Chapter 3

WITH MANIFOLD FORCE

"There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally

increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon

be covered by the progency of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man

has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand

years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny...."

--Charles Darwin

The first premise of classical Darwinism is that species evolve from

other species. The second premise is that Natural Selection is the

means of evolution. The third premise is the so-called "Malthus

doctrine." This doctrine maintains that organisms tend to reproduce

at a geometrical rate, whereas resources replenish themselves slowly--

at an arithmetic rate. Consequently, severe struggle for the means of

subsistence becomes inevitable.. It is this premise that is referred to in

the subtitle of the Origin ... The Preservation of Favoured Races in the

Struggle for Life.

The Malthus doctrine was set forth by the Thomas Malthus (1766-

1834) in one of the most influential of modern essays, the "Essay on

the Principle of Population" (1798). In this essay, Malthus argues that

because "all animated life [tends] to increase beyond the nourishment

prepared for it," there can be never be real progress or happiness for

humankind. Humanity is doomed to procreate itself into destitution.

- 1 -

Before Malthus and his nightmarish visions, the rulers of Europe

looked upon large populations as assets; after the "Principle of

Population," they began to view large populations as liabilities. Behind

their readiness to embrace Malthusianism was the terrible French

Revolution, which had made it very clear that large masses of people

can be lethal to ruling classes. In 1789 (first year of the Revolution),

the European country with the largest population was .... France.

Leader of the reaction against the French Revolution and all that it

represented was Britain. England's initial response to the revolution in

France was mild enthusiasm. Certainly there was no need for a similar

revolution in England. England had a constitution, one that was

greatly admired. However, when inflammatory pamphlets started

circulating in England, the voices of reaction began to make

themselves heard. The most articulate of those voices belonged to

Edmund Burke, who in his younger years had pleaded the cause of the

American colonies before Parliament. In 1790, Burke was an old man.

An old man with a large estate to support.

On February 9, 1790, Burke arose in the House of Commons and

began his critique of the new "democracy"" "Our present danger is ...

from anarchy, a danger of being led, through an admiration of

successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excess of an

irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscatory, plundering, ferocious,

bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger

is no longer from intolerance but from atheism--a foul, uncanny vice, a

foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind--which seems in

France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction,

accredited, and almost avowed." [1] In November of the same year,

- 2 -

Burke published his famous Reflections on the French Revolution,

which represented the "conservative" position in most convincing

terms.

The subsequent excesses of the French Revolution appeared to

many to prove Burke's argument. When news that Louis XVI had been

beheaded reached London, George III and most of his subjects were

absolutely shocked. There was no more cheering for France. On

January 24, 1793, the British government ordered the French minister

to leave the kingdom. On February l, France declared war on both

England and Holland. [2]

The attitude of the upper classes in England at the time might be

summarized by the word "panic." In the words of the Durants, "panic

struck the upper classes of Britain when they found themselves faced

by another revolution so soon after the costly revolt of the American

colonies. The thousand-year-old world of kings and aristrocracies

seemed to be collapsing, beseiged by peasants burning feudal

chateaux and title deeds, and by city mobs imprisoning the royal

family and cutting off hundreds of noble heads....." [3] All this, many

Britons felt, was the result of "atheistic" French philosophers

(especially Rousseau) and their English counterparts, people like

William Godwin (the "Foolish Philosopher") and Thomas Paine, the "pen

of the American Revolution."

THE MALTHUS DOCTRINE

It was in against this background that Rev. Malthus committed to

paper his pessimistic appraisal of the condition of man. It all began as

- 3 -

something of an academic exercise. Thomas' father was an admirer of

Rousseau. Wouldn't be fun to challenge Father with a view completely

different from his own? The father was so impressed by the ingenuity

of his son, he encouraged Thomas to publish the piece. Malthus took

up the dare and published the "Principle of Population" in 1798.

Populations, whether animal or human, know no internal

constraints, the Rev. Malthus argued. Populations simply grow and

grow, until checked by Famine, Disease, or War. Do populations

exhibit any internal contraints to excessive population growth?

Malthus' answer was "No." Populations are unprincipled.

Where did Malthus get the idea that unless held in check by

severe external factors, populations devastate their environment?

Curiously, the same islands that were so important in the formation of

Darwin's thought played a major role in the cogitations of Malthus ...

the Galapagos.

In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, ships would

stop at the Galapagos to pick up giant (delicious) Galapagos turtles.

The turtles, piled on their backs in the holds of ships, would remain

alive for a very long time. Goats, on the other hand, were a lot of

trouble. They had to be fed, and they couldn't be piled on their backs.

