Commentary by Michael Baggot
May 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Ben Stein has suffered extensive media criticism for drawing the connection between Darwin, Hitler, and the modern eugenics movements in a powerful 10-minute section of his film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.
In an MSNBC.com review, Arthur Caplan calls the connection Stein draws between Darwin’s theory and the Holocaust “despicable”. Neo-Darwinians on the whole have unleashed a barrage of insults at Stein and his work. They have also, however, completely failed to address the intimidating body of evidence Stein presents to support his claims.
While Stein has explicitly asserted that not every neo-Darwinist is a eugenicist, an examination of the historic record reveals that neo-Darwinism can and has provided the philosophic justification for numerous horrific eugenic projects.
According to Darwin, the survival of the fittest is the engine for progress for men as well as the rest of the animal kingdom. In his “Descent of Man,” Darwin laments that the misguided care of the weaker members of society has come as a detriment to the whole. He warns that measures must be taken to “prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” which is essentially nothing less than the mission statement of eugenicists the world over.
Less than a century after Darwin’s death, in his chapter on “Nation and Race” in “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler described the struggle for existence in Darwinian terms: “The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher evolution of organic living beings would be unthinkable.”
The Nazi party framed its mission in terms of a Darwinian struggle to achieve a more evolved life form. According to the Hitler-approved pamphlet “Why are We Fighting?”, “Our racial idea is only the ‘expression of a worldview’ that recognizes in the higher evolution of humans a divine command.”
Another Hitler-approved booklet, “Racial Policy”, outlined the Nazi vision of man as follows: “The preservation and propagation, the evolution and elevating of life occurs through the struggle for existence, to which every plant, every animal, every species and every genus is subjected. Even humans and the human races are subject to this struggle; it decides their value and their right to exist.”
There is a ruthless consistency to the Darwinian-phrased Nazi propaganda. After all, if Darwin has rendered the “God hypothesis” superfluous and hence any notion of man as the intrinsically valuable creature made in God’s image and likeness, what better criteria is there for human worth than power?
According to Darwin, man is different from the rest of the animals only by a matter of degrees. There is nothing that essentially distinguishes man from the other beasts. At best, man is a more complex machine than the rest of the animals. It should not be surprising then that the prominent bioethicist Peter Singer appeals to Darwinian evolution when attacking the sanctity-of-life ethic and defending abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. According to Singer, Darwin “undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe.”
Likewise, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett calls Darwin’s views the “universal acid” that erodes traditional moral convictions rooted in the dignity of the human person. His strictly biological assessment of human worth lets Dennett speak of the “gradations of value in the ending of human lives,” as he offers a case for euthanasia.
In a particularly powerful portion of “Expelled,” Stein lets Cornell historian of science William Provine detail the implications of neo-Darwinism. Without qualification, Provine adamantly affirms that neo-Darwinism demonstrates that there is no meaning to life. Not surprisingly, he claims that he would put a bullet through his own head if his brain tumor reemerged. Provine chides his brother for clinging to this life for so long.
One is then led to wonder if Provine has a more sympathetic view of the large quantity of apparent drains on our society that fill our nations hospitals and nursing homes. The materialistic nihilism Provine honestly insists is entailed in neo-Darwinism seems to be completely incompatible with traditional humanitarian aspirations to defend the weak and vulnerable of society. Instead the weak and vulnerable are to be considered as obstacles to the progress of the human species in its evolutionary journey. They are to be eradicated. And, if not actively eradicated, then, at the very least, they should not be allowed to reproduce.
If man is the accidental byproduct of blind natural forces and not the planned creation of an Intelligent Creator, then his worth is something to be earned rather than gratefully received. The denial of man’s intrinsic human dignity is at the heart of every eugenics movement from Hitler’s Germany to early 20th century America to Planned Parenthood’s continued mission to eliminate the “unwanted” children of the world.
Is every neo-Darwinian a racist bent on genocide? No. But as Darwinian thinkers themselves admit, the neo-Darwinian outlook provides a handy foundation for the Culture of Death’s rejection of human dignity and thus opens the way for the host of attacks on human life that continue to infect nations across the globe. Thank you, Mr. Stein, for reminding us that ideas have major consequences.
(author’s note: I am indebted to the Discovery Institute’s Richard Weikart for compiling important passages from Hitler and Nazi propaganda in his recent article “Was It Immoral for ‘Expelled’ to Connect Darwinism and Nazi Racism?”)
Learn more about Expelled:
https://www.expelledthemovie.com
Learn more about the Darwin-Hitler connection:
https://www.darwintohitler.com
Read more about Darwin’s devaluation of the human person:
https://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2172&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Social%20Sciences%20and%20Humanities