Lecture 3 Prof. Joseph Spoerl
Our topic for today is “Social Darwinism,” which is the attempt to derive moral or evaluative conclusions from the theory of evolution, often with a view to justifying the domination of the weak by the strong. As you know, Darwin’s theory of evolution says that a high rate of reproduction among plants and animals leads to a struggle for survival; this struggle for survival leads to natural selection and the survival of the fittest: the fit, the well-adapted, survive and pass on their advantages to their offspring, while the unfit, the poorly-adapted, die out. No sooner did Darwin publish his theory than commentators began the attempt to extract moral conclusions from it. Darwin alludes to one such attempt in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell written only two months after the publication of the Origin of Species. In this letter Darwin says: “I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib [i.e. review], showing that I have proved that might is right and therefore that Napoleon is right, and that every cheating tradesman is also right.”[1] So right off the bat, in 1859, Darwin was being accused of having concocted a theory that has the unsavory moral implication that “might is right,” that the strong have a right to trample on the weak.
Social Darwinism is not so much a single theory as it is a family of theories, so I want to distinguish between several varieties of Social Darwinism. These are metaphysical, economic, and racial Social Darwinism. These are distinct theories: a person who held one did not necessarily hold the others, so I will treat them one by one instead of lumping them all together. I will focus on one main writer as an illustration of each of these versions of Social Darwinism.
Let’s begin with metaphysical Social Darwinism. To illustrate this type of social Darwinism I will focus on Herbert Spencer, an important 19th C English philosopher and sociologist. Spencer lived from 1820 to 1903. Spencer was a remarkable, self-taught man who read widely in the natural science of his day. He was a free-lance writer who never held a university appointment. He attempted to distill from science philosophical or metaphysical conclusions about the nature of reality in general. By a remarkable coincidence, without ever having read or heard of Darwin, Spencer developed a theory of evolution similar to Darwin’s, a theory that Spencer developed in a book called Social Statics, published in 1850, nine years before the Origin of Species. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Spencer became an enthusiastic supporter of Darwin when the Origin of Species came out in 1859, and he set out to write a series of books in which he would apply the idea of evolution to all of the sciences and to every aspect of reality. He created what he called a “synthetic philosophy,” an all-inclusive philosophical theory that incorporated all scientific data and used a scientific methodology.
Let me very briefly summarize for you some of the elements of Spencer’s thinking. On the reverse side of your outline you will find a quotation (passage A.) from Spencer’s Social Statics (from 1850). In it he says:
“All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright when removed to a cold climate? It is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed…. Equally true is it that evil perpetually tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of life, this non-adaptation of an organism to its conditions is ever being rectified; and modification of one or both continues until the adaptation is complete…. Man exhibits just the same adaptability…. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower…. [S]o surely must the human faculties be molded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.”[2]
So, according to Spencer, all evil, all suffering, results from the failure of an organism to adapt to its environment. This applies to human beings as well: we suffer because we are not yet perfectly adapted to our environment. Our environment has two dimensions, the natural world and the social world. The increase in population over the past few thousand years has made the social state unavoidable: we have no choice now but to live in close proximity to many other people. Much of our suffering is due to the fact that we are only imperfectly adapted to social life: qualities that were helpful when we were hunters and predators, like aggression and violence, must give way to peaceful, cooperative habits for life in modern society to go smoothly. Our adaptation to social life is still incomplete, since we still have tendencies to violence and aggression, but we are gradually progressing. We are progressing because the pain that anti-social behavior causes gives us an incentive to avoid such behavior, and the pleasure that comes from peaceful cooperation with others motivates us to become more cooperative. So eventually human beings will become perfectly sociable, perfectly adapted to living at close quarters with others in densely populated societies.[3]
Spencer thought his theory had important implications for politics and economics. If progress is to occur, human beings must be made to feel the pain that comes from antisocial behavior, and the pleasure that comes from sociable behavior. Theft, murder, fraud, and laziness must therefore be punished, and honesty, diligence, and cooperation must be rewarded. The government, therefore, should protect private property, so that honest, diligent workers can reap the rewards of their virtue; it should punish thieves and murderers; and, to ensure that lazy, improvident, and antisocial people feel the pain of their vices, it should not step in to help them with welfare programs. So Spencer was a strong supporter of laissez faire capitalism, the system of private property, free markets, and limited government (that is, no regulations and no welfare programs).
