Social Darwinism/Economic Libertarianism

In her column in The Washington Post, Susan Jacoby points out that not all atheists are politically liberal. It may seem that way, since the religious right and the political right are both concentrated in the Republican Party these days. But atheists tend to be skeptics (the reverse is usually, but not always, true as well), and we skeptics are quite diverse in our thinking.

And historically, secular thinking - which is basically what we Americans always thought our government was all about - has never been limited to any particular political creed. But Jacoby identifies one long-standing secular philosophy, descended from social Darwinism but whose modern supporters might claim as simply economic libertarianism:

The modern descendants of the social Darwinists are cultural libertarians but economic conservatives, influenced in some instances, as their predecessors were, by pseudo-scientific convictions about racial intellectual superiority--which they attribute not to God but to nature itself. This strain of American secularism and atheism runs from the social Darwinists of the Gilded Age through the eugenicists of the early 20th century and the followers of Ayn Rand's so-called objectivism, to those within secular organizations today who insist on calling themselves skeptics, are offended by the depiction of secularists as humanists, and tend to be as opposed to government social programs as members of the religious right.

The essence of social Darwinism was its assertion (never made by Darwin) that the struggle of organisms for existence in nature was replicated by the struggle of humans within civilization. The poor were poor not because God had decreed it, as religious conservatives had claimed about slavery, but because they simply did not have the wits or the strength to be anything else. The inventor of social Darwinism (though he did not call it that) was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose ideas received a much more favorable reception in Gilded Age America than in his native England. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and applied it to human beings.

This is, of course, a summary by an opponent of this philosophy. I think it's quite fair as a historical description, but modern proponents will quite likely claim to have abandoned the racism of the past. Fine. But then, what does this political philosophy imply these days? (Note that I'll comment on a few other points in Jacoby's column in the second page of this post. For now, I just want to examine this particular question.)

Suppose that this political philosophy - or the modern incarnation of it - is exactly correct. Suppose that the wealthy are better people than the rest of us - not just better at making money, but better in all qualities that matter. Suppose that successful people deserve their success, and that we should be celebrating that. Suppose, as a strict value judgment, that this is exactly the correct path for our country and our world. What then does that imply?

Obviously - or so it seems to me - this does not imply establishing any kind of hereditary aristocracy, whether based on wealth or anything else. In fact, just the reverse. Clearly, we'd want people to get ahead based on their own merits, not on who their parents were, and not on special advantages which they'd enjoy and others wouldn't. As much as possible, in this game of merit, we'd want to begin with a level playing field, wouldn't we? Doesn't this whole philosophy imply that?

And therefore, as a society, we'd need to insure that all children start off with an equal - or at least a fair - chance. Only then would their success be truly a matter of ability (and luck, true, but we can't entirely eliminate chance as an influence - and likely still a big one, no matter what we do). So this philosophy seems to imply heavy estate taxes, so that all children have to work for what they get, rather than floating through life on the effort of a parent, grandparent, or distant ancestor.

It also implies an intense government effort in childhood - especially early-childhood - nutrition and education. No child should be unfairly denied an equal start on their life, to the extent that we can manage this. After all, we want success to be based on merit, don't we? And free public education at all levels should be uniformly good (or uniformly bad, I guess - but it's hard to imagine we'd think that was the way to go). No child should get a bad education just because he was raised in poverty, and no child should get the unfair advantage of superior schools and superior teachers just because some ancestor was especially successful. (Ideally, of course, we'd want all schools and all teachers to be superior.)

Remember, we're assuming, rightly or wrongly, that this social Darwinist/libertarian philosophy is the correct path for us all. These are the implications of that. If success based on individual merit is our goal, then we must see that we promote exactly that.

Of course, to make sure that children have a level playing field, we must work very hard to improve the resources of the poorest children. Clearly, it would be stupid to focus on making education worse for rich kids, as a way of giving everyone an equal start. I think we can all agree on that, can't we?  But it will still take money - lots and lots of money - to bring educational standards up for everyone else. We've already agreed, hopefully, on the need for a heavy estate tax, but we're also going to need progressive taxation.

