In his new book, Richard Weikart joins great anti-reductionists in offering indispensable knowledge, insight, sanity, and measure in our culture wars.
In his new book, Richard Weikart joins great anti-reductionists in offering indispensable knowledge, insight, sanity, and measure in our culture wars.
Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, by Richard Weikart (Discovery Institute, 187 pages, $15.95)
I n 1909, on the 50th anniversary of the execution for treason of the radical-Christian abolitionist John Brown, the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois published a tribute to him, who in his own time and after his death, during the subsequent American Civil War, had become an inspirational martyr for anti-slavery, anti-racist whites and blacks. But Du Bois was confronted with a logical and rhetorical problem that he struggled to overcome in his tribute. After the Civil War and the death of Lincoln, “those that stepped into the pathway marked by men like John Brown faltered and large numbers turned back,” Du Bois wrote. “They said: He was a good man — even great, but he has no message for us today — he was a ‘belated [Protestant] Covenanter,’ an anachronism in the age of Darwin, one who gave his life to lift not only the unlifted but the unliftable.”
What had intervened between 1859 and 1909 was the emergence and intellectual domination, in the United States and elsewhere, of Darwinian racism, often called “scientific racism,” whose first key document was published in the very year of Brown’s execution, Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Brown was captured (by Colonel Robert E. Lee) in his failed insurrection against slavery in Harpers Ferry, Va., in October; Darwin’s momentous book was published on November 24; and Brown was executed on December 2, 1859. The ascendancy of the “scientific racist” conceptualization of Darwin and his many American, British, German, other European, and Japanese disciples was to prove stronger than the Judeo-Christian idealism of Brown and Abraham Lincoln — and of Frederick Douglass and many other noble souls — in the period after the Civil War, especially when married to the melodramatic, hammer-and-dynamite moral nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Our modern confusion and carnage are largely results of this particular immoralism and secularizing and reducing of consciousness and conscience. As so often, “science” is a good servant but a bad master. As the intellectual historian Richard Olson put it, we should neither defy nor deify science.
We owe a great debt to the intellectual historian Richard Weikart of California State University, Stanislaus, for a series of excellent documentary historical studies on the particularly horrific and tragic ascendancy of these scientistic beliefs and ideas in Germany, where Darwinism took very deep ideological root. His From Darwin to Hitler was reviewed in the print edition of National Review (“Murderous Science,” March 28, 2005). Of course Weikart is not original in the conceptual scheme he has recognized, documented, and deplored: Studies of first-rank intellectual importance on the demoralizing development of Darwinism have over the last 80 years been published in English by eminent scholars such as Jacques Barzun (1941), Richard Hofstadter (1944), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1959), Richard Spilsbury (Providence Lost, 1974), and Thomas Nagel (2012), whose outstanding philosophical critique Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012) I reviewed in National Review.
But Weikart has doggedly and rightly concentrated on the Darwinian intellectual bacillus as it inspired, affected, and accelerated the modern German tragedy of 1870–1945. Darwin himself wrote with optimism and praise to a German scholar in 1868: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” Prevail they did in Germany, owing not least to the explosive, histrionic rhetorician Nietzsche. And the world bled and wept at the outcome, commencing “the second Fall of Man,” as the philosopher Sidney Hook called history from 1914 onward.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s rhetorical and logical problem in effectively praising the antiquated Christian “Covenanter” John Brown in 1909 was the ascendancy of social-Darwinist, racialist ideas that undermined the credibility of the theologically grounded conception of the equal worth of all human persons. With John Brown’s body in the ground, his visionary “truth” did not “go marching on”; Darwin’s reductive theory did. Though Darwin did occasionally and inconsistently, and his popular defender Thomas Henry Huxley more clearly and forcibly, dispute the moral implications of Darwinism (Huxley rather heroically in a stoical Puritan mode in late Victorian England), they and their allies and followers were never able to escape — most were not eager to escape — from these implications. However initially demoralizing and anomalous, these reductive ideas were developed into a comprehensive worldview. From racialist predecessors such as Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and the shady Count Gobineau in France — known and opposed by Tocqueville, on Christian grounds — post-1859 racialism picked up glamour and potency from its association with “science.” A documentary book published by MIT Press is titled “The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics” (2008).
Nonreligious dissenters from high and hard Darwinism in the early 20th century, such as the British Fabian George Bernard Shaw (see his wise and witty preface to “Back to Methuselah,” 1921), were ignored even by fellow socialists; religious dissenters such as the Christian-democratic politician-statesman William Jennings Bryan were perpetually belittled and then permanently, irretrievably slandered (e.g., Inherit the Wind, 1955). Little wonder that DuBois’s 1909 book on John Brown subsided into obscurity and was not republished until 50 years later and never had much effect: He could not escape the Darwinian tar baby.
