From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Deuteronomy 23:2–3

  Darwinism, Racism, and Supremacism

  We have discussed in chapter 6 the deleterious influence of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century founder of a new conception of man and the “social contract.” We also mentioned his direct heir Adam Smith, who proposed a mercantile utopia that would allegedly transform the sum of individual egoists into a happy community through the free market alone. Soon after Smith there appeared, in the same ideological lineage, Thomas Malthus. The “law of Malthus,” enunciated in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), postulates that any period of prosperity creates an exponential increase in population that, if not stopped, eventually exceeds food production capacity, resulting in famines, wars, and excess mortality. Malthus therefore opposed social protection legislation, for “these laws create the poor whom they assist.” Therefore: “If a man cannot feed his children, they must die of hunger.” Malthusianism, well-adapted to the Victorian mental climate, inspired Herbert Spencer, who formulated the natural law of “survival of the fittest” in Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857) and denounced the absurdity of socialist initiatives aimed at protecting weak individuals from the harsh laws of natural selection.

  Spencer’s theory, often called “social Darwinism,” is now stigmatized as an abusive misappropriation of Charles Darwin’s biological evolutionary thought. But it was actually Spencer who prepared the scene for Darwin; Spencer’s book appeared two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). So it is really Darwinism that should be called “biological Spencerism.”

  Darwin was well received by the Victorian bourgeoisie because he blended the “natural sciences” with the Spencerian law of “survival of the fittest,” which was already in embryo in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, author of Hereditary Genius, its laws and consequences (1862), invented “eugenics” to correct the perverse effect of civilization, which “diminishes the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection and preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.” Apparently, Spencer’s laissez-faire was not enough; the state must intervene, not to help the weak, but to prevent them from reproducing themselves. It was Leonard Darwin, Charles’s son, who led the fight as president of the British Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928.

  Karl Marx, after having for some time shared his friend Friedrich Engels’s enthusiasm for Darwin’s Origin of Species as “the natural-history foundation of our viewpoint,” had second thoughts when he recognized that Darwin had merely projected the rules of British capitalism onto the animal kingdom. “It is remarkable,” Marx wrote to Engels on June 18, 1862, “how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all] and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom,’ whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.”632

  Indeed, the enthusiasm for Darwinism cannot be explained by its scientific merits, and it was not naturalists who first welcomed it. Let us recall that the idea of evolution, that is to say a genealogical kinship between animal species, had been popular long before Darwin. Darwin’s originality was to suppose that evolution resulted from a blind process of “natural selection” of the Malthusian type, that is, based essentially on competition for resources. From the reasonable hypothesis of the adaptation of species to their environment by natural selection (the common sense hypothesis justified by his observations), Darwin drew up the bold and forever unprovable hypothesis that natural selection is also responsible for the emergence of new species. (A species is defined as a group of individuals capable of breeding among themselves, but not with individuals of another species.) The idea is simple and easily illustrated: When food available to leaf browsers becomes scarce, short-necked browsers die first; and this process, repeated over a very long time scale, produces giraffes. For this to happen requires that some animals be accidentally born with a neck longer than others, and that such accidents accumulate a sufficient number of times to create a new species. By this simple mechanism, Darwin explained how, over a few hundred million years, bacteria became homo sapiens, by way of fish and monkeys.

  It is important to understand that, according to Darwin, “natural selection” is not creative in itself, but destructive; it acts only negatively by eliminating the least able individuals. It allows only the preservation of accidental variations, when they are advantageous to the individual under the conditions of existence in which he is placed. Darwin had no idea of the nature and causes of these “accidentally produced variations,” and did not exclude factors yet unknown. (As is generally the case, the master was less dogmatic than his students.) It was not until the genetic discoveries of the 1940s that accidental variations were determined to be mistakes in the reproduction of the DNA code.

  However, experiments show that genes are replicators and hence stabilizers, and that their accidental mutations only produce degenerations, which are generally sterile, and in no case carry any “selective advantage” that could be passed down. In other words, natural selection tends to preserve the genetic heritage by eliminating individuals who deviate too much from the standard. It has room for maneuver and may eventually produce some adaptation to changes in the environment, but in general it prevents evolution rather than encouraging it. It is true that “artificial selection” in the long run makes it possible to “improve” a domestic animal species from the point of view of a particular criterion (yield of milk or meat, for example) and thus create a new “race.” But not a new species; even modern genetic technology does not allow us to take this step.

  Genetic discoveries and common sense should therefore have caused the extinction of Darwinism among the credible theories of evolution. Yet this was not the case. On the contrary, since it was less a scientific theory than a theology of the death of God, a new form of speculative Darwinism was coined under the name “the synthetic theory of evolution.” It relies entirely on the idea that man has developed purely accidentally from the first bacteria, without the intervention of any intelligent design, by the simple combination of “chance and necessity.”633 Darwinism today synthesizes the idea that modern man is supposed to have of himself and that is inculcated by orthodox education. It is both a doctrine of the essence of man and a myth of the creation of man. Darwinism is the heart of nihilist theology. For this reason, it will probably also resist the new challenge of epigenetics, which proves the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics, as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had theorized.

