Return to module outline.Loss of Childhood: Week 2
The unfortunate history of past attempts to unite
the theory of evolution with theories of the social.
Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer
Return to module outline.
Last updated 30.09.11.
Introduction and Overview
Consider the final claim made in Weikart's book, From Darwin to Hitler - in the reference list:
Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism, especially in its Social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world's greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy (Weikart 2004: 233).
This is such a troubling, and perhaps unanticipated conclusion to draw from Darwin - and here is some more:
... Nazi barbarism was motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific. The evolutionary process became the arbiter of all morality. Whatever promoted the evolutionary progress of humanity was deemed good, and whatever hindered biological improvement was considered morally bad. Multitudes must perish in this Malthusian struggle anyway, they reasoned, so why not improve humanity by speeding up the destruction of the disabled and the inferior races? According to this logic, the extermination of individuals and races deemed inferior and 'unfit' was not only morally justified, but indeed, morally praiseworthy. Thus Hitler - and many other Germans - perpetrated one of the most evil programmes the world has ever witnessed under the delusion that Darwinism could help us discover how to make the world better (Weikart, 2004: 226).
To say the very least, this sets the educational stakes very high indeed, and obviously raises the temperature of any casual discussion about birth control and IVF. What is missing from these quotes is part of Weikart's more detailed explanation in which it becomes clear that his use of the term 'Darwinism' in these quotes refers to an account of Darwin that gained popularity in Germany in general in the last half of the Nineteenth Century (see Ernst Haeckel, below), and amongst Hitler's circle of friends in the late 1920s in particular. This owed very little to the account of evolution developed in Darwin's Origin of Species. Instead, the principal source was the extended writings of Herbert Spencer, coupled with the work of one of Darwin's own relations, Francis Galton - one of the principal sources of inspiration for the 'science' of eugenics.
Weikart usefully provides a detailed narrative of how Spencer's work became absorbed by the German intellectual and scientific tradition - but equivalents could be constructed in North America, Australia, and Norway. For the specifically German uptake of these ideas, the principal figure to note is Ernst Haeckel. Although no moral philosopher, Haeckel's interpretation of Darwin's writings derived five implications which Weikart itemises.
Darwinism undermines mind-body dualism and renders superfluous the idea of a human soul distinct from the physical body,
Darwinism implies determinism, since it explains human psychology entirely in terms of the laws of nature,
Darwinism implies moral relativism, since morality changes over time and a variety of moral standards exist even within the human species,
Human behaviour, and thus moral character are, at least in part, hereditary,
Natural selection (in particular, group selection) is the driving force producing altruism and morality.
Weikart: 25.
Darwin - to a lesser extent, Spencer - followed the mainstream of British moral philosophy in rejecting Kant and other Enlightenment rationalists, preferring instead the conclusions which were expressed by Hume and Shaftsbury, i.e., stressing the importance of acting upon the impulses that followed from normal upbringing within civil life, relying on the education and 'wisdom' of the 'natural' sentiments (note, this is different again from Rousseau). This Humean perspective reduced morality almost to the level of custom, but Darwin also stressed that in humans the moral sense developed from a combination of social instincts and rationality, and, to quote Weikart for the last time,
Darwin further explained that human social instincts and group selection had led quite naturally - with no need for supernatural intervention - to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Thus, he assured his contemporaries, his theory was nothing to fear, for it confirmed one of the central tenets of Judeo-Christian morality (Weikart: 21).
Herbert Spencer
OK. At this point it is useful to turn to Spencer himself, and the extended article by Robert Richards and others in the reference list ('The Relation of Spencer's Evolutionary Theory to Darwin's'). Richards provides many details of context, but for our immediate concerns the following points should be noted:
In Darwin's Origin of Species, Spencer is recognised as a predecessor, and in one of his letters to a friend describes Spencer as the 'greatest living philosopher in England'.
Both men read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and were drawn to consider Lamarckism seriously (the inheritance of characteristics acquired while the individual parent is in the adult form).
However, Spencer was much more interested than Darwin in drawing conclusions about the nature of society, and this seems to have made Lamarckism a much more striking theory for him, despite Lyell's final rejection of this account of speciation.
Like Darwin, Spencer employed Malthus's notion of population pressure, but he used it to draw conclusions for society which diametrically opposed those of Malthus himself. 'Spencer argued that as populations grew, individuals would have to accommodate themselves to increasingly difficult circumstances; habits would have to be developed to articulate men to these circumstances; and these habits, as well as the anatomical changes they would induce, would sink into the heritable structure of the organism.' (Richards: 21) (Think perhaps of Wells and his story of The Time Machine and the Eloi and Morloks - but was Spencer thinking of this process as a form of speciation, or more simple, specialisation? What would be the difference?)
The resulting social evolutionism/perfectionism/progressivism was partially accepted by Darwin.
Spencer identified a form of natural selection, in that he suggested there would be constant progress towards higher degrees of 'skill, intelligence, and self-regulation - a better co-ordination of actions - a more complete life.', i.e., those failing to meet these increasingly sophisticated survival demands would die. This view is interesting to compare with Teilhard de Chardin's very different account of human development - see his The Phenomenon of Man (and moving away from the intentionally scientific, Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men).
Spencer suggested that population pressure would reduce as the species became more intelligent, since he believed that the more intelligent the species, the less the progeny.
This reference to the progress of human society needs to be balanced by Spencer's recognition that 'the survival of the fittest' (his phrase, not Darwin's) would not always ensure higher intelligence: '... very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes survival.' Richards adds a paradoxical corollary: 'Superiority, whether in size, strength, activity, or sagacity, is, other things equal, at the cost of diminished fertility.' Richards: 24-5.
For Spencer, human survival of the fittest meant principally the elimination of 'humanly' inferior traits, not the selection of favourable attributes and the building up of progressively better attributes. Richards concludes with an important summary of Spencer's position: 'The creativity of evolution, in Spencer's scheme, was left to Lamarckian functional accommodations. But for Darwin, natural selection was creative and produced better, more progressively advanced creatures.' Richards: 25. Darwin, as you probably know, introduced his readers to the importance of 'sports' - mutations as we would call them.
Whatever the strength of these limitations, Spencer offered a powerful set of ideas to explain social change, and even a set of principles to evaluate social action and policy, i.e., education, to name but one arena. (At this point, stop and ask yourself just what kind of educational system Spencer would be advocating today.) However, prior to the publication of The Origin of Species, all of Spencer's accounts of physical and mental change relied on Lamarckian principles: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. After the Origins' publication, Spencer began to appreciate the explanatory power of natural selection, but continued to argue for both systems - natural selection explaining broad changes that matched organisms to their environment, but his own version of Lamarckism then operating as the means by which the observed precision of matching between species and environment took place. In his view, this was the only way the improbabilities of evolution could be explained [making him, perhaps, a front-runner for contemporary arguments for intelligent design?]. But as has been said, his main interest was in human mental evolution, and he was one of the first authors to write texts with such titles as Principles of Psychology and Principles of Sociology. His socialist utopianism entailed the belief that human beings would become ever better adapted to the demands of social living, so that the greatest intellectual and ethical satisfactions might eventually be obtained for the species.
Spencer, Darwin, and Social Darwinism
The term 'Social Darwinism' can hardly be laid in all its negative connotations at the door of Herbert Spencer alone. While Spencer and Darwin disagreed over the significance of Lamarckian inheritance for social life and the fine tuning of evolution, both were clear that human evolution took place within an environment that was, at least in part, socially constructed.
Throughout the last half of the Nineteenth Century, ideas of nationhood and racial identity were undergoing rapid development, prompted in part by increasing industrialisation and the widespread European enthusiasm for colonial exploitation following the model set by Britain (which in turn had been inspired by the maritime colonial expansion of Spain, Portugal, and Venice before them). The concepts of nation and 'race' were typically presented at the time, not only as 'natural' conditions of being, but as conditions that made it easy to perceive a hierarchy of human types in which the white European (an assumed male) stood at the pinnacle of progression. By mid-century, England and its enormous empire offered to many observers vindication of the view that the English were the 'top' nation, and that Englishmen and women (according to the 'natural' aptitudes of their different sexes) represented one of the highest, if not the highest, form of humanity. But for the less jingoistically inclined there were contradictory strands within this perception. The fate of the Roman empire was both a source of fascination and a warning to more than just the Romantic poets. A century of muscular Christianity of one sort or another may have led many to conclude that the refinement of European culture, and its systems of moral conduct, were so developed as to make impossible a collapse back into barbarism - but then there was the growing competition between the nation states themselves, and later on - for the British - the experience of the Crimean War and then the Boer War. Alongside the more smug assessments of Britishness and progress there was always the memory of the dark start to the nineteenth century - the shock and dismay felt throughout European states as those holding national power and authority watched, first the destruction of all pre-existing tradition by the French Regicides, and then the subsequent descent into terror as the fury of the Parisian mob began to engulf its own in its enthusiasm for 'Madame Guillotine'. Later still, they saw France rebuild itself around a probably demonic, and certainly unstoppable, conqueror in the diminutive shape of Napoleon Bonaparte - who, for a while, became emperor of almost all Western Europe.
Which is all to say that by the time Darwin published his Origin of Species, although the value of Western Civilisation was still widely accepted as an unquestionable good, its stability was no longer taken for granted - arguments along the lines of there being, at least in potentiam, a national fight for survival were 'in the air'. Initially, this fight for survival appeared to be contingent on the degree to which societies were capable of controlling the human passions - the 'bestial heritage' of their masses, and of course both of authors - Spencer and Darwin - assumed that such control was both possible and desirable. The Nineteenth Century conclusion - if one could speak of such a thing - was that if educational and social policies failed in this respect, Western (and other) civilisations might start to follow Rome. Some authors warned darkly that this was already the case and that the process of decline had set in leading to an inevitable conclusion. (cf. again H. G. Wells' story, The Time Machine, written in 1887 and offering a profoundly pessimistic view of what would happen in the future even if wars did not totally destroy the Western world - and again his other highly influential text The War in the Air ends after universal aerial bombardment with all civilised states having been driven back to the conditions of the Middle Ages.
With this shifting context in mind, Herbert Spencer's later and partial appropriation of Darwin's ideas is illustrative of what nineteenth century European culture was capable of, and also serves as a model for what the early twentieth century would also be susceptible to. The general name for this phenomenon is 'Social Darwinism'. Herbert Spencer had already published works offering a form of evolutionary analysis of society before Darwin published his Origin of Species, and it was Spencer, not Darwin, who first used the word 'evolution'. In fact, Spencer had made such a mark with the word (see the section on Haeckel, above) that Darwin initially rejected it because of its connotations of progress - connotations which Spencer had embraced and emphasised but which Darwin eschewed. In the many later revisions of his key texts, Spencer substituted part of Darwin's explanatory framework for that offered by Lamarck, and Darwin seems initially to have been bemused, if not satisfied, that Spencer's conclusions were roughly consistent with his own. However, Darwin repudiated two aspects of Spencer's work. First, the assumption that evolution itself was teleological - expressed a purpose - and that change necessarily embodied progress (according to Spencer, changes within and between types would always be towards greater perfection). Secondly, Spencer's readiness to apply one idea to everything, disregarding the variety of things and their myriad detail. In opposition to this stance, Darwin stressed in his introduction to the Origin of Species that natural selection was only one amongst a range of possible mechanisms accounting for change. In other words, Spencer's notion of evolution was dogmatically applied to the whole of society, the world, and the universe itself and, as Richards indicates, its supposed mode of operation was one of refinement - characteristics were whittled away through the generations until what remained was a pure essence - a perfect type. The other important assumption which Spencer made, in terms of theory, was that selection was re-located away from the individual organism and placed at the level of the population and its social group - another way in which educational and social policy making became of paramount importance in deciding the 'fitness' of the nation.
To sum up, what made these misinterpretations of Darwin's analysis of variation, differential survival, and speciation so significant (and potentially destructive) was the fact that one of the most striking slogans to be derived from later editions of The Origin of Species - 'survival of the fittest' - a phrase coined by Spencer but adopted by Darwin - was associated in the literature of Social Darwinism with the supposed moral duty to ensure 'survival of the most advanced'. From here, those so inclined could readily infer that this form of social competition necessarily entailed intellectual and moral domination and physical, and especially reproductive, curtailment of the power of the 'lower' working classes. [Much depends on what one means by 'most advanced' - see Nietzsche, F. (1998 [1887]) On the Genealogy of Morals Oxford: Oxford University Press for a critique of Spencer's position and a radically different take on social evolution.] The sometimes draconian state interventions that followed the identification of needs relating to 'social hygiene' in various Victorian city councils and in other European cities often rested on the assumption that the morally and intellectually superior were in danger of being out-bred by 'degenerate' classes, races, etc. (cf. Malthus's analysis of population growth but, principally, the writings of an infamous relation of Darwin's, Francis Galton). This ideology provided, therefore, a 'scientific' justification for legislation intended to at least maintain the status quo with respect to the more advanced classes of humanity, if not actually improve their condition (cf. the work of Jacob Riis in America and the 'hygienic' interventions of Leeds City Council documented by John Tagg - see his The Burden of Representation, and Riis' How The Other Half Lives - both in the library).
This view entailed, therefore, that the rules of conduct existing within particular societies should (note the moral force here) be evaluated in terms of their capacity to increase or decrease the reproductive chances of morally superior groups, classes, nations, and races. Once again, note how these bits of real history are played out again in the stories of our two authors. Education within this perspective should bifurcate into institutional provision for the upper classes - destined to take their place in an educational meritocracy - and some adequate provision for the lower classes sufficient to control both their destructive potential and their indiscriminate breeding habits. Not the least aspect the provisions a lower class education should achieve would be a general duty of service towards those of more social significance than themselves - a readiness to serve and, if required to do so, a willingness to step aside for the greater good of the community and the advance of civilisation (cf. Plato's Republic?). Spencer also argued that competition within and between the social classes, and the economic 'battles' of the Modern era, now largely substituted for the species' previous battles against nature which had been fought on our behalf by our distant ancestors. Similarly, the development of social technologies such as medicine, agriculture, and the institutions supporting the exercise of military power would substitute for the members of a race having developed strong limbs, far-seeing eyes, and powerful minds (the example of the rise of Prussian militarism and bureaucracy was often cited at this time - the Prussion late mid-century invasion of France and the rout of the French forces were taken as powerrful object lessons).
Social Darwinism revisited - today and in the recent past
Social Darwinism is now generally accepted as being a far too humanised version of the radical inhumanity of Darwin's theory of evolution, as Richard Dawkins has eloquently argued. But Darwin himself sometimes lapsed into this framework of assumptions at various points while writing The Origin of Species; he was, after all, a man of his times. (See, for instance, his difficulties in explaining altruistic behaviour in Man and other animals.) In summary form, the main assumptions of this Spencer-inspired ideology were:
A useful American site to visit in relation to all of this is at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
Eugenics
Is eugenics an inevitable consequence of Spencer's theorising about social progress?
However much Spencer can really be charged with being the philosopher of Galton-inspired eugenics, in both the German and North American traditions this link was made. Weikart documents the development of the social thinking which led to Hitler's own policy of eugenic control over the German 'stock', but Hitler was not alone in believing that social Darwinism implied that controlled selection of a human population would result in greater protection, if not strengthening of the 'blood lines' or 'race.' Using 'Eugenics' as a keyword search in the library will produce a number of very interesting selections put out by the Eugenics Society - they are all worth browsing, since they provide insight into the consequences of interpreting Darwin and Spencer in this way. All of the examples discussed were developed before the 'New Synthesis' - the combination of Darwinian theory with Mendelian genetics - was worked out. By and large, all such societies share a similar optimism about calcuable national genealogies being achieved by expulsion, by imprisonment, by sterilisation, and by death, so as to remove undesirable 'types' or 'traits' from their populations. Similarly, they are equally optimistic about the extent to which selective breeding of couples deemed to posses desirable characteristics can produce rapid social improvement.
Historically, in nearly all cases, the first expressions of interest in eugenic policies within any one nation state were formulated in terms of assumptions about their having been in the past, and existing until very recently, a relatively homogeneous population, e.g. eugenics was proposed as a solution to the consequences of letting 'outsiders' and other 'undersirables' breed with the national stock, such as the 'feeble minded', hardened criminals, and particularly if the nation possessed colonies, the 'primitive' indigenous groups). One begins, therefore, to recognise how widespread were expressions which today we tend to associate more or less exclusively with the Nazis. And even in this case, Hitler's state was initially far harsher in its actions towards 'deviant' German types than it was towards other races, notably the Jews. It was only after the failure of aggressive social policies intended to 'drive out' the Jews from German society - policies such as the appropriation of Jewish goods and businesses, the denial of any means of employment, and the eventual mass imprisonment of those Jews remaining within Greater Germany, that the Holocaust began in earnest - and throughout this period it continued to be more than just an atrocity against the Jews alone. Apart from other 'races', the Holocaust also engulfed political opponents of the regime, those exhibiting 'non-Aryan' sexual persuasions, and of course, those deemed to be mentally unstable.
Today, the consensus view on the utility of Social Darwinism to achieving social utopianism amounts to something like the following:-
the scientific optimism of selective breeding was misplaced - genetics, particularly human genetics, is not so obliging; and the basis for selection - the criteria of 'race', mental instability, homosexuality, criminal status, etc. were often arbitrarily defined and bore only slight or indirect relationships to any underlying genetic reality. In other words, even assuming that state sanctioned selective breeding could ever be moral, in the case of these historical examples it failed to produce the results which were supposed to justify the practice in the first place. Genetically, the typically identified human 'races' are almost indistinguishable, and the complexity of most genetic systems of inheritance for physical and mental characteristics entails that the kinds of human selection process typically proposed offered a very blunt instrument indeed with which to try and mould such a sophisticated an outcome. Nevertheless, the example of domestic selective breeding does give pause for thought. While notions of Aryan superiority over other 'races' proved to be a nonsense, e.g. the Berlin Olympics of 1932, there is little doubt that if eugenic principles had continued to be ruthlessly applied, Germany might well have ended up within a few centuries being populated by exclusively blonde haired and blue eyed people - assuming no immigration and no 'miscegenation.' However, it is doubtful if even Hitler, or his subsequent followers, would have been satisfied with what would have remained little more than a 'cosmetic' outcome. As Weikart makes clear, Hitler's assumption was that it would be possible through eugenics to mould the intellectual and physical characteristics of the German people and their descendents sufficiently to result in their literal superiority over all other human forms. A more careful study of domestic breeding might have given the Nazi scientists pause for thought. While breeders have been reasonably successful in moulding body types, their abilities to mould aspects such as intellect and temperament have been much more questionable. Where there have been successes it has nearly always been to produce smaller and more docile, i.e., less intelligent, forms than those formed in the 'wild' - pit-bull terriers notwithstanding.
References and Bibliography
Behe, M. (2003) Darwin's Black Box New York: Free Press Association.
Cadberry, D. (2001) The Dinosaur Hunters London: Fourth Estate; very good account of the social and institutional context for pre- and post- Darwinian thinking about evolution.
Cartright, J. (2000) Evolution and Human Behaviour Basingstoke: Palgrave; textbook review of Darwin, Spencer, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
Chandrasekhar, S. (1981) 'A Dirty Filthy Book' Berkeley: University of California Press; Nineteenth Century reactions to birth control.
Chesterson, G. K. (2000 [1922]) Eugenics and Other Evils Seattle: Inkling Books; excellent reproduction by a terrific writer giving you much insight into the extent to which this 'science' was being taken seriously at the time. At the back of the book are some heavily commented reproductions of eugenics literature.
Foucault,
M. (1992) Madness and Civilisation
Fudge, E., Gilbert, R. & Wiseman, S. (eds.) (1999) At the Borders of the Human: beasts, bodies, and natural philosophy in the early modern period Basingstoke: Macmillan; good range of essays for context leading to Darwin's Descent of Man.
Gould, S. J. (1997) Life's Grandeur: the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin London: Vintage ((1996) Very readable and useful analysis of the mechanisms and implications of Darwinian selection. In particular, this book contains an excellent analysis of the place of 'progress' within evolutionary thinking.
Gould, S. J. (1996) The Mismeasure of Man London: W. W. Norton & Co.; extremely useful background reading to eugenics and social darwinism.
Hayles, K. (1999) How We became Post-Human Chicago: University of Chicago Press - onward and ever upward?
.
Jones, G. & Peel, R. (2003) Herbert Spencer: the intellectual legacy London: The Galton Institute; try to make the time to at least read the second article in this collection of essays by Robert Richards; 'The Relation of Spencer's Evolutionary Theory to Darwin's'.
Kohn, M. (2004) A Reason for Everything: natural selection and the English imagination London: Faber & Faber; well-written sequence of biographies of the principal theoreticians involved in developing our present understanding of the theory.
Macfarlane, A. (2003) The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian trap Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Malik, K. (2000) Man, Beast and Zombie: what science can and
cannot tell us about human nature
Malthus, T. R. (1999) An Essay on the Principles of Population, Oxford, Oxford Classics; the key text for Darwin's Origin of Species.
Midgley, M. (!978) Beast and Man: the roots of human nature Hassocks: Harvester Press.
Midgley, M. (2001) Science and Poetry London: Routledge.
Midgley, M. (2002) Evolution as Religion London: Routledge.
Montagu, A. (ed.) (1980) Sociobiology Examined Oxford: Oxford University Press; an early and much respected critique.
O’ Hear,
A. (1997) Beyond Evolution: human nature
at the limits of evolutionary explanation
Peel, A. ed. (1996) Marie Stopes: eugenics and the English birth control movement London: Galton Institute
Peel, A. ed. (1998) Essays in the History of Eugenics London: Galton Institute
Richardson, A. (2003) Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century Oxford: Oxford University Press; chapters 4 to 8 are particularly pertinent.
Tone, A. ed. (1997) Controlling Reproduction: an American history Wilmington: S. R. Books; very good interplay between academic essay writing and reproduced case study material which extends into the various aspects of the abortion debate
Trivers, R. (2002) Natural Selection and Social Theory Oxford: Oxford University Press - his take on evolutionary psychology.
Uglow, J. (2002) The Lunar Men London: Faber & Faber; extremely readable account of an eighteenth century group of amateur scientists reacting to Rousseau, Linnaeus, and anticipating Charles Darwin.
Weikart, R. (2004) From Darwin to Hitler Basingstoke: Palgrave; excellent study of the various interpretations of Social Darwinism leading to eugenics and mass killings on 'rational' grounds.
West-Eberhard, M. (2003) Developmental Plasticity and Evolution Oxford: Oxford University Press; extensive, detailed, and often illustrated accounts that demonstrate better than Darwin could the creativity of natural selection. Well worth reviewing in relation/comparison with Spencer's notion of evolution.
Some useful websites:
Evolution (and Darwin)
Malthus
Herbert Spencer
Social Darwinism
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/spencer-darwin.html
Intelligent Design
http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/
http://actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html
http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html
a comedic response : http://www.venganza.org/
and the SouthPark view on this idea - you need sound for the video clip: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/11/evolution_on_so.html
