Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters
3. Nazis and 'Evolutionary Humanism'
Were Hitler and the Nazis 'evolutionary humanists', as Harari contends? To answer this question, we must interrogate what Harari means by the label, 'evolutionary humanism'. For him, this worldview has two defining features. Firstly, it is atheistic, having 'broken loose from traditional monotheism' [Harari 2015: 258]. Secondly, it is Darwinian, 'rooting itself in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory' [Harari 2017: 295]. If the Nazis are to be 'evolutionary humanists' on Harari's own account, they must be both atheists and Darwinians. In fact, they were neither.
In his Mein Kampf and public speeches, Hitler appealed again and again to the 'Almighty Creator', to 'Providence' and to the 'divine'. There are many passages in Mein Kampf that express his belief that he is being guided by divine providence. One representative passage follows:
And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.
[Hitler 1925: 61]
Publicly, the regime cast itself as Christian and anti-atheist. In an August 1934 address, Hitler declared that National Socialism 'stands on the ground of a real Christianity' and sets itself 'in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement' [Baynes 1942: 386f]. This was not mere political opportunism. The Nazis established a state church of their own, 'Positive Christianity'. They banned books that would 'ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion . . . faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk' [Fighting League for German Culture: Guidelines, as cited in Arizona Board of Regents 2002]. The Nazi's 1933 Enabling Act was used to outlaw atheist and freethinker organizations.
The Catholic Church aided both Hitler's and Mussolini's fascist governments. On 20 July 1933, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) signed the Concordat with Nazi Germany in order to secure the Church's religious freedom. This institutional accommodation was far from anomalous. Indeed, some years before in 1929, the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Accords with Mussolini's government, establishing Catholicism as the official religion of Italy. During the Second World War, hundreds of Catholic priests accompanied the Wehrmacht on the front lines to offer spiritual guidance. German soldiers went into both world wars with Gott mit uns (God is with us) stamped on their belt buckles. At the end of the Second World War, many priests and other Catholic clergy used clandestine efforts to help Nazi war criminals escape along 'ratlines' to South America. Whatever else the Third Reich was, it was not an atheist project.
Nor were Hitler and the Nazis Darwinians. Nazi racial theory drew not on common descent of species but on the older, essentially creationist idea that God had created each race separately, an idea traceable to Christian writers such as Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927). Hitler [1925: 222] himself appealed to 'an iron law of Nature – which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms', a fixity of kinds that is the negation of Darwinian evolution. Consistent with this, in 1935 the regime banned 'writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism' [Die Bücherei 1935: 2:6/279, cited in Arizona Board of Regents 2002]. A movement that bans Darwin is a poor candidate for a Darwinian sect.
The deepest irony is that the term 'evolutionary humanism' has a perfectly well-documented origin, and it is the opposite of what Harari supposes. It was coined by Julian Huxley in 1946 in his seminal essay, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy. Huxley was the first Director-General of UNESCO and the founding president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Far from underwriting Nazism, Huxley presented evolutionary humanism as its refutation. For Huxley [1946: 14], evolutionary humanism 'constitutes a complete disproof of all theses, like those of Hegelian philosophy, of Fascism, or of Nazism'.
This new approach to living together, Huxley [1946: 21] enjoined, aims for
international peace and security, collaboration among the nations, and human welfare . . . democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, as well as respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights
Harari has taken a label devised in 1946 as an explicit rejection of Nazism and pinned it on the Nazis, apparently unaware of its etymology and history. Their ideology was in fact antithetical to 'evolutionary humanism' as its author, Huxley, defined it. But even on Harari's own understanding of 'evolutionary humanism', Hitler and the Nazis failed the grade. They were neither atheistic nor Darwinian, but were rooted in a form of Christian theism espousing the separate creation of the species and races. Next, I will examine whether Harari's treatment of socialist humanism fares any better in aligning with history.
