Social Darwinism
Kidds target was utilitarianism
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Attracted to Spencer's writings, his american disiples shared his youthful optimism but during the 1880s and 1890s had similar problems coming to terms with a world grown increasingly Darwinian
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Although reviewers generaly praised Social Darwinism, several objected to Hofstadter's definitios, particularly as related to the conserved Darwinism of Spencer and Sumner
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During the 1940s historians cut these Gordian knots. The result was a vastly expanded definition of social Darwinism. 'the name loosly given to the applicatoin to society of the doctrine of the struggle for exsistence and survival of the fittest.'
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After the war social darwinism was not used. instead cultural, ecological, or behavioristic models.
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People didnt know if kidd ws a individualist or a socialist
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Social Evolution, his book, reopened the warfare between science and religion, which many Americans suppose long settled.
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society didnt know which to believe neo-Darwinian or Neo-Lamarchianism
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After the turn of the century darwinism played an important role in debates over race relations and eugenics... and in discussions of international policy and way
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Althuohg it was generally agreed that Darwinian struggle war brutish, the rhetoric of darwinism for this very reason provided a tiny minority with the language of cynicism and disillusionment- whether as the victorian equivalent of modern references to the 'ratrace' or as neo-calvinist warnings to the perils of abandoing individualism, private property, and other natural rights.
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As a social myth it distorted reality in the interest of traditional values, Christian and secular
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Darwinism affected social thought in fostering the idea that men must transcend nature rather than following her dictates; and indirectly, as a weapon- the myth of social darwinism- against laissez faire and utilitarianism.
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so viewed, the social darwinian stereotype respresented an anti-utopian blueprint of a world guided solely by scientific considerations, a recurring motif in the Anglo-American reaction against scientism
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attacking the brutal laws of social darwinism, they grounded their activism in the nervous perception that natural forces, if left alone, were evil and destructive. Socially this perseption helped generate a decade of progressive reform. Intellectually, it forstered significant departures in sociology and social science.
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its vitality in these years- from the scopes trial to attacks on the nazis- in any case provided the immediate impetus to the historical flowering of the 1940s
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stressing the importance of intellect and culture in human evolution, activists demanded increased governmental reguation; new efforts of social walfare and control; and a more positive role for America abroad.
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while it was too much to clain that attacks on social darwinism alone brought this major shift in american social science, its continuing role in sociological debate in the interwar years suggests that it was a contributing factor
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During the 1890s labor violence, agrarian protest, and disturbing new evidence of urban poverty convinced many Americans that 'the wolfish struggle for existence' as one contributer to the Arena called it was growing worse.
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Reinforcing this vision of a world grown Darwinian, the theories of the German biologist, August Weismann gave Darwinism new and omnious overtones.
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Despite the evidence of despair and reactionism, the spectre of neo-Darwinism, for the very reason that it seemed to undermine traditional values, also quickened the reform impulse and in the long run widened the gap between biological inheritance (instinct) and social inheritance (culture) in Anglo-America sociology.
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American reformers tended to one of two possibilities. One might abandon nature and reason for the less definite benefits of the long-run or one might reexamine nature for evidence of what Peter Kropotkin called nutual aid, and undating of Spencer's altruism.
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During the progressive era, these approaches fed distinct, if overlapping, streams within American reform- the one, a harsher utilitarianism that stressed social control and group welfare; the other, an older humanitarianism that emphasized individual well-being.
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Much of the reaction to neo-Darwinism also revealed a curious combination of antiscientism and scientific fervor such as first surfaced in reform thought in the previous decade.
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Neo-Lamarchianism remained the bedrock of American social thought for two decades. But the neo-Darwinian challenge, emphasizing the specifically Darwinian aspects of Darwin's theory, dramatized concerns that had lain just below the surface for some time
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Huxley's speech Evolution and Ethics consisted of him saying that ehtics and evolution were forever at odds
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Despite Huxlets disagreement swith Wallace and his occasional lapses in logic as he developed his position, his principal target in the romanes speech was Herbert Spencer and individualism of the extreme sort
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Despite his attempt to depoliticize nature, Huxley's worries about British society were not far from the surface.
