The Evolutionary Sociology of Herbert Spencer
As human beings are animals, we are bound by the same fundamental laws of biology as the rest of the animal kingdom. The biological world, of which we are a part, is composed of ecological systems, combinations of biological organisms and communities of those organisms that find themselves always within a dynamic equilibrium, or else quickly shifting toward one. This dynamic equilibrium is maintained by forces of natural selection that occur within conditions of relative stasis (as described by Charles Darwin) or rapid punctuation (as described by Stephen Jay Gould). Because human beings are biological entities, and because our societies are emerging superorganisms, it is necessary to consider our lives within the framework of natural selection. Doing so, as was done by Herbert Spencer, is historically labeled social Darwinism, but has taken more contemporary form in ecological-evolutionary theory, as expressed by Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan.
Herbert Spencer was an English mutualist[1] who famously developed a philosophy of societal evolution. Spencer described society, as a whole, as an organism that lives according to biological laws and impulses, evolving in a manner similar to the way individual organisms evolve. Though he was as much, if not more so, influenced by a competitor of Darwin’s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Spencer’s view would be retrospectively labeled social Darwinism. The main problem with this is that Spencer’s works, like his Social Statics, had come out years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. So Spencer was not only influenced by Darwin’s competitor, Lamarck, but was a competitor himself. Except that Spencer was well-aware of Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who himself was an evolutionary theorist. So, the term still works, in an odd enough way. He was also influenced by Robert Chambers and his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a teleological view of evolution that was greatly influential among Spencer’s fellow radicals. While Charles Darwin described traits selected by way of natural selection, Lamarck had believed that, by way of use or disuse, an organism acquired characteristics. Both visions contained teleological elements to them.
Darwin’s finches are his famous example of natural selection, the finches of the Gallapagos Islands having adapted different traits— particularly in their beaks— suited to the differences in their geographical situation, traits that fill particular geographic niches within the range covered by the finches as a whole. The varying traits of the finches correlated with geographic differentiation that had affects on, for instance, diet. According to Darwin, these finches adapted to niches[2] by way of natural selection: those finches who were not suited for the clinal[3] variations were deselected. Major sources of selection identified by Darwin were what is now called ecological selection (selection by the environment) and what he named sexual selection (selection by sexual mates), but he referenced artificial selection (selection by breeders) to make sense of these. If an organism did not survive their environmental conditions, as by being unable to sustain the diet or flee from predation, they did not pass along their traits, and so were deselected by the environment. Likewise, without sexual reproduction, those traits do not get passed along.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had a different view. He used the giraffe as his famous example. According to Lamarck, the giraffe got its long neck after striving time and again to browse from higher and higher foliage, eventually acquiring the characteristic of the long neck from the extended use of it. A cumulative effect of changes resulted from efforts stacking up along generations, passing on acquired traits through inheritance along the way. As Jean-Baptiste Lamarck understood it, one could acquire characteristics through repeated use, and pass these characteristics on to one’s offspring, and this is how evolution occurred.
Herbert Spencer would take from both Lamarck and Darwin, though Lamarckism had a bigger influence. Still, Spencer was in overall agreement with Darwin, once Darwin’s work was out, and anticipated it to a certain extent; so much so that the namesake for Spencer’s view would be Darwin. But social Lamarckism may be more appropriate (though, this may also be under-considerate toward the legitimate influence of Darwin, particularly Erasmus but also Charles, on Spencer).[4] Regardless, Spencer’s view was largely a combination of Lamarck and what would become Darwinian selection, providing him a unique approach that he would apply not only at the individual level of personal evolution, or even the interpersonal level, but at the level of society as well. Like Lamarck, Spencer held to the theory of acquired characteristics through use or disuse and inheritance. He held that the arm of the blacksmith swelled with muscle as a matter of his individual evolution, through his use of it. Likewise, individuals could acquire traits conducive to civil society, such as congeniality and generosity. But, like Darwin, he held that the traits acquired could be a disservice if found in the wrong environment, or if made archaic by competitors. Thus, individuals as well as societies were subject to forces not just of use or disuse in acquiring characteristics, or inheritance, but also natural selection. This is why Herbert Spencer is called a social Darwinist. Spencer believed that societies and the individuals in them acquired traits through use that were then put to the test of natural selection to see who was fittest.
