The Lying Stones of Marrakech (40 page)

Troubling issues of this sort often find their unsurprising resolution in a bit of wisdom that has permeated our traditions from such sublime sources as Aristotle's
aurea mediocritas
(or golden mean) to the vernacular sensibility of Goldilocks's decisions to split the difference between two extremes, and find a solution “just right” in the middle. Similarly, one can ask either too litde or too much of Darwinism in trying to understand “the origin of man and his history.” As usual, a proper solution lies in the intermediary position of “a great deal, but not everything.” Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire gain their odd but sensible conjunction as illustrations of the two extremes that must be avoided—for Wilberforce denied evolution altogether and absolutely, while the major social theory that hindered industrial reform (and permitted conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire) followed the most overextended application of biological evolution to patterns of human history—the theory of “Social Darwinism.” By understanding the fallacies of Wilberforce's denial and social Darwinism's uncritical and total embrace, we may find the proper balance between.

They didn't call him Soapy Sam for nothing. The orotund bishop of Oxford saved his finest invective for Darwin's attempt to apply his heresies to human origins. In his review of
The Origin of Species
(published in the
Quarterly Review
, England's leading literary journal, in 1860), Wilberforce complained above all: “First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well as to the animals around him.” Wilberforce then uncorked a passionate argument for a human uniqueness that could only have been divinely ordained:

Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit,—all are equally and
utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son.

But the tide of history quickly engulfed the good bishop. When Wilberforce died in 1873, from a head injury after a fall from his horse, Huxley acerbically remarked that, for once, the bishop's brains had come into contact with reality—and the result had been fatal. Darwinism became the reigning intellectual novelty of the late nineteenth century. The potential domain of natural selection, Darwin's chief explanatory principle, seemed nearly endless to his devotees (though not, interestingly, to the master himself, as Darwin remained cautious about extensions beyond the realm of biological evolution). If a “struggle for existence” regulated the evolution of organisms, wouldn't a similar principle also explain the history of just about anything—from the cosmology of the universe, to the languages, economics, technologies, and cultural histories of human groups?

Even the greatest of truths can be overextended by zealous and uncritical acolytes. Natural selection may be one of the most powerful ideas ever developed in science, but only certain kinds of systems can be regulated by such a process, and Darwin's principle cannot explain all natural sequences that develop historically. For example, we may talk about the “evolution” of a star through a predictable series of phases over many billion years from birth to explosion, but natural selection—a process driven by the differential survival and reproductive success of some individuals in a variable population—cannot be the cause of stellar development. We must look, instead, to the inherent physics and chemistry of light elements in such large masses.

Similarly, although Darwinism surely explains many universal features of human form and behavior, we cannot invoke natural selection as the controlling cause of our cultural changes since the dawn of agriculture—if only because such a limited time of some ten thousand years provides so little scope for any general biological evolution at all. Moreover, and most importandy, human cultural change operates in a manner that precludes a controlling role for natural selection. To mention the two most obvious differences: first, biological evolution proceeds by continuous division of species into independent lineages that must remain forever separated on the branching tree of life. Human cultural change works by the opposite process of borrowing and amalgamation. One good look at another culture's wheel or alphabet may alter the course of a civilization forever. If we wish to identify a biological analog for cultural change, I suspect that infection will work much better than evolution.

Second, human cultural change runs by the powerful mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. Anything useful (or alas, destructive) that our generation invents can be passed directly to our offspring by direct education. Change in this rapid Lamarckian mode easily overwhelms the much slower process of Darwinian natural selection, which requires a Mendelian form of inheritance based on small-scale and undirected variation that can then be sifted and sorted through a struggle for existence. Genetic variation is Mendelian, so Darwinism rules biological evolution. But cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies.

Nonetheless, the first blush of high Victorian enthusiasm for Darwinism inspired a rush of attempted extensions to other fields, at least by analogy. Some efforts proved fruitful, including the decision of James Murray, editor of
The Oxford English Dictionary
(first volume published in 1884, but under way for twenty years before then), to work strictly by historical principles and to treat the changing definitions of words not by current preferences in use (as in a truly normative dictionary), but by the chronology and branching evolution of recorded meanings (making the text more an encyclopedia about the history of words than a true dictionary).

But other extensions proved both invalid in theory, and also (or so most of us would judge by modern moral sensibilities) harmful, if not tragic, in application. As the chief offender in this category, we must cite a highly influential theory that acquired the inappropriate name of “Social Darwinism.” (As many historians have noted, this theory should really be called “social Spencerism,” since Herbert Spencer, chief Victorian pundit of nearly everything, laid out all the basic postulates in his
Social Statics
of 1850, nearly a decade before Darwin published
The Origin of Species
. Darwinism did add the mechanism of natural selection as a harsher version of the struggle for existence, long recognized by Spencer. Moreover, Darwin himself maintained a highly ambivalent relationship to this movement that borrowed his name. He felt the pride of any creator toward useful extensions of his theory—and he did hope for an evolutionary account of human origins and historical patterns. But he also understood only too well why the mechanism of natural selection applied poorly to the causes of social change in humans.)

