[MD] Social Darwinism

[david buchanan]

This comes from the "Collective intelligence (Granger)" thread.

On 16 May Ian asked Arlo:
Could you elaborate on the kind of "Social Darwinists" you seem to have it 
in for. Personally, I'm pretty confortable with neo-Darwinian evolutionary 
explanations of processes throughout the MoQ levels.

Arlo replied:
My contention is not with evolutionary processes. I think these underscore 
the MOQ, and are not only unavoidable but Good. ...Social Darwinism, at its 
simplest, says that who lives and who dies should be decided by social 
power. In days of yore, social darwinism favored the aristocracy. Who lived 
and who died was determined by social birthright, family status, etc. Kings 
received medical attention, peasants were left in the streets to die. ...The 
underlying belief was that survival should be hinged to certain social 
patterns. Those with these patterns were deemed "more valuable", those 
without were seen as "expendable". Today we retain that mindset, and have 
latched onto "wealth", replacing the idea of an aristocracy with a 
capistocracy. The idea that "who lives and who dies" should be decided by 
"who has money" underlies the modern discourse on healthcare. The "poor" are 
lazy and stupid and if they die off then it is of no loss at all.

dmb chimes in:
A while back I read some of Richard Hofstadter's 1944 classic "Social 
Darwinism in American Thought"   and I can tell you that Arlo is not 
exaggerating. Social Darwinism has been used to justify all kinds of 
cruelty. Slavery, poverty, colonialism, racism, sexism and it even informed 
the Nazi's race theories and their genocidal project against non-Aryans.

This attitude was not invented as a response to Darwin's theory of natural 
selection so much as that theory reflected the world Darwin lived in 
already. He was basically projecting 19th century Victorian social values 
onto nature and so it effectively gave scientific sanction to already 
existing tendencies.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian, the White man's burden, etc. That's 
social darwinism too.

"In this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike 
and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations 
which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities." Theodore Roosevelt

Hofstadter opens chapter nine, titled "Racism and Imperialism", with that 
quote from Teddy but he opens chapter ten, the conclusion, with a quote from 
William James. The emphasis is William's...

"The entire modern deification of survival PER SE, survival returning to 
itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive 
excellence in WHAT survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is 
surely the strangest intellecual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to 
another."

Pirsig echoes James with his emptiness-mocking phrase, "survival of the 
survivors".

What's my point? One should NOT be comfortable with social darwinism. It's 
intellectually bogus and morally it's even worse. A person would have to be 
oblivious or black-hearted to go along with that shit.

Thanks,
dmb

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