The Influence of Malthus and Darwin on the European Elite

excepts of an essay
by T.D.Hall

The Malthus doctrine was set forth by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in one of the most influential of modern essays, the "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798). In this essay, Malthus argues that because "all animated life (tends) to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it," there can never be real progress or happiness for humankind. Humanity is doomed to procreate itself into destitution.

Before Malthus and his nightmarish vision, the rulers of Europe looked upon large populations as assets; after the "Principle of Population", they began to view large populations as liabilities. Behind their readiness to embrace Malthusianism was the terrible French Revolution, which made it very clear that large masses of people can be lethal to ruling classes.

In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, the ministers of monarchy and members of the ruling classes met to discuss the newly discovered "population problem" and to devise ways of implementing the Rev. Malthus´ recommendation that the mortality rate of the poor must be increased.

"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor," Malthus declared, "we should encourage contrary habits, In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations," and so forth.....

Another way to state the main premise of the Malthus doctrine is: "All animated life" is governed exclusively by the sexual-reproductive drive...Thus stated the Malthus concept is an example of "sexual determinism" of the most reductive kind... Malthus reduces a complex interplay of factors to just one--sexual drive....

The Malthus doctrine, one of the most influential "doctrines" of modern times, never had any scientific basis whatsoever.
Malthus took a very unusual situation--that of the goats in Galapagos--and called it typical, the way things are in the biological realm...In his later years, Malthus acknowledged his error and revised his position on the "principle" of population. Unfortunately, it was the original view, not the revised which came to the attention of Charles Darwin

Did Darwin knowingly conspire to insinuate into science an abhorrent view of life?-- conspire with reactionaries to establish an evolution theory that justified the rulers of the last century and our own in committing numberless crimes against the common people, all in the name of science.
"The greatest authority of all advocates of war is Darwin," wrote Max Nordau in the North American Review in 1889.
"Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science."

In response to the above question, I can enter only an opinion at this point: Darwin was no original thinker; he was a great collector and synthesizer of information. Where social theory is concerned, Malthusianism had achieved an orthodox status among Darwin´s associates in the Royal Society...

Further, the "idea of life as meaningless struggle" played a decisive role in the brutalization of the western world. Guided by the "scientific ideas that "war is the health of the nation" and that the great threat to the state is over-population, the rulers of late nineteenth century Europe precipitated the Age of Imperialism.

After Darwin, the nations of Europe found themselves with "surplus populations." Nation after nation entered the race to acquire foreign lands. The motive was not greed, it was "survival". The nations that would survive into the future, it was believed, would be those in possession of vast tracts of land for the dumping of surplus society. Given such attitudes (), war became inevitable.

It became inevitable for another reason as well: War was viewed by Bernhardi and other influential hardcore Social Darwinists as an indispensable regulator" of populations.

"If it were not for war," Bernhardi writes, "we should probably find that inferior and degenerate races would overcome healthy and youthful ones by their wealth and their numbers. The generative importance of war lies in this, that it causes selection and thus war becomes a biological necessity."...

By the middle of our Malthusian (the 20.) century, the great "Superpowers"--the winners of the struggle for dominance--were threatening the annihilation of the entire planet... in the name of survival.

"The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution," writes Michael Denton. "The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would not have been possible without its intellectual sanction..."

Among the currents which have swept the world, " we may list... Imperialism, the mad rush for empire in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth; the rise in the twentieth century of various forms of socialism premised on the idea that the first responsibility of the state is population control, a responsibility inevitably involving emphasis on the elimination of supposedly defective peoples; the First and Second World Wars; the Cold War; and the numerous late twentieth (and twenty first) century "hot "wars...

"War", writes Jacques Barzun, " became the symbol, the image, the inducement, the reason and the language of all human doings on the planet. No one who has not waded through some sizable part of the literature of the period 1870-1914 has any conception of the extent to which it is one long call for blood,..."

The call for blood began with the French Revolution. The blood of the nobility ran in the gutters, and that was something that steeled the hearts of those in the ruling classes. The masses had dared war on their masters. They would pay the price. And pay they did, by willingly engaging in war after war...marching off to the sound of the death drums of Hobbes and Malthus and "our gentle" Charles Darwin.
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