Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London's The Iron Heel and Before Adam

(This is the text of a talk given at the American Literature Association's Symposium on Naturalism, 6 October 2007.)

Jack London was branded by association the moment Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought hit the shelves in 1944. One of the earliest reviews recounted a session of the American Sociological Society devoted to Social Darwinism. The reviewer notes that “none of [the participants] went in for any such vociferous and belligerent discipleship as did Jack London.” Readers of London’s youthful exchanges with Cloudesley Johns would consider this association appropriate: a twenty-four year-old London declared himself “An Evolutionist, believing in Natural Selection, half believing Mathus’ ‘Law of Population,’ and a myriad of other factors thrown in, [who] cannot but hail as unavoidable, the Black and the Brown going down before the White.” According to William Cain, this sentence is evidence that “London is quick to express his social Darwinism.” But as an expression of social Darwinism, London’s statement is quite vague.  London connects Darwin to Malthus, then connects Malthus to “a myriad of other factors,” and concludes that “the Black and Brown [are] going down before the White.” How this will happen is unclear, as he never mentions any causal mechanism. Cain’s casual reference to the accepted fact of social Darwinism—and London’s alleged allegiance to it—obscures the nuances of London’s actual, quite tortured, evolutionary logic.

Almost every account of social Darwinism must, by necessity, ignore the wide acceptance of the two mechanisms of Lamarckian evolution in the early 20^th Century: teleology and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The classic example of the latter is the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck.  But the giraffe only accounts for the better known of the two Lamarckian mechanisms—and the secondary one at that. The other, more important mechanism is what Stephen Jay Gould translates as “the complexifying force.” This complexifying force is distinct from environment. Lamarck argues for a persistent tendency toward greater complexity through non-adaptive evolution. The implication is that even if the environment were to remain stable, evolution would still occur through the spontaneous generation of “more elaborate” and “more complex” organs.

Lamarck’s complexifying force is vital to one of London’s great influences, Herbert Spencer—it’s the engine behind his dictum that things necessarily develop from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous—but never appears in accounts of social Darwinism. An account of the period emphasizing the influence of the Darwinian “struggle for existence” to the exclusion of the Lamarckian complexifying force fundamentally distorts the process Spencer and his contemporaries thought guided the development of civilization. Despite the contradictions which arise from the wedding of these two evolutionary processes, the resultant theory allows for a more accurate account of the forces believed responsible not only for social development, but also, and importantly for London, its pace.

Pace was also a key concern of sociologist James Mark Baldwin. Although Lamarck is never mentioned by name in Baldwin’s “A New Factor in Evolution,” his decision to drop “acquired characteristics” in favor of his contemporary Henry Fairfield Osborn’s “ontogenetic variations” is telling, as the process he describes concerns the preservation of traits modified by actions performed in the course of a single lifetime. The difference between his position and Lamarck’s is that Baldwini does not believe this process is strictly biological. In fact, he concludes “A New Factor” with the claim that “evolution is…not more biological than psychological.” Instead of arguing that social development is analogous to biological, Baldwin claims that the pressures motivating biological evolution also motivate social. The Baldwin effect, so called, thus outlines how individuals, by dint of their own cleverness, can alter the conditions of competition both for their offspring and the general population. Baldwin assumes that certain individuals possess what are now called “mental modules” more adaptable than those of their contemporaries. Because of the greater plasticity of their mental modules, they’re better able to recognize a good idea when they see one, and more importantly, reshape their modules in accordance with it. This plasticity was heritable and distributed evenly throughout the human race—among rich and poor, black and white, women and men. If a great leader with a genuinely great idea challenges the prevailing ideology, the people who follow that leader will have more plastic mental modules than those who do not. And since that genuinely great idea would increase the evolutionary fitness of those who followed it, the next generation of the human race would, on the whole, have more people with more plastic modules. Within the course of two generations, then, a people psychologically distinct from their forebears could be created.

In “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity,” Jack London describes how “the individual is capable of, and does perform, telic actions—that is, adjusts his acts to remote ends; a thing which society never does.” He laments the stupidity of the crowd, here functioning metonymically for society at large, which despite being composed of individuals capable of telic action, en masse behave as if such feats of foresight are impossible. Although he posits no solution to this problem—concluding, somberly, that humans “are as individually wise as [they] are collectively foolish”—he strikes one optimistic note: it is possible for “two or three individuals, or a score, [to] organize a company or corporation and collectively perform telic actions.” Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Such actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they don’t. Such leaders will accelerate the process London believes already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history…the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.”

