(PDF) From Darwin to Hitler?

Minerva (2007) 45:175–189 Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s11024-007-9029-z Essay Review OREN HARMAN ON THE POWER OF IDEAS Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and AmericaÕs Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: ThunderÕs Mouth Press, 2003), 550 pp., ISBN 1-56858-321-4 Peter Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugen- ics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 312 pp., ISBN 1-4039-6502-1 Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow (T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)1 ‘The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas wonÕt keep. Something must be done about them.Õ (Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead)2 Ideas, like poplars, never stand alone. They gain a life of their own. They produce a shadow. Yet what is the nature of that shadow that Eliot so elegantly perceived? And what is the temperament of that ‘vitality of thoughtÕ that renders ideas unkeepable, unless they are actualized, as Whitehead observed, in historical events? Edwin Black is concerned with the possibility that the racist myth of Nordic superiority was born in America, and that Ameri- can eugenicists peddled the notion to a Nazi regime that eventually carried this logic to its inescapable conclusion – the genocide and mass extinction of all non-Aryans in lands designated German. 1 T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (London: Faber and Guyer, 1925), Stanza V 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead as Recorded by Lucien Price (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1954), 254, 28 April 1938. 176 OREN HARMAN Peter Weikart, looking more widely, asks whether a uniquely German interpretation of social Darwinism informed and made possible the NazisÕ racial evolutionary ethic and genocidal zeal. Both authors are troubled by the same elusive question: What is the power of an idea? ON THE ORIGINS OF NAZI RACISM American eugenic theorist David Starr Jordan put it simply in a booklet called War and the Breed: ‘father a weed, mother a weed, do you expect the daughter to be a saffron root?Õ3 Here was the eugenic logic in a nutshell: heredity teaches the all-pervasive, often lamentable, sometimes admirable principle of ‘like breeds likeÕ; although, gleaned entirely from the study of the breeding of plants and animals, the principles of heredity are, as leading American geneticist Charles Davenport gently put it, ‘the same in man and hogs and sun-flowersÕ.4 However, leading eugenicists went further. Since, in their view, behavioural traits – intelligence, moral sense – and social rank are as genetic as eye colour and height, it follows that the expensive burden of inferior persons – exacerbated by a differential birth-rate (the under-classes out-breeding the educated elites) – poses a threat to humanity. Yet, mankind had found a means to stem the tide of biological contamination – a calculated science of heredity, which aimed not only to increase the ‘well-bornÕ or ‘eugenicÕ (from the Greek roots for ‘goodÕ and ‘originÕ), but also to eliminate the infe- rior. Eugenics – the manipulation of human genes for the benefit of individuals, groups, and nations – was to save the world from the crippling biological analogue of NewtonÕs second law of thermody- namics, the organic decay of mankind. Immediately following the Second World War, replete with its history of sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide, the eugenic imperative was identified with fascism. But more than thirty years of scholarship have now inched the science of breeding better human beings back into its proper framework, enabling us to see it 3 David Starr Jordan, Eugenics Review, 6 (3), (1914), 197–198, as cited in Edwin Black, War Against the Weed, 223. 4 C.B. Davenport to V.L. Kellogg, 30 October 1912, as cited in Black, ibid., 36. ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 177 as a worldwide movement. Eugenics flourished in many countries during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and was backed by many humanists, liberals, and socialists. Well before Hitler and Auschwitz, eugenics flourished in the United States of America. It is on this target that Black – whose previous book accused IBM of knowingly assisting HitlerÕs murder machine by selling its punch-card machines to Germany5 – now trains his pen. BlackÕs argument is straightforward. If Francis Galton – the Englishman who coined the term ‘eugenicsÕ in 1883 and became its first champion – was the grandfather of the movement, the early twentieth-century American eugenicists should be seen as its fathers. In Britain, enthusiasts drew upon GaltonÕs liberal (if misguided) theory, constructed along the fault lines of class. In the United States of America, eugenics became a plan of action, a marriage between biological racism and power that sought to control – and to eliminate – not only the weak and decrepit, but also the ‘otherÕ, the non-white, and the ‘un-AmericanÕ. Thus it was not in the demented mind of