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Hunting Down Social Darwinism

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Hunting Down Social Darwinism Hunting Down Social Darwinism Will This Canard Go Extinct? Stuart K. Hayashi Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix I: Stalking Social Darwinism 1 1 Did Nineteenth-Century Capitalists Want the Poor to Die? 3 2 The Conflation of Laissez Faire with Regulation-Imposed Eugenics 27 3 The Equivocation Infects the Intellectuals 51 4 The Camouflaging of Eugenicists as Eugenicism’s Opponents 81 5 Progressivism: The Genesis of Eugenics 103 II: The Governism of the Third Reich 131 6 Is Naziism the Final Stage of Capitalism? 133 7 Socialism and Fascism: Close Relatives 151 8 The Führer versus Free Enterprise 177 9 They Loved Blood and Soil but Not the Mind 201 10 Extinction of the Social Darwinism Canard 233 III: The Final Lessons of Liberty 259 11 The Ethologists’ Unpaid Debts to Spencer and Sumner 261 12 Overthrowing the Anarchists 299 13 Natural Liberty Requires Adherence to Truth 315 Conclusion of Trilogy 331 Bibliography 339 About the Author 399 2015 LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Preface To Oppose the Welfare State Is to Be a Bigot? I type these words during a phase in which the United States and Europe face a fiscal crisis. Following decades of spending tax money to support welfare programs not merely for the poor but also for the middle class, the USA and Europe find themselves confront- ing the great likelihood that their welfare systems cannot be sustained indefinitely. Some commentators of the free-market persuasion, recognizing the dangers of national govern- ments digging themselves deep into debt through their welfare programs, advise that these governments exercise greater fiscal discipline, reducing their spending and allow- ing for their economies to recover and prosper through economic deregulation and liber- alization. Such free-market suggestions come from a sound basis, but the partisans of the entrenched welfare-state mechanisms stubbornly deny the need to abolish or so much as shrink the pervasive influence of these welfare systems. In response to any call for the freeing of enterprise and disempowerment of the welfare state, the partisans of the wel- fare state howl that any proposal to discontinue welfare payments—however gradually they are phased out—amounts to a genuflection to the discredited doctrines of social Darwinism. Social Darwinism, we are told, is a doctrine that right-wing bigots invented in the nineteenth century. In this age, Charles Darwin laid forth his theory of natural selection, pointing out that various organisms of the same species competed with one another for limited resources in an effort to survive. On account of mutations, some individual organ- isms developed traits unlike those of other members of the same species. Individuals possessing the traits that proved most advantageous in adapting to the environment would survive and procreate. To subsequent generations, these survivors would transmit the very same traits that had helped them adapt and flourish. Conversely, the competitors of the same species possessing the less advantageous properties would be unable to survive long enough to reproduce. They would perish and thereby prove unable to trans- mit their disadvantageous traits to other generations. Here, the advocates of the welfare state—which I also call the regulatory-entitlement state—proclaim that nineteenth-century social Darwinists sought inappropriately to apply Darwin’s theory to the study of human society, particularly in the area of government policies pertaining to political economy. The welfare state’s partisans charge that the social Darwinists, most prominently Great Britain’s Herbert Spencer and the USA’s William Graham Sumner, posited a theory to this effect: Competition in the free-market capitalist economy recreates the competition in the jungle that Darwin described, as well it should. Should someone ascend from penury to wealth and prestige in the market economy, it is on account of that person possessing superior biological traits. Such a person is obligated to have children, in whom those same superior biological traits shall manifest. Contrariwise, if someone remains in penury her entire life, her failure to ascend to wealth is to be attributed to her possessing low-quality inborn traits. The best outcome is for such a low-quality person to die in the absence of bearing any children, for any children she raises shall likely inherit her inferior biological traits and continue to retard the progress of the human race. As private charity and tax-funded welfare enable the inferior poor to survive and support their children, ix x Preface private charity and tax-funded welfare enfeeble Western society. What is best is to institute a strict laissez-faire capitalist policy, cutting off tax-funded welfare and letting the inferior classes die off