by Paul Johnson
Eugenics became a central plank of national policy in Germany. That is not surprising. Darwin’s work was adopted enthusiastically in German scientific circles from the early 1860s on, and Darwinismus formed the basis for scientific race theory. Germany became the home for race theorists, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of an enormous race history of the modern world centered on Germany, who adopted German citizenship in 1916 at the height of the First World War. He emphasized the cultural side of the Aryan master race (as he called it) by living in Bayreuth and marrying Wagner’s only daughter, Eva. He held that “so long as there are true Germanen in the world so long can and will we have confidence in the future of the human family.” But the entrance of the Jews into European history was the intrusion of “an element foreign to everything that Europe had hitherto been, and achieved.”
Darwin used phrases like “as rich as Jews” and blamed “a primitive Jewish God” for much that was wrong with Judeo-Christianity, especially the doctrine of eternal punishment, which he thought positively evil. But he was not anti-Semitic. What made his teaching so destructive in Germany was his emphasis on the constant violence involved in natural selection. It is doubtful if Adolf Hitler actually read the Origin, but he certainly absorbed its arguments and the psychology of strife seen as necessary for the emergence of higher forms. Hitler was fond of dwelling on the awful prospect (which Thomas Carlyle had made into a joke) of mankind evolving backward or downward. He said:
If we do not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the might of the stronger, a day will come when the wild animals will again devour us – when the insects will eat the wild animals, and finally nothing will exist except the microbes. By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.
Thus we see how ideas develop their own self-sustaining and often destructive careers in history. The emotional stew that built up inside Darwin’s mind from seeing the Fuegans, looking at beaks in the Galápagos, and reading Malthus—a stew that permeated with its verbal odors almost every page of Origin—became for some a vicious poison. Darwin’s fondness for the word struggle—he used it dozens of times—was particularly unfortunate. Hitler adopted it and made it the title of his book, which was both autobiography and political program, Mein Kampf. Struggle was healthy; it was nature’s way. And under the cover and darkness of war, it became easy to resort to another much-used word of Darwin’s, extermination.
Once in power, Hitler began a process that carried dysgenics to its logical conclusion. Over four hundred thousand mentally unfit persons were sterilized in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. When war came, seventy thousand of these unfortunates, though incapable of breeding, were “exterminated.” These mass-extermination programs were the model for the elimination of entire races, gypsies and Jews, with the Slavs to follow if the war lasted long enough. It is important to note that Hitler was not a solitary figure in his peculiar version of Darwinismus. In his ascent to power, he always polled better among the university population, professors and students, than among the German electorate as a whole. German biologists who held academic status were almost unanimously behind the eugenics program, and over 50 percent of them were members of the Nazi party, the highest percentage in any professional group. Both Himmler, head of the SS, and Goebbels, the propaganda chief, were students of Darwin.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the notion of struggle being natural and essential in the improvement of humanity was a belief that ran right across the political spectrum. The delight with which Engels and Marx pounced upon the Origin the week of its appearance was succeeded by a continuing interest among leading Communists, from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, in Darwin’s theory of natural selection as justification for the class struggle. It was essential to the self-respect of Communists to believe that their ideology was scientific, and Darwin provided stiffening to the scaffold of laws and dialectic they erected around their seizure and retention of power. Stalin had Darwin’s “struggle” and “survival of the fittest” in mind when dealing with the Kulaks and when relocating the minorities of Greater Russia: extermination of groups was a natural event if the party, redefined as the elite of the politically “fit,” was to survive. Mao Tse-tung, who had his own view of Darwin, saw the “struggle” in terms of his Cultural Revolution, in which one embodiment of Communist culture replaced an outmoded and unfit predecessor. Pol Pot, introduced by his professor Jean-Paul Sartre to the idea of evolution to higher forms, translated the theory in terms of Cambodia into an urban-rural struggle in which one fourth of the population died. In the twentieth century, it is likely that over 100 million people were killed or starved to death as a result of totalitarian regimes infected with varieties of social Darwinism. But then Darwin himself had always insisted on the high percentage of destruction involved in breeding, whether of seeds, embryos, births, of even mature birds, mammals, and species in general. Nature, he believed, is always profuse, in death as well as life, and if he had been asked to reflect on the human toll of “struggle” in the twentieth century, he would certainly have pointed out that the world population nevertheless dramatically increased throughout the period. At the time Origin was published, there were about 1,325 million human beings in the world. By the time Mao Tse-tung, last of the great “exterminators,” died—having himself presided over the deaths of 70 million—the human total had risen to 3,900 million.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Triumph and the Reversal
of Natural Selection
Few men have lived such a successful and contented life as Darwin. The Origin was one of those books that established itself immediately and has never been ousted from its salient place in scientific literature. The acclaim for his work culminated in the autumn of 1877, when he was made an honorary doctor of laws at a special meeting of his old university, Cambridge. Emma in a letter to her son William described the scene in the Senate House:
Gallery crammed to overflowing w. Undergraduates & the Floor crammed too w. Undergs. climbing on the statues & standing up in the windows. There seemed to be periodic cheering in answer to jokes which sounded deafening. But when Father came in in his red cloak ushered in by some authorities, it was perfectly deafening for some minutes. I thought he would be overcome but he was quite stout & smiling & sat waiting for the Vice-Chancellor. The time was filled up with shouts & jokes & groans . . . we had been watching some cords stretched across from one gallery to another, wondering what was to happen but we were not surprised to see a monkey dangling down, which caused shouts & jokes about our ancestors etc. Then came a sort of ring tied with ribbons wh. we conjectured to be the “Missing Link.” . . . a few Latin words & then it was over & everybody came up & shook hands.