Adolf Hitler, but in the USA – at round-table seminars, at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, at ‘Fitter FamilyÕ contests, at state fairs across the nation, and in congressional hearings on immigration policy – that the racial myth of Nordic superiority was first hatched. Worse still, it was the American example that the Nazis followed, unhindered by democratic limitations. Such is BlackÕs disturbing thesis. Much of BlackÕs work covers familiar territory. The history of American eugenics has become a cottage industry, and the unearth- ing of new material has become increasingly difficult. Still, building on the work of Daniel J. Kevles, Diane Paul, Robert Proctor, and Paul Weindling, among others6 – and with the help of tens of vol- unteers who scoured 50,000 documents in many major and minor archives across the USA and Europe – Black has produced an admirably exhaustive documentation of eugenics in America. 5 Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and AmericaÕs Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishing, 2001). 6 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (New York: Humanity Books, 1998); Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Paul J. Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 178 OREN HARMAN The picture he paints is painful. Eugenic science was, for the most part, based upon a farrago of race and class prejudice.7 Yet eugenics achieved respectability at leading universities across the nation. Eugenicists convinced powerful men: Teddy Roosevelt wrote to Davenport in 1913, ‘We have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong typeÕ (p. 99). Eugenics flourished by aligning itself with money and power. Successive presidents of the American Breeding Association (ABA), the eugenics movementÕs main professional partner, were also Sec- retaries or Deputy Secretaries of the US Department of Agricul- ture. In 1910, the widow of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman provided the funding for DavenportÕs ERO, which became part of the Department of Genetics at the Carnegie Institution of Wash- ington, and which was later supported by Rockefeller philanthro- pies as well. The Race Betterment Foundation was created in 1906 by another wealthy American, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of the cer- eal family. In 1914, Dr. Kellogg called upon the ‘white races of Europe ... to establish a race of Human ThoroughbredÕ in the USA (p. 88). Davenport responded by telling Kellogg that this goal could be accomplished by working quietly with institutions for the feeble-minded. Eugenics also made its way by intimidation. National and local campaigns rammed the costs of biological degeneracy down the throats of the American public. Beginning in Indiana in 1907, and spreading by 1931 to 26 other states, legally mandated sterilization of ‘imbecilesÕ, ‘moronsÕ, epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, and other for- mally designated ‘undesirablesÕ was carried out, often by coercion and deceit. (Doctor: ‘Do you like movies?Õ Patient: ‘Yes, sir.Õ Doctor: ‘Do you like cartoons?Õ Patient: ‘Yes, sir.Õ Doctor: ‘You donÕt mind being operated on, do you?Õ Patient: ‘No, sir.Õ Doctor: ‘Then you can go ahead.Õ) Ultimately, more than 70,000 Americans – 10,000 of them in the 1950s – were surgically robbed of their right to procreate. American eugenics was a national enterprise, legally sanctioned by the Federal government. In the infamous 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, the US Supreme Court – led by Oliver Wendell Holmes in an eight to one majority – upheld the argument that, if vaccination was for the good of the communityÕs health, then cutting Fallopian 7 To take just one example: an article in Eugenical News in 1919 reported that, since only 12% of Negro songs are in the minor key, it is plain that Negroes are happy and display a ‘dominant mood ... of jubilationÕ under apartheid. Notwithstanding this combination of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods, and leaps of logic, eugenics was caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge, to create the glitter of a genuine science. ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 179 tubes could be justified for the nationÕs social health. Congress also used a eugenic rationale to pass the racist Immigration Act of 1924, which kept millions of Europeans away from the not-so- promised land. This unhappy chapter in American history is well known, and Black recaps it well, adding fine new detail, in chilling, depressing prose. However, BlackÕs main goal is to describe American eugenics as the cradle of the Nazi Nordic/Aryan myth of superiority. In their language and intentions, he argues, American eugenicists should be viewed as proto-Nazis. ‘Can we build a wall high enough around this countryÕ, Black quotes Davenport, ‘so as to keep out these cheaper races, or will it be a feeble dam ... leaving it to our descen- dants to abandon the country to the blacks, browns and yellows and seek an asylum in New Zealand?