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Marx and Darwin: Two misinterpreted pioneers of the modern scientific view
The following essay explores a scientific historical parallelism, which looks completely different than you would normally say, and that goes much deeper. Both Darwin and Marx were methodological rebels, whose novelty was greeted with incomprehension and deep disgust even by those who believed themselves to accept their message.
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"As enthusiastic supporters of Darwin's evolutionary theory Kautsky, Bernstein, Plekhanov and others developed a conception of history and society which described the development of humanity in analogy with the natural laws of science. The "provisional value" of scientific theories was replaced with absolute truths. (...)" Werner Schmidt
Comparisons between Marx and Darwin were not uncommon during the 1800s. They got an almost canonical character of the March day in 1883 when Friedrich Engels was at Highgate Cemetery in north London, and held his burial speach at the grave of his friend, a speech in which he re-drew this parallel. It does exist. But how has it been interpreted by posterity? I would argue that it has been interpreted in the light of two, largely parallel distortions and misinterpretations of Marx's historical materialism, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Distortions that is not only is of interest to those involved in marxism and evolutionary biology but the history of science in general. They also have practical significance, because these misinterpretations still haunt us and makes people get both theories completely wrong.
A mechanical view of science
The view of the nature of science, it's means and goals that were predominant even in the first half of the 1800s, was mechanical, static, linear, inductive and deterministic. It was mechanical in the sense that the paradigm was Newtonian mechanics. This was about the movement of bodies. Bodies influenced each other by bumping against each other, or by the (essentially mysterious) peer effects resulting from their mutual gravitation. The world consisted of two components, "force" - that is the kinetic energy of moving bodies' - and "matter" in the physical sense, stuff, concrete tangible bodies and particles. Exactly how bodies interacted they considered themselves able to figure out. They had solved the two body-problem, the question of how two point masses moves around a common center of mass. Thus they had been able to calculate the moon's orbit months and years in advance and create good tide tables for the benefit of shipping. The three body-problem resisted, but this, they explained, was due to the mathematical methods have not yet developed sufficiently. In this light the world appeared as a huge clockwork. Those who could determine the number of cogs on the wheels and clock speed, had in principle the answers to both past and future in their hands.
This clockwork ticked steadily. It looked like it always did, it was broadly unchanged since it was created (by the Christian biblical God, of course). It was all inclusive. The planetary system was a sort of gigantic horarium, like the clockwork models that contented school boys and adorned curio cabinets, but also the earth's living creatures were mechanisms, Cartesian machines built by other material than clockwork and locks. L'homme machine, la Mettrie wrote, "man a machine". And a top the saloon tables trudged Vaucanson's mechanical duck that quacks, ate grains and shits just like a real duck, though it has never been in an egg. - The black coats and the pious of cource had their concerns. la Mettrie was them to daring. But successfully physical theology summed it all under the title "God's goodness and omnipotence." Just as Our Lord had placed the planets in their stable orbits around the sun as he sat in his benevolence to brighten and warm them, He had created the living creatures, each one perfectly designed for her by Him contrived place in life. The creature adaptations - elephant's trunk, the whale's bards, the mosquito's sting - was vivid illustrations of this all-encompassing, all-knowing and all sighted providence. The Pangloss theory of physical theology died away on the continent during the early decades of the 1800s, but in the UK it survived even in the middle of the century, and even after 1859, when Darwin published Origin of Species origin. And as it was in the natural world, it was also in human society, where God put the king in his castle and the beggar at his door - to the best of both.
"Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"
God had thus created laws of nature and society, laws which regulated the stars and the lives of all the created creatures. It was these laws that the American Declaration of Independence referred, entitled formulation, when the rebellious colonists demanded political independence and equal rights for all people (i.e. white men). Science's job, they believed, was to discover these laws.
This they believed was done when you through logical induction discovered some simple quantitative correlation between the phenomenon of a and b. Such was the "laws" - Ohm's law, Ampère law and what all their names - that we learned in school. Most had the approximate form a = b operation c where c often was a constant. Such laws, they believed, expressed universal and eternal relationships. Once you learn them, you just had to put them in to their technical problems, and then you had the solution.
These laws were linear in the purely mathematical sense. Double b, and also a was doubled. All connections were simple, quantitative, and unambiguous. Accordingly, laws were also predictive. You could use them to make predictions, for example, about what would happen if you doubled b. If you knew all laws and all quantities, you also knew the future. You certainly did not, outside the laboratory, and even the engineers' bridges crashed occasionally together. But this was a practical shortcoming: in the future one would know better. The clockwork determinism that was already in the metaphor, was aslo embodied in the form of the "natural laws" themselves. A good natural law had no exceptions. Ohm's law does not say that the voltage is equal to the potential difference through the resistance except on Mondays and when the researcher has a cold. And this determinism was for the living as well as the non-living, biology and society as well as physics and chemistry. The future was totally locked by the current, which in turn is completely determined by the past. As the events in the world was determined, that is "lawful" as opposed to arbitrary, they were also deterministic, ie. predetermined. No distinction between these two concepts was known. The same applied to people whose fates inexorably were laid down by a heritage and environment over both of which they had as little influence. It was a backward reductionism that in people's lives became fatalism. This was a paralyzing experience. It wasn't fully apparent while the predetermined end was identified with God's benevolent providence, but when it had ceased to be, it struck through with full force in 1880 - and 1890-century literature and cultural ambiance. God was dead and the world a man's prison.
By that time, the natural sciences, even the "physical", was already moving into a different metaphor and a different mental environment, and in front of themselves some already sensed the "fundamental crisis" of physics that after the turn of the century led to the abdictation of classical physics and birth of quantum mechanics and relativity. But the literateurs, editors, critics - in short, ideologues, stubbornly held to this outdated scientific view well into the 1900s. And some still do. Even the physicists were fully capable of judging others' scientific expressions by other and older criteria, than they used to guide and justify their own research. And it was on this stage that Karl & Charles, Marx and Darwin, entered, were applauded and booed out.
About scientific method
The contemporary scientific theory generally regards "the scientific method" as synonymous with the hypothetical-deductive method. The name of this seems to have been coined by Karl Popper, but it was described for the first time explicitly by William Whewell as early as 1840, and it has subsequently been shown that all successful scientists in the modern sense from Galileo applied it, either they have been clearly aware of it or not. And it has also been demonstrated - in Darwin's case, with the help of his surviving and now published work notes - that both Marx and Darwin gave good examples of this method. It starts with the hypothesis: the researcher sets up various demonstrable theories about how this (the phenomena she wants to "explain", that is, insert into an overarching theoretical context) associates with that (the overall theory in question). Then the most likely hypothesis is tested against empirical data. The researcher searches for critical inferences that can be derived, deduced, from the hypothesis and that are different from those that are drawn from competing hypotheses - including the null hypothesis that is that no connection exists. If it is evident that the conditions that should exist according to the hypothesis also exists in reality, the hypothesis is promoted to the rank and dignity of theory, a useful scientific model of reality. Until further notice.
