Beside Social
Darwinism, religion, and the argument by design, issues of economic
ideology becloud the debate over Darwinism. Many who would consider
themselves secularists seem convinced belief in Darwinian theory is
connected to their economic viewpoints. But it isn't true. Adam
Smith, much misunderstood, becomes an imaginary fixation of theorists, and
his form of thinking starts to pervade social thought very early, often in
concealed form, as in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. Kant, by the skin of
his teeth, bestrides the confusion. Marx is one of the first observers of
this phenomenon. Smith is still in the age of the struggle for economic
freedoms, in the halo of yankee doodle liberty, another generation starts
to react to the consequences of a new world emerging.
In
general, the field is so vitiated by addlepated hybrids of economic
sociology and the shotgun marriage of the views of Adam Smith and Darwin
that the credibility of the subject has been lost. And the world of Social
Darwinism has come and gone, perhaps not gone yet at all. One gets the
suspicion social thinking selected out of all the emergent evolutionism of
the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century the one individual and
version that suited its ideological purposes. For the crystallization of
Darwinism is anomalous. An old charge, made over and over, to little
avail. In the famous words of Karl Marx, the ruling ideas are the ideas of
the Bourgeoisie.
Issues of
ideology are easily thrown about and often haunt the accuser as much as
the accused, but the effect is basic, amidst the endless distracting
denial. We are trained to forget. Now a leftist is instantly accused of
ideology. That would surprise an earlier world. But the question of
ideology is intrinsic.
The game is an old
one. Start with Malthus and the point is clear, a science of population is
founded by a rank reactionary impulse, and the debate over this, amidst
the Ricardian extension of Adam Smith, takes up a whole generation, as the
birth of social theory is stirred with an almost laughable and primitive
mixture of conservative ideology and radical objections, as the very idea
of evolution, with its leftist cast, is conservatized and housetrained for
economic purposes. Karl Marx, and his generation, are the
first to grapple with the depth of the confusion created by the new
economism, and he does so without rejecting the valid insights of these
new sciences. One of the first creators of economic models, he follows
Ricardo. Debunking Malthus is itself open to challenge and a bit old hat,
but we can extract the point of his thinking, for the importance that it
has without forgetting this ominous birth that precedes a similar effect
in Darwinism, with its latest replay of this stinkpot mudslinging in the
sociobiology scrapes. Into this atmosphere comes Darwin's theory, not so
unsophisticated as this, but still with this odor of the response and
conservative reaction to a period of revolution. In that context,
Larmarck's (and Lamarck was unmentionably radical), not Darwin's, theory
of evolution is rewritten by Darwin with an incompletely clear or proven
mechanism of natural selection that is theory's gift from heaven to a
classical liberal. We can rest our case just there.
It is worth
remembering that Smith was quite subtle, as a packager of gestating
capitalist observations stretching back a century and more to William
Petty or Hobbes, and also a sophisticated moralist, and is not really a
scientific theorist at all, but a man recommending a policy, a consultant.
Not Adam Smith, but the fantastic version of the man that animates market
thinking, is the problem, for it is routinely used to justify extreme
versions of economic depradation as historically inevitable. Smith never
would have condoned much of this. And the economic systems coming into
existence show also a strong character of being 'rigged in the favor' of
certain parties to the action, even as they create an unprecedented new
source of social dynamism. Conservative libertarian views make us forget
that the question is not the freedom of the market, but the balance of
freedoms in both the State and civil society. The individual against the
State is one freedom, the individual within the State is another freedom.
Thus, whatever
the case, the claim on 'laws of a science of economy' are at the very
least ambiguous, since they are open to change by fiat, voiding the 'newtonian
law' analysis of so much social scientism. We can do to this what Karl
Popper did with the 'historicisms' of the left, supposedly. Karl Polanyi's
The Great Transformation makes this point beautifully clear, the market
order of the nineteenth century is in part a unique system imposed against
resistance. The creation of the great nineteenth century free market
systems were experiments, not just economic inevitabilities, and by his
reckoning the source of immeasurable disaster. We never compute the
possible relation of this imposed economism, and, for example, its
consequences seen in the The First World War.
This
interaction of theorist of history with the present bedevils all attempts
to apply science as universal generalization to history and is the source
of instant ideology, which does a brisk business indeed, still in our own
day. Whatever the merits of Smith's views, they are not science. The
Smith icon is someone else, a phantom stalking the economy.
In general, Smith is
not telling us how economies evolve, as as much how they should be
arranged in his view, in the context of mercantilism and the collision
throughout history of the state and its regulation of markets. Once we set
the conditions they evolve one way, as opposed to another. The myth that
markets are an omniscient talisman is false by any standard of evidence.
It took a generation of heroic state regulators and factory inspectors to
stamp out child labor of the worst sort, in England. These are themselves
ideological assertions, but in the context of the rise of evolution this
economic backdrop, in all its perspectives, is important to remember. For
Darwin was much the man of his time.
Maybe Smith is
right, or not, but this is a value calculation in