Ethnic Darwinism: Toward a New Ethic of Scientific Nationalism
 
 by Joe McCarthy
 
Traditionalists have long bemoaned the inroads of what is called 'scientism' into the body of Western thought. The Savoyan aristocrat and counter-enlightenment theorist Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) in his explication of the causes of seventeen eighty-nine, traced its intellectual origins to the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, whose naturalistic inclinations resulting in his reliance on more temporal explanations for worldly processes caused Maistre to see in him the germ of the degenerative forces that befell France, and indeed continues to rock the world, particularly the Western world, in our time. [1] The former Chinese Premier Chou Enlai, in an especially expansive mood, was asked to weigh the effects of the revolution in France. His reputed answer was as witty as it was accurate: "It's too early to tell."
 
In more recent times the nationalist political theorist M. Rafael Johnson has lent his own angst to the fray in sort of updating the derision cast upon the scientism scourge. In this case the target is Darwinism, which he sees as part of a continuum of ideologies representative of an erosion of the Western mind, contrasting with a more spiritually centered outlook which he calls the 'ethnos', or ethnically based community. [2]
 
There is no doubt that Darwinism, at least in its modern interpretation, has tended to lend credence to more leftish socio-political movements and cultural currents. This fact of course accounts at least partially for the ingrained hostility toward Darwinian ideas found among conservatives, particularly evangelical Christian conservatives, and 'right-wingers' generally. [3] But this adoption of Darwin as a sort of secular saint by the forces of irreligion and egalitarianism is as much an appropriative act as it is substantive. While a genuine argument can be made that Darwin's main theorem, evolution through natural election, provides intellectual sustenance to atheism, the commonalities stop there. This is where authentic continuity ends and ideological appropriation begins. Darwin's views on a whole host of issues, ranging from the role of women to race were definitively to starboard in orientation. His racial views, notably those found in his The Descent of Man, are enough to horrify today's liberals, and if expressed by any lesser luminary would certainly result in a thorough repudiation, irregardless of any reputable contributions otherwise offered. Quoting from The Descent of Man:
 
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savages races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla. [4]
 
Adding to the fire, Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, was the father of eugenics and is condemned in some quarters as the originator of what these critics term 'scientific racism'. It is with Galton that modern intelligence testing began [5] and he can be credited for laying the groundwork for the study of heredity's role in the ethnological component of human accomplishment. Darwin had no objection to Galton's work in principle, especially as he based much of his thinking on Darwinism.
 
It is certainly reasonable to surmise that if Darwin lived today he would be subjected to the kind of scorn and derision which would make the furor directed at modern subjects like Shockley and Jensen look like a warm-up. He'd be condemned as an intellectual crank, at best. Ironically, he'd certainly be demonized by his most prominent recent disciples. Many of them, such as Stephen Jay Gould, have virtually made careers out of 'debunking' similar 'racist hucksters'. There is little reason to suspect that Darwin would be accorded treatment much different. The often observed admonition that if Jesus were to return, he would be crucified by the modern world seems to apply. Darwin, as the temporal messiah, could scarcely expect better than the Prince of Peace.
 
It also should not be overlooked that Darwin was himself very much a theist and even a Christian at the time he enunciated his 'dangerous idea' in his magnum opus. Rebuking those who saw in his theory an attack on religion, Darwin noted that similar protests were lodged against Newton's discovery of gravity, by personages no less weighty than Leibniz incidentally. [6] While humanistic atheists have found a handy hammer in Darwin with which to assail the citadels of theism in general and Christian theism in particular, the irony is that this was far from Darwin's intention.
 
Interestingly enough, the very same secular egalitarians most eager to misappropriate Darwin in matters religious are equally apt to decry the so-called 'Social Darwinism' of Spencer, Smiles, etc., as a 'misuse' of Darwin's theory. By now most of us are familiar with the spiel. It is said that 'Social Darwinism' lifted the theory of Natural Selection and misapplied it to human society, thus providing an ideological enabling act to all things which the champions of 'equality' view with alarm: imperialism, racism, dog-eat-dog capitalism, colonialism, et al. But like so much else emanating from this quarter, this charge lacks substance. This is a 'just so' story [7] that just isn't so.
 