Herbert Spencer was enormously influential in his day. He was especially influential in the United States, where his works were widely read. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that Spencer was second only to Darwin in affecting the way he and other American intellectuals thought about the universe.[4] A good example of this influence is given by Andrew Carnegie, the great American industrialist. Carnegie describes the impact of Spencer and Darwin on his intellectual development in his Autobiography (see quotation on reverse of outline, passage B.):
“When I … was in this stage of doubt about theology, including the supernatural element…. I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works: The Data of Ethics, First Principles, Social Statics, The Descent of Man….. I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. ‘All is well since all grows better’ became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection.”[5]
Notice the religious tone of Carnegie’s words. Evolution takes the place of divine providence. Progress is necessary. The more evolved necessarily triumphs over the less evolved; the more evolved is good, while the less evolved is evil[6]; so good necessarily triumphs over evil in the long run.
Let me sum up the key points about metaphysical social Darwinism. Metaphysical social Darwinism deduces from evolutionary theory the moral judgment that the universe is necessarily getting better. This applies to human beings too: human beings are constantly and necessarily evolving to a morally higher state.
Let us move on now to economic social Darwinism. In fact, we have already touched on it briefly, since Herbert Spencer was an economic as well as a metaphysical social Darwinist. Economic social Darwinism is the attempt to justify laissez faire capitalism by using Darwin’s theory of evolution. One of the most famous economic social Darwinists was another American disciple of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). Sumner was an economist and sociologist who taught for many years at Yale University. He was a passionate champion of capitalism and an equally passionate opponent of government intervention in the free market. While Sumner was influenced by Spencer, he did not share Spencer’s belief in the necessity of progress. He was an economic social Darwinist without being a metaphysical social Darwinist. He was all too aware of the fragility and reversibility of social progress. He thought that social progress depends entirely on the correct distribution of rewards and punishments in society.
To understand Sumner’s theory, imagine for a moment a pure, laissez faire capitalist society: no welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, FDIC, tariffs, energy assistance, farm subsidies, public schools, minimum wage laws, etc. Imagine that you lived in such a society. What would you do? Well, you would acquire some useful skills and find a job. You would avoid unemployment by working hard and being competent and constantly upgrading your skills, because there is no government unemployment insurance: you pay the price of your own unemployment, not someone else. You would save your money for a rainy day, because no one else will bail you out in an emergency or pay for your retirement; and you would shop around carefully for a well-managed bank, because there is no FDIC to bail you out if the bank goes broke. You would have no more children than you could afford to support and educate, because there are no public schools: you can’t force your neighbors to pay for educating your kids. If you are a farmer, you will raise only crops for which there is a market, since Uncle Sam won’t bail you out if no one will buy your wheat or soybeans. You would look after your health, because there is no Medicare or Medicaid to pay for healthcare if you ruin your health by smoking or drinking too much. If you owned a factory, you would make sure it was run efficiently so you could compete with foreign imports, because the government won’t protect you with tariffs.
In other words, in a pure laissez faire capitalist society, YOU pay the price for your own laziness, stupidity, and irresponsibility, so you have a powerful incentive not to be lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. Conversely, YOU reap the rewards of your own diligence, prudence, and sobriety, so you have a powerful incentive to be diligent, prudent, and sober.
Contrast this with a society in which the government constantly intervenes to help people who are in financial trouble. Some businesses have trouble competing with foreign imports, so the government slaps tariffs on foreign goods. Some people are hungry, so the government provides food stamps and school lunches. Some people are unemployed, so the government provides unemployment insurance. Some people lose their savings when badly managed banks go bankrupt, so the government guarantees bank deposits. Some people can’t afford heating bills, so the government pays them. Some people can’t afford health insurance, so the government pays for it. Some farmers can’t find customers to buy their crops, so the government buys them. Some people can’t afford school tuition, so the government guarantees free education for everyone. In this non-laissez faire capitalist society, people have far fewer incentives to be prudent: they don’t have to watch out for their own interests, since the government is doing it for them. So they are now more likely to run inefficient factories, to spend rather than save, to abuse their own health, to deposit money in badly run banks, to plant crops that no one will buy, to have more children than they can support.