For seapersons stopping by in the Galapagos, the sensible thing to do

was trade goats for turtles. A great many goats were released on the

islands. In time, goats on certain of the islands ate just about every

bit of vegetation. [4]

Malthus happened to run across the "Galapagos goats" information

in a book on the poor laws published by Viscount Townshend in the

early 1700s. Gladly Malthus seized upon the data, as it supported him

- 4 -

in a long-running debate with his father, who was a Rousseau-style

optimist. What the goat situation indicates, Malthus believed, is that

the sexual drive knows no constraints, no internal constraints that is.

What is true for the goats is also true for humanity, Malthus supposed.

Consequently, populations--whether populations of goats or humans--

must be controlled by external factors, by a responsible elite.

In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe,

the ministers of monarcy and members of the ruling classes met to

discuss the newly discovered "population problem" and to devise ways

of implementing the Rev. Malthus' recommendation that the

mortality rate of the poor must be increased.

"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor," Malthus

declared, "we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we

should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses,

and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our

villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in

all marshy and unwholesome situations," and so forth. [5]

Another way to state the main premise of the Malthus doctrine is :

"All animated life" is governed exclusively by the sexual-reproductive

drive. The "-logy" (logic) behind biology is the logic of sexual drive.

Thus stated the Malthus concept is an example of "sexual

determinism" of the most reductive kind. Why "reductive?" Malthus

reduces a complex interplay of factors to just one factor--sexual drive.

Any form of reductive determinism has, on its face, little or no

scientific merit. Some very innovative thinkers have been castigated,

and cast out of the scientific forum, because of their attachment to

reductive determinism. Sigmund Freud is a case in point. Once the

- 5 -

label of "sexual determinist" was applied to Freud, Freudian

psychology was essentially finished.

The Malthus doctrine, one of the most influential "doctrines" of

modern times, never had any scientific basis whatsoever. Malthus

took a very unusual situation--that of the goats in the Galapagos--and

called it typical, the way things are in the biological realm. If they are

not subject to external contraints, all animals will over-run their

environment, breed themselves out of existence. Prepared by his

theology to take a rather dismal view of humanity, 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 his later years, Malthus ackowledged his error and revised his

position on the "principle" of population. [6] Unfortunately, it was the

original view, and not the revised, that came to the attention of

Charles Darwin.

THE MALTHUS-DARWIN CONNECTION

In putting together his theory of evolution, Darwin was pressed to

find an explanation for "variability"--variations in organisms and

species. He knew from his observations in the Galapagos and

elsewhere that geography was an important factor in speciation. Take

members of the same species and put them in different geographical

locations, they'll evolve into different species. So much was certain.

What was not clear to Darwin was the mechanism, the means, by

- 6 -

which the differentiation occurred. The matter was problematical.

Then, in 1838, Darwin read the "Essay on the Principle of Population."

"In October 1838," Darwin writes in his autobiography, "I happened

to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared

to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on ,

from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it

at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable

variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be

destroyed." [7]

The Malthus idea of existence as an incessant struggle suggested to

Darwin an explanation for variation that would be regarded as sensible

by just about everyone: The "Mother" of variation is none other than

the old, familiar struggle for existence. And Natural Selection is the

"Dad"--the decider. Dissertations on geographical determinism,

dissertations on any type of determinism, not required. Variations

existing now are the winners of past and present struggles for

existence. Variations of the future will be those that survive the tests

of struggle and selection.

Recall the subtitle of the Origin: The Preservation of the Favoured

Races in the Struggle for Life. Ever since the French Revolution, the

fate of the ruling classes had been somewhat in question. Was the

elite losing ground? Was the elite obsolete? "No, indeed," saith

Darwinism. "Elite status is prima facie evidence of evolutionary

superiority." What does it take to maintain that superiority?

"Acceptance of the first and foremost responsibility of the elite--to

subdue all expressions of unprincipled natural man."

- 7 -

The Malthus-Darwin position regarding natural man was the direct

opposite of the Deistic position of those in the line of Rousseau and

Lamarck. For the latter, natural man was divine, close to the Creator.

"Civilization" is corruption. For those in the Darwin camp, the opposite

is true. Natural man is vicious, and society represents the efforts of

the ethical few to contain the violence and the destructiveness

inherent in natural man.

"Among primitive men," wrote foremost Social Darwinist T.H.

Huxley, "the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the

toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their

circumstances, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond

the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of

each against all was the normal state of existence. The human

species, like others, plashed 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 war of each

against all is the natural state of existence.

Further: "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 Malthus hypothesis, which Darwin incorporated into his theory.

