Peter Dickens
Fitzwilliam College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge CB3 OJG
peter@15chedworth.freeserve.co.uk
wc:
2060
SOCIAL DARWINISM
Social Darwinism is the
application of the theory of natural selection to human society.
Alfred Wallace, the theory’s co-discoverer, once asked Charles
Darwin whether he would follow up his Origin of Species with a
book on human beings.
Darwin replied:
You ask whether I shall
discuss ‘man’. I think
I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices,
though I fully admit it is the highest and most interesting problem
for the naturalist (Cited in Hawkins 1997:20)
Darwin was
understandably cautious.
But others have felt less constrained, with the result that
massive theoretical and political issues have arisen.
Most living creatures,
Darwin and Wallace argued, produce many more offspring than are
needed to reproduce their numbers. Such multiplication, if left
unhindered, meant that ‘the earth would soon be covered by the
progeny of a single pair.’
However, the numbers of each species remained much the same
from one generation to the next. What was taking place?
A struggle for survival
and reproduction must be occurring, one between individuals and the
rest of nature. No two individuals are alike, each possessing
variations which confer advantages and disadvantages in the
struggle. Those
individuals with particular advantages will be those that develop
and reproduce future generations. All this, Darwin and Wallace
believed, occurs in the context of inevitable resource-shortages. As
Malthus had argued in the late 18th century, populations grow at a
geometric rate while food supplies grow arithmetically. The environment was
therefore active in eliminating those individuals without the
characteristics necessary to survive and
reproduce.
Turning now to Social Darwinism, human
characteristics can also be seen as resulting from struggle to
survive. Herbert Spencer, for example, looked forward to a society
in which individuals are free to realize their full potential. A long evolutionary process
would take place, leading to a race in which people found fulfilment
in aesthetic and spiritual matters, rather than in the materialism
of Spencer’s own day.
Those individuals not adapting and developing in this way
would slowly die out.
Note, however, a divergence between Spencer’s views and those
of Darwin. Spencer had
no Malthusian fear of over-population, believing that humans have
the capacity to adapt to environmental and social change. There are also differences
between Social Darwinists.
Spencer believed that state-intervention would delay the
improvement of the human species while William Sumner, the
influential Yale Social Darwinist, increasingly saw a need for
social reform.
The transfer of
evolutionary ideas to human beings is an intellectual and political
minefield. There are
five themes here; the politics of knowledge, the question of
‘struggle’, the notion of ‘progress’, the assumption of direction
and an ‘end’ to which evolution is developing.
As regards knowledge,
the theory of natural selection can easily be seen as a product of
its era and knowledge recruited to distinctive political ends. ‘The struggle for survival’,
for example, can be seen as a transposal of the social struggle (all
too apparent in Darwin’s Britain) to the non-human world. Similarly, the
‘successful’ variations are no less than the human success-stories
of middle-class Victorian society again transposed to the natural
world. Similarly,
Malthus’s theory of necessary resource-shortages is by no means the
objective and scientific theory as he claimed. Wallace, though clearly
influenced by Malthus, was also sympathetic to Owen’s
socialism. Such a
politics argues that ‘resource-shortages’ are not inevitable. They are a product of social
and property relations.
Similarly, forms of
social evolutionism were well-established before Darwin’s Origin. Herbert Spencer coined the
phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ some ten years before the
publication of The
Origin. As
applied to humanity, he meant the struggle between races to survive, the demise
of the weakest leaving the strongest to ‘keep up the average fitness
to the conditions of life’. Here again was
an apparently objective science being used to enhance an overtly
political programme.
Social Darwinism is sometimes seen as a ‘neutral instrument’,
albeit one capable of being recruited to by a range of political
positions.
Such adoption by a range of causes is a matter of historical
fact. But to
describe the theory as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ is probably being
over-deferential to this ‘science.’
These issues remain
important today.
‘Neo-Darwinism’ in the form of sociobiology also claimed to
be an objective form of knowledge. (This time the organism,
including the human organism, is seen as a carrier of and reproducer
of ‘selfish genes’ into future generations) (Dawkins 1989). But this
perspective too can also be seen as a product of its day, the
‘selfish gene’ being no less than the selfish person of
neo-liberalism transferred back to the natural world. But, all this
said, the theory of natural selection as developed by Darwin and
Wallace remains largely intact. It was a social construction
(what theory is not?) but many biologists would argue that it still
describes real causal mechanisms affecting both the natural and the
human worlds.
The ‘struggle for
survival’ is a problematic second theme. So too is the linked
question of ‘human nature’.
Darwin was again cautious over these matters; recognising in
The Descent of Man that
the struggle to reproduce can take a number of forms, including
various forms of co-operation.
Yet Social Darwinism is often equated with liberalism, with
attempts to prosper and with an idea of human nature which focuses
on the individual at the expense of her or his social and
environmental context.
Such an interpretation led to early support for Social
Darwinism from influential classes in North America. But alternative
understandings were made in other societies. Prince Kropotkin, the
Russian anarchist, argued strongly in his 1902 book Mutual Aid that the
fundamental feature of all nature, including human nature, was
mutualism and co-operation. The lesson of Darwin
here was that this propensity needed active support in capitalist
societies devoted to individualistic competition. Mutualistic and
solidaristic interpretations of Darwin were also more common in
other societies, including France.
