Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism was based on an analogy between the biological laws governing organisms and the laws governing human society. Social Darwinism became a dominant American philosophy during the Gilded Age. It seemed to support the system which produced the Rockefellers and Camegies, and businessmen readily acclaimed it.
Big business could draw on the views of philosophers and scientists to justify its actions. In 1859 Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, published his influential book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In this and later books, Darwin attempted to prove that in nature those plants and animals which survive do so because they are the fittest.
The sociologists generally confounded the so-called "struggle for existence" with Darwinism, and very few of them had any adequate idea of what Darwin's phrase "natural selection" meant. But the 19th Century sociologists had only a confused idea of the whole process which they imagine to constitute Darwinism. Darwinism was very generally confounded with Malthusianism, and the fact that Darwin modestly admitted that he was led to the consideration of such subjects by reading Maithus on The Principle of Population caused most of the sociological writers who graduated out of political economy into sociology, to identify the Malthusian law with Darwinism as a whole, and to imagine that when they have stated the former, which, as economists, they usually understand, they have stated Darwin's great biological principle, which they do not at all understand.
Darwin did not say nor mean to imply that the Malthusian principle embraced the whole of the biologic law. It is contained in the latter with certain qualifications, and naturally suggested the wider applications that Darwin made of it to the organic world; but it falls far short of embodying even the principle of natural selection.
The view of the Darwinian theory in its relation to human association was summarized by one of the foremost exponents of the theory of evolution as follows: "The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life, everywhere and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. . . . The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified fittest is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert nor alter it. "Many are called, but few are chosen." This principle of selection is as far as possible from democratic; on the contrary it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word." [Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching, p. 93.]
This view of the theory of selection is not an isolated interpretation; on the contrary it was the view held by the great majority of the authorities on the Darwinian theory, with a few exceptions, as well as by the immense body of popular opinion which followed the view of these authorities.
We lived in a world of struggle, and man is a fighting animal, said the adherents of this view. We must therefore resign ourselves to the fact of struggle as one of the laws of life, as one of the hard facts of existence in a world governed by the law of the survival of the fittest, where the weakest goes to the wall and all life is but a life of battle. War was held to be a part of this great law of evolution, which runs throughout the universe, and however much one may regret the horrors and the suffering which it brings in its train, it must be recognized that war is the cause of social progress.
Social Darwinism assumed that more people are born than can survive because of limitations of food and room; to quote Malthus, "Food and room only increase in arithmetical ratio while humanity multiplies in geometrical ratio." Therefore, a struggle for existence ensues among men in which there is a premium on those who are fittest while the unfit are eliminated by selective death, resulting in a survival of the type of the superman. As applied in its broader international aspect, social Darwinism argued that war is necessary between nations as a selective agent by which the unfit nations are to be eliminated from this planet—with the aid of gun powder—so that nations that are the fittest may alone survive and eventually inherit the earth as a race made up of super-nations.
M. Achille Loria, in a very interesting chapter entitled "Social Darwinism," confined himself to a statement of the principle that "the quantity of subsistence existing on the earth is not sufficient for the nourishment of all organized beings, so that they are compelled to secure it at the price of an incessant struggle," and he bases his discussion entirely on that principle, saying: "It is natural that the weak should be defeated in this struggle, because, not being able to obtain any nourishment, or at least not a sufficient quantity, they perish, while the strong survive and triumph, so that the species possessing the "fittest" qualities improve little by little and rise to more perfect conditions of existence."
M. Loria then shows that certain sociologists apply this theory to social phenomena: "Men, too, they say, have carried on for centuries a terrible struggle for life, which, in our days, manifests itself in the unbridled competition of which we are witnesses; in this fierce struggle the victory is to the strong, and this constitutes the basis of evolution and progress. It is therefore wrong to deplore the bloody battles between men and the fierce competition which makes them trample upon one another in order to be first, since it is this competition which insures the triumph of the best, the most worthy; it is wrong to try to make laws to mitigate this struggle, since it is a valuable factor in progressive development."
But the "struggle," if it can be so designated, between parasites and their hosts, including that between carnivorous and herbivorous animals, is only a very small part of Darwinism. In fact it may be said to form no part of it, since it was well understood long before Darwin was born. And yet, curiously enough, the so-called "social Darwinism" scarcely ever gets farther than this. I have never seen any distinctively Darwinian principle appealed to in the discussions of "social Darwinism." It is therefore wholly inappropriate to characterize as social Darwinism the laisses-faire doctrine of political economists, even when it is attempted to support that doctrine by appeals to the laws of organic development.
This doctrine was held by Herbert Spencer, another Englishman, who developed an economic theory of extreme laissez faire and believed that those who got ahead deserved to do so because they had proved themselves the fittest. Darwin's theory conformed to Spencer's philosophy; in a civilized society as in a state of nature, those survive who are the fittest.
Followers of Darwin and Spencer believed in the doctrine of "survival of the fittest" so firmly that they combined the two philosophies into what they considered a natural law. Prominent among American advocates of this Social Darwinism was a Yale University professor, William Graham Sumner. Sumner believed 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." According to Sumner the weak fall prey to the strong in the struggle for existence, and business tycoons reaped material riches because they were the fittest — the product of natural selection.
Carnegie, who had from an early age questioned his Christian faith. On reading Spencer, Carnegie wrote, "Light came as in a flood and all was clear." Rockefeller, a devout Baptist, told his Sunday-school class that ". . . growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and of God."
This meant, as Spencer argued, that the government should not interfere with the natural evolution of the state of affairs and should not restrain business through regulation and reform. On the other hand, big business believed that it was perfectly legitimate for the government to favor industry through protective tariffs and to give large land grants to the railroads.
The misunderstanding of Darwin's social theory was widespread, and his writings on the subject were little known. The truth is that the advocates of Social Darwinism entirely overlooked a factor in biology that is as important in evolution and survival, if not more important, than the law of struggle. The successful lives of the species of animals and plants that obey the law of cooperation, testify to its efficiency as a real factor in the survival and progressive evolution of species. One of the most successful of those plants whose watchword is cooperation, is the dandelion — a European immigrant, accidentally introduced on the Atlantic coast in imported grain; it has succeeded in securing "a place in the sun" from Atlantic to Pacific. The reason for the dandelion's conquest of America is that every blossom is a community of cooperating individuals working for common ends.
This law of mutual aid, utterly ignored by the Social Darwinians, is really in extensive operation in nature. The fishing pelicans, the flocks of migrating birds, the engineering feats of the beavers, the herds of many mammals, and the community life of ants, bees and wasps—most successful of all insects—are but a few illustrations of the existence and effectiveness of the principle of cooperation in nature. Cooperation, i.e. mutual aid with division of labor and interdependence, is as real in nature as struggle.
Social Darwinism was not only the creed of big business; it was widely accepted in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century. But many Americans — farmers, labor leaders, and other advocates of reform — refused to accept a social philosophy based on the ideas of Spencer and Darwin. Believing that the benefits of society should be the inheritance of all, they pressed for reforms. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, their efforts were increasingly successful, and the influence of Social Darwinism declined.
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