Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Spencer claimed to have anticipated Darwin, not to have followed him;84 the claim was false, but its effect in any case was to align the two thinkers, in whatever order, in the leading ranks of social Darwinism.85 Spencer practised compassion and praised peace – but only in acknowledgement of the overwhelming power of morally indifferent nature. He had little formal academic training and was never encumbered by the need to specialize. He fancied himself as a scientist – his rather exiguous professional training was in engineering – and he ranged in his writings over science, sociology, and philosophy with all the assurance, and all the indiscipline, of an inveterate polymath. But he achieved vast influence, perhaps because contemporaries welcomed his comfortingly confident assertions of the inevitability of progress. He hoped to effect the synthesis Comte had sought, fusing science and humanism in ‘social science’. Spencer’s aim, he often said, was – recalling Comte’s search for a science that would ‘reorganize’ society – to inform social policy grounded in biological truths.

  Instead, he encouraged political leaders and policymakers in dangerous extrapolations from Darwinism. Warmongers relished the idea, for instance, that conflict is natural, and – because it promotes the survival of the fittest – progressive. There were potential justifications for massacre in further implications of Spencer’s work: that society is well served by the elimination of antisocial or weak specimens and that ‘inferior’ races are therefore justly exterminated. Thanks to Spencer’s disciple Edward Moore, who spent most of his career teaching in Japan, these principles became indelibly associated with the teaching of evolution in East, Central, South, and South-East Asia. From 1879 Moore’s version of Darwinism began to appear in Japanese:86 the work mediated the doctrines to readers in nearby regions. Meanwhile, Cesare Lombroso, who pioneered the science of criminology, convinced most of the world that criminality was heritable and detectable in the atavistic features of throwbacks – criminal types who, he argued, typically had primitive, neo-simian faces and bodies, which selective breeding could eliminate.87 Louis Agassiz, the Harvard professor who dominated anthropology in the United States in the late nineteenth century, thought that evolution was driving races to become separate species, and that the offspring of interracial unions must suffer from reduced fertility and inherent feebleness of body and mind.88 Hitler made the last turn in this twisted tradition: ‘War is the prerequisite for the natural selection of the strong and the elimination of the weak.’89

  It would be unfair to blame Darwin for this. On the contrary, by advocating the unity of creation, he implicitly defended the unity of mankind. He abhorred slavery. Yet he could hardly escape all the intellectual traps of his time; everyone in the nineteenth-century West had to fit into a world sliced and stacked according to race. Darwin thought blacks would have evolved into a separate species if imperialism had not ended their isolation; as it was they were doomed to extinction. ‘When two races of men meet’, he wrote, ‘they act precisely like two species of animals. They fight, eat each other … But then comes the more deadly struggle, namely which have the best-fitted organization or instincts … to gain the day.’90 He also thought people of weak physique, character, or intellect should refrain from breeding in the interests of strengthening the human lineage (see here). There was no clear dividing line between social Darwinism and scientific Darwinism: Darwin fathered both.

  Projected from biology onto society, the theory of natural selection was a good fit for three trends of the time in Western political thought: on war, on imperialism, and on race. The notion of the positive effects of the struggle for survival, for instance, seemed to confirm what apologists for war had always supposed: conflict is good. When Emer de Vattel wrote the mid-eighteenth century’s great textbook on the laws of war, he assumed that his readers would agree that war is a disagreeable necessity, restrained by the norms of civilization and the obligations of charity.91 Hegel disagreed. War, he thought, makes us realize that trivia, such as goods and individual lives, matter little. ‘Through its agency’, he observed, long before anyone could appropriate Darwin’s theory in support of the same conclusion, ‘the ethical health of nations is preserved.’92 The beneficence of war was an idea with ancient roots, in the myth of the warrior-state of Sparta, which Aristotle, Plato, and most of the other classical authors on ethics and politics professed to admire for the austerity and selflessness of its citizens. The medieval tradition of chivalry – in which the profession of warrior was represented as a qualification for heaven – may have contributed, as, no doubt, did the religious traditions that made war for some faith or other seem holy (see here).

