The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [132]
The Hitler Youth Movement, closely allied with the Nazi party, taught military discipline and ideological doctrine. The swastika was an ancient symbol of good fortune.
Nazi posters carried a travesty of the Darwinian message: the strong survive only by destroying those whose presence would poison the blood of the race.
Two forms of the Darwinian cult of progress. Left, the American view: progress through free enterprise. Right, the Russian view: progress through planning.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Darwin was being interpreted in a totally different way. Here too he was to give credence to a view already developed before Origin by an Englishman, Herbert Spencer, son of a schoolmaster from Derby, a self-taught engineer working on the railways.
In 1852 Spencer had produced a paper also based on Malthusian ideas called ‘A theory of population deduced from the general law of animal fertility’. In it he came close to establishing the principle of natural selectivity, and by 1859 he had developed his ‘Synthetic Philosophy’, in which he drew together all knowledge under the single principle of evolution.
Spencer was essentially optimistic. ‘Evolution,’he said, ‘is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.’This, he said, came about through the ‘survival of the fittest’, a phrase which he first coined. ‘Pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress… it had forced Man into the social state, made social organisation inevitable; it had developed the social sentiments.’
Spencer thought that if the struggle for existence were relaxed, social dissolution would follow. In this struggle, the weak should go to the wall for the greater good of the general community.
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle… are the decrees of a large, far seeing benevolence, [which also] brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.
The goal towards which the cosmos was heading, said Spencer, was a world in which there was maximum opportunity for the individual to express and fulfil himself without encroaching on the rights of others.
The struggle for existence in plants and animals, as Darwin showed, brought evolutionary change, and this change was progressive, leading to a community formed of successful individuals. The environment was thus improved by struggle. Any interference by the state in social matters such as housing, poor laws, charity, factory acts, banking, education or the raising of tariffs, would make it easier for the non-competitive to flourish, to the detriment of the community.
In the United States, founded under a constitution that expressly discouraged government interference, Spencer’s Social Darwinism took hold like wildfire. There, as Darwin seemed to demand, the government had one duty -to preserve the individual’s freedom to act in his own interest.
The frontier spirit, as homesteaders race for free land in Oklahoma, 1889, In keeping with the spirit of the times, the last would get the least.
’Poor, huddled masses yearning to be free’- immigrants in New York at the turn of the century. The American belief in rugged individualism offered a bright future to those strong enough to grasp it. To the weak it offered nothing.
In 1877 Social Darwinism found expression in the Charity Organisation Society, already operating in Britain since 1869. Its aims were to rationalise charity and provide aid only for those who needed it, with the intention of improving the conditions of those families who were in desperate straits sufficiently for them no longer to be in need of charity.
Spencer’s admirers in America, E. L. Youmans and John Fiske, ensured that 300,000 copies of his book were sold shortly before his triumphant arrival in 1882. By this time he was already the darling of