On Darwinism and Hitlerism

ON DARWINISM AND HITLERISM

(Excerpts from Joshua Youngkin, “Richard Weikart on Darwinism and Hitlerism,” Evolution News and Views, September 20, 2011)

In his most recent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Discovery Institute fellow Richard Weikart lays out a historian’s case for the proposition that Adolf Hitler’s murderous policies arose from a scientific racism inspired by Charles Darwin’s most famous ideas.

According to Weikart, Hitler wasn’t an amoral monster, but a frighteningly “moral” one — “moral” in the sense of principled, of course. Principles can be directed to evil or to good. Hitler was an autocrat who aimed to bring about what seemed to him to be a praiseworthy end, a biological utopia forged in the fiery struggle for life. In Hitler’s mind, this world-to-come would be the inevitable result of Natural Selection, a blind and unforgiving process he would merely speed along by expansionist warfare, eugenics, and institutional racism. In Hitler’s view, evolutionary progress was so great an end that any means used to achieve it would be moral, even programmatic genocide.

The most ghoulish evils of Nazi foreign and domestic policy were made possible in the first place because Hitler sought to apply Darwinian concepts to the world outside the biology lecture hall. Mere ideas are not to blame for mortal suffering, true, but in light of Hitler’s Ethic, the exportation of Darwinian ideas outside the confines of biological study merits close watch.

One academic reviewer, Professor Larry Arnhart, has questioned the causal connection between the thoughts of Charles Darwin and those of Adolf Hitler. By fixing on a trivial truth, Arnhart misses Weikart’s main point.

As Arnhart rightly points out, the German-reading Hitler probably did not read the original works of the English-writing Charles Darwin. Hitler no doubt learned Darwinian theory through the mediating influences of fellow German-speakers like Ernst Haeckel. But most people who know about Darwinian theory first become acquainted with it through writers or teachers other than Charles Darwin. I know I did. Even Richard Dawkins became a committed Darwinist well before he read Darwin, as he comments [September 20] in the New York Times.

The point is, however and through whomever Hitler imbibed Darwinian notions he clearly applied them outside their proper place to bring about suffering he sincerely viewed as moral by the “light” of those notions. For this, Weikart puts Hitler on trial, leaving Darwin in the dock awaiting prosecution by another.

(Joshua Youngkin, “Richard Weikart on Darwinism and Hitlerism,” Evolution News and Views, September 20, 2011)