Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Scientific racism,” the theory that races fall into an evolutionary hierarchy of mental sophistication with Northern Europeans at the top, is a prime example. It was popular in the decades flanking the turn of the 20th century, apparently supported by craniometry and mental testing, before being discredited in the middle of the 20th century by better science and by the horrors of Nazism. Yet to pin ideological racism on science, in particular on the theory of evolution, is bad intellectual history. Racist beliefs have been omnipresent across history and regions of the world. Slavery has been practiced by every civilization, and was commonly rationalized by the belief that enslaved peoples were inherently suited to servitude, often by God’s design.³⁰ Statements from ancient Greek and medieval Arab writers about the biological inferiority of Africans would curdle your blood, and Cicero’s opinion of Britons was not much more charitable.³¹

More to the point, the intellectualized racism that infected the West in the 19th century was the brainchild not of science but of the humanities: history, philology, classics, and mythology. In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic warrior civilization across Eurasia, diverging into the Persians, Hittites, Homeric Greeks, and Vedic Hindus, and later into the Vikings, Goths, and other Germanic tribes. (The speck of reality in this story is that these tribes spoke languages that fell into a single family, Indo-European.) Everything went downhill when the Aryans interbred with inferior conquered peoples, diluting their greatness and causing them to degenerate into the effete, decadent, soulless, bourgeois, commercial cultures that the Romantics were always whinging about. It was a small step to fuse this fairy tale with German Romantic nationalism and anti-Semitism: the Teutonic Volk were the heirs of the Aryans, the Jews a mongrel race of Asiatics. Gobineau’s ideas were eaten up by Richard Wagner (whose operas were held to be re-creations of the original Aryan myths) and by Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a philosopher who wrote that Jews polluted Teutonic civilization with capitalism, liberal humanism, and sterile science). From them the ideas reached Hitler, who called Chamberlain his “spiritual father.”³²

Science played little role in this chain of influence. Pointedly, Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Hitler rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the idea that all humans had gradually evolved from apes, which was incompatible with their Romantic theory of race and with the older folk and religious notions from which it emerged. According to these widespread beliefs, races were separate species; they were fitted to civilizations with different levels of sophistication; and they would degenerate if they mixed. Darwin argued that humans are closely related members of a single species with a common ancestry, that all peoples have “savage” origins, that the mental capacities of all races are virtually the same, and that the races blend into one another with no harm from interbreeding.³³ The historian Robert Richards, who carefully traced Hitler’s influences, ended a chapter entitled “Was Hitler a Darwinian?” (a common claim among creationists) with “The only reasonable answer to the question . . . is a very loud and unequivocal No!”³⁴