[Mb-civic] Of Darwinism and Social Darwinism

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

 http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1129-28.htm
  
  Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
  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.
  
  In The Origin of the Species, published 150 years ago, Charles Darwin  amassed evidence that mankind evolved through the ages from simpler  forms of life through a process he called "natural selection." This  insight became the foundation of modern biological science. But it also  greatly disturbed those who believe the Bible’s account of creation to  be literally true. In recent years, as America’s Conservative Movement  has grown, some of these people have taken over local and state school  boards with the result that, for example, Kansas’s new biology  standards now single out evolution as a "controversial theory." Until a  few weeks ago, teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania were required to tell  their students they should explore "intelligent design" as an  alternative to evolution. (The good citizens of Dover just booted out  the school board responsible for this, summoning a warning from  Conservative Coalition broadcaster Pat Robertson that God would wreak
  
 disaster on them.)
  
  Social Darwinism was developed some thirty years after Darwin’s famous  book by a social thinker named Herbert Spencer. Extending Darwin into a  realm Darwin never intended, Spencer and his followers saw society as a  competitive struggle where only those with the strongest moral  character should survive, or else the society would weaken. It was  Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest."  Social Darwinism thereby offered a perfect moral justification for  America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American  industry, the gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban  slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy. It  allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim that the fortune he  accumulated through the giant Standard Oil Trust was "merely a survival  of the fittest, ... the working out of a law of nature and a law of  God."
  
  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." Any transfer  of wealth from rich to poor thereby undermines the nation’s moral  fiber. Allow the virtuous rich to keep more of their earnings and pay  less in taxes, and they’ll be even more virtuous. Give the non-virtuous  poor food stamps, Medicaid, and what’s left of welfare, and they’ll  fall into deeper moral torpor.
  
  There is, of course, an ideological inconsistency here. If mankind did  not evolve according to Darwinist logic, but began instead with Adam  and Eve, then it seems unlikely societies evolve according to the  survival-of-the-fittest logic of social Darwinism. By the same token,  if you believe one’s economic status is the consequence of an automatic  process of natural selection, then, presumably, you’d believe that  human beings represent the culmination of a similar process, over the  ages. That the conservative mind endures such cognitive dissonance is  stunning, but not nearly as remarkable as the repeated attempts of  conservative mouthpieces such as the editorial pages of the Wall Street  Journal and the Weekly Standard to convince readers the conservative  movement is intellectually coherent.
  
  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. Social scientists have  long understood that one’s economic status in society is not a function  of one’s moral worth. It depends largely on the economic status of  one’s parents, the models of success available while growing up, and  educational opportunities along the way.
  
  A democracy is imperiled when large numbers of citizens turn their  backs on scientific fact. Half of Americans recently polled say they  don’t believe in evolution. Almost as many say they believe income and  wealth depend on moral worthiness. At a time when American children are  slipping behind on international measures of educational attainment,  especially in the sciences; when global competition is intensifying;  and when the median incomes of Americans are stagnating and the ranks  of the poor are increasing, these ideas, propagated by the so-called  Conservative Movement, are moving us rapidly backwards.
  
  Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of  Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has  served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of  labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books, including  The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the  best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his  most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker,  Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street  Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect  magazine.
  
  This article can also be found in The American Prospect, December 2005.
  
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