It perhaps follows at once that this method is in stark contrast to those who were considered to be the alone valid in Marx's and Darwin's time. It is, foremost, not inductive. You can not just collect irrefutable theory-free facts (whatever that is), shake them and see them spontaneously organize themselves into columns, statutes and treatises. It is not tied to specific technical or practical approaches - it may but need not be "experimental", it may but need not be quantitative or "exact". And above all it is not absolute and need not be deterministic and predictive, modern scientific theories seldom are. It is not absolute because it - partly because it serves as a model for far larger and more complex contexts than the simplistic "laws" of earlier times - is originally recognized as imperfect and provisional. As long as it works, that is, as long as it helps us to new knowledge (heuristic value) and a better understanding (hermeneutic value), it is a good theory. It is however neither "true" in any metaphysical or "proven" in any logical sense. It only shows its value in our scientific practice, as Marx put it. Conversely, one can not "disprove" it by questioning its metaphysical, absolute and eternal truth (which it never claimed) or by noticing any formal logical contradiction. Scientific theories are abandoned when their usefulness in practice is exhausted, then but not before. Usually when we formulate a better theory. And science is not divination either. The "predictions" that one sometimes finds mentioned, has been coined by philosophically naive scientist. They are not predictions about the future, but the critical inferences which are used to test a hypothesis. They may relate to the present and the past as well as the future. If we find on the other hand, professors and assimilated who possesses eternal truths and can make full binding predictions about the future, we are with almost certainly dealing with pseudoscience - a kind of "science" that with special enthusiasm been grown and cultivated in the academic social sciences.
Two unfashionable theories
Marx's historical materialism and Darwin's theory of natural selection has some features in common, which explains the similarities of their reception and their parallel fate. Darwin managed with some success to conceal his theory's non-inductive origin, while Marx was working with a Hegelian terminology that at least made his German readers feel vaguely (though unfoundedly) at home. However most of their methodological critics took note of the clearly non-deterministic nature of their theories.
Where were here the absolute and eternal "laws" that physicists so proudly held up to display? Where were the cocksure and with date provided predictions about the future, as they felt able to expect from a social theory that emerged with claims of being scientific? To this day, since theoretical physicists in almost a century operated with indeterministic, statistical quantum mechanics, and when even the astronomers had to swallow the message that the three body-problem is fundamentally unsolvable, you can still hear half educated professors, fourth educated senior lecturers in the political career and uneducated editorial writers explaining to the public that Marx's theories are unscientific, because "its predictions did not come true." That there are no predictions of the type they expect, let alone the predictions that they in their innocence believe are there, they are probably totally unaware of, the idea that they might need to read and even understand the texts they criticize is deeply alien to these scientists. Marx and Darwin's theories are heuristic and abductive, but predictive in the normal sense, they are not. The only "prediction" in them is much more profound: All that is solid melts into air.
Since the two theories are not generally predictive, they are even less so in the individual case. Quantum mechanics can't predict exactly when a particular atom of uranium 238 will decay into an alpha particle and an atom thorium 234, nor can historical materialism predict which party will win the next election, or the theory of evolution predict what new species a given species will give rise to, when and where. In Darwin's case, added the aggravating circumstance that the evolutionary mechanism has a stochastic component. The changes in the genome (which we would now say), caused by recombination and mutation, which is the raw material of evolution, occur at random. There is no direction, no inherent "drive to perfection." Even today there are one-way critics, mostly physicists with philosophical itching, which appear completely unable to grip the two-stage nature of the evolutionary process: first a random variation, then a directional sifting through the natural selection that rewards those organisms that have the best ability in the given environment to keep their genes to the next generation. Random? they say. Aha, a random process! Then they sit down and calculate the probability that an arbitrary collection of atoms of carbon, nitrogen, etc., or at least one chimpanzee, by pure chance should give rise to Albert Einstein, usually in a single step. You see, they say, the probability is negligible and therefore the theory is incorrect. Pointing to the other side of the selection will on the other hand make them do a somersault into pure teleology and starts raving about innate drives and so on.
Both have also been considered fair game by people who wanted to exercise their pre-conceived logicistic ideas. Some people claim that the surplus value theory does not add up mathematically. Similarly, some argued that the idea that the environmentally adapted have better chances to propagate their genes is illogical. Hey, they say, a circular argument! That they are better adapted, one can only see in that they reproduce more! Both miss completely the fact that there are not two neo-scholastic or mathematical theories they are dealing with, and that theories therefor can not be "refuted" by such methods.
Karl Popper even claimed that the theories that could not be refuted in this way was unlawful. I need at the moment not waste many words on this claim. Many science theorists who, unlike Popper actually studied how successful scientific theories are constituted, mainly perhaps Imre Lakatos, has pointed out that in this case, we must scrap all disciplines except the purely formal, logic and mathematics. In addition, there are in mathematics a lot of rates that can not be formally refuted, because they are too complicated for a formal analysis. The only thing you can say is that they seem consistent with experience. Just as in science! Yikes!
In the case of Darwin one have often been preoccupied with the moral indignation that his doctrine of species unscriptural not to say wicked inconsistancy roused. Known is Huxley's, according to him self true story about two women's conversation over a cup of tea (read with Oxbridge-accent and sprawling little finger): Descended from the apes? My dear, let us hope that it is not true. But if it should be true, let us hope that it will not become generally known! But evolution was soon to become fully accepted, except among some fools in the lunatic fringe. This is different from the purely methodologically wicked theory of evolutionary mechanisms, which as I said is still difficult to understand for many non-biologists. Marx's theory, however, almost entirely remained unacceptable because professors and editorial writers, probably correctly, guessed that it would have a damaging arousing effect of the lower classes if it became widespread and understood.
Both Marx and Darwin's theories were thus formally indigestible for their contemporaries, with the scientific or pseudo-scientific pre-understanding they had. Thus became also essential elements of the real content unintelligible. In Darwin this was, as we have seen, mainly what he called the theory of descent with modification. Equally important - and in Marx's case, crucial - was that both theories were transformed into ideologies with in some regards parallel content. We understand by now what these ideologies had to be like. Here are some of the main features of them:
Absolute claims
Both theories, which were open, provisional and developable, were declared to be a set of eternal truths, which by their ingenious authors was revealed to humanity and that by (mostly self-certified) interpreters was forwarded to the public. In Darwin's case the purely scientific implications were not as devastating as the scientific community had some immunity against such claims. The reading audience swallowed them, however, line and sinker, and since Marx' interpreters did not have much academic training but was more urgent to find a weapon to beat their political opponents' heads with, the implications for the development of marxism was dubious. Marxism was dogmatized. It became ideology.
