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Date :  2005-10-06
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Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

Source :  Gustavo Vallejo


This term refers to a vast problem that rises from connections between science and ideology, biological knowledge and power in Victorian England, with derivations, displayed in globalisations, which reveal it as a rhetorical device to naturalise social inequalities. Together with the direct integration of social darwinism into the generalized state of laissez faire, there are other more complex biological and socio-political appropriations, which helped updating its leading role in globalisation processes.

The merger point of these relations constantly brings us back, of course, to Charles Darwin’s theory (1) which has been as important to our main concern as its reelaborations, since the adjective social was added to boost the scope of what was already a great metaphor, perhaps the most significant one that modern science has ever built. A metaphor that contributed to show that the evolution that animal and plant species undergo matches the progress of human societies. From this, a problem from the biological field immediately became sociological, populational, and a political and economical one too.
As Robert Malthus (2) warned about the risks of population growth in societies with insufficient food-supply for everyone, in these huge post Industrial Revolution urban concentrations he himself could not see, his thesis has come to have an unexpected impact. In fact, the evolutionary thought accompanying the rise of the bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century had already been penetrated by Malthusian logics and the risks that resources be exhausted by population growth became a central problem for the Victorian England scientific sphere.

Since the last part of the nineteenth century a marked eagerness to integrate Darwin’s basic concepts to Malthusian warnings has appeared in the political sphere, and some social rereadings have given rise to a clear assumption: when struggle for life was set in the social field, intraspecific competition from the standpoint of early evolutionaries was redefined and that struggle they noticed between lions and gazelles has changed since then into the struggle of gazelles against gazelles.
The “second Darwin”, who incorporated compassion and altruism to his theory, added a crucial factor to the explanation of the struggle for life, which, even if it was intraspecific, could be established between groups. Remarkable people as the anarchist Pietr Kropotkin or Elisée Reclus will soon enlighten the intense appropriation of darwinism led by the left until the Great War, overprinting to the relation of evolutionism and social progress a metaphor of the human nature: it could be seen as an independent and harmonious whole blending social cooperation with human reason. But the idea that the “struggle” was a group competition will also exacerbate struggles anchored in racial grounds. Simultaneously, a political appropriation occurred, from ultraliberalism to totalitarian regimes, accompanying the path of darwinism from a biological approach seeing the organism as the frame for a generalised inter-individual competition to another one, considering it as the result of corporative interactions. The “struggle” between groups could then be used to legitimate the colonization of nations, the state of war, race and women inferiority, etc. Further reinterpretations of the darwinian metaphor should also be analysed in the following light: the “struggle” concept of the struggle for life was translated into German by the word kampf, which exactly entails the ideas of aggression and war, as in Adolf Hitler’s famous text.

While some altruistic suggestions from Darwin’s theory found a scientific reinterpretation in Sociobiology which, owing to its organicism and its tendency to explain society from the study of a group of genes based on the knowledge about “social insects” still causes quite some controversy, the hardest matrix of the hyper-competition in a "not-for-all" world went on being evoked through the successive malthusian reinterpretations. The latter did also include those uses formulated from left wing groups to promote birth control and settle women’s rights in an agenda that had incorporated nuclear family, which would enable them to have an active social life, and a model of reproduction detached from sexual pleasure. However, political appropriations of darwinism have hardly been crystal clear, even around neomalthusionism. Evidence of this is the recent elaboration of this doctrine by Giovanni Sartori from Italy, who plays the role of the guard of general welfare in the globalisations context of a Europe threatened by the “invasion” of illegal Latin Americans and Africans. That true left emblem, birth control, here becomes an excuse for new forms of global exclusion. According to Sartori and Mazzoleni in La Terra Scoppia. Sovrapopolazione e Sviluppo (2003), if the Catholic Church continues to interfere with the application of neomalthusionist policies in underdeveloped countries, global order will endure at risk.




Notes:

(1) Formulated with On the origin of species of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (1859) and The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (1871).
(2) In An essay on the principle of population (1798).



Bibliography:

Glick, Thomas, Ruiz, Rosaura y Puig-Samper, Miguel Ángel (ed.); El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica, UNAM-CSIC-Doce Calles, Madrid, 1999.
Lightman, Bernard (ed.); The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, York University, Toronto, 2004.
Miranda, Marisa y Vallejo, Gustavo (comp.); Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 2005.
Puig-Samper, Miguel Ángel, Ruiz, Rosaura y Galera, Andrés (ed.); Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en Europa e Iberoamérica, Junta de Extremadura-UNAM-Doce Calles, Madrid, 2002.
Tort, Patrick (ed.); Darwinisme et société, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1992.
Tort, Patrick (ed.); Dictionnaire du Darwinisme et de l´évolution, 3 vol., Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1996.


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