Herbert Spencer

Tue Dec 29 09:20:40 CST 1998

On Mon, 28 Dec 1998 15:01:43 -0800 Spencer Thiel <s_thiel at geocities.com>
writes:

>I believe that he was actually the coiner of the phrase "survival of 
>the fittest", usually credited to Darwin and now totally assosciated
with
>Darwin.  What's that called again?

and Paul wrote 

>>Herbert Stencil wasn't such a bad guy but Herbert Spencer is
>>associated with Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest carried 
>into the social and cultural order, justification for conservative
politics 
>and colonialism. Not likely to be popular on the p-list.

And after a further colloquy Paul wrote again:

>Does this mean Darwin was picking up the vocabulary of other
>"evolutionists" by the time he got around to writing On the O of S?

>Or what?

Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I have some ideas (and borrow a few).

  First, a little more on Spencer.  Spencer, in his more than 300
published books (and countless scores of articles for the Economist),
advanced, among other things social Darwinism (before Darwin had
published the Origin).  I believe that the use of the term "survival of
the fittest" comes from Spencer's Social Statics (1850).

Spencer was indeed brilliant and one of the most influential Victorian
intellectuals.  He was also pretty clearly a racist and colonial
apologist.  He deployed his sociobiological theories and rather eccentric
anthropology in aid notions of racial superiority.

Briefly, Spencerian social theory--which has cast a long shadow,
influencing such folks as Talcott Parsons (Systems Theory) and Freidrich
Hayek--was simply one of inevitable progress.  Organisms and human
institutions advance from the simple to the complex, a development which,
in Spencer's view, is always improving.  (This, of course, makes him more
Lamarckian than Darwinist, but more on that later).  The theory proceeds
from this premise to the more sinister conclusions for which he is
infamous.  Spencer spoke of a 
"stern discipline" in nature, where predators prevent the multiplication
of inferior samples. He wrote that society should emulate this natural
function and "excrete" its unworthy members.  But, in the Spencerian
world, this does not happen because of the meddlesomeness of the state
and its "spurious philanthropists."  In other words, welfare, provision
for the needy, social services, and the state in general is responsible
for degrading the species.  

He also was of the opinion that there is such a thing as the "primitive
mind," which is "unspeculative, uncritical, incapable of generalizing,
and with scarcely any notions save those yielded by perceptions."  From
this it was not a great leap, when writing late in the 19th Cetnury, that
black children who are educated alongside white children "did not
correspondingly advance in learning -- their intellects being apparently
incapable of being cultured beyond a particular point."  (Apparently the
mind of the social Darwinist is not capable of being cultured beyond a
certain point, as Charles Murray is but an echo of Spencer--no
'improvement' there!).

And even worse yet, the eugenicism latent in all this came to the fore at
times:

  "If anyone denies that children bear likeness to their progenitors in 
character and capacity - if he holds that men whose parents and 
grandparents were habitual criminals, have tendencies as good as those 
of men whose parents and grandparents were industrious and upright, he 
may consistently hold that it matters not from what families in a 
society the successive generations descend. But whoever does not 
espouse so insane a proposition, must admit that social arrangements 
which retard the multiplication of the mentally best, and facilitate 
the multiplication of the mentally worst, must be extremely injurious."

(Apparently, Spencer had a problem of translating theory into practice. 
Geroge Eliot had been quite madly in love with him, but he ultimatley
rejected her on the ground that she was not pretty enough, though he
acknowledged her intellect).

Anyway, this may seem to have strayed from Paul's question whether Darwin
was an 'evolutionist' in the Spencerian/Lamarckian sense.  I make no
pretense to authority on this, but I understand that there is a good deal
in Darwin's writings suggesting that he flatly rejected the notion of
natural selection operating to "improve."  

Yet he used the value-laden term "survival of the fittest" in the Origin.
 In the first edition he did so without acknowledgement, yet in some
subsequent edition he credited Spencer.  My paperback includes the
credit, but I don't know at what point in time the acknowledgement came. 

Darwin fulminated against Lamarck, yet could not seem to resist the
rhetoric of 'improvement' or distinctions between 'higher' and 'lower'
(though he at times also railed against those terms of ordinality:

"Lamarck, who believed in an innate and inevitable tendency towards
perfection in all organic beings, seems to have felt this difficulty so
strongly, that he was led to suppose that new and simple forms are
continuously being produced by spontaneous generation. Science has not as
yet proved the truth of this belief, whatever the future may reveal. On
our theory the continued existence of lowly organisms offers no
difficulty; for natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does
not necessarily include progressive development--it only takes advantage
of such variations as are beneficial to each creature under its complex
relations of life."  

But it cannot be denied that there are Spencerian, not to mention
Malthusian, currents in Darwin's writings.  The notion that Darwin was
inspired by Malthus's gloomy predictions of "geometric" population
advance outstripping the only "arithmetically" increasing food supply
actually is supported by Darwin's autobiography in which he stated that
he read Malthus's Principles of Population (for amusement) and found he
had a theory (!). 

At any rate, there seems to be quite a debate about whether Darwin was an
'evolutionist'--a debate that persists.  He used the term evolution in
the Descent of Man.  

Here's what Gould, ever the Darwin rehabilitator, has said:

 "The second riddle--why does Darwin not use the word evolution? He 
talks about descent with modification. Why? Because evolution was a 
perfectly well-understood, if uncommon, vernacular word in English at 
that time, which meant progress. Darwin would not have used a word that 
meant progress because, almost uniquely among 19th-century 
evolutionists, Darwin's own mechanism of evolutionary change does not 
include any necessary predictable, inherent progress. Natural selection 
is a theory about adaptation to changing local environments; that's 
all. Darwin would not use a word that meant progress, especially when 
he was trying very hard to separate the mechanism from the common 
social belief, the psychological hope, the desire of everyone, to 
equate this process with progress. He was quite clear on that. He was 
reading Chambers' The Natural History of Creation and he wrote a 
marginal note in his copy: "Never say higher or lower."

  "So why do we call it evolution today? Largely because Herbert Spencer 
won. Spencer was an inherent progressionalist and used the word 
evolution for that reason--and perfectly properly within his system. 
Spencer thought there was progress in cosmology and economics and the 
history of language and biology and everywhere, and his system took 
hold, much to Darwin's disappointment. Darwin finally gave up and he 
used the word evolution, I think for the first time, in The Descent of
Man in 1872.

 I love Gould.  But Stephen, I would have to say, it seems that Spencer
won before the battle began, since the concept of 'the fittest' was
embraced as early as the Origin of Species.  I think it hard to say that
Darwin 'gave up' as late as 1872.     

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