For London, this trending evolutionary drama begins in Before Adam, in which he condenses millions of years of evolution into the life of a single ancestral hominid called Big-Tooth. Big-Tooth belongs to the Folk, the moderately advanced of the novel’s three populations. The Fire People, the most culturally advanced of the groups “were less different from [the Folk] than were [the Folk] from the Tree People. Certainly, all three kinds were related.” The difference between these peoples is not biological, but cultural; the Fire People have acquired skills the Folk and Tree People lack. Nor are the Fire People more intelligent. In accordance with the craniometric theories popular at the time, London equates crude differences in head shape and size with intelligence. When he writes that the Fire People “did not have large heads, and between them and the Folk there was very little difference in the degree of the slant of the head back from the eyes,” he indicates that whatever bodily differences these peoples possess, they have the potential to possess similarly nimble minds. After Big-Tooth comes in contact with the culturally superior Fire People, he is quick to recognize the foremost trait which makes them so: cooperation.

Although he does not institute such cooperation among the Folk or align himself with the Fire People, Big-Tooth’s recognition works within the Baldwinian model, as evidence that he possesses mental plasticity the rest of the Folk lack. That his experiences persist in the “racial memory” of contemporary humans indicates that, at some point not narrated in the novel, he was able to ingratiate himself into the camp of the Fire People. Not all of the Folk were capable of doing so: the Fire People instilled fear without wonder in his friend Lop-Ear; and Red-Eye, the walking atavism, lacked the ability to even understand how it was the (individually) weaker Fire People could overpower him and the Folk. Big-Tooth is able to integrate himself into the community of the Fire People not because he possesses the charm of Lop-Ear or the brute strength of Red-Eye, but because he is able to recognize the advantages offered by their cooperative ethos. It’s not that he’s more intelligent than Lop-Ear—in fact, Lop-Ear’s the more intelligent of the two. Intelligence, then, is not the criteria by which members of the Folk like Big-Tooth will be selected for: the ability to recognize the superiority of the cooperative ethos is. This difference is critical, because it removes the burden of human evolution from the civilizing force of advancing knowledge and places it within the bounds of London’s oft-professed socialism, thus offering one possible resolution to the infamous contradiction in his thought.

The process inaugurated in Before Adam comes to fruition in The Iron Heel, London’s answer to Edward Bellamy’s bloodless account of the transformation of the States into “The Great Trust” in Looking Backward. Instead of public opinion ripening to the notion that the revolution would consist of, quoting Bellamy, “the nation…organizing as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed [into] a monopoly in the profits and economics of which all citizens share,” London envisions an agglomeration of industrial titans operating outside state sanction until they become the state. “The Oligarchy” or “Iron Heel,” as he calls it, operates not for the benefit of mankind, but as an exaggeration of the capitalist excesses of the early twentieth century.

In his foreword, the fictional editor Anthony Meredith writes of the Iron Heel that “in the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity of history—a whim, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of today who speak with certitude of social progress.” Through Meredith, London attacks the certainty of those who preached the gospel of noninterference, a group which includes both Bellamy and Spencer. Despite Meredith’s insistence that there is an “orderly procedure of social evolution,” the existence of the Iron Heel demonstrates that while it may be necessary, it is not necessarily timely. The procedure can be retarded; when it is, the culprit identified by London is almost always atavism. In Before Adam, the atavism’s literalized in the body of Red-Eye: the rest of the Folk “were in the process of changing [their] tree-life to life on the ground. For many generations [they] had been going through this change, and [their] bodies and carriage had likewise changed. But Red-Eye had reverted to the more primitive tree-dwelling type.” He was “the great discordant element in [the] horde,” because, as his name suggests, he unthinkingly adhered to the Tennysonian notion that nature was “red in tooth and claw.” He bloodied and murdered fellow members of the Folk in competition for his wives, then bloodied and murdered the women he won. That he could do so is a testament to the fact that the Folk “were incapable of a cooperative effort strong enough to kill him or cast him out [and] of the collective action necessary to punish him.” They possessed “an impulse toward cooperation,” but they possessed no means to communicate it. When Red-Eye attempts to kill the infirm Crooked-Leg, the Folk respond angrily but individually, “vaguely thinking thoughts for which there are no thought-symbols.” As the fight continues, instead of organizing a response to Red-Eye’s murderous rampage, the Folk scream and shout until someone pounds on a log. “Unconsciously, [their] yells and exclamations yielded to this rhythm. It had a soothing effect upon [them]; and before [they] knew it, [their] rage had been forgotten; [they] were in the full swing of a hee-hee council.” These councils “splendidly illustrate the inconsecutiveness and inconsequentiality of the Folk,” but they also speak to the larger issue of the role the aesthetic can play to distract members of a community from the social injustices immediately before it. The Folk should come to the aid of Crooked-Leg, but lack the language to formulate a plan; instead they stand aside, dancing, while an atavism murders one of their number. “It was,” the narrator cynically observes, “art nascent” (183).

