When a
Wisconsin school district jumped on board with the other red-state Creationists this week and, borrowing a bit of postmodern rhetoric, publicly proclaimed their determination to insure that the science curriculum is not monologic, i.e. "totally inclusive of just one scientific theory," I started to think a bit more about the disconnect between Scientific and
Social Darwinism and contemporary American politics.
There has been quite a bit written about creationism, theocracy, and curricular disputes in the diaries - e.g.
EdwardsRaysOfSunshine diary yesterday on the
evolution controversy in Georgia - but I think we should talk further about the distinction between scientific and social Darwinism (a topic also raised by
a quick comment from padraig pearse yesterday). Why do we need to think about it? Because social Darwinism is actually intimately connected to neoliberalism: both have their roots in Adam Smith and the peculiar brand of conservatism offered up by both would value the individual over the community and adamantly oppose the idea of revolutionary practice as a means of producing social change.
One of the key texts on Social Darwinism would be
Richard Hofstadter's,
Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). Hofstadter is concerned to show why Darwinian policies in the social sphere would have been tremendously popular in the early twentieth century. In the decades before the depression, the popularity and influence of
eugenics coincided with the increasing number of immigrants and racial minorities in the U.S. The culture school of William James and John Dewey changed things somewhat in that there was a growing institutional investment in the study of the cultural and environmental, rather than the biological, conditions that shaped an individual.
There is a massive disconnect between the biological and the social in the present moment: the very politicians and right-wing "public intellectuals" (one must use scare quotes in this instance) who offer up creationism and "intelligent design" as "alternatives" to scientific Darwinism are simultaneously offering us a neoliberal politics strongly inflected by social Darwinism. No need even to give lip service to the welfare state any longer: if the poor cannot lift themselves up out of poverty, then of course it is just "natural selection" and "the survival of the fittest" at work and who are we to contravene such natural laws? And, if we do not need regulation of either financial markets or the information society - because these entities are self-regulating and self-modifying - then we certainly do not need to regulate the environment (it is after all a natural system). Finally, if the income gap between the rich and the poor grows wider and the Faustian pact made by the neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians intensifies global political and religious conflicts, then all we are able to do is just let it be. The idea of revolutionary change, after all, is anathema to an ideology that holds that competition between races, societies, and species is a natural, organic process, but that hierarchies are genetically predetermined.