I wasn't going to respond to this, but now that f. Christian has put out an excerpt from an article that quotes Peikoff, said excerpt seeming to indicate that an Objectivist writer is vaguely insinuating that modern science is in bed with the Nazis, I must let Peikoff clarify just where Naziism came from:
True reality, [Hegel b.1770, d.1831] holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel's version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute "externalizes" itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute's career. ... It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute's development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, ... distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal....
The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."
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The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." "The march of God in the world, that is what the state is." The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is "an absolute unmoved end in itself," and it "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."
The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany.
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The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism.... These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period's intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support - by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier): "The blood which one has in one's veins at birth one keeps all one's life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all." No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.
What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes:
replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of "Spirit," the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.-- Leonard Peikoff, 1982, The Ominous Parallels, pp 34-35.The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism. [Karl Popper, 1962, The Open Society and its Enemies]
"In order to create the "new man" for the new state, one must first capture the language. Then they must capture the institutions such as the universities. The... totalitarians---have done that in the United States in the last half-century far better than if we had been invaded by Russians in the '60s. Instead we were invaded by the products of the Frankfurt School of Sociology and its generals such as Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky."
I will use a parallel to make an argument in favor of ID over evolution, based on what is known in philosophy as the Allegory of Paley's Watch.
Suppose you live in a small village on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. You live in conditions that would be described as "primitive" by our standards, and you have no exposure to the outside world. While walking along the beach one day, you come across a large pile of driftwood and other assorted things that have been washed up by the tides, seemingly at random. In the midst of the various things on the beach you come across a gold watch, though your primitive circumstances and lack of exposure to the outside world make you thoroughly ignorant of what exactly this thing is.
The point that is made in Paley's allegory is that a rational person in such a situation would be able to deduce that the item was different than all the other things washed up on the shore. It would be clear to you that this watch was not the result of a natural or random process but of a creative process, and even though you do not know the purpose that this thing serves (and even if the watch is not working when it lands on the beach) you would base this presumption on nothing more than the complexity of the object in your hand.
You can take this allegory one step further. Imagine that while walking along the beach you come upon a pile of driftwood in all shapes and sizes, all of the pieces worn down in a random fashion by the wind and the waves. Now suppose that in the midst of this pile you find one piece of wood that is not worn like the rest but is carved in some intricate manner into a figurine or even some other form that you don't recognize. Once again, any rational person would recognize that this carved piece of wood had an origin that was "higher" than the random pounding of the waves, and once again you would make this case based on nothing more than the complexity of the object in your hand.
It is important to note that no process of scientific evaluation would ever be able to validate your theory in either case (assuming, of course, that you were never able to leave the island and look for the source of these items). What is also worth noting is that it is not entirely impossible for these objects to have washed up on the beach as a result of a random process. It is theoretically possible for the wind and the waves to erode a piece of driftwood in such a way that it assumes a complex, intricate form. It is far less likely, but also theoretically possible, that the various minerals and elements required to form the watch (gold, nickel, glass, etc.) could be brought together in a random process to produce the objest in your hand.
And yet despite the lack of "scientific proof" to support the theory of an outside creative cause, and the theoretical possibility that these objects were the result of a natural process, the person who believes that these things were created at random is the one who is actually making an irrational leap of faith!