Why Should We Care if Hitler Believed in Darwinism?

Part 2 of 2

In Part One I explained that I came to the conclusion that Hitler was heavily influenced by Darwinism through intense historical investigation. I did not have a preconceived notion about these links before reading many books and articles written by leading German Darwinists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the course of my research I simply noticed that many Darwinists—both biologists and non-biologists—were using Darwinism to promote racism, eugenics, euthanasia, militarism, and expansionism, all central features of Nazi ideology.

But what difference does all this make anyway? Aside from understanding historical developments (an important reason in itself, as any historian will tell you), why should we care whether Darwinism influenced Hitler or not?

Before proceeding further, let me state the obvious: Darwinism does not lead logically or inevitably to Nazism. Most Darwinists are not Nazis.

However, Darwinism contributed several key ideas to the Nazis that still have much currency among Western intellectual elites, no matter how anti-Nazi they are:

1. biological organisms, including humans, have no intrinsic purpose or meaning, because evolution is a non-teleological process;

2. humans are not qualitatively distinct from animals; and

3. morality has evolved by Darwinian processes.

What this means is that in the Darwinian worldview humans—as well as morality—are simply cosmic accidents. The implications of this are staggering.

After my book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life was released in 2016, I did a radio debate with the philosopher Peter Singer, who has an endowed chair at Princeton University.¹ Our debate question was: Is human life intrinsically valuable? Singer, who shares James Rachels’s position that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic, took the negative position.

During the 2009 festivities celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversay of the publication of The Origin of Species, I attended a conference about evolutionary ethics. One of the keynote speakers, a Darwinian biologist, insisted that Darwin had smashed teleology in biology. He lamented that biologists still routinely used teleological language when discussing biological processes, and he enjoined everyone to stop it. Then, another presenter informed us about the moral implications of this non-teleological vision of biology. He told us about the black widow, which devours the male after mating. He then claimed that it is just a flip of the coin—pure chance—that we as humans do not act this way. If we did, it would be integrated into our morality.

At the same 2009 conference I met a philosophy graduate student who was a true believer in evolutionary ethics. I decided to ask him: If ethics have simply evolved by random processes, was Hitler right or wrong morally? He admitted that even though he did not like Hitler’s policies, he could not condemn Hitler as morally wrong.

Darwin, it seems to me, faced a similar problem, though he did not know it, because Hitler was in the future. In his autobiography Darwin stated,

“A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.”²

Darwin, good Victorian that he was, thought these strongest instincts would convince us to follow the Golden Rule (apparently with a key exception, for elsewhere in his writings he not only justified, but exulted in, the European extermination of indigenous people).

Here’s the problem for Darwin: Hitler was “follow[ing] those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem[ed] to him the best ones.”

Hitler claimed that his instincts told him to hate Jews and to discriminate against them (and ultimately kill them). Further, as I demonstrate in Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler believed that his policies—including exterminating the Jews—was morally righteous, because he thought it would promote evolutionary progress in the human species.

The Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins illustrated this same problem in a 2007 interview, where he was asked if there is an external standard for morality, and if not, “What is to prevent us from saying that the Muslim [extremists] aren’t right?” Dawkins replied, “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.”³ Really? Most people do not find this a difficult question, but apparently Darwinism makes it so.

In sum, Darwinism does not necessarily lead to Nazism, but it does have moral implications that should make us suspicious.

1. Listen to this interview at Premier Unbelievable.

2. Darwin, Autobiography, 94.

3. Larry Taunton, “Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist,” December 1, 2007, inbyFaith, at accessed 8-22-2014.