aex chap 3 (by ted hall)
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more fascinating and curious stuff from Ted HallTRANSCRIPT
Chapter 3
WITH MANIFOLD FORCE
"There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally
increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon
be covered by the progency of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man
has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand
years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny...."
--Charles Darwin
The first premise of classical Darwinism is that species evolve from
other species. The second premise is that Natural Selection is the
means of evolution. The third premise is the so-called "Malthus
doctrine." This doctrine maintains that organisms tend to reproduce
at a geometrical rate, whereas resources replenish themselves slowly--
at an arithmetic rate. Consequently, severe struggle for the means of
subsistence becomes inevitable.. It is this premise that is referred to in
the subtitle of the Origin ... The Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life.
The Malthus doctrine was set forth by the Thomas Malthus (1766-
1834) in one of the most influential of modern essays, the "Essay on
the Principle of Population" (1798). In this essay, Malthus argues that
because "all animated life [tends] to increase beyond the nourishment
prepared for it," there can be never be real progress or happiness for
humankind. Humanity is doomed to procreate itself into destitution.
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Before Malthus and his nightmarish visions, the rulers of Europe
looked upon large populations as assets; after the "Principle of
Population," they began to view large populations as liabilities. Behind
their readiness to embrace Malthusianism was the terrible French
Revolution, which had made it very clear that large masses of people
can be lethal to ruling classes. In 1789 (first year of the Revolution),
the European country with the largest population was .... France.
Leader of the reaction against the French Revolution and all that it
represented was Britain. England's initial response to the revolution in
France was mild enthusiasm. Certainly there was no need for a similar
revolution in England. England had a constitution, one that was
greatly admired. However, when inflammatory pamphlets started
circulating in England, the voices of reaction began to make
themselves heard. The most articulate of those voices belonged to
Edmund Burke, who in his younger years had pleaded the cause of the
American colonies before Parliament. In 1790, Burke was an old man.
An old man with a large estate to support.
On February 9, 1790, Burke arose in the House of Commons and
began his critique of the new "democracy"" "Our present danger is ...
from anarchy, a danger of being led, through an admiration of
successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excess of an
irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscatory, plundering, ferocious,
bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger
is no longer from intolerance but from atheism--a foul, uncanny vice, a
foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind--which seems in
France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction,
accredited, and almost avowed." [1] In November of the same year,
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Burke published his famous Reflections on the French Revolution,
which represented the "conservative" position in most convincing
terms.
The subsequent excesses of the French Revolution appeared to
many to prove Burke's argument. When news that Louis XVI had been
beheaded reached London, George III and most of his subjects were
absolutely shocked. There was no more cheering for France. On
January 24, 1793, the British government ordered the French minister
to leave the kingdom. On February l, France declared war on both
England and Holland. [2]
The attitude of the upper classes in England at the time might be
summarized by the word "panic." In the words of the Durants, "panic
struck the upper classes of Britain when they found themselves faced
by another revolution so soon after the costly revolt of the American
colonies. The thousand-year-old world of kings and aristrocracies
seemed to be collapsing, beseiged by peasants burning feudal
chateaux and title deeds, and by city mobs imprisoning the royal
family and cutting off hundreds of noble heads....." [3] All this, many
Britons felt, was the result of "atheistic" French philosophers
(especially Rousseau) and their English counterparts, people like
William Godwin (the "Foolish Philosopher") and Thomas Paine, the "pen
of the American Revolution."
THE MALTHUS DOCTRINE
It was in against this background that Rev. Malthus committed to
paper his pessimistic appraisal of the condition of man. It all began as
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something of an academic exercise. Thomas' father was an admirer of
Rousseau. Wouldn't be fun to challenge Father with a view completely
different from his own? The father was so impressed by the ingenuity
of his son, he encouraged Thomas to publish the piece. Malthus took
up the dare and published the "Principle of Population" in 1798.
Populations, whether animal or human, know no internal
constraints, the Rev. Malthus argued. Populations simply grow and
grow, until checked by Famine, Disease, or War. Do populations
exhibit any internal contraints to excessive population growth?