Õ (p. 37). The Harvard-edu- cated eugenics leader Lothrop Stoddard was more decisive in his 1926 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Suprem- acy: ‘Just as we isolate bacterial invasions and starve out the bacte- ria by limiting the area and amount of their food-supplyÕ, he wrote, ‘so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitatÕ (p. 188). AmericaÕs leading race theorist and eugenicist Madison Grant referred to peoples other than Nordic in the USA as ‘human flotsamÕ. None of this would have meant quite so much, had American eugenics been without international aspirations and influence. But the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912 was dominated by Americans. Work started in 1911 at the Eugenics section of the ABA, in conjunction with the Carnegie Institution, on the ‘Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human PopulationÕ. By the 1920s, American eugenics journals, societies, and research institutions had succeeded in fostering an international movement. Now Nordics came to be viewed in Europe, as in the USA, as the only solution to the worldÕs eugenic problems. Germany, formerly inconspicuous on the world eugenics scene, jumped on the bandwagon. The prominent German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz took his cue from his American counterparts in con- ceptualizing Rassenhygiene. In 1913, Géza von Hofmann, Austrian diplomat and a budding eugenicist, published Racial Hygiene in the United States, exhorting Austria and Germany to follow AmericaÕs lead. ‘GaltonÕs dream is being realized in AmericaÕ, he wrote; ‘America wants to breed a new superior raceÕ (p. 265). A young Hitler studied American eugenics literature while in jail in 1924, 180 OREN HARMAN and even wrote a warm letter thanking Madison Grant for his wonderful book. Indeed, he produced in Mein Kampf passages eerily similar to sections of GrantÕs The Passing of the Great Race, and included high praise for AmericaÕs sterilization laws and immi- gration policies. For Black, ‘the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 in jail ... were strictly AmericanÕ (p. 270). By the time the International Federation of Eugenic Organiza- tions met in Rome in the autumn of 1927, American and German co-supremacy was reflected in the dominance of two figures: Davenport and Eugen Fischer. The USA–German partnership had metamorphosed into one of equality, an impression felt by dele- gates crowding under a massive wall-map showing the defective populations of the world. American eugenics had gone global, and its missionaries were spreading the gospel. In fact, for some Ameri- cans, eugenic evangelists seemed to be doing too good a job. By 1934, Joseph DeJarnette, Superintendent of VirginiaÕs Western State Hospital, was disgruntled: ‘Hitler is beating us at our own game(Õ (p. 7). Some American eugenicists welcomed the idea that National Socialism, unhindered by liberal democracy, could impose a new world order. They helped their German colleagues secure generous funding from the Rockefeller Foundation (p. 284 and throughout ch. 15). Unqualified German racial references to Jews were commonplace in American eugenic publications well into the 1930s. Some American eugenicists even argued that the Nazi sterili- zation laws were robustly consistent with Buck v. Bell. Black has done an exhaustive job of collecting facts and docu- ments. The connections he finds between American and German eugenics are all valid, although they were explored a decade ago by Stefan Kuhl.8 Black also acknowledges that German eugenics had indigenous roots, dating from the late nineteenth century. He is also aware that Hitler did not become a racist simply by reading American eugenic magazines. Still, these factors do not seem to weigh heavily in BlackÕs overall thesis. Nor is he deterred by facts that do not support it. Specifically: • Almost all American eugenicists, including the more extreme variety, denounced the Nazis following the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws. • Cultural anti-Semitism and economic fears in America shaped the 1924 Immigration Act as much as did strictly biological 8 Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 181 eugenic considerations. • Rockefeller officials genuinely (although not always success- fully) attempted to disentangle legitimate investigations by credible German researchers from Nazi abuses of science. • Independent German sterilization and race-theory traditions (and the fact that Ploetz established the worldÕs first eugenics society) directly influenced Nazi policy. No evidence seems able to deter Black from his ide´e fixe that America invented the idea of a master race, and then taught it to the world, including the Nazis, who simply took the idea to its log- ical, despicable conclusion. ‘The war against the weakÕ, he writes, ‘had graduated from AmericaÕs slogans, index cards, and surgical blades to Nazi decrees, ghettos, and gas chambersÕ (p. 318). This is gripping stuff, but it is not intellectual history at its best. Henry James once said: ‘The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.