Stick It To The Historians! or Social Darwinism? No Such Beast.

Responding to last Saturday's outburst of robust hatred, Luther Blissett jokingly recommended I avoid criticizing scholars in my field by criticizing historians instead.  A week of dissertation frustration later, I'm seriously considering seriously considering his advice.  Here's the dilemma:

Social Darwinism is less coherent fin de siècle philosophy and more convenient myth unwittingly perpetuated by the well-meaning Richard Hofstadter.[1]  Hofstadter emphasized the Herbert Spencer vogue in the person of William Graham Sumner, connected it to racist imperialism and thus was born a philosophical movement that only ever existed conceptually.  Now, I could discuss (at great length) how Hofstadter should've undertaken a more comprehensive revision of his seminal Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944)  when the "Revised Edition" appeared in 1959.  After all, by 1959 he had already written The Age of Reform, and should've known that the majority of references to evolutionary theory (though rarely "Darwinian" in anything but name) between 1890 and 1910 weren't mouthed by laissez faire capitalists like Spencer's friend Andrew Carnegie but by reformers like pioneering sociologists Lester Frank Ward and James Mark Baldwin.  Of all the robber barons, only Carnegie--whose ideas on social evolution were more Malthussian than Darwinian--fit Hofstadter's mold. 

Not that it's even that important: in terms of the frequency with which people applied evolutionary theory to social, cultural and political matters, "social Darwinism" pales in comparison to appeals to a Lamarckian model of evolution made by advocates of social reform.  The real impact of evolutionary theory can be seen in someone like John Dewey, whose firm belief that anyone could acquire an education is founded on an idea that characteristics like "intelligence" and "culture" could be acquired over the course of an individual lifetime.  That's classic how-giraffes-got-long-necks Lamarckism.  If you're still reading you may be one of the lucky few I eventually ask to read this dissertation of mine when it nears completion.  Rest assured I've almost reached my point.

Because you've not done the primary research on your own and I haven't cited it here, I beg you to grant me all that and then tell me what I should when every article I read begins something like this:

As popularized at the time, Social Darwinism was reduced to a crude argument claiming the survival of the fittest among individuals within soicety and among societies as well.  The doctrine appealed to the privileged Anglo-Saxon elite because it reinforced ethnocentric and evolutionist attitudes towards so-called primitive peoples...

...or it would have if such a doctrine predicated on such a reduction had existed. Clarice Stasz's overall argument is whip-smart, but because of its assumptions (quoted above) it can't help but flounder.  The section above's followed by an argument whose assumptions render it entirely useless for my purposes; and because of Hofstadter's eminence, Stasz's assumptions may well represent those of all literary scholars who have worked on literature of the period.[2]

So should I take Luther's advice and nail my theses to Hofstadter's door and write a dissertation in which I appear to ignore the relevent criticism in order that I might not take an explicitly adversarial stance?  Or should I wax chimeric and fluff my feathers, pound my chest and show these literary critics my canines? 

[1] Whoever edited my editorial work on that Wikipedia entry edited away Robert Bannister's name but not his argument.  I'm tempted to edit it back in but fear turning this editorial brushfire into a conflagration.

[2] I qualify with "may well" because while I haven't run across any criticism that picks up Bannister's line instead of Hofstadter's, there's always a chance that such a work exists in some obscure journal whose entire print-run of 14 all landed in obscure libraries in the corners of countries I've never even heard of.

Comments

[Alan Baumler]

Here are a couple on China for you. I don’t really like Frank Dikotter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern China, but it is the most recent thing, and there is a lot of stuff in there. Pussy’s China and Charles Darwin would probably be more useful.

[Caleb]

Scott, you may already know of this quote, but in Dusk of Dawn (1940), W. E. B. DuBois writes:

At Harvard ... I began to face scientific race dogma: first of all, evolution and the "Survival of the Fittest." It was continually stressed in the community and in classes that there was a vast difference in the development of the whites and the "lower" races; that this could be seen in the physical development of the Negro. I remember once in a museum, coming face to face with a demonstration: a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee. Eventually in my classes stress was quietly tranferred to brain weight and brain capacity, and at last to the "cephalic index."

You might also be interested in (and might already know about) Marcus Garvey's essay "African Fundamentalism," written shortly after the Scopes trial, which makes many passing references to evolution and its critics (not the least of which is the allusion in the essay's title). It's collected in UC Press's recent compendium of excerpts from Garvey's collected works, Life and Lessons.

I don't know exactly what to make of these quotes; I'll leave that to you, of course! But I'd be very interested to know if your work deals at all with how African American intellectuals dealt with Darwin and evolution. I suspect the kind of irony-laced allusions you find in DuBois and Garvey were prevalent more generally.

[Sean McCann]

I love that Bannister book. Rocked my world and made me see the turn-of-the-century in completely new ways. The amazing thing to me isn't just how wrong the classic picture was but how extraordinarily widespread reformist Lamarckianism was and how frequently neglected since. A major little told story of cultural history. (Go, Scott! Finish the diss.)

Jonathan, what do you mean enculturation is necessarily Lamarckian? Not in the sense of acquired traits transmitted by inheritance. It was just the difference between enculturation and genetic transmission that turn of the century reformers (because of good intentions and because understandably they didn't have a good grasp on genetics) were unable to get clear. Wasn't it in 1897 that Weissman first published his rediscovery of Mendel and (his resisted) challenge to Lamarckianism? And it wasn't until after 1910 that Morgan came to the fore.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Thanks, Alan, for jumping in with the China stuff. Scott: It's worth noting, perhaps, that the neologism for Darwinism, "survival of the fittest," and social darwinism in the ideographic East Asian languages was a very simple four character phrase: "strong eat; weak meat."