In the 19th and 20th centuries, biological theories became part of politics. Bitter national struggle was often based on the work of the biologists of the time, often, unfortunately, greatly distorted. In some cases, biological, political and spiritual theories merged into a strange “mystical” mixture, from which Nazism also drew.
The appearance of Charles Darwin in the second half of the 19th century was a great inspiration for bio-political theories. Although Darwin himself was no great ideologist, his theory of natural selection quickly became a welcome inspiration for national struggle, war, colonialism and “social Darwinism”. Not every interpretation of Darwinism was extreme though; the Sokol movement and many moderate thinkers were also inspired by it.
Edvard Beneš was a member of the Czechoslovak Eugenics Society, founded in 1915. This society, however, rejected hard “racial hygiene” emphasizing soft measures, such as taking care of the health of the population and promoting principles of hygiene.
In his work, Beneš considers culture to be the overall manifestation of the life of a nation, which he sees almost as a collective organism. One such natural manifestation is war, which each nation wages in its own typical way. War, according to Benes, cannot be rejected unequivocally, as some pacifists would have it. Under certain conditions war is even necessary, for example for preserving one`s own culture or for helping another endangered culture. At the same time, however, he argues that war is not an unambiguously positive and natural phenomenon. In fact, the social Darwinists of the time one-sidedly emphasized the principle of constant struggle in nature and wanted to apply it literally to society. War, in their view, was an effective principle of human progress. Edvard Beneš, on the other hand, stresses that in nature and society, in addition to struggle, the principle of mutually beneficial cooperation, mutualism, also works. Such a view, opposing the idea of an endless struggle of all against all, was also advocated, for example, by Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin. Beneš also stresses that social phenomena cannot be interpreted fully in terms of biological theories, which can only serve for analogical comparisons.
In his interpretation of biological theories, Edvard Beneš advocated a moderate point of view and was challenging the radical positions of many Darwinists (one-sided emphasis on natural selection, application of biological theories to society), which have appeared periodically since the 19th century until today. He advocated a broader concept, according to which more principles are at work in nature and society: besides struggle, there is also the principle of mutual cooperation.
