Darwin and Malthus

PBS ^ | 2001

[Tailgunner Joe]

The year was 1838. In England, the Industrial Revolution was under way, but it had made rich only the owners of production, not the workers. In increasingly crowded cities, ordinary people struggled for their daily existence. Some of the poor rioted. The Poor Laws were under attack: Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics. It was in this pivotal year that Darwin, back from his voyage on the Beagle and trying to understand the forces that drove the origin of new species, read the works of Thomas Malthus, a parson and social economist.

In opposition to the utopian thinkers of the day, Malthus believed that unless people exercised restraint in the number of children they had, the inevitable shortfall of food in the face of spiraling population growth would doom mankind to a ceaseless struggle for existence. Out of that unforgiving battle, some would survive and many would not, as famine, disease, and war put a ceiling on the growth in population.

These ideas galvanized Darwin's thinking about the struggles for survival in the wild, where restraint is unknown. Before reading Malthus, Darwin had thought that living things reproduced just enough individuals to keep populations stable. But now he came to realize that, as in human society, populations bred beyond their means, leaving survivors and losers in the effort to exist.

Immediately, Darwin saw that the variation he had observed in wild populations would produce some individuals that were slightly better equipped to thrive and reproduce under the particular conditions at the time. Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate the population. "The result of this would be the formation of new species," he wrote later. "Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."

That theory, of course, was none other than natural selection, the driving force of evolution. Though scholars have debated just how influential Malthus was in Darwin's thinking, there can be no doubt that his view of the struggle in society enabled Darwin to appreciate the significance of the struggle in the wild.

[wyattearp]

From your own link:

"It is not that “Darwinism of logical necessity leads…to Nazism,” so that (absurdly) every Darwinist is logically a Nazi. Rather, Darwinism provides a new understanding of human nature, and hence a new view of “human life and death,” that made Darwinism “a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause” of Nazism."

[Tailgunner Joe]

This is from PBS after all. The important fact is that it was Malthus' incorrect nonsense which Darwin based his whole theory on.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Right. Some are commies.

[Mylo]

Hitler didn't kill Jews because he believed in Evolution.

If he believed in Evolution through natural selection and he thought Jews were inferior then things would sort themselves out just fine.

Hitler told the German people that they needed to kill the Jews because the Jews killed Christ.

In a speech delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990), Hitler said:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.

Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.""

Hitler on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ."

In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!"

October 24, 1933, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

[general_re]

Some are commies, and some are Nazis. You know, like Edmund Burke.

[Tailgunner Joe]

From my link: "Edmund Burke's ideas were taken up by conservatives and that's one reason why they have proved less likely to be seduced by Malthusian-like warnings such as eugenics in the 1920s, the 'Population Bomb' in the 1960s, and more recently warnings about environmental catastrophe. Experience and history teach, they say, that the human race has more than enough ability to overcome obstacles and continue to improve its condition."

The link says that Burke opposed elitist utopianism while Malthus embraced it.

[general_re]

The link says that Burke opposed elitist utopianism while Malthus embraced it.

From your link: "Thomas Malthus championed the second approach to criticizing utopianism."

You didn't even read it, didja? Title sure looked nice, though, right?

[general_re]

Pffft. Hitler - what does he know about fascism?

[Chanticleer]

I remember being told in school (in the 70s) that by the time the year 2000 arrived, we'd be out of room, out of water, out of space, out of fuel, out of food and out of air. We were told birth control was a necessity, and that anything more than "replacement" was wrong.

It is 2005, isn't it? Haven't there been several countries in the news of late encouraging, even rewarding, their citizens for procreation?

Wish I could remember my teachers' names. I'd love to have a chat! Of course, I would have to bring our four children along for the ride.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Actually Hitler condemned Christianity as a Jewish slave religion.

What did Adolf Hitler think about Christianity? - "There cannot be any help in the people's struggles in the long run from a moral doctrine which preaches love of the enemy, orders one to turn the left cheek when the right has been struck, etc."

[Tailgunner Joe]

"Burke was not opposed to revolution as such and was a supporter of the American revolution and Irish independence. What he opposed in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France was the idea that a select group of thinkers could develop an abstract set of ideas and impose them on society without doing great harm. Society and its laws, he said, needed to be based on experience. We should not carelessly change what has worked in the past under the assumption we know how to do better. And when we make changes, we should look at their results carefully to see if the changes do more harm than good. He also believed human nature was too complex and resistant to change to fit into anyone's model of how a society ought to be constructed. For Burke, societies will always be less-than-perfect patchworks with flaws that cannot be entirely eliminated.

"Thomas Malthus championed the second approach to criticizing utopianism. He accepted the basic principle of all utopian thinkers, that a society can be constructed with the predictability and logic of a machine. But he pointed to a fatal logical flaw in utopian reasoning. Less-than-ideal societies have their population growth restrained by high death rates."

In other words, they disagreed completely.

You're the one who didn't read it, but your slander of Edmund Burke associating him with Malthus sounded good didn't it?

[Tailgunner Joe]

I guess you just think your fellow evos will be too stupid and easily led to read it themselves and discover your slanderous decption.

[general_re]

So in the Tailgunner Joe dictionary, "criticizing utopianism" and "embracing utopianism" mean exactly the same thing.

LOL.

[wyattearp]

Some child molesters are christians. What is your point, exactly?

[general_re]

Apparently the link did come up short in one respect, insofar as it omitted something from the following sentence - "Liberals and socialists (and Tailgunner Joe - g_r) had a difficult time digesting Malthus."

[Tailgunner Joe]

"He accepted the basic principle of all utopian thinkers, that a society can be constructed with the predictability and logic of a machine."

Just like materialist evos. He agreed with the utopians goals, he just differed on the question of how to achieve it.

[Mylo]

Do you argue with my citations? They were all publicly given speeches or published books.

Opposed to this, all the anti-Christian quotes from Hitler were from one source that published well after his death. Even if true, he apparently only whispered these anti-Christian musings to that ONE PERSON.

Meanwhile his published books, and public speeches, DISSEMINATED TO MILLIONS called upon Germans to revenge themselves against the Jews for the murder of Christ.

SO no revisionist history please. There is plenty of that garbage around already.

[general_re]

I see, so in the Tailgunner Joe dictionary, we can also find that "principle" means exactly the same thing as "goal". When the article says "For a time, Malthus said, that scheme might work...But in the long run the kindness of a utopian society would turn to cruelty", it's pretty clear that he does not "accept" the goal of utopianism, he is instead arguing that utopianism is not achievable.

Is this some sort of attempt to bludgeon people with illiteracy? Shouldn't you study a bit of history before attempting something like this? Can't hurt, really...

[Tailgunner Joe]

Bill Clinton also claimed to be a Christian and a lot of moronic dupes believed him too and used it as an excuse to bash the religion they hate.

Hitler was lying. It's that simple. The statements you cite were from before he came to power. He was a politician like Clinton.

My link is from his private conversations not meant for public consumption when he had no reason to lie. Albert Speer corroborates Hitler's attitude about Christianity in his memoirs, and even says that Hitler hid these thoughts in public and in the presence of women.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Malthus' goal was the same as every liberal utopian. Figure out a way to feed all the starving poor people.

As Christ said, "You shall always have the poor with you, but you won't always have Me."