This trend was led by Karl Kautsky, who from 1883 was editor of the SPD's Journal Die Neue Zeit. He used this strategic position to create the "orthodox Marxism" which he claimed to defend, but which had very little to do with Marx's actual way of thinking. Werner Schmidt, who in a very instructive way illuminated these processes (in ... then I am not a Marxist) sometimes use the term "Kautskyism" to describe this catechistic product. However, he staggers, and call it as a rule, "Marxism" as this was the actual term of the past. I prefer to describe an approach that takes Marx seriously as marxism, and call it's deformed version Kautskyism. This Kautskyism became Second International Marxism and formed the basis for Plekhanov, the Bolsheviks and the Comintern ideology. Lenin's furious attack on the "renegade Kautsky" has partly obscured the fact that the real difference between them was that Lenin refused to accept Kautskyisms practical consequences. There are in Lenin a fairly violent gap from the (in itself difficultly dogmatized and schematic) philosophical foundation and the political practice, a gap that after 1917 was veiled by the temporary success.
Schematism
Both theories were reduced to simple schemes which were applied all across the board, though - one is tempted to say, with a special enthusiasm - in areas that the founders had not addressed or where they even said they were not applicable. Here were the immediate consequences were worse for "darwinism" than to marxism. Marx's theory was, after all about society. Darwinism was not, but the social darwinists, with Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel in the lead, applied without much ado the theory of the beasts "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" directly on the contemporary social conditions. So came "vulgar darwinism." Les Misérables at the bottom of society were obviously there because of their overall ineptitude, and that they should settle for. The upper class, however, were the upper class because of their excellence, and the social ideal was what Svante Folin sarcastically called "the saber-toothed merchant." During this operation one skipped several intermediate analytical levels without even pretending that they existed. Anyone who is reasonably oriented in the final 1800 century literature know what impact these ideas had.
One might think that such a theory should have encouraged class circulation. Would not it be in the spirit of natural selection, that the useless upper-class juveniles were ordered down into the proletariat, while promising proles got a chance to advance socially? That consequence was, however, rarely drawn. The genetic determinism of the time and its obsession with the idea of "degeneration" - a theme which in itself would be worth a whole book - meant that the social condemnation was apparently also valid for all the following generations. In addition, the late 1800s evolutionists actually tended to treat selection with embarrassed silence. Future thinking was rather going in an ortogenic direction, ie. assuming an intrinsic drive of to perfection. Darwin was on depreciation.
Social darwinist ideas begun as well known to re-circulate in the 1980s. Haeckel himself was a friend, that Darwin would have asked God to protect himself from had he not been an atheist. Haeckel was in many respects, Darwin's Kautsky, a terrible simplificateur if any. He was also a great German chauvinist, Bismarck-admirerer and anti-Semite. He deserves to be singled out as the creator of social- and political darwinisms, more than the gentle and far less simplistic Spencer (who, I observed with a certain amusement at my own visit to the old man Marx, is buried virtually by his feet).
In the case of marxism schematicism had slightly different consequences. It led to political schematism. Like you in a classic american B-Western immediately can distinguish the bad guys in black hats, from the good guys in white, the kautskyite could immediately point out society's black hats. For social class division, itself highly schematicly and staticly percieved, were concidered to judge both differenting class factions and individuals within both the bourgeoisie, the middle layers and the petit bourgeoisie to condemnation. Bind them together! (Supplemented by Stalin to bind them together and shoot!) White hats was worn only by the Genossen who stood at the factory floor or drove trains, and of cource by their associate editors, party bosses and other senior colleagues, who were proletarian honoris causa. This attitude also led to the ouvrierisme or worker worship, which desribed the existing industrial proletariat as "a sacred creature," and to virtues they lifted all the restrictions, faults and loads that came out of its misery.
Automatism and mechanicism
Determinism led naturally to a belief in historical, economic and social automatisms. Humanity traveled nolens volens along a railroad track, past the stations with signs Primitive communism, The patriarchal society, Slave society, Feudalism and Capitalism, in the direction of the Communist terminus. What the passengers were doing had little or no importance. So there were of course some side track where some first-class carriages ware disconnected, but they all had the same destination, history's rubbish heap.
At essentially the same way evolution was unidirectional and single-track. "Development" led inexorably onwards and upwards (and degeneration down and even reverse). A comical illustration of this approach is that in many editions printed image of "March of Humanity." To the far left shuffles a shaggy, short-legged, low browed and thoroughly bestial creature out on his knuckles. Later in the ranks, we see how he gets up on his legs (he is almost always a he) and how he, through various kneeling and bent apparitions, eventually turned into a straight, high browed Mr. America, although it generally refrains from the bank pyjamas and mobile phone in fear of making a parodic impression. This does not help in the eyes of evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists. They view the whole picture as silly, a simplistic legacy of Spencer and Haeckel. Humanity's creation was an extremely complicated and contradictory history. Likewise, the belief in the law-bound succession of modes of production - like it that they could exist in purely schematic form - in Kautskyism has come to replace the concrete analysis of the existing reality, which characterized both Marx and Darwin's scientific work.
Of cource the kautskyites were also facing the problem how to motivate their party members to work and sacrifice for future bliss, that would appear anyway no matter how you behaved. The only thing they could produce was a vague murmur that one might get the train to go a little faster. Possibly one could argue that it was nice to know that you acted, or at least were treated according to History (which at the same time, and strangely enough hypostatized as an independent real person). Nikolai Bukharin, who second to Stalin himself drove the mechanization of "diamat", dialectical materialism, to its most absurd heights or depths, illustrates this. In his book Historical Materialism (1921) there is a chapter about "determinism and indeterminism" where he naturally occupies the most rigid deterministic position. There he quotes with approval a poem by Meresjkovskij, where he lets the falling raindrops rejoice that they fall of their own free will. Behold man!
Where is here Marx's proletariat, the autonomous actor of history? Autonomy has disappeared and with it, strictly speaking, also the proletariat. It has turned into one of history's (no, History's) raw materials which can be treated and sacrificed more or less in any way, any own contributions it can hardly have to give. Here we meet Stalinism, from its humble debut in the German - and later the Nordic - Social Democracy and to its full flowering during Joseph Stalin himself. Anyway this negligible cannon fodder would eventually be replaced by the new socialist man that Stalin and his ideological lackeys fantasized about. This was true even more for the individual. Marx's dream, that of a society of free association's where each individual person's free development was the condition for the free development of all, had been written off. It had been replaced by an almost fascist vision of the individual's beatification though his total rise in to the collective, directed by enlightened prominent comrades.
