#6 by Zwaarddijk » Nov 17, 2011 3:51 pm
The reference to Machiavelli probably is meant to be parsed as follows: leaders say whatever they need to to gain and maintain their power. Even pretending to believe things they don't.
It's quite likely some of the higher Nazis were atheist or at least non-believers wrt Christianity - and popular misunderstandings even to this day of evolution make people believe in various racist ideas, lower vs. higher on an evolutionary scale etc. Heck, there's posters on this forum that have similar misunderstandings of evolution, altho' don't try and use these misunderstandings for malevolent purposes. Still, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, evolution was misunderstood by a lot of people in academia - you had people thinking that all kinds of social phenomena could be graded by how far up on an evolutionary ladder they were - languages, religions, societies, races, etc. They failed to realize that generally, evolution isn't a strive upwards towards some goal - it's a constant attempt to optimize. Every language is spoken in a slightly different context, and therefore will have different pressures working on it, religions do evolve in similar ways but have even less easily measurable pressures on them, societies as well.
And added complication when it comes to race and eugenics, is how dog-, horse- and livestock-breeding all tend to strive for keeping lineages pure. This easily is reinterpreted as a good goal per se - but that's only really a sensible goal if we have races that have been designed by intentional breeding, and we know what the members of the race will be expected to do during their lives. We know some races of horse will be well fitted to pulling carts, some will be well fitted on the race track, some races of dog will be good at various kinds of hunting, some at guarding, some at being pets in general, others have traits that are very beneficial when it comes to assisting the blind, etc, and it's reasonable we want to keep those traits relatively intact. With humans, conditions change - conserving the current races may be of no benefit five generations down the line, and even then, the varieties within every 'race' no matter how you define them are wide enough to make such a conservation effort rather useless. Evolution, in reality, is the best thing in this context- it favors traits that currently give benefits, and that's all there is to it. The nazis that did think they were serving evolution failed to understand it entirely - but I do not doubt they figured they were helping evolution.