Download Excerpts from The Evolution Wars (2001)

Excerpts from The Evolution Wars (2001)
by Michael Ruse
Social Darwinism
A good and full religion has a moral code, directives that it gives to its acolytes.
“Love your neighbors as yourself.” “Honor thy mother and thy father.” “Do not
lust after the wives of other men.” Evolutionists took very seriously, as part of
their system, this need for obligation. This led to the full development of what
came to be known as Social Darwinism—a moral code based on evolution—
although truly it would be better known as Social Spencerianism . . . [A Social
Darwinist] ferrets out the nature of the evolutionary process—the mechanism or
cause of evolution—and then transfers it to the human realm, arguing that that
which holds as a matter of fact among organisms holds as a matter of obligation
among humans.
Take the case of Herbert Spencer. Several
years before Darwin published . . . Spencer
(1852) recognized the significance of the
struggle for existence for human population
development. He saw clearly that natural
urges to reproduce would bring on differential
survival and reproduction of organisms within
and between populations, and that this could
lead to permanent biological change . . .
Spencer at once drew the implications for
our species. Take, to use his example, the
different natures and behaviors of the Irish and
the Scots. In true Victorian fashion, Spencer
argued that even though the Irish have lots of
children, because of their lazy, indolent ways
they are going to fail in life’s struggles. The far more frugal and hardworking
Scots will succeed and thrive, as indeed they do. Change in human nature will
ensue.
From this satisfying biological inference, Spencer made an easy transition to
economics, arguing that just as biology favors an unrestricted struggle and
consequent selective success, so also economically this is the way that one should
go for success. In particular, one should promote policies based on extreme
laissez-faire socioeconomics. States should stay away from the activities of
people following their own self-interest. In no way should politicians try to
regulate or otherwise control unrestricted competition . . .
Spencer could sound positively brutal about those who would help the
unfortunate within society: “If the unworthy are helped to increase, by shielding
them from that mortality which their unworthiness would naturally entail, the
effect is to produce, generation after generation, a greater unworthiness” (Spencer,
1873). And one can find similar sentiments in the writings of Spencer’s
followers . . .
But there is much more to the story than this . . . it is clear (from statements
and from actions) that it was never the intent of Spencer or his followers to
deny the importance of individual charity. Take two of Spencer’s more
notorious disciples. John D. Rockefeller [1839-1937] spend the first part of his
life building up the vast petroleum company Standard Oil and the second part of
his life fighting the federal government as it tried to break up the monopoly he had
established over so vital a national resource as fuel oil. From his childhood,
Rockefeller had tithed to his church, and he gave seriously and deeply to
charity. The University of Chicago would never have become the world
institution that it is without Rockefeller munificence.
The same generosity is true of Andrew Carnegie [18351919], who came from Scotland and made his fortune by
founding and building U. S. Steel. He always claimed that
no man should die rich, and he gave huge amounts of
money directed toward the founding of public libraries.
Carnegie’s charity was an immediate function of his
reading Spencer, a reading that stressed the positive rather
than the negative side of laissez-faire. Carnegie (like other
industrialists) was proud of what he had done, thinking it a
credit to his own abilities rather than a black mark against the lesser abilities of
others. That poor but gifted children might likewise have the opportunity to
develop and use their talents, Carnegie wanted to found public places of
instruction and learning where one might go to better oneself . . .
Alternatives to Laissez-Faire
. . . The belief that some are chosen by nature to be successes and some are
doomed to failure, that not only are all humans not born equal but that this is a
right and proper state of affairs, was to the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie as
much a matter of [Calvinist] theology as it was of scientifically based
philosophy.
At first this was true also of Thomas Henry
Huxley. He spoke of himself as a “scientific
Calvinist,” meaning that he thought that the
stern laws of nature decided the fates of us
all, determining some to succeed and others
to fail . . . [Later] despite his continuing
friendship with Herbert Spencer, he pulled
away from laissez-faire. For the mature
Huxley, ethical success lay not in a
conformity with and acquiescence to
nature’s laws. It lay rather in fighting such
laws and the evil consequences to which
they lead. At the same time, Huxley saw the virtues of a functioning civil service
and of intervention by the state into such things as education and medicine and the
military and the like.
One senses that for Huxley there was always a conflict within: his enthusiasm for
naked evolutionism, which he always interpreted as based on a brutal struggle,
battled with his innate decency and his conviction that it is our ultimate moral
obligation to fight those vile personal attributes that come in a package deal as part
of our biology. No such worries ever troubled the happy thinking of Alfred
Russell Wallace. As a boy, he had been taken by one of his older brothers to hear
the Scottish mill owner and early socialist Robert Owen. He always looked back
to this moment as a real turning point and, for the rest of his very long life, Wallace
was ever an ardent socialist. Against Darwin, he believed that selection can
operate for the good of the group as well as for the individual, and he thought
that evolutionary success would be something that promoted the harmonious
whole over the selfish individual.
Similar sorts of views appealed to the exiled Russian
Prince Petr Kropotkin [1842-1921]. He claimed that
there exists between all animals, including
humans, a natural sense of sympathy, something
that he called mutual aid. Kropotkin did differ from
Wallace in having little or no time for the state
whatsoever. One suspects that his anarchism owed
as much to the fact that he hailed from czarist Russia .
. . as it did anything in evolution . . .
As always, evolutionism’s relationship with
people’s actions and beliefs is ambiguous . . .
1) What are Ruse’s main points in these excerpts?
2) Evaluate the following statements: “All Social Darwinists believed in the
same political-economic structure—laissez-faire capitalism. Therefore,
Social Darwinism is simply about applying ‘survival of the fittest’ to
human society.”