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinist has an extremely negative connotation to it. But what was Spencer’s social Darwinism about?[5] Perhaps it helps to understand what Spencer meant by the fittest in his famous description of evolution as “survival of the fittest.” Automatically, fears bring the worst people to mind, that survival of the fittest implies the brutest or most cunning will win; but that is not what Herbert Spencer meant by fittest. According to Herbert Spencer, the fittest are those who most successfully navigate the dynamics of life in society, dynamics involving give and take.[6] Those who are the most sociable, without at the same time being naïve enough to become victims to the cunning or foolish enough to lack foresight, are the most likely to survive. Those who provide the greatest benefit to others in living their life, without giving up their own gains, are the safest from natural selection. For Spencer, the competition in Nature was largely over who can best cooperate, much as the competition to join a team is. The team wants the most capable, agreeable, and innovative participants, and the individual strives to prove themself worthy to such a team, by showing they can be a betterment to it.
Spencer’s was not a view that those who might be smaller in stature must necessarily fall to the larger members of society, or that sympathy was a vice to be avoided at all costs, though he did acknowledge benefits to size and limits to sympathy. Spencer affirms sympathy and embraces the arguments from sympathy, suggesting they simply are not applied consistently until they result in equality of liberty. Spencer affirmed that sympathy is very important indeed, but that the most important sensibility of all is the regard for the liberties of another honest person. Liberties, for Spencer, are not simply a matter of individual greed, but of self-reflection and consideration that the needs of oneself may be like the needs of others, bringing us to something more universally applicable. This seems very much to be in the spirit of the Golden Rule, as can be commonly found expressed underlying the thought of the mutualists. Herbert Spencer’s rendition of this rule would be his Law of Equal Liberty, that the only limit on liberty is the like liberty of others. This would become a staple of mutualists to follow.
This is a far shot from the warlords and fascist dictators that come to mind when we hear the term social Darwinist. In the imagination of the public mind, social Darwinism brings to mind battling gangs struggling for dominance, cold-heartedness in regard to the troubles faced by others, or so on. And Spencer was clear to imagine limits to popular sympathy, in which natural selection did play an evolutionary side-role for society, such that social Darwinist is not an entirely inappropriate title for him. Spencer warned that forcing charity by way of taxing the earnings of others was an infringement on moral principles as well as having a degenerative evolutionary effect. Spencer preferred that those who carry their own weight and give the most to society—the honest producers— should be fairly rewarded, their characteristics being more widely passed along as a result. But, nonetheless, Spencer was a philosophical anarchist and libertarian, and, by many accounts and despite his protest otherwise, a socialist, who wrote esteemed pieces such as “The Right to Ignore the State” as well as, in his younger years, “The Right to the Use of the Earth,” a plea to make land available to all. In his older years, even while abandoning his prior ideas about land nationalization, he continued to blame the state, in Man Versus the State, for poverty and social ills. He generally abhorred violent solutions to social problems, and wanted only to make the public aware of its own limits, limits the state otherwise infringed. He wished not to suggest public support for dictators or warlords, or for robber barons, though he acknowledged their evolutionary successes. In Spencer’s eyes, these were among the most detestable of society’s elements, unfit for the perfection that society was striving toward in its evolution.
In his support of the survival of the fittest, Spencer was merely carrying on in the Radical Enlightenment tradition established by Spinoza, which says that “might makes right.”[7] Of course, for Spinoza, a democratic-republican in the time of monarchy, might was established by way of right, that is, by way of rational, mutual understanding. The mightiest are those who rationally cooperate. Spencer’s view, like Spinoza’s, can be described as a kind of tough love, challenging one to reach toward perfection.[8] Spencer did believe in the survival of the fittest—a term he coined—, but for him “the fittest” were the most capable of living together in society, and so the most sociable. His disdain for weakness stemmed not from his Darwinism—as would be expected from his critics—, but from his Lamarckism, his view that people were too keen at times to not morally evolve, while other did. Spencer believed that moral evolution could occur—if the individual or society is worth preserving— out of an effort of will and inner potential, guided by the knowledge of the world, which one would clearly seek out should they have the capacity to continue on. It is in this way that his social Darwinism is not unlike some Christian expressions of tough love, a paternalistic love that encourages development by holding you responsible, not letting you off of the hook.[9] Spencer clearly situates human sentiments and morality within the process of evolution, suggesting that ethics are an adaptation to life in society, or what more recently may be called human niche construction.[10] Indeed, by way of a Lamarckian process, tempered by what would become Darwinism, Herbert Spencer believed that society was perfecting itself.[11]
The Malthusian Alternative
The alternative to social Darwinism[12]— which allows each member to play a role conducive with their capacity for individual influence— is Malthusianism, depopulation by elite interests. If allowing antisocial individuals and societies to fall to natural selection (not artificial selection[13]) seems harsh, Malthusianism—named after Thomas Malthus— supports the elites choosing segments of the population for eradication, in the name of keeping society afloat. Where social Darwinism, at its most vile, passively refrains from help, Malthusianism actively chooses who will be sterilized, euthanized, or etc.