Firstly, the very term 'Social Darwinism' was popularized by the leftist historian Richard Hofstadter decades after Spencer's death. It was not in common usage in the time Spencer is alleged to have hatched it, nor did Spencer himself use it. Moreover, 'Social Darwinism' is typically seen to have embodied ideas that pre-dated the publication of Darwin's theory.
 
Secondly, there is no evidence that Darwin objected to the application of evolution through natural selection to human affairs, or, as is inferred, distanced himself from Spencer. In fact, competent scholarship points in the opposite direction. Darwin hailed Spencer, and in describing his own theory, went so far as to exclaim: "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient." [8] Of course, 'survival of the fittest' was the watchword for the Spencerian system that is now dubiously misnamed 'Social Darwinism'.
 
Thirdly, the method of intellectual borrowing, or building theorems upon previous theorems developed hitherto, is as old as science itself. Surely Spencer should not be faulted for simply continuing this process. Strangely, while Spencer is derided and defamed for applying Darwin's wildlife-based theory of natural selection to human events, no one deigns to cast similar aspersions upon Darwin for applying the human-based theory of the 'struggle for existence', brought into being by the English economist Thomas Malthus, to wildlife.
 
At this point it can be observed that Spencer's critics are less concerned with the disinterested approach that characterizes science than they are with the promotion of a narrow social agenda. Furthermore, it is clear that 'Social Darwinism' has considerably more call for the employment of Darwin than does atheism. While Darwin dismissed the use of his theory for the furtherance of God-denying, he praised Spencer, and at the very least didn't attack his elaboration of the Darwinian schema. Additionally, Darwin's close affinity to other 'Social Darwinists', such as Malthus and Galton, is well known. If egalitarian atheism can lay claim to Darwin, certainly 'Social Darwinism' can.
 
In common with Hegel before him, except on a more expanded level, Darwin has influenced a wide range of disciplinary endeavors spanning the field of human thought. One area where Darwin's influence has been minimal however is in the realm of Ethnic Nationalism. For reasons partially explained herein, the political 'right' has been largely leery of accepting Darwin. As an Ethnic Nationalist in the Herderian mold, I see this as a serious error. It is the purpose of this discourse to provide much needed Darwinian underpinnings to the nationalist ethos, thus establishing a scientific rationale which has heretofore been sadly lacking for the politics of Blood and Soil.
 
Among Darwin's many storied achievements, one that is given too little mention is his elaborative thesis dealing with Malthus' aforementioned theory of the 'struggle for existence'. Writing with the clarity that Malthus lacked, Darwin articulated powerfully the brutal cleaving process inherent in Natural Selection. Put simply, the strong survive, the weak perish. This is nature's law, and an incontrovertible reality that has withstood attempts by the likes of Kropotkin to gainsay it. [9]
 
The struggle to survive is a biological imperative imposed upon every living organism. It has both interspecific and intraspecific ramifications, and is naturally most intense where different varieties are in competition. Darwin provides us with examples:
 
As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between the species of distinct genera ... How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates! ... In Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. [10]
 
Darwin exemplifies the natural fealty for kith, kin, tribe and its consequent, which is to say opposite - that is the natural inclination to view differential groupings as competitors and even enemies. Such an idea is no doubt condemned as 'xenophobia' in establishment circles, but that doesn't make it any less of a scientific fact.
 
