An essay by Robert J. Richards with Commentary by David Sloan Wilson
Robert J. Richards does not suffer fools lightly. In the title essay of his book Was Hitler a Darwinian? he quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet to describe the search for a Darwinian influence in Nazi war policy: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost the shape of a camel?”
Richards is Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. His interests broadly address the history and philosophy of psychology and biology, including his magisterial 1989 book Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. His new collection of essays examines a number of disputed questions in the history of evolutionary theory, including the widely held view that Darwinian thinking was somehow responsible for the atrocities of the Hitler regime during World War II.
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Richards’ examination of this claim is thorough, including its philosophical underpinnings, the views of Hitler himself, the views of the people who influenced Hitler, and the views of others in Hitler’s regime. In my opinion, it is historical scholarship at its best and I am therefore delighted to make it available in its entirety, with the permission of the author and publisher, as part of This View of Life’s series of articles on Truth and Reconciliation for Social Darwinism.
Richards begins by examining the basic logic of the accusation that Darwin as a person or his theory as a body of ideas influenced Nazi war policy. Let’s say that Hitler kept a copy of Descent of Man at his bedside and quoted it chapter and verse. Would that have made Darwin morally culpable or his theory any less true? Does anyone hold Mendel culpable for eugenic policies, chemists culpable for the use of their compounds in Nazi gas chambers, or Jesus culpable for the many horrors committed in his name (including by Hitler)? The entire logic underlying the accusation is baseless.
In addition, the claim that Hitler was influenced by Darwin, either directly or indirectly, can be authoritatively rejected. In one of the only direct references to evolution by Hitler that can be found, he wrote “nothing indicates that development within a species has occurred of a considerable leap of the sort that man would have to have made to transform him from an apelike condition to his present state.” As Richards remarks, “Could any statement [rejecting Darwinism] be more explicit?”
What’s certain is that Hitler was influenced by German notables such as the composer Richard Wagner and books such as the four-volume “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” by Joseph Arthur Gobineau and “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The ideas of racial purity promulgated by these authors long predated Darwin. Gobineau’s books were published before The Origin of Species and Chamberlin rejected the entire concept of the transmutation of species.
Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s German disciple, is sometimes said to have influenced Nazi war policy, as if he rather than Darwin is culpable. Richards begins by rejecting the idea that Haeckel’s views on evolution differed substantively from Darwin’s. Hence, if the claim about Haeckel were true, then that would trace a clear line of influence back to Darwin. But the claim about Haeckel isn’t true. Both Darwin and Haeckel did rank human races in a hierarchy of intelligence and moral capacity, which was pervasive among Europeans during the 19th century, but Darwin’s racialism didn’t include Jews and Haeckel ranked Jews at the same evolutionary level as Germans and Europeans. Haeckel even spoke directly about anti-Semitism in an interview during the early 1890’s, where he said “I hold these refined and noble Jews to be important elements of German culture”. Richards concludes that “biologists and philosophers most closely identified with the goals of the Nazi party and officials in that party utterly rejected Darwinian theory, especially as advanced by Darwin’s disciple Ernst Haeckel.”
Richards’ essay on Hitler calls into question the entire enterprise of stigmatizing Darwin’s theory of evolution with the term “Social Darwinism”. It’s not as if evolutionary theory has never been used to justify unethical practices. Any idea can be used for good or bad purposes. What’s wrong is the claim that evolutionary theory is somehow especially prone to misuse or was misused in specific cases such as Nazi war policy. We owe a debt of gratitude to careful scholars such as Robert J. Richards for setting the record straight.
Was Hitler a Darwinian?
The Darwinian underpinnings of Nazi racial ideology are patently obvious. Hitler’s chapter on “Nation and Race” in Mein Kampf discusses the racial struggle for existence in clear Darwinian terms. — Richard Weikart, Historian, Cal. State, Stanislaus[1]
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? — Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, 2.
Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler, maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial extermination.”[2] In a subsequent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Weikart argues that Darwin’s “evolutionary ethics drove him [Hitler] to engage in behavior that the rest of us consider abominable.”[3] The epigram to this chapter makes Weikart’s claim patent. Other critics have also attempted to forge a strong link between Darwin’s theory and Hitler’s biological notions. In the 2008 documentary film “Expelled,” a defense of Intelligent Design, the Princeton trained-philosopher David Berlinski, in conversation with Weikart, confidently asserts: “If you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.”[4] John Gray, former professor at the London School of Economics, does allow that Hitler’s Darwinism was “vulgar.”[5] Hannah Arendt also appears to have endorsed the connection when she declared: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”[6] Even the astute historian Peter Bowler comes quite close to suggesting a causal connection between Darwin’s accomplishment and Hitler’s: “By making death a creative force in nature . . . Darwin may indeed have unwittingly helped to unleash the whirlwind of hatred that is so often associated with his name.”[7] Put “Darwin and Hitler” in a search engine and hundreds of thousands of hits will be returned, most from religiously and politically conservative websites, articles, and books.