Malthus' answer was "No." Populations are unprincipled.
Where did Malthus get the idea that unless held in check by
severe external factors, populations devastate their environment?
Curiously, the same islands that were so important in the formation of
Darwin's thought played a major role in the cogitations of Malthus ...
the Galapagos.
In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, ships would
stop at the Galapagos to pick up giant (delicious) Galapagos turtles.
The turtles, piled on their backs in the holds of ships, would remain
alive for a very long time. Goats, on the other hand, were a lot of
trouble. They had to be fed, and they couldn't be piled on their backs.
For seapersons stopping by in the Galapagos, the sensible thing to do
was trade goats for turtles. A great many goats were released on the
islands. In time, goats on certain of the islands ate just about every
bit of vegetation. [4]
Malthus happened to run across the "Galapagos goats" information
in a book on the poor laws published by Viscount Townshend in the
early 1700s. Gladly Malthus seized upon the data, as it supported him
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in a long-running debate with his father, who was a Rousseau-style
optimist. What the goat situation indicates, Malthus believed, is that
the sexual drive knows no constraints, no internal constraints that is.
What is true for the goats is also true for humanity, Malthus supposed.
Consequently, populations--whether populations of goats or humans--
must be controlled by external factors, by a responsible elite.
In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe,
the ministers of monarcy and members of the ruling classes met to
discuss the newly discovered "population problem" and to devise ways
of implementing the Rev. Malthus' recommendation that the
mortality rate of the poor must be increased.
"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor," Malthus
declared, "we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we
should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses,
and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our
villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in
all marshy and unwholesome situations," and so forth. [5]
Another way to state the main premise of the Malthus doctrine is :
"All animated life" is governed exclusively by the sexual-reproductive
drive. The "-logy" (logic) behind biology is the logic of sexual drive.
Thus stated the Malthus concept is an example of "sexual
determinism" of the most reductive kind. Why "reductive?" Malthus
reduces a complex interplay of factors to just one factor--sexual drive.
Any form of reductive determinism has, on its face, little or no
scientific merit. Some very innovative thinkers have been castigated,
and cast out of the scientific forum, because of their attachment to
reductive determinism. Sigmund Freud is a case in point. Once the
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label of "sexual determinist" was applied to Freud, Freudian
psychology was essentially finished.
The Malthus doctrine, one of the most influential "doctrines" of
modern times, never had any scientific basis whatsoever. Malthus
took a very unusual situation--that of the goats in the Galapagos--and
called it typical, the way things are in the biological realm. If they are
not subject to external contraints, all animals will over-run their
environment, breed themselves out of existence. Prepared by his
theology to take a rather dismal view of humanity, Malthus concluded
that humans were no different from the goats. Humans had to be
checked by Famine, Disease or War, or by the intervention (or non-
intervention) of an ethical elite, or they would over-run the planet,
leaving it as barren as the goat-infested Galapagos.
In his later years, Malthus ackowledged his error and revised his
position on the "principle" of population. [6] Unfortunately, it was the
original view, and not the revised, that came to the attention of
Charles Darwin.
THE MALTHUS-DARWIN CONNECTION
In putting together his theory of evolution, Darwin was pressed to
find an explanation for "variability"--variations in organisms and
species. He knew from his observations in the Galapagos and
elsewhere that geography was an important factor in speciation. Take
members of the same species and put them in different geographical
locations, they'll evolve into different species. So much was certain.
What was not clear to Darwin was the mechanism, the means, by
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which the differentiation occurred. The matter was problematical.
Then, in 1838, Darwin read the "Essay on the Principle of Population."
"In October 1838," Darwin writes in his autobiography, "I happened
to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared
to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on ,
from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it
at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable
variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be
destroyed." [7]
The Malthus idea of existence as an incessant struggle suggested to
Darwin an explanation for variation that would be regarded as sensible
by just about everyone: The "Mother" of variation is none other than
the old, familiar struggle for existence. And Natural Selection is the
"Dad"--the decider. Dissertations on geographical determinism,
dissertations on any type of determinism, not required. Variations
existing now are the winners of past and present struggles for
existence. Variations of the future will be those that survive the tests
of struggle and selection.
Recall the subtitle of the Origin: The Preservation of the Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life. Ever since the French Revolution, the
fate of the ruling classes had been somewhat in question. Was the
elite losing ground? Was the elite obsolete? "No, indeed," saith
Darwinism. "Elite status is prima facie evidence of evolutionary
superiority." What does it take to maintain that superiority?
"Acceptance of the first and foremost responsibility of the elite--to
subdue all expressions of unprincipled natural man."
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The Malthus-Darwin position regarding natural man was the direct
opposite of the Deistic position of those in the line of Rousseau and
Lamarck. For the latter, natural man was divine, close to the Creator.
"Civilization" is corruption. For those in the Darwin camp, the opposite
is true. Natural man is vicious, and society represents the efforts of
the ethical few to contain the violence and the destructiveness
inherent in natural man.
"Among primitive men," wrote foremost Social Darwinist T.H.
Huxley, "the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the
toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their
circumstances, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond
the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of
each against all was the normal state of existence. The human
species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the general stream
of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and
thinking neither of whence nor whither." The Hobbesian war of each
against all is the natural state of existence.
Further: "One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief
cause, of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without
limit, which [tendency] man shares with all living things...." This is the
familiar Malthus hypothesis, which Darwin incorporated into his theory.
Further: "The effort of ethical man to work towards a moral end by
no means abolished ... the deep-seated organic impulses which impel
the natural man to follow his non-moral course...." Ethical man is the
product of "moral" (as opposed to natural) evolution. Society is an
expression of moral evolution. "Society not only has a moral end, but
in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality." The primary,
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absolutely necessary function of ethical man, and society is to regulate
non-moral man. Ethical man "founds his life on a more or less
complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle
for existence...." [8] Thus it was that Darwinism (and Social
Darwinism) gave the ruling classes of the nineteenth century a new
lease on power, a new justification for existence. They were the
regulators of the sex-crazed, violent beast--the amoral masses of
mankind.
As the quotation which heads this chapter indicates, Darwin fully
embraced the Malthus hypothesis that all organisms breed at a
geometrical rate and know no internal constraints. This is the
hypothesis we label the "Malthus doctrine." "There is no exception to
the rule," Darwin writes with totally unwarranted certainty, "that every
organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not
destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single
pair." What about humans? "Even slow-breeding man," Darwin
states, "has doubled in twenty-five years, and this rate, in a few
thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his
progency...." [9]
The long and short of it is: Darwin took a perverse, elitist,
unscientific philosophy (Malthusianism) and made it one of the
foundations of modern biology and evolution. Without the
legitimization that Darwin provided, Malthusianism would not have
survived much beyond mid-century. It was patently part of an
hysterical ruling class response to the French Revolution.
Did Darwin knowingly conspire to insinuate into science an
abhorrent view of life?--conspire with reactionaries to establish an
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evolution theory that justified the rulers of the last century and our
own in committing numberless crimes against the common people, all
in the name of science. "The greatest authority of all the advocates of
war is Darwin," wrote Max Nordau in the North American Review in
1889. "Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can
cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim
the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of
science." [9] In response to the above question, I can enter only an
opinion at this point: Darwin was no original thinker; he was great
collector and synthesizer of information. Where social theory is
concerned, Malthusianism had achieved an orthodox status among
Darwin's associates in the Royal Society. All indications are that
Darwin truly believed in the Malthus theory. "As more individuals are
produced than can possibly survive," he writes with apparent sincerity,
"there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one
individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of
distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine
or Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdom...." [10]
In their enthusiasm for the "Malthus-Darwin doctrine," some of
Darwin's followers carried the idea of life-as-fight to absurd lengths:
"T.H. Huxley said that all the molecules within each organism were
competing with each other. August Weismann [a German biologist]
suggested that the particles of germ plasm were in conflict with each
other, so that the ancestors who had contributed them could be seen
as struggling with each other as to which should be re-created.
Wilhelm Roux developed the theory that the organs were struggling
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with each other for nourishment, kidneys against lungs, heart against
brain. Neither Darwin nor his immediate followers had much feeling
for the internal stability and harmony of the organism." [11]
Interestingly, the "struggle for existence" is rarely discussed any
longer as an issue in biology. As Norman Macbeth indicates, "Darwin
took it over from Malthus, who was a sociologist (and a grim one)
rather than a biologist. It was not derived from a loving contemplation
of plants and animals. Such a contemplation would show that there
were always more seeds than were needed for the replacement of the
parents, but it would not show that 'each organic being was striving to
increase at a geometrical ratio' or that there was continual struggle...."
[12]
Today, in biology, the emphasis is on co-operative relationships
among organisms rather than competitive ones. In The Lives of a Cell,
for instance, biologist Lewis Thomas writes: "Most of the associations
between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative
ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of
adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing
signals, warnings, flagging the other off...." [13]
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IN THE NAME OF SURVIVAL
After 1859, the Darwinian "vision" of existence as purposeless
struggle and of evolution as a haphazard process quickly replaced the
Judeo-Christian vision of human life as a purposeful, divinely guided
moral struggle. The Darwinian revolution deposed God as Source, and
indeed exiled from the realm of "true science" all teleological
considerations (considerations as to the purpose and ends of life).
"Instead of endorsing the eighteenth-century concept of a drive toward
perfection," writes Ernst Mayr, "Darwin merely postulated change....
By chance this process of adaptation sometimes results in changes
that can be interpreted as progress, but there is no intrinsic
mechanism generating inevitable advance." [14]
"Darwin's new and revolutionary [reactionary] view," writes
Australian scientist Michael Denton, "implied that all the diversity of
life on Earth had resulted from natural and random processes and not,
as previously believed, from the creative activity of God. The
acceptance of this great claim and the consequent elimination of God
from nature was to play a decisive role in the secularization of western
society...." [15]
Further, the idea of life as meaningless struggle played a decisive
role in the brutalization of the western world. Guided by the
"scientific" ideas that war is the health of the nation and that the great
threat to the state is over-population, the rulers of late nineteenth
century Europe precipitated the Age of Imperialism. After Darwin, the
nations of Europe found themselves with "surplus populations." Nation
after nation entered the race to acquire foreign lands. The motive was
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not greed, it was "survival." The nations that would survive into the
future, it was believed, would be those in possession of vast tracts of
land for the dumping of surplus population.
In a very short time, all of Africa was carved up by the European
powers. Aboriginal peoples of that continent who objected to slavery
were destroyed. Many great tribes, tribes that for thousands of years
existed in balance with the environment, were eradicated. It was the
"African Holocaust." Today, the holocaust continues.
Competition for empire (i.e. the possession of colonies for the
dumping of surplus population) was a major cause of World War I. In
1901, Arthur Dix, the editor of two Berlin journals, wrote: "A timorous
people, which knows not how to use its elbows, may of course put a
stop to the increase of population--it might find things too narrow at
home. The superfluity of population might find no economic existence.
A people happy in its future, however, knows nothing of artificial
limitation; its only care can be to find room on the globe for a
livelihood for other members of its own race." [16]
In Britain as Germany's Vassal (1912), Social Darwinist (and retired
German general) F. von Bernhardi writes, "In the interest of the world's
civilization it is our duty to enlarge Germany's colonial empire. Thus
alone can we politically, or at least nationally, unite the German
civilization throughout the world, for only then will they recognize that
German civilization is the most necessary factor in human progress.
