Social Darwinism Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought

Social Darwinism Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought 'With a new preface ROBERT C. BANNISTER Temple University Press Philadelphia 1979 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Idea of Social Darwinism 3 1 The Scientific Background 14 2 Hushing Up Death 34 3 Philanthropic Energy and Philosophic Calm 57 4 Amending the Faith 79 5 William Graham Sumner 97 6 The Survival of the Fittest Is Our Doctrine 114 7 Neo-Darwinism and the Crisis of the 1890s 137 8 A Pigeon Fanciers' Polity 164 9 The Scaffolding of Progress 180 10 The Nietzsche Vogue 201 11 Beyond the Battle: The Literary Naturalists 212 12 Imperialism and the Warriar Critique 226 Epilogue: From Histrionics to History 245 Notes 252 Index 285 Preface 1. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth asks readers to do two things more difficult than they may initially appear: first, to recon sider debates over social and public policy issues from the 1870s through the 1910s with an openness and sensitivity they would wish for their own statements; and second, to reconceptualize the issue of social Darwinism 1 so as to ask, not what individuals or groups were social Darwinists, but how the label itself functioned in debates in the six decades following the publication of the Origin of Species. A reconsideration alone yields two conclusions, both important al though neither ground-breaking. One is that Gilded Age defenders of free market mechanisms, individualism, and laissez faire (so-called "conservatives" but in reality liberals by mid-nineteenth-century stan dards) rarely laced their prose with appeals to Darwinism and virtually never in the way described in conventional accounts. 2 Rather, they were suspicious of, if not downright frightened by, the implications of the new theory. Such was even the case with Herbert Spencer and his American disciples-the stereotypical textbook social Darwinists -whose world view remained essentially pre-Darwinian. 3 The second conclusion is that New Liberals, socialists, and other advocates ofposi tive government appealed openly and with far greater regularity to Darwinism to support their causes. 4 These appeals typically contrasted false readings of Darwin (i.e., of the opposition) with a correct one (Le., their own). Although important in their way, these two points are essentially preliminary. To ask how the epithet social Darwinism functioned, on the other hand, is to turn the conventional account rather literally on its head. Not only was there no school (or schools) of social Darwinists: the term was a label one pinned on anyone with whom one especially disagreed. The so-called conservative social Darwinists of the 1880s (laissez faire liberals, utilitarians, and the like) were, as social Darwinists, the in vention of their opponents to the left. Eventually, the label was used, not merely to caricature the "let-alone-philosophy" (as it was termed), but to denigrate programs of other state activists one happened to oppose, whether New Liberals, fellow socialists, or eugenicists. 5 Un- xii : Preface like Methodist or muckraker (two labels that were also initially pe jorative), social Darwinism is singular in that virtually no one adopted it as a badge of honor. A social Darwinist, to oversimplify the case, was something nobody wanted to be. This argument, admittedly, turns on rather careful definition of two key terms in the title: social Darwinism and myth. A social Darwinist, for present purposes, is anyone who embroidered his (and, far less frequently, her) message with the phrases natural selection, the struggle for existence, or the survival of the fittest, or who otherwise invoked the authority of Charles Darwin or the Origin of Species in discussing social policy. These rhetorical appeals might be extensive or brief and might be summoned in defense of any position, whether laissez faire liberalism or state socialism, pacifism or militarism, egali tarianism or racism. But they must have been present. For this rea son, not everyone with whom one happens to disagree can qualify for the label. A classical economist, arguing for free competition on the grounds that it guarantees low prices, for example, is not thereby a social Darwinist. Nor are all racists, sexists, and militarists, each of whom has and continues to flourish quite without benefit of Darwin. 6 References to "nature," "natural," or even the "social organism," in the absence of tell-tale Darwinian phrases, do not count either. In fact, the phrases struggle for existence, natural selection, and survival of the fittest (used singularly or in combination) were widely perceived as code words with relations to recognizable social ideologies and were not used casually. Such buzz words, as the historian Forrest McDonald has recently noted, provide clues to a broader range of atti tudes. In current discourse a reference to the "right to life" tells us considerably more than do the words themselves, just as in the 1780s reference to "bloodsuckers" revealed a good deal about the attitude of the speaker toward traders in public securities. 