  Surprisingly, perhaps, the idea that war is good also had a liberal pedigree in the tradition of a citizen militia, enhanced by military training, with experience of mutual responsibility and commitment to the state. The Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War embodied the tradition. In the same spirit, the French Revolution introduced mass conscription. Henceforth, war was for ‘the Nation in Arms’ to wage, not just a professional elite. Napoleon, who thought war was ‘beautiful and simple’, mobilized populations on a scale unseen in Europe since antiquity. His battles were of unrestrained violence, unlike the relatively gentlemanly encounters of the previous century, when generals were more concerned to conserve their forces than to destroy hecatombs of enemies. Total war – waged actively between entire societies, in which there is no such thing as a non-combatant or an illegitimate target – inverted the usual order of events: it was a practice before it was an idea.

  Carl von Clausewitz formulated it as ‘absolute war’, in On War, posthumously published in 1832. Having risen through the ranks of the Prussian army, fighting against French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, he assumed that states’ interest in advancing at each other’s expense made them irreversibly disposed to fight each other. Rational action was action adjusted to its ends. So the only rational way to wage war is ‘as an act of violence pursued to the utmost bounds’. It is a mistake, Clausewitz suggested, to spare lives, for ‘he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority’. He advocated ‘wearing down’ the enemy by attrition and general destruction. The doctrine led ultimately to the shelling and bombing of cities to subvert civilian morale. The ultimate objective (though, to be fair to Clausewitz, he did point out that this was not always necessary) was to leave the enemy permanently disarmed. Belligerents who believed him, and who included the entire military and political establishment of Europe and America for the century and a half after publication of his book, demanded unconditional surrender when they were winning, resisted it obstinately when they were losing, and imposed vindictive and burdensome terms if they won. His influence made war worse, multiplying the victims, spreading the destruction, and encouraging pre-emptive attacks.93

  Clausewitz, however, shared one aim with Grotius (see here): he was willing to feed the dogs of war with unlimited meat once unleashed, but insisted on a prior condition: that war should not be for its own sake, but for political objectives otherwise unrealizable. ‘War is a mere continuation of policy by other means’ was his most famous utterance.94 In practice, however, he was convinced that war was ubiquitous and inevitable. Hegel’s view, meanwhile, encouraged a new wave of war worship in Europe.95 When his country attacked France in 1870, the Prussian chief of staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, denounced ‘everlasting peace’ as ‘a dream, and not even a pleasant one. War is a necessary part of God’s order.’96 In 1910 the founders of Futurism – the artistic movement that idealized machines, speed, danger, sleeplessness, ‘violence, cruelty, and injustice’ – promised to use art to ‘glorify war – the world’s only hygiene’.97 War alone, wrote Mussolini, who owed much of his style and some of his thought to the Futurists, ‘raises all human energy to the highest pitch and stamps with nobility the people who have the courage to face it’.98

  By overspilling the battlefield and threatening entire societies with destruction, war p
rovoked a pacifist reaction. The 1860s were the key cautionary decade. Around two-thirds of the adult male population of Paraguay perished in war against neighbouring countries. Observers in China put the total number lost in the Taiping Rebellion at twenty million. Over three-quarters of a million people died in the American Civil War, and over half a million, on the French side, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Photography and battlefield reporting made the horrors of war graphic and vivid. The peace movements, however, were small, uninfluential, and bereft of practical remedies, save for an idea proposed by one of the late nineteenth century’s most successful armaments manufacturers, Alfred Nobel. Most of his fellow-pacifists hoped to promote peace by honing international law; others, more crankily, proposed to ameliorate human nature by education or eugenics – filleting out or repressing people’s instinct for violence. Nobel disagreed. War would ‘stop short, instantly’, he promised during a congress in Paris in 1890, if it were made ‘as death-dealing to the civilian population at home as to the troops at the front’.99 Consistently with his vocation as an explosives expert – and perhaps in an effort to assuage his own conscience – he dreamed of a super-weapon so terrible that it would frighten people into peace. When he founded the Peace Prize, he was hoping to reward the inventor. The idea seems counterintuitive, but it is the logical consequence of the old adage ‘Who wants peace prepares for war.’

