Charles Darwin
Page 32
List called for ‘the ruthless subjection of non-Aryans to Aryan masters in a highly structured, hierarchical state’.13
Why, it may be asked, was Hitler so susceptible to the poisonous writings of those such as Liebenfels and List? In his book Hitler: Dictator or Puppet, the author has presented evidence that Hitler was, in fact, a sufferer from schizophrenia – a disorder which had a profound effect on his mind and way of thinking.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
The final acknowledgment that Nazism in no way derived from ‘Darwinism’ – in the true sense of that word and as defined above – came from the English-born Nazi Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927).
Chamberlain was born in Southsea, Hampshire on 9 September 1855. His father William, was a commander in the Royal Navy (and, from 1874, Rear Admiral) and his mother Eliza, the daughter of a British naval captain.
At the age of fourteen, due to poor health, Chamberlain left England to visit health resorts on the continent, accompanied by his Prussian tutor Otto Kuntze, who extolled to him the virtues of Prussian militarism and introduced him to German history, literature and philosophy, including the works of artists and poets such as Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Wagner. Kuntze remained his tutor for four years. At the University of Geneva, Chamberlain embarked upon a three-year study of various subjects, including philosophy, physics, chemistry and medicine. In Vienna in 1889, he began researching into plant physiology.
Another influence on Chamberlain’s life was that of Joseph Arthur, Compte de Gobineau (1816–82) whose Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines made the case for the superiority of Nordics and Aryans – peoples whom he, Gobineau, forecast would decline, owing to their intermingling with other races.
In 1899 Chamberlain’s own book Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), was published in two volumes and, in it, he attributed the moral, cultural, scientific, and technological superiority of western civilization to the positive influence of the ‘Germanic race’ (which for him included Slavs and Celts). Foundations was greeted with rapture by the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who invited the author to his Court; thus began a lifelong friendship and correspondence between the two of them. ‘It was God who sent your book to the German people, and you personally to me,’ wrote Wilhelm to Chamberlain.
In 1915 Chamberlain, who regarded it as an act of treason by Britain that she had opposed Germany during the First World War, was awarded the Iron Cross for services to the German Empire; in 1916 he adopted German nationality.
In Mein Kampf Hitler refers admiringly to the ‘principles of civil wisdom laid down by thinkers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain …’.14 In 1925 the Nazi Party’s official journal declared Foundations to be ‘the gospel of the Volkish movement’. (‘Völkische Bewegung’ – a German, populist ethnic movement).15 The book was also included as part of the curriculum of every German school and was to be found in all public libraries.
However, not only did Chamberlain not subscribe to Darwinism, in its true and original sense, he was openly contemptuous of it. For example, in his introduction to Foundations, he describes Darwinism as ‘A manifestly unsound system’.16 But his most acerbic comments on the subject are to be found in his biography of Immanuel Kant where, in his ‘Author’s Introduction’, he speaks of ‘A manifestly unsound system like that of Darwin … .’ He then proceeds to make the following statements:
i. ‘The recklessness with which Darwin frequently treats facts is beginning to be increasingly recognized.’17
ii. ‘The Darwinian craze works such mischief ….’18
iii. ‘Had Darwin, the incomparable observer of empirical phenomena, the man worthy of all honour, been in ever so slight a measure a thinker, he could not have failed to see that species in general is no direct natural phenomenon ….’19
iv. ‘What a want of reflection disfigures the fundamental thoughts of Darwin and his followers.’20
v. ‘Even Newton could have taught Darwin that empirical exact science never succeeds in making anything of the origin of natural phenomena …21’.
NOTES
1. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
2. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.178.
3. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.26.
8. Ibid, p.277.
9. Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: a Dictator’s Apprenticeship, p.217.
10. Hitler, op. cit., p.41.
11. Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab, p. 34. See also Norman, Hitler: Dictator or Puppet, pp.51–4.
12. List, Das Geheimnis der Runen, 2a, p.81f. In Goodrick-Clarke, p.85.
13. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, p.63.
