Darwin's Deadly Legacy

FROM DARWIN TO HITLER:

EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY

by

Richard Weikart

From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany was released in 2004 (paperback edition in 2006) with Palgrave Macmillan in New York, a major publisher of historical scholarship.


Dustjacket blurb:

In this compelling and painstakingly researched work of intellectual history, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially those pertaining to the sacredness of human life. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary "fitness" (especially in terms of intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis. He convincingly makes the disturbing argument that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles rather than nihilistic ones. From Darwin to Hitler is a provocative yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.

Available in paperback at amazon.com. barnesandnoble.com, and other on-line bookstores.

Richard Weikart is professor of modern European history at California State University, Stanislaus. He has lived in Germany over five years, including one year on a Fulbright Fellowship. He has published two previous books, including Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (1999), as well as articles in German Studies Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Isis, European Legacy, and History of European Ideas. For more information, see his professional vita. For information about speaking engagements, please contact him via e-mail (click here).

Praise for From Darwin to Hitler:


"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and 'racial hygiene'. Without over-simplifying the lines that connected this body of thought to Hitler, he demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibitions and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientists, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power." -- Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of The Coming of the Third Reich

"This is one of the finest examples of intellectual history I have seen in a long while. It is insightful, thoughtful, informative, and highly readable. Rather than simply connecting the dots, so to speak, the author provides a sophisticated and nuanced examination of numerous German thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were influenced to one degree or another by Darwinist naturalism and their ideas, subtly drawing both distinctions and similarities and in the process telling a rich and colorful story." -- Ian Dowbiggin, Professor of History, University of Prince Edward Island and author of A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America

"This is an impressive piece of intellectual and cultural history--a well-researched, clearly presented argument with good, balanced, fair judgments. Weikart has a thorough knowledge of the relevant historiography in both German and English." -- Alfred Kelly, Edgar B. Graves Professor of History, Hamilton College, and author of The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914

"This is truly a well-crafted work of intellectual history, and one directly relevant to some of the most consequential ethical discussions of our present time. Christians and all people of good will would do well to ponder these arguments, recognizing how easily the best and brightest can commit the worst and darkest under the progressive banner of biological 'health and fitness.' The book should provoke much debate and discussion, not only among historians but among ethicists and scientists too." --Thomas Albert Howard, Associate Professor of History, Gordon College, author of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University

"The philosophy that fueled German militarism and Hitlerism is taught as fact in every American public school, with no disagreement allowed. Every parent ought to know this story, which Weikart persuasively explains." --Phillip Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance

"If you think moral issues like infanticide, assisted suicide, and tampering with human genes are new, read this book. It draws a clear and chilling picture of the way Darwinian naturalism led German thinkers to treat human life as raw materials to be manipulated in order to advance the course of evolution. The ethics of Hitler's Germany were not reactionary; they were very much 'cutting edge' and in line with the scientific understanding of the day. Weikart's implicit warning is that as long as the same assumption of Darwinian naturalism reigns in educated circles in our own day, it may well lead to similar practices." --Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and co-author of The Soul of Science and How Now Shall We Live

"Richard Weikart's masterful work offers a compelling case that the eugenics movement, and all the political and social consequences that have flowed from it, would have been unlikely if not for the cultural elite's enthusiastic embracing of the Darwinian account of life, morality, and social institutions. Professor Weikart reminds us, with careful scholarship and circumspect argument, that the truth uttered by Richard Weaver decades ago is indeed a fixed axiom of human institutions: 'ideas have consequences.'" --Francis J. Beckwith, Associate Director, J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, and Associate Professor of Church-State Studies, Baylor University

"Richard Weikart has provided bioethicists with an excellent resource in From Darwin to Hitler." --Center for Bioethics and Culture Newsletter

"Weikart has written a significant study because it raises key ethical questions in broad terms that have contemporary relevance. His historicization of the moral framework of evolutionary theory poses key issues for those in sociobiology and evolutionary pscyhology, not to mention bioethicists, who have recycled many of the suppositions that Weikart has traced." --H-Net review on H-Ideas

". . . Richard Weikart's excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable chapter of cultural and intellectual history . . ." --National Review

"This important work of intellectual history will act as a catalyst for rethinking the scientific and social forces that shaped the racial policies of the Third Reich." --Choice

"This book will prove to be an invaluable source for anyone wondering how closely linked Social Darwinism and Nazi ideologies, especially as uttered by Hitler, really were." --German Studies Review

[...]
Methodologically, the book is the kind of history of ideas that connects thinkers and texts by means of conceptual or linguistic resemblances. There are indeed some thought-provoking connections to be made here, for as is well known, National Socialism incorporated ideas about biology, race, struggle, and survival. Less well known may be the particular scientists and social thinkers in Weikart's study, whose writings conveyed Darwinian ideas to the twentieth-century German audience. They developed various naturalistic systems of ethics and various proposals for racial advancement, some of which were reprehensible by any reasonable standard, and some of which bore resemblances to later Nazi ideas.
The method becomes problematic, however, when one tries to argue from these kinds of resemblances to causal relationships. Is the scientific causing the political? Influencing it? Converging with it? Being appropriated and misrepresented by it? ... ... ...
Weikart goes so far as to assert that "in philosophical terms, Darwinism was a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause for Nazi ideology" (p. 9). As the book portrays it, Darwinism's causal role lay in undermining Christian ethics, which would otherwise have held as the last bastion against Nazism, no matter how many other causes were working in Hitler's favor. I suppose this is also the rationalization for leaving all those other causes out of the book. There is of course no way to investigate what would have happened without Darwinism, or even to imagine the modern world without any challenges to pre-modern Christian doctrines. Perhaps Nazism could have been avoided, as Weikart asserts. Perhaps it would only have had to appropriate less biological rhetoric and more of some other sort.

Weikart tries to argue that no ideology as coherent and destructive as Nazism could ever have developed as long as ethics stood on unquestioned Christian foundations, which upheld the sanctity of every individual life. He seems at times to picture a halcyon pre-Darwinian past, when the absolute theoretical foundations of ethics made a real difference in practice. However, as Weikart does acknowledge, there were many ethical lapses before Darwin, too. One might reasonably doubt whether Western civilization was significantly more corrupt after its intellectuals took the naturalistic turn, but Weikart does not. He argues--incredibly, for someone who likes his morals absolute--that things like racism and slavery were less bad before Darwin, because Europeans still had Christian values and were moved to send missionaries to Africa as well as slave traders (pp. 103, 185).

... ... ...

Also in need of addressing is the increasing trend for women of an advanced age trying to make a baby, even as the risk of genetic defect in the offspring skyrockets.

What needs to be addressed is the question of why that woman was not able to start a family at age 17 or 20. Humans are biologically programmed to start families at 16 - 20, and not 35 - 45. The present social arrangement is not working.

The question I would ask before implementing any such thing is: do we want people who cannot financially support a child to have a baby anyway?

Social Darwinism is not Darwinian evolution.

It's no more of a red herring than claiming some biological imperative that women give birth at 18.

Medicine is as artificial as economics.

Medicine makes it possible for older couples to safely have healthy children.
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Yes, but if the right would agree to subsidized child care and perhaps a yearly cash payout for each child as the Europeans do progress could be made.