The fact that everyone joked about Darwin and that he liked the jokes endeared him to the public. Punch turned him into a familiar figure. When he died, the public demanded that he be buried at Westminster Abbey, and his coffin was borne by ten eminent men: the Dukes of Devonshire and Argyll, the Earl of Derby, the American Ambassador James Russell Lowell, Canon Farrar, and five scientists, Hooker, Huxley, Wallace, John Lubbock, and William Spottiswoode. The Times devoted a column and a half to the ceremony, one of the defining funerals of the late Victorian epoch.
Darwin’s private life was outwardly happy and placid, underlining his persistent good fortune. Emma was a wise and loving wife and long survived him. Seven of his ten children survived and prospered, George becoming professor of astronomy at Cambridge and winning a knighthood, Francis and Horace being elected fellows of the Royal Society. His many grandchildren delighted him. His finances flourished, and he was able to assist all his progeny to lead comfortable lives. He was esteemed by his neighbors and revered by his servants. Many cherished animals were buried in the gardens, alongsid
e the orchid house, the greenhouse where the plants climbed and devoured insects, and the soggy place where the worms bred.
In his last years, he wrote a good deal of autobiographical material, some of which has survived. It is guarded, though there are occasional flashes of frankness. Thus, when a child: “I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods”; “once as a very little boy I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy, I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power.” He said he was considered by the masters “rather below the common standard in intellect.” He quotes his father: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs & rat-catching, & you will be a disgrace to yourself & all your family.” Most of it is anodyne rambling. “I did not care much about the general public. . . . I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame.” “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation”; “The plain language of the [biblical] text seems to show that the men who do not believe, & this would include my Father, Brother & almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” “Few persons can have lived a life more retired than [my wife and I] have done.” “[Emma] has been my greatest blessing, & I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I would rather have been unsaid.”
What is the most striking admission is the collapse of his entire cultural life in middle and old age. He lost all interest in art. It is significant that his attempt to get material for his Expressions from painting and prints was a failure. On holiday in the Lake District in 1879, the Darwins called on Ruskin at his house overlooking Coniston Lake, and Ruskin showed them his magnificent watercolors by Turner. Darwin took no interest—could see nothing in them. The incomprehension was reciprocated; Ruskin thought Darwin’s views on evolution were “pernicious nonsense” and that “if he would get different kinds of air & bottle them, and examine them when bottled, he would do much more useful work than he does in the contemplation of the hinder parts of monkeys.” Darwin once got “intense pleasure” from listening to music, though “utterly destitute of an ear [so that] I cannot perceive a discord or keep tune & hum a tune correctly.” Later he lost completely whatever taste for music he ever had, and when Emma played, he watched her for the pleasure of admiring the skill as her hands moved over the keys, not for the sounds she produced. He took no interest, for instance, in the great Wagner boom, despite the fact that his work was read to each other by Richard and Cosima Wagner, just as George Eliot and Lewes had done, and despite the reiterated theme of transformation in the operas. Most surprising of all was the disappearance of his taste for poetry. Once, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley “gave me great pleasure” and “I took intense delight in Shakespeare.” But he confessed in 1876 that “now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry,” and an effort to return to Shakespeare “nauseated me.” Even “fine scenery” did not “cause me the exquisite delight” it once did. All he liked was to have read to him novels, “if they do not end unhappily.” He did not require high quality, just a character “whom one can thoroughly love, & if it be a pretty woman all the better.” Darwin is an archetypal figure in Eliot’s Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, and the Darwinian impulse is strong in Conrad and Hardy, and still more in Ibsen’s plays, where the doom of heredity is a recurring theme. But there is no evidence that Darwin took any interest in the evolution of literature. It is worth repeating his complaint: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws, out of large collections of facts.” He thought he should have “made a rule to read some poetry & to listen to some music at least once every week,” to “keep active through use” those “parts of my brain now atrophied.”
