From Darwin to Hitler -- Darwinism and the culture of death

By Aussiegirl

Here's a fascinating review of a new book called "From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany", by Richard Weikart.

So -- you thought Darwinism was the very latest in enlightened scientific and rational thought? That only knuckle-dragging religious zealots and bigots subscribed to a more God-centered view of man as a creature made in God's image and possessing a soul and a rational mind capable and indeed, obligated to make moral choices for good or evil?

Well, of course, if one applies the theories of Darwin to man and makes him little more than a slightly advanced animal, then what's morality got to do with it? It's survival of the fittest, bub, and kill or be killed or eat or be eaten. And best to rid the human race of those who are less than perfect, and to cleanse the gene pool to lay the foundation for a truly grand future of perfect people inhabiting a perfect world.

Once we understand the true implications of Darwinism and its effect on the thinking of the 20th Century, it is clear why we live in a culture of death, and why the sacraments of the left are abortion and euthanasia. Fabulous review -- highly recommended -- read the whole thing.

New Oxford Review

From Darwin to Hitler is a fine work about how Darwin's notion of morality virtually supplanted Christian morality in Germany between the 1870s and the 1930s. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin suggested that morality was the result of biological evolution and that it differed only in degree, not in kind, from the social instincts of animals. While admitting that man, due to his cognitive abilities, had evolved further than animals, Darwin insisted that his social instincts, too, had developed by natural selection in the struggle for existence. Richard Weikart shows that Darwin's materialist account of morality hugely influenced German intellectuals of that era, causing many of them to reject the sanctity of life.[...]

One concludes from reading Weikart that the Culture of Death sprang from evolutionism. For Darwin "viewed death and destruction as an engine of evolutionary progress" and saw the carnage left behind by natural selection as ultimately fulfilling "a good purpose." Death was key to the vision that Darwin borrowed from Malthus. Thus, Thomas Huxley rightly saw that, according to Darwin, "only from death on a genocidal scale could the few progress." The individual is "nothing" and the species "everything," and therefore, Ludwig Büchner concluded, the smallest steps of progress in history or nature are marked "with innumerable piles of corpses." Carneri called such deaths a source of "rejuvenation," while Friedrich Hellwald envisioned the victors in the evolutionary struggle striding "across the corpses of the vanquished." Man was a part of nature, like animals, Tille said, and nature had no qualms about sacrificing the individual to "the species." In Christianity, however, each person is called to salvation and eternal life. This exaltation of the person had been the cornerstone of Western life for over a millennium by the time Darwinism arrived; even in the 18th century, when Christianity was under attack, the sanctity of human life remained enshrined in classical liberal ideology. But in the following century, the Darwinists would work to change all that, by denying the "unique moral status" of the human being based on "an immaterial soul" and by rejecting the "sacred and inviolable" nature of human life. Darwinist Robby Kossman explained that evolution removed the barrier between man and animal, so it now looked "sentimental" for Christians to "overestimate" the life of an individual, when the progress of the species had to come through "the destruction of the less well-endowed individual." (Here one can already glimpse therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem-cell research on the horizon.)

Karl Vogt saw the mentally disabled as "closer to apes in their brain function" than to "the lowest normal humans." He called the "microcephalic" the "missing link between apes and humans." On this point, Darwin agreed. According to Weikart, contempt for the disabled was rife "in the writings of biologists, psychiatrists, and physicians around the turn of the century." Ignaz Kaup called them "parasites." Heinz Potthoff criticized welfare programs for supporting "idiots and cripples." Theodor Fritsch referred to certain individuals as "half" or "quarter" people, and Alfred Hoche dubbed the mentally disabled the "mentally dead." These attitudes derived from Darwinism and were thought to serve evolutionary progress. Weikart sees Darwinists as having "replaced God with evolution."

Between the publication of the Descent of Man and the 1930s, the sanctity of human life came under all-out attack. Infanticide, involuntary euthanasia, abortion, and suicide all became topics of public debate. At that time, Weikart says, Darwinists claimed "they were creating a whole new worldview with new ideas about the meaning and value of life based on Darwinian theory." The science of evolution suddenly mushroomed into a full-fledged counter-Christian morality. For instance, Haeckel argued that "the developing embryo, just as the newborn child, is completely devoid of consciousness, is a pure 'reflex machine,' just like a lower vertebrate." The preborn child during the first year, he said, crossed all the "evolutionary stages of its ancestors" and at birth reached only the level of "our animal ancestors." Thus, the newborn possessed "no consciousness and no reason," and killing such a child was "no different than killing other animals." In addition, Haeckel defended suicide, assisted suicide, and "the involuntary killing of the mentally ill," along with the killing of "lepers, cancer patients, and others with incurable illnesses."