  In 1920, the English writer Bernard Shaw saw in Darwinism (or rather the dogmatic form elaborated by August Weismann and popularized at the time under the name of neo-Darwinism) a new secular religion whose philosophical foundation is the denial of any other reality than matter, alongside the ethical principle of competition for the survival of the fittest. In ten years, Shaw wrote, “Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilisation will survive it.” But Shaw, who was a proponent of the theory of “creative evolution” or vitalism, like Henri Bergson in France (Creative Evolution, 1907), also understood that Darwinism’s appeal was linked to the growing disgust that rational thought feels for the capricious and genocidal demiurge of the Old Testament: “What made it scientifically intolerable was that it was ready at a moment’s notice to upset the whole order of the universe on the most trumpery provocation.”634 Even today, Darwinian ideology remains in power by fraudulently presenting itself as the only alternative to biblical “creationism.” Darwin or the Bible, such is the ridiculous alternative proposed to the docile intelligence of the schoolchildren and students of the West.r />
  The paradigm of Malthus, Spencer, Darwin, and Galton deserves the name “Darwinian paradigm” for three reasons. First, it is the Darwinian idea of “selection” that best summarizes the paradigm. Secondly, this paradigm is now firmly rooted in the supposed Darwinian (actually pre-Darwinian) idea that “man descends from the ape.” And finally, Darwin is now the venerated prophet of this secular religion. By convention, therefore, let us call the processes of natural or artificial selection “Darwinian mechanisms” or “Darwinian strategies.” This is an abuse of language, since these very real mechanisms do not validate Darwin’s speculative theory on the appearance of species; but the terms are justified by usage.

  The Darwinian paradigm goes beyond left-right divisions; Spencer’s “laissez-faire” is rather right-wing, but Galton’s eugenics, which valorizes state interventionism, is historically left-wing.635 Nonetheless, the latter is merely a more sophisticated version of the former, claiming to support the “survival of the fittest” by the sterilization of the less able. In its classical form, “social Darwinism” is a faithful ally of Smith’s economic liberalism. “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole social body to choose those who meet the requirements of a given task,” enthused the American William Graham Sumner in 1907.

  Darwin is the direct descendant of Hobbes, via Malthus and Spencer. In fact, he only made literal what was still a metaphor in Hobbes: Man is an animal. Not only is the civilized man descended from the savage, but the savage himself descends from the ape. Darwinism soon imposed itself as the metaphysical framework of all “human sciences,” and the foundation of a new idea of man, who is no longer distinguished from the animal kingdom by a qualitative leap. Sigmund Freud, among others, owed his success to having re-founded psychology on Darwinian principles, that is to say, on the premise that the creative spirit of man was only a by-product of his (repressed) animal instincts: “The development of man till now seems to me to require no other explanation than that of animals” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920); “It is merely the principle of pleasure [. . .] which from the outset governs the operations of the psychic apparatus” (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929). Since, according to Darwinian logic, procreation determines selective advantage, it was naturally in the sex drive that Freud found the key to the human psyche.

  Darwinism scientifically condoned racism, the ideological justification for colonialism, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. Darwin had extended his theory from animal species to human races in his second work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he predicted that in a few centuries, “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Darwin brought to this idea the stamp of natural science, and above all, by linking it to his theory of the origin of species, he implicitly placed this genocidal process in the continuity of a positive evolution that had earlier produced the savage from the monkey.

  The English and the Americans found in Darwin the confirmation of the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon” or “Nordic” race: “a race of leaders, organizers and aristocrats,” according to the American Madison Grant. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916) Grant advocated limiting the immigration of other European races (“Alpine” and “Mediterranean”) and maintaining segregation between black and white because “once raised to social equality their influence will be destructive to themselves and to the whites.” The worst danger was that whites and blacks would “amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates.”

  Judaism as Darwinian Strategy

  The Darwinian paradigm has a strong resonance among Jewish supremacists. Harry Waton wrote in his Program for the Jews, published in 1939: “Since the Jews are the highest and most cultured people on earth, the Jews have a right to subordinate to themselves the rest of mankind and to be the masters over the whole earth. Now, indeed, this is the historic destiny of the Jews.”636

  In fact, the notion of natural selection among human races came to Jewish thinkers long before it dawned on Spencer and Darwin. As mentioned in chapter 5, the Marrano Isaac de la Peyrère can be considered as a precursor, with his Talmudic theory of the Adamic origin of the Jews and pre-Adamic origin of the Gentiles (Præadamitæ, 1655). Seven years before Darwin’s The Origin of Species, it was Disraeli who developed a proto-Darwinian vision of the struggle of the races: “It is in vain for man to attempt to baffle the inexorable law of nature which has decreed that a superior race shall never be destroyed or absorbed by an inferior” (Lord George Bentinck, 1852). Shortly thereafter, the inventors of the first Darwinian racialist theories were Jewish authors, such as Ludwig Gumplowicz, professor of political science in Graz for twenty years and author of The Struggle of Races (1883).

