The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and
the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis
of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the
whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God
that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting
and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all
those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an
artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to
human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted
is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the
principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature's principle is mutual fight
and antagonism.
Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly
repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed
foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy.
In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they
needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people;
namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of
scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The _Gott_ of the
German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German
success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from
_Gott und uns_; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.
I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in
a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second
impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of
the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was
well illustrated by the conditions of the moment--and it was a memorable
one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the
land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in
tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and
cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for
existence,--and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No
wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought
to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its
evolution in harmony with natural law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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