Õ9 This is a rather good description of BlackÕs book. FROM DRAMA TO HISTORY What seems to Black a straightforward narrative becomes for Peter Weikart infinitely complex. WeikartÕs questions begin where BlackÕs answers end. Given the labyrinth paths that ideas must travel, he wonders, is intellectual history possible? Do ideas have logical conclusions, or does this impute too much importance to logic, or define it too restrictively? And what about the relations of ideas to actions? Do ideas serve simply as after-the-fact justifications – sub- sumed into echoes of existing motivations and sensibilities – or are ideas more powerful, creating realities in the mind from which cer- tain consequences inevitably follow? How are we to describe the complex ways in which ideas are received? How do they meet in the mind? Weikart, a responsible intellectual historian, must find it difficult to fall asleep at night! Ultimately, Weikart settles on the side of those who believe that attempts at cultural and intellectual history, however imperfect, are more valuable than a priori resignation. Weikart acknowledges that 9 Henry James, Preface to Volume 12 of his Collected Works (New York: C. ScribnerÕs Sons, 1908). 182 OREN HARMAN the path from Darwin, Wagner, Nietzsche, racism, and historical anti-Semitism to the Nazis is neither simple nor direct. Neverthe- less, these roads did lead somehow to Auschwitz. He quotes the historian Steven Ascheim: ‘However great the perils of teleology, they should not blunt our determination to understand the processes and impulses that, at least in one instance, led to this destination.Õ10 Weikart has produced a fascinating, careful, and, above all, honest attempt to define the twisted road from Darwin to Hitler. The picture is, of course, more complicated than Black would have us believe. First, let us establish the context. Turn-of-the-cen- tury Germany was caught in the turbulence of modernization. Between 1890 and 1914, she had become EuropeÕs ‘machine nationÕ, leading the way in the chemical and steel industries, and the technologies of war. As elsewhere in Europe, a pre-occupation with biological degeneration and cultural decadence was accompa- nied by popular anti-Semitism, and by intellectual revolts against positivism and materialism. However, Germany felt these general tendencies with a particular intensity. Faith in progress and ratio- nalism, Nietzsche argued, had annihilated the mythic foundations of ancient culture and produced the emptiness of contemporary life. To save Germany, Nietzsche called for a dialectical synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. In parallel, Wagner led a revolt against individualism, and called for a return to family val- ues and collectivist sensibilities. Germany was straining to balance the seductions of modernity against, to use Ann HarringtonÕs phrase, the ‘hunger for wholenessÕ.11 ‘In all of GermanyÕ, the liber- al historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote in his memoirs, ‘something new could be felt around 1890, not only politically but also cultur- ally, ... a new and deeper longing for the genuine and true, but also a new awareness of the problematic fragmentation of modern life awoke, and [we] tried to dive down again from its civilized surface into the now eerie, now tempting depthsÕ.12 By 1914, the thirst born of this sentiment was partly quenched by the call to arms. A generation that imbibed nationalism and ideal- ism now marched into battle. War meant the chance to pursue 10 Steven E. Ascheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 111, as cited in Weikart, 5. 11 Anne Harrington, Re-enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30. 12 As quoted in Ibid., 23. ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 183 something truly noble, beyond the stultifying, bourgeois existence of the individual. As the historian Ernst Troeltsch pronounced in 1914: The first victory we won, even before the victories on the battlefield, was the victory over ourselves.... A higher life seemed to reveal itself to us. Each of us ... lived for the whole, and the whole lived in all of us. Our own ego was dissolved in the great historic being of the nation. The fatherland calls( The parties disap- pear ... the whole nation was gripped by the truth and reality of a supra-personal, spiritual power.13 A youthful audience cheered Faith and idealism would die on the battlefield, together with much of a generation. As the extent of defeat became known, the German people rose in revolt, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to The Neth- erlands; the Social Democrats proclaimed the Weimar Republic, and then signed the Versailles Treaty. It is in these circumstances – a humiliating defeat, followed by a debilitating treaty, an untried government, and economic strife – that historians have sought to locate the roots of Nazism. Some have understood Nazism as a nihilistic shattering of limits in a Nietzschean ecstasy of blood and glory (Hermann Rausch- ning); some, as a revolt against bourgeois transcendence (Ernst Nolte); others, as a Faustian covenant with the demonic (Thomas Mann); and still others, as the reincarnation of a pre-industrial authoritarian world strengthened by modernity, yet married to a rejection of liberalism and Enlightenment rationality (Jeffrey Herf); or as the extreme expression of an alliance between nationalism and middle-class morality (George Mosse). Others have seen it as an uneasy marriage of bourgeois and anti-bourgeois elements, a fusion of the conventional and the radical, by which Nazism suc- ceeded in transcending middle-class morality while simultaneously embodying it (Steven Ascheim). Cultural historians have grappled with the elements of volkism, cultural pessimism, economic and political institutions, Realpolitik, militarism, nationalism, industrial- ism, expansionism, and racism. Each has told his own story, with different emphasis. Finding oneÕs way through this forest is not easy. However, while recognizing the significance of all the relevant social, political, and economic factors, Weikart sticks to intellectual history. How did social Darwinism, he wants to know, influence the Nazi ethic? And what contribution did it make to GermansÕ amenability to Nazi ideology? 13 As quoted in Ibid., 30. 184 OREN HARMAN Darwinism took Germany by storm shortly after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Under attack in England, Dar- win wrote a colleague that the ‘support which I receive from Ger- many is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevailÕ (p. 10). Although, his book mentioned almost nothing about the political implications of evolution by natural selection, DarwinÕs theory was interpreted, especially in Germany, as having stark repercussions for the future of civilization. It was a German, Ludvig Woltmann, who first gave the enterprise its name – ‘social DarwinismÕ. The world view championed by German social Darwin- ists amounted to a generational revolt against Judeo-Christian and neo-Kantian moralities. A careful reading of intellectuals – philoso- phers, moralists, scientists, geographers, economists, physicians, social commentators – enables Weikart to represent the pluralities of social Darwinism as they touched upon eugenics, sex, marriage, militarism, race, the value of life, and the definition of the ‘unfitÕ. Weikart emphasizes that by the 1920s, despite their differences, most German intellectuals espoused a Darwinian Weltanschauung. This worldview included the following notions: • the moral sense is a biological instinct rather than a spiritual endowment; • moral relativism is implied by the denial of the timeless and transcendent character of ethics; • biological determinism and inequality between people and races are incontrovertible truths; • the theory of evolutionary progress and decline is correct; • the welfare of the individual is subservient to the health of the group, and this implies the non-sacredness of life; • war plays an important role in the struggle for biological progress; and • progress and biological purification are one and the same. These beliefs were imbibed by Hitler and provided scientific and cultural support for Nazi ideology. It is, of course, difficult to measure the extent to which Darwinism – and not the more general, materialistic, and naturalis- tic secular worldview born of the complex social and political chan- ges occurring in Germany – led to the devaluing of life and the revaluation of Christian morality. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 185 the crutch of a well-articulated, well-defined scientific theory did play an important role. As Weikart puts it (p. 233): Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism, espe- cially in its social Darwinist and eugenic permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince them- selves and their collaborators that one of the worldÕs greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy. Darwinism – or at least some naturalistic interpretations of Darwinism – succeeded in turning morality on its head. Weikart has established his thesis. Amidst the thickets between Darwin and Hitler, he has traced a line from social Darwinism to a Nazi worldview. The author leaves it to his readers to determine just how directional that line really was. After all, the sources which the historian must use are conflicting. Contrast, for example, Rudolph HessÕs statement that ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biologyÕ (quoted in Black, p. 270), with the confident pro- nouncement by Günther Hecht, spokesman for the Nazi PartyÕs Department of Race Relations, that ‘National Socialism is a politi- cal movement, not a scientific one... Therefore neither Lamarck, Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel ... nor [any of their] followers ... are in any sense ... precursors, let alone ... founders of the basic political principles of National Socialism.