Page 122 - The Social Weapon: Darwinism

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other Social Darwinists, Pearson claimed that conflict between
races is necessary, and that struggle within a single race is insuf-

ficient for evolution. Some of these claims of Pearson, which are
devoid of any scientific truth, read as follows:
What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the
lower races of man. How many centuries, how many thousand of
years, have the Kaffir or the negro held large districts in Africa
undisturbed by the white man? Yet their intertribal struggles
have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable with
the Aryan. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe
that you will succeed in modifying the stock. History shows me
one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization
has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the
survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. 68
Twisted statements like these provided imperialism with
an allegedly scientific backing. The Europeans who occupied
the African continent and a large part of Asia, as well as perse-
cuting the Australian native peoples, claimed that their occupa-
tions were based on natural law and the only way for humanity
to progress. (That this claim had no foundation was later proven
by subsequent advances in the scientific world.) According to
Pearson, wars formerly conducted in an unconscious manner

would now have to be waged in a conscious, pre-planned fash-
ion:
There is a struggle of race against race and of nation against na-
tion. In the early days of that struggle it was a blind, unconscious
struggle of barbaric tribes. At the present day, in the case of the
civilized white man, it has become more and more the conscious,
carefully directed attempt of the nation to fit itself to a continu-
ously changing environment. The nation has to foresee how and
where the struggle will be carried on... I have asked you to look
upon the nation as an organized whole in continual struggle with

The Social Weapon: Darwinism