With the exception of the aforementioned, most scholars of Hitler’s reign don’t argue for a strong link between Darwin’s biology and Hitler’s racism, but they will often deploy the vague concept of “social Darwinism” when characterizing Hitler’s racial ideology.[8] The very name of the concept—whatever its content—does suggest a link with evolutionary theory and particularly Darwin’s version of that theory. The supposed connection between Darwin’s conceptions and Hitler’s is often traced via the biological ideas of the English scientist’s German disciple and friend, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919).
In his book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (1971), Daniel Gasman claimed: “Haeckel . . . was largely responsible for forging the bonds between academic science and racism in Germany in the later decades of the nineteenth century.”[9] In a later book, Gasman urged that Haeckel had virtually begun the work of the Nazis: “For Haeckel, the Jews were the original source of the decadence and morbidity of the modern world and he sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary life and society.”[10] Gasman’s judgment received the imprimatur of Stephen Jay Gould, who concluded in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977):
But as Gasman argues, Haeckel’s greatest influence was, ultimately, in another tragic direction—National Socialism. His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism.[11]
Scholars like Gould, Bowler, and Larry Arnhart—as well as a host of others—attempt to distinguish Haeckel’s views from Darwin’s, so as to exonerate the latter while sacrificing the former to the presumption of a strong causal connection with Hitler’s anti-Semitism.[12] I don’t believe this effort to disengage Darwin from Haeckel can be easily accomplished, since on central matters—descent of species, struggle for existence, natural selection, inheritance of acquired characters, recapitulation theory, progressivism, hierarchy of races—no essential differences between master and disciple exist.[13] So if Hitler endorsed Haeckel’s evolutionary ideas, he thereby also endorsed Darwin’s.
The Supposed Causal Connection between Darwin and Hitler
Those critics who have urged a conceptually causal connection between Darwin’s or Haeckel’s biology and Hitler’s racial beliefs—Weikart, Berlinski, and a myriad of religiously and politically constricted thinkers—apparently intend to undermine the validity of Darwinian evolutionary theory and, by regressive implication, morally indict Darwin and Darwinians like Ernst Haeckel. More reputable scholars—Gould, Arnhart, Bowler, and numerous others—are willing to offer up Haeckel to save Darwin by claiming significant differences between their views, a claim, as I’ve suggested, that cannot be sustained. The arguments arrayed against Darwin and Haeckel have power, no doubt. Whether they should have power is the question I would like to investigate.
Two salient issues arise out of the allegations of a connection between Darwinian theory and Hitler’s racial conceptions: first, the factual truth of the claimed causal connections; and second, the epistemic and moral logic that draws implications from the supposed connections. The factual question can be considered at four levels. These distinctions may seem tedious to the impatient; but they are necessary, since the factual claim is often settled by even talented scholars through the deployment of a few vague observations. First, there is the epistemological problem of the very meaning of the assertion of causal connections among ideas. This issue falls under the rubric of influence, that is, one individual’s ideas influencing or having causal impact on those of another. A host of acute epistemological problems attend the conception of influence (ideas, after all, are not like billiard balls), but I will bracket them in this discussion and simply assume that influence is real and causally potent. The second level of the factual question is: Did Hitler embrace Darwinian theory? Third, did any supposed endorsement actually lead to his racial policies, especially concerning the treatment of Jews? Finally, we should consider the beliefs and attitudes of those scientists working directly under the authority of the Nazi party: Did they adopt Darwinian theory and on that basis urge the inferiority of Jews and recommend eugenic measures? I will consider each of these latter three levels of the factual question in turn.
There is a kind of pseudo-historical game that can be played with causal influence, a distraction that will vitiate a serious attempt to deal with the second and third levels of the factual question. Instead of tracing out a reputed serious engagement of Hitler with Darwin’s ideas and making an effort to determine how those ideas might have actually motivated him, one could play something like “Six Degrees of Charles Darwin.” That is, one could catch Hitler using, say, a certain phrase he picked up from someone whom he read, who in turn read someone else who used the phrase, who found it in a journal article that mentioned someone quoting Darwin, etc. Virtually any remarks made by Hitler could thus be traced back to Darwin—or to Aristotle, or to Christ. The real issue would be whether the phrase had Darwinian ideas behind it and whether such usage by Hitler motivated his actions.
Attendant on the factual question is that of the meaning of “Social Darwinism” when applied to Hitler and other Nazis. The term is maddeningly opaque, but we can discriminate several different notes that conventionally fall under the conception and then decide which of those notes apply to the Nazis, and to Hitler in particular.