Progressively higher real taxes (despite any deductions) on the wealthier members of society won't be a punishment for their success, certainly not. It will merely be a means of ensuring a fair start to all children, so that we really can have a merit-based society. And, of course, it's the rich who have the money, so that's where we must go if we want to actually implement this conservative philosophy.

But there's more. If we want success to be the result of our individual capabilities and effort, we must make sure that fraud and theft is minimized (it will never be completely eliminated, I'm sure). You will be encouraged to get ahead, but not by stealing from others. That would clearly give you an unfair advantage,... and an unfair advantage would mean that it's not the truly deserving people who become successful.

This implies not just strong enforcement of SEC rules and anti-monopoly laws, but also strict enforcement by the Environmental Protection Agency. Obviously, dumping pollution - such as carbon dioxide emissions - into the commons gives the dumpers an unfair advantage by unloading the costs on our whole society while keeping the profits for themselves. This is not getting ahead based on merit.

In fact, we'd need to target the whole "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" government system which most conservatives seem to push. Rational economic libertarians would still accept "socialist" policies to give every child a good start in life, but would be adamant that corporate costs couldn't be unloaded on the public, for private gain. That kind of "socialism" is just not fair, and it seems to be the antithesis of the philosophy that success should be based on merit.

I'm not an economic libertarian - and certainly not a social Darwinist - but I can enthusiastically support these particular policies. It's only in other aspects of this philosophy where I'd be in opposition. For example, I wouldn't be willing to let the elderly starve to death, no matter how poorly they'd managed their lives. Likewise, I think that health care is a right, not a privilege. As a society, we are wealthy enough these days to afford these things. But I don't think any of that would have a significant effect on this basic idea. After all, it's luxuries - and social status - that's really the incentive for most people.

There would be some difficult decisions, true. No matter what, a child's home life will make a huge difference in his opportunities. Yes, we can make sure he gets enough food, but can we do that while letting his parents starve?  And it's hard to study when you're cold, when you're sitting in the dark, or even homeless. How do you make sure that unsuccessful people suffer as they deserve, while also ensuring that all children start with a level playing field and a fair chance to rise on their own merits. That's probably the fundamental contradiction of this philosophy.

No, I can't go along with it, myself. But I'm not a big proponent of theory-based proposals, anyway, not in the social science arena. I'm more of a practical guy. Identify a problem, examine proposed solutions, and test the most likely of them. OK, we can't ethically treat human beings as lab rats, but we can attempt a solution and then study the results.

People who are too wedded to a particular philosophy see everything through that lens. Idealists have done a lot of harm in the world. Of course, they've also done a lot of good. Without idealism, we'd never get anywhere. But in general, when it comes to politics and to social policies in general, I'd rather look to the practical than the theoretical.

And libertarians of all stripes seem to be overwhelmingly, often ridiculously, theoretical. Most libertarians of my acquaintance take everything to its most absurd conclusion. It's as if they have no regulator at all. Once set in libertarian mode, they move immediately to extremes. But then, this is a generalization, and like all generalizations, I'm sure it's not always true.

Below the fold, I'll discuss (more briefly, I hope) a couple of other points from Susan Jacoby's column.

As she points out, social Darwinism is a distortion of Charles Darwin's thinking. He was describing what had happened, how life had evolved into so many diverse species, and what was still happening (very slowly, for most species). He didn't place a value judgment on this. It's reality, but it's not in any way a goal for human societies or even for individual human beings.

In fact, Darwin's theory of natural selection was so shocking to people, and so disturbing to religion, just because it was such a cruel, bloody, wasteful method of progress (and indeed, "progress" wasn't the point at all). Lamarckian evolution would have been far easier to take. Darwin's bombshell wasn't evolution, which was nothing new, but the method. And religions struggled - and still do - to reconcile such a horrible process with their belief in a benevolent god.

[Note that, like social Darwinism, eugenics wasn't really based on Darwin's theory of natural selection, either. It was based on artificial selection - the improvement of species deliberately, as in the breeding of domestic livestock, which had been known and practiced for centuries.]

