Konrad Lorenz on human degeneration and social decline: a chronic preoccupation

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.