Moreover, all of these government programs cost money. Someone must pay for the food stamps, the welfare, the unemployment insurance, the tariffs, the schools, the farm subsidies, the social security and Medicare, the deposit insurance. The people who pay are the people who have money to pay, namely, the honest, hard-working, uncomplaining, responsible people. They are forced to bail out the lazy, shiftless, improvident members of society. They are penalized for their prudence while the shiftless are rewarded for their imprudence. Virtue is punished and vice is rewarded when the government shifts from laissez faire to the welfare state.
One of Sumner’s most famous essays is entitled “The Forgotten Man.” The forgotten man is the honest, uncomplaining, hard-working guy who is forced to pay for the welfare schemes devised by tender-hearted social reformers. Sumner writes (see reverse of outline, passage C.):
“When you see a drunkard in the gutter, you are disgusted, but you pity him. When a policeman comes and picks him up, you are satisfied. You say that ‘society’ has interfered to save the drunkard from perishing. Society is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble of thinking, to say that ‘society’ acts. The truth is that the policeman is paid by somebody, and when we talk about society we forget who it is that pays. It is the Forgotten Man again. It is the industrious workman going home from a hard day’s work, whom you pass without noticing, who is mulcted [fined or swindled] of a percentage of his day’s earnings to hire a policeman to save the drunkard from himself. All the public expenditure to prevent vice has the same effect. If we let nature alone, she cures vice by the most frightful penalties. It may shock you to hear me say it, but when you get over the shock, it will do you good to think of it: a drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.”[7]
Elsewhere Sumner writes: “Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”[8]
To sum up: economic social Darwinism justifies laissez faire capitalism by arguing that it promotes social progress by rewarding virtues like diligence, frugality, and sobriety while penalizing vices like laziness, wastefulness, and intemperance.
Finally, we come to racial social Darwinism and its most infamous proponent, Adolf Hitler.[9] Racial social Darwinism says that some “races” (the Germans or Aryans, Hitler believed) are biologically superior to others and that the allegedly superior races ought to keep themselves pure and to dominate the allegedly inferior races.
First some background.[10] The modern science of genetics began in 1900 with the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance. The initial successes of genetic science led to a naïve confidence that many social problems have a simple genetic cause and an equally simple genetic solution. This was the conviction that drove the eugenics movement in the early 1900s in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. The eugenics movement sought human improvement through control of reproduction. For example, in the U.S. the eugenics movement persuaded many states to pass laws that allowed involuntary sterilization of criminals and people with low intelligence (the mentally ill and retarded and anyone with a low IQ). Many states also passed laws prohibiting marriages between the races, since blacks were seen as genetically inferior to whites. The eugenics movement’s biggest victory was passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This law dramatically reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. from eastern and southern Europe and from other cultures considered genetically inferior. Many top geneticists testified in favor of this bill, since they were convinced of the genetic inferiority of Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Asians, and any ethnic group except the genetically “superior” Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe. (This law was not repealed until the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s.)
The eugenics movement of the early 1900s not only affected public policy in the U.S. It also had an enormous impact on Adolf Hitler. In 1924, while in prison after his failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler read a book called Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, by three leading German scientists. This book was one of the leading genetics textbooks in Europe at the time. The main sources of the data used by the authors of that textbook came from the scientific establishment of the United States.[11] Hitler also wrote his autobiography Mein Kampf while he was in prison, and its discussions of eugenics and genetics were directly influenced by his reading of Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene.
