Reason and Social Darwinism

Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason is my weekend reading. After an initial burst of polemic that was perhaps too careless about the roles of new information technologies and games in modern idea formation, she settles into a detailed analysis of the history of reason, science, pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism in American life. Almost as soon as Huxley hit the lecture circuit with a discussion of Darwinian evolution, social and economic theorists began an expansive integration of the core algorithm into their theories, justifying racism, colonialism, laissez-faire capitalism and, later, eugenics from a loosely critical reading of Darwin.

It was the triumphalist laissez-faire notions that celebrated industrialists under the banner of Social Darwinism that I found the most interesting, since there remains a core of this in contemporary Republican/Conservative reasoning. Indeed, paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan routinely revive a weakened form of these notions when opposing social programs like affirmative action and justifying positions where individual and racial differences are not correctable by public policy.

And therein is the irony, I suppose, that Social Darwinism informs some of the most anti-Darwinist modern thinkers. Competition is good for you. Still, the most telling development to emerge from the same era is that ideas have a certain prolific vitality, mutating outward from basic scientific observations into new formulations that reengineer the scientific core into a series of quasi-scientific speculations. Then, over time, the speculations are whittled down and even completely discarded as the pseudoscience is ejected and only the core remains.