7 So, by the 1880s, the phrases struggle for existence and natural selection, as applied to so ciety, were catchwords used by those who opposed unrestricted com petition and the cult of individual success against those who allegedly espoused these values. For this reason, defenders of free enterprise or individual initiative invoked them at their peril. One evidence of these verbal conventions was the widespread use of quotation marks when the terms were used; another was the stylized nature of the refer ences. As with all linguistic conventions, there were occasional devia tions. But the outcry that typically greeted rare attempts to defend economic competition by likening it to the Darwinian struggle in na ture shows how firmly the conventions were established. Preface : xiii A second crucial term is myth, here used in the literary or anthropo logical rather than in the popular sense of simple untruth. As a compo nent of a more general ideology, myth refers to an image or metaphor designed to trigger reactions that reinforce that ideology. A metaphor of this sort, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has written, gains its power "precisely from the interplay between the discordant meanings it symbolically coerces into a unitary conceptual framework" and its success in overcoming psychic resistance to this coercion on the part of the reader or listener. When they misfire, such metaphors seem "mere extravagance"-an example being attempts to brand the Taft-Hartley Law of 1947 a "slave labor act" or, only slightly more effective, refer ences to military conscription in the 1960s as "involuntary servitude." Social Darwinism-as the view that natural laws of struggle and sur vival should be allowed to operate freely in human society-was (and essentially remains) such a metaphor. Myth, so conceived, does not simply distort or select in order to rationalize self-interest or to reduce role strain (the two views Geertz was opposing). Rather, it provides an emotional roadmap to render "incomprehensible social situations meaningful," and so to allow pur posive action. Such ideological symbols, Geertz adds, are most likely to take shape when political traditions and received religious and moral doctrines lose their directive power, a description that well fits late nineteenth-century America. 8 By any standard, the term social Darwinism was and remains a smashing success in dramatizing alleged outcomes in a world without social conscience or, it turns out, without social engineering. In view of some of the excesses ofthe purposive action that resulted, this success may well have been a mixed blessing. Had the label social Darwinism been merely a debating tactic, we might applaud the skill of those who forged so potent a rhetorical weapon in a culture still ambivalent about the claims of science. But it was more. Born in debate, the epithet took on a life of its own. For many New Liberals it was a lens that magnified and distorted evidences of actual "struggle" in American society. Left to its own devices, so the argument went, the social order was a Dar winian jungle. Extreme measures were needed to reestablish order. Thus, for example, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker interpreted evi dences of racial disorder as proof that Jim Crow laws were needed despite contrary evidence (recorded in his own notebooks) that segre gation laws were themselves the cause of racial clashes. Eugenicists likewise proposed to jettison rights of privacy and individual liberty to counter the indiscriminate breeding of the poor and dispossessed. xiv : Preface However one judges these cases, the point for present purposes is simply to underline the ideological context in which the concept func tioned. Two examples will illustrate the complexities involved. The first is Yale professor William Graham Sumner, conventionally pictured as the dean of "conservative" social Darwinists. 9 Although early influ enced by Malthus, during the 1870s and 1880s Sumner remained wary (and largely ignorant) of biological evolutionism, whether in the Spen cerian or Darwinian versions. During his years as an Anglican clergy man, he distinguished scientific method from the speculations and the ories hawked under its authority. Although he sprinkled some of his prose with Spencerisms during the 1870s ("progress . from the simple to the complex") and used Spencer's Study of Sociology (1874) in one of his classes, he remained suspicious of Spencerian grand theory. In the early eighties, Sumner learned the hard way that association with biological evolutionism could be hazardous to career. Attempt ing some too-clever epigrams on several occasions (the alternative to the "survival of the fittest" being the "survival of the unfittest"), he was besieged by criticism, even from his sometime-ally the Nation criticism that, in substance, anticipated later charges of social Dar winism. Meanwhile, a battle with Yale president Porter over his use of Spencer almost cost him his position in New Haven.

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