Equally dramatic were of course not the consequences of "haeckelism". But even there the stifness dominated. The richness of life that put the young entomologist and world traveler Charles Darwin in ecstasy - an enthusiasm that constantly shines through in The Voyage of the Beagle, one of the century's great travel books - and that was the aging cripples comfort and joy, greenery and blood, birdsong and death scream, ther butterflys escape and the leopard's leap, all this was turned into dust and ashes.
Progress Ideology
In one of his notebooks Darwin tells himself: "Never say 'higher' or 'lower'!" No species is "more primitive" than others. Everyone has a pedigree that stretches as far back to when life first arose. All prove, just by existing, that they are fairly adapted to their environment, but more it is not: perfection does not exist in the living world. Who can say that the ring worm is a higher life form than a flat worm, the mammal higher than the reptile? The finalist belief that man would be the evolutionary purpose and meaning was for Darwin an absurdity. Finalism, scala naturae and other physical theology he had done away with. Development, evolution, was for him not at all synonymous with progress.
Thus, Darwin was also largely immune to the endemic racism of his time. His family and those closely associated with the Wedgwoods had both campaigned actively against slave trade and slavery. His sympathy for Brazil's blacks was as strong as his aversion to the country's lost, uncultured slave owners, and at old age he explains how the screams of a tortured slave still tormented him in his nightmares. He hated oppression with a spontaneous hatred that never failed him, but he never hated oppressors. He just despised them. The fire landers appeared to him as the most miserable of men, on a material level not far above the animals, but also for them he could sympathize, without romanticizing them, and he never doubted that their humanity was fundamentally the same as his own . For Marx progress exists. It exist because the productive forces, that is, people's knowledge and skills, can grow by further development and be accumulated over generations. Therefore, we have not stopped at the gatherer or the neolithic agricultural level. Thus also mankind's choices, for better or worse, has increased and with them her cultural creativity. Nevertheless, Marx's vision of society is far from linear. He never ceased to point to its contradictory nature, to how the proletarian became a free worker by being "liberated" from productive property, how steam engines and major industry created new wealth but also the utmost poverty:
"In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force." - Karl Marx
And over it all hovers like a bourdon tone the perspective in the introduction to the Manifesto: The class struggle can indeed lead to one class' revolutionary victory, but it can also end up with "the common ruin of all condending classes". This, of course, satisfied neither kautskyites or haeckelites. They were ideologues, and such contradictions and reservations have no place in an ideology. Both turned their "development doctrine" to the doctrine of clear and automatically entering progress. Of these two doctrines was really haeckelism the darker, because while the kautskyistes originally expected a communist or "socialist" paradise open to all, the sum of haeckelian evolution was the Nietzschean Übermensch who would become the modern average men's superiors. However, the average intellectuals of the bourgeoisie and merchants never seriously though that far. The litterateurs posed as café-über menschen, the merchants thought of more and more and more shops, bigger and better profits. Schmidt says that the ideologization of marxism was due, in part to Marx's overall work at the time, the overwhelming part was unpublished or insurmountable, and that the party building with the help of unschooled industrial workers made it appealing, or perhaps entirely necessary to simplify and dogmatize Marx' thinking. So be it. However, I can not associate myself with the thought that this would be the only causes, this because the same thing happened with evolution theory. This was available in a book published in edition after edition already in Darwin's own lifetime, it spread at least as much in the educated classes as in the great unwashed, and above all Haeckel and the haeckelites never built any party. No, the reason was probably the pre-understandings and prejudices of the time, an insistent and assertive Zeitgeist which kept up its distorting mirror towards everything around him.
Two thinkers against the tide
Darwin's home, Down House in Kent, is now a museum. In the library stands on a shelf the dedicated copy of the first book of Capital Marx sent to Darwin.
The volume is uncut. It does perhaps not matter, the two's works are so different that Darwin would scarcely have got much out of reading. The difference is almost parodic between the ruthlessly systematic analysis of the capitalist production process that initiates Capital, and the exhaustive survey of the exterior breeding of show pigeons which forms the first chapter in The origin of species.
Both Marx and Darwin have later been described as the most exemplary and consistent exponents of their century of thinking, and this by both their self-proclaimed disciples and their sworn enemies. When we have distanced ourselves from the malignant manifestations of that century's theory and practice, they have therefore both been obvious targets. When we have mocked naive optimism of progress, we have put the fools hat on both Karls' and Charles' heads. When we have annoyed us over pedantic schematism, we decorated them with the donkey's ears. And when we condemned the Stalinist terror, oppressive social Darwinism and silly "biologism," we have pressed the red-hot branding iron against their foreheads. I hope to have shown that this was done with injustice. Both were, though of course of and in their time, in important respects thinkers against the current. Their greatness consisted in the fact that they so decisively broke with the thinking of their time and denied conventional wisdom. This also explains the tenacious resistance against them, the systematic and persistent misinterpretations which also show a striking parallelism.
Book six of the Swedish encyclopedia second edition, Chaussé-Debussy, came out in 1948. When I turn up Darwin, Charles, I find that, although he has a rather long article - but this is Swedish Encyclopedia in 32 books - it is still shorter than that of an average German academic philosopher like Dilthey. And when I read the article, I find that Darwin was an old oddball, although he put evolution on the map, but otherwise were wrong in almost everything. Above all, he was wrong when he believed in natural selection. In our time, scientists know better: they believe in chance, or in some cases in ortogenetic progress mechanics. And this was written in 1948! It would have been more understandable if it had been written in 1928. For, since then, "the modern synthesis" had been staged by scientists and thinkers like Dobzhansky, Stebbins, Mayr and Huxley. They had shown that the population genetics, not to mention genetics in its entirety, was unintelligible except in the perspective of natural selection; and at the same time genetics had given selection the material basis Darwin so desperately sought. In our day, the theory of evolution in its Darwinian-making is the super-paradigm and overarching theory of bioscience. One is hit with the crushing weight by the realization of Sweden's intellectual provincialism, by the stagnation in its academic duck pond and the complacent incompetence of the over-ducks.
However, at that time the real opposition to Darwin's theory was broken. The venerable Professor Ignorant (Oskar Carlgren) who wrote the article has nevertheless still colleagues, who haughtily or in theological fury sit to judge over the nineteenth century's other master thinker, Marx. The natural sciences have built-in procedures for verification of results, examining the theories and factually based peer review on a level that the social sciences notoriously and miserably lack, to say nothing of the "cultural debate", this "thinking" without disturbing factual or rational limits . And as Darwin is concerned, it is with the same fury denied that his discoveries would have any relevance to our own view of ourselves.
In sum: Take Marx and Darwin seriously - both of them. Do not be content with the "Marx" and the "Darwin" the ideologues shows up for you as a deterrent. They are pure aberrations and field ghosts, puppets made to take the slap on the ideological Punch and Judy. Intellectual understanding arises not without resistance and without effort, but it is in principle available to every literate person. It is its own reward.