Like pseudoscience today, social Darwinism took that name in order to assume the mantle of a scientific theory. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Those who preached social Darwinism in the United States always claimed that their views were "scientific"--an adjective, when appended to what are essentially social philosophies, that is always a dead giveaway of their pseudo-scientific nature. Genuine science does not have to label itself scientific; pseudo-scientific thought does, in a vain effort to prevent being unmasked as mutton dressed as lamb. Thus, the adjective "scientific" often prefaced the decidedly unscientific, non-evidence based form of communism practiced in the Soviet Union. Plaudits to "scientific Communism" were supposed to prevent Russians from noticing that there was no food in the stores. In the United States, social Darwinists (some of whom, as free market disciples, now have a permanent address at right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute) have always claimed that any government reforms or regulations are attempts to interfere with the natural, scientifically based order of things.

Social Darwinists tend to misunderstand evolution in other ways as well. They forget that we're a species of social animal. As such, we have governments. We've always had governments, of one form or another, because we live together. Our evolution, our survival, has been at least as dependent on cooperation as on competition. We're not like tigers, which meet briefly for reproduction and then live solitary lives. The "lone wolf" human being is almost as disturbed a model for humanity as, ironically, it is for wolves (which are pack animals, of course).

"Survival of the fittest," a term coined by Herbert Spencer, is rather misleading (Darwin's "natural selection" is much better). Social animals survive as a group. We've evolved traits which let us work together better - language, for one - because that's how we live. Societies are natural to human beings. Governments are natural to human beings. That's who we are.

And in every society that's ever existed, I suspect, those on top generally think that they deserve to be on top, that they're smarter, tougher,... better than people further down the social ladder. And they probably judge the innate nature of others by where they are on that ladder at that particular time.

Whatever supposedly scientific method has been used to measure intelligence--from 19th-century phrenology to today's psychological tests--the striking fact about generalizations regarding group intelligence is that they have always correlated with the group's economic status at a given historical moment. That is why many upper-class social Darwinists were convinced that East European Jewish immigrants were intellectually inferior at the turn of the century and would always remain so--and why we rarely hear such claims today.

In reality, for the vast majority of us, luck has been a far bigger contributor to our success than ability. I don't mean to disparage ability, not at all. And certainly not determination (which is probably even more important). But the luck of birth is hugely important to all of us - born in this time and place, born free rather than slave, born of the "right" race or into a family of the "right" religion. And think of how different your life would be with different parents - not just their economic situation, although that would be huge, but their personalities, their parenting abilities, their beliefs and their behavior.

The average American life expectancy, around 40 at the turn of the century, has doubled--not primarily as a result of high-tech surgical procedures, drugs for the elderly, or even the common antibiotics introduced at mid-20th century but mainly as a result of improved sanitation and nutrition in the earliest decades of the century. Better sanitation--provided, let us not forget, by government--allowed many of those immigrants, then presumed to be genetically inferior, to live long into the century and send their children to high school and college. Had the children's genes magically improved?

Frankly, it's hard to understand the kind of thinking that produced eugenics, the kind that really thinks some kind of social Darwinism or "survival of the fittest" is a good model for human societies. At the very least (and I don't mean to imply that anything else about this is correct), biological evolution is very, very slow. Even assuming everything else about this is valid (which it's not, not even close), it would take thousands of years - at a minimum - to start to see any results.

Look, on the other hand, at the enormous advances we've made, and are making, through science and technology, through advances in government policies, through just making sure that no one starves and that everyone gets an education. It's hard to imagine people looking fondly on false analogies with biological evolution, isn't it? Who could possibly think we'd be better off with that?

Many religious critics of atheism have chastised atheists for considering themselves intellectually superior to believers. I do consider atheism, as a way of looking at the world, intellectually superior to faith in the supernatural (a characteristic of every religion). But I certainly do not consider all atheists intellectually superior to all religious believers. There is no such thing as "scientific atheism." There are atheists who respect the difference between real science and pseudo-science and those who do not. There are atheists who wish to use reason to promote social progress (yet another filthy Enlightenment notion) and those who use bogus reasoning as a club to assert their own superiority. It is depressing to see the great tool of reason used for the latter purpose by those atheists who have fallen for some of the most persistent pseudo-scientific beliefs in American intellectual history.