14. Hitler, op. cit., p.244.
15. Matthew and Harrison, op. cit.
16. Chamberlain, Foundations of the 19th Century, p.xxxvii.
17. Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant, A Study and a Comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, p.50.
18. Ibid, p.107.
19. Ibid, p.118.
20. Ibid, p.118.
21. Ibid, p.123.
Chapter 37
Why Superstition may be Preferable to Reason?
Having discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin lived to see it become increasingly accepted as a fact by scientists and others throughout the world. However, it was a source of great vexation to him a), that there remained those who refused, for one reason or another, to recognize its truth, and b), that millions preferred, instead, to hang on to what he regarded as superstitions – of which religion was a part, which all too often proclaimed messages that were diametrically opposed to his theory.
To those who have studied the writings and documentary films of ethnologist, evolutionary biologist and author Professor Richard Dawkins, it is clear that he is both bemused and perplexed by the failure, in many instances, of twenty-first century man to recognize and appreciate the truth of Darwin’s theory. After all, this is not the Middle Ages, neither is it the nineteenth century, when the Great Oxford Debate – which ought to have laid the matter to rest once and for all – occurred. Said Dawkins:
Rather than adapt to evidence, many of us, it seems, remain trapped in ways of thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors. Irrational belief, from dowsing [a technique for searching for underground water, minerals, or anything invisible, by observing the motion of a pointer (traditionally a forked stick, or paired bent wires) or the changes in direction of a pendulum, supposedly in response to unseen influences1] to psychic clairvoyance [‘psychic’ – ‘relating to or denoting faculties or phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws’: ‘clairvoyance’ – the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact2], has roots in early mankind’s habit of attributing spirit and intention to natural phenomena such as water, the sun, a rock, or the sea. Even in the twenty-first century, despite all that science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe, the human mind remains a wanton storyteller, creating intention in the randomness of reality.3
The use, by Dawkins, of the words ‘inherited from our primitive ancestors’, could be taken to mean ‘passed on by text or word of mouth, down through the generations’, or it could imply that there is a genetic basis for ‘irrational belief’. However, he apparently believes that there is yet another explanation.
Dawkins’s meme hypothesis
In order to explain how ideas, whether good or bad, spread from person to person and become lodged in their minds, Dawkins turned, not to the gene, but to the ‘meme’.
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far
behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.4
The name which Dawkins chose for this proposed new replicator was ‘meme’ – defined as an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation5 (the word deriving from the Greek mimema – that which is imitated).6
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins quotes his colleague, psychologist Professor Nicholas K. Humphrey, as stating that
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking — the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.7
Dawkins later elaborated thus:
If memes in brains are analogous to genes they must be self-replicating brain structures, actual patterns of neuronal wiring-up that reconstitute themselves in one brain after another.8
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself: By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: what is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive mentions of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.9
No one would deny that one person can learn from another and, having done so, spread that person’s ideas further afield. But Dawkins fails to explain why some people adopt an idea and believe in it, whereas others do not. An alternative explanation is, of course, that all superstitious beliefs, including those of a religious nature, are phenomena which are entirely learned.
For Dawkins to endorse the view that his hypothetical meme is an actual physical structure within the nervous system, is a bold step indeed, reminiscent of Darwin, and his (now disproved) theory of pangenesis. Nevertheless, said Dawkins,
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We are built as genes machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of selfish replicators.10
In other words, just as Dawkins regarded the gene as a selfish entity, so he appears to regard the meme in the same light. Subsequently, however, he issued this caveat.
I had always felt uneasy [about] spelling this out aloud, because we know far less about brains than about our genes, and are therefore necessarily vague about what such a brain structure might actually be.11
Such conjectures on the part of Dawkins and Humphrey beg the question, what is happening inside the brain?
NOTES
1. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
2. Ibid.
3. Dawkins presents ‘The Genius of Charles Darwin’, C. IWC Media Ltd, Channel 4 DVD, 2008.
4. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 192.
5. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
6. Ibid.
7. Dawkins, op. cit., p.192.
8. Ibid, p.323.
9. Ibid, pp.191–3.
10. Dawkins, op. cit., p.200.
11. Ibid, Endnotes, p.323.
Chapter 38
The Ingrained Nature of False Beliefs
i. Curtailment of curiosity
By professing to have all the answers, religion may, in a believer’s mind, obviate the need for further enquiry. Novelist, screenwriter and atheist Ian McEwan states that ‘if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began – the relationship between this sky god and you – it does curtail your curiosity’.1
ii. Brainwashing, especially of children.
To brainwash a person is to make him or her adopt radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible pressure.2 Darwin warned against such tactics in his Autobiography, saying that we must not
overlook the probability of the constant inculcation [the instilling of an attitude, idea, or habit, by persistent instruction]3 in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would become as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.4
(This sentence was subsequently removed from the text of Darwin’s Autobiography at the request of his wife Emma, who made her request three years after her husband’s death.)
The Jesuits, or the Society of Jesus, is a Roman Catholic order of priests founded by St Ignatius Loyola, St Francis Xavier and others in 1534 to do missionary work. The order was zealous in opposing the Reformation.5 The maxim of the Jesuits is, ‘Give me a child for his first seven years and I’ll give you the man’. In other words, the Jesuits appreciate the fact that young minds are particularly vulnerable to religious indoctrination, enforced by the constant exposure to ‘sacred texts’, music, iconography, etc. Similarly, it is no accident that some other religions also have their faith schools.
iii. Ignorant, biased, or politically correct teachers
Dawkins was appalled to discover that a teacher of science in an English school believed, despite overwhelming evidence including that provided by the science of carbon dating, that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old. He was equally surprised that some schoolteachers were unwilling to challenge their pupils’ beliefs, in circumstances where the holy scriptures said one thing and science another.
iv. The stifling effects of religious or political ideology: the censoring of information
Since Darwin there has been an unending succession of assaults against intellectuals, dissidents and freethinkers, amongst the most notorious being the Chinese so-called Cultural Revolution that took place in between 1966 and 1976. Initiated by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of People’s Republic of China, its stated aim was to enforce socialism, remove capitalist, traditional and cultural elements from Chinese society and impose Maoist orthodoxy. Today, such persecution continues the world over, as Amnesty International – a worldwide, non-governmental organization, whose objective is ‘to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated’ – will readily confirm.
Another tool in the hand of the modern-day despot is censorship, which might mean jamming satellite radio
and television broadcasts from abroad; ordering material to be removed from the internet; or banning foreign newspapers, lest their ideas contaminate the minds of the despot’s subjects.
v. Peer pressure
This may also be a strong influence in curtailing freedom of thought.
vi. Threats to the unbeliever, of violence and intimidation in this world, and eternal damnation in the next
vii. Genes and belief
Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, points out that
If a trait or behaviour is even partly genetic [i.e. inherited], we should see its signature showing up in twins. If the trait or behaviour in question does not differ much between MZ and DZ twins, then one is forced to conclude that genes play little if any role in the behaviour. This is because MZ twins are like genetic clones (they are genetically identical, so share 100 per cent of their genes), while DZ twins are genetically no different to any pair of siblings (they share on average 50 per cent of their genes).6
(MZ – Monozygotic – derived from a single ovum, and so identical. DZ – Dizygotic – derived from two separate ova, and so not identical.)7
Research having demonstrated that there is a greater similarity in the religious behaviour of MZ twins, as compared with DZ twins, this is taken to mean that there is a genetic basis for religiousness. Shortly, it will be demonstrated that this notion is not as farfetched as it at first appears.
viii. Hormones and belief
It has been found that during meditation, of which prayer is a part, there is a rise in the blood levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin.8 Could it be that the feel-good factor which these substances provide has an addictive property which induces the individual concerned to become more religious?