Social Darwinism

There are three connected issues here. What is human nature? How fixed and transmissible is it? How does human nature relate to modern society?

Commentators imbue "human nature" with the qualities that best fit their philosophical and political predilections. Writing in the early twentieth century, for example, the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) argued that all species are collectively oriented. The struggle for existence is actually composed of individuals collaborating. Indeed, the rise of capitalism had wrecked this essential human nature, a circumstance to be reversed by an anarchist society. In contrast, Fabian socialists, such as Sidney Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), argued that people can easily be individualistic and competitive. They therefore envisaged a form of social engineering that would override these propensities. Individual actions "must sooner or later be checked by the whole, lest the whole perish through the error of its member" (cited in Hawkins, p. 165). Meanwhile, William Sumner (1840–1910) and others in the United States celebrated possessive individualism, arguing that "the progress of civilisation … depends on the selection process; and that depends upon the workings of unrestricted competition" (quoted in Hofstadter, p. 57).

Social Darwinism has relied heavily on the idea of "traits" or "characteristics" that are seen as determining whether an organism, a "race," or even a nation survives and satisfactorily breeds. This issue is especially important when considering eugenics, the deliberate selection of people with particular traits and their discouragement from breeding through forms of social control. Darwin's own writings, especially The Descent, express anxiety about biological decline stemming "the weak members of civilised society" not only propagating their kind but, as a result of medical and charitable intervention, leading to "the degeneration of a domestic race" (Darwin, 1901, p. 206).

The issue was to arise forcibly with Darwin's cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) and his colleague Karl Pearson (1857–1936). In Hereditary Genius, Galton studied family trees over a period of two hundred years and argued that a disproportionately large number of distinguished jurists, politicians, military commanders, scientists, poets, painters, and musicians were blood relatives. He concluded that it would be "quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations" (quoted in Kevles, p. 4). His young colleague Pearson attempted to measure mental capacities and claimed on a statistical basis, one appealing to scientific method, that these capacities were indeed passed on between generations.

But the influential Herbert Spencer envisaged "human nature" as flexible and transformed over time. "Primitive man" was immoral, irrational, mendacious, and aggressive. A number of groups (including children, women, inferior social ranks, and tribal cultures) remain arrested in a prehistoric state, although they could be civilized during their individual lives. Social evolution, Spencer argued, is generally progressive. It has consisted of a steady improvement of a primitive state of affairs. Individualism, morality, and voluntary association (qualities Spencer approved of) had developed in modern society, one in which people could start caring for one another.

The idea of inborn characteristics generating success has remained influential since the days of Galton and Pearson. It was made prominent in the late twentieth century with the suggestion by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray that success in modern society depends on people's inbuilt ability to handle information. In modern society the successful are those with advanced mental capacities. Meanwhile unsuccessful people with low intelligence are interbreeding to produce a rapidly increasing underclass. Society is again envisaged as "natural," class structure being a product of inborn characteristics. Robert Plomin and others supporting the work of Herrnstein and Murray are searching for a genetic basis to intelligence.

The issue of a fixed, heritable, possibly genetically based human nature remains highly controversial. In contrast, there is a rapidly growing literature showing that early parenting and schooling are especially important in determining both mental and physical "fitness" (Dickens, 2004). Perhaps the most important defining "trait" of human beings is their flexibility, their capacity to adapt to many different circumstances.

As regards the relationship between human nature and modern society, a recurrent theme was established by Graham Wallas (1858–1932), another Fabian socialist. Writing in 1908, he asked, "Why should we expect a social organisation to endure, which has been formed in a moment of time by human beings, whose bodies and minds are the result of age-long selection under far different conditions?" (quoted in Hawkins, p. 64). The implication is that human nature was established during the earliest years of human evolution but is inappropriate for, or even destructive to, modern society.

This is a position developed later by "evolutionary psychology." Again using the idea of a genetically based human nature, the suggestion is that humanity's principle predispositions were established while the species evolved on the savannah. The modern mind remains a "neural computer," one "driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status and knowledge" (Pinker, p. 524). Male philandering, female coyness, and even aesthetic predispositions were genetically embedded in humanity during that era. These theories are also proving highly controversial (Rose and Rose).