How Sarah Palin Could Prove Darwin Wrong by Becoming the Stupidest President in History

Of Darwinism and Social Darwinism

by Robert B. Reich

The Conservative Movement, as its progenitors like to call it, is now mounting a full-throttled attack on Darwinism even as it has thoroughly embraced Darwin’s bastard child, social Darwinism. On the face of it, these positions may appear inconsistent. What unites them is a profound disdain for science, logic, and fact.
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The modern Conservative Movement has embraced social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism. Social Darwinism gives a moral justification for rejecting social insurance and supporting tax cuts for the rich. “In America,” says Robert Bork, “‘the rich’ are overwhelmingly people – entrepreneurs, small businessmen, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc. – who have gained their higher incomes through intelligence, imagination, and hard work.”
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The only consistency between the right’s attack on Darwinism and embrace of social Darwinism is the utter fatuousness of both. Darwinism is correct. Scientists who are legitimized by peer review and published research are unanimous in their view that evolution is a fact, not a theory. Social Darwinism, meanwhile, is hogwash.

“Bastard Child” at the very least! Social Darwinism does not follow from “Darwinism” and, worse, it attributes to Darwin positions he never took. Interestingly, the term “survival of the fittest” was never used by Darwin. Though it has been variously attributed, Hofstadter traced the phrase to rail road men and other early ‘robber barons’:

Railroad executive Chauncy Depew asserted that the guests of the great dinners and public banquets of New York City represented the survival of the fittest of all who came in search of fortune. They were the ones with superior abilities. Likewise railroad magnate James J. Hill defended the railroad companies by saying their fortunes were determined according to the law of survival of the fittest.

—Hofstadter, Richard; 1959; Social Darwinism in American Thought, Braziller; New York.

Elsewhere, the term is attributed to Herbert Spencer who clearly inspired a generation of radicalized, latter-day ‘industrialists’ all of them lacking the “…quality of mercy” so immortalized with but a few words by Shakespeare.

[Herbert] Spencer said that diseases “are among the penalties Nature has attached to ignorance and imbecility, and should not, therefore, be tampered with.” He even faulted private organizations like the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children because they encouraged legislation.

—Social Darwinism and American Laissez-faire Capitalism

An equally fallacious corollary to “Social Darwinism” is often phrased: the rich are rich because they are better, work harder and are more intelligent.” To be expected, George W. Bush put it more crudely: “The poor are poor because they are lazy!” In the same vein, the conservative economist Joseph A. Schumpeter likened recessions to a “douche” leaving us to wonder just who is “douched” and how? Indeed, millions were douched by R. Reagan. Many never returned to ‘steady employment’! Reagan ‘douched’ their jobs and their unions permanently!

Only sociopaths believe that a tiny and shrinking elite should be empowered to the exclusion of everyone else to decide matters of life and death. It unconscionable that by its pursuit of obscene riches, just 1 percent of the nation may with its purely fiduciary interests decide matters of life or death for millions, indeed billions all over the world. It is difficult not to conclude that New Orleans after Katrina is but the disastrous consequence of this kind of “blame the victim” thinking. It is insane and unconscionable to believe that because short-sellers, Wall Street insiders, quick buck artists and robber barons have gotten in front of a wave that they are justified in asserting a right, by virtue of wealth, to make decisions that threaten human life, indeed, a global future.

It is not surprising that Spencer’s influence continues, not in the field of biology, but in economics, specifically those theories most often associated with the right wing: the American apologists, William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten.

No doubt, Spencer’s ideas received a major boost after Darwin’s theories were published, but it was at the very outset that the issues were muddied and have been ever since. It is unfortunate that the application of the terms “adaptation” and “survival of the fittest” to social thought became known as “Social Darwinism”. They are neither ‘Darwin’ nor ‘Social’.

More recently, the work of John Nash, recently the subject of the motion picture, A Beautiful Mind, argued persuasively that not only games but societies and economies benefit more from cooperation and community than from competition. Spencer, and Social Darwinists after him, took another view. And that is unfortunate.

Spencer believed that because society was evolving, government intervention ought to be minimal in social and political life. Nevermind that government is but a function of society and responsible to it. Influenced by Spencer, many describe American capitalism in terms of the “rational man” making rational decisions in not only a free market but a ‘rational’ one. In practice, however, economic decisions may or may not be rational and free markets are merely hypothetical. It is a mistake to believe that “rational self-interest”, said to work collectively behind Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, has had anything but an irrational effect in most cases.

‘Social Darwinism’ and other defenses of robber baron practices may sound good ‘in theory’ but are, in fact ‘bad theory though conservatives have worked mightily to force reality into a mold. That’s bad science; models must describe reality —not the other way round. The right wing are incurable ‘theorists’ proposing unworkable theories like ‘supply-side’ economics [trickle-down theory] and other equally failed schemes which have succeeded only in making the economically failed and incompetent right wing feel good about being utter failures, uncaring psychopaths or inarticulate boobs.

Nash proved that cooperation is often more successful than competition, leading to the inevitable conclusion that societies which rationalize discrimination, income disparity, and social injustice on a fallacious basis like Social Darwinism, are apt not be so successful themselves. In fact, they never are. The utterly failed administration of Ronald Reagan is the specimen that proves it: only the administration of George H.W. Bush had worse figures for both job creation and GDP growth. In fact, every Democratic President since WWII has a better record. The two losers compete for the bottom. The nation cannot afford another Bush, nor another Reagan. It is a mistake to ‘reward’ these losers with another failed administration, another chance to cheat the people, another opportunity to wage aggressive war for the purpose of stealing oil and other resources.

In the motion picture, A Beautiful Mind, Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe, is in a favorite watering hole with two colleagues, later termed “negotiants” in his theories. The three young males were distracted by three unattended and comely females. Among the three, a blonde, was seen to be the most desirable. Nash immediately saw a mathematical certainty of failure should all three males “hit on” the most attractive female. Equally certain, mathematically, was rejection by the remaining unattended females who would then be insulted, becoming “second and third choices.” Some fifty years later, Nash still polishes and refines the mathematics behind the only chance that three “geeks” might have with three comely young women–cooperation rather than competition:

…it is more desirable to be accepted than to accept (!), so with there being reduced pressure to avoid the penalty of the {0,0,0} payoff when there is failure at the first step then the players naturally adapt at equilibrium by becoming “less accepting” and “more demanding.” (The demand parameters…rise as the acceptance rate quantities decrease, but this turns out to be at a logarithmic rate).

…the players can be viewed as in a sort of “continuous auction” process where…the players are able to “bid”…and get into the process of cooperation. And this continuous version of the voting process seems probably to be good for generalization to any number of players.

–John Nash from a published email [emphases mine, LH]

The word “theory” is either misunderstood by the right wing or the term is perverted for it’s propaganda value. There is nothing wrong with “theory” per se, though the word is consistently used by the right wing as a pejorative except, significantly, when it is applied to Spencer and, more recently, Milton Friedman or Arthur Laffer. Accurately, the negative connotations implied are simply not to be found among those who use the word “theory” academically or in science. This linguistic abuse is propaganda.

It must be noted that Einstein was, likewise, a “theorist”; so too, Newton. Einstein has been confirmed no more times than Darwin; Newton is close enough for mundane applications or “government work”. Significantly, neither “theory” has been challenged in court —though both theories may one day be replaced or reconciled with a “theory of everything” [TOE]. But there is a political agenda behind the campaign of attacks on Darwinism even as the same constituency supports Intelligent Design –a monicker designed to ‘sound Darwinian’ though it clearly is not!