Malthusianism has promoted depopulation and social control; deselection still occurs, as is inevitable. What has been changed from social Darwinism in Malthusianism is merely the participation of common members of society in the selection process, substituting for their choices the credentialism and scientism of the professional-managerial class and their elite sponsors. Social Darwinism, in contrast, is a process by which common members of society, and society at large— through the exercise of sexual selection, social selection, societal selection, and so on, pressures available to all to use to the degree they have natural influence—, directs its own evolutionary future in a process of tit-for-tat, rewarding the most amicable, considerate, and willing to reciprocate. In such a process, the individual choices of one may be made up for or offset by another, with no individual having an absolute influence upon the whole of society. If an individual or society is to be deselected under such conditions, then such an individual would have to have exhausted all of the sympathy that their community has to offer them, such that, by unanimous consent, the individual must begin to support themselves or perish to natural forces outside of society’s control, having no claim on the efforts of others.
The Malthusian alternative, again, is depopulation by elite members of society, whose only indicator of others’ fitness is the measure by which those others are willing to conform to the whims of the ruling class (from which those elite members are drawn), the measure by which their obedience and servile innovations serve the interests of ruling class elites. Those who have moral disagreement with the ruling class elites, whose sensibilities prevent them from joining in the cult of statism and usury; those who could carry their own weight if given the chance to do so under fair conditions, who could become important officials in a new society if not for the material blockades of class; they are swept away with the idle members of their class. Those who are prone to sloth and cowardice are treated no differently from those who strive for self-betterment and societal gains, which often run contrary to the demands of the ruling class.[14]
Darwinism— not to be confused with Spencer’s so-called social Darwinism— was itself an outgrowth of Malthusian thought, and Spencer was addressing the truths found in both Malthus and Darwin, while giving promise that— through qualitative growth within society— there was no need to force depopulation.[15] However, the one hard truth was, Spencer suggested, that, due to natural conditions outlined by Malthus, society must let go of those whom are not fit to survive within it, who do not care about their fellows’ self-interest as they do their own (providing thereby for individual liberty and societal wellbeing). Members of society had to continue to acquire characteristics, and thereby provide society itself with quality characteristics to inherit, such as new industries, in order for society to continue forward. Society should not force its earnest and hardworking members to provide for degenerative elements that fail to develop or exercise their faculties and, thereby, fail to maintain their acquired and inherited characteristics. To a certain extent, one’s sympathy does play a role in natural selection taking place, but, Spencer suggests, there are brutes whom, sympathy given, would be a drain on society. The situation of these brutes is more due to their poor disposition than to their poor lot in life. Even the most generous could not bring themselves to voluntarily sacrifice for their care. Malthusianism is the only alternative, and it is a degenerative one. Social Darwinism provided a generative and egalitarian substitute for the Malthusian solution.
While an interest to robber barons—for which he is often damned—, as well, Spencer’s natural philosophy was also the basis of socialist evolutionary thinking, as reported in the book The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism by David Stack. By Piers J. Hale’s account, in Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, social Darwinism was the working class’s mutualist answer to elite Malthusianism. Likewise, David T. Beito, in his From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, makes at least two references to Herbert Spencer’s being embraced by the American mutualist societies. These mutualist societies used social Darwinism in opposition to paternalistic control by the state, favoring instead self-development and co-operation. This view had also been passed on through the individualist anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker and Francis Tandy, and— despite George’s criticism in A Perplexed Philosopher— would also become a major influence on Henry George, another opponent of Malthusianism.
