Darwin and the Revolution

I am back to working on my book project, for the first time since January. (I wouldn't claim that under normal circumstances I produce copious academic work during the semester, but the exigencies of the pandemic have really cut my during-the-semester work down to nothing.) I'm revising a chapter from my dissertation about novels of political violence that feature biologists and use Darwinian rhetoric.

This chapter was a relative late add to the dissertation. In my proposal, I had a chapter that discussed three novels of political violence; this became seven novels of political violence later on. Eventually I split that up into two chapters each covering three novels, and shunted one of the novels into a different chapter. That meant the new chapter had no real framework. I think it cited a sentence apiece from two different sources in support of its claims about social Darwinism! Social Darwinism was, indeed, something I knew very little about. But, you know, a good dissertation is a done dissertation, and I marked this all down on my to-do list for revising it into a book.

Thus I have spent the past month learning about social Darwinism. It turns out that I did not know very much!

To understand social Darwinism, we don't begin with Darwin, but we actually begin in the 1950s. The term was popularized by Richard Hofstadter, a professor of history, in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944). This book defined "social Darwinism" as a justification for laissez-faire ruthless capitalism, arguing that it was popular especially in America. Basically, Hofstadter's idea went, social Darwinism was the self-serving justification of people who either 1) crushed other people on their way to the top, or 2) wanted to remove all government rules preventing them from crushing people on their way to the top. These social Darwinists claimed any such crushing was the "survival of the fittest," and you couldn't say that was bad, that was how nature worked, and what it produced was, definitionally, the fittest!

A lot of people have criticized Hofstadter for a lot of reasons, but I don't know enough to assess most of of the criticisms. The one that seems particularly interesting to me is twofold. The first part is that there was no such thing as social Darwinism. What I mean by this is that the term "social Darwinism" indicates there is a difference between applying Darwinism to the biological arena and applying Darwinism to the social arena. The social arena was the biological arena. The British historian James Moore has done some strong work explaining what, in a historical sense, "Darwinism" means and how its originators meant the term. Some seek to defend Darwin by saying social Darwinism was a misapplication of his theory, but this neglects both how he devised it and how he himself used it.

For example, Moore points out in his article "Socializing Darwinism," that Darwinism was derived in part from Malthusianism, which was all about society: "Both Malthus and Darwin believed in the beneficent necessity of the laws of nature that give rise to a struggle for existence in human populations. Both believed the dictate of these laws was that individuals ought generally to enjoy the fruits of their foresight or suffer the pains of their improvidence. Both believed that the degrees of material success or failure in question are direct indications of moral worth and, as such, ought not to be mitigated" (Science as Politics, edited by Les Levidow, Free Association Books, 1986, p. 52). It was not a distinction drawn in the creation of his theory.

Diane B. Paul argues that social Darwinism "was a term that would have baffled Darwin. In Victorian England, scientists took for granted that biological facts mattered for social theory and policy" ("Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics," The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, Cambridge UP, 2009, p. 229). Similarly, according to Moore, "The routine distinction made today between 'Darwinism' and 'Social Darwinism' would have been lost on the author of the Descent of Man, and probably on most of his defenders until the 1890s” (p. 62). For Darwin and his adherents-- and detractors!-- Darwinism was social Darwinism.

(Now, there are some critics who use this to argue no one should go around using the term "social Darwinism" at all, or that it should only be used to identify a very narrow group of people who self-identified as social Darwinists. This I don't think follows. It does seem useful to have a term that describes the concept of applying evolution by natural selection to social organization even if the original Darwinists wouldn't have made that distinction themselves.)

The second part of the criticism I want to highlight follows from the first: because Darwinism was social Darwinism, everybody who was engaging with Darwin's ideas was doing it. So it wasn't just right-wingers looking to grind down competitors in Progressive-Era America who were claiming Darwinian backing, it was everyone who was interesting in making a theory of society. So as Paul points out, Darwinism was used to justify laissez faire, to justify colonialism, to justify socialism, to justify eugenics (p. 240). It was used to justify anarchism, and some anarchists even made use of eugenics, as Richard Cleminson discusses in his book Anarchism and Eugenics: An Unlikely Convergence (Manchester UP, 2019). (Some people argue eugenics is a kind of social Darwinism; some people argue very vehemently that it is not.) How could anarchists-- people who reject state control-- allow arguable the ultimate form of state control of the individual? Paul Crook's Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War (Cambridge UP, 1994) discusses how Darwin was used to justify military conflicts and became a secular source of pacifism for the "peace biologists."

I like how J. W. Burrow puts it in his book The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (Yale UP, 2000): "What Social Darwinists chiefly argued about, without consciously putting it in those terms, which would have given the game away, was which form of competition was desirable and ensured progress or, if one adapted to it successfully, survival, and which types of competition should be suppressed; to have recognized them all as potentially operative, as a Darwinian would do in biology, would have removed the point" (p. 94). That is to say, even if you believed the government should stop your business from crushing other businesses-- survival of the fittest, after all-- you probably did believe that the government should prosecute people who tried to steal from your business-- even though surely that was survival of the fittest too!

Very few people disagreed on whether Darwin applied to social life, they just disagreed on what was "natural" and should be allowed, and what was supposedly stymieing evolution and thus should not be allowed. If you were a socialist, you thought capitalism an unnatural development holding back evolution. First decide who you want to be victors/survivors, then "endorse or condemn forms of competition depending on whether they seemed likely to ensure the desired result" (Burrow, p. 94). 

Most socialists who drew on Darwin seemed to skew toward the peaceful end; in his book Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) (1894), the Italian crimonologist Enrico Ferri argued that science showed violence was in fact not part of the revolution: "the processes of evolution and revolution—the only wholly social or collective processes—are the most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, individual violence have only a very feeble power of social transformation" (p. 145). For Ferri, "revolution" meant "the concluding phase of an evolution" and was not to be used "in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt" (p. 141). Darwinism validate peaceful transition. But Ferri's book was translated into English by the "millionaire socialist" Robert Rives La Monte, who argued in his essay "Science and Revolution" (1909) that "a social cataclysm or revolution to be necessary to break the shell of capitalism within which the chick of the Society of Fellowship has been developing" (p. 105). He ended his essay by declaiming, "Let us be careful not to go to extremes and deny the fact and the fruitfulness of slow evolution, but let us with equal determination assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution! […] I find it difficult, I repeat, to see how any sane man […] can not believe a cataclysmic revolution not only inevitable, but a consummation devoutly to be desired" (p. 113). Even within the same ideology, you could apply Darwinism and get two completely contradictory results.

Paul admits it might all be rhetoric... but "rhetoric can be a potent resource" (p. 242). And it was a potent rhetoric too. If you were using Darwinism, Burrow argues that every struggle was magnified in importance: "Great-power status, imperialist expansion, the control of crime or disease, were spoken of [...] as matters of national life or death. Class and racial tensions too were projected onto the scale of world history, of continuing social evolution, as though the fate of nations or humanity, with alternatives of utopia or the extremity of grovelling degeneracy, of world domination or ultimate extinction or enslavement, hung poised in the balance" (pp. 95-6). Every little struggle became charged with cosmic significance.

Little wonder, then, that the writers of the early sf I look it drew on (social) Darwinism so much.