There is this article of Laurent Guyénot (
From Yahweh to Zion by Laurent Guyénot and
The New History of Mankind: Who Are we? What are we? How did we get here?) that worth a visit:
Genealogy of Darwinism
What is Darwinism? Karl Marx, after first sharing the enthusiasm of his friend Friedrich Engels for The Origin of Species (1859), finding there "the historical-natural basis of our conception", changed his mind by recognizing that Darwin projected in the animal and vegetable kingdom "his own English society".
Darwin's theory, he then wrote to Engels, was merely "the pure and simple transposition, from the social domain into the living nature, of the doctrine of Hobbes: bellum omnium contra omnes[the war of all against all], and of the thesis of competition dear to bourgeois economists, associated with the Malthusian population theory". [1]
In other words, Darwin is the spiritual offspring of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith (liberalism theorist) and Thomas Malthus. Marx was right. Let us look at this genealogy.
Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes, author of the famous Leviathan (1651), is a revolutionary political theorist, who breaks with the Aristotelian tradition honoured by Thomas Aquinas, according to which man is a naturally political being. For Hobbes, man is sociable not by nature, but by necessity:
"Men have no pleasure (but on the contrary, a lot of displeasure) in being together where there is no power to dominate them all through fear. »
Driven mainly by the instinct of self-preservation and living in the constant anguish of violent death, "man is a wolf for man" in the state of nature, and human relations can be summed up as "the war of all against all". To avoid extinction, humanity invents the social order, which is a contract between individuals by which each transfers its natural rights to a Sovereign. Hobbes is the first theorist of the "social contract", and will be the major reference of all political philosophers after him, until today.
Leo Strauss, for example, a neoconservative master of thought, is a specialist in Hobbes. He defended the thesis that Hobbes had been influenced by Machiavelli (1469-1527), and evidence of this influence has recently been found in unpublished writings by Hobbes[2]. What Machiavelli wrote in half words, Hobbes can write more openly a century and a half later. Machiavelli, for example, indicated in a roundabout way that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul. Hobbes, on the other hand, clearly displays his ontological materialism:
"The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and all that is not material is not real. »
Hobbes is therefore considered to be the founder of modern materialism. But Hobbes was the product of his time. His work and success are set in the particular context of Cromwell's Puritan England. The latter, after having signed in 1649 the death warrant of King Charles I (the act is written by a certain Isaac Dorislaus), instituted himself Lord Protector of the ephemeral Commonwealth, from 1653 until his death in 1658. Cromwell was a bloody tyrant for Catholics, and the author of a genocidal campaign against the Irish, but he was a great friend of the Jews who, from Holland, orchestrated Calvinist propaganda and financed the revolutionary army (in particular the extremely wealthy Fernandez Carvajal, who also made his network of spies available to Cromwell). Under royalty, Jews were still officially banned from the Kingdom (since 1290), but many Portuguese or Venetian marranes had settled in London under the Calvinist mask. A campaign led by the Dutch Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel (Portuguese marrane returned to Judaism), near Cromwell, contributed to the de facto lifting of the ban. Under Calvinist influence, Judaism even enjoyed such prestige that authors competed with each other in inventiveness to prove that the English themselves, the new chosen people, were the direct descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. This theory originated in The Rights of the Kingdom (1646), a plea for regicide written by John Sadler, personal secretary of Oliver Cromwell, a Hebrew and friend of Menasseh Ben Israel.
Materialism has always been part of Judaism, for it is firmly written in the Hebrew Bible, which explicitly denies the existence of an individual immortal soul: man is dust and returns to dust (Genesis 3:19). Over the centuries, this materialism has been tempered by external influences (Hellenistic and then Christian), but has never been totally abandoned by the intellectual elite. Moreover, it has become widely popular in the Marranean circles, especially since they, through Calvinism, have emancipated themselves from talmudism and returned to the source of the Old Testament. If then Hobbes' materialism may seem revolutionary - and incompatible with monotheism - in the Christian world, it is not in any way revolutionary in the same way.
Hobbes is a Calvinist puritan, but his religious ideas are so typically Jewish that his Marian origin has been hypothesized (as assumed by Machiavelli, whose neoconservative Michael Ledeen writes: "Listen to his political philosophy and you will hear Jewish music")[3]. For example, Hobbes reduces Christian faith to the assertion that "Jesus is the Messiah", and defends a political vision of the Messiah that owes everything to the Old Testament. For Hobbes, "the Kingdom of God was first instituted by Moses' ministry over the Jews", because at that time, "God alone is king"[4].
Whether from a crypto-Jewish background or not, it is undeniable that the success of Hobbes owes much to the influence of Jews and Marranos in England and the cultural climate they spread there. Hobbes is only the most visible leader of a current of thought that penetrates Christianity as a foreign body and promotes a complex of anthropological, sociological and political ideas that will reach maturity in Victorian times and shine throughout the West to found modernity.
