---
title: "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin"
chunk: 13/14
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:12.127004+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Alleged support of eugenics and racism ===
Teilhard has been criticized by the theologian John P. Slattery for allegedly incorporating elements of scientific racism, social Darwinism, and eugenics into his work. He argued in 1929 that racial inequality was rooted in biological difference: "Do the yellows—[the Chinese]—have the same human value as the whites? [Fr.] Licent and many missionaries say that their present inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I'm afraid that this is only a 'declaration of pastors.' Instead, the cause seems to be the natural racial foundation…" In a letter from 1936 explaining his Omega Point conception, he rejected both the Fascist quest for particularistic hegemony and the Christian/Communist insistence on egalitarianism: "As not all ethnic groups have the same value, they must be dominated, which does not mean they must be despised—quite the reverse … In other words, at one and the same time there should be official recognition of: (1) the primacy/priority of the earth over nations; (2) the inequality of peoples and races. Now the second point is currently reviled by Communism … and the Church, and the first point is similarly reviled by the Fascist systems (and, of course, by less gifted peoples!)". In the essay 'Human Energy' (1937), he asked, "What fundamental attitude … should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving what is so often no more than one of life's rejects? … To what extent should not the development of the strong … take precedence over the preservation of the weak?" The theologian John P. Slattery interprets this last remark to suggest "genocidal practices for the sake of eugenics".
Even after World War II Teilhard continued to argue for racial and individual eugenics in the name of human progress, and denounced the United Nations declaration of the Equality of Races (1950) as "scientifically useless" and "practically dangerous" in a letter to the agency's director Jaime Torres Bodet. In 1953, he expressed his frustration at the Church's failure to embrace the scientific possibilities for optimising human nature, including by the separation of sexuality from reproduction (a notion later developed e.g. by the second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex), and postulated "the absolute right … to try everything right to the end—even in the matter of human biology".
The theologian John F. Haught has defended Teilhard from Slattery's charge of "persistent attraction to racism, fascism, and genocidal ideas" by pointing out that Teilhard's philosophy was not based on racial exclusion but rather on union through differentiation, and that Teilhard took seriously the human responsibility for continuing to remake the world. With regard to union through differentiation, he underlined the importance of understanding properly a quotation used by Slattery in which Teilhard writes, "I hate nationalism and its apparent regressions to the past. But I am very interested in the primacy it returns to the collective. Could a passion for 'the race' represent a first draft of the Spirit of the Earth?" Writing from China in October 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Teilhard expressed his stance towards the new political movement in Europe, "I am alarmed at the attraction that various kinds of Fascism exert on intelligent (?) people who can see in them nothing but the hope of returning to the Neolithic". He felt that the choice between what he called "the American, the Italian, or the Russian type" of political economy (i.e. liberal capitalism, Fascist corporatism, Bolshevik Communism) had only "technical" relevance to his search for overarching unity and a philosophy of action.

=== Other ===
Fritjof Capra's systems theory book The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture positively contrasts Teilhard to Darwinian evolution.

== Bibliography ==
The dates in parentheses are the dates of first publication in French and English. Most of these works were written years earlier, but Teilhard's ecclesiastical order forbade him to publish them because of their controversial nature.  The essay collections are organized by subject rather than date, thus each one typically spans many years.