God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  8

  Hitler and ‘Perverted Science’

  If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, SPEECH TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 18 JUNE 1940

  AS EARLY AS 1928, Churchill had recorded his concerns about ‘a future catastrophe’ that could potentially destroy the human race.

  The organisation of mankind into great States and Empires, and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness, enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined. All the noblest virtues of individuals were gathered to strengthen the destructive capacity of the mass. Good finances … made it possible to divert … the energies of whole peoples to the task of devastation. Democratic institutions gave expression to the willpower of millions… . Lastly, Science unfolded her treasures and her secrets to the desperate demands of men, and placed in their hands agencies and apparatus almost decisive in their character.1

  A short twelve years later, on 18 June 1940, Churchill was suitably grim as he spoke to the House of Commons. France had just capitulated to the Nazis, leaving Britain to stand alone against Hitler’s evil regime. Churchill had been prime minister for thirty-nine days, and the daunting weight of his responsibilities would only increase over the next five years.

  In his remarks that day, Churchill not only sounded the alarm for Christian civilization; he also warned that, if the Nazis prevailed, the ‘whole world’ would ‘sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’.2

  In 1940 the scope of atrocities associated with the Nazis’ attempts at genocide and racial purification had not yet come to light, but Churchill could see the potential for ‘enterprises of slaughter’, made possible by industrialization and advances in technology.

  Today, we might call ‘perverted science’ scientism. True science pursues truth wherever it leads, but scientism pursues its own agenda, even if it means denying the truth.

  Some today would label those who are concerned about the perversion of science as anti-science, but it isn’t an either/or proposition. Churchill was certainly not anti-science, but neither was he willing to kowtow to every claim of science.

  In his ‘last great speech … in the House of Commons’, on 1 March 1955, he offered this warning: ‘We have antagonisms now as deep as those of the Reformation and its reactions… . But now they are spread over the whole world… . We have force and science, hitherto the servants of man, now threatening to become his master.’3

  Churchill spoke of two concerns in particular. The first, as we have seen in previous chapters, was the survival of Christian civilization. As a historian, Churchill knew that the roots of true science lay in the rich soil of the Judeo-Christian world view.4 He was concerned that the perversion of science in the West would follow its separation from its spiritual roots – a separation that Hitler championed.

  Though he began life as a Catholic, Hitler had come to regard Christianity as a religion of ‘meekness and flabbiness’.5 Furthermore, Hitler viewed the Jews as an inferior race that stood in the way of human evolution, so he had little regard for the virtues of their world view. He saw the Jews as enemies who would drag humanity to a lower level. Therefore, he tried to sever Germany from its Judeo-Christian roots.

  Hitler would destroy those roots by taking over the Church and replacing biblical doctrine with Nazi creeds. He sought to establish new roots – poisonous ones that would kill many millions before the war’s end.

  ‘Perverted science’ would be integral to Hitler’s aims. Finding military uses for advancing technology would be front and centre. Corruption of scientific practices would be unrestrained. Perverted science would give rise to the sadistic Josef Mengele and other inhumane scientist-physicians, and would sooner invent a better gas chamber for concentration camps than find a cure for cancer.

  Some of Churchill’s concern about the perversion of science would no doubt have arisen from his reading of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler not only provided an autobiography but also described his personal world view and the philosophy underlying it. In 1948, Churchill reflected on the nature of Hitler’s book:

  All was there – the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist state; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.6

  DISCERNING THE ZEITGEIST

  Churchill knew well the forces that had pushed Hitler towards the dark side. His powers of discernment could grasp the ‘spirit of the age’, the Zeitgeist in which both he and Hitler had been sired and nurtured. Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary throughout the Second World War, said that Hitler ‘considered the Christian religion to be a hypocritical trap which had outlived its time’ and that the Nazi leader believed that his religion ‘was the law of nature’.7

  Adolf Hitler was immersed in a Zeitgeist full of race-based theory and anti-Semitism, and he believed in the Darwinian vision of how life advances towards its highest form. In From Darwin to Hitler, professor Richard Weikart explores exhaustively the link between Darwinism and Hitler. His seminal work is an important reference for this chapter.