One must remember that Spencer’s view— while acknowledging the harshness of Nature— is established within a radical context in which natural resources are made available to all,[16] the economy is free and open for participation, and honesty pays off. Spencer’s was not an elitist philosophy. His social Darwinism was not capitalist,[17] but mutualist (or social individualist more explicitly). While rejecting the continental use of socialist to describe his views (opposing Proudhon upon having a comparison made) he was nonetheless a socialist in the Ricardian socialist or Godwinian tradition, as learned from Thomas Hodgskin and others, and was correctly compared to Pierre Proudhon to which he cringed due to Proudhon’s socialist status. Yes, he did favor laissez-faire, but he also favored the nationalization of land, labor unions, and worker cooperatives. This makes him a libertarian socialist (by a definition of socialism he himself would likely reject), much like the Ricardian socialists who influenced him, and like Proudhon whom he did not like being made comparison to.[18]
Spencer’s Influence
The mutualists are not the only ones to have taken influence from Spencer, however, nor were the robber barons an only exception to their interest. He made a major impact on sociology at large, and even on psychology.
The sociology of Herbert Spencer, and indeed his social Darwinism which cannot be separated from it, plays a major part in the ecological-evolutionary theory of Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan. Nolan and Lenski combine the insights of Herbert Spencer with Karl Marx and others, suggesting that—despite the prior seeming defeat of Lamarckism, upon the work of which they recognize Spencer had been building— recent developments cultural and memetic evolution (and I would add epigenetics) have come to support, to a certain extent, Lamarck’s view that societies evolve through use or disuse and inheritance of acquired characteristics. Along with the mechanisms of ecological selection, sexual selection, kin selection, social selection, cultural selection, and etc., Nolan and Lenski hold that we must recognize also intersocietal selection, the selection of societies by other societies through warfare, economic competition, or etc. Intersocietal selection, as they see it, matches the technological and political development of a given society, taken as a whole, against that of another. That society which has developed the most productive technologies produces higher population levels, which contribute greatly to innovations, including in regard to political or socioeconomic relations. These relations contribute in a complex positive-feedback loop system to increase the population even further, and so also innovation, feeding back in on itself.[19]
Societies, often differing in culture, are often found at odds with one another, and in competition over resources that Malthus correctly pointed out are limited. Those societies that better manage their resources and better maintain their populations are more fit for survival than those who do not. Those societies that can manage the jump from a single-community society to a multi-community society will tend to outcompete those who remain in a single-community society, through extermination sometimes, but also by way of assimilation after military defeat or voluntary submission to the practices of the dominant culture. These practices will have proven themselves capable of sustaining a larger society than the one assimilated, while generally appropriating beneficial aspects from the culture of that society. And as a society grows larger, it must, in order to manage its resources and population, devise new systems by which to organize itself, resulting in new systems of government (or, I would add, lack thereof), such as democracies or republics. Societies that offer their members freedom and equality benefit from the resulting innovations, and grow even larger, adding back to the feedback loop.
That ethics arise through evolutionary pressures is also well-established in fields such as evolutionary psychology, also pioneered by Herbert Spencer, but continued in the work of more recent thinkers such as Robin Dunbar. While not directly related, the pressures behind evolutionary psychology play out clearly in the sexual and social selection of archaic humans, as found in anthropology. Indeed, alpha males were fought by sororities organizing sex strikes[20] and fraternities of beta males flinging projectile weapons, united in their opposition to alpha male control. The sex strikes and intermale conflicts stand as examples of sexual and social selection that diminished the influence of the alpha male.[21] With that influence diminished, the remaining males would face different selective behaviors, beyond that needed for forming the coalitions they had built against the alphas. Now they would face the pressures of women and of other beta males. This would transition them from male primates to sapient human men, who would have to show consideration, and so to have emotional sensations, that would be rewarded by the group. These are the kinds of evolutionary pressures, among a myriad others, that would influence our psyche.
Despite Spencer’s massive influence, what makes Spencer important to me is that he shows us the limits of mutualism (as well as its potential within those limits). Mutualism can only exist within the confines of voluntaryism and natural obligation, and this means that we must be willing to let go of those who refuse or are unable to reciprocate. If we do not stay within these lines, we must be willing to coerce the sociable for the sake of those who lack the quality to exist at their own expense (but while utilizing cooperative gains). But Spencer poses that this comes with a predicament: If we are to subsidize the unfit for the sake of the fit, we begin to dilute the fitness of the species with the unfitness of those who are being subsidized by its fit members. Mutualism cannot preserve those with whom mutuality cannot be sufficiently established. We may agree with Spencer’s social Darwinism— which we must do if we wish to maintain mutualism— or we may reject his social Darwinism in favor of Malthusianism and social control. Those are our options.
Opposition to Spencer, Social Darwinism, and Mutualism
So, what happened? Why does Spencer get such a bad rap today? His reputation is one likely placed beside the infamous Hitler in the minds of most contemporaries. Spencer would be what is considered today a race realist. He believed that racial differences were consequential, and he derived some of his positions from phrenology, which is considered contentious today.