Õ14 While many Nazi leaders enthusiastically adopted the militaristic imagery of the ‘survival of the fittestÕ and the ‘struggle for existenceÕ, others felt uneasy with the subversive implications of Darwinism for the immutability and separateness of the Aryan race. SS historians even intimated that Darwinism had contributed to socialism, and was therefore suspect on those grounds. Indeed, while Hitler himself used the language of Darwinism to justify genocide, he was also influenced by the eminent German racialist, Houston Stewart Cham- berlain, who said of Darwinism that, in a hundred years, it would be judged ‘as men today judge alchemyÕ. Beyond these conflicting sensi- bilities, comes the question of emphasis. And we must be thankful to Weikart for admitting that his study focuses upon issues (the devalu- ing of human life, eugenics, racial struggle, and extermination) to which a Darwinian ethic is particularly germane. Had he focussed upon other aspects of Nazism – such as anti-Semitism or totalitarian- ism – the Darwinian connections would have been much weaker. These are just a few of the difficulties facing the physician of memory who attempts to write intellectual history. 14 As quoted in ibid., 194. 186 OREN HARMAN THE POWER OF IDEAS What does all this mean for our understanding of the power of ideas? Three things: one in the realm of ideas and logic; another in the domain of ideas and action; and the third in the thorny world of morals deduced from facts. Both Black and Weikart raise the question: do ideas have logical conclusions that inevitably lead to particular historical/ontological outcomes? BlackÕs thesis strongly implies that they do, while Weik- artÕs caution argues that they do not. The histories of racism and of eugenics suggest that complex interactions between biological and social thought arise when scientific theories are absorbed into wider debates generated by far more basic social and political dif- ferences. This helps to explain the simultaneous championing of the breeding of humans by robber-baron capitalists and racist supre- macists, on the one hand; and state-interventionist socialists and liberal fighters for womenÕs rights, on the other. (Black acknowl- edges this pluralism, but does not allow it to interfere with his the- sis). Likewise, it renders less paradoxical (to those who wrongly ascribe to scientific ideas rigid political consequences) the NazisÕ enthusiastic adoption of the vitalism favoured by the embryologist Hans Driesch – a rabid anti-Nazi, and one of the first non-Jewish professors to lose his university job for that reason. Finally, it lessens the logicianÕs burden to begin to comprehend the utter mishmash of conflicting logics in HitlerÕs mind, and their reflection in Nazi interpretations of Darwinism, race, and the struggle for moral superiority. From the outset, the application of Darwinism to politics was rejected by staunch Darwinians. ‘The ethical progress of societyÕ, wrote his bulldog, T.H. Huxley, in a famous essay in 1893, ‘depends, not on the imitating of the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.Õ15 Did Hitler, as Weikart asks, ‘hijack Darwinism and hold it hostage to his own malevolent political philosophy, or did he merely climb on board and follow it to its destination?Õ (p. 3). Obviously, there is no right answer. Ideas never belong entirely to anyone, and especially not to those with whom they originate. They bend. Invariably, they are made to fit. 15 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Evolution and EthicsÕ (the Romanes Lecture for 1893), as quoted in Phillip Appleman (ed.), Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 503. ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 187 If this is the case, it is unclear whether intellectual history can establish causes. Surely, if ideas are merely used opportunistically, then we must look to the realms of economics and politics, and to the darker recesses of the soul, for true explanations of action. Intel- lectual history would then become an exercise in defining the limita- tions of ideas in action. Weikart concludes that, without the scientific rationale provided by HitlerÕs interpretation of social Darwinism, the Nazis could not have perpetrated their crimes. This is hard to prove, and the reader is invited to judge, based on his or her subjective feel- ing for what constitutes a sociological proof, how far Weikart has been successful. But to demonstrate that ideas are necessary – in the sense that, in their absence, action would be impossible – is different from a sociological proof, and seems itself to be a priori impossible. Oliver Wendell Holmes (of the infamous Buck v. Bell case) wrote two years earlier in Gitlow v. New York that ‘Every idea is an incitementÕ.16 On a nuanced interpretation, it would seem the vener- able justice got it wrong. That ideas in themselves are almost never sufficient to account for action is a commonplace. Whether they are even necessary remains an unsolvable puzzle. Still, we would like to believe that human evolution has shifted the balance from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex. And, of course, it has. We engage in history, and argue about life, because we rightly perceive that ideas are important, that they