O gene político: como as ideias de Darwin mudaram a política

The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics
By Dennis Sewell
Reviewed by John Gray - 17 December 2009

Evolutionary road

"It is as if man had suddenly been appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution." Appearing in a 1957 essay by the biologist Julian Huxley on "trans-humanism" (a term that Huxley coined), this is a declaration that could be made by any number of Darwinian ideologues today. Evolution has never been just a scientific theory. Ever since it was first properly formulated by Darwin, the theory has been used to advance a variety of political projects. It is not only "social Darwinist" supporters of laissez-faire capitalism who have claimed that their political ideals were grounded in evolutionary theory. So have Nazis, communists, anarchists and Fabian social engineers. Today, Darwinism is invoked as part of a campaign against religion by people who claim to be liberals. Behind the rival political programmes to which Darwinism has been yoked lies Huxley's belief that humankind is now in a position to direct its future evolution.

The principal achievement of Darwin's account of evolution is that it dispenses with the idea of purpose or design. Evolution is a directionless process, producing highly complex forms of life only to wipe them out. There is no progress in nature, but in ethics and politics the idea of evolution is invariably joined with the hope of improvement. Generations of progressive thinkers have invoked Darwinism to prop up their visions of a more advanced society. But the content of these visions has shifted over time, and one of the virtues of The Political Gene is to show how often Darwinism has been used to promote ideals of human progress that are illiberal, authoritarian or racist.

Drawing an implicit parallel with The Black Book of Communism, published in France in the late 1990s, which detailed communist atrocities ignored by bien-pensant opinion, Dennis Sewell writes that "the Black Book of Darwinism contains some real horrors". A large part of The Political Gene focuses on how leading Darwinists have campaigned for eugenics. Francis Galton (1822-1911), one of the founders of modern psychology, used Darwin's theory to promote his field as "an upbeat project offering an optimistic hope of Utopia", even writing an unpublished novel, Kantsaywhere, about a republic ruled by a Eugenic College, whose fellows set and administer "anthropometric tests" measuring the "fitness" of the population. Galton's repulsive utopia may seem remote from any 20th-century political reality but, as Sewell shows, eugenic ideas of the kind Galton pro pagated were taken seriously, not least in the United States, where 33 states passed sterilisation laws and at least 60,000 people were sterilised as "unfit".

In Germany, the chief propagandist for Darwinism was Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who, like Galton, promoted the idea of a racial hier archy. Holding that "the lower races . . . are psychologically nearer to the mammals - apes and dogs - than civilised Europeans", Haeckel was pivotal in giving scientific respectability to the categorisation of race. The extent to which his ideas were used by the Nazis is disputed, but there can be little doubt that his enormously influential writings helped open the door to racist pseudo-science in Europe.

Certainly, versions of Darwin's theory were recruited in support of some thoroughly unpleasant causes and, when linked with racist theories, they created a climate in which genocide could be represented as a scientifically defensible policy. It is at this point that 21st-century defenders of Darwinism will be up in arms, indignantly protesting that these were abuses in no way entailed by the theory of natural selection.

They have a point. Darwin did write of "civilised man" replacing the "savage races", but he never advanced any theory of innate racial inequality. While eugenic movements have always been prone to racism, eugenic theories need not - as a matter of logic, at any rate - accept race as a scientific category. More generally, one cannot hold a theory responsible for the uses that are made of it, if only because judgements of value do not flow automatically from explanatory claims.

This last point is confirmed by the diversity of contending movements that have claimed a pedigree in Darwinian thinking. Nazi exponents of "scientific racism", communists who believed in a collectivist future for humanity, anarchists who followed Peter Kropotkin in thinking evolutionary theory vindicated the importance of mutual aid, advocates of laissez-faire such as Herbert Spencer (who invented the expression "survival of the fittest") and high priests of social engineering such as Lord Beveridge - a long-standing advocate of eugenics, as Sewell demonstrates - can't all be right. It might seem reasonable to conclude that they were all wrong, and say that no moral or political position can be derived from Darwinism.
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