The following essay explores a scientific historical parallelism, which looks completely different than you would normally say, and that goes much deeper. Both Darwin and Marx were methodological rebels, whose novelty was greeted with incomprehension and deep disgust even by those who believed themselves to accept their message.
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"As enthusiastic supporters of Darwin's evolutionary theory Kautsky, Bernstein, Plekhanov and others developed a conception of history and society which described the development of humanity in analogy with the natural laws of science. The "provisional value" of scientific theories was replaced with absolute truths. (...)" Werner Schmidt
Comparisons between Marx and Darwin were not uncommon during the 1800s. They got an almost canonical character of the March day in 1883 when Friedrich Engels was at Highgate Cemetery in north London, and held his burial speach at the grave of his friend, a speech in which he re-drew this parallel. It does exist. But how has it been interpreted by posterity? I would argue that it has been interpreted in the light of two, largely parallel distortions and misinterpretations of Marx's historical materialism, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Distortions that is not only is of interest to those involved in marxism and evolutionary biology but the history of science in general. They also have practical significance, because these misinterpretations still haunt us and makes people get both theories completely wrong.
A mechanical view of science
The view of the nature of science, it's means and goals that were predominant even in the first half of the 1800s, was mechanical, static, linear, inductive and deterministic. It was mechanical in the sense that the paradigm was Newtonian mechanics. This was about the movement of bodies. Bodies influenced each other by bumping against each other, or by the (essentially mysterious) peer effects resulting from their mutual gravitation. The world consisted of two components, "force" - that is the kinetic energy of moving bodies' - and "matter" in the physical sense, stuff, concrete tangible bodies and particles. Exactly how bodies interacted they considered themselves able to figure out. They had solved the two body-problem, the question of how two point masses moves around a common center of mass. Thus they had been able to calculate the moon's orbit months and years in advance and create good tide tables for the benefit of shipping. The three body-problem resisted, but this, they explained, was due to the mathematical methods have not yet developed sufficiently. In this light the world appeared as a huge clockwork. Those who could determine the number of cogs on the wheels and clock speed, had in principle the answers to both past and future in their hands.
This clockwork ticked steadily. It looked like it always did, it was broadly unchanged since it was created (by the Christian biblical God, of course). It was all inclusive. The planetary system was a sort of gigantic horarium, like the clockwork models that contented school boys and adorned curio cabinets, but also the earth's living creatures were mechanisms, Cartesian machines built by other material than clockwork and locks. L'homme machine, la Mettrie wrote, "man a machine". And a top the saloon tables trudged Vaucanson's mechanical duck that quacks, ate grains and shits just like a real duck, though it has never been in an egg. - The black coats and the pious of cource had their concerns. la Mettrie was them to daring. But successfully physical theology summed it all under the title "God's goodness and omnipotence." Just as Our Lord had placed the planets in their stable orbits around the sun as he sat in his benevolence to brighten and warm them, He had created the living creatures, each one perfectly designed for her by Him contrived place in life. The creature adaptations - elephant's trunk, the whale's bards, the mosquito's sting - was vivid illustrations of this all-encompassing, all-knowing and all sighted providence. The Pangloss theory of physical theology died away on the continent during the early decades of the 1800s, but in the UK it survived even in the middle of the century, and even after 1859, when Darwin published Origin of Species origin. And as it was in the natural world, it was also in human society, where God put the king in his castle and the beggar at his door - to the best of both.
"Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"
God had thus created laws of nature and society, laws which regulated the stars and the lives of all the created creatures. It was these laws that the American Declaration of Independence referred, entitled formulation, when the rebellious colonists demanded political independence and equal rights for all people (i.e. white men). Science's job, they believed, was to discover these laws.
This they believed was done when you through logical induction discovered some simple quantitative correlation between the phenomenon of a and b. Such was the "laws" - Ohm's law, Ampère law and what all their names - that we learned in school. Most had the approximate form a = b operation c where c often was a constant. Such laws, they believed, expressed universal and eternal relationships. Once you learn them, you just had to put them in to their technical problems, and then you had the solution.
These laws were linear in the purely mathematical sense. Double b, and also a was doubled. All connections were simple, quantitative, and unambiguous. Accordingly, laws were also predictive. You could use them to make predictions, for example, about what would happen if you doubled b. If you knew all laws and all quantities, you also knew the future. You certainly did not, outside the laboratory, and even the engineers' bridges crashed occasionally together. But this was a practical shortcoming: in the future one would know better. The clockwork determinism that was already in the metaphor, was aslo embodied in the form of the "natural laws" themselves. A good natural law had no exceptions. Ohm's law does not say that the voltage is equal to the potential difference through the resistance except on Mondays and when the researcher has a cold. And this determinism was for the living as well as the non-living, biology and society as well as physics and chemistry. The future was totally locked by the current, which in turn is completely determined by the past. As the events in the world was determined, that is "lawful" as opposed to arbitrary, they were also deterministic, ie. predetermined. No distinction between these two concepts was known. The same applied to people whose fates inexorably were laid down by a heritage and environment over both of which they had as little influence. It was a backward reductionism that in people's lives became fatalism. This was a paralyzing experience. It wasn't fully apparent while the predetermined end was identified with God's benevolent providence, but when it had ceased to be, it struck through with full force in 1880 - and 1890-century literature and cultural ambiance. God was dead and the world a man's prison.
By that time, the natural sciences, even the "physical", was already moving into a different metaphor and a different mental environment, and in front of themselves some already sensed the "fundamental crisis" of physics that after the turn of the century led to the abdictation of classical physics and birth of quantum mechanics and relativity. But the literateurs, editors, critics - in short, ideologues, stubbornly held to this outdated scientific view well into the 1900s. And some still do. Even the physicists were fully capable of judging others' scientific expressions by other and older criteria, than they used to guide and justify their own research. And it was on this stage that Karl & Charles, Marx and Darwin, entered, were applauded and booed out.
About scientific method
The contemporary scientific theory generally regards "the scientific method" as synonymous with the hypothetical-deductive method. The name of this seems to have been coined by Karl Popper, but it was described for the first time explicitly by William Whewell as early as 1840, and it has subsequently been shown that all successful scientists in the modern sense from Galileo applied it, either they have been clearly aware of it or not. And it has also been demonstrated - in Darwin's case, with the help of his surviving and now published work notes - that both Marx and Darwin gave good examples of this method. It starts with the hypothesis: the researcher sets up various demonstrable theories about how this (the phenomena she wants to "explain", that is, insert into an overarching theoretical context) associates with that (the overall theory in question). Then the most likely hypothesis is tested against empirical data. The researcher searches for critical inferences that can be derived, deduced, from the hypothesis and that are different from those that are drawn from competing hypotheses - including the null hypothesis that is that no connection exists. If it is evident that the conditions that should exist according to the hypothesis also exists in reality, the hypothesis is promoted to the rank and dignity of theory, a useful scientific model of reality. Until further notice.
