The Poisonous Effects of the "Struggle for Life" Ideology

When there first appeared Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," the book was greeted by many almost if it was manna from heaven.  A scholar (Velikovsky) noted the following:

"One wonders at the avidity displayed by scientists in the acceptance of the Darwinian theory....It was not brought up against him that he had no academic position in a university, or that his own scholastic degree was that of a bachelor of theology, or that he omitted all footnotes to his sources, or that it was often impossible for a reader to check the data...Darwin became the supreme authority, the symbol of resolution of all questions, and a substitute for the Creator himself."

At that time there was something which was like a gigantic springboard ready to launch some theory of natural biological origins that might have been proposed, ensuring its cultural success. That springboard was the social structure of academia. Just as the social structure of medieval churches served as a huge springboard that helped many a legend go viral (such as legends of the healing powers of saint bones), the social structure of universities and colleges stood ready to make a natural theory of biological origins go viral. Once an idea starts being spread about by the professors at ten or twenty top universities, the idea has a good chance of eventually infecting the masses, even if the idea is very poorly substantiated. Once a bandwagon effect gets rolling to spread some idea in a process of social contagion, and an academia herd effect comes into play, some flimsy claim can become a societal norm, a speech custom that all compliant students are expected to mouth.  

Within the halls of academia there existed a large group of people extremely eager to popularize some theory of natural biological origins as soon as it appeared. We may call these people the yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys. “We got this” is a phrase people say when they think they have something under control or when they think they understand some thing. The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys included people in academia who hungered for some theory of natural biological origins which would feather their caps and enhance their prestige: a set of professors yearning to crown themselves with glory by positioning themselves as sages who understood the great secret of biological origins. 

Of course, if you are a professor of biology or a professor of natural history, you will seem like a vastly more impressive person if you can convince people that you understand the deep mystery of the origin of species and the origin of humanity. Some professor saying "I understand how mankind originated" sounds like a far more impressive figure than some professor humbly saying, "Such a mystery is a hundred miles over my head." The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys also included many inside and outside of academia who desired some theory of accidental origins that would fit in with their belief in the nonexistence of any power greater than man.  In the nineteenth century atheists wanted a theory of natural biological origins more than a young boy wants a Playstation or Xbox machine under his Christmas tree. 

So we can begin explaining how Darwinism got to be so popular by mentioning the two groups of people that were most eager for a theory such as Darwin's: professors (particularly biology professors) and atheists. But there were other groups that flocked to Darwinism: oppressive capitalists and oppressive imperialists. To such people Darwinism was like a big Christmas gift: an ideology that would give a green light or a "thumbs up" to their cruel and oppressive behavior. 

Darwin said that the basis of all biology was a "struggle for existence" or "struggle for life" in which "survival of the fittest" was the key principle. Darwin used the very term "struggle for life" in the title of his book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," also making use of the racist-sounding phrase "preservation of favoured races." Two large groups of people greatly welcomed such ideas:

(1) Capitalist business men running Victorian Era factories, workhouses and sweatshops that ruthlessly overworked workers, and often worked children to their deaths.  The Victorian Era (1837 - 1901) was famous for its brutal exploitation of workers. 

(2) Anyone at all building an international empire such as the British Empire, an empire built upon the ruthless exploitation and domination of people all over the globe. 

Velikovsky puts it this way:

"The teaching of Darwin in a sense sanctified the exploitation of the less fit by the better fit -- that is, exploitation of those less able to adapt to the circumstances and opportunities of the times. The industrial revolution that was shaping itself in the Victorian age saw the enterprising, but also the unscrupulous, take advantage of the underprivileged, the resourceless, the ignorant, the unprotected -- in a word, the unfit. The exploitation manifested itself in work hours from before dawn until the night, in child labor paid pittances, in unhygienic factories and perilous mines." 

The map below shows the British Empire at its height in 1920.  Of course, global empires are not built by gentle means. Global empires are built through the oppression and exploitation of local peoples. Darwinism provided a green light to the oppression that built the British Empire. All cruelties and oppression could be justified with slogans such as "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence."

Using the term "enslaved" in a rather loose way, to mean oppression something less than literal enslavement, Velikovsky put it this way, referring to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901):

"The British Islands, having lost the American colonies at the end of the former century, now, under Victoria, were expanding to become the dominant colonial power in the world. The blacks of Africa, the dark-skinned peoples of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean and various other colors were enslaved as colonial people -- and though the colonial expansion of the British goes back to the sixteenth century, it never reached the scope, the glamour and the degree of extortion that it did in the days of Victoria." 

