"The most sickening associations of a biological conception of human nature are the ones to Nazism. Though the opposition to the idea of a human nature began decades earlier, historians agree that bitter memories of the Holocaust were the main reason that human nature became taboo in intellectual life after World War II...
The misuse of biology by the Nazis is a reminder that perverted ideas can have horrifying consequences and that intellectuals have a responsibility to take reasonable care that their ideas not be misused for evil ends. But part of that responsibility is not to trivialize the horror of Nazism by exploiting it for rhetorical clout in academic catfights. Linking the people you disagree with to Nazism does nothing for the memory of Hitler's victims or for the effort to prevent other genocides. It is precisely because these events are so grave that we have a special responsibility to identify their causes precisely.
If we censored ideas that the Nazis abused, we would have to give up far more than the application of evolution and genetics to human behavior. We would have to censor the study of evolution and genetics, period. And we would have to suppress many other ideas that Hitler twisted into the foundations of Nazism:
• The germ theory of disease: The Nazis repeatedly cited Pasteur and Koch to argue that the Jews were
like an infectious bacillus that had to be eradicated to control a contagious disease.
• Romanticism, environmentalism, and the love of nature: The Nazis amplified a Romantic strain in
German culture that believed the Volk were a people of destiny with a mystical bond to nature and the
land. The Jews and other minorities, in contrast, took root in the degenerate cities.
• Philology and linguistics: The concept of the Aryan race was based on a prehistoric tribe posited by
linguists, the Indo-Europeans, who were thought to have spilled out of an ancient homeland thousands
of years ago and to have conquered much of Europe and Asia.
• Religious belief: Though Hitler disliked Christianity, he was not an atheist, and was emboldened by
the conviction that he was carrying out a divinely ordained plan.
The danger that we might distort our own science as a reaction to the Nazis’ distortions is not hypothetical. The historian of science Robert Proctor has shown that American public health officials were slow to acknowledge that smoking causes cancer because it was the Nazis who had originally established the link. And some German scientists argue that biomedical research has been crippled in their country because of vague lingering associations to Nazism.
Hitler was evil because he caused the deaths of thirty million people and conceivable suffering to countless others, not because his beliefs made reference to biology (or linguistics or nature or smoking or God). Smearing the guilt from his actions to every conceivable aspect of his factual beliefs can only backfire. Ideas are connected to other ideas, and should any of Hitler's turn out to have some grain of truth — if races, for example, turn out to have any biological reality, or if the Indo-Europeans really were a conquering tribe — we would not want to concede that Nazism wasn't so wrong after all.
The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward countless political and scientific topics. But it was not the only ideologically inspired holocaust in the twentieth century, and intellectuals are only beginning to assimilate the lessons of the others: the mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of Marxism... Though both Nazi and Marxist ideologies led to industrial-scale killing, their biological and psychological theories were opposites. Marxists had no use for the concept of race, were averse to the notion of genetic inheritance, and were hostile to the very idea of a human nature rooted in biology. Marx and Engels did not explicitly embrace the doctrine of the Blank Slate in their writings, but they were adamant that human nature has no enduring properties. It consists only in the interactions of groups of people with their material environments in a historical period, and constantly changes as people change their environment and are simultaneously changed by it. The mind therefore has no innate structure but emerges from the dialectical processes of history and social interaction. As Marx put it:
All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
... Marx's twentieth-century followers did embrace the Blank Slate, or a: least the related metaphor of malleable material. Lenin endorsed Nikolai Bukharin's ideal of “the manufacturing of Communist man out of the human material of the capitalist age.” Lenin's admirer Maxim Gorky wrote, “The working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist” and “Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work with than wood” (the latter while admiring a canal built by slave labor). We come across the metaphor of the blank slate in the writings of a man who may have been responsible for sixty-five million deaths:
"A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it - Mao Zedong"
And we find it in a saying of a political movement that killed a quarter of its countrymen:
Only the newborn baby is spotless. — Khmer Rouge slogan
... An accurate appraisal of the cause of state genocides must look for beliefs common to Nazism and Marxism that launched them on their parallel trajectories, and for the beliefs specific to Marxism that led to the unique atrocities committed in its name...
Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. “The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,” wrote Marx; “the will to create mankind anew” is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology”
The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful.50 Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn't matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.
The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxism and Nazism. The ideology of the Blank Slate helps explain some of the features that were unique to the Marxist states:
• If people do not differ in psychological traits like talent or drive, then anyone who is better off must
be avaricious or larcenous (as I mentioned earlier). Massive killing of kulaks and “rich” or
“bourgeois” peasants was a feature of Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's
Cambodia.
• If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society that wants the right kind of
minds must control the experience (“It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written”).
Twentieth-century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dictatorships. They tried to
control every aspect of life: childrearing, education, clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even
food and sex. Authors in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become “engineers of human souls.” In
China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex adult dormitories, and the
separation of children from parents were recurring (and detested) experiments.
• If people are shaped by their social environments, then growing up bourgeois can leave a permanent
psychological stain (“Only the newborn baby is spotless”). The descendants of landlords and “rich
peasants” in postrevolutionary regimes bore a permanent stigma and were persecuted as readily as if
bourgeois parentage were a genetic trait. Worse, since parentage is invisible but discoverable by third
parties, the practice of outing people with a “bad background” became a weapon of social competition.
That led to the atmosphere of denunciation and paranoia that made life in these regimes an Orwellian
nightmare.
• If there is no human nature leading people to favor the interests of their families over “society,” then
people who produce more crops on their own plots than on communal farms whose crops are
confiscated by the state must be greedy or lazy and punished accordingly. Fear rather than self-interest becomes the incentive to work.
• Most generally, if individual minds are interchangeable components of a superorganic entity called
society, then the society, not the individual, is the natural unit of health and well-being and the proper
beneficiary of human striving. The rights of the individual person have no place...
[This] is meant to overturn the simplistic linkage of the sciences of human nature with the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. That glib association stands in the way of our desire to understand ourselves, and it stands in the way of the imperative to understand the causes of those catastrophes. All the more so if the causes have something to do with a side of ourselves we do not fully understand."
--- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature / Steven Pinker