The economic principle of scarcity plays its part, as the struggle for existence displays all of its savage yet natural splendor. As this dynamic unfolds - and it includes everything from feral beasts on safari competing for food to rival peoples such as the Iranians and the Iraqis warring over a waterway - it becomes a cold, cruel struggle as each species, and more important for our purposes, variant within species, seeks to expand its territory and propagate its kind; in a word: survive. Darwin said it best:
 
In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing in mind - never to forget that every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase its numbers.... [11]
 
And again:
 
All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. [12]
 
As should be clear by now, the fact that Darwinism is germane to Ethnic Nationalism is obvious. Ethnic Nationalism, being a body of doctrine that recognizes the varied cultural patrimonies of the globe's peoples, maintains that it is a summum bonum to conserve a people's distinct linguistic, racial, and cultural integrity. In a sense, the Ethnic Nationalist is the genuine multiculturalist (loathsome as that word may be to many as it is currently accepted and understood), for those who adhere to the concept of the 'ethnos' respect and attempt to sustain the unique cultural makeup of a people, whereas garden variety multiculturalism demands a standardization of the world's peoples through the imposition of a 'McCulture' of mass immigration, consumerism, and ever sleazier popular culture. Look around as one might, it is progressively difficult to see much variety these days. Whether one travels to Milan or Sydney, it is the same thing time and again: the same stores, usually American; the same popular culture, again usually American; and a seemingly endless deluge of immigrants from the undeveloped world which can only culminate in a general browning uniformity - a seemingly very un-multicultural result.
 
This at bottom cuts to the core of the lie that is multiculturalism, as it reflects the bitter reality that exists wherever multiculturalism is triumphant. Far from delivering on the promise of a smorgasbord of mini-cultures, we have been sold a bill of goods from Wal-Mart and McDonalds, irrespective of which city or country we happen to reside in. To this the Ethnic Nationalist-cum-Ethnic Darwinist offers deadly opposition, realizing that his worldview is scientifically pre-ordained, and only ideological as an afterthought.
 
Recognizing the biologically determined fact that the species variant with which the person belongs must try to propagate and preserve itself, the Ethnic Darwinist goes into battle knowing his struggle transcends politics or ideology. He is also spared the pitfalls surrounding prevailing nationalist meta-ideologies: whether it be the esotericism of Evola, the mysticism of Spengler, or even more fringe lines of thinking whose un-scientific basis is only matched by its ineffectiveness.
 
Ethnic Darwinism then is not a systematic outlook or worldview in the traditional sense, but something more as a recognition of nature's law and the conscious application of the law to human action. In looking to the pristine reality of nature, it sees in the struggle to survive a mandate to look beyond the decadent and rotting corpse of civil society, and seeks to check and even reverse this decay by reinstituting nature's balance. [13]
 
The Ethnic Darwinist, relying on an unshakeable scientific basis, thus provides overwhelming ammunition to the guns of Nationalism. Indeed, the era of Scientific Nationalism has arrived.
 
Notes
 
1. Joseph de Maistre, Examen de la philosophie de Bacon,: Ou, L'on traite diffeIrentes questions de philosophie rationnelle (Palagaud, Lesne et Crozet, 1836)
2. M. Rafael Johnson, "Mass Man, Mass Politics, and the Capitalist Order," The Barnes Review, November/December 2003, vol. 9, no. 6.
3. Cf. Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, (New York: Crown Forum, 2006) This work, by the neo-conservative dilettante, seems to be the most recent denunciation found in this great body of literature.
4. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 162,163.
5. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 1, 2.
6. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Signet Classics edition, 2003), p. 452.
7. With apologies to Rudyard Kipling.
8. The Origin of Species, p. 75.
9. Peter Kropotkin, (1842-1921) Russian anarchist and zoologist who attempted to show in his book, Mutual Aid, that life in the wild is essentially cooperative rather than competitive. His book is all but ignored today.
10. The Origin of Species, pp. 85, 86.
11. Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
12. Ibid., p. 87.
13. It has been pointed out by some authors that civilization, despite its many blessings, has the consequence of weakening the breed, as it sustains those less likely to survive in a state of nature. Without rehashing the various takes on this view let us say that it is right and that Ethnic Darwinism, as it relies so heavily on the laws of nature, will offer a healthy counterbalance in propping up the decrepit civilization of the West.