Page 36 - The Disasters Darwinism Brought To Humanity

36 T T H E D I S A S T E R S D A R W I N I S M B R O U G H T T O H U M A N I T Y Y
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launched controversies which affected many branches of European
thought… The ideas of Darwin, and of some of his contemporaries such as
the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, …were rapidly applied to ques-
tions far removed from the immediate scientific ones… The element of Dar-
winism which appeared most applicable to the development of society was
the belief that the excess of population over the means of support necessi-
tated a constant struggle for survival in which it was the strongest or the
'fittest' who won. From this it was easy for some social thinkers to give a
moral content to the notion of the fittest, so that the species or races which
did survive were those morally entitled to do so.
The doctrine of natural selection could, therefore, very easily become asso-
ciated with another train of thought developed by the French writer, Count
Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, who published an Essay on the Inequality of Human
Races in 1853. Gobineau insisted that the most important factor in develop-
ment was race; and that those races which remained superior were those
which kept their racial purity intact. Of these, according to Gobineau, it was
the Aryan race which had survived best… It was.. Houston Stewart Cham-
berlain who contributed to carrying some of these ideas a stage further…
Hitler himself admired the author (Chamberlain) sufficiently to visit him on
his deathbed in 1927. 21
As has been shown, there is an ideological chain linking Darwin to
racist thinkers and imperialists, and stretching from there as far as Hitler.
Darwinism is the ideological basis of both imperialism, which drowned
the world in blood in the 19 century, and Nazism, which did the same
th
thing in the 20 .
th
Victorian Great Britain also found its so-called "scientific basis" in
Darwinism. Great Britain made great profits out of colonialism, and saw
no reason not to visit disasters upon the heads of those living under that
colonialism for its own advantage. One example of British imperialism's
dirty politics was the "Opium Wars" against China. Great Britain began to
smuggle the opium it grew in India into China from the first quarter of the
th
19 century. This opium smuggling was speeded up as time passed to
make good the deficit in its foreign trade. The flow of the drug into the
country also had the effect of weakening the Chinese state's authority