Mandeville and Smith
Adam Smith, author of the famous The Wealth of the Nations (1776), is a student of Hobbes, but instead of the latter's "Sovereign", he substitutes the "Market". Postulating as Hobbes that human beings are motivated exclusively by their own profit, he nevertheless bets that, in a society of free competition, the sum of individual selfishness is enough to create a just society:
"Each individual... seeks only his own profit, and in this, as in many other cases, he is moved by an invisible hand to promote an end that was not part of his intention. »
This Invisible Hand is, in reality, that of a plutocracy reigning over a world totally subjected to the commercial spirit.
The missing link between Hobbes and Smith is Bernard Mandeville, a political philosopher born to Huguenot parents who had taken refuge in Holland and settled in London in 1693. Most certainly influenced by Dutch Marranean circles, and perhaps in reality of Marrane ancestry, he published in 1714 in English The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, aimed at proving that :
"The defects of men in depraved humanity can be used to the advantage of civil society, and that they can be given the place of moral virtues. »
Private vices contribute to the public good while altruistic actions can actually harm it. For example, a libertine acts by vice, but "his prodigality gives work to tailors, servants, perfumers, cooks and women of bad life, who in turn employ bakers, carpenters, etc.". ». On the contrary, morality is of no social use, and even harmful to collective prosperity, since it condemns luxury: a society cannot have both morality and prosperity at the same time. This political theory is based on an anthropological theory that postulates in man a passion for the admiration of others, which Mandeville calls self-liking, self-esteem. Self-esteem" is expressed in the display of elegant and well-dressed clothes, crews, furniture, expensive buildings, everything that men can acquire to be valued by others. "It is therefore the driving force behind the luxury economy. But, says Mandeville, this luxury economy based on self-esteem only concerns consumers. Production must be ensured by an industrious class maintained in an economy of need, i.e. in a state of destitution forcing them to work for a living.
The happy society according to Mandeville is the one that allows a class to live in pleasure and idleness, thanks to the work of the poor: an opinion that Voltaire shared. Rousseau, on the other hand, whose vision of man was like the antidote to that of Hobbes, devoted several writings to criticizing the Mandeville system, which inspired a deep disgust in him and whose disastrous consequences he saw. [5]
Malthus, Spencer and Darwin
Shortly after Smith, Thomas Malthus appeared in the same ideological lineage. His famous law, set out in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), postulates that any period of prosperity creates an exponential increase in population which, if not stopped, eventually exceeds the capacity to produce food, leading to famine, war and excess mortality.
Malthus therefore opposes social protection laws, because
"these laws create the poor they assist". Therefore:
"If a man cannot feed his children, they must starve. »
Malthusianism, which adapted well to the Victorian mental climate, inspired Herbert Spencer at the end of the 19th century, who formulated the natural law of "survival of the fittest" in Progress, its Laws and Causes (1857). Spencer in turn denounces socialist initiatives aimed at protecting weak individuals from the harsh laws of natural selection.
Darwin himself admits in his book that his theory is only "the doctrine of Malthus applied to the animal and vegetable kingdom, acting with all its power". It should be recalled that Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution, i.e. a genealogical relationship between animal species, but simply proposed a Malthusian explanation, based on natural selection by adapting it to the state of natural resources. For Malthus, this mechanism applies within the same species, in this case the human species. But Darwin posits the bold and forever unverifiable hypothesis that natural selection is also responsible for the appearance of new species (a species being defined as a group of individuals capable of reproducing among themselves, but not with individuals of another species). Darwin is also influenced by Spencer. Spencer's theory is now stigmatized as an abusive misuse of Charles Darwin's biological theory, and is referred to as "social Darwinism". But Spencer's book was published two years before Darwin's on The Origin of Species (1859). It was actually Spencer who prepared the scene for Darwin, and it is Darwinism that should be referred to as "biological spencerism".
Darwin's success is not due to his intrinsic scientific merits, and it was not the naturalists who welcomed him. Darwin was especially well received by the Victorian bourgeoisie because he brought to the spencerian theory and dominant political ideology a support from the hard sciences.
In Darwin's wake came his cousin Francis Galton, anthropologist and statistician, author of Hereditary Genius, its laws and consequences (1862), inventor of "eugenics", whose purpose is to correct the perverse effect of civilization. This, regrettably, "reduces the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection and preserves the weak lives that would have perished in barbaric lands". Therefore, Spencer's laissez-faire approach is not enough; the state must intervene, not to help the weak, but to prevent them from reproducing. And it was Leonard Darwin, Charles' son, who led the fight as President of the British Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928.
