Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Like “scientific racism,” the movement called Social Darwinism is often tendentiously attributed to science. When the concept of evolution became famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it turned into an inkblot test that a diverse assortment of political and intellectual movements saw as vindicating their agendas. Everyone wanted to believe that their vision of struggle, progress, and the good life was nature’s way.³⁵ One of these movements was retroactively dubbed social Darwinism, though it was advocated not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, who laid it out in 1851, eight years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Spencer did not believe in random mutation and natural selection; he believed in a Lamarckian process in which the struggle for existence impelled organisms to strive toward feats of greater complexity and adaptation, which they passed on to later generations. Spencer thought that this progressive force was best left unimpeded, and so he argued against social welfare and government regulation that would only prolong the doomed lives of weaker individuals and groups. His political philosophy, an early form of libertarianism, was picked up by robber barons, advocates of laissez-faire economics, and opponents of social spending. Because those ideas had a right-wing flavor, left-wing writers misapplied the term social Darwinism to other ideas with a right-wing flavor, such as imperialism and eugenics, even though Spencer was dead-set against such government activism.³⁶ More recently the term has been used as a weapon against any application of evolution to the understanding of human beings.³⁷ So despite its etymology, the term has nothing to do with Darwin or evolutionary biology, and is now an almost meaningless term of abuse.

Eugenics is another movement that has been used as an ideological blunderbuss. Francis Galton, a Victorian polymath, first suggested that the genetic stock of humankind could be improved by offering incentives for talented people to marry each other and have more children (positive eugenics), though when the idea caught on it was extended to discouraging reproduction among the “unfit” (negative eugenics). Many countries forcibly sterilized delinquents, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and other people who fell into a wide net of ailments and stigmas. Nazi Germany modeled its forced sterilization laws after ones in Scandinavia and the United States, and its mass murder of Jews, Roma, and homosexuals is often considered a logical extension of negative eugenics. (In reality the Nazis invoked public health far more than genetics or evolution: Jews were likened to vermin, pathogens, tumors, gangrenous organs, and poisoned blood.)³⁸

The eugenics movement was permanently discredited by its association with Nazism. But the term survived as a way to taint a number of scientific endeavors, such as applications of medical genetics that allow parents to bear children without fatal degenerative diseases, and to the entire field of behavioral genetics, which analyzes the genetic and environmental causes of individual differences.³⁹ And in defiance of the historical record, eugenics is often portrayed as a movement of right-wing scientists. In fact it was championed by progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger.⁴⁰ Eugenics, after all, valorized reform over the status quo, social responsibility over selfishness, and central planning over laissez-faire. The most decisive repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles: government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is not among them.

I’ve mentioned the limited role of science in these movements not to absolve the scientists (many of whom were indeed active or complicit) but because the movements deserve a deeper and more contextualized understanding than their current role as anti-science propaganda. Misunderstandings of Darwin gave these movements a boost, but they sprang from the religious, artistic, intellectual, and political beliefs of their eras: Romanticism, cultural pessimism, progress as dialectical struggle or mystical unfolding, and authoritarian high modernism. If we think these ideas are not just unfashionable but mistaken, it is because of the better historical and scientific understanding we enjoy today.