It perhaps follows at once that this method is in stark contrast to those who were considered to be the alone valid in Marx's and Darwin's time. It is, foremost, not inductive. You can not just collect irrefutable theory-free facts (whatever that is), shake them and see them spontaneously organize themselves into columns, statutes and treatises. It is not tied to specific technical or practical approaches - it may but need not be "experimental", it may but need not be quantitative or "exact". And above all it is not absolute and need not be deterministic and predictive, modern scientific theories seldom are. It is not absolute because it - partly because it serves as a model for far larger and more complex contexts than the simplistic "laws" of earlier times - is originally recognized as imperfect and provisional. As long as it works, that is, as long as it helps us to new knowledge (heuristic value) and a better understanding (hermeneutic value), it is a good theory. It is however neither "true" in any metaphysical or "proven" in any logical sense. It only shows its value in our scientific practice, as Marx put it. Conversely, one can not "disprove" it by questioning its metaphysical, absolute and eternal truth (which it never claimed) or by noticing any formal logical contradiction. Scientific theories are abandoned when their usefulness in practice is exhausted, then but not before. Usually when we formulate a better theory. And science is not divination either. The "predictions" that one sometimes finds mentioned, has been coined by philosophically naive scientist. They are not predictions about the future, but the critical inferences which are used to test a hypothesis. They may relate to the present and the past as well as the future. If we find on the other hand, professors and assimilated who possesses eternal truths and can make full binding predictions about the future, we are with almost certainly dealing with pseudoscience - a kind of "science" that with special enthusiasm been grown and cultivated in the academic social sciences.
Two unfashionable theories
Marx's historical materialism and Darwin's theory of natural selection has some features in common, which explains the similarities of their reception and their parallel fate. Darwin managed with some success to conceal his theory's non-inductive origin, while Marx was working with a Hegelian terminology that at least made his German readers feel vaguely (though unfoundedly) at home. However most of their methodological critics took note of the clearly non-deterministic nature of their theories.
Where were here the absolute and eternal "laws" that physicists so proudly held up to display? Where were the cocksure and with date provided predictions about the future, as they felt able to expect from a social theory that emerged with claims of being scientific? To this day, since theoretical physicists in almost a century operated with indeterministic, statistical quantum mechanics, and when even the astronomers had to swallow the message that the three body-problem is fundamentally unsolvable, you can still hear half educated professors, fourth educated senior lecturers in the political career and uneducated editorial writers explaining to the public that Marx's theories are unscientific, because "its predictions did not come true." That there are no predictions of the type they expect, let alone the predictions that they in their innocence believe are there, they are probably totally unaware of, the idea that they might need to read and even understand the texts they criticize is deeply alien to these scientists. Marx and Darwin's theories are heuristic and abductive, but predictive in the normal sense, they are not. The only "prediction" in them is much more profound: All that is solid melts into air.
Since the two theories are not generally predictive, they are even less so in the individual case. Quantum mechanics can't predict exactly when a particular atom of uranium 238 will decay into an alpha particle and an atom thorium 234, nor can historical materialism predict which party will win the next election, or the theory of evolution predict what new species a given species will give rise to, when and where. In Darwin's case, added the aggravating circumstance that the evolutionary mechanism has a stochastic component. The changes in the genome (which we would now say), caused by recombination and mutation, which is the raw material of evolution, occur at random. There is no direction, no inherent "drive to perfection." Even today there are one-way critics, mostly physicists with philosophical itching, which appear completely unable to grip the two-stage nature of the evolutionary process: first a random variation, then a directional sifting through the natural selection that rewards those organisms that have the best ability in the given environment to keep their genes to the next generation. Random? they say. Aha, a random process! Then they sit down and calculate the probability that an arbitrary collection of atoms of carbon, nitrogen, etc., or at least one chimpanzee, by pure chance should give rise to Albert Einstein, usually in a single step. You see, they say, the probability is negligible and therefore the theory is incorrect. Pointing to the other side of the selection will on the other hand make them do a somersault into pure teleology and starts raving about innate drives and so on.
Both have also been considered fair game by people who wanted to exercise their pre-conceived logicistic ideas. Some people claim that the surplus value theory does not add up mathematically. Similarly, some argued that the idea that the environmentally adapted have better chances to propagate their genes is illogical. Hey, they say, a circular argument! That they are better adapted, one can only see in that they reproduce more! Both miss completely the fact that there are not two neo-scholastic or mathematical theories they are dealing with, and that theories therefor can not be "refuted" by such methods.
Karl Popper even claimed that the theories that could not be refuted in this way was unlawful. I need at the moment not waste many words on this claim. Many science theorists who, unlike Popper actually studied how successful scientific theories are constituted, mainly perhaps Imre Lakatos, has pointed out that in this case, we must scrap all disciplines except the purely formal, logic and mathematics. In addition, there are in mathematics a lot of rates that can not be formally refuted, because they are too complicated for a formal analysis. The only thing you can say is that they seem consistent with experience. Just as in science! Yikes!
In the case of Darwin one have often been preoccupied with the moral indignation that his doctrine of species unscriptural not to say wicked inconsistancy roused. Known is Huxley's, according to him self true story about two women's conversation over a cup of tea (read with Oxbridge-accent and sprawling little finger): Descended from the apes? My dear, let us hope that it is not true. But if it should be true, let us hope that it will not become generally known! But evolution was soon to become fully accepted, except among some fools in the lunatic fringe. This is different from the purely methodologically wicked theory of evolutionary mechanisms, which as I said is still difficult to understand for many non-biologists. Marx's theory, however, almost entirely remained unacceptable because professors and editorial writers, probably correctly, guessed that it would have a damaging arousing effect of the lower classes if it became widespread and understood.
Both Marx and Darwin's theories were thus formally indigestible for their contemporaries, with the scientific or pseudo-scientific pre-understanding they had. Thus became also essential elements of the real content unintelligible. In Darwin this was, as we have seen, mainly what he called the theory of descent with modification. Equally important - and in Marx's case, crucial - was that both theories were transformed into ideologies with in some regards parallel content. We understand by now what these ideologies had to be like. Here are some of the main features of them:
Absolute claims
Both theories, which were open, provisional and developable, were declared to be a set of eternal truths, which by their ingenious authors was revealed to humanity and that by (mostly self-certified) interpreters was forwarded to the public. In Darwin's case the purely scientific implications were not as devastating as the scientific community had some immunity against such claims. The reading audience swallowed them, however, line and sinker, and since Marx' interpreters did not have much academic training but was more urgent to find a weapon to beat their political opponents' heads with, the implications for the development of marxism was dubious. Marxism was dogmatized. It became ideology.