can be powerful, and transform our worldviews. To prove that ideas are necessary to action is an epistemological problem, with little or no bearing on the ontological claim. In this sense, the debate about the power of ideas can be thought of as analogous to the debate about the power of genes. It is, at the moment, difficult to deter- mine the relative influence of genetics and environment on the emergence of complex behavioural traits. Yet our growing under- standing of gene action imposes the belief that one is impossible without the other. The ‘nature v. nurtureÕ debate has been cast in misleading terms. Genes constrain environments, and environments constrain genes. Similarly, it is clear that human nature filters not only the ideas that human beings have, but also the ways in which they are appropriated. HitlerÕs use of social Darwinism, including its partly American-inspired eugenic and racist versions, is a good example. Conversely, ideas constrain human nature. In England, as in Australia and New Zealand and many other countries, eugenic 16 Gitlow v. New York, 268 US 652, 673 (1925). 188 OREN HARMAN arguments were perceived relatively early as leading down danger- ous paths. Not one eugenic law of the vicious character legislated in the United States of America was ever passed in GaltonÕs home- land. Across the Atlantic, the ABA (which would later become the American Genetics Association) designated in 1911 ten classes of Americans – some eleven million people – for ‘eliminationÕ, yet we know this never happened. Both in Britain and in America, argu- ment counted for something, whether or not we are able to ascer- tain precisely how it worked. Finally, we turn to the facts that are central to both Weikart and Black. We acknowledge with Huxley (and Hume before him) the logical fallacy of the claim that, because plants and animals have advanced to a perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittestÕ, it follows that human beings, as ethical beings, must look to the same process. (We pass over the empirical fallacy of those who assert that genes are more determinative than they really are). From this perspective, what are we to make of those who followed the ‘eugenic imperativeÕ? Black reminds us that the day Davenport was promised Harri- manÕs fortune to build the Eugenics Record Office was, in his words, ‘A Red Letter Day for humanity!Õ (p. 47). Dr. Albert Wig- gam, a leading member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, thought that, had Jesus been alive, ‘he would have been president of the First Eugenic CongressÕ. Before Hitler and Goebbels, George Bernard Shaw referred to eugenics as the new religion of humanity. Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Margaret Sanger, and Havelock Ellis – along with thousands of liberals and humanists across the globe – subscribed wholeheartedly to aspects of the new creed. Yet, if what humanists committed was simply a logical (or indeed empirical) fal- lacy, to what extent can we be critical of their moral judgment? These people were convinced that what they were doing was right for humankind. Clearly, the answer is to be found at the point where moral boundaries are transgressed, for it is here that we expect basic com- passion to intervene. This is because we believe in the primacy of certain principles – chiefly, respect for human life – over and above any kind of logic, however apparently sanctioned by science (and scientists). Is this compassion ingrained in our nature? The capacity surely is. But the capacity for altruism, humanism, and sympathy ON THE POWER OF IDEAS 189 for our fellow men and women resides alongside other passions, some of which are violent, xenophobic, racist, and self-interested. (Nazism is a testament to the fact that a group-centred ideology can be more pernicious than the individualistic ethic). When and where certain aspects of our natures are expressed is a complex function of time and place, ideas and culture, political opportunity and social circumstance. If Black and Weikart, each in his own way, fails fully to describe the power of ideas and the dynamic of their appropriation, they both show that history can be a faithful guide in matters of morality, as well as science. In going about our lives, it seems we must learn better to negotiate our personal desires and public fears, our collectivist aspirations and private hopes. As we march into a brave new world of modern genetics and public debate, this is a powerful idea very much worth pondering. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Oren Harman is an assistant professor in the Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Bar Ilan University, and teaches in the Life Sciences Faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromo- some: A Life of Cyril Darlington (Harvard University Press, 2004), and the co-editor of Rebels of Life: Iconoclastic Biologists of the 20th Century (Yale University Press, forthcoming). He is also a contributing science editor for The New Republic. 53 Shmaryahu Levin Street Kiryat Hayovel Jerusalem Israel E-mail: