Eugenocide
Darwinism & the Rise of German Eugenics
by Richard Weikart
Darwinism was a matter of life and death, and no one understood this better than Darwin. Immediately after explaining that each organism “has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction,” he closed his chapter on “The Struggle for Existence” in On the Origin of Species on a more comforting note: “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”
This put a rather positive spin on the struggle for existence, the law, as he put it, “leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” Even while overtly denying any purpose or goal for evolution, Darwin could not resist the mid-Victorian cult of progress.
One of the alluring features of Darwinism, it seems to me, is that it offers a secular answer to the problem of evil and death. Indeed, it was more than an answer—it gave Darwinists hope and inspiration that suffering and death would ultimately spawn progress. Darwin clearly viewed death and destruction as an engine of evolutionary progress, as we see in the penultimate sentence of On the Origin of Species: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
The Darwinian idea of death as a natural engine of evolutionary progress represented a radical shift from the Christian conception of death as an unnatural, evil foe to be conquered. This shift would bring in its train a whole complex of ideas that would alter ways of thinking about killing and the “right to life.”
Darwinian Theodicy
Darwin’s jubilation at the power of natural selection to wrest victory from the jaws of death is reminiscent of the biblical promise, “Death is swallowed up in victory.” In one respect, then, his theory of natural selection was a secular answer to Judeo-Christian theodicy (the justification of belief in a benevolent God in a world of evil), since it provided an explanation for the existence of evil and promised that evil would ultimately fulfill a good purpose.
In a speech in 1909 honoring Darwin’s hundredth birthday, a famous professor at the University of Munich expressed exactly this point. Max von Gruber opened his speech by countering the common misconception that nature is peaceful, harmonious, and idyllic. Rather, it is “filled with pitiless, gruesome struggle, with torment and death.” Darwin, he exulted, had discovered a rationale behind all this seemingly meaningless misery:
The never-ceasing struggle is, according to him [Darwin], not useless. It constantly clears away the malformed, the weak, and the inferior among the generations and thus secures the future for the fit. Thus only through the inexorable extermination of the negative variants does it provide living space for the strong and its strong offspring, and it keeps the species healthy, strong, and able to live.
Suffering and death, then, fulfilled a higher purpose: the preservation and advancement of all living beings. Even though Gruber thought human reason and pity could and should mollify the struggle among humans, Darwinism helped him find purpose and meaning in the mass destruction of other organisms.
Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (both from Palgrave Macmillan). Some of his writings can be found at www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart.
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