I've been thinking about this for awhile and am trying to get together some texts to consult.
The topic is the misuse of scientific ideas:
In the first half of the 20th century, I maintain, there was significant and multifold misuse of scientific ideas in politics and morals. The scientific concept was lifted out of its scientific context and applied non-scientifically to other areas. I think one can see why this time period would be prone to such practice: (1) it was a time of profound scientific discoveries and (2)it was a time of precarious world politics. Put those 2 situations together and the misuse of science is likely.
The philosophical question is, does such use of scientific ideas always lead to vicious systems? Is there such misuse today?
The historical question is, is my above contention accurate?
(this is similar to my "dangers of secularism" thread, but that topic suffered from vagueness. I am trying to be more precise).
Let's take, for example, Hitler and Nazism:--was he mainly Christian, as some might maintain by quoting what appear to be Christian passages from his speeches, or mainly pseudo-Darwinian, as I maintain? And how much did his purported Christian belief or purported pseudo-Darwinian belief influence Nazism?
Evidence: I maintain that Nazism had within it the idea of natural selection, lifted from Darwinism.
from Mein Kampf:
"Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless. She diminishes, not the power of procreation as such, but the conservation of the procreated, by exposing them to hard trials and deprivations with the result that all those who are less strong and less healthy are forced back into the womb of the eternal unknown. Those whom she permits to survive the inclemency of existence are a thousandfold tested, hardened, and well adapted to procreate in turn, in order that the process of thoroughgoing selection may begin again from the beginning. By thus brutally proceeding against the individual and immediately calling him back to herself as soon as he shows himself unequal to the storm of life, she keeps the race and species strong, in fact, raises them to the highest accomplishments." (131)
Here, I suggest, is the idea of natural selection. What's different is that Hitler is thinking in terms of races rather than species. In fact, Hitler uses the idea of "race" as though it meant "species."
In his chapter on "Nation and Race," he tries to show that "racial purity" is natural, and therefore good:
"The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc . . ." (285)
He seems to think the different "races" are like different species, with their own separate gene pool.
This idea, I claim, is central, not peripheral, to Nazi dogma, and is a perversion of Darwinism.
Work Cited: Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin, 1971
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