We should also note
different understandings of both the struggle to survive and of
human nature in our own day. The Bell Curve, published in
1994 by Herrnstein and Murray, represents a contemporary form of
Social Darwinism.
They argue that intelligence is the prime means by which
human beings succeed in modern knowledge-based societies. Some
groups, particularly black people, are seen as possessing inherently
low levels of intelligence. White people are better endowed and
Asians have, it is argued, higher intelligence-levels than both
these groups.
Social stratification and social success are again,
therefore, seen as largely the result of individuals’ assumed
internal characteristics. Society, according to this position, is
itself ‘natural.’ Here
is another example of a science (in this case a science measuring
‘intelligence’) which is easily recruited to a particular kind of
politics. And it is a
‘science’ which is itself highly contested by many social and
natural scientists.
They would especially question over-simple notions of
‘intelligence’ and would argue that intellectual capacities are best
seen as developing during a person’s early lifetime.
Closely linked to the
‘science’ of intelligence is the fact Social Darwinism has often
been linked with eugenics.
This is the attempted speeding up of human evolution, the
selection of the ‘best’ humans and the neglect or even killing of
the supposedly ‘inferior.’ These concerns have
recently resurfaced with the rise of biotechnology and cloning. Embryos deemed to be ‘unfit’
can be modified or even destroyed. Such ‘unnatural selection’
must be of major concern but it is important to stay focused on the
more subtle, often unintended, effects of the social and ‘natural’
environment on people’s well-being.
‘Progress’ is a third
theme. Sumner, like
Spencer, argued strongly for a sense of ‘progress’ emerging from the
struggle to survive.
If human beings were allowed to realise their capacities
societies high levels of ‘civilisation’ would eventually be
achieved. As is often
still assumed, science was seen as the main means by which such
progress was to be achieved. The most ‘intelligent’
people are taken to be those best able to advance science and hence
society at large.
Progress, according to this perspective, therefore had
distinct normative connotations. It has close links
with the philosophical and sociological ideas of Georg Hegel and
Auguste Comte.
Progress, entailing increased scientific knowledge (including
knowledge of the self) is equated both with increased civilisation
and the creation of freed, emancipated, selves.
Darwin was aware of the
difficulties here but did not always resolve them. He claimed the ‘science’ of
natural selection to be value-free. Yet much of his language
describing evolutionary change implicitly adopted a notion of
progress. Note, for
example, the following from The Origin.
The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s
history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life and are
higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague
yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many palaeontologists, that
organisation on the whole has progressed.
(1968:129)
Darwin also espoused
aspects of Lamarckian thinking, especially in The Descent of Man. According to this view,
acquired characteristics could be inherited by later
generations. As people
continued fighting for survival, and so long as governments and
philanthropists did not interfere, the most favourable
characteristics would emerge and be passed to later
generations. Progress
was again the most likely outcome.
The progress question
closely links to our fourth theme, that of directionality. Spencer
and much of early sociology adopted a strong notion of
direction. For Spencer
and writers such as Emile Durkheim the direction of social change is
away from homogeneity towards structured heterogeneity. Directionality is also
a feature of much historical materialism. For Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, European history is divided into four distinct
eras; tribal, classical, feudal and capitalist. Communism would
be final, most ‘progressive’, outcome. Note in Marx and Engels the
significance of class-struggle with each society being an embryonic
version of the following social form. Note also the implication in
much social theory that all societies inevitably follow the same
direction. Such
understandings borrowed more or less explicitly from evolutionary
thought. The transition
from the simple to the complex was raised to a point of cosmic
significance by Spencer, an understanding which applied to the
human, biological and physical worlds. Contemporary sociologists
such as Niklaus Luhmann also maintain that society is increasingly
characterised by autonomous ‘sub-systems’, with the result that
modernity is increasingly ‘unsteerable’. Analogies are still
made between biological and social evolution. But paradoxically, and most
unfortunately, these make little contribution to the increasingly
urgent task of understanding how human societies are rooted in their
ecological environments.
Finally, note the related theme of teleology. Marx and Engels argued that
one of Darwinism’s main gains was ‘the death of teleology’; an end
to any notion that an organism or society is the result of any
pre-determined end. In
important ways this was achieved, with Darwinism delivering an
apparently fatal blow to Christian accounts of origins. Nevertheless, there remain
traces of teleology.
Darwin’s notion of a multiplicity of ‘species, genera and
families of organic beings’ all having ‘common parents’ has distinct
biblical overtones.
Indeed, evolutionary theory is arguably another science
offering itself as a God-surrogate and demanding constant uncritical
adulation. Such a
view can, however, be used to
marginalise the real scientific insights made by Darwin,
Wallace and others.
Future work linking
evolutionary and social thought must consider humans and other
species as an evolved species with distinct powers. But these potentials must be
seen as realised or constrained by different social and political
contexts. Critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar and others,
is a useful way forward. It recognises the reality of causal
mechanisms operating in the natural worlds (natural selection being
an example) while insisting on these theories being critically
assessed and taking account of how such mechanisms combine with
social relations and processes to produce the societies we actually
observe and experience.