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"The thief and the murderer followed nature just as much as the philanthropists" Huxley talking about spencer
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Despite his critismism of Spencer's ethics, and what Huxley termed 'fanatic individualism,' the scientist shied from urging any significant expansion of state power.
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In Evolution and Ethics Huxley gave new authority to familiar charges against the Spencerian position. Since natural selection chose moral and immoral qualities alike, it provided no standard for good and bad.
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The absense of specific proposals was not entirely accidental. The terms of the Romanes lecture forbade specific reference to religion or politics.
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The basic fallacy of evolutionary ethics stemmed from an unfotunate ambiguity in the phrase 'survival of the fittest' since a 'moral flavour' inevitably attached to the term 'fittest'. In cosmic nature, however, wht is 'fittest' depended upon conditions, he lectureed, making a point most Spencerians conceded, but never fully appreciated.
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Nature remained the mysterious woman: the ' present state' was ' but a fleeting phase of her infinite variety'.
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As the debate over social Darwinism developed however, Huxley's real message became less important than the pattern of response it evoked. A minority, predictably on the left, charged that he in fact advocated the reactionary Darwinism he appeared to condem.
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Quoting Huxley's injunction that ethics demaded 'the fitting of as many as possible to survive' the authoer of Socialism and the Ethics of Jesus concluded: ' no better exposition of the element common to the teachings of jesus and the aims of socialism has even been made that this by one who was neither christian nor socialist
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The weak and ill-constituted shall pereish... Sympathy thwarts on the whole the law of development which is the law of selection... nothing in our unsound moderism is unsounder than chrisitan sympathy.
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Gone was the Enlightenment's easy familiarity with tht elaws of nature, the self-evident truths upon which the American experiment was based.
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However these questions were unanswered, the Romanes lecture marked a turning point in debate over social evolution and was a final blow to the Spenerian world-view.
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Kidds thesis: Human history was a saga of unmitigated competition, selection, and survival. Progress is the result of selection and rejection... Where there is progress these must inevitable be selection, and selection in turn involved competition of some kind. Socities like the individuals comprising them, are to be regarded as the product of the circumstances in which they exist-the survival of the fittest in the rivalry which is constanly in progress.
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One religion could provide the needed sancion, he continued
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From Kidds book you couldnt tell if it was scientific or religious individualistic or socialistic
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Kidds attitude toward sience was indeed ambialent. Viewing science positively, he implicitly assigned it as a crucial role in shaping a new order. However paradoxically, the discovery of the ultrarational santion was the product of the reason of the social critic.
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In reality, Kidd ws neither an individualist nor a socialist, as these terms were used through the eighties but rather a link between the earlier liberalism of a William Graham Sumner adn the mood which in merica produced progressivism.
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Although Kidd argued that future progress depended on the 'same cosmic process which ws been in opertion from the begining' he insisted that fundamental changes were necessary to insure that competition resulted in maximum efficiency, a term that became a watchword for Kidd no less than it did for a genertion of American reformers.
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The aim here however is not to defent Kidd's definition of science, his social views, or his contribution to sociology. Rather it is to underscore the ambialence towards bother social change and science tht made Social Evolution at once challenging and infuriating.
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Although Huxley and Kidd caused an intellectual flurry, most Americans found the work of two other European popularizers more acceptable: Peter Kropotkin and Henry Drummond.
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the law of mutual struggle there is in nature the law of mutual aid, whichi, for the success of the struggle of life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more imporatnt than the alw of mutul contest.
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But from its inception, Mutual Aid was also shaped by the developing conflict among evolutionists over the true meaning of Darwinism adn the growing suspicion that science was somehow growing immoral
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Since Mutual Aid appeared in book form more than a decade after Kropotkin's first article, his argument never had the dramatic impact of Kidd's ultrarational sanction.
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Henry Drummond believed that the warfar between religion and science was based on a huge misunderstand.
