Socialism, Evolutionary Theory & the Solipsism of the Dissertator

Were Scott McLemee to cast his current project back a couple of decades, his usefulness to me would shoot up exponentially.[1]  Sure, his bi-weekly Intellectual Affairs column somehow never disappoints the considerable expectations with which  I anticipate it.  Certainly, the standard he's set for blogging about academic matters is one all academic bloggers should aspire to meet.  But answer me this:

What has Scott McLemee done for me lately? 

Nothing.  Except for the occasional edification.  And clarification.  And elucidation.  Not to mention all the incidental detenebrations about alembicated over-subtilizations. (Rips sleeve off shirt.  Tourniquet staunches learned but labored logorrhea.  Spits.  Appears overly pleased by own inscrutability.  Arm of Angry God stretches from offstage left.  Fingers roll into Infallible Fist.  Angry God shakes Infallible Fist.  Scott laughs heartedly, dies ironically.)  My highly rational point is that the only value all people who are not Scott Eric Kaufman have for all people who are Scott Eric Kaufman resides in the catalytic potential of their thought and the possibility that it will assist all people who are Scott Eric Kaufman in finishing his damnably unfinishable dissertation. 

That said, were I not nearly blinded by myopic visions of completed chapters I would no doubt be incredibly interested in McLemee's current work.  He's addressing many of the same issues I am only more directly, by which I mean "not alembicated through refined literary filters like my work will day be."  Of course, since popular and literary cultures are often indistinguishable in the period in which I work, my focus on the literature may allow me to address these issues with a confidence McLemee will never acquire, what with the rise of radio programs destined to fade unrecoverable into the ether.  (If ever you wanted to excavate my insecurities, the previous sentence would be an excellent place to begin, e.g. "What ate at Scott day-and-night for months-upon-months was the possibility that somewhere out there, in an "archive" consisting of the collapsed basement of a soon-to-be-demolished house, awaits an article providing incontrovertible evidence of Jack London's position on...")

All of which is only to say that I believe I have to systematize my account of the relation of socialist thought to evolutionary theory.  Right now it's currently more an account of what idiosyncratic socialist thinkers (like Jack London) considered a reasonable bridge between these two diverse bodies of thought.  I have a hunch (based on three years of research) that the majority of thinkers wouldn't fit neatly into any recognized body of evolutionary or socialist thought, and that London's eclectisim is thus far more representative than one might think. 

Still, since socialist doctrine was far more routinized after the establishment of Communist Party liasons in the C.P.U.S.A. and evolutionary thought would be closer to the establishment of the Modern Synthesis, there's a good chance that both may've been far less adventurous than they had been at the turn-of-the-century.  But I can't say that with any certainty.  I had intended this discussion turn to the incompatibilities of "social Darwinism" (however speciously defined) and eugenics, but I've blathered on too long already, so that will have to wait until the morrow.

[1]Here's what McLemee said:

I've been trying to come to some understanding of what the average rank-and-file Socialist Party member would have meant by the word "evolution," one hundred years ago. Such a person might never have read Darwin. But the evidence strongly suggests that he or she would have read Herbert Spencer, or gotten Spencer's ideas at second. That is, from the originator of the phrase "survival of the fittest," and of what we now think of as free-market libertarianism. How could I square that with the socialism of my friends from a century ago?

Well, long story short, they were also reading Ernst Haeckel (or hearing about him anyway), and mixing that in, along with other notions of what the concept implied. In other words, "evolution" meant a patchwork of information and speculation, with politics determining how it was articulated rather than vice versa.

Comments

[Louis Proyect]

Here are some items that are worth pursuing:

1. Kautsky was an enthusiastic follower of Darwin and Spencer before he ever came across Marx. In 1881, he wrote an article for Die Neue Zeit titled "The Indian Question" that asserted that the reason the Europeans defeated the Indians is that they were technologically backward. Plekhanov's "Fun­damental Problems of Marxism" also exhibits much of the same mechanis­tic concept of historical change. In the chapter "Productive Forces and Geography," he makes the case that the Indians of North America remained at a low stage of development because they lacked domesticated animals. These questions are not just of theoretical interest since failure to under­stand them correctly led to divisions between the Sandinistas and the Miskitos, who were regarded as not up to the same cultural level as the Pacific Coast Spanish-speaking majority.

2. In voice-over narration for Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," Morgan Freeman explains that Homo Sapiens had earned the right to rule earth because it had developed a resistance to disease over the millennia. It struck me that this ending inverted what had happened in the New World, when the invading European exterminated the indigenous peoples with smallpox, measles and other diseases that they had not developed a resistance to.

In looking at H.G. Wells's novel, you discover that this was something very much on the mind of the author. In chapter one, he writes:

"And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

As a member in good standing of the Fabian Society, Wells was susceptible to the social Darwinism that leader Beatrice Webb fostered. She was strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer and came to believe that human progress was determined very much by genetics.

It was only a small step from such a belief to the "science" of eugenics. It was a step that H.G. Wells took enthusiastically and that influenced a number of his novels including "War of the Worlds". As David Levy and Sandra Peart pointed out in an article that appeared in the March 26, 2002 Reason Magazine (a libertarian publication), H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" tells the story of a future Earth where humanity has evolved into two separate "races." "Descendants of the working class have become subterranean, ape-like, night creatures who live by eating the decadent descendants of the old upper class. This evolutionary nightmare reflected Victorian ideas about race and hierarchy, and about the undesirable direction that evolution might take if the better sort of people didn't intervene."

Wells was very impressed with the work of Francis Galton, a pioneer in eugenics. While Galton entertained ideas about promoting a better human being à la Nazi science, Wells was more concerned about the dangers of mixed breeding. Here is what he had to say about the black/white intermarriage: "The mating of two quite healthy persons may result in disease. I am told it does so in the case of interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyka region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly, and rarely live."

Levy and Peart describe the odd affinity that Wells had for Stalin:

Wells was nothing if not energetic. Late in his life, his discussion with Joseph Stalin about the good society was published with comments by G. B. Shaw, J. M. Keynes and others. Unlike Stalin, who trusted that the Party would bring progress, Wells believed in the Scientific Elite. "Now," he told Stalin in 1934, 'there is a superabundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it. Recently I was dining with the Royal Society, our great English scientific society. The President's speech was a speech for social planning and scientific control. To-day, the man at the head of the Royal Society holds revolutionary views, and insists on the scientific reorganisation of human society."

[Scott McLemee]

Your kind comments are much appreciated, Mr. Acephalous. And it's been tonic to read the thinking-out-loud entries about your work on evolution. I'm still at a fairly early stage of thinking through my own project, so it was useful to find my hunch more or less corroborated.

The way I framed the question in the passage you cited -- trying to figure out what evolution meant down at the Socialist Party hall, among people who might have read some pamphlets or heard lectures -- introduces all kinds of problems that aren't there when you are dealing with, say, particular authors or political figures who left archives. The potted version of Spencer that we now think of in recalling that period was a factor, of course. But so was Haeckel, as well as a certain version of Nietzsche. All served up as a kind of gumbo.

On a different note: I never think of my writing at IHE as being a blog, really. The intent, anyway -- the sense of form and possibility of this kind of column -- was shaped by the example of various writers who were dead long before anyone ever came up with the term "blog." (That may be a nuance with no meaning for anybody else, of course.) My main ambition for IA is just to make it the kind of thing I'd actually want to read.

Again, thanks for everything. But it's disappointing to learn you aren't named after Bataille's posse. Evidently they found somebody willing to be the guest of honor at the human sacrifice they wanted to perform, then Bataille thought the better of it.

[Eric Rauchway]

As you are now perusing archives in the basements of nearly-demolished houses, it might seem too nearly routine, even banal, for me to suggest Robert Hoxie's articles from around 1910, which contain observations on the eclectic opinions of the average socialist voter. But if it is not, then I do.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Louis, I've looked at Wells before, but not in relation to his socialism, only his evolutionism. I don't know why I haven't thought to do this yet, since it seems an eminently sensible thing for me to do, so I appreciate the tips. (Eric also deserves some appreciation, since I haven't looked into the Hoxie but now will.)

Scott--I always feel odd addressing people by my name, but what can you do?--I didn't mean to say that IHE is a blog, but the impressive pace at which you pound it out is more bloggy than not. (That's meant as a compliment. You see the tripe I produce at this prodigious pace.) As for the content of non-traditional (from the p.o.v. of literary studies) written records--pamphlets and the like--I've read as many as I can get my hands on, but at the time I was reading them I hadn't focused yet on evolutionary theory, so that's something I need to get back to. Ah, blessed leg-work! (Fortunately I find archival work more gratifying than many people I know.) Anyhow, we should keep each other posted on what we find, since we may be able to save each other a lot of grudge work.

[Scott McLemee]

That's fine, doing the archival work and all. But you realize that in 1994 the MLA passed a rule requiring that use of any historical research much be limited to no more than two anecdotes per monograph -- at least one of which must appear in the opening paragraph. If you go beyond that, there is a fine.