  Nobel reckoned without lunatics or fanatics for whom no destruction is a deterrent and no weapon too woeful. Still, against the balance of probabilities, atomic bombs did contribute to the equipoise of ‘mutually assured destruction’ in the second half of the twentieth century. Nuclear proliferation has now revived insecurity. It may be that regionally balanced power, with, say, Israel and Iran or India and Pakistan deterring each other, will reproduce in miniature the peace that prevailed between the United States and the Soviet Union; but the prospect of a rogue state or terrorist network starting a nuclear war is unnerving.100

  ‌Late-nineteenth-century advocates of war had plenty of arguments in its favour before Darwin added one that seemed decisive. But the theory of evolution, as we have seen, could shape social thought. Darwin’s influence on eugenics is a case in point. Not that eugenics as such was anything new. Plato thought that only perfect individuals could make up a perfect society: the best citizens should breed; the dim and deformed be exterminated. No such programme could work: there is no lasting agreement about desirable mental or physical qualities; an individual’s worth depends on other, incalculable ingredients. Environmental conditions mingle with inherited characteristics to make us the way we are. Heredity is obviously important: as we saw above (see here) observers noticed it at work for tens of thousands of years before genetic theory produced a convincing explanation of why – for example – some looks, skills, quiddities, diseases, and deficiencies run in families.

  Plato’s candid but cruel recommendation was shelved. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, however, it revived. A form of Darwinism boosted eugenics by suggesting that human agency might stimulate the supposed advantages of natural selection. In 1885, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, proposed what he called eugenics: by selectively controlling fertility to filter out undesirable mental and moral qualities, the human species could be perfected. ‘If a twentieth part’, he suggested, ‘of the cost and pains were spent on measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!’ Eugenics, he insisted in 1904, ‘co-operates with … Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races’.101

  Within a couple of decades, eugenics became orthodoxy. In early Soviet Russia and parts of the United States, people officially classified as feebleminded, criminal, and even (in some cases) alcoholic lost the right to marry. By 1926 nearly half the states in America had made the sterilization of people in some of these categories compulsory. The eugenic idea was most zealously adopted in Nazi Germany, where law followed its precepts: the best way to stop people breeding is to kill them. The road to utopia lay through the extermination of everyone in categories the state deemed genetically inferior, including Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Meanwhile, Hitler tried to perfect what he thought would be a master race by what would now be called ‘designer breeding’ – matching sperm and wombs supposedly of the purest German physical type. Big, strong, blue-eyed, blond-haired human guinea pigs did not, on average, seem to produce children any better or any worse qualified for citizenship, leadership, or strenuous walks of life than other people.

  Revulsion from Nazism made eugenics unpopular for generations. But the concept is now back in a new guise: genetic engineering can now reproduce individuals of socially approved types. Males allegedly of special prowess or talent have long supplied commercially available semen to potential mothers willing to shop for a genetically superior source of insemination. Theoretically, thanks to the isolation of genes, ‘undesirable’ characteristics can now be eliminated from the genetic material that goes into a baby at conception. The consequences are incalculable, but the human record so far suggests that every technological advance is exploitable for evil.102

