Richard the Lionheart’s time… I don’t concede very much of Weikert’s thesis, absed on his 2004 book. I’ll look at the new one, but I don’t expect much more honest and careful historical interpretation than the first. Yes, there were people who made nasty arguments about race using Darwin. Also using the Bible, English law, genetics, free market economics, and so forth. Even communism. The cause of racism is not Darwin, and the cause of the Shoah is not either. What Weikert is no doubt avoiding saying is that the mediate foundation for all these evils was religion. The Nazis used religion in a way that would have made Machiavelli, let alone Burke, gasp in horror. Hitler and his minions used Catholicism and Lutheranism when they could (read up on the Confessing Church as an underground movement opposing the state accepted churches sometime). More than any scientific worldview, they employed anything they could to bolster their “Volkish philosophy”, which had roots far deeper and more insidious than evolutionary biology. It’s just a myth, a propagandistic claim made by those who wish to evade their own traditions’ responsibilities for what happened. Nothing to see here. Move along. Ethics and Moral Philosophy Evolution History Philosophy Religion Sermon
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So don’t base your ethics on these sciences. In fact believe them to be false because they have bad consequences. There’s a fallacy about that, which I am struggling to recall… Argumentum ad Dufuses, I think. If you accept the history of ideas, Isaiah Berlin traces Nazism back through Romanticism to German Pietism.
I always thought Alfred Rosenburgh was the big influence on Hitler. But I suspect Weikert will have to ignore him to make his point. Houston Stewart Chamberlain a big influence on Rosenburgh was not exactly a fan of Darwin he viewed Germany as being able to shake of what he refered to as the “English sickness”, which within a hundred years would be “judged as men today judge alchemy.” I suspect from what Ive read that Weikert would agree with such ‘Facist rhetoric’. http://books.google.com/books?id=vUwxW_ZwkgkC&pg=PA106&dq=“Houston+Stewart+Chamberlain”+darwinism&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES#v=onepage&q=%22Houston%20Stewart%20Chamberlain%22%20darwinism&f=false I came across this comment by Weikert which I found rather a suprising claim. “In a seminar two bright students once told me point-blank that based on their understanding of the Darwinian origins of morality, they do not think that Hitler was evil.” http://www.discovery.org/a/6691
Anti-semitism goes back further than Richard I . There were major persecutions of Jews during the First Crusade at the end of the 11th Century – and incidents before that.
Edward the 1st. first major expulsion. The statute of Jewery he issued stated that all Jews had to wear a yellow badge.
My understanding is that anti-Semitism can be first identified among the Greeks, who, even before the (alleged) birth of Christ were not big fans of Jews (weren’t some of the first anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria?) I don’t know whether Christian anti-Semitism can be traced to the Greeks, but I suppose, considering the substantial influence that all things Greek played in the development of Christianity during its first few centuries, it might have played a role. Whatever the case, clearly by the Middle Ages, anti-Semitism was a facet of European Christendom. In my many debates with Creationists who try to make the link between Darwin and the Holocaust, I’ve simply come to the conclusions: 1. They minimize to the extreme the extent of pre-Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout Europe. 2. They basically assert that there is no meaningful link between the 1,500 or 1,600 years of anti-Semitism in European Christendom and the anti-Jewish sentiment that Hitler so well manipulated.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” –Charles Darwin, DESCENT OF MAN, 1871, 1:201
Yeah, we know about that one. And it’s not, in any sense, an advocacy of this outcome. I’ve dealt with this before, here, here, and here
Rather than horse breeding aren’t the ideas of genetic superiority more likely descendants of ideas about aristocracy?
Both. Aristocratic breeding was the transfer of the equestrian class’s shared knowledge about horse breeding to themselves. In some ways they cared more about the horses. Animal husbandry is the distal source of all this stuff. Including genetics itself (although we must include a massive amount of botanical breeding skills as well there).