Let us turn now to Hitler’s views on eugenics and “racial hygiene.” Consider the following passage from Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (passage D. on your outline):
“Any crossing between two beings of not quite the same high standard produces a medium between the standards of the parents. That means: the young one will probably be on a higher level than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will succumb later on in the fight against the higher level. … The stronger has to rule, and he is not to amalgamate with the weaker one, that he may not sacrifice his own greatness. Only the born weakling can consider this as cruel, but … he is only a weak and limited human being; for, if this law [did not hold], all conceivable development towards a higher level, on the part of all … living beings, would be unthinkable for man.”[12] “…there is only one most sacred human right, and this right is at the same time the most sacred obligation, namely: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure, so that by the preservation of the best human material a possibility is given for a more noble development of … human beings.”[13]
Hitler therefore opposed marriages between Germans and what he (following the common prejudice of his time) considered “lower” races like Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, or blacks. He also favored selective breeding among Germans, the allegedly “purest” Germans mating with other “pure” Germans.[14] He also implemented the policy of euthanasia (i.e. killing) for defective Germans (the mentally ill and retarded, for example) to keep their inferior genes out of the gene pool. Most infamously, he finally resorted to genocide (the killing of whole ethnic groups) to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals, whom he saw as poisoning the human gene pool. So when Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf [15] that the “best and strongest” have “the right of victory” over the weak and inferior, he meant it in the most brutally literal way. Consider a few more quotations from Hitler:
“The whole work of nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness – an eternal victory of the strong over the weak. There would be nothing but decay in the whole of nature if this were not so. States which offend against this elementary law fall into decay.” “Through all the centuries force and power are the determining factors…Only force rules. Force is the first law.” “Always before God and the law the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.”[16]
One last quotation brings out the pseudo-Darwinian cast of Hitler’s thought:
“By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme Christianity would mean the systematic cult of human failure.”[17]
To sum up racial social Darwinism: Hitler thought that one group or “race” (the German or Aryan) is genetically superior to all others and that this superiority gives members of that group the right and the duty to keep themselves pure and to dominate, and even eradicate, what Hitler saw as inferior groups.
I want now to offer a brief assessment of Social Darwinism in all of its versions.
I think that all three forms of Social Darwinism rest on a mistake, a logical fallacy that philosophers call “the naturalistic fallacy.” The naturalistic fallacy always has the same form. It always goes something like this: “X occurs (or: X happens, X is ‘natural.’) Therefore, X is good (or: X ought to be done or allowed to occur).” This is a fallacy: that is, the conclusion just does not follow from the premise. It is natural for smallpox to kill everyone who does not have a natural immunity to it, but this is not good; it is much better for us to thwart the natural course of things by vaccination. It is natural for food to spoil and for spoiled food to make us sick, but this is hardly good; it is much better to refrigerate our food to thwart mother nature. By the same token, it may be “natural” for the strong to eliminate the weak, and for the weak and defective to die out in the struggle for existence, but it does not follow that this is good, or that we ought to eliminate the weak or allow them to die out. Just because a certain pattern occurs in nature does not mean that we human beings should follow that pattern ourselves.
The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of confusing facts and values, descriptions and prescriptions. Darwin’s theory is a description of the way the world is: “a high rate of increase leads to a struggle for existence, which in turn leads to natural selection and the survival of the fittest.” These are not moral or evaluative judgments. They are not saying how things should be. They are saying how things are. To read Darwin’s theory and to conclude, as Carnegie did, that “All is well since all grows better” is to miss the point of it. It is not a theory about the way things should be, but about the way things happen to be. Indeed, natural science in general is descriptive, not prescriptive. Albert Einstein wrote, “As long as we remain within the realm of science proper, we never meet with a sentence of the type, ‘Thou shalt not lie’… Scientific statements of facts and relations … cannot produce ethical directives.”[18]
Consider the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” The term “fittest” here does not designate a moral concept. It means only “best adapted to its environment.” It does not mean the most beautiful or the most morally virtuous. As Darwin says in the reading you have done, “low and simple forms will long endure if well-fitted for their simple conditions of life.”[19] The plants Darwin described on the Galapagos Islands were survivors, but they were ugly and aesthetically uninteresting. Modern scientists tell us that the earliest and simplest organisms, bacteria, are also the most successful of all organisms, with a total biomass that may well exceed that of all other organisms combined.[20] The courageous Germans who stood up to the Nazis got killed, but the cowards who did the Nazis’ bidding survived. So “fittest” is a biological concept, not a moral or aesthetic attribute.