He tried as honestly as he could to analyze his own gifts—and shortcomings. “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit,” like Huxley. He thought himself “a poor critic.” His power to follow an abstract train of thought was “very limited.” His memory was “hazy.” But “I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things . . . [and] observing them carefully.” He thought his industry was “great,” his love of science “steady and ardent.” He had, he thought, “patience” and originality, springing from “the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists.” His habits were “methodical,” and ill health had “saved me from the distraction of society and amusements.” He had enjoyed “a fair share of invention as well as of common sense.” However, he was inclined to call his abilities “moderate” and added, “My work has been over and over again greatly overpraised.”
It should be noted that Darwin’s sharply critical estimate of his own gifts and work was accompanied by often ruthless reflections on his contemporaries. These were for his private eye only: It was against his lifelong practice of networking to disparage fellow savants in public. But his secret thoughts were unedifying. Even Humboldt was a “disappointment,” who “talked much.” Buckle, too, was “a great talker” who “left no gaps” for others to put a word in. And “I doubt whether his generalisations are worth anything.” Spencer was the same—not “of any strictly scientific use” and certainly “no use to me.” And “he was extremely egotistical.” Owen was “my bitter enemy,” inspired by jealousy. He quotes Falconer’s opinion that he was “not only ambitious, very envious & arrogant, but untruthful and dishonest.” His “power of hatred was certainly unsurpassed.” The botanist Robert Brown would not lend plants—“he was a complete miser & knew himself to be a miser.” He thought it “a pity” that Huxley had “attacked so many scientific men,” albeit he had “worked well for the good of mankind.” Hooker was “the most untirable worker I have ever seen” but “very impulsive & somewhat peppery in temper.” Herschel’s every word was “worth listening to” but when he came into a room, it was “as if he knew his hands were dirty, & that he knew that his wife knew that they were dirty.” William Buckland was “vulgar and [an] almost coarse man.” The degree to which geologist Roderick Murchison “valued rank was ludicrous.” This was the trouble with Lyell too: “very fond of society, especially of eminent men & of persons high in rank.” Babbage was “a disappointed & discontented man . . . morose.” He quoted him saying, “There is only one thing I hate more than piety, & that is patriotism.” He accused Carlyle of “haranguing during the whole of dinner on the advantages of silence,” and said of him, “I never met a man with a mind so ill-adapted for scientific research.”
In his old age Darwin admitted, “I have lost the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone.” He assured Tennyson that there was nothing in his theories to prevent anyone believing in a supreme being. But he did not think about God or the possibility of an afterlife. He closed his mind to speculation about the infinite and concentrated on worms. One is tempted to feel that he deliberately shut his eyes to the ultimate consequences of his work, in terms of the human condition and the purpose of life or the absence of one. Though he sometimes, in his published works, put in a reassuring phrase, his private views tended to be bleak. He wrote to Hooker: “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature.” He was always confused about cruelty. In his traveling days, he condemned “buccaneers” and “whalers” for “always taking cruel delight in knocking down the little birds.” He thought that “the natives” were cruel in their treatment of turtles. Yet he records without comment his own delight in turtle meat and soup, made from creatures he had killed, and describes the “extreme tameness” of the birds, which allowed him to approach near enough to “kill them with a switch” or knock them down “with a cap or hat.” He habitually killed and opened up the stomachs of creatures to discover what they ate. But that was “science.” Killing for other purposes was “cruelty.”
If Darwin was ambivalent about the fact of cruelty, he was also confused about its motivation. How could impersonal nature be, as he said, “horribly cruel”? Judgments
of value about nature’s actions, design, efficiency, and success or failure often slipped into his narratives. He found it no easier than anyone else to imagine an existence without object, where, in Thomas Hobbes’s bleak phrase, “there is no contentment but in proceeding.” So while surrendering gradually any belief in any kind of omnipotent being or any conceivable afterlife, he continued to believe, or half-believe, in nature as a success story, an endless ascent to higher organisms, more efficient, more adaptable, more capable of coping with their surroundings.
But was that where his theory of natural selection actually led? It was clearly one of the most powerful and inclusive ideas ever produced by man. While Darwin was still alive, in 1880, Leslie Stephen, in an article in the Fortnightly Review called “An Attempted Philosophy of History,” predicted that the new science of life would conquer all: “Darwinism has acted like a charm, affecting the whole development of modern thought . . . we classify the ablest thinkers by the relation which their opinions bear to it, and whatever its ultimate fate, no one can doubt that it will be the most conspicuous factor in modern speculation.” Stephen, the polymath creator of the Dictionary of National Biography, was an updated version of Herbert Spencer and a progenitor of the Bloomsbury Group. His prediction has proved broadly correct, even though for a time it looked as though the ideas of Marx or Freud or Einstein might prove more powerful and durable.