This trend was led by Karl Kautsky, who from 1883 was editor of the SPD's Journal Die Neue Zeit. He used this strategic position to create the "orthodox Marxism" which he claimed to defend, but which had very little to do with Marx's actual way of thinking. Werner Schmidt, who in a very instructive way illuminated these processes (in ... then I am not a Marxist) sometimes use the term "Kautskyism" to describe this catechistic product. However, he staggers, and call it as a rule, "Marxism" as this was the actual term of the past. I prefer to describe an approach that takes Marx seriously as marxism, and call it's deformed version Kautskyism. This Kautskyism became Second International Marxism and formed the basis for Plekhanov, the Bolsheviks and the Comintern ideology. Lenin's furious attack on the "renegade Kautsky" has partly obscured the fact that the real difference between them was that Lenin refused to accept Kautskyisms practical consequences. There are in Lenin a fairly violent gap from the (in itself difficultly dogmatized and schematic) philosophical foundation and the political practice, a gap that after 1917 was veiled by the temporary success.
Schematism
Both theories were reduced to simple schemes which were applied all across the board, though - one is tempted to say, with a special enthusiasm - in areas that the founders had not addressed or where they even said they were not applicable. Here were the immediate consequences were worse for "darwinism" than to marxism. Marx's theory was, after all about society. Darwinism was not, but the social darwinists, with Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel in the lead, applied without much ado the theory of the beasts "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" directly on the contemporary social conditions. So came "vulgar darwinism." Les Misérables at the bottom of society were obviously there because of their overall ineptitude, and that they should settle for. The upper class, however, were the upper class because of their excellence, and the social ideal was what Svante Folin sarcastically called "the saber-toothed merchant." During this operation one skipped several intermediate analytical levels without even pretending that they existed. Anyone who is reasonably oriented in the final 1800 century literature know what impact these ideas had.
One might think that such a theory should have encouraged class circulation. Would not it be in the spirit of natural selection, that the useless upper-class juveniles were ordered down into the proletariat, while promising proles got a chance to advance socially? That consequence was, however, rarely drawn. The genetic determinism of the time and its obsession with the idea of "degeneration" - a theme which in itself would be worth a whole book - meant that the social condemnation was apparently also valid for all the following generations. In addition, the late 1800s evolutionists actually tended to treat selection with embarrassed silence. Future thinking was rather going in an ortogenic direction, ie. assuming an intrinsic drive of to perfection. Darwin was on depreciation.
Social darwinist ideas begun as well known to re-circulate in the 1980s. Haeckel himself was a friend, that Darwin would have asked God to protect himself from had he not been an atheist. Haeckel was in many respects, Darwin's Kautsky, a terrible simplificateur if any. He was also a great German chauvinist, Bismarck-admirerer and anti-Semite. He deserves to be singled out as the creator of social- and political darwinisms, more than the gentle and far less simplistic Spencer (who, I observed with a certain amusement at my own visit to the old man Marx, is buried virtually by his feet).
In the case of marxism schematicism had slightly different consequences. It led to political schematism. Like you in a classic american B-Western immediately can distinguish the bad guys in black hats, from the good guys in white, the kautskyite could immediately point out society's black hats. For social class division, itself highly schematicly and staticly percieved, were concidered to judge both differenting class factions and individuals within both the bourgeoisie, the middle layers and the petit bourgeoisie to condemnation. Bind them together! (Supplemented by Stalin to bind them together and shoot!) White hats was worn only by the Genossen who stood at the factory floor or drove trains, and of cource by their associate editors, party bosses and other senior colleagues, who were proletarian honoris causa. This attitude also led to the ouvrierisme or worker worship, which desribed the existing industrial proletariat as "a sacred creature," and to virtues they lifted all the restrictions, faults and loads that came out of its misery.
Automatism and mechanicism
Determinism led naturally to a belief in historical, economic and social automatisms. Humanity traveled nolens volens along a railroad track, past the stations with signs Primitive communism, The patriarchal society, Slave society, Feudalism and Capitalism, in the direction of the Communist terminus. What the passengers were doing had little or no importance. So there were of course some side track where some first-class carriages ware disconnected, but they all had the same destination, history's rubbish heap.
At essentially the same way evolution was unidirectional and single-track. "Development" led inexorably onwards and upwards (and degeneration down and even reverse). A comical illustration of this approach is that in many editions printed image of "March of Humanity." To the far left shuffles a shaggy, short-legged, low browed and thoroughly bestial creature out on his knuckles. Later in the ranks, we see how he gets up on his legs (he is almost always a he) and how he, through various kneeling and bent apparitions, eventually turned into a straight, high browed Mr. America, although it generally refrains from the bank pyjamas and mobile phone in fear of making a parodic impression. This does not help in the eyes of evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists. They view the whole picture as silly, a simplistic legacy of Spencer and Haeckel. Humanity's creation was an extremely complicated and contradictory history. Likewise, the belief in the law-bound succession of modes of production - like it that they could exist in purely schematic form - in Kautskyism has come to replace the concrete analysis of the existing reality, which characterized both Marx and Darwin's scientific work.
Of cource the kautskyites were also facing the problem how to motivate their party members to work and sacrifice for future bliss, that would appear anyway no matter how you behaved. The only thing they could produce was a vague murmur that one might get the train to go a little faster. Possibly one could argue that it was nice to know that you acted, or at least were treated according to History (which at the same time, and strangely enough hypostatized as an independent real person). Nikolai Bukharin, who second to Stalin himself drove the mechanization of "diamat", dialectical materialism, to its most absurd heights or depths, illustrates this. In his book Historical Materialism (1921) there is a chapter about "determinism and indeterminism" where he naturally occupies the most rigid deterministic position. There he quotes with approval a poem by Meresjkovskij, where he lets the falling raindrops rejoice that they fall of their own free will. Behold man!
Where is here Marx's proletariat, the autonomous actor of history? Autonomy has disappeared and with it, strictly speaking, also the proletariat. It has turned into one of history's (no, History's) raw materials which can be treated and sacrificed more or less in any way, any own contributions it can hardly have to give. Here we meet Stalinism, from its humble debut in the German - and later the Nordic - Social Democracy and to its full flowering during Joseph Stalin himself. Anyway this negligible cannon fodder would eventually be replaced by the new socialist man that Stalin and his ideological lackeys fantasized about. This was true even more for the individual. Marx's dream, that of a society of free association's where each individual person's free development was the condition for the free development of all, had been written off. It had been replaced by an almost fascist vision of the individual's beatification though his total rise in to the collective, directed by enlightened prominent comrades.
