Sander Gliboff, "Darwin on Trial Again" [a review of: Richard Weikart. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany] (2004)

H-NET Online, Published by: H-German (September, 2004); http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-disability&month=0501&week=c&msg=9uaEAlKgwmCPgfwkDg9UbA&user=&pw=

Richard Weikart. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics,
> and Racism in Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xi + 312 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN
> 1-403-96502-1. 
> Reviewed by: Sander Gliboff, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University.
> Published by: H-German (September, 2004)
> Darwin on Trial Again
> 
> The American creationist movement has been waging war against Darwin and modern science for decades, but their strategy is evolving. Instead
> of pitting only the Bible against the biology, they are cultivating their credentials in a variety of academic disciplines and attacking
> from many new directions. On the history front, Richard Weikart's book appropriates the Holocaust and indeed the entire course of Western
> civilization for the creationist side, as it traces a decline in Western morals from the Origin of Species to the origin of National
> Socialism. It is being sold at a big discount by the Discovery Institute, one of several organs of the religious right that is touting
> it as an argument against teaching evolution. It may also prove instrumental in making a case against reforming marriage and legalizing
> abortion or assisted suicide, because it includes comparable proposals among the links between Darwin and Hitler.
> According to Weikart, all of these evils have stemmed from Darwinian
> "naturalism." Naturalism is the principle that marks the modern boundary between science and theology or metaphysics. It limits
> scientific investigation to the natural realm and disallows supernatural agencies and divine intervention in scientific
> explanations. For example, it might very well please the Creator to make an object fall with a force that is inversely proportional to the
> square of its distance from the center of the earth, but under naturalism, physicists leave that Creator out of the equations that
> describe and explain gravitation. Similarly, biologists do not invoke the Creator in their work, either.
> Among modern creationists, Phillip Johnson first made an issue of
> biologists' naturalism in Darwin on Trial (1991), where he raised legalistic and philosophical objections to the way it banishes God from
> the sciences. Here Weikart builds upon Johnson's work with historical and ethical objections. In particular, he objects to the fact that
> Darwin included humanity as part of Nature and treated the human mind and the moral sense as subjects for biological research. Rather than
> investigate Man's immortal soul or the divine foundations of ethics, Darwin's naturalistic approach took ethics to be a human creation, a
> product of the brain and of cultural and biological evolution. That, says Weikart, undermined traditional Christian values and constituted
> the first link in a chain of ideas leading to National Socialism and the Holocaust.
> The book is very well crafted to maintain a scholarly stance and avoid
> any blatant evangelizing or explicit political advocacy. It never cites Johnson or other creationists and it does not identify the author as a
> fellow of the Discovery Institute. Skillfully, it deploys the bugbear of naturalism to draw attention away from anti-Semitism, with its
> inconvenient Christian connections, as well as from any other intellectual, political, social, cultural, economic, diplomatic,
> military, or technological components of Nazism or factors in Hitler's success. The result, by scholarly standards, is an overly narrow and
> selective history, which makes only cursory use of the extensive secondary literature on the origins of National Socialism and the
> history of Darwinism.[1] 
> In the first part of the book, titled "Laying new foundations for ethics," Weikart anchors the Darwinian end of his chain of ideas. He
> has Darwin and early Darwinians developing evolutionary systems of ethics. These systems varied among themselves or allowed for historical
> change in ethical norms, hence were relativistic in comparison to Christianity, which was absolute. Part two, "Devaluing human life,"
> ascribes to Darwinians the view that individual human lives are not sacred, not equal, and may be sacrificed selectively for the sake of
> evolutionary progress or other perceived good. Here the chain branches and links up with eugenics on the one hand and with scientific theories
> of racial inequality on the other. Part three, "Eliminating the 'inferior ones,'" connects the theories to practical proposals. On the
> eugenics branch: promoting population fitness through marriage reform, birth control, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. On the side of
> scientific racism: promoting international and inter-racial struggle, imperialism, and militarism. Part four, "Impacts," completes the chain
> to Hitler, who, Weikart argues, was influenced by both the practical proposals and the theories of ethics, which he needed for winning
> converts to his cause. Hitler and his followers are depicted not as amoral, but as having embraced the wrong sort of morality, the
> naturalistic sort, instead of the one that was engraved in stone. And that, so to speak, is the moral of Weikart's story: there is no
> workable form of morality that is not God-given and absolute. All else leads to Hitler.
> 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? Maybe the influences go the other way, and science is responding to political trends and pressures.
> Maybe science and politics are both responding to something else in the historical context. A good historian of science will have an eye out
> for various patterns of give and take among biologists, physicians, social philosophers, politicians, even theologians, interested segments
> of the public, and eventually Hitler. With Weikart, it is a foregone conclusion that the connections are causes and influences, always
> emanating from Darwin. 
> 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).
> It is dismaying to see such opinions being passed off as results of
> scholarly research. The book's few merits only deepen the dismay because they suggest that Weikart knows better. His book is rich in
> primary material, thoroughly documented, and clearly and concisely written. It features an intriguing and diverse cast of characters,
> including biologists like Ernst Haeckel, philosophers like Christian Ehrenfels, the eugenicists Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer, the
> psychologist August Forel, and the feminist Helene Stoecker. Unfortunately, Weikart only repeats their most outrageous stances on
> ethics and human evolution and omits their criticisms of the still-Christian (despite Darwin) societies in which they lived. In
> short, he does not strive for a contextual understanding of the selected writers any more than for an explanation of Hitler. They are
> only characters in a contrived, cautionary tale against religious apostasy, Darwinism, and free inquiry into the foundations of ethics.
> Note
> [1]. Relevant works on the roles of science, medicine, and eugenics in
> the history of National Socialism include, e.g.: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel
> Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene. Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
> University Press, 1988). On important discontinuities between Weimar eugenics and Nazi extermination: Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex. The
> German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For an overview of the
> history of Darwinism, including discussion of religion and morals, see Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley:
> University of California Press, 2003). For a more detailed historical treatment of Darwinian ethics: Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the
> Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
> Citation: Sander Gliboff. "Review of Richard Weikart, From Darwin to
> Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany," H-German, H-Net Reviews, September, 2004. URL:
> <a href="http:/www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=37981105462766.">http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=37981105462766.
> Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
> redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
> location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the
> Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].

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Sander Gliboff, "Darwin on Trial Again" [a review of: Richard Weikart. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany] (2004)

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