It must be remembered, however, that Spencer was a Lamarckian as well as a libertarian, so Spencer’s descriptivist positions, which may at times be harsh, were not intended to be prescriptively limiting to the individuals he was describing. That is, while acknowledging different levels of development between different races, Spencer in no way promoted hatred. Rather, he would be delighted should anyone conduct themselves in manners conducive to civil society, and held that the different races each had virtuous members among them, that, when put into competition with other races, made them even more fit.[22] Spencer was opposed to prejudice, as prejudice limited the individual and cultural groups in their evolutionary pursuits. Prejudice means that we don’t give others a shot because of preconceived notions. But Spencer preferred to keep his view descriptive, to describe races, but not to limit them by law or even by custom. Prejudice is the enemy of evolution. Anyone who could succeed in social cooperation, as Spencer saw things, was fit to exist. Anyone who was not fit to exist was likely incapable of virtuous individual qualities such as rational thinking or foresight, or amicability, or was otherwise unable to succeed in social cooperation. As such, it is possible to disagree with Spencer in his descriptions and assessments of racial differences—his expectations, but not legislations—, while nonetheless agreeing with the overall evolutionary metaphysic of his project.[23]
Nonetheless, Spencer’s race realism does tend to be one of the main factors condemning his project in the minds of most people. Indeed, people are very sensitive about race, so much so that honest scientists[24] such as Carelton S. Coon were removed from the public discourse when the UN suborganization, UNESCO, published its official statement denouncing racial differences. Regarding politics, and like Herbert Spencer whom he was likely aware of, Coon had ultimately argued that racial differences—which he was keen to organize into five main types— did not matter for policy-creation, because humans deserve equal treatment simply for having the quality of being human.[25] Coon’s explicit rejection of racial politics[26] did not stop from taking place what would be called a “palace coup” that “had indeed taken place at the citadel of science,” by Donna Haraway. Racial science, social Darwinism, and unapproved approaches to eugenics[27] would all come under fire with the moralistic statement of UNESCO. This palace revolution in the discipline would solidify the postmodern era in science, which had already begun when Paul Dirac’s sea of negative energy was substituted for the Nazi scientist Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; in other words, when truth was substituted for obscurity.
It must be stressed that thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Carleton S. Coon were— at least explicitly— not advocates of racial policies or discrimination by governments. Rather, they were looking to the scientific basis of race, and, in discovering differences, they came to the politically incorrect view that differences in economic outcome were not by necessity the product of unfair treatment, but that, rather, differences in economic outcomes can be expected even when a completely fair and just system is in operation. In fact, while differences remain, they would suggest, special treatment toward a particular race is the act of unfairness and injustice, because it restricts members of society from the use of their natural faculties which, themselves, benefit society. An analogy may be that a fair track race does require equal starting places, but does not produce equal outcomes; and a race that produces equal outcomes is likely unfair, having different starting positions to make it so (and even then being unlikely).
Postmodern Decadence
Not only science, but politics in the postmodern era would be drastically different from those of Enlightenment modernism as well. The Left would give up its class consciousness in favor of identarianism—identity politics— derived from the Frankfurt School neo-Marxists (called cultural Marxists because they transitioned from class issues to cultural issues) as well as from Maoism and the cultural revolution coming from out of China. This worldview of cultural Marxism, which transitioned the Left from the class conscious Old Left to the cultural New Left, was adamant in its social progressivism, which took the form not only of social democracy and democratic socialism, but of stringent anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia. This was led by neo-Marxist students who, themselves, would later develop into the Bobo professional-managerial class that presently administers capital on behalf of the thinning idle capitalist class. To the New Left— prone to hysterias set on in “revolutions from above” ignited by planist and synarchist forces, as well as in elite-manufactured wars such as World War II—, Herbert Spencer’s views, like those of Carleton S. Coon, were seen as little less than Nazism, to be pushed off of the college campuses.[28]
The change in college campuses was also accompanied by changing notions of privilege. To Spencer, and others coming from out of the Radical Enlightenment, privilege was largely aristocratic, and in commercial society had to do with legal charters, licensing, and other decrees of government favor. But, come the New Left, privilege began to mean something else entirely. It became possible to talk about racial privilege and sexual privilege with a straight face, as if privilege was the same as genetic or cultural endowment. Thus began the politics of jealousy. All of a sudden, to state the scientific possibility of races having evolved at different rates was to fight on the side of the “privileged,” as an oppressor. It did not matter that Herbert Spencer had been a Ricardian socialist, an anti-capitalist who advocated for equality of liberty for all members of society regardless of racial distinction; he was on the side of “privilege,” of white men. This emerging New Left attack on Spencer and social Darwinism was concurrent with an ongoing assault on the labor movement, the deconstruction of the nuclear family, the continuing decline of science at large, suburbanization, disappearance of the “third place” (and arguably civil society as a whole), and so on. The postmodern palace coup was bigger than an occurrence in science.
The postmodern era did involve a serious shift away from rationality and science toward passions and sensibility, but the postmodern assault on social Darwinism represents a larger attack on mutualism. Mutualism was the first seriously organized movement to resist the transition to industrial capitalism, desiring to replace relations of domination with a free market industrial democracy, an associationalist republic of labor, and so was the major concern of the ruling class. Social Darwinism had been the evolutionary foundation upon which mutualism was established. And mutualism was not just for the white racists; it was monumentally larger than the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan: Prince Hall Freemasonry is a black fraternity, for instance. David T. Beito’s book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State makes clear that American blacks were major participants, and covers other people of color’s participation in mutualism as well, such as Chinese immigrants. Mexican Americans in Texas History, compiled and contributed to by Emilio Zamora and others, makes a strong statement of Mexican American mutualism, probably the most inspiring I have read of them all. But mutualism at-large, nonetheless tended to take a great deal of influence from Herbert Spencer and his social Darwinian conception, including the first popularizer-organizer of mutualist anarchism in Mexico, Plotino Rhodakanaty. Even so— and despite mutualists having long done so from Anglo-Saxons to Southern blacks to Mexican Americans and Chinese immigrants—, by convincing the population that even voluntary combinations along the lines of cultural affinity were oppressive by their very nature, the ecological-evolutionary foundation of mutualism—social Darwinism— was popularly rejected upon postmodern terms as a rendition of racism.
The attack on social Darwinism—a position shared by mutualist thinkers such as Pierre Proudhon, even if not elaborated upon, and embraced by mutualists such as Benjamin Tucker and Francis Tandy— was itself an attack on mutualism (as part of an even larger attack on the Enlightenment and even on Western society). Mutualism, like social Darwinism, promised that individuals could develop qualitatively, and did not need to rely on administration by elite interests in society. Having relation to Freemasonry—indeed, called “Freemasonry for workers” by Pierre Charnier, an anticipant of Pierre Proudhon— mutualism had developed in part upon alchemical and esoteric Christian beliefs in the ability of the individual to change, to transmutate their character from base metal to gold, before coming to embrace social Darwinism as the natural explication of these beliefs. Mutualists focused a great deal on character-development and on building virtues in the individual that would allow them to succeed in life despite their hardships. They had succeeded in establishing secret revolutionary networks, international associations, medical provisions, productive capacities, financial institutions, and more, becoming the greatest threat that has ever existed to the ruling class. But for all of their beauty, their foundation was an understanding that life involved a great deal of struggle that was best met by mutual aid and cooperation, an otherwise inescapable law of the jungle that meant demise for those who refused to be sociable and to reason together. Perhaps nothing was met with more disdain by mutualists—aside from their corollaries, political and economic authority— than ignorance and superstition. And perhaps nothing provided the mutualists more hope for the future than the lessons Nature had to offer humanity in natural selection, including market selection.
The labor movement, which Herbert Spencer had been a proponent of, would be dissembled concurrently with his social Darwinsim, from outside:“lodge practice” ended, labor union membership was diminishing, cooperatives were losing financing, and then demutualization of mutual insurance and financial institutions. At the same time, mutualism was being co-opted in a strange way. Cooperatives were replaced by corporations, mutual credit by fiat money, mutual insurance by social security, and revolutionary labor unions by business unions and professional associations. Otto von Bismarck utilized actuarial science, as established within the mutualist field of mutual insurance, in an effort to establish the first welfare state. Before this, Marx had caused a schism in socialism, leading to the divide between libertarian socialists and authoritarian socialists. But while Marxism’s infiltration into the mutualist-organized International Workingmen’s Association represented the wrestling of socialism from the influence of mutualism, and Bismarck’s co-opting of actuarial science for the ends of the welfare state represented paternalistic competition with fraternal mutualism, another and explicit assault on mutualism would also be launched with the work of the occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, whose vision of synarchy, a proto-postmodern political utopia embraced by the proto-fascist fin de siècle,[29] would inspire, along with the Dunantists and other elite humanitarians, the development of the European Union, the League of Nations, and indeed the United Nations.