It is a great virtue of Richard Weikart’s new book that in it he again carefully traces this tragic and treacherous terrain and trajectory, from Darwin, through his German disciple Haeckel and Hitler and Nazism, to contemporary white nationalism. This bacillus is very much alive and, although generally an extreme-right movement (as Nietzsche can be seen as an extreme-right figure), it is constantly and most consistently assisted by political liberals and leftists who assume and assert that any criticism of Darwin, Darwinism, “natural selection,” or evolutionism is retrograde, intolerable obscurantism. The honorable leftist anti-Darwinian tradition of George Bernard Shaw has been forgotten and lost. The brutal evolutionary gorilla in the salon of civilization must be treated to tea and compliments.
Weikart judiciously points out eloquent scholarly dissenters from “gentle Darwinism” — such as the British historian Mike Hawkins, in Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (1997) and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in Darwin (1991) — who “even explicitly discuss the role of racial extermination in his theory.” And yet still Paul Krugman tells us in the New York Times that acceptance of Darwinism in high-school teaching is the infallible test of liberal enlightenment. Pace Krugman, the tissue of received ideas is an unclean phenomenon, perennially in need of antiseptic rationality.
Weikart points out that the fundamental theological worldview of the American Declaration of Independence and of Lincoln (and John Brown) also enabled Christian figures such as David Livingstone (1813–1873), the Scottish missionary in Africa, to oppose racialist-imperialist views and projects. John Brown himself befriended and defended Native Americans as well as assisted blacks in the Underground Railroad in several American states. Weikart mentions that one of the few centers of German intellectual opposition to the racialist ascendancy in the pre-Nazi and Nazi period was the Catholic periodical Natur und Kultur. Even before the Nazis took power in 1933, biologists were preponderantly Nazi, and Weikart draws on Ute Deichmann’s study Biologists under Hitler (English translation, 1996).
A particularly valuable feature of Weikart’s book is his survey of recent and contemporary American Darwinian racists, white nationalists whose work fuels the “alt-Right,” including the anti-Semitic California university professor Kevin MacDonald. In three volumes on alleged Jewish influences in recent Western culture, MacDonald has deplored the vast effect that the German-Jewish emigré scholar Franz Boas (1858–1942), long at Columbia University (1896–1938), has had on the conceptualization and study of anthropology in the modern university. In a 1998 book MacDonald titled a hostile chapter “The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences.” Weikart writes that MacDonald “slammed Boas for resisting Darwinian and biological explanations for human behavior . . . and lamented Boas’s influence on reducing racism in American thought.” According to Weikart, MacDonald depicts Boas as “an archenemy of the (non-Jewish) white race.”
Boas’s main hermeneutic sin was apparently his bracketing or subordination of Darwinism as a sufficient means of understanding and “rating” different human cultures, claiming instead some autonomy and integrity for different cultures and resisting the overmastering Darwinian category of “favoured races.” As recently as 2020, Weikart shows, “MacDonald reiterated his attack on Boas,” and he quotes MacDonald as deploring Boas for “more or less obliterating what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu.”
The tragic history of that “thriving Darwinian milieu” has been well documented in Weikart’s books over the past 20 years. Its atavistic, chauvinistic appeal remains powerfully attractive, especially to ethnocentric, atheistic white nationalists flattered and thrilled by transgressive, reductive visions of the human person that mock and demean traditional metaphysical and theological language and concepts such as justice, worth, mind, spirit, soul, dignity, and sanctity. Reviewing James Rachels’s reductionist book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism 30 years ago in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Wright wrote that the book’s thesis is that “the idea of human dignity — which underlies our whole morality, including the concept of human rights — is a relic of pre-Darwinian thought, the ‘moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.’” How glibly celebratory and gleeful our scientistic nihilists can be: How smugly and sweetly they speak of catastrophe!
Weikart thus joins great anti-reductionists such as Barzun, Himmelfarb, Michael Polanyi, and C. S. Lewis as an indispensable resource of knowledge, insight, sanity, and measure in our inevitable and incessant culture wars, whose stakes are very high. Careful, well-informed, and judicious, he reminds us of the depths for good and ill of the human person and of the tragic character of human history when those qualities are not acknowledged and properly understood. He reminds this reader of the wisdom that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Isabella in Measure for Measure (2.2.120–24):
But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.