  Many of the most enthusiastic disciples of Spencer, Darwin, and Galton were Jewish. Lucien Wolf, a well-known journalist, editor-in-chief of the Jewish World, but also a politician and historian, was one of the first to develop a “Darwinian” theory of Jewish racial superiority, in an 1884 article entitled “What Is Judaism? A Question of Today,” published in the Fortnightly Review, one of the most popular and influential British magazines. Jewish superiority, he wrote, “constitutes almost a stage in evolution” (unlike the followers of Mohammed, who “are among the rotting branches of the great tree of humanity”). This superiority is the result of eugenic principles enshrined in Jewish law, and encouraged by tradition: “The natural impulse to reject all further infusions of alien blood, as soon as the consciousness of superiority was reached, found every support in their national legends and traditions, and became accentuated by the hostility of their neighbours.” The key to Jewish superiority is, therefore, consanguinity: “Jewish separatism, or ‘tribalism,’ as it is now called, was invented to enable the Jews to keep untainted for the benefit of mankind not only the teachings of Judaism but also their physical results as illustrations of their value.”637 Like many thinkers of his time, Wolf was actually more Larmarckian than Darwinian, since he did not speak of “selection” and thus suggested that Talmudic eugenics produces acquired traits that are transmitted. But let us not forget that Darwin himself did not exclude this Lamarckian factor.

  On the other hand, Wolf refers here only to a process internal to “race.” His contemporary and friend Joseph Jacobs, who worked with Francis Galton, emphasized the competitive relationship between races, thus introducing a factor of selection. In his Studies in Jewish Statistics: Social, Vital and Anthropometric (1891), a collection of articles first published in The Jewish Chronicle, Jacobs suggests that persecution has brought out the best of Jewish potentialities: “The weaker members of each generation have been weeded out by persecution which tempted them or forced them to embrace Christianity, and thus contemporary Jews are the survival of a long process of unnatural selection which has seemingly fitted them excellently for the struggle for intellectual existence.”638 This perception of persecution as a selective factor—a Spencerian mechanism ensuring the “survival of the fittest” by way of the expulsion of “soft” Jews from the gene pool—is a commonplace in the Jewish community’s discourse about itself. Theodor Herzl, among many others, evoked this idea without bothering to argue for it, since it went without saying among those he was addressing: “Jew-baiting has merely stripped off our weaklings; the strong among us were invariably true to their race when persecution broke out against them.”639

  Jewish literature about the Jews is full of “Darwinian” explanations of the uniqueness of the Jewish people. Here is an example from the Zionist Nahum Goldman: “One of the great prodigies of Jewish psychology, which explains to a large extent the extraordinary survival of our people in spite of two thousand years of dispersion, has consisted in creating an absolutely brilliant defense mechanism against the politico-economic situation in which the Jews found themselves—against persecution and exile. This mechanism can be explaine
d in a few words: The Jews have regarded their persecutors as an inferior race.”640 In other words, persecution reinforced the community’s sense of superiority.

  Here is how Yuri Larin, a close associate of Lenin, explained the overrepresentation of Jews “in the apparatus of public organizations”: “The Jewish worker, because of the peculiarity of his past life and because of the additional oppression and persecution he had to endure for many years under tsarism, has developed a large number of special traits that equip him for active roles in revolutionary and public work. The exceptional development of the special psychological makeup necessary for leadership roles has made Jewish revolutionary workers more capable of gaining prominence in public life than the average Russian worker, who lived under very different conditions.” According to Larin, the economic “struggle for survival” in overcrowded shtetls had created above-average individuals. “In other words, the conditions of everyday life produced in urban Jews a peculiar, exceptional energy,” unlike “the bulk of our Russian workers [who] were of peasant origin and thus hardly capable of systematic activity.” Moreover, because of the discrimination against Jewish workers under the tsarist regime, “there developed, among this segment of the Jewish people, an unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and support.” Finally, because education had always been the main path of Jews toward emancipation, “tens of thousands of Jewish laboring youth used to spend long years, night in night out, bent over their books, in an attempt to break out of the narrow circle of restrictions. It rarely worked […], but the higher cultural level acquired in this manner went on to benefit the revolutionary struggle.”641 Jews, in other words, are closer than others to the proverbial New Man that Revolution aimed at creating.