Further: "The effort of ethical man to work towards a moral end by

no means abolished ... the deep-seated organic impulses which impel

the natural man to follow his non-moral course...." Ethical man is the

product of "moral" (as opposed to natural) evolution. Society is an

expression of moral evolution. "Society not only has a moral end, but

in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality." The primary,

- 8 -

absolutely necessary function of ethical man, and society is to regulate

non-moral man. Ethical man "founds his life on a more or less

complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle

for existence...." [8] Thus it was that Darwinism (and Social

Darwinism) gave the ruling classes of the nineteenth century a new

lease on power, a new justification for existence. They were the

regulators of the sex-crazed, violent beast--the amoral masses of

mankind.

As the quotation which heads this chapter indicates, Darwin fully

embraced the Malthus hypothesis that all organisms breed at a

geometrical rate and know no internal constraints. This is the

hypothesis we label the "Malthus doctrine." "There is no exception to

the rule," Darwin writes with totally unwarranted certainty, "that every

organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not

destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single

pair." What about humans? "Even slow-breeding man," Darwin

states, "has doubled in twenty-five years, and this rate, in a few

thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his

progency...." [9]

The long and short of it is: Darwin took a perverse, elitist,

unscientific philosophy (Malthusianism) and made it one of the

foundations of modern biology and evolution. Without the

legitimization that Darwin provided, Malthusianism would not have

survived much beyond mid-century. It was patently part of an

hysterical ruling class response to the French Revolution.

Did Darwin knowingly conspire to insinuate into science an

abhorrent view of life?--conspire with reactionaries to establish an

- 9 -

evolution theory that justified the rulers of the last century and our

own in committing numberless crimes against the common people, all

in the name of science. "The greatest authority of all the advocates of

war is Darwin," wrote Max Nordau in the North American Review in

1889. "Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can

cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim

the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of

science." [9] In response to the above question, I can enter only an

opinion at this point: Darwin was no original thinker; he was great

collector and synthesizer of information. Where social theory is

concerned, Malthusianism had achieved an orthodox status among

Darwin's associates in the Royal Society. All indications are that

Darwin truly believed in the Malthus theory. "As more individuals are

produced than can possibly survive," he writes with apparent sincerity,

"there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one

individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of

distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine

or Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and

vegetable kingdom...." [10]

In their enthusiasm for the "Malthus-Darwin doctrine," some of

Darwin's followers carried the idea of life-as-fight to absurd lengths:

"T.H. Huxley said that all the molecules within each organism were

competing with each other. August Weismann [a German biologist]

suggested that the particles of germ plasm were in conflict with each

other, so that the ancestors who had contributed them could be seen

as struggling with each other as to which should be re-created.

Wilhelm Roux developed the theory that the organs were struggling

- 10 -

with each other for nourishment, kidneys against lungs, heart against

brain. Neither Darwin nor his immediate followers had much feeling

for the internal stability and harmony of the organism." [11]

Interestingly, the "struggle for existence" is rarely discussed any

longer as an issue in biology. As Norman Macbeth indicates, "Darwin

took it over from Malthus, who was a sociologist (and a grim one)

rather than a biologist. It was not derived from a loving contemplation

of plants and animals. Such a contemplation would show that there

were always more seeds than were needed for the replacement of the

parents, but it would not show that 'each organic being was striving to

increase at a geometrical ratio' or that there was continual struggle...."

[12]

Today, in biology, the emphasis is on co-operative relationships

among organisms rather than competitive ones. In The Lives of a Cell,

for instance, biologist Lewis Thomas writes: "Most of the associations

between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative

ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of

adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing

signals, warnings, flagging the other off...." [13]

- 11 -

IN THE NAME OF SURVIVAL

After 1859, the Darwinian "vision" of existence as purposeless

struggle and of evolution as a haphazard process quickly replaced the

Judeo-Christian vision of human life as a purposeful, divinely guided

moral struggle. The Darwinian revolution deposed God as Source, and

indeed exiled from the realm of "true science" all teleological

considerations (considerations as to the purpose and ends of life).

"Instead of endorsing the eighteenth-century concept of a drive toward

perfection," writes Ernst Mayr, "Darwin merely postulated change....

