War and Darwinism: Biological Militarism in European and American Thought in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
In the early summer of 1918, as World War I was drawing to a close, the renowned American biologist Raymond Pearl criticized his colleagues at a scientific conference in Washington for not seeing war as a biological phenomenon, “a giant experiment in human evolution" Pearl claimed that the basis for the great war in Europe was allegedly laid by Charles Darwin's book "The Origin of Species".
Indeed, it is generally accepted that Darwinism not only had a significant influence on various racist theories, but also actively encouraged war. For example, philosopher and historian Alexei Rutkevich, in his work “Ideas of 1914,” notes that “Social Darwinism was an integral part of the ideology of the colonial powers" But did Darwinism really encourage war and racist imperialism, and ultimately give rise to the First World War? Or did Darwin himself hold other views, and have his theories been distorted? Was there an alternative Darwinian legacy, one based on consent and mutual aid, rather than violent conflict?
This question was asked by historian Paul Crook in his book Darwinism, War and story: Debates on the Biology of War from the Origin of Species to the First World War. In this book, Crook examined questions surrounding the biological causes and consequences of war in the period between the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and the First World War. He reconstructs the theoretical underpinnings of war and human aggression in many European thinkers, from Darwin and Spencer to Kropotkin and Chalmers.
In this article we will look at Crook's work and some of its main points.
Charles Darwin on War and the Struggle for Existence
Paul Crook writes that when militarists invoked Darwinian theories to justify war, they often used phrases like “survival of the fittest” (or “survival of the strongest”), but rarely addressed what Darwin actually said about human aggression and war. Darwin acknowledged that war and genetic selection were important factors in human history, but he also believed that violence and altruism were intertwined in human evolution, and he believed that conflicts gradually became less violent and more compassionate.
Charles Darwin noted that primitive humans were social creatures by nature, but also warlike – tribes were constantly at war with each other, in an eternal struggle for survival. The noble aspects of human nature and moral qualities had a dark side: they were used to improve the methods of warfare. That is, social cooperation was inextricably linked with military effectiveness, while war had social advantages and biological justifications.
Since ancient times, tribes that were not only physically strong, but also socially cohesive, skilled in organization, manufacturing technologies weapons, tribes in which there was "many brave and loyal members, always ready to warn of danger and protect each other", genetically displaced other tribes. As peoples with a high level of both social and military discipline gained the upper hand over other peoples, "their social and moral qualities developed and spread throughout the world».
This gave rise to a difficult dilemma that has been repeatedly raised by scholars in subsequent debates: Will humanity's propensity for war diminish as it progresses socially, or will it prove ineradicable?
Darwin himself was a cautious optimist in this regard. He was not inclined to view human aggression as an unchangeable model of behavior, not subject to cultural change. Darwin believed that ethical values would gradually spread and become an integral part of human culture, and that altruism would become a habitual and universal phenomenon.
Darwin pointed out that as a result of conflicts – between tribes, and then nations and empires – a higher morality had emerged and would develop, which would eventually make war and various cruelties obsolete. However, Darwin made at least two significant reservations: (1) he recognized that the development of humanity requires a constant struggle for existence; (2) he allowed for the possibility of regression or even a dead end in human evolution.
Natural selection was necessary for the development of peoples, and Darwin sounded the alarm, later taken up by eugenicists, that advanced societies were in danger of decay because they overprotected the weak and poor, built asylums for the feeble-minded and sick, and supported the ill with modern medicine and vaccination. Darwin wrote that
thus the weak and unfit multiply, which is harmful to the human race.
Darwin himself was a man of his time who had mixed feelings about race. He had relatively liberal political views, was an opponent of slavery, and supported the North in the American Civil War. On the one hand, Darwin did not support genocide against “inferior races” in the name of progress and admired the “noble savages” – the Indians who fought the Spanish to the last in South America. On the other hand, he often experienced culture shock when meeting savage tribes. For example, after meeting the Patagonians in 1832 during the voyage of the Beagle, he wrote:
Looking at such people, it is hard to believe that they are your brothers.
Darwinism and Militarism in Germany
In the mid-nineteenth century, doctrines of biological militarism emerged in the West, but they encountered resistance from liberal political circles because they ran counter to accepted values based on traditional morality, order, and legitimacy. For these reasons, Anglo-American militarism, which was a significant phenomenon, was expressed less in aggressive Darwinian terms than in terms of racial and imperial service and paternalism.
In Germany, the links between militarism, imperialism, and Darwinism were strongest, but even there the interactions were complex. There is some evidence to suggest that the militarism of Bismarck's Germany was also driven more by nationalist motives and Realpolitik than by biological rationales. Economic imperialists and early Lebensraum theorists certainly drew on Darwin's ideas, but a militant and expansionist ideology that combined Darwinian science with a strong tradition of statecraft emerged only in the early twentieth century.
There is very little evidence that the Darwinian principle of the struggle for existence was used during the Bismarck years to justify nascent capitalism with the help of “social Darwinist” paradigms. Only after the 1890s did radical currents of social Darwinism emerge, proposing eugenic measures to save the nation and the race.
Social Darwinism in pre-war Germany was not nearly as ferocious as it is written. The most famous popularizers of Darwinism in Germany were Ernst Haeckel and his friend Wilhelm Bölsche, author of the bestseller Love in Nature. In their Darwinism, the "struggle for existence" did not play a significant role.
The glorification of war by Helmuth von Moltke and Heinrich von Treitschke only seemed Darwinian at first glance, but was in fact merely a repetition of the old axioms of “might makes right.” (In fact, Treitschke was suspicious of Darwinism.) Even General Friedrich von Bernhardi, who called war “biological necessity", and whom Anglo-American propagandists during the First World War called the evil genius of biological militarism, used Darwinism only as a useful supplement to his basic ideas about German hegemony.
The true founders of German conflictology can be considered the Prussian historians Friedrich Hegel, Leopold von Ranke and Heinrich von Treitschke with their pre-Darwinian theories of rationalization of state violence. Although Hegel hoped that the evils of war could ultimately be overcome by reason and ethics, he highly valued the stimulating effect of war, noting that
Long-term peace, not to mention “eternal peace,” can lead to the moral decay of peoples.
He believed that war was a means of purification and uplifting the spirit of the nation. In turn, Leopold von Ranke rejected the liberal theory of the origin of the state, arguing that the state arose as a result of war - "the mother of all things", the catalyst of progress.
"War as a Driver of Change": The Theories of Walter Bagehot
In England, the man who consciously sought to apply Darwin's ideas to social theory was Walter Bagehot (1826–1877). His discussions of war, civilization, human progress and regression influenced Darwin in writing The Descent of Man.
Bagehot was convinced that conflict and the art of war were the driving force of change. It was a rule, "according to which progress is achieved through competitive struggle in conditions of constant war"For most of history, evolutionary success depended on the extent to which the strong outnumbered the weak,"and in some cases the strongest turned out to be the best».
Bagehot saw human history as a bloody and unpredictable event. Progress was an anomalous rather than an inevitable event: Darwin noted this passage when he read Bagehot's essay. According to Bagehot,
Only a few nations, and even then only European ones, have been able to advance, and all of them consider this progress to be inevitable, natural and eternal.
According to Bagjot, wars "ruthlessly destroyed old foundations and promoted innovation and diversity", and therefore they can be seen as true catalysts for social change. He argued that wars can lead to racial mixing and give rise to "useful variability».
Bagehot's work certainly addressed Victorian concerns and anticipated the cultural prejudices of the following century, characterized by a fear of atavism and a difficult perception of progress.
World War I and the Myth of the "Beast Within"
The First World War did not change the course of the debate about the biology of war, but it gave it new impetus. As the Oxford pragmatist Ferdinand Schiller later noted, war "clearly showed how unchanged in his ferocity homo sapiens remains, and how illusory was the belief in moral progress"The brutality of these events gave new force to the myth of the 'Beast Within', which was now embodied in biological terms.
In the lead-up to World War I, American psychologist Henry Rutgers Marshall believed that humans shared with animals an inherited "instinctive feelings"that underlie the behavior patterns"fight or flight" He interpreted the selfless behavior of warriors in terms of a form of altruism that benefits the tribe. The fighting instincts of man are an example of collective instinctive actions, characteristic of higher mammals, that serve the biological well-being of the tribe. K "tribal instincts of a higher order"Marshall took"patriotic instinct».
Another American psychologist, William James, in turn, directly stated:
Man is first and foremost an animal that loves to fight... Even a thousand years of peace will not rid us of our inclination to fight.
From a biological point of view, man was "the most fearsome of all predatory animals and, in fact, the only one that systematically hunts members of its own species" James noted that despite the irrationality and horrors of modern warfare, "horror breeds fascination».
The First World War was indeed seen by many as an escape from the mundanity of bourgeois life and materialism, as a revolutionary act against capitalism and as a means of spiritual rebirth. In England, the writer Hilaire Belloc extolled the "a fruitful vision of the war of rebirth", and many saw it as an antidote to the decline of civilization. Wartime literature was replete with metaphors about the fragility of civilization and the "wild beast" lurking within man.
The Scottish historian John Adam Cramb, who wrote Germany and England in 1914, predicting the inevitable conflict between these Teutonic peoples, praised war as a necessary step on the state's path to full self-realization.
The European war did indeed seem, in the words of the American evangelist Gerald Stanley Lee, "a majestic and terrible culmination"the primitive theory of human nature (Krupp's theory of human nature - "scratch a gentleman and you will find a savage"). During the war, simplified ideas about man as a fighting ape or a primitive predator became widespread. People were depicted as puppets controlled by biological strings, and violence was considered an evolutionary necessity.
According to Paul Crook, the theories of the "fighting animal" were laid down before the war in the works of such scientists as G. Marshall, W. James and W. McDougall.
Conclusion
Modern research on Darwinism and social Darwinism has shown that Darwinism should not be equated with militarism, since it was popular with both the "left" and the "right," both revolutionaries and reactionaries, both socialists and conservatives, both militarists and pacifists.
Paul Crook notes that Darwin's theories certainly had a significant impact on the debate about war and peace, but he also believes that the use of Darwinism to justify war has been overstated in the historical literature. Darwin has been frequently cited by both right-wing militarists and left-wing Marxists (such as Karl Marx).
As Crook has demonstrated, for most militarists, Darwin's theory served merely as a rhetorical supplement to more important justifications for war based not on Darwinism but on realpolitik, radical nationalism, and imperialism.
References
[1]. Paul Crook. Darwinism, war and history. The debate over the biology of war from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 1994.
[2]. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
[3]. Radkau, J. The Age of Nervousness. Germany from Bismarck to Hitler / trans. from Ger. N. Shtilmark; under scientific editorship S. Tashkenov; introduction by S. Tashkenov; National Research University Higher School of Economics. - Moscow: Publishing House of the Higher School of Economics, 2017.
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