The strategy of those attempting to show a causal link between Darwin’s theory and Hitlerian ideas about race runs, I believe, like this: the causal relation of influence proceeding from Darwin to future Nazi malevolence justifies regressive epistemic and moral judgments running from the future back to the past, thus indicting Darwin and individuals like Haeckel with moral responsibility for the crimes of Hitler and his minions and thereby undermining evolutionary theory. Now the validity of this kind of moral logic might be dealt with straightaway: even if Hitler had the Origin of Species as his bedtime reading and clearly derived inspiration from it, this would have no bearing on the truth of Darwin’s theory or directly on the moral character of Darwin and other Darwinians. Mendelian genetics became ubiquitous as a scientific foundation for Nazi eugenic policy (and American eugenic proposals as well), though none of the critics question the basic validity of that genetic theory or impugn Mendel’s moral integrity. Presumably Hitler and other party officials recognized chemistry as a science and utilized its principles to exterminate efficiently millions of people. But this hardly precludes the truth of chemical theory or morally taints all chemists. It can only be rampant ideological confusion to maintain that the alleged connection between Hitler’s ideas and those of Darwin and Haeckel, ipso facto, nullifies the truth of evolutionary theory or renders these evolutionists, both long dead before the rise of the Nazis, morally responsible for the Holocaust.
If Hitler and leading Nazi biologists had adopted Darwianian theory, exactly what feature of the theory would supposedly have induced them to engage in morally despicable acts? Weikart, for one, asserts that it was Darwinian materialism that “undercut Judeo-Christian ethics and the right to life.”[14] This charge has three salient problems. First, strictly speaking, Darwin was not a materialist; when the Origin was published he was a theist.[15] The leading Darwinian in Germany in the late nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel, rejected the charge of materialism; he was a convinced Goethean monist (i.e., all organisms had a material side and a mental side). But it’s true, Darwin and Haeckel were perceived as materialists by many later critics—and by historians like Weikart. Second, as I’ll indicate in a moment, Darwin’s own moral theory certainly did not abandon Judeo-Christian precepts. Nor did Haeckel’s. Haeckel was quite clear. He accepted the usual moral canon: “Doubtless, human culture today owes the greater part of its perfection to the spread and ennobling effect of Christian ethics.”[16] Haeckel, like Darwin, simply thought that Christian precepts had a source other than Divine command; those norms derived from the altruism bred in the bone by natural selection.[17] But the chief reason why presumptive Darwinian materialism cannot be the source of the malign actions of Hitler and leading Nazi biologists is simple: they were not materialists. As I will show below, Hitler’s gauzy mystical attitude about Deutschtum and the German race was hardly materialistic; moreover, leading Nazi biologists rejected Darwin and Haeckel precisely because the theories of these two scientists were, it was thought, materialistic while volkisch biology was not. In the first instance, however, it is crushingly naïve to believe that an extremely abstract metaphysical position, such as materialism—or vitalism—can distinctively produce morally deleterious or virtuous behavior. In this instance, though, whether abstract ethereal belief or not, Darwinian theory cannot be the root of any malign influence perpetrated on the Nazis for the reason Weikart asserts. Below I will describe the character of the more rarified metaphysics of Nazi scientists to show why it had no connection with Darwinism. Another consideration further attenuates the gossamer logic of the arguments mounted by Weikart, Berlinski, Gasman, Gould, and members of the Intelligent Design crowd: their exclusive focus on the supposed Darwin-Hitler or Haeckel-Hitler connection reduces the complex motivations of the Nazi leaders to linear simplicity.
The critics I have mentioned, and many others besides, ignore the economic, political, and social forces operative in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; and they give no due weight to the deeply rooted anti-Semitism that ran back to Luther and Medieval Christianity and forward to the religious and political sentiments rife at the end of the nineteenth century.[18] The names of those who prepared the ground before Hitler entered the scene go unmentioned: the court preacher and founder of the Christian Socialist Party, Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909), who thought the Jews threated the life-spirit of Germany;[19] Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904), founder of the League of Anti-Semitism, who maintained that the Jews were in a cultural “struggle for existence” with the spirit of Germanism, taking over the press, the arts, and industrial production;[20] or the widely-read historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), who salted his historical fields with animadversions about alien Jewish influences on German life and provided the Nazi’s with the bywords: “the Jews are our misfortune.”[21] Then there was the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), whose music Hitler adored, even as a young man attending countless performances of The Flying Dutchman, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and the Ring cycle, and as rising political leader visiting the maestro’s home in Bayreuth at the invitation of the Wagner family. In 1850 Wagner composed a small pamphlet, which he reissued and expanded in 1869, entitled Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in music).[22] He wished “to explain the involuntary revulsion we have for the personality and nature of the Jews and to justify this instinctive repugnance, which we clearly recognize and which is stronger and more overwhelming than our conscious effort to rid ourselves of it.”[23] These are only a few of the intellectuals—or near-intellectuals—who expressed unreflective to more consciously aggressive anti-Semitic attitudes at the turn of the century; their malevolent depictions and vicious rants cascaded through German intellectual society in the early years of the twentieth century. Of course, these attitudes were not confined to Germany, but invaded distant shores as well. The new American ambassador to Germany in 1933, William E. Dodd (1869-1940), former chair of the history department of which I am currently a member, could, for example, discount the outrageous attacks on Jews in Berlin by SA troops with the casual remark to a Nazi official that “we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.”[24] Dodd finally did come to appreciate that the Nazi treatment of Jews went beyond the bounds of “civilized” anti-Semitism, and he became an early voice of warning about the intentions of Hitler’s government. The disposition of Dodd and the others I have just mentioned were innocent of any concern with Darwin’s theory. Finally, one needs consider the politicians, especially in Vienna, who used anti-Semitism in opportunistic ways. I will examine the views of these latter more particularly below, since Hitler himself ascribed his racial attitudes to this source. The critics of Darwin and Haeckel have in their indictments neglected the various complex social and cultural forces that fueled the anti-Semitic obsessions of Hitler and his henchmen. The critics have sought, rather, to discover a unique key to Nazi evil.[25]
The presumption that a factual connection between Darwin’s Origin of Species and Hitler’s Mein Kampf morally indicts Darwin and somehow undermines evolutionary theory rests, quite obviously, on defective moral and epistemic logic—rather, on no logic at all. Nonetheless, I will put aside this logical consideration for the moment to investigate the supposed factual linkage.
Darwinian Theory and Racial Hierarchy
The first factual issue to tackle is: Did Hitler embrace Darwinian theory? The question, however, needs to be made more exact: What features of Darwin’s theory did he embrace, if any? Concerning the theory, especially as applied to human beings, we can discriminate three central components: 1) that human groups can be arranged in a racial hierarchy from less advanced to more advanced; 2) that species have undergone descent with modification over vast stretches of time and that human beings, in particular, descended from ape-like ancestors; and 3) that natural selection is the principal device to explain species transitions. Now the questions become: Did Hitler adopt any of these positions, and were they derived ultimately from Darwin? And did these ideas cause him to adopt or favor racist and specifically anti-Semitic views characteristic of Nazi biology? Of course, a positive answer to this latter question is essential to complete the causal connection between Darwinian theory and Hitler’s lethal racial attitudes.
The first component of Darwinian theory to consider is that of racial hierarchy. Gould argued that Darwin’s theory was not progressivist, and therefore it did not situate species and races, particularly the human races, in any hierarchical scheme. He maintained, for example, that “an explicit denial of innate progression is the most characteristic feature separating Darwin’s theory of natural selection from other nineteenth-century evolutionary theories.”[26] Lamarck, by contrast, had postulated an internal, quasi-hydraulic mechanism, that produced progressively more complex species over time. And Haeckel, quite graphically, arranged the human groups in a hierarchical scheme. Though other scholars have followed Gould’s lead,[27] it’s quite clear that Darwin thought of natural selection as a kind of external force that would generally produce, over vast stretches of time, more progressively developed organisms. In the penultimate paragraph of the Origin of Species, he explicitly stated his view: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”[28] Even before he formulated his theory, however, Darwin was disposed to regard certain races as morally and intellectually inferior, as for example, the Fuegian Indians he encountered on the Beagle voyage. His later theoretical formulations and his own cultural assumptions surely reinforced each other. In the Descent of Man, Darwin described the races as forming an obvious hierarchy of intelligence and moral capacity, from savage to civilized, with the “intellectual and social faculties” of the lower races comparable to those that must have characterized ancient European man.[29] Accordingly, he ventured that “the grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations,”[30] which explained for him the extermination of the Tasmanians and the severe decline in population of the Australians, Hawaiians, and Maoris. Those groups succumbed in the struggle with more advanced peoples.[31] So, despite some scholars’ views to the contrary, it’s clear that Darwin’s progressivist theory entailed a hierarchy of the human races. His opposition to slavery, which was deeply felt, did not mitigate his racial evaluations.[32]
Darwin’s racialism never included Jews. His few scattered references to Jews contain nothing derogatory. Of some interest, though, he did observe that Jews and Aryans were quite similar in features, due, he supposed, to “the Aryan branches having largely crossed during their wide diffusion by various indigenous tribes.”[33] This is in some contrast with Hitler, for whom the Jews and Aryans were pure (i.e., unmixed) races—a matter discussed below. Haeckel, however, does include Jews in his hierarchical scheme.
In the first edition of his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural history of creation,1868), Haeckel represented in a tree-diagram nine species of human beings, along with their various races, all stemming from the Affenmensch, or ape-man. The vertical axis of the diagram was meant to suggest progressive development in intelligence and moral character (see fig. 9.2); it showed Australians, Hottentots, and Papuans at the lowest branches, with Caucasians occupying the highest. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the German and Mediterranean races of the Caucasian species (upper right in the diagram) are leading the other groups—except, that is, for the Berbers and the Jews, two other branches of the same species. Haeckel located the Jews at the same evolutionary level as the Germans and other Europeans—hardly the kind of judgment expected of a supposed racial anti-Semite.[34]
Haeckel spoke directly to the question of anti-Semitism. He, along with some forty other European intellectuals and artists, was interviewed in the early 1890s about the phenomenon of anti-Semitism by Hermann Bahr (1863-1934), a journalist and avant-garde playwright. Haeckel mentioned that some of his students were anti-Semitic but he explicitly disavowed that prejudice himself. He did acknowledge that some nations, including Germany, were judicious in barring the immigration of Slavic Jews since they would not adopt the customs of their new countries but remained stubbornly unassimilated. He yet celebrated the gebildeten Juden of Germany. He is quoted by Bahr as proclaiming:
I hold these refined and noble Jews to be important elements in German culture. One should not forget that they have always stood bravely for enlightenment and freedom against the forces of reaction, inexhaustible opponents, as often as needed, against the obscurantists [Dunkelmänner]. And now in the dangers of these perilous times, when Papism again rears up mightily everywhere, we cannot do without their tried and true courage.[35]
As is suggested by this quotation, Haeckel’s long-term opponent was the Catholic Church, for which he had a mixture of disdain and, at least for its black-robed troops, the Jesuits, some grudging admiration.[36]
So neither Darwin nor the leading German Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, can be accused of anti-Semitism, certainly not the kind of racism that fueled Hitler’s animus and stoked the fires of the Holocaust. The belief in a racial hierarchy, assumed by both Darwin and Haeckel, also needs to be put in a larger historical context. The common presumption of higher and lower races antedates Darwin’s work by many generations and cannot be uniquely attributed to Darwinian theory.
The pre-evolutionary naturalists Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), and Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)—all of whose works directed subsequent thought about the distinction of human races—ranked those races in a hierarchy, with Europeans, naturally, in the top position.[37] For example, Linnaeus placed the genus Homo within the order Primates (which included monkeys, bats, and sloths) and distinguished two species: Homo sapiens and Homo troglodytes (anthropoid apes). He divided Homo sapiens (wise man) into four varieties: American (copper-colored, choleric, regulated by custom), Asiatic (sooty, melancholic, and governed by opinions), African (black, phlegmatic, and governed by caprice), and European (fair, sanguine, and governed by laws). Linnaeus conceived such differences as expressive of divine intent.[38] Carl Gustav Carus affirmed a comparable hierarchy, though he declared that the races of mankind could not be classified with animals as had Linnaeus. Because of their mental character, humans formed a kingdom of their own with four distinct races, each endowed with different abilities: “the people of the day” (Europeans, Caucasians, Hindus), “the people of the night” (Aethiopians—South Africans, Papuans, Australians), “the people of the eastern twilight” (Asians—Mongols and Malays), and “the people of the western twilight” (North and South American Indians).[39] The original lands of these peoples—their climate and geography—wrought effects on their anatomy, especially on skull sizes and brain formation, rendering them with different capacities for cultural attainment. The people of the day had achieved the highest development in the appreciation of beauty, truth, and goodness.[40] Though each of the groups could be located in an ascending hierarchy, human mentality remained distinctly separated from the capacities of brutes, which meant, in Carus’s terms, they certainly did not derive from any ape forbearer, as suggested by Lamarck.[41] These racial categories of leading naturalists, established long before the appearance of Darwin’s work, were mutually reinforcing of common prejudices. But the point to be made is simply that assumptions of racial hierarchy, ubiquitous in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did not originate in Darwinian evolutionary theory; they were commonplaces in scientific literature since at least the eighteenth century. Darwin and Haeckel, like most other naturalists of the period, simply accepted the hierarchy and gave it an account in terms of their theoretical system.
The Racial Ideology of Gobineau and Chamberlain
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two of the most influential proponents of the theory of racial hierarchy were Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927). Gobineau’s four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human races, 1853-1855) was translated into several languages. It went through five German editions from 1895 to 1940 and served as the intellectual rationale for the anti-Semitic Gobineau societies that spread through Germany at the turn of the century.[42] Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The foundations of the nineteenth century) flooded Germany with an amazing thirty editions from 1899 to 1944. Chamberlain was inspired by Gobineau’s analysis of race and became a member of the elite Gobineau society, along with other members of the cult of Richard Wagner.[43] The books of Gobineau and Chamberlain helped to articulate and give form to the racial views of Hitler and his chief party philosopher manqué, Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946). For that reason, I will linger over the works of these two harbingers of the Nazi movement.
Arthur, Count de Gobineau was born of a royalist family in 1816. His father joined the anti-revolutionary forces during the Directorate and was later imprisoned by Napoleon’s regime.[44] Through his early adulthood he mourned the passing of the aristocratic order and expressed in several novels, poems, and plays of the 1840s his distaste for the materialistic and crass attitudes of the rising bourgeoisie. His odd friendship with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)—with whom he had a considerable correspondence over religion, morals, and democracy—brought him into the troubled government of the Second Republic in 1849; and after the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851, he advanced to several diplomatic posts during the regime of the Second Empire (1851-1871). His diplomatic work allowed him sufficient leisure time to cultivate a knowledge of Persian, Greek, and South Asian languages and civilizations, which reinforced his sentiments about a golden age of aristocratic order. He elevated his class prejudices to something quite grand: he argued that modern nations had lost the vitality characterizing ancient civilizations and that the European nations, as well as the United States, faced inevitable decline, the French Revolution being an unmistakable sign of the end. When he learned of Darwin’s evolutionary theory he quite disdainfully dismissed it, thinking its anemic progressivism a distortion of his own rigorously grounded empirical study; certainly the time was near, he believed, when Haeckel’s phantasms of ape-men would evanesce.[45] He was assured of the decline of human societies—so palpable before his eyes during the years of political turmoil throughout Europe—and proposed a very simple formula to explain it: race mixing.
Gobineau indicated that he was moved to write his Essay because of the views of James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), who argued for the essential unity of mankind and the common capacities of the various human races.[46] Gobineau wished to demonstrate, on the contrary, that while we might have to give notional assent to the Biblical story of common origin, the fundamental traits of the white, yellow, and black races were manifestly different and that their various branches displayed intrinsically diverse endowments. To support this contention, he spun out, over four substantial volumes, a conjectural anthropology whose conclusions, he ceaselessly claimed, had the iron grip of natural law. The beginning of his story, he allowed, did have a bit of mythical aura about it. The Adamite generation, knowledge about which trailed off into fable, begot the white race—about this the Bible seemed certain, while the origins of the yellow and black races went unmentioned in the sacred texts.[47] So we might assume that each of these races had independent roots, since each displayed markedly different traits.[48] The whites were the most beautiful, intelligent, orderly, and physically powerful; they were lovers of liberty and aggressively pursued it. They played the dominant role in any civilization that had attained a significant culture. The yellow race was rather lazy and uninventive, though given to a narrow kind of utility. The black race was intense, willful, and with a dull intellect; no civilization ever arose out of the pure black race. Each of the three races had branches with somewhat different characters. So, for instance, the white race comprised the Assyrian, Celtic, Iberian, Semitic, and Aryan stocks. These stocks had intermingled to produce some of the great civilizations of the past—Gobineau discriminated some ten such ancient civilizations.[49] The Greek civilization, for example, arose from the Aryan stock with a tincture of the Semitic. High attainment in culture, science, and the arts had only existed, however, where there was a large admixture of the Aryan. Even the Chinese, in his estimation, derived from an Aryan colony from India. Had these branches of the white race remained pure, their various ancient civilizations would still be flourishing. But racial mixing caused an inevitable degradation of their character.
Gobineau postulated two contrary forces operative on the races of mankind: revulsion for race mixing, especially powerful among the black groups, and a contrary impulse to intermarriage, which oddly was characteristic of those peoples capable of great development.[50] As a result of the impulse to mate with conquered peoples, the pure strains of the higher stocks had become alloyed with the other strains, the white race being constantly diluted with the blood of inferior peoples, while the latter enjoyed a boost from white blood. Contemporary societies, according to Gobineau, might have more or less strong remnants of the hereditary traits of their forbearers, but they were increasingly washed over as the streams of humanity ebbed and flowed. The modern European nations thus lost their purity, especially as the white component had been sullied in the byways of congress with the yellow and black races. So even the modern Germans, who still retained the greatest measure of Aryan blood and yet carried the fire of modern culture and science—even the Germans had begun to decline and would continue to do so as the tributaries of hybrid stocks increasingly muddied the swifter currents of pure blood.
Despite Gobineau’s theories of race and his influence in Germany, he was no egregious anti-Semite, at least not of the sort that so readily adopted his views. He regarded the Jews as a branch of the Semites, the latter being a white group that originally extended from the Caucasus Mountains down through the lands of the Assyrians to the Phoenician coast. The Hebrews, as he preferred to call the Jews, retained their racial purity up to the time of the reign of King David, a period when so many other, less worthy peoples, were brought into the kingdom: “The mixing thus pressed through all the pores of Israel’s limbs.” As a consequence, “the Jews were marred through mating with blacks, as well as with the Hamites and Semites in whose midst they were living.”[51] In short, the Jews fared no better and no worse than other groups of originally pure stocks; like them, they enjoyed for a while the advantages of a homogeneous population, and then slipped silently down the racial slope into their current mongrel state.[52]
The theme of cultural degradation due to race mixing echoed through the decades after the publication of Gobineau’s treatise. Richard Wagner, who became a friend and correspondent of Gobineau, anticipated the dangers of racial decline, though, like the poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), believed that art might reverse the decline, at least for the German people. Americans also heard the unhappy knell. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a New York lawyer, with biological and anthropological acumen on a level below that even of his French predecessor, pressed the same concerns in a comparably conjectural study, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the German edition of which was found in Hitler’s library.[53] Grant thought the superior Nordic race—the true descendent of the Aryan speaking peoples—to be endangered by cross-breeding. He thought the proximate danger to Aryan purity came from the two lower stocks of the Caucasian group—the Alpine race (Eastern Europeans and Slavs) and the Mediterranean race (stemming from the southern areas of Asia minor and along the coasts of the inland sea), thus the swarthy Poles, Czechs, and Russians and the even more swarthy Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Unmistakable signs indicated the decline of the American civilization: simplified spelling and incorrect grammar told the story, for Grant, of decay from Nordic standards.[54] Even more alarming were the Polish Jews swarming in New York City—the cloaca gentium, in terms borrowed from Chamberlain: the Jews wore the Nordic’s clothes and stole his women, thus genetically obliterating his commanding stature, blue eyes, blond hair, and Teutonic moral bearing.[55] (There would appear to be no accounting for Nordic women’s taste in men.) The German nation fared little better; through miscegenation it had suffered a large decline in the number of pure Teutons.[56] Grant played in syncopated harmony the American version of Gobineau’s tune. But the most influential orchestrator of this theme at the turn of the century, done in Wagnerian style, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Chamberlain, born in 1855, descended from the lesser British aristocracy and from money on both sides of his family.[57] His father, mostly absent from his life, fought in the Crimean War, serving as an admiral of the British fleet. After his mother suddenly died, he and his two brothers were shipped off to Versailles to live with a grandmother and aunt. In 1866, to reintroduce him to his native heritage, his father enrolled the ten-year-old, French-speaking lad in an English school; but ill health kept him there only for a few years. The boy returned to France where his schooling was taken over by a German tutor, who instilled a love of the language and culture of Germany. After three years his tutor took up a post back in his native land; and Chamberlain, now thirteen, saw to his own education, reading promiscuously in the literature of Germany, France, and England, and cultivating an interest in the solitary science of botany. His father died in 1878, leaving him with a decent income and freedom to marry a woman whom he had met when a teenager of sixteen and she twenty-six. The nuptials occurred three years later. He now worried about a formal education. His self-tutelage was sufficient to win him a place in the natural science faculty at the University of Geneva, from which he graduated with distinction in 1881. While at Geneva he came under the autocratic sway of Karl Vogt (1817-1895), whom he thought too influenced by the experience of the revolutions of 1848. Vogt was an evolutionist, though according to Chamberlain’s reckoning, he was mistrustful of Darwinism and Haeckelianism.[58] The young student sought to pursue a doctoral thesis in plant physiology at Geneva, but interrupted his study after two years due to a free-floating nervous indisposition. His attempt at a stock brokerage business met quiet failure; yet with the aid of additional funds from his aunt, he continued private study, especially in German philosophy and literature. Kant and Goethe became his loadstars. Then he discovered Richard Wagner, and his glittering firmament became fixed.
Shortly after he was married in 1878, Chamberlain and his wife Anna attended the premier of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Munich, an event that ignited what would become an ever growing passion for the numinous music and deranged doctrines of the great composer. In 1882, the couple visited the consecrated ground of Bayreuth, where they heard Parsifal three times. He wrote his aunt that the “overwhelming beauty” simply stunned him (mich einfach verstummen machte).[59] Not only the aesthetic power of the music transfix him, his fervent Christianity became alloyed with the mystical theology fueling the Wagnerian legends of questing knights and battling gods. He enrolled as a member of the Wagner Society (Wagner-Verein), formed after the composer’s death in 1882, and helped found a new French journal devoted to the art of the composer. His many articles for the journal drew him closer to Cosima Wagner, second wife of the maestro, daughter of Franz Liszt, and titular head of the inner circle of the cult, which fed on the racial theories of Gobineau, now growing into Teutonic glorification and pernicious anti-Semitism. The measure of Chamberlain’s devotion, not simply to the music but to the mystical association of Wagner with the German spirit, can be taken by the extent of his labors: four books and dozens of articles on the man and his music during the short period between 1892 and 1900.[60] The more significant measure, perhaps, was the kindling of his admiration for, if not burning love of, Wagner’s youngest daughter, Eva, whom he married in 1908 following an expensive divorce from his first wife.
After moving from Dresden to Vienna in 1889—and still relying on the financial kindness of his aunt—Chamberlain renewed his intention to finish a doctorate in plant physiology. He started attending lectures at the university, especially those of the botanist Julius Wiesner (1838–1916), with whom he became quite friendly, despite Wiesner’s Jewish ancestry. With the encouragement of Wiesner, he resurrected extensive measurement experiments on the movement of fluids in plants that he had originally conducted in Geneva. Since his nervous condition precluded further experimental work, he now put his original findings into a broad historical and philosophical context, arguing that no adequate mechanistic account could be given of the rise of sap in plants and its resistance to falling back.[61] We must assume, he contended, that vital forces are at work. Whether these forces operated extrinsically to the molecular structure or internally to it, the evidence confirmed their presence: mechanical forces alone could not lift the sap in trees the 150 or 200 feet of their height.[62] Despite an insatiable mania for publishing (his Schreibdämon, as he called it), the writing of the dissertation was desultory, finally appearing in 1897, though not submitted for a degree. Immediately on its publication, he began the composition of his master work, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which would eventually flood Germany with a rich farrago of Goethean sentiment, Kantian epistemology, Wagnerian mysticism, and Aryan anti-Semitism. The medley echoed through the German reading public for almost half a century.
While Gobineau maintained that the races were originally pure but tended to degenerate over time because of miscegenation, Chamberlain contended that purity of race was an achievement over long periods of time; once achieved, however, it could be endangered by race mixing.[63] His notion of race was quite loose, insofar as the Greeks, Romans, Iranians, Chinese, English, French, Jews, Aryans (or Germans) all formed, in his estimation, distinct races. His test of race was the direct, intuitive experience of the other, rather than any craniometric measures. He was quite vague about the origins of human beings, simply observing that as far as history testified human beings have always existed.[64] He dismissed as a “pseudo-scientific fantasy” Haeckel’s argument that the human races descended from ape-like forbearers.[65]
For Chamberlain, the two principal races that achieved purity and retained it were the Aryan and the Jewish. The Aryans, which in their more recent incarnation he referred to as Germans, were the bearers of culture, science, and the arts. Their mental accomplishments flowed from blood, he argued (or really simply stipulated). In a wonderful piece of quasi-idealistic morphology, he described the real German as having an ideal type: “great, heavenly radiant eyes, golden hair, the body of a giant, harmonious musculature, a long skull [and]. . . high countenance.”[66] All of this notwithstanding, individual Germans might be dark-haired, brown-eyed, and small of stature. (One had to see the blond giant standing behind the form, for example, of the puny chicken-farmer with dark receding hair—Heinrich Himmler.) Against the blond giant stood the threatening Jew. Chamberlain devoted one-hundred-thirty-five continuous pages to dissecting the Jewish type, its physiology and character. So distinct were the racial traits that one could be certain that Christ was not a Jew, a view that Hitler took over from Chamberlain.[67] Throughout the Foundations, this Anglo-German would vacillate between referring to the Jews as a pure race, meaning relatively permanent, but also of a “mongrel character” (Bastardcharakter).[68] That character displayed the typical attitudes his fellows had come to associate with Jews: materialistic, legalistic, limited in imagination, intolerant, fanatical, and with a tendency toward utopian economic schemes, as found, for instance, in Marxism.[69] The Jews’ very “existence is a sin (Sünde); their existence is a transgression against the holy laws of life.”[70] Thus any mating between Jew and Aryan could only corrupt the nobility of the latter: the Jewish character “is much too foreign, firm, and strong to be refreshed and ennobled by German blood.”[71] This could only mean a struggle between the Aryans and the Jews, “a struggle of life and death [ein Kampf auf Leben und Tod].”[72]
Chamberlain used the trope of racial struggle frequently in the Foundations. Indeed, the phrase usually identified with Darwinian theory, “struggle for existence” (Kampf ums Dasein), appears eight times in the Foundations. The single word “struggle” (Kampf) turns up one-hundred-twelve times. But these terms were not markers of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Chamberlain rejected Darwin’s conception completely, comparing it to the old, discredited “phlogiston theory.”[73] But not only did he dismiss Darwin’s main explanatory device, he simply rejected transmutation of species altogether. After all, it was an idea already refuted in advance by Kant.[74] However, its influence continued perniciously to affect all it touched. He wrote Cosima Wagner at the time of the composition of the Foundations: “this hair-raising absurdity poisons not only natural science but the whole of human thought: Darwinism rules everywhere, corrupting history and religion; it leads to social idiocy; it degrades judgment about men and things.”[75]
In a letter of advice to a young student, Chamberlain contended that while some of Darwin’s observations might be empirically helpful, his theory “is simply poetry [einfach eine Dichtung]; it is unproven and unprovable.” Anyone with the least tincture of metaphysics would understand the impossibility of solving the world puzzles by evolution.[76] The main difficulty—as he detailed in manuscripts composed at the time of the Foundations—has to do with the integrity of form. Taking his cue from Georges Cuvier, Goethe, and Kant, Chamberlain argued that our direct, intuitive experience revealed only two archetypal forms in the plant world and eight in the animal world (e.g., radiate animals, articulate animals, vertebrate animals, etc.) governed by laws of formation (Bildungsgesetze). These fundamental forms simply could not pass into one another; otherwise we would have the ape being a cousin of the tree it was climbing. Moreover, animal forms exhibited an integral correlation of their constituent parts, constrained within certain limits of variability, such that any radical change of a part would collapse the harmony of the whole; and radical changes in an animal’s form would fatally disrupt its relation to other animals. Thus transmutation of forms, as Lamarck, Darwin, or Weismann conceived it, would be impossible.[77] Chamberlain’s racism and conception of struggle of races owed no theoretical debt to Darwin, Haeck