We must endeavor to acquire new territories throughout the world by
all means in our power, because we must preserve to Germany the
millions of Germans who will be born in the future, and we must
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provide for them food and employment. They ought to be enabled to
live under a German sky, and to lead a German life." [17]
Given such attitudes (not only in Germany, but throughout Europe),
war became inevitable. It became inevitable for another reason as
well: War was viewed by Bernhardi and other influential hard-core
Social Darwinists as an "indispensable regulator" of populations. "If it
were not for war," Bernhardi writes, "we should probably find that
inferior and degenerate races would overcome healthy and youthful
ones by their wealth and their numbers. The generative importance of
war lies in this, that it causes selection, and thus war becomes a
biological necessity." [18]
In the twentieth century, the Malthus-Darwin doctrine conditioned a
struggle for power on an unprecedented scale. The twentieth century
is the most bloody, the most brutal on record. For the first time, the
principal targets of war became populations.
One who had attempted to stop the carnage was the Russian
naturalist and evolutionist Petr Kropotkin. In the last decades of the
nineteenth century, Kropotkin argued the view that the key to
evolutionary progress is not conflict, but cooperation. In his years of
research in Siberian and elsewhere, Kropotkin maintained, he failed to
find "that bitter struggle for existence, among animals belonging to the
same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not
always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the
struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution." [19] "If we ask
Nature," Kropotkin writes, "'Who are the fittest: those who are
continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?'
we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid
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are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and
they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of the
intelligence and bodily organization...." [20]
In 1902, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid--A Factor of Evolution, a
thorough, scientific refutation of the idea that struggle for survival is
the source of evolutionary progress. It was too late. The Social
Darwinists were in command of the field, and they were demanding
war. In 1914, the despairing Kropotkin wrote: "When the present war
began, involving nearly all Europe in a terrible struggle, and this
struggle assumed ... a never yet known character of wholesale
destruction of life among the non-combatants and pillage of the means
of subsistence of the civil population, 'struggle for existence' became
the favorite explanation with those who tried to find an excuse for
these horrors." [21]
As we all know, the First World War was only the beginning of the
horrors. For many twentieth century leaders, "genocide" was regarded
as a legitimate tool of state policy. "National Socialism," said Nazi
Deputy Party leader Rudolf Hess in 1934, is nothing but applied
biology." [22] The third premise of classical Darwinism became the
foundation of the Third Reich.
"The entire Nazi regime," writes Robert Jay Lifton, "was built on a
biomedical vision that required the kind of racial purification that would
progress from sterilization to extensive killing." As early as the
publication of Mein Kampf (1924-26), Lifton indicates, "Hitler had
declared the sacred racial mission of the Geman people to be
'assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial
elements [and].... slowly and severely raising them to a dominant
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position.'..." [23] For Hitler, the most famous of the twentieth century
Social Darwinist politicos, the stakes were absolute: "If the power to
fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this
world of struggle ends." [24]
By the middle of our Malthusian century, the great "Superpowers"--
the winners of the struggle for dominance--were threatening the
annihilation of the entire planet ... in the name of survival.
"The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the
Darwinian revolution," writes Michael Denton. "The social and political
currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would not
have been possible without its intellectual sanction...." [25] Among the
"currents which have swept the world," we may list ... Imperialism, the
mad rush for empire in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth; the rise in the twentieth century of various forms of
socialism premised on the idea that the first responsibility of the state
is population control, a responsibility inevitably involving emphasis on
the elimination of supposedly defective peoples; the First and Second
World Wars; the so-called Cold War; and the numerous late twentieth
century "hot" wars.
Since the establishment of Darwinism as the West's official
evolutionary theory, "war' has been the order of the day. "War," writes
Jacques Barzun, "became the symbol, the image, the inducement, the
reason, and the language of all human doings on the planet. No one
who has not waded through some sizable part of the literature of the
period 1870-1914 has any conception of the extent to which it is one
long call for blood,...." [ 26] The call for blood began with the French
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Revolution. The blood of the nobility ran in the gutters, and that was
something that steeled the hearts of those in the ruling classes. The
masses had dared war on their masters. They would pay the price.
And pay they did, by willingly engaging in war after war ... marching off
to the sound of the death drums of Hobbes and Malthus and "our
gentle" Charles Darwin. ≈
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