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Whatever its shortcomings, Mutual Aid answered Huxley not simply with theory, but an apparent wealth of biologiacl and anthropological fact that suggest that nature, if properly understood, could be trusted after all.
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Despite a frustrating imprecision that drew shower of criticism, Drummond seemed to offere the gerneral public everything it wanted to know bout God but was affraid to believe.
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His thesis, he argued, was actually an extension to religion of the strategy Spencer adopted in applying natural law to the social world
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Stung by critizism, Drummond by the time of Huxley's Oxford adress wondered if his attempt to kind science to religion was not after all 'immoral and unscientific'
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But the decade did shift the center of debate, as a split opened between two varieties of reform Darwinism. Perhaps comforted by Kropotkin, Drummond, or other similar arguments, a majority of reformers continued to urge regulation of industry and social welfar measures in much the same language as hd the earlier critics of laissez faire and competition. A significant minority, however, now believed that a new situation demanded new controls if society were to escape from what a supporter of drummond called 'the shadow of Darwinism.'
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Drummonds struggle for the life of others nonetheless joined altruism, particularly in the arsenal of those who wanted moderte change but feared extremes.
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More acceptable were the solutions of Kropotkin and Drummond, although the first seemed to involve permanent struggle and the second a naive faith that love conquores all.
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This debate over neo-darwinism during the 1890s left no clear legacy.
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By the 1890s imperialists, racists, and militarists also appropriated Darwinism.
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In the post Civil War decades, so the story goes, misapplied Darwinism bolstered laissez faire, individualism, and Horatio Algerism. For defenders of the industrial order, such phrases as the struggle for exsistance, survival of the fittest, and natural selection provided explaination and excuse for poverty and exploitation
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Agreement on the use of the term (adaption, mutual aid, struggle for the life of others) however was not always so clear.
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As late as 1940, an American sociologist defined social Darwinism as a technical term used to designate a group of writers, sociologists, and eugenicists who ignore the all important distinction between man and the lower animals, i.e the former's possession of culture.
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Since the Origin of Species spoke to a range of issues in biology, there was always opportunity for confusion
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When Darwinian individualism declined Darwinian collectivism of the nationalist or racist variety was begining to take hold.
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For the past two decades, however, historians of science, social theory, and American history have raised doubts, directly or indirectly, concerning the accuracy of this portrait of late nineteenth century thought.
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Meanwhile, however, the social darwinian hypothesis was transforming American scholarship
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By the late 1960s the suspicion grew that very few Americans were actually social Darwinists. 'It is true that in the last half of the 19th century great numbers of americans were ideologically committed to the notions of competition, merited success, and deserved failure. But it is not true that this commitment was grounded on Darwinian premises. No more than a small handful of American business leaders or intellectuals wre 'social darwinists' in any sense precise enough to have useful meaning
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The term social darwinism although applied ubiquitously consistently derived its sting from the implication that the struggle and selection of the animal realm were also agents of change (and progress) in human society- the governing assumption being that men shared natural laws with thte rest of Creation
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Although effective in debate, this tactic was ironical in view of the fact that the reformers, not their laissez faire opponents, were the Darwinians in any precise meaning of the term.
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Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley, the three leading spokesmen of the new view, together supported the theory that nature provided no guide to ethics or social policy... Herbert Spencer resisted this conclusino and attempted to incorporate natural selection within a synthetic philosophy framed initially in terms of mechanical concepts dderived from thermodynamics.
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More intriguing that social darwinism itself is what one might erm they myth of social darwinism- the charge, usually unsubstantiated or quite out of proportion to the evidence, that Darwinism was widely and wantonly abused by forced of reation. While not deliberate deception, this myth was important in itself. As as a prelude to the 'correct' readings of Darwin, it invariably prefaced the many varieties of so-called reform Darwinism.
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The origin of species, from the start, fatally undermined social speculation based on the assumptions of harmonious, mechanical, self-regulating laws of nature, which in one form or another have dominated Anglo American thought since Newton
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