Obviously, the Folk require much in the way of socialization before they could be considered civilized, but to London’s mind they are “just meat,” not all that different from the revolutionaries of The Iron Heel. They possess the “impulses” of contemporary humanity; they merely lack the language to coordinate and act upon them. Their art is useless, without purpose; moreover, it actively distracts them from the vicious beating taking place before their eyes. The Fire People destroy them not because they are better physical specimens, lack language, or practice a meretricious aesthetic; they are conquered because their shortcomings prevent them from having what the Fire people have: a “wizened old hunter directing it all.” To return to Baldwin, a leader who possesses traits which provide him selective advantage creates an environment in which denizens with similarly mutable mental modules are more likely to be selected. The improvement of any group can be tied to—and accelerated by—the leadership of an individual with a highly plastic mind. The competitive advantage the Fire People have is not in the current leader, however; it results from the generations who have come before him, the mutable forbears who first decided to follow the most intelligent among their people. Atavisms like Red-Eye possessed brute strength and a proclivity to wield it without compunction, but they belong to the past. As Everhard tells a group of small grocers in The Iron Heel:

You are perishing, and you are doomed to perish utterly from the face of society. This is the fiat of evolution. It is the word of God. Combination is stronger than competition. Primitive man was a puny creature hiding in the crevices of the rocks. He combined and made war upon his carnivorous enemies. They were competitive beasts. Primitive man was a combinative beast, and because of it he rose to primacy over all the animals. And man has been achieving greater and greater combinations ever since. It is combination versus competition, a thousand centuries long struggle, in which competition has always been worsted. (85)

When Everhard’s socialist appeals fail to sway the grocers, he laughs and informs them that if they “prefer to play atavistic roles [they] are doomed to perish as all atavisms perish.” Their naïve belief in laissez-faire capitalism and the “orderly procedure of social evolution” will not, Everhard insists, lead them to the utopia Bellamy described in Looking Backward. In fact, Everhard—speaking for London—attacks Bellamy’s mechanism of social evolution, the organization of current monopolies into ever larger combinations: “Have you ever asked what will happen to you when greater combinations than even the present trusts arise? Have you ever considered where you will stand when the great trusts themselves combine into the combination of combinations—into the social, economic, and political trust.” Instead of Bellamy’s paternalistic notion of “The Great Trust,” Everhard warns that eventually “the combination of the trusts will itself be the government,” and that they will protect their atavistic interests even if it requires a second Civil War.

Playing out in The Iron Heel is a conflict central to London, given the influence of Spencer upon him: he believes that society will necessarily evolve in accordance with the Lamarckian complexifying force and socialist principles, but he fears the power of atavisms to retard that evolution. That the Iron Heel successfully stifles the coming socialism for over 700 years is meant as a warning to complacent contemporaries who believed the necessity of social evolution a compelling reason to resist more radical measures of social reform. The effect of the Iron Heel on the proletariat, London argues, will be both political disenfranchisement and the stoppage of biological evolution. For the Baldwin effect links alterations in the social environment to further evolutionary development of the human brain. Mental plasticity is a trait which could be selected for or against, so the vision of the future H.G. Wells produced in The Time Machine lingers behind the scenes of the Chicago Riots which close The Iron Heel. The proletariat may currently (circa 1906) have strength and intelligence enough to challenge the Oligarchy; but given time, that could change. The Baldwin effect accelerates development, but it need not do so to the intellectual benefit of the working classes. Conditions could warrant the selection of mental traits perfect for factory life over those best suited to the life of a political revolutionary under the Iron Heel. A quick illustration:

One of the final chapters of The Iron Heel opens with Avis Everhard describing her transformation into “Mary Holmes,” the identity she assumes after joining up with “the Frisco Reds”:

Every day I practiced for hours in burying forever the old Avis Everhard beneath the skin of another woman whom I may call my other self…It was this automatic assumption of a role that was considered imperative. One must become so adept as to deceive oneself…It was necessary for us to practice until our assumed roles became real…But the work was going on everywhere; masters in the art were developing, and a fund of tricks and expedients was being accumulated. This fund became a sort of text-book that was passed on, a part of the curriculum, as it were, of the school of Revolution.

Commenting on this passage, Meredith writes:

Disguise did become a veritable art during that period. The revolutionists maintained schools of acting in all their refuges. They scorned accessories, such as wigs and beards, false eyebrows, and such aids of the theatrical actors. The game of revolution was a game of life and death, and mere accessories were traps. Disguise had to be fundamental, intrinsic, part and parcel of one's being, second nature.

Avis describes the necessary conditions for the selection of certain mental modules over others, but Meredith describes the outcome of that evolution: a time in which “disguise” was “intrinsic, part and parcel of one’s being.” In the work of someone other than London, this may appear to be the perfection of an art; however, what begins as an art for London becomes of necessity a skill to be selected for. Those who can better follow the lessons the “masters in the art were developing” were more likely to survive than their compatriots, no matter how much stronger or more intelligent they may have been. Of particular importance here is the fact that the masters need not be directly related to their students. Their influence on the gene pool is indirect, for they merely teach their students the skills required to survive. Those who best learn those lessons do, and because the plasticity required to learn them is heritable, they pass it onto their children. Unlike the Darwinian or the conventional Lamarckian models, the Baldwinian one provides a means for the childless to impact the evolution of the species.

Comments

[Mike S]

Scott, not that it matters, but sometimes I can't tell if you're coming to science via literature or the other way around. In other words, your interest in biology and sociobiology occasionally seems to exceed your interest in a text's literariness.

Show your true colors, Kaufman! You are a biologist masquerading as a literary scholar.

[Ahistoricality]

And did peals of laughter, or knowing sidelong looks, accompany the subtle nod to your online identity?

I wouldn't presume to speak for Scott, but I think Mike S's question is fundamentally irrelevant. London was writing in a milieu in which social and biological theory were literary elements, and understanding the plotting and logic of the literature requires a fairly extensive understanding of the intellectual atmosphere.

There's an analogy, in that sense, to be made to certain genres of Science Fiction in the recent past/present, wherein social and historical theories combine with physics and astronomy, computer science, etc., to create their milieux and dynamics. Actually, H.G. Wells' Time Machine, mentioned above, fits that model, too.

[SEK]

your interest in a text's literariness

Mike, I'm writing about Jack London. There isn't any of that to be interested in.

Otherwise, Ahistoricality nails it: I can't make sense of London without the cultural stuff, and the cultural stuff was profoundly scientific at the turn of the last century.

[SEK]

(Also, no peals of laughter, only a lone chuckle.)

[John Emerson]

I probably should read Hofstadter's Social Darwinism books in order to make my dislike of his work more complete. Everything I've read of his has been tendentious, and I applaud that, but I don't like his tendency. He fit the mood of the times but was a major factor in giving us the feeble Democratic Party we have today. His books are still used to indoctrinate up and coming Democratic wonks.

Reading about American political history ca. 1880-1920 Darwin comes up all the time, and it isn't always Social Darwinists (i.e., law of the jungle free market absolutists.) Everyone was reading him. The name "Darwin" became quite popular, peaking in about 1920, and is still passed down in families, mostly in rural areas in my experience.

[John Emerson]

Hofstadter was accused of being a literary historian because he didn't do source research, and he more or less admitted it.

[Ahistoricality]

Everything I've read of his has been tendentious, and I applaud that, but I don't like his tendency.

I am so stealing this line, first chance I get.