To the horror of Saint-Yves, labor had become internationally organized under the First International, following the inspiration of the Canuts Rebellion, and had successfully captured Paris in the Paris Commune for a short period of time. This had to be met, as he saw it, with a likewise international force of banksters, industrialists, and academics, ultimately guided by mystics such as himself. The efforts of the International had prior been infiltrated and divided by Marxists, but coinciding with the rise of the synarchist project was the uptick of marginalism, the emerging prominence of Austrian economics, and the Gilded Age.[30] It also involved a strong embrace of the sensibilism behind Romanticism, such as that taken to by the Dunantists and other elite humanitarians, which would translate economically into progressivism, paternalistic conservatism, and sewer socialism, and culturally into postmodernism (postmodernism can be traced back through the fin de siècle to Saint-Yves, among others). In a way, the emerging corporate technocracy represented a synthesis of the previously embraced Marxism and its Austrian challenger, as synarchists— or planists— are keen to make use of both Left- and Right-wing elements, markets and public infrastructure.[31]
The rise of the welfare state and identity politics was a means of haulting the qualitative growth that was being supported by mutualism and social Darwinism. You must understand that medical service was provided in American mutualist networks— house calls primarily— for two dollars a year before the transition to the new system in order to fully grasp what has been lost and how influential mutualism really was. Mutualism was the single greatest threat to the domination of the world by the financial elites and technocrats. The decadent, synarchic attack on social Darwinism and mutualism coincided with reframing discussions of privilege, and with the decline of science, the family, “third places,” civil society, and free thought, leaving Malthusianism and unrealizable, technocratic dreams of post-scarcity as the only alternative to social Darwinism (the free exercise of sexual, social, cultural, economic, and societal selection, etc. in self-directed, cooperative efforts of evolution). Thus we were set about on a degenerative decline, where Spencer had tried to inspire us otherwise.
[1] See Piers J. Hale. Spencer was influenced by the philosophical anarchist William Godwin and the Ricardian socialist Thomas Hodgskin, held views consistent with the mutualists, was a major figure in influencing American individualist anarchism and radical movements more widely, and Hale labels him as such. I agree with this assessment of Spencer.
[2] He did not call them niches, and niche would not receive its label until Roswell Hill Johnson coined the term and Joseph Grinnell wrote a paper on it.
[3] Darwin did not use this term, which was coined by Julian Huxley
[4] Spencer, by the way, was influenced also by Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, who had his own view on evolution
[5] Some suggest that Spencer should not be counted among the social Darwinists at all, as he anticipated Charles Darwin and was labeled a Darwinist retrospectively
[6] Spencer understood the economy to be something of a circulatory system for society, which branches itself into various organ-izations, much as the body has organs that specialize in their particular functions. And societies live and die, as Spencer sees it, and they evolve much the same as the individual organisms that make them up. And they gain and lose acquired functions by way of use or disuse and inheritance, as Lamarck held, and face natural selection, much as Charles Darwin taught. As individuals specialized in the economy, forming organizations, society gained in its functions, but those functions could be degenerated if they become unimportant or neglected; the acquired traits could diminish from disuse. Those who refuse to carry their own weight and to be sociable with others, while we may have sympathy for them to the extent of wanting to educate them and even give them a hand now and again, should not be subsidized by compulsory taxation, but should find their access to others’ resources limited to the charity those others are willing to extend voluntarily.
[7] Spinoza taught that inherent in us is a conatus, a force of striving, that carries us onward, often in competition with others. Spinoza holds that whatever is is correct to be, and that the conatus leads us to succeed, to be.
[8] And, like Spinoza and Godwin, Herbert Spencer was an ontological necessitarian
[9] And his opposition to usury and land speculation certainly has Christian roots as well: Spencer had grown up among radical Christians such as Unitarians and Universalists; for some of these, Jesus’s message against usury was of utmost importance, and Spencer seems, like Proudhon, to have taken radical influence from this direction and from “just price” ideas.
[10] Humans, in living their lives, change their environment, and, in so doing, establish new niches that must be adapted to. In this way, humans go about constructing their own evolutionary niches.
[11] Perfection as something attainable on Earth was a topic in radicalism since at least the time of the Cathars, who called members Perfecti
[12] Spencer is said to have popularized the saying there is no alternative
[13] Artificial selection is selection by an external biological intelligence, such as when humans selectively breed dogs
[14] Often having to face more selective pressures anyway, the lower classes of society develop a natural fitness that would only contribute to the diversity of the genepool, and where social Darwinism would reward the sociability of these individuals, would remunerate their sacrifices, improving the fitness of the species and acceptance of individuals within it, Malthusianism would overlook these differences, not out of malice or malintent, but because the best able to see these qualities—members of the communities of the individuals, and, more importantly, the fact of the individual’s ability to sustain themself—have had their influence removed from the selection process, being swept away with the others in depopulation efforts, from wars and famines and depressions and so on.
[15] Darwin’s On the Origins of Species was fully titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, demonstrating his Malthusian influence, in common with Spencer
[16] At least early in Spencer’s philosophy, that most influential to fellow radicals and not as much to aristocrats and robber barons
[17] Spencer was one of the pioneers of the field of sociology, a field generally dominated by socialists and scorned by capitalists (who themselves prefer economics)
[18] He suggested that he was unfamiliar with Proudhon, and later protested that his work was not like Proudhon’s because Proudhon was a socialist
[19] Biological systems, which can be described as negentropic or syntropic systems, naturally involve positive-feedback loops— self-influencing and self-advantaging, cumulative cycles—, which are in part responsible for the internally-driven development of the organic system in question
[20] See Chris Knight and his “sex strike theory of human origins”
[21] In fact, this has left a distinct signature in the evolutionary record, marked by the reduction in sexual dimorphism in body size and canine teeth differences between males and females when it comes to modern Homo sapiens. If not for the sexual and social selection of mutually affiliated females and males, we’d be living a life very much like that of a Gorilla or Chimpanzee troup, with a single or small group of males controlling a harem of females and restricting other males from access to them out of sheer brute force. We must be reminded that the canine teeth of the Great Apes— who are marked by a largely frugivorous, insectivorous, and potentially sometimes folivores or rhizovores diet (in the case of extinct Hominids such as the australopithecines, oreopithecines, and paranthropus), with confrontationally scavenged carrion and opportunistic hunting of live small prey thrown in for good measure— do not exist for the sake of consuming large game, but, rather, exist for the purpose of lethal combat over harems of females in male-male competition. Humans, on the contrary, have fists evolved for punching, and men, especially, have jaws meant to take a punch. Women today tend to select for strong-jawed men in part because women in the past who sexually preferred such jaws had a higher chance of their genes surviving by way of their sons. These genes, then, due to the ability of their sons to take a punch, got passed on frequently to modern-day women, who maintain the preference for strong jaws despite their importance having diminished with the advent of civil society. Humans lack the combative feature of large canines, as well as the drastic difference in body size between males and females of most other Great Ape species.
[22] For Spencer, discerning fitness was not something done by decree, but as a matter of fact: those who survived were fit. Cooperative activities added to this fitness.
[23] Indeed, even in the case of disagreement as to his descriptions, social science demands we do just this, as Spencer’s contributions to ecological-evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology make plain.
[24] Despite whatever errors or insensibilities he allowed to show
[25] He was liberal in treating others’ use of his work, and advised known scientific racists such as Carleton Putnam, but nonetheless seems to have done this in a liberal spirit, holding himself the view that his research explained why some races may fair better than others, even given conditions of equality. He does not seem, himself, to have presented the view that legislation should be created to address the races differently.
[26] Coon has been criticized for consulting white racists who did want to change policy around race, but nonetheless maintained that this was not an interest of his own
[27] Eugenics actually has its home in anarchist philosophy, such as that of Moses Harman, whose paper Lucifer the Lightbearer also went by the name Eugenics, and was co-opted by people such as Margaret Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood, and a student of the anarchist Emma Goldman, also a proponent of eugenics
[28] I’m not exactly sure how Patrick Nolan and Gerhard Lenski have maintained their prominence in such an atmosphere, although I am sure a Professor Emeritus status helps
[29] Among the elements of the fin de siècle was Decadence, a literary and arts movement whose title along demonstrates its opposing values to Spencer’s evolutionary progress
[30] Herbert Spencer did have some visitations with some of the robber barons of the day, but concluded that, despite their interest in his work, they were unable to fully understand what he was going on about, because his work was ultimately an effort against their interests.
[31] Nonetheless, the corporatists themselves split into a neo-Marxist, progressive Left and a slightly more conservative, mainly Objectivist Right.