  Hitler was not even on my radar screen when I began my research… . However, the more books, articles, and documents I read by Darwinists and eugenicists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the more I read by and about Hitler, the more I became convinced that there were significant historical connections between Darwinism and Hitler’s ideology.8

  Darwin’s theory of evolution and its presuppositions were detailed in his book On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859. The roots of Darwin’s theories found fertile soil in continental Europe, cultivated by racial theorists who had long been tilling the ground: ‘The influence of Darwinism can be gauged by the outpouring of books and articles in late nineteenth-century Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.’9

  One of those who drank deeply from that flood was the German-born geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, who came to prominence in the twentieth century. In his autobiography, Goldschmidt tells of reading ‘with burning eyes and soul’ the works of the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (who also would have a great influence on Hitler’s thinking).10 The Darwinian world view as presented by Haeckel ‘was typical for educated young people of [Goldschmidt’s] day’.11

  One of the presuppositions that began to grow (and that would eventually undergird the Nazi world view) had to do with ‘biological improvement’. Weikart writes:

  Biological improvement of Europeans would give them a greater advantage in the struggle against other races, while biological degeneration – which many eugenicists feared was occurring – might lead to disaster for Europeans in the global struggle for existence.12

  Important opinion-makers began to realize that Darwinism was not just about biology but was also about society. An entire body of work emerged on ‘social Darwinism’, which Richard Hofstadter defines as ‘an ideology using a competitive view of nature and Darwin’s concept of the struggle for existence as a basis for social theory’.13 Many atheists and other secular Darwinists protest that Darwin intended no social applications from his evolutionary theory. However, in a letter dated 26 July 1872, Darwin himself affirmed that it had certain social implications.14

  These presuppositions and the resulting world view characterized not only the societies of continental Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also that of the British Isles. Winston Churchill understood these attitudes because they pervaded so much of the British aristocracy prior to 1940. In fact, he and his father had been castigated at times by their peers for including Jews among their f
riends.

  There were many members of the [British] aristocracy who, at least before May 1940, expressed their rather definite sympathies for Hitler – or, at least, for the then Germanophile inclinations of [Prime Minister] Chamberlain. Such tendencies were shared by members of the royal family and, what was more important, by civil servants of considerable influence. One of these was Sir Horace Wilson, who before 1940 was Chamberlain’s closest and most trusted adviser.15

  During the Chamberlain administration, Horace Wilson ‘sat in a small office outside the prime minister’s room in Downing Street, and everyone with an appointment had to pass through this office and have a few minutes’ conversation with Sir Horace’.16 One observer called Wilson ‘the uncrowned ruler of England’.17 But Wilson was also closely tied to the appeasement of Hitler before the war, and ‘one of the first things that Churchill did [when he became prime minister] was to tell Horace Wilson to get out.’18

  Once Adolf Hitler was firmly in power, with his economic and employment policies in full swing, he was free to focus his attention on what he believed to be the cause of the new Germanic empire’s foundational challenges – the Jews. Mein Kampf is littered with evidence of Hitler’s radical racial beliefs, shaped by what can only be described as ‘mystical Darwinism’ – that is, taking the blind evolutionary processes of natural selection and infusing them with transcendent authority and godlike omniscience and omnipotence.

  The Nuremberg Laws, based on the premise of a pure Aryan race of strong and healthy Germans, were utterly anti-Semitic and designed to prevent what Hitler feared would be contamination and defilement of the blood of the superior race.19

  The Nazi racial doctrine held that intermixing with weak non-Aryans would produce even weaker children, resulting in the inevitable demise of the German race; therefore, it was the duty of the Aryans to ensure that non-Aryans did not infect them with their blood. Once Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws, he could easily move forward with his plan to deport the Jews to concentration camps for the purpose of enslaving and murdering them.

  THE PERVERSION OF SCIENCE

  Churchill’s concerns about the corruption of scientific knowledge and its application to the waging of war in the emerging industrial age – ‘developments and extensions … which will be incomparably more formidable and fatal’20 – were only intensified by what he read in Mein Kampf, heard in statements made by Hitler during the pre-war period, and saw in the build-up of the Nazi war machine. Let’s examine the implications of a few key elements of Nazi ideology.

  The ‘phony war’ between reason and revelation, rationality and faith, reality and mystery

  Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. During the period when the principles of modern science were under development, revelation and reason were linked. Sir Isaac Newton grasped this connection and ‘explicitly stated that he was investigating God’s creation, which was a religious duty because nature reflects the creativity of its maker’.21

  Newton was reaching back into the Middle Ages, a time that has been pilloried as anti-science but that actually represents a more highly integrated approach to philosophy, theology and the study of the workings of nature.22 In fact, it was the ‘natural philosophers’ of the Middle Ages (the term scientist wasn’t coined until 1833) who made modern science possible. Without ‘their central belief that nature was created by God and so worthy of their attention’, writes James Hannam, ‘modern science would simply not have happened’.23

  During the eighteenth century Enlightenment, revelation was pushed out of the epistemological formula. In the minds of some scholars, Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century shattered altogether the link between revelation and reason.

