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SOCIAL
IMPACTS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
Social
Darwinism refers to the attempts to utilize the evolutionary
theory of Darwin to give descriptions of society or prescriptions
for its best constitution. According to that theory, there is a
struggle for existence among animals and plants which results in
evolutionary change. This change is not neutral, it entails ‘development’,
which may be regarded as ‘progress’. The implied value in ‘progress’
was the cue for some thinkers to argue that evolutionary change
should be deliberately nurtured by the more intense prosecution of
the struggle for existence which would encourage the ‘best’
out of individuals and societies.
Darwin
himself agreed on better adaptation, and increasing
complexification, but wholly rejected the idea that the
evolutionary progress of organisms had any kind of moral
implication. He understood the ‘improvement’ implied in ‘progress
through evolution’ in a functional rather than an ethical,
moral, or social sense.
‘Darwinism
- Spencerism’
By some
analogy to its biological counterpart, Social Darwinism argues
that the struggle for existence among humans may be expected to
yield social progress, just as struggle among human communities
does produce evolutionary adaptive results. Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903), English sociologist and philosopher, was the pioneer
of this approach, so much so that Social Darwinism might, in many
respects, be better called ‘Social Spencerism’. Spencer was
raised in the competitive atmosphere of the Industrial Revolution
and remained one of the great champions of laissez-faire
economics. It was he who coined the term ‘survival of the
fittest’ to describe natural selection, although he was never a
convinced Darwinist. He had already accepted a progressive view of
human society, and the idea of biological evolution, during the
1850s, before Darwin’s theory became public. For Spencer,
Malthus’s ‘law’ of demographic change was the dynamic agent
of social development, constantly forcing societies to progress
economically in order to escape the pressure of limited resources.
At the same time, he was convinced by Lamarck’s arguments for
evolution and began to see the possibility of constructing a
synthesis that would unite all aspects of natural and human
evolution under the same laws.
Social
Darwinism and the American way
Social
Darwinism received some of its widest support in the U.S where the
laissez-faire economics developed in England and France in the
late 18th century were vigorously espoused, and where, after the
successful War of Independence, rights of the individual
(especially in the form of freedom from government interference)
were enthusiastically promoted. The leading Social Darwinist in
American academic circles was William Graham Sumner (1840-1910),
Professor of political economy and social science at Yale which,
under his influence, became a kind of pulpit for Social Darwinism.
His ideas were derived chiefly from Spencer. He viewed the
capitalist system with great favour because it allowed the free
play of the ‘competition of life’. Unlike Spencer, he was very
pessimistic and didn’t look forward to a future state of
equilibrium. The well-known industrialist and philanthropist,
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1914), held the view that individualism,
private property, the law of accumulation of wealth and the law of
competition promoted the highest and best in human achievements.
Other businessman liked to see (and present) themselves as
successful survivors in the struggle for existence. For example
Rockefeller said: ‘The growth of a large business is merely
survival of the fittest...’. Interestingly, many rich American
industrialists and businessmen found no difficulty in
accommodating Christianity to the Darwinian idea of a competitive
struggle which ‘necessarily’ eliminated the weaker parties in
the struggle.
War of
nations and races
It is not
surprising that Social Darwinist arguments were readily extended
to the conclusion that evolutionary progress of mankind is
furthered by inter-racial or inter-national struggles. The theory
of evolution could be and was used in justifications of wars for
national or racial supremacy. The best known writer in this vein
was the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896). In
his ‘Politics’, he argued that the weak must perish, and that
they perish ‘justly’: ‘The grandeur of history lies in the
perpetual conflict of nations, and it is simply foolish to desire
the suppression of their rivalry.’
Though
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) never stated explicitly that he was
drawing on Darwin’s theory of evolution, we can easily see in
the Hitlerian doctrine of racial superiority a kind of Darwinism
carried to logical extreme of madness. (Darwin himself might have
had some racist tendencies. For example, he wrote: ‘The more
civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow
in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very
distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have
been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the
world.’
Influence
on political ideology
Spencerian
Social Darwinism reached its peak of influence in 1882, when
Spencer visited U.S. for an extensive lecture tour. But that tour
also coincided with the beginning of questioning and reaction.
Leading the reaction was Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913), a
geologist and a professor of sociology. Ward took his stand on the
side of nurture in the growing controversy of nature vs. nurture.
His thoughts can be described as reformed or liberal Social
Darwinism, repudiating the struggle doctrines of the laissez-faire
school in favor of emphasis on social improvement through
attention to the conditions of the social environment.
Australia,
in the period from 1860 to 1885, saw the most frequent advocacy of
Spencerian evolutionary ideas. Many Spencerian, Darwinian and
Malthusian ideas and slogans were repeated by politicians,
businessmen, academics, and journalists, just as in the U.S.. But
the succeeding period of economic depression dampened the
enthusiasm, again as in the U.S., and criticisms began to develop
and made themselves felt in the 1880s.
Throughout
the 19th and early 20th centuries, various political and
intellectual ideologies were clearly inspired to some degree by
Social Darwinism - militarism, colonialism, racism, Nazism. Even
socialism and anarchism were influenced by this doctrine. Marx and
Engels were much interested in Darwin’s work, and used his
theory to underpin their notion of the historical evolution of
class struggle.
