It’s worth noting, at the outset, that the term “Social Darwinism” wasn’t ever actually used by any of the “Social Darwinists” or Eugenicists, but rather as an accusation against them. Usually, the primary target of this term is Herbert Spencer, a 19th Century British writer who would best be described today as Libertarian. He fit in pretty nicely with a lot of the Europeans of that era, from Kipling to Nietzsche; he believed in some pretty objective answers to both moral and practical questions, he believed in Progress, and he believed that the post-”Enlightenment” European civilization, with its focus on Reason and Science, with its secularism and legalism, was pretty close to the apotheosis of humanity.
Most cultural historians agree that this way of thinking was shattered by some pretty blunt events that occurred in the early 20th Century. First, intellectuals in every field, from music to mathematics to art to physics, started to focus on subjectivity and on the variety of possible perspectives, and this new Modernism challenged and eventually toppled the objectivism of Spencer and his colleagues. Next, the Great War broke out in 1914, a travesty that killed millions of Europeans for no reason whatsoever, leaving most of the survivors with a fairly strong conviction that the “Reason” of their great Civilization was mostly a fiction, and that the Liberalism of the 19th Century hadn’t, in fact, created a better world than the Medieval one it had replaced. Finally, as the 20th Century moved on, non-European (and non-male) voices started to be heard, and the simplistic racism of this view — that the Europeans were the more Civilized, and that they were somehow helping the rest of the world by conquering it — became impossible to cling to. Today, this attitude of European cultural superiority only exists among the most committed neofascists.
And perhaps it’s that idea — cultural superiority, as an objective, even measurable fact — that earns Spencer the criticism that now falls on him and his legacy. Put simply, Social Darwinism is the idea that, just as in the natural world, some cultures or ideas are more “fit” than others, and that the more “fit” cultures will “survive.” In fact, the very phrase “survival of the fittest” comes not from Charles Darwin, but actually from Herbert Spencer, who coined it in his 1864 book The Principles of Biology, written 5 years after On the Origin of Species. This idea, that some cultures are better and that those are the cultures that will naturally emerge as the more successful ones, is all too obviously a justification for racism, for eugenics, and for Nazism, although those latter two did not exist in Spencer’s lifetime and thus he could not quite have foreseen them. Still, he did live in the same era as Imperialism, and It’s pretty easy to see the direct line from the idea of Social Darwinism to the conquest of Africa right up to Hitler. It’s a rightly loathed idea, and I’m not here to try to defend it as such.
But there is actually something worth reclaiming here, and it starts with a better understanding of Darwinism itself.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is, still, one of the most misunderstood in all of popular culture. And no, I’m not talking about the way stupid creationists misunderstand it to the point of railing against it; rather that the way we continue to talk about evolution, even among those of us who are scientifically literate, is highly problematic. The error that most of us make is what you might call a teleological one: that is, we act as though evolution has a “purpose,” or a direction. We use the phrase “highly evolved,” or the comparative, “more highly evolved.” What is this supposed to mean? Evolution has no top or bottom; those are human ideas, from human political culture. No species is more “highly evolved” than any other — they’re all evolved exactly as much as they need to be to exist in their current environments.
To see how deeply embedded these misconceptions are, think about how we talk about our own species as if it is the “winner” of evolution; we talk about how we are the “dominant” species on the planet, and even say ridiculous things like “A hundred million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth,” or “The lion is the king of the jungle.” As if jungles have kings? Admittedly, we don’t quite say these things as if they’re scientifically accurate, but even just that language in popular culture is enough to make a mess out of our understanding of not only the natural world, but also our own.
Dinosaurs, of course, never “ruled” the earth. There was once a time when there were a lot of large species, most of them probably more chicken-like than we like to believe. There were many of those species over the course of roughly a hundred million years; they’re not all the same, and none of them were ever elected President or crowned King of anything. We have chosen to name one of them ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex,” which basically translates to “King Lizard Tyrant,” when in reality it was exactly none of those things. It wasn’t the largest dinosaur, or the species that lasted the longest, or the most ferocious, or … you get the point, right? We all know this, but we don’t confront it enough. Neither dinos nor lions nor humans can rightly be called the “dominant” species on earth. By what basis do we even call ourselves the “top” species? There are literally a quadrillion ants in the world, and trillions of krill, and here’s how many bacteria there are in the world today, roughly: 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. In terms of biomass (how much of it there is, so basically population x weight), Krill probably have the most of any single species, while copepods make up the largest if we allow for a group of closely-related species. Among land mammals, in terms of biomass, total cows way outweigh total humans.
Numbers aside, it isn’t just about how many or how important any individual species seems to be. The point of all of this is to say that evolution, as a process, doesn’t have a goal, or an endgame, or in any way a hierarchy. There are a shade under 9 million different species of plants and animals on Earth, and it’s safe to say that all 9 million of them are, roughly, tied for being the “fittest.”
After all, “survival of the fittest” is a tautological concept. We only know what’s “fittest” because it survives, and the only way to survive is to be “fit.” That is all that “fit” means, in evolutionary theory. It doesn’t mean that you are bigger or stronger or smarter, it just means that you exist. If you exist, and you’re not extinct, then congratulations, you’re fit. Humans are fit, and so is grass, and so are beetles, and so is the novel coronavirus.
Again, this is worth reiterating because of just how much our pop-culture consciousness has messed up our perception of things. We think about evolution as if it’s some linear process that gets “better.” Haven’t you seen this image?
Like, seriously, what the fuck is this? I think most of us know, intellectually, that this isn’t how it works, but somehow this doesn’t evoke the rage that it probably should. An image like that is basically the same as “Columbus discovered America”; an outdated idea that needs correcting because, honestly, it’s a lot closer to Nazism than you want to admit, even if you did learn it this way in grade school.
Then you have this one:
What do you think? Better? I guess, because it’s more accurate about the fact that these animals all share “common ancestors,” but really it’s still too teleological. All the creatures across the top are the ones we recognize from the present world, and it’s just a history of how they all got here. It subtly suggests that the current variety of life was always destined to be, and the expansion of species along these ancestral lines is, again, depicted wrongly as a sign of linear progress. Here’s one I found online that I like a little better:
Without getting into its details, it doesn’t seem to have the same implication of a “top” or a “bottom,” of a rhyme or a reason to the diversity of life.
Because that’s really the point of evolution (and not only Darwinian evolution, honestly): it’s an explanation of, and celebration of, diversity. It’s seeing how all 9 million species are connected through the past. All of them are “fit” and thriving as of now.
So, this is the first thing I want to reclaim for a new Social Darwinism. Isn’t human culture the same? We share a history going back a few thousand years, most of us come from one of a relatively small number of original cultures, but now we’ve blossomed into this incredible diversity of languages, of facial features, of sexualities, of heritages of food and music and habits and activities. Where the 19th Century “Social Darwinists” were looking for objective superiority and hierarchy, I suggest we look at human culture using a more accurately evolutionary perspective, one where no culture is better than any other — where all of them have survived to this point, and therefore all of them are fit. Understood correctly, Social Darwinism should mean the awareness that we live among myriad cultures, all of which are fit, none of which is inherently “superior.”
But wait, there’s more! Because the above is really just about evolutionary theory, which is not the same as “Darwinism.” Because many of Darwin’s contemporaries understood there was a process of evolution; what Darwin actually presented that was original was the answer to “why” species seem to be evolving, differentiating, diversifying. Darwin’s brilliant hypothesis was that species are adapting, naturally and without intent but just by the process of “natural selection,” to their environments. That is to say: in nature, a species thrives as “fit” if and when it is properly adapted to its environment.
And of course, when the environment changes, either the species changes along with it, or it ceases to exist. That’s why there are no more Velociraptors, and they’re now chickens. That’s why there are no more Dodo birds; their environment changed (in that humans suddenly existed in their habitat). Then you have things like panda bears or tigers, for whom the existence of humans has also been a death sentence, except we think they’re pretty awesome, so some human conservationists have kept them around. It’s a fairly strange set of circumstances for those species driven to the point of extinction by humans, but then conserved by humans as well, but it’s still an example of how speciation reacts to environmental pressures.
That is to say, species can and do change, always. They don’t change, though, out of a sense of “progress.” They aren’t getting better; they are naturally seeking an equilibrium with their environment, an ecological balance. When that balance is out of whack, they are forced to change, and again without any intent or interference or ten-point-plan necessary, they naturally change. The versions of that species that no longer mesh with their environment cease to exist; the versions that can survive, that are “fit” to this new environment, are the ones that last and grow and become, eventually, the only type that exists. The reason there are so many cows, by the way? Because humans find them, and their breastmilk, really yummy. Especially when the cow breastmilk grows mold, and then we make sandwiches out of it, or sprinkle it on pasta (but really, is anything better than chicken menses? Definitely a great adaptation from these ersatz-Velociraptors).
The lesson of this is: If you want to intentionally change what species exist, you can fiddle with genetic experimentation if you like, or you can scream at them at the top of your voice to change, or you can pass a law making it illegal for them to exist in that form. We try this brute-force approach with a lot of “pests,” don’t we? We put rat poison out, we spray for mosquitoes, and we develop vaccines against viruses, and then the problem is totally solved; there are no more rats or mosquitoes or omicron variants. Or … okay so it doesn’t work that way, but then what does? Well, if you keep your house clean, the cockroaches won’t find it hospitable, and if you chop down all of the forests, then the forest-dwellers will go extinct. If, instead of brute-force action in favor of, or against, speciation that you don’t like, you simply change the environmental conditions, you will cause evolution to happen, and you will have a different species.
This, then, is the second lesson of a correctly-understood Social Darwinism. If you want to change human society, you must change the social environment. What exactly this entails should be the topic of an entirely different essay, but in essence what I mean is this: People are racist etc. because they are scared and hopeless and easily manipulated. If they were more secure in their lives, finances, and psychology, perhaps they’d be a little less prone to being terrible. They would evolve to be fit for their new environment — as they are now fit for their current dystopian one. It seems to me that the only way to really change culture, to change society, to change humanity, is to change its environment.
Everything in our culture, if seen ecologically, is operating as it should. Our environment is hospitable to Mitch McConnells and Samuel Alitos and all sorts of other disgusting vermin that thrive, just as rats and cockroaches thrive in our cities far better than in our countryside. They are not aberrations, and they are not objectively less well-suited than any of us are; we can observe that, given this environment, these are the kinds of people and the kinds of actions that will develop, through natural selection. I am no more highly evolved than Lauren Boebert; both of us are fit for our shared environment, in different ways, and some version of each of us will always exist until, due to changes in the environment, one or both of us is no longer fit, and goes extinct.
So, if you really want to change the world, you actually have to change the world, and not individual actors in it who are just behaving as suits their social ecology. And I honestly believe there are ways to do this under current conditions, but that’s for another time.
Or, you could try continuing to scream at them, and see if that solves your rat problem.