  Churchill, in his reference to ‘perverted science,’ was no doubt conscious of the racial policies already coming to the fore in pre-war Nazi society. And Hitler, in measuring scientific truth only on the basis of what appeared to be reasonable inferences drawn from Darwin’s theories, contended that he was promoting the science that would help the human race. For Darwin and his followers, ‘group competition, such as war and racial antagonisms, played a crucial role in the development of human societies, and even in the development of morality.’24 Hitler embraced this theory and pursued ‘a two-pronged strategy involving both artificial and natural selection: eugenics within German society to improve the health and vitality of the “Aryan race”, and radical struggle and warfare towards those outside the German racial community’.25

  After Darwin’s work was published, the biological sciences grew rapidly. Increasingly, the idea that linked revelation and reason was crushed under the multiplying theories. The result was that ‘most scientists’ in that period began to ‘advance theories of human inequality as matters of scientific fact’, writes professor Henry Friedlander, who himself was held by the Nazis in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.26

  Utilitarianism replaces transcendent moral values

  Adolf Hitler was no less a child of his times than Winston Churchill. The Darwinist Zeitgeist into which Hitler was born was growing rapidly in Austria, Germany and Britain. In the eighteenth century, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had cast his bread on the waters of British thought, and some in the aristocracy had gobbled it down. According to Bentham, actions are moral in proportion to how much utility they produce, which is measured by material outcomes that produce pleasure and happiness.

  Though Churchill had aristocratic roots, he had not taken Bentham’s bait, perhaps because he was not fully received into that social stratum or because he did not think of himself as an aristocrat. Many in the British upper class disdained him, and this may have saved Churchill from adopting a merely utilitarian world view.

  Fifteen years before Hitler was born, Georg von Gizycki and Friedrich Jodl were also thinking about utilitarianism. One outcome of Gizycki’s work, writes Richard Weikart, was ‘rescuing ethics and morality from its connections with religion, creating a this-worldly moral philosophy to replace the prevalent otherworldly conception’.27 Ultimately, this would devolve into the Nazi guidelines for determining whether a person deserved life or death. ‘One important criterion’ for determining whether a person would live or die under Nazi regulations, writes Henry Friedlander, ‘was utilitarian and based on a patient’s level of productivity’. Individuals to be executed were ‘denounced as “life unworthy of life”’. They were considered ‘burdensome lives’ and ‘useless eaters’.28

  Utilitarianism has a crushing effect on transcendent values, as Churchill was well aware.

  It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs… . Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.29

  It is the loss of this transcendence that so captivated Bentham, Hitler and other utilitarians, with their ethics of raw pragmatics. We still hear the echoes of it today, in the writings of militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, among many others. In a Twitter exchange with a woman who wrote, ‘I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down’s syndrome,’ Dawkins replied, ‘Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.’30

  Reductionism: the mechanization of all things

  ‘Prussian idealism took the heart of flesh and blood from the German and in its place gave him one of iron and paper’, wrote Theodor Haecker in 1940.31 The German educational system that had been the prototype for scholastic excellence in the nineteenth century, and that had drawn students from across the world, had ‘resurrected in modern garb the most immoral kinds of consciousness, of ethnocentrism and national egotism, apparently now rationally warranted by Darwinian “racial science”’.32

  In The Old Faith and the New, David Friedrich Strauss, another shaper of the philosophical Zeitgeist in which Hitler was raised, tried to displa
ce the Christian world view with that of naturalistic science. Strauss believed that the human soul was merely the brain and its physical functions and that ethics were developed only to facilitate human existence. ‘Even the Ten Commandments lose their sanctity,’ Richard Weikart observes in a discussion about Strauss. ‘They are merely tools useful to humans in the course of evolutionary competition, rather than divinely ordained commands.’33

  If human beings are nothing more than mechanisms inside a much larger machine, they can be ‘turned off’ if they break down or have inferior parts. According to Nazi philosophy, the only biological mechanism that should be kept running and constantly tweaked through eugenics was the Aryan human.

  According to this way of thinking, the Jews were gremlins in the machine. In February 1945, Hitler mused that because the Jews were ‘parasite[s] which cannot and will not be assimilated’, Germany’s attempt to eliminate them ‘has been an essential process of disinfection, which we have prosecuted to its ultimate limit and without which we should ourselves have been asphyxiated and destroyed’.34

  Reductionism: from the ultimate questions to the immediate

  The second reduction wrought by scientism has to do with the key issues of life itself. In a mechanistic view, major assumptions about the purpose and meaning of existence are overturned; but a transcendent understanding of humanity is a bulwark against such reductionism.

  For Churchill, the ultimate questions could be summed up in three concerns: ‘Why are we here? What is the purpose of Life? Whither are we going?’35

  The great schism between revelation and reason shifted the focus away from the ultimate to the immediate. Scientism excused this reductionism by claiming that the ultimate questions were beyond its empirical grasp while at the same time scorning and marginalizing the theology that provides the tools to understand the ultimate questions.