The ideology of Darwinism aided and abetted this oppression. One of Darwin's main works was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. That book had some shockingly racist passages in it. One of them was the passage below:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

This racist passage predicts that the “savage races” (meaning humans such as blacks and Africans) will in the future all be exterminated. It is also a passage seeming to suggest that blacks or Australian aborigines are closer to gorillas than Caucasians are.  Although it does not specifically advocate a program of racial extermination, such a passage can be called exterminationist-friendly.  The British imperialists oppressing Africans in East Africa and aborigines in Australia no doubt took solace in passages such as the one above, which rather seemed to give them a "green light" to proceed as cruelly as they wished.  American imperialists also took comfort from Darwinist ideas, using them to justify their oppression in places such as the Philippines. 

A book by another scholar states this, referring to the passage by Darwin quoted above:

"The use of natural selection as a vindication of militarism or

imperialism was nothing new in European or American thought. Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which had referred in its sub-title to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life...Had not Darwin himself written quite complacently, in The Descent of Man, of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilization?" 

The same scholar gives us this quote:

" 'The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin,' explained Max Nordau in the North American Review in 1889...'They can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary [bloodthirsty] instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science.' "

Later the same scholar writes this:

"Darwinism and the imperial urge were bound to be fused. If Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did at least put a new instrument into the hands of the theorists of race and struggle."

Velikovsky remarks below on how Darwinian ideas helped plant the seeds of Hitlerism:

"The doctrine of the fit, whom natural law expects, almost obliges, to live off the unfit, developed in its next phase into Nietzsche's teaching of the Superman to whom all is permitted. And the basis for the Hitlerian philosophy in the following generation was prepared: out of 'fit' and then 'Superman' emerged the concept of a master race." 

Referring to the fifty years before World War I, a book tells us "Darwinism became a kind of popular philosophy in Germany more than in any other country, even England." A book notes the following about Ernst Haeckel, a German writer who had a best-seller book ("The Riddle of the Universe") first published in 1899 and selling half a million copies by 1933: 

"Haeckel saw in Darwin's theory the chance to provide a unified theory of physical, biological and psychological phenomena...Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of his philosophy was the duty of self-preservation and self-assertion according to the natural law of struggle for life. That there are clear differences between the existing human races is a point emphasized by Haeckel...At another level, the idea of spreading the German Lebensraum, or vital space, was essential; the idea of an expansion to the East was essential. It is obvious that the National Socialist bio-policy...was well inaugarated by Haeckel, and indeed followed my many others. In this sense, Hitler 'did not invent national socialist bio-policy' (Stein 1988:51), but took it from the Haeckels and converted it into a down to earth treatise as Mein Kampf should be perceived. "

A search for references to Darwin in Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe" shows 47 occurrences, many of them worshipful. On pages 220 to 221 of this book Haeckel gives the atheistic-Darwinist reasoning under which Darwinism was used to justify a "might makes right" degenerate morality. Sounding like he was planting the seeds of Hitlerism, the fervent Darwin devotee Haeckel stated this:

"Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the struggle for life the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the  'survival of the fittest' or the 'victory of the best'  ; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense)....Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call 'the history of the world '? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history : No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same 'eternal laws of iron' as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years."

A major popularizer of Darwinism was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose works were very popular in the nineteenth century, but are read by almost no one today. A book states this about Spencer:

"Spencer was a firm opponent of welfare, relief or any kind of state aid to the poor of the sick. Such measures, he claimed, simply increased the number of 'unfit' individuals and interfered with social evolution."

Spencer probably was inspired by the cruel and immoral statement below by Darwin in The Descent of Man:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated ; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination : we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Darwinism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up many tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. For example, in the wikipedia.org article “Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union,” we read, “The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.” We read details such as these:

•  “In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.” 
• "During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot."

Similarly, a CIA document refers to attacks by the Red Guard in Maoist China that "spared no religious group in China." On the page here we read of some of the unspeakable persecutions Communist officials used on religious students (seminarians). 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have had centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts. 

The effects of Darwinism on human history have been extremely pernicious. Darwinism continues to be a comfort for racists trying to justify their erroneous claims. The continued popularity of  Darwinism in academia (despite the disastrous moral effects of Darwinism) is not so surprising when we consider that Marxism was popular in pockets of US academia during the late 1960's, at a time when the worst bloody excesses of the Maoist Cultural Revolution were occurring, and decades after millions had needlessly died under the hands of Marxist regimes such as Stalin's. A small fraction of professors in sociology and economics continues to support Marxism. It is sometimes joked that Marxism is dead everywhere in the world except in academia.

It is good for a person to study things such as (1) the psychic phenomena and brain physical shortfalls that lead to the idea that all humans are souls rather than mere animals; (2) the fine-tuned laws and fundamental constants of the universe that lead us to suspect the existence of not just eternal laws of physics but eternal laws of morality;  (3) the gigantic degree of cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence  within the bodies of humans. Such studies may inspire in that person a beneficial ethics in which respect for all humans and harmony and the cooperative teamwork of very diverse agents is emphasized and prized, an ethic that is the opposite of the cruel and morally poisonous "survival of the fittest" ideology.  

Postscript: On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: I million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 1 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths