Social Darwinism

What is Social Darwinism?

Social Darwinism is a set of ideas that attempted to explain and justify a specific social order. Social Darwinists asserted that inequalities are natural. At a practical level, Social Darwinists opposed social intervention to reduce disparities. In political and social theory, Social Darwinists challenged the view that greater equality among individuals and groups is possible and desirable. Social equality may have existed in primitive societies, they thought, but it disappeared as societies became more complex. In fact, growing inequality spurred societal evolution.

Capitalism, which Social Darwinists saw as the most advanced form of society, is especially competitive. Social Darwinists addressed a contradiction in capitalist society—the formal equality of citizens is in tension with the large disparities among individuals and groups in wealth, power, living conditions, and ownership of property. Social Darwinists explained this contradiction by asserting that formal equality cannot eliminate the effects of fundamental biological differences in human ability.

At a philosophical level, Social Darwinists opposed ideologies of transcendence, arguing that because inequalities persist and are natural phenomena, egalitarian social orders must be considered counterfactual utopias that can never be realized in complex societies. Attempts to realize egalitarian social arrangements can only end in disorder, stagnation, or bureaucratic rigidity, they thought. Social Darwinists considered inequalities and disparities to be a natural and healthy condition associated with dynamic societies and economic growth.

Comparison with Darwin's Theory of Evolution

The ideology of Social Darwinism used terms from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution of species but applied them to human institutions with a considerable amount of distortion and misinterpretation.

[Page 1248]Darwinian evolution is a theory of change in populations and species. Inheritable variation in the characteristics of individuals and populations is a fundamental feature of life in this view. As the environment changes, inherited characteristics become more or less conducive to the survival of individual organisms and the likelihood that they can reproduce themselves and pass these characteristics on to offspring. Thus, in the long run, certain organisms with inherited traits that are favorable to survival and reproduction become more numerous within that specific environment, but other individuals and entire species may disappear. Natural selection takes place within a specific environment, and within that environment, a species (or a variant form within a species) is said to survive when it continues to reproduce itself. Under favorable conditions, its numbers or population proportion may increase in succeeding generations.

Natural selection and changes in species can readily be observed and do not always take many eons. For example, when the landscape of English mill-towns became darker and sootier during industrialization, dark moths were less likely to be seen and eaten by predators than were light moths, so dark-colored mothers were more likely to survive and reproduce. They became more common. Multidrug resistant tuberculosis bacteria and penicillin-resistant bacteria are strains that emerge by natural selection and survive in the new environment of modern drugs that kill the nonresistant varieties. Developments in genetics in the late 19th and 20th centuries—specifically the discovery of DNA and the understanding of mutations—have clarified the mechanisms posited in Darwin's original formulation.

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