The Influence of Malthus and Darwin on War and Genocide
By Richard Kieninger (based on a 1995 article by Leading Edge Research Group)
One of the most significant turning points in human history occurred in 1798 with the publication of Reverend Thomas Malthus’ book, Essay on the Principle of Population. In what became known as the Malthus Doctrine, he argued that because “all animated life [tends] to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it,” there can never be real progress or happiness for humankind. Humanity is doomed to procreate itself into destitution. The Rev. Malthus postulated that populations, whether animal or human, know no internal constraints. Populations simply grow and grow, until checked by famine, disease, predators, or war. Do populations exhibit any internal constraints to excessive population growth? Malthus’ answer was “No. Populations are unprincipled.”
However well-informed this zoological observation had been applied to animal populations in the wild, Malthus extended them to the human population. Why did he do that and where did he get such an idea that unless held in check by external restraining factors, human populations devastate their environment? Coincidentally, the same islands that provided Charles Darwin with an abundance of field data also played a major role in the cogitations of Malthus—the Galapagos.
In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, sailing ships released goats on the islands. In time, goats on certain of the islands ate just about every bit of available vegetation. From this, Malthus posited that the sexual drive knows no constraints, no internal constraints that is, and, by extension, what is true for goats is also true for humans; presto! Therefore, populations—whether populations of goats or humans—must be controlled by external factors which, by his way of thinking, amounted to a responsible elite group of humans: people like himself.
Malthus took a very unusual situation—that of the goats in the Galapagos—and called it typical; the way of life in the biological realm. If they are not subject to external constrains, all animals will over-run their environment by breeding themselves out of existence. Malthus concluded that humans were no different from the goats. Humans had to be checked by famine, disease or war, or by the intervention (or non-intervention) of an ethical elite, or they would over-run the planet, leaving it as barren as the goat-infested Galapagos. In truth, the Malthus doctrine had no scientific basis whatsoever.
But, let us rewind history a bit to see why, in an age of scientific discovery, that such an unfounded theory would take root and rapidly spread in popularity among the upper classes in Europe.
It was in 1781, that General Cornwallis surrendered the British forces to the American military thus ending the most embarrassing loss in the history of the British Crown. For one of the most powerful military forces in the world to lose a crucial war to the “scrappy bunch of illiterate beggars” known as Americans, was considered the most humiliating setback ever suffered by the Crown, and they vowed to continue the fight for as long as it takes.
the loss to the Americans, came the violence of the French Revolution. The
leader of the reaction against the French Revolution—and all that it
as pressing as it was, the predicament of the British Crown was about to
became even more so. When news that Louis XVI had been beheaded reached
Malthus, the rulers of
further underscore the importance of reigning in the rabble came Charles
Darwin, who in 1838, read the Malthus essay on population. The Malthus idea
of “existence as an incessant struggle” suggested to
since the American and French Revolutions, the fate of the ruling classes had
been somewhat in question. Were the elite losing ground? Were the elite
obsolete? “No, indeed,” said
powerful voice among the British intellectuals of the day was T. H.
Huxley—the “Bulldog of Darwin” as he was known. “Among primitive men,” wrote
Huxley, “the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the highest and
shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances,
survived. The human species, like others, splashed and floundered amid the
general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might,
and thinking neither of whence nor whither.” The Hobbesian wars of each
against all is the natural state of existence (bellum omnium contra omnes).
“One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause of the struggle
for existence, is the tendency to multiply without limit, which [tendency]
man shares with all living things...” This is the familiar Malthusian
1859, the Darwinian “vision” of existence as a purposeless struggle and of
evolution as a haphazard process quickly replaced the Judeo-Christian vision
of human life as purposeful and divinely guided. The Darwinian revolution
deposed God as Source, and indeed exiled from the realm of “true science” all
considerations as to the purpose and ends of life. “Instead of endorsing the
eighteenth-century concept of a drive toward perfection,” writes Ernst Mayr, “
consequent elimination of God from nature was to play a decisive role in the secularization
of Western society, and the “idea of life as a meaningless struggle” played a
decisive role in the brutalization of the Western world. Guided by the
“scientific” ideas that “war is the health of the nation” and that the great
threat to the state is overpopulation, the rulers of late Nineteenth Century
Europe precipitated the Age of Imperialism. After
for empire (i.e. the possession of colonies for the dumping of surplus
population) was a major cause of World War I. In 1912 retired German general
F. von Beruhardi, a Social Darwinist, wrote, “In the interest of the world’s
civilization, it is our duty to enlarge
such attitudes, not only in
In the Twentieth Century, the Malthus-Darwin doctrine conditioned a struggle for power on an unprecedented scale. The twentieth century was the bloodiest, most brutal on record. For the first time, the principal targets of war purposely became populations; the First World War markeing only the beginning of the horrors.* For many Twentieth Century leaders, “genocide” was regarded as a legitimate tool of state policy. “National Socialism,” said Nazi Deputy party leader Rudolf Hess in 1934, “is nothing but applied biology.” Thus, Classical Darwinism became one of the foundations of the Third Reich.
“The entire Nazi regime,” writes Roger Jay Lifton, “was built on a biomedical vision that required the kind of racial purification that would progress from sterilization to extensive killing.” As early as the publication of Mein Kampf (1924-26), Lifton indicates, “Hitler had declared the sacred racial mission of the German people to be ‘assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements [and]... slowly and severely raising them to a dominant position.’” Moreover, racial purity was also demanded by author Helena Blavatsky who wrote that only those persons with a certain pure racial blood could advance to the next Root Race. The doctrines of Nazism were essentially Blavatskyism as it was dictated to her by self-avowed automatic writing via her Tibetan controllers. In any case, for Hitler—the most famous of the twentieth century Social Darwinist politicos—the stakes were absolute: “If the power to fight for one’s own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, the great “Superpowers”—the winners of the struggle for dominance—were threatening the annihilation of the entire planet ... in the name of survival. “The Twentieth Century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution,” writes Michael Denton. “The social and political currents, which have swept the world in the past eighty years, would not have been possible without its intellectual sanction.” Among the “currents which have swept the world,” we may list Imperialism, the mad rush for empire in the late Nineteenth Century and early twentieth; the rise in the Twentieth Century of various forms of socialism premised on the idea that the first responsibility of the state is population control: a responsibility inevitably involving emphasis on the elimination of supposedly defective peoples; the First and Second World Wars; the so-called Cold War; and the numerous late twentieth century “hot” wars.
the establishment of Darwinism as the West’s official evolutionary theory, “war”
has been the order of the day. “War,” writes Jacques Barzun, “became the
symbol, the image, the inducement, the reason, and the language of all human
doing on the planet.” Unless one has waded through some sizable part of the
literature of the period 1870-1914, he has no conception of the extent to
which it is one long call for blood. The call for blood began with the French
Revolution. (that the