It is worth asking whether Darwin himself was a social Darwinist. The answer, I think, is “no,” and this is another piece of evidence that Social Darwinism is in fact a distortion of Darwin’s theory. In The Descent of Man, Darwin observes that civilized human beings go out of their way to help the weak – with welfare systems, hospitals, vaccinations, orphanages, homes for the mentally ill and retarded, and so forth.[21] Darwin makes the interesting statement that “no one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” (By this he means that by helping the weak and defective to survive, we are allowing them also to reproduce and pass on their defects to their offspring.) But then he asserts that the sympathy that leads us to rescue and protect the weak and the handicapped is the noblest thing in us, something that we should cherish and nurture. Nature might allow the weak to die out, and the strong to triumph, but we human beings must not imitate nature in this respect, for to do so would be to sacrifice what is best and noblest in ourselves, our capacity for sympathy and love. It is a mark of Darwin’s greatness that he had the logical acumen to distinguish between the natural and the noble and the human decency to prefer the latter to the former.
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Beckwith, Jon. Making Genes, Making Waves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study In Tyranny. Revised edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Gramercy Books, 1979. First published 1859.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent Of Man. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. First published 1871.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1999.
Flew, A.G.N. Evolutionary Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940.
Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism In American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. First published 1944.
Huxley, T.H. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. New York: Appleton, 1896.
Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Olson, Steve. Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Singer, Peter. A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970. First published 1850.
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Ethics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978. First published 1892-3.
Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
[1] Cited in Singer, p. 10.
[2] Spencer, 1850, pp. 54-60.
[3] Spencer, 1850, pp. 57-8.
[4] Hofstadter, p. 32; see Hofstadter, Ch. 2, “The Vogue of Spencer.”
[5] Carnegie, p. 327. On the complicated question of just how far Carnegie was a disciple of Spencer, see Wall pp. 391-7.
[6] Spencer, 1893, vol. I, p. 61: “…the conduct to which we apply the name good, is the relatively more evolved conduct; and … bad is the name we apply to conduct which is relatively less evolved.”
[7] Sumner, 1963, p. 122.
[8] Sumner, 1963, pp. 76-7.
[9] In discussing racism, it is difficult to avoid using the term “race,” even though it is a highly problematic word with no precise meaning. Steve Olson remarks (2002, pp. 33-4): “For a long time people have tried to use the physical differences among groups to divide human beings into discrete categories called ‘races.’ They have sorted humans into three races, five races, thirty races, even thousands of ‘microraces.’ Many schemes have been proposed; none has worked. There are just too many exceptions, too much overlap among groups. Humans just don’t sort neatly into biological categories, despite all the attempts of human societies to create and enforce such distinctions. Meanwhile, the word ‘race’ has become so burdened with misconceptions, so weighed down by social baggage, that it serves no useful purpose. The sooner its use can be eliminated, the better.”
[10] The following is taken from Beckwith 2002, pp. 98-115.
[11] Beckwith, 2002, p. 108. See also Olson p. 183.
[12] Hitler, p. 390.
[13] Hitler, p. 606.
[14] Cited in Bullock, pp. 399-400.
[15] Hitler, p. 396
[16] Cited in Bullock, pp. 398-399.
[17] Cited in Flew, p. 36.
[18] Cited in Singer pp. 12-13 and Flew p. 42. For a cogently argued rebuttal of metaphysical social Darwinism by one of Darwin’s contemporaries and disciples, see T.H. Huxley, 1896.
[19] Sophomore Humanities Reader, 2003-5, p. 336-7
[20] Mayr, 2001, p. 278.
[21] Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch. V, pp. 138-9. Some other evidence from The Descent of Man that Darwin’s morality was not that of the racial or economic social Darwinists: sympathy for all other sentient beings is “the noblest virtue with which man is endowed” (p. 127); “as [man’s] sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals – so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher” (p. 129); “disinterested love for all living creatures” is “the most noble attribute of man” (p. 130); “the golden rule, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise,’ …lies at the foundation of morality” (p. 131); “to do good unto others—to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you—is the foundation stone of morality” (p. 136). Darwin does, however, slip into metaphysical social Darwinism at the very end of the penultimate paragraph of the Origin of Species, where he writes: “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection” (Darwin, Origin, p. 459; see the Sophomore Humanities Reader, 2003-5, p. 344). The premise in this inference is false, unless one implausibly defines “good” as a state of being comparatively well-adapted to one’s environment (a definition that Darwin himself rejects in Ch. V of The Descent of Man, as demonstrated by the quotations just cited in this note).