Eugenics converted Darwinian natural selection into a consciously applied tool of political intervention

Evidence

Eugenics promised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine according to which it was impossible either to predict who would turn out to be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting fitness. This possible consequence of applied eugenics was stressed in Germany in the twenties as a reaction to Spengler’s Decline of the West. The process of selection had only to be changed from a natural necessity which worked behind the backs of men into an “artificial,” consciously applied physical tool. Bestiality had always been inherent in eugenics, and Ernst Haeckel’s early remark that mercy-death would save “useless expenses for family and state” is quite characteristic. Finally the last disciples of Darwinism in Germany decided to leave the field of scientific research altogether, to forget about the search for the missing link between man and ape, and started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists thought an ape is. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which a naturalistic doctrine becomes an applied biopolitical tool — the conversion of selection into conscious technique.
• XREF: This “bio becomes politically applied” mechanism feeds directly into the biopolitics/necropolitics vocabulary the reader is assembling for later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Natural experiments always depend on prior political interventions — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1977; Native birth-rate decline was a prudential Darwinian response to immigration — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 853