Essentialism
and relativism
The
influence of Darwinism on philosophical ideas was considerable and
many-sided, but the precise way this influence worked is by no
means easy to state in simple terms. Generally, Darwinian theory
promoted or assisted the decline of Essentialism and the
concomitant rise of relativism in many branches of philosophy. The
doctrine of essences, all allegedly ‘ultimate explanations’,
was driven out of philosophy. The American school of philosophy
called ‘Pragmatism’, developed in the 1870s, was
self-consciously influenced by Darwinism, some of its proponents
being firm believers. Notably, Chauncy Wright (1830-1875), who, to
Darwin’s considerable pleasure, defended the Darwinian theory
against the perceptive attacks of some Catholic scholars. Charles
Pierce (1839-1914), after his careful study of Darwin’s work,
envisaged a kind of natural selection process acting on ideas.
Ethics
Darwin
himself was one of the first to consider the relationship between
ethical theory and evolutionary doctrines, as when he argued that
altruism might have had an evolutionary origin. He tried to show
how ethical behavior would have survival value, and thus might
become established in human societies. But Darwin didn’t take
the further step and say that one might distinguish between right
and wrong by considering what had happened during the course of
evolution, or where it was going in future. Evolution in itself
did not provide an ethical code. Herbert Spencer, however, went
beyond Darwin and hinted that this would be a possibility, as he
wrote, ‘The conduct to which we apply the name good, is the
relatively more evolved conduct, and ... bad is the name we apply
to conduct which is relatively less evolved.’
Such
opinions were countered by T. H. Huxley in his 1893 essay, ‘Evolution
and ethics’. saying that one cannot possibly draw any moral or
ethical conclusions from a consideration of the course of
evolution, evolution and ethics are quite distinct. Although his
arguments were quite persuasive, others went on attempting to
derive ethical norms from the evolutionary process.
Exclusion
of the supernatural
Darwinian
theory was purely naturalistic; it made no appeal to entities such
as God, divine spirits, hypothetical intellects, final causes,
souls or Platonic ideas. By providing an alternative naturalistic
explanation of design, Darwin made it seem less necessary to
construct a view of the world that invoked some kind of
supernatural being. Darwin’s theories therefore gave
considerable support to materialist interpretations of the world.
The old mind/body dualism of Descartes and his followers would be
replaced by a monistic materialism. This attitude proved
particularly attractive in Germany, in the writings of the members
of so-called ‘Monist League’, the work of the
philosopher/biologist, Ernst Haeckel ( 1834-1919) being
particularly prominent. Haeckel, once regarded as a progressive
liberal opposed to the excesses of arbitrary state power, has (in
the light of more recent studies) come to be considered as one of
formative influences on German Nazism., The three main strands in
his thought were German Romantic Idealism, scientific positivism
and materialism, and Darwinism. But Haeckel’s materialism was
interestingly different; for him, atoms were endowed with souls.
Also
drawing on biological evolution, although less directly, was the
philologist and nihilist professor, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900), particularly in his poetic-philosophic discourse work
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He believed that by a proper exercise of
will, certain men might evolve into a world-elite of ‘Ubermenschen’
or Supermen. Superman would be his own master and might succeed to
the rank and authority traditionally associated with God.
Metaphysics
Henri
Bergson (French philosopher, (1859-1941), accorded primacy to
spirit and intuition, rather than matter and analysis. Metaphysics
was concerned with spirit and intuition, and
he sided
with the metaphysicians. Bergson’s evolutionism, though
all-pervasive in his system, was very different from Darwin’s
naturalistic, mechanistic or materialistic doctrine of evolution
by natural selection. It is clear that Bergson far transcended the
hard ground of Darwinian science and moved on to the lusher fields
of speculative metaphysics. In its time, his work Creative
Evolution aroused considerable excitement and enthusiasm.
On the
subject of metaphysics Darwin himself was somewhat skeptical: ‘To
study metaphysics as it has always been studied appears to me to
be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics.’ He felt that
one who had explained the (biological) origin of man, who knew
what a baboon was, had done more to explain man than Locke.
Religion
Darwinism’s
impact on religion can be summarized by saying that it undermined
religious beliefs, and was one of the major influences in
encouraging agnosticism. Its naturalistic structure opposed the
teleological basis of Christianity and other religions. Between
1830 and 1875, we observe an evolution in British society and
particularly British scientific society. In 1830s, science as a
profession was just beginning, and because of the peculiarities of
British higher education there were strong links between science
and organized religion. The next forty to fifty years saw those
links weaken and break; and evolutionism, particularly Darwinian
evolutionism gained the opportunity to be used. Darwin succeeded
where Chambers (who proposed a designed evolution) failed, because
Darwin had earned respect as a scientist. So for this change in
Victorian Britain, the Darwinian Revolution was part cause and
part effect.
Conclusion
Evolution,
one of the fundamental discoveries and concepts in modern thought,
is central to modem biology and to the use of biology in modern
society. Without it, genetics, physiology, ecology, and every
other aspect of biology would lack coherence. Evolution has also
added new perspectives to the discussions on scientific
methodology. More dramatic (and famous) has been the theory’s
extra-scientific impacts. Evolution has been and probably will
remain a doctrine that has consequences for our understanding of
the nature of man, and the purpose (or lack of purpose) in his
existence. Also, because of its social implications, as in human
genetics, evolution is a subject highly charged with emotion, and
much of the literature on it suffers from unspoken and often
untested assumptions. It is very difficult to discuss the theory
with objectivity. Discussion of it tends to spill over to
virtually every area of discourse in the humanities and social
sciences: Sociology, Economics, Politics, Theology, Philosophy,
Psychology, Anthropology, Literature, and Music. |
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