Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 164, June 2020, Pages 267-272
Animal Behaviour

Special Issue: Animal Behaviour: A Historical Approach
Konrad Lorenz on human degeneration and social decline: a chronic preoccupation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.01.007Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Konrad Lorenz was one of the major founders of ethology.

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    He came to scientific prominence during the Nazi era.

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    He believed that degeneration and social decline were the result of domestication.

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    Early in his career, he adopted Nazi-type terminology, prescriptions and arguments.

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    After World War II, he adopted more popular theories of the day (capitalism, ecology).

Throughout his career, Konrad Lorenz, co-founder of ethology, extrapolated from animal behaviour to humans – especially concerning degeneration as a result of domestication – and then prescribed for the allegedly resulting ills of society. The descriptions were constant. Lorenz had observed that wild animals subjected to and bred in captivity often underwent various abnormal physical and behavioural changes, such as changes in stature and coloration, and also in instinctive behaviour patterns – mating, eating, raising young, and so on. He went on to posit that the same sorts of ‘degeneration’ of human individuals were due to overcrowding, race mixing, poor nutrition, overbreeding, etc. – any kind of human society being equated with captivity – and claimed that faults in human society arose from these sorts of individual degeneration effects. Then, of course, as a physician, he prescribed for how society might be cured. Since he came to scientific prominence during the Nazi era, there have been constant criticisms and accusations that Lorenz must have been a Nazi and that Nazi ideology underlay many of his ideas about humanity and ethology. The thesis of this paper is that Lorenz had accepted the truth of human degeneration and social decline before the rise of Nazism. While he adopted Nazi-type terminology, prescriptions and arguments during the early stages of his career (which coincided with the rise and fall of the Third Reich), he dropped them as soon as the end of World War II rendered them unacceptable. Thereafter Lorenz retained the belief in human degeneration and social decline, but chose other arguments and prescriptions based in part on popular theories of the day, e.g. capitalism, and later ecology.

Section snippets

Lorenz, human degeneration and Nazi ideology

I soon discovered that besides the philosophical questions that had led to my interest in Lorenz, there was also a historical puzzle. Lorenz generalized about degeneration and human social decline throughout his career. Since he came to scientific prominence during the National Socialist (Nazi) era, there were constant criticisms and accusations that Lorenz must have been a Nazi and that Nazi ideology underlay many of his ideas about humanity and ethology. Was this true?

A little later, when it

Lorenz on human degeneration and society

Throughout his career, Lorenz extrapolated from animal behaviour to humans – especially concerning degeneration as a result of domestication – and then used these extrapolations as an explanation for the allegedly resulting ills of society. The descriptions were constant. For example, Lorenz (1936/1970) had observed that wild animals subjected to, and bred in, captivity often underwent various abnormal physical and behavioural changes, such as changes in size and coloration, and also in

World war II and after

During World War II the leading members of the ethological community found themselves on different sides of the conflict. Tinbergen lived in occupied Holland and experienced the sufferings and privations of that country under the Nazis, before eventually moving to England (Burkhard, 2005). Von Frisch remained in Germany but had to painfully navigate his research and career when it was discovered that he had Jewish great-grandparents who had converted to Catholicism. He was forced to resign his

Cultural and scientific antecedents: Germany and the U.S.A. before the Nazis

Nazism, racial hygiene and the belief that some races are superior to others did not suddenly arise in 1933. In the 75 years since the end of World War II there have been a plethora of studies on the roots of Nazism and German fascism. The antecedents of these political movements are many and varied; simplistic explanations do not suffice. Here I discuss only two specifically biological aspects of the cultural and scientific milieu in Germany and the U.S.A. that many have suggested contributed

Archival research in Germany

By 1976, I realized that the next thing I had to learn about was archival sources in Germany. Luckily the American Historical Association (AHA) had recently published a guide to German archives, a real treasure. (Although this guide seems to be out of print now, the AHA apparently has a more comprehensive and timely one, which may be available through their Web site.) There I learned about the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the Berlin Document Center (BDC), the latter at that time still under

Conclusions about Lorenz’s Nazi involvement

What did I conclude about Lorenz's Nazi involvement and the reasons for it? Lorenz was predisposed for many different reasons to be sympathetic to the Nazi racial programme. Due to his own prior education and environment, long before the Nazis came to power he had already accepted a world-view that included the ‘degeneration’ of civilized human beings. His views and interpretations of what he was seeing in the behaviour of domesticated animals, and the Nazi pronouncements on the need for racial

‘Degeneration’ – Lorenz’s views post world war II

For the purposes of this paper, perhaps the most important thing to emphasize is the fact that the Nazi-type pronouncements were only the first of Lorenz's prescriptions, over the course of his career, concerning measures to be taken against human degeneration and societal ‘decline and fall’. The fact that Lorenz persisted in describing ‘degeneration effects’ of society long after the end of the Third Reich makes it more convincing to me that Lorenz actually believed in their existence.

I should

Acknowledgments

I thank Dr Zuleyma Tang-Martínez for her excellent help in turning my manuscript from a conference talk into a paper. Her work as Editor certainly went ‘above and beyond’. Some of the research for this paper was done with the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant no. SOC 78-11404.

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