3) The Varieties of Darwinism

Charles Darwin, reluctant prophet of modernity

This is the third entry in the Spiritual Eugenics project.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was an epochal moment for western culture. Darwinism challenged the old faith of Christianity, but it also created new faiths, new ‘science-religions’, new mutations of evolutionary ethics, politics and religion.

As we’ll see, Darwinism was a decisive influence for the alternative forms of New Age spirituality that emerged in the late 19th century. New Age innovators adapted and spiritualized the idea of natural evolution, to create theories of ‘spiritual evolution’, in which humans (or a few special humans) are evolving into a new species of homo superior. This project explores the repercussions of that idea, and how it sometimes led to spiritual elitism and ‘spiritual eugenics’.

The principle influence on Darwin’s revolutionary idea was his reading of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which Darwin read ‘for amusement’ in 1838.

Malthus, although a vicar, put forward a new biological morality. Humans, in his theory, were subject to the iron laws of nature, like any other animal. Specifically, he identified a natural law of population which ruled all species. Organisms tend to reproduce and increase their number, as long as there are enough natural resources for them to feed on and expand into, and a lack of external checks such as predators. If a species becomes too numerous, its numbers will be checked by nature — it will run out of food, or be struck by plague or predators. The same is true of humans. Human populations tend to increase until they are checked by famine, plague or war. Humans must learn to adapt to this natural law — they must learn self-control, including sexual self-discipline, so as not to fall into ‘misery and vice’. By ‘vice’, Malthus meant prostitution, homosexuality, masturbation and other non-reproductive sex acts, and early methods of birth control. Later ‘neo-Malthusians’ would strongly advocate for birth control as the best means for controlling population growth.

In practice, Malthus was pessimistic about humans’ capacity for self-control. Most humans (especially the shiftless working classes) would naturally fall into misery and vice, he thought. Philanthropic efforts to support the poor and needy were generally a bad idea, as they would only increase the number of the poor, thereby increasing the amount of misery and vice in the world. Better to let nature do its work, and kill off the superfluous beings. Malthus advocated poor houses where the unemployed would be put to work, to tire them out and prevent them over-breeding.

Malthus’ brutal law of nature was a long way from traditional Christianity, in which every human life is the sacred creation of a loving Father, and in which Christians have a duty to help the poor and wretched. And yet Malthus did still believe in God, after a fashion. He believed in a Deist Supreme Being, who sees to it that mind and morality emerge out of the ‘mighty creative furnace’ of life, through competition, suffering and struggle.

Malthus’ theory of population was and remains hugely influential. He taught economics at the East India Company’s college, and his ideas influenced generations of colonial administrators in the British Empire. If colonies like India or Ireland were struck by famine, it was the subjects’ own fault for over-breeding, and intervening would only increase their number, and therefore increase the misery.

For example, the viceroy of India during the Great Famine of 1876 was Lord Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the mid-19th century fantasy best-sellers Zanoni (1842) and The Coming Race (1871), both of which imagined the emergence of superbeings far superior to homo sapiens. (His novels inspired Theosophy, an evolutionary spirituality examined here).

His son, Robert Bulwer-Lytton was a firm believer in the creed of Malthusianism, and in the wisdom of allowing nature to naturally sort the ‘fit’ from the ‘unfit’ by letting the ‘unfit’ die. He was, in his own words, ‘profoundly persuaded that every rupee superfluously spent on famine relief only aggravates the evil effects of famine, and that in all such cases waste of money involves waste of life.’ The British did provide some relief to the starving Indians, shepherding them into Malthusian ‘relief camps’ where they had to work for their food allowance. This allowance was less than prisoners would be given in Nazi camps, and the mortality rate in these relief camps was estimated at around 90%. Scholars estimate around 8 million Indians died in the 1876 famine.

This catastrophe would be repeated in the Bengal Famine of 1943, in which another four million or so Indians died. The 1943 famine occurred under the rule of Winston Churchill, another Malthusian who thought Indians bred too much. He had written in 1898 of a previous Indian epidemic: ‘[A] philosopher may watch unmoved the destruction of some of those superfluous millions, whose life must of necessity be destitute of pleasure.’ His chief scientific advisor, the highly racist Lord Cherwell, believed nature and science could engineer a stable society ‘led by supermen and served by helots’, ie slaves. There has never been a famine in India since it attained independence from rule by the Anglo-Saxon superbeings.

I write more on Malthus and his influence here and here.

