Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, writes a longish but important essay which traces the main lineaments of Western thought about human nature through the 19th and 20th century. The essay is titled The Dehumanizing Impact of Modern Thought: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Their Followers, and it shows clearly how the ideas of these thinkers prepared the ground for the horrors of the 20th century.
Weikart begins by recalling the words of Viktor Frankl:
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, "If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted," Frankl continued, "with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment--or, as the Nazi liked to say, of 'Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."
Read the whole essay at the link. It will help you to understand why a lot of people are convinced that atheistic materialism leads ineluctably, in the enthusiastic words of 19th century Darwinian Ludwig Büchner, to "innumerable piles of corpses".
RLC