  Eugenics and racism were closely allied. Racism is a much abused term. I use it to denote the doctrine that some people are inescapably inferior to others by virtue of belonging to a group with racially heritable deficiencies of character. In weaker senses of the word – prejudice against alterity, revulsion from ‘impure blood’, hypersensitivity to differences of pigmentation, commitment to a narrowly circumscribed moral community of the like, and, in a current variant, mere willingness to assign individuals to racially defined units of speech or study – racism is untrackably ancient.103 In the nineteenth century, however, a new kind emerged, based on supposedly objective, quantifiable, scientifically verifiable differences. In some ways, it was an unintended consequence of Enlightenment science, with its obsession with classification and measurement. Botanical taxonomy supplied racists with a model. Various methods of classification were proposed – according to pigmentation, hair type, the shape of noses, blood types (once the development of serology made this possible), and, above all, cranial measurements. Late-eighteenth-century efforts to devise a classification of humankind according to cranial size and shape threw up data that seemed to link mental capacity with pigmentation (see here). The late-eighteenth-century Leiden anatomist, Petrus Camper, arranged his collection of skulls ‘in regular succession’, with ‘apes, orangs, and negroes’ at one end and Central Asians and Europeans at the other. Camper never subscribed to racism, but there was obviously an underlying agenda in his method: a desire not only to classify humans according to outward or physical characteristics, but also to rank them in terms of superiority and inferiority. In 1774 an apologist of the Jamaica plantations, Edward Long, had justified the subjection of blacks on the grounds of their ‘narrow intellect’ and ‘bestial smell’. Henry Home in the same year went further: humans constituted a genus; blacks and whites belonged to different species. Now there was scientific backing for the claim. In the 1790s, Charles White produced an index of ‘brutal inferiority to man’, which placed monkeys only a little below blacks, and especially the group he called ‘Hottentots’, whom he ranked ‘lowest’ among those who were admissibly human. More generally, he found that ‘in whatever respect the African differs from the European, the particularity brings him nearer to the ape’.104

  Nineteenth-century science piled up more purported evidence in support of racism. Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, who died in the same year as Darwin, worked out a ranking of races in which ‘Aryans’ came out on top and blacks at the bottom. Gregor Mendel, the kind and gentle Austrian monk who discovered genetics in the course of experiments with peas, died two years later. The implications of his work were not followed up until the end of the century, but, when drawn, they were abused. With the contributions of Darwin and Gobineau, they helped to complete a supposedly scientific just
ification of racism. Genetics provided an explanation of how inferiority could be transmitted in a lineage across generations. Just when white power was at its most penetrative and most pervasive, scientific theory was driving it home. Inferior races were doomed to extinction by natural selection, or could be actively exterminated in the interests of progress.

  It might be objected that racism is timeless and universal. In most languages – it is worth recalling (see here) – the word for ‘human being’ denotes only members of the tribe or group: outsiders are classed as beasts or demons. Contempt is a common mechanism for excluding the stranger. What the nineteenth century called ‘race’ had been covered earlier by terms like ‘lineage’ and ‘purity of blood’. None of these prefigurations of racism, however, had the persuasive might of science behind them, nor the power to cause so much oppression and so many deaths.105

  Blacks were not the only victims. Anti-Semitism acquired new virulence in the nineteenth century. It is an odd doctrine, hard to understand in view of the beneficence of Jews’ contributions to humankind, especially in spirituality, arts, and sciences. Christian anti-Semitism is especially perplexing, as Christ, his mother, the apostles, and all the starting points of Christian belief and devotion were Jewish. Nietzsche, indeed, often expressed admiration for Jewish achievements, but Jews’ input into Christianity showed him that they were ‘a people born for slavery’, whose appeal from Earth to heaven marked, for him, ‘the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals’.106 A well-supported view is that anti-Semitism originated in Christianity and developed in the Middle Ages, when Jews – together with some other ‘outsider’ groups and ghetto dwellers in Europe – experienced persecution of increasing pace and virulence. But, though not completely emancipated, Jews benefited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, getting a share of the ‘rights of man’ and, in many cases, emerging from the ghettos into the social mainstream. In any case, the anti-Semitism that emerged in the nineteenth century was new. The tolerance of host societies cracked as Jewish numbers grew. Anti-Semitic violence, sporadic in the early part of the century, became commonplace in Russia from the 1870s and Poland from the 1880s; partly under pressure of the numbers of refugees, it spread to Germany and even, in the 1890s, to France, where Jews had previously seemed well integrated and established at every level of society.