Darwin’s epiphany and the birth of new science-religions

When Darwin read Malthus’ essay, ‘it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.’ Those species which were well-adapted would prosper and pass on their characteristics to their progeny, while those that were not well-adapted would go extinct. This pitiless automatic process, happening over millions of years, was sufficient to explain all the varieties of species in the world. It was not the case, as 18t-century champions of natural theology thought, that the adaptiveness of each species was proof of God’s intelligent design. Rather, a blind and uncaring nature produced adaptation through suffering, struggle and extinction. The paleontologist George Cuvier had discovered the remains of extinct species in 1800, and we now know that 99.9% of all species that have existed on Earth have gone extinct.

Darwin patiently gathered data from the natural world that supported his theory of the evolution of species through natural selection — including the evolution of homo sapiens from earlier primates and hominids, like the Neanderthal man whose skull was discovered in 1856. But he delayed publishing his findings, partly because he was aware how shocking and challenging to traditional Christian beliefs they would be (his wife was a devout Christian, and Darwin himself was a respectable country gentleman). In 1859, however, he was galvanized into action when he discovered another naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, had arrived at a similar conclusion — also inspired by his reading of Malthus. The two decided to publish their findings together.

The publication of Origin of Species created a tumult in Victorian society, just as Darwin hoped and feared. It provoked countless debates about the ramifications for the Christian world-view, such as the famous Oxford debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley in 1860.

But it’s a mistake to see Darwinism as purely destructive in terms of beliefs and faiths. It’s better to see the impact of Darwinism as like a meteor, devastating some forms of belief but creating many new forms of faith.

For example, Karl Marx adapted evolutionary theory into his communist philosophy — the Proletariat are engaged in a struggle with the bourgeoisie, and will finally emerge as the fittest class. Prince Pyotr Kropotkin adapted evolutionary theory into his anarchist philosophy — just as the most cooperative species dominate, so too the most cooperative societies will do best. Darwin’s friend Herbert Spenser, who coined the term ‘struggle for survival’, incorporated evolutionary theory into his Social Darwinian philosophy, in which the free market is a jungle in which corporations compete, and the fittest corporation triumphs (a philosophy that proved popular with Gilded Age ‘robber barons’ in the US).

There were also Christian Darwinists, atheist Darwinists, Spiritualist Darwinists, nationalist Darwinists, globalist Darwinists, racist Darwinists, anti-racist Darwinists, animal rights Darwinists — and they all insisted Darwin’s biological theory proved their particular moral philosophy.

These new evolutionary ‘science-religions’ raised as many questions as they answered. What was the role of the mind, consciousness or the soul in this new Darwinian universe? Is evolution a blind and purposeless process, or is there a direction to it? Does evolution lead to ‘higher’ or ‘better’ forms, and are some individuals, classes, nations, cultures or races therefore more evolved or ‘fit’ than others?

This last point is the nub of the matter, for the purpose of this project. Darwin himself sometimes insisted nature and the evolutionary process is not moral or teleological. ‘Never say ‘higher’ or ‘lower’’ he tells himself in one note. And yet other times he sees the competition between nations and races in terms of superior and inferior.

As the historian Alison Bashford has explored, Darwin was influenced by stadial theories of development, such as can be found in 18th century philosophers like Adam Smith and David Hume, in which humans naturally evolve through cultural stages, from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies to commercial societies. In Enlightenment theories, this is generally seen as an evolution from primitive to advanced, from barbaric to civilized.

Darwin to some extent adopted this stadial theory of cultural evolution. Although he was an abolitionist, Darwin writes in The Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.

Thomas Huxley, the most prominent public defender of Darwinism in Victorian society, also sometimes suggested that some races are more biologically evolved than others, and that Aborigines, for example, are lower down the evolutionary scale. It was in his 1863 work Man’s Place in Nature that the famous ‘ascent of man’ diagram first appeared (below), and it also featured a scale of skulls, with ‘Australian man’ (ie aborigines) apparently closer to hominids than later races.

The first appearance of the ‘ascent of man’ diagram in Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature

Humans thus found themselves in a radically new and confusing universe in the late 19th century, in which their identity, values and destiny were uncertain. Does the universe care about us? Do we have free will? What was the grounding for ethical claims, if not God? Were some ways of living, some societies, perhaps some races, better or more ‘fit’ than others?

Would humans evolve into something new and glorious, or would we go extinct? And could we even perhaps intervene in the evolutionary process, to create ‘higher’ and ‘better’ forms of human? This was the ‘creed’ of eugenics, introduced in 1883 by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.