Equally dramatic were of course not the consequences of "haeckelism". But even there the stifness dominated. The richness of life that put the young entomologist and world traveler Charles Darwin in ecstasy - an enthusiasm that constantly shines through in The Voyage of the Beagle, one of the century's great travel books - and that was the aging cripples comfort and joy, greenery and blood, birdsong and death scream, ther butterflys escape and the leopard's leap, all this was turned into dust and ashes.
Progress Ideology
In one of his notebooks Darwin tells himself: "Never say 'higher' or 'lower'!" No species is "more primitive" than others. Everyone has a pedigree that stretches as far back to when life first arose. All prove, just by existing, that they are fairly adapted to their environment, but more it is not: perfection does not exist in the living world. Who can say that the ring worm is a higher life form than a flat worm, the mammal higher than the reptile? The finalist belief that man would be the evolutionary purpose and meaning was for Darwin an absurdity. Finalism, scala naturae and other physical theology he had done away with. Development, evolution, was for him not at all synonymous with progress.
Thus, Darwin was also largely immune to the endemic racism of his time. His family and those closely associated with the Wedgwoods had both campaigned actively against slave trade and slavery. His sympathy for Brazil's blacks was as strong as his aversion to the country's lost, uncultured slave owners, and at old age he explains how the screams of a tortured slave still tormented him in his nightmares. He hated oppression with a spontaneous hatred that never failed him, but he never hated oppressors. He just despised them. The fire landers appeared to him as the most miserable of men, on a material level not far above the animals, but also for them he could sympathize, without romanticizing them, and he never doubted that their humanity was fundamentally the same as his own . For Marx progress exists. It exist because the productive forces, that is, people's knowledge and skills, can grow by further development and be accumulated over generations. Therefore, we have not stopped at the gatherer or the neolithic agricultural level. Thus also mankind's choices, for better or worse, has increased and with them her cultural creativity. Nevertheless, Marx's vision of society is far from linear. He never ceased to point to its contradictory nature, to how the proletarian became a free worker by being "liberated" from productive property, how steam engines and major industry created new wealth but also the utmost poverty:
"In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force." - Karl Marx
And over it all hovers like a bourdon tone the perspective in the introduction to the Manifesto: The class struggle can indeed lead to one class' revolutionary victory, but it can also end up with "the common ruin of all condending classes". This, of course, satisfied neither kautskyites or haeckelites. They were ideologues, and such contradictions and reservations have no place in an ideology. Both turned their "development doctrine" to the doctrine of clear and automatically entering progress. Of these two doctrines was really haeckelism the darker, because while the kautskyistes originally expected a communist or "socialist" paradise open to all, the sum of haeckelian evolution was the Nietzschean Übermensch who would become the modern average men's superiors. However, the average intellectuals of the bourgeoisie and merchants never seriously though that far. The litterateurs posed as café-über menschen, the merchants thought of more and more and more shops, bigger and better profits. Schmidt says that the ideologization of marxism was due, in part to Marx's overall work at the time, the overwhelming part was unpublished or insurmountable, and that the party building with the help of unschooled industrial workers made it appealing, or perhaps entirely necessary to simplify and dogmatize Marx' thinking. So be it. However, I can not associate myself with the thought that this would be the only causes, this because the same thing happened with evolution theory. This was available in a book published in edition after edition already in Darwin's own lifetime, it spread at least as much in the educated classes as in the great unwashed, and above all Haeckel and the haeckelites never built any party. No, the reason was probably the pre-understandings and prejudices of the time, an insistent and assertive Zeitgeist which kept up its distorting mirror towards everything around him.
Two thinkers against the tide
Darwin's home, Down House in Kent, is now a museum. In the library stands on a shelf the dedicated copy of the first book of Capital Marx sent to Darwin.
The volume is uncut. It does perhaps not matter, the two's works are so different that Darwin would scarcely have got much out of reading. The difference is almost parodic between the ruthlessly systematic analysis of the capitalist production process that initiates Capital, and the exhaustive survey of the exterior breeding of show pigeons which forms the first chapter in The origin of species.
Both Marx and Darwin have later been described as the most exemplary and consistent exponents of their century of thinking, and this by both their self-proclaimed disciples and their sworn enemies. When we have distanced ourselves from the malignant manifestations of that century's theory and practice, they have therefore both been obvious targets. When we have mocked naive optimism of progress, we have put the fools hat on both Karls' and Charles' heads. When we have annoyed us over pedantic schematism, we decorated them with the donkey's ears. And when we condemned the Stalinist terror, oppressive social Darwinism and silly "biologism," we have pressed the red-hot branding iron against their foreheads. I hope to have shown that this was done with injustice. Both were, though of course of and in their time, in important respects thinkers against the current. Their greatness consisted in the fact that they so decisively broke with the thinking of their time and denied conventional wisdom. This also explains the tenacious resistance against them, the systematic and persistent misinterpretations which also show a striking parallelism.
Book six of the Swedish encyclopedia second edition, Chaussé-Debussy, came out in 1948. When I turn up Darwin, Charles, I find that, although he has a rather long article - but this is Swedish Encyclopedia in 32 books - it is still shorter than that of an average German academic philosopher like Dilthey. And when I read the article, I find that Darwin was an old oddball, although he put evolution on the map, but otherwise were wrong in almost everything. Above all, he was wrong when he believed in natural selection. In our time, scientists know better: they believe in chance, or in some cases in ortogenetic progress mechanics. And this was written in 1948! It would have been more understandable if it had been written in 1928. For, since then, "the modern synthesis" had been staged by scientists and thinkers like Dobzhansky, Stebbins, Mayr and Huxley. They had shown that the population genetics, not to mention genetics in its entirety, was unintelligible except in the perspective of natural selection; and at the same time genetics had given selection the material basis Darwin so desperately sought. In our day, the theory of evolution in its Darwinian-making is the super-paradigm and overarching theory of bioscience. One is hit with the crushing weight by the realization of Sweden's intellectual provincialism, by the stagnation in its academic duck pond and the complacent incompetence of the over-ducks.
However, at that time the real opposition to Darwin's theory was broken. The venerable Professor Ignorant (Oskar Carlgren) who wrote the article has nevertheless still colleagues, who haughtily or in theological fury sit to judge over the nineteenth century's other master thinker, Marx. The natural sciences have built-in procedures for verification of results, examining the theories and factually based peer review on a level that the social sciences notoriously and miserably lack, to say nothing of the "cultural debate", this "thinking" without disturbing factual or rational limits . And as Darwin is concerned, it is with the same fury denied that his discoveries would have any relevance to our own view of ourselves.
In sum: Take Marx and Darwin seriously - both of them. Do not be content with the "Marx" and the "Darwin" the ideologues shows up for you as a deterrent. They are pure aberrations and field ghosts, puppets made to take the slap on the ideological Punch and Judy. Intellectual understanding arises not without resistance and without effort, but it is in principle available to every literate person. It is its own reward.