as they ought. The welfare-state proponents identify Spencer and Sumner as having originated that cold-hearted prescription, and they then proclaim that anyone who favors a reduction in tax-funded welfare must favor such a reduction, on some psychological level, on the same bigoted basis as the one ascribed to Spencer and Sumner. In short, it is said, to resent the welfare system is to be a social Darwinist—a right-wing bigot whose policy recommenda- tions, if implemented, would result in poor people dying when their lives would other- wise be saved. Social Darwinism, then, rationalized classism, elitism, and able-ism. And it gets worse, add the proponents of the welfare state, because the evils of the right-wingers’ social Darwinist doctrine go farther. Seeking to continue the misapplication of Darwin’s theory to the rationalization of right-wing policy proposals, claim the welfare statists, the social Darwinists developed the pseudoscientific ideology of eugenics. Eugenics pro- claimed that a person’s genes were what primarily determined his or her character and behavior. As mental illness was ascertained as genetically heritable, eugenicists deemed epileptics and sufferers of bipolar disorder to be defective, just as social Darwinists had stigmatized the poor. In turn, social Darwinists urged for the oppression of the mentally ill. That is why social Darwinists supported the policy of state governments to mandate highly invasive medical procedures that sterilized epileptics and manic depressives, against their consent. Moreover, as sexual dimorphism renders inborn biological differ- ences between men and women, social Darwinists cited biological theory to rationalize Victorian gender roles. Consistent with the assumptions about the inferiority of the poor and the mentally ill, social Darwinists judged women to be congenitally biologically inferior to men and worthy of nothing but domination by men. Likewise, the social Darwinists noticed that, in general, two people of different “races” were more genetically dissimilar than were two people of the same “race.” Assuming Caucasians to be the most genetically superlative race, social Darwinists decided to ex- pand their bigoted conclusions about the poor and the mentally ill to the nonwhite races. Following in their stigmatization of paupers and depressives as persons too weak to deserve to live, they likewise stigmatized nonwhites as weaklings who ought to be subju- gated or exterminated. Hence, Spencer’s and Sumner’s social Darwinism rationalized European conquest of indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In total, social Darwinism misused biological science to legitimize the status quo of white, male, right-wing capitalist patriarchy to engender classism, elitism, able-ism, sexism, racism, colonialism, and fascism. When these conservative right-wing ism’s were integrated into a single political philosophy, the result was Nazism. Applying social Darwinism, the Nazis decreed Jews to be the congenitally inferior race of underdogs, and therefore sought to squelch them. Insofar as we account for such considerations, say the critics of laissez faire, it follows that if a free-marketer takes his own latent social Darwinist premises to their logically necessary conclusion, the free-marketer’s philosophy leads to Naziism. And if the free-marketer does not go that far, adds the welfare proponent, the fact remains that any implementation of the free-marketer’s suggestion for cutting welfare will result in poor people perishing. In short, goes the welfare proponent’s argument, someone who demands constraints on tax-funded welfare payments is a right-wing bigot at best and a Nazi at worst. As an example of a partisan of the regulatory-entitlement state denouncing free-mar- keters as social Darwinists, I present a speech that Barack Obama provided in 2006 in a commencement address at Knox College. Then-Senator Obama announced: Preface xi At the end of the Civil War, when farmers and their families began moving into the cities to work in the big factories that were sprouting up all across America, we had to decide: Do we do nothing and allow captains of industry and robber barons to run roughshod over the economy and workers by competing to see who can pay the lowest wages at the worst working conditions? Or we do try to make the system work by setting up basic rules for the market, instituting the first public schools, busting up monopolies…? We chose to act, and we rose together. Today, at the beginning of this young century, we have to decide again. Once again, there are those who believe…that the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government…in the form of tax breaks,…and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him- or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say [to] those whose health care [costs] or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck.
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