Social Darwinism often serves as a blanket term for any genetic or biological claim made about the inevitability (or at least the “naturalness”) of social inequalities among classes and sexes, or military conquests of one group by another. But such a broad definition distorts the history of this important subject—although pseudo-Darwinian arguments have long been advanced,
prominently and forcefully, to cover all these sins. Classical Social Darwinism operated as a more specific theory about the nature and origin of social classes in the modern industrial world. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
article on this subject correctly emphasizes this restriction by first citing the broadest range of potential meaning, and then properly narrowing the scope of actual usage:

Social Darwinism:
the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature…. The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.

Spencer believed that we must permit and welcome such harshness to unleash the progressive development that all “evolutionary” systems undergo if allowed to follow their natural course in an unimpeded manner. As a central principle of his system, Spencer believed that progress—defined by him as movement from a simple undifFerentiated homogeneity, as in a bacterium or a “primitive” human society without social classes, to complex and structured heterogeneity, as in “advanced” organisms or industrial societies—did not arise as an inevitable property of matter in motion, but only through interaction between evolving systems and their environments. These interactions must therefore not be obstructed.

The relationship of Spencer's general vision to Darwin's particular theory has often been misconstrued or overemphasized. As stated above, Spencer had published the outline (and most of the details) of his system nearly ten years before Darwin presented his evolutionary theory. Spencer certainly did welcome the principle of natural selection as an even more ruthless and efficient mechanism for driving evolution forward. (Ironically, the word
evolution
, as a description for the genealogical history of life, entered our language through Spencer's urgings, not from Darwin. Spencer favored the term for its vernacular English meaning of “progress,” in the original Latin sense of
evolutio
, or
“unfolding.” At first, Darwin resisted the term—he originally called his process “descent with modification”—because his theory included no mechanism or rationale for general progress in the history of life. But Spencer prevailed, largely because no society has ever been more committed to progress as a central notion or goal than Victorian Britain at the height of its colonial and industrial expansion.)

Spencer certainly used Darwin's mechanism of natural selection to buttress his system. Few people recognize the following historical irony: Spencer, not Darwin, coined the term “survival of the fittest,” now our conventional catch-phrase for Darwin's mechanism. Darwin himself paid proper tribute in a statement added to later editions of
The Origin of Species:
“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection…. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”

As a mechanism for driving his universal “evolution” (of stars, species, languages, economics, technologies, and nearly anything else) toward progress, Spencer preferred the direct and mechanistic “root, hog, or die” of natural selection (as William Graham Sumner, the leading American social Darwinian, epitomized the process), to the vaguer and largely Lamarckian drive toward organic self-improvement that Spencer had originally favored as a primary cause. (In this colorful image, Sumner cited a quintessential American metaphor of self-sufficiency that my dictionary of catchphrases traces to a speech by Davy Crockett in 1834.) In a post-Darwinian edition of his
Social Statics
, Spencer wrote:

The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were published, has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken up in them. Contrariwise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence strengthening that position. The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater than [I formerly recognized]. The process of “natural selection,” as Mr. Darwin called it… has shown to be a chief cause … of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with the lower, and diverging and re-diverging as they evolved, have reached their present degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life.

But putting aside the question of Darwin's particular influence, the more important, underlying point remains firm: the theory of Social Darwinism (or
social Spencerism) rests upon a set of analogies between the causes of change and stability in biological and social systems—and on the supposedly direct applicability of these biological principles to the social realm. In his founding document, the
Social Statics
of 1850, Spencer rests his case upon two elaborate analogies to biological systems.

1. The struggle for existence as purification in biology and society. Darwin recognized the “struggle for existence” as metaphorical shorthand for any strategy that promotes increased reproductive success, whether by outright battle, cooperation, or just simple prowess in copulation under the old principle of “early and often.” But many contemporaries, including Spencer, read “survival of the fittest” only as overt struggle to the death—what T. H. Huxley later dismissed as the “gladiatorial” school, or the incarnation of Hobbes's
bellum omnium contra omnes
(the war of all against all). Spencer presented this stark and limited view of nature in his
Social Statics:

Pervading all Nature we may see at work a stern discipline which is a litde cruel that it may be very kind. That state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation, to the great perplexity of many worthy people, is at bottom the most merciful provision which the circumstances admit of…. Note that carnivorous enemies, not only remove from herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the sickly, the malformed, and the least fleet or powerful. By the aid of which purifying process… all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented; and the maintenance of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive of happiness, is ensured.