It should be noted that the paradigm that was being put in place at that time went beyond the right-left divide; Spencer's "laissez-faire" approach was rather liberal, while Galton's eugenics, which valued state interventionism, was historically leftist[6]. But the second is basically only a sophistication of the first; it claims to support the "survival of the most fit" by sterilizing the least fit. The Darwinian paradigm can therefore be placed at the service of a state obsessed with racial purity, as Hitler's Germany will be, as well as at the service of commercial liberalism, as in England and the United States.
In the final analysis, Darwin's anthropology, implicit in The Origin of Species and explicit in The Descent of Man and Natural Selection (1871), is indeed the heir to that of Hobbes, because Darwin has only made literal what was still only a metaphor in Hobbes: man is a beast. Not only does civilized man descend from the savage (Hobbes), but the savage himself descends from the monkey (Darwin).
In his second book, Darwin provides a cold justification for colonialism and the Amerindian genocide, writing:
"In a future period, not so distant and measurable in terms of centuries, man's civilized races will certainly exterminate and replace the wild races throughout the world. » [7]
Darwin says nothing more than what had been said before him, but he brings to this idea the stamp of naturalistic science, and above all, by connecting it to his theory of the origin of species, he implicitly places this genocidal process in the continuity of a positive evolution that has already produced wild man from the monkey.
Jewish Congress
Darwin also wrote in The Descent of Man:
"If a tribe has many members who possess a high degree of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, and are therefore always ready to help each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, it must obviously prevail over most other tribes, and this is what natural selection is all about. » [8]
It is easy to understand the favourable reception of this idea among the British Jewish elite, who hold a firm conviction in the superiority of the Jewish people, and who therefore find in the Darwinian Selection a new interpretation of the Divine Election. No one embodied this disposition of spirit better than Benjamin Disraeli, future British Prime Minister, friend of Baron Lionel de Rothschild and precursor of Zionism. Hannah Arendt describes Disraeli as a "race fanatic" who, in his writings, "traced the plan of a Jewish empire, in which the Jews would be the governing class, strictly separated". [9]
Seven years before The Origin of Species, Disraeli wrote:
"It is futile for man to attempt to thwart the inexorable law of nature that decreed that a superior race could never be destroyed or absorbed by an inferior race. » [10]
The Darwinian paradigm has a strong resonance in the Jewish mentality, and many Jewish thinkers stand out among Spencer's, Darwin's and Galton's most enthusiastic disciples. Lucien Wolf, editor-in-chief of the Jewish World, but also politician and historian, was one of the first to develop a "Darwinian" theory of the racial superiority of Jews. He wrote in 1884, in an article entitled What is Judaism? A Question of To-Day:
"I believe that the importance of the superiority of the Jews lies precisely in the fact that it is almost a degree in evolution. »
This superiority would be the happy result of "the rigid observance for long centuries of a "particular" legalism by a particularly exclusive people", by which he mainly means strict endogamy:
"Jewish separatism, or "tribalism" as it is now called, was invented to enable Jews to preserve without stain for the benefit of humanity not only the teachings of Judaism but also their physical results as illustrations of their value. » [11]
In relation to endogamy, the Jewish valorization of intellectual work, which ensures a strong competitiveness of rabbis on the matrimonial market, is often invoked as a Darwinian explanation of the superior intelligence of Jews: thus, in the Middle Ages, the most successful spirits made themselves clean monks if they were Christians, but obtained the wives of choice and a large descent if they were Jews. [12]
Joseph Jacobs, who worked with Francis Galton, emphasized the competitive relationship between races. His Studies in Jewish Statistics, Social, Vital and Anthropometrical (1891) states
"In the case of Jews, persecution, when it was not too harsh, probably helped to bring out their best potential. ...] Eventually the weakest members of each generation were eliminated by persecution that tempted or forced them to embrace Christianity, and so contemporary Jews are the survivors of a long process of unnatural selection that apparently excellently adapted them to the struggle for intellectual existence. » [13]
This positive reversal of persecution as a spenseric mechanism ensuring the "survival of the fittest" by expelling "soft" Jews from the gene pool is a commonplace among community Jews. Theodor Herzl evokes it as if it were a matter of course:
"This hatred of Jews will never have caused anything but the defection of the weakest among us. The strongest Jews proudly return to their people when persecution breaks out. »
As Claude Klein points out in his translation of The State of the Jews, it is in the same logic that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977) described Jews leaving Israel as "falling waste"[14]. As for the importance of endogamy for the preservation of the Jewish race, it was summarized by Golda Meir in these terms:
"Marrying a non-Jew is like joining the six million[exterminated Jews]? » [15]
Laurent Guyénot
And lucky french readers
HERE the original article.
www.yalescientific.org