By chance this process of adaptation sometimes results in changes

that can be interpreted as progress, but there is no intrinsic

mechanism generating inevitable advance." [14]

"Darwin's new and revolutionary [reactionary] view," writes

Australian scientist Michael Denton, "implied that all the diversity of

life on Earth had resulted from natural and random processes and not,

as previously believed, from the creative activity of God. The

acceptance of this great claim and the consequent elimination of God

from nature was to play a decisive role in the secularization of western

society...." [15]

Further, the idea of life as 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 over-population, the rulers of late nineteenth

century Europe precipitated the Age of Imperialism. After Darwin, the

nations of Europe found themselves with "surplus populations." Nation

after nation entered the race to acquire foreign lands. The motive was

- 12 -

not greed, it was "survival." The nations that would survive into the

future, it was believed, would be those in possession of vast tracts of

land for the dumping of surplus population.

In a very short time, all of Africa was carved up by the European

powers. Aboriginal peoples of that continent who objected to slavery

were destroyed. Many great tribes, tribes that for thousands of years

existed in balance with the environment, were eradicated. It was the

"African Holocaust." Today, the holocaust continues.

Competition for empire (i.e. the possession of colonies for the

dumping of surplus population) was a major cause of World War I. In

1901, Arthur Dix, the editor of two Berlin journals, wrote: "A timorous

people, which knows not how to use its elbows, may of course put a

stop to the increase of population--it might find things too narrow at

home. The superfluity of population might find no economic existence.

A people happy in its future, however, knows nothing of artificial

limitation; its only care can be to find room on the globe for a

livelihood for other members of its own race." [16]

In Britain as Germany's Vassal (1912), Social Darwinist (and retired

German general) F. von Bernhardi writes, "In the interest of the world's

civilization it is our duty to enlarge Germany's colonial empire. Thus

alone can we politically, or at least nationally, unite the German

civilization throughout the world, for only then will they recognize that

German civilization is the most necessary factor in human progress.

We must endeavor to acquire new territories throughout the world by

all means in our power, because we must preserve to Germany the

millions of Germans who will be born in the future, and we must

- 13 -

provide for them food and employment. They ought to be enabled to

live under a German sky, and to lead a German life." [17]

Given such attitudes (not only in Germany, but throughout Europe),

war became inevitable. It became inevitable for another reason as

well: War was viewed by Bernhardi and other influential hard-core

Social Darwinists as an "indispensable regulator" of populations. "If it

were not for war," Bernhardi writes, "we should probably find that

inferior and degenerate races would overcome healthy and youthful

ones by their wealth and their numbers. The generative importance of

war lies in this, that it causes selection, and thus war becomes a

biological necessity." [18]

In the twentieth century, the Malthus-Darwin doctrine conditioned a

struggle for power on an unprecedented scale. The twentieth century

is the most bloody, the most brutal on record. For the first time, the

principal targets of war became populations.

One who had attempted to stop the carnage was the Russian

naturalist and evolutionist Petr Kropotkin. In the last decades of the

nineteenth century, Kropotkin argued the view that the key to

evolutionary progress is not conflict, but cooperation. In his years of

research in Siberian and elsewhere, Kropotkin maintained, he failed to

find "that bitter struggle for existence, among animals belonging to the

same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not

always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the

struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution." [19] "If we ask

Nature," Kropotkin writes, "'Who are the fittest: those who are

continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?'

we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid

- 14 -

are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and

they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of the

intelligence and bodily organization...." [20]

In 1902, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid--A Factor of Evolution, a

thorough, scientific refutation of the idea that struggle for survival is

the source of evolutionary progress. It was too late. The Social

Darwinists were in command of the field, and they were demanding

war. In 1914, the despairing Kropotkin wrote: "When the present war

began, involving nearly all Europe in a terrible struggle, and this

struggle assumed ... a never yet known character of wholesale

destruction of life among the non-combatants and pillage of the means

of subsistence of the civil population, 'struggle for existence' became

the favorite explanation with those who tried to find an excuse for

these horrors." [21]

As we all know, the First World War was 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." [22] The third premise of classical Darwinism became the

foundation of the Third Reich.

"The entire Nazi regime," writes Robert 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 Geman people to be

'assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial

elements [and].... slowly and severely raising them to a dominant

- 15 -

position.'..." [23] 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." [24]

By the middle of our Malthusian 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...." [25] 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.

Since 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 doings on the planet. No one

who has not waded through some sizable part of the literature of the

period 1870-1914 has any conception of the extent to which it is one

long call for blood,...." [ 26] The call for blood began with the French

- 16 -

Revolution. The blood of the nobility ran in the gutters, and that was

something that steeled the hearts of those in the ruling classes. The

masses had dared war on their masters. They would pay the price.

And pay they did, by willingly engaging in war after war ... marching off

to the sound of the death drums of Hobbes and Malthus and "our

gentle" Charles Darwin. ≈

- 17 -

- 18 -