Darwin and Totalitarians

The evolutionary path from Darwin to twentieth-century dictators and death.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently gave an excellent speech describing the difference between the founders’ design for the Constitution and how the Progressives and many current legal scholars view it today. For those who live in the progressive “bubble,” Thomas’s views may seem eccentric and uncommon. They are not.

Thomas discusses the Declaration and the statement that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as the underlying principle of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He assumes governments and laws are created to protect those rights.

The Bill of Rights was not written as a list of services the government was to provide for citizens. Rights were understood as freedoms that the citizens had, which the state could not abuse. The Constitution limited the government’s actions.

That was the way the law was understood until the Progressive movement early in the Twentieth century. The Progressives believed they were smarter than the Founders and that the Constitution should no longer be viewed as a limiter constraining imperfect human beings. They had evolved beyond the timid understanding of the founders.

Hillsdale College produced an almost eight-hundred-page collection of American historical source documents called The U.S. Constitution: A Hillsdale College Reader. Chapter ten is “The Progressive Rejection of the Founding.” It shows the views of the progressives in the first quarter of the twentieth century. They believed in a different source of rights. It is an excellent way to understand the differences.

Frank Goodnow was President of Johns Hopkins and the first president of the American Political Science Association. His 1915 paper, The American Conception of Liberty, explains why the founders built what they did when he says:

The political philosophy of the eighteenth century was formulated before the announcement and acceptance of the theory of evolutionary development.

Then he notes the post-Darwinian attitude when he explains:

Rousseau in his “Social Contract” treated man as primarily an individual and only secondarily as a member of human society. ...
In a word, man is regarded now throughout Europe, contrary to the view expressed by Rousseau, as primarily a member of society and secondarily as an individual. The rights which he possesses are, it is believed, conferred upon him, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs.

PBS picked up a series James Burke produced for the BBC about the impact of science on society. Chapter 9 of The Day the Universe Changed is aptly named; Fit to Rule. Burke discusses Darwin, evolution, and how various groups used it to justify putting themselves over others with varying degrees of severity. Capitalists, Aryans, hereditary upper classes, and various ethnic and racial groups pointed to The Origin of the Species as proof that they should rule and hold others down.

Justice Thomas understood that the version of that the movement in the United States had its own moral problems and was part of something bigger that had even worse problems worldwide. The U.S. Supreme Court had its own infamous “Three generations of imbeciles is enough” ruling, allowing sterilization as part of the “improving the race” movement by the progressives. Much of it occurred in minority communities or among people who had no voice. It was reduced, but not eliminated, after the public heard about the Nazi atrocities.

The Justice went on to link the progressives to the moral disasters of the Nazis and Communists.

Matt Ford of the National Review opined that the Justice “Can’t Get … History Right.” He objected to the Justice’s view that progressivism was part of the cause of those disasters. He seemed especially annoyed at the idea that Nazism, “National Socialism,” was in fact, socialism of any sort. For some reason, leftists think they’re better than Hitler if they can prove that “left” and “right” look like this:

That is, of course, meaningless if you are dead because you are an egg and the leader “had to break eggs to make an omelet!” Hannah Arendt has a better term: Totalitarian

I don’t understand why those on the left are more offended by Hitler’s crimes than Stalin’s and Mao’s. Not that Hitler didn’t want to do more harm, but the other two each killed many more people than he did.

Burke has a quote to show another part of Darwin’s impact:

Darwin was to have one last major success in perhaps the most unexpected of quarters. When he read Origin, Marx wrote to Engels: ‘Origin is the natural history foundation for our views.’
…
Marx was impressed by Darwin’s thesis that the struggle for existence was at the root of improvement. For Marx, the social equivalent lay in the class struggle towards revolution.

Justice Thomas is right. Darwin has been used as a justification for all who want arbitrary power over others. As Friedrich Hayek has warned, socialism is simply The Road to Serfdom.