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The
Atheist Devotional: Timeless Meditations for
the Godless by M. Moore
Copyright ã 2008 M. Previous: Reading Number 5: And Now a Word from...Adolf Hitler! Next: Reading Number 7: Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil...and Sanity
- Reading Number Six -
Darwin the Social Darwinist
Excerpted from: Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter 5
Let’s go back now to Darwin for one more reading. Okay, so Darwin had a very low view of the “savage” races, and he believed that their destiny was to be exterminated by the “higher” races. But Darwin didn’t really apply his principles of the survival of the fittest to humans in the same ruthless way that Hitler did, did he? What a silly question. Of course he did. Or very nearly so.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
And you thought Hitler was taking Darwin to extremes! No, he was just taking him literally. And why shouldn’t Darwin speak this way? After all, humans are just another kind of animal, maybe the most highly evolved of them all, but still just an animal. But that’s not the whole story. True to form, Darwin stood firmly on both sides of this question. He goes on to say...
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy... Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
What a relief. Just when he reaches the precipice, Darwin at the last minute finds a way to shield himself from the charge that he’s a heartless monster. Yes, our urge to aid the helpless is just a pesky, “incidental” side effect of our instinct of “sympathy” (our ability to bond with others of our species), but we must “bear without complaining” this bothersome compulsion, while hoping that those inferior sorts among us will be good enough not to have too many children and so eventually die out. Of course, not everyone is as patient as Darwin was, and his clear teaching that allowing the inferior to breed freely is bad for our species was taken very much to heart by people like Hitler and Margaret Sanger (who founded Planned Parenthood with the express purpose of trying to get rid of black people and other “inferior” types by pushing sterilization, abortion, and birth control upon them*). And even Darwin cannot help reverting (later in the same chapter) to singing the praises of the struggle for existence and its death toll for the weak:
Natural selection follows from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid rate of increase. It is impossible not to regret bitterly, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty... But as man suffers from the same physical evils as the lower animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils consequent on the struggle for existence. Had he not been subjected during primeval times to natural selection, assuredly he would never have attained to his present rank... No doubt such advance demands many favourable concurrent circumstances; but it may well be doubted whether the most favourable would have sufficed, had not the rate of increase been rapid, and the consequent struggle for existence extremely severe.
So the so-called Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, with their view that we should not help the poor, because that would interfere with the harsh struggle for existence and the “survival of the fittest” (Spencer coined the term and Darwin happily adopted it), were really doing nothing more than promoting ideas that Darwin himself had laid down. And so we leave Charles Darwin for the moment, bidding him a fond farewell, with our thanks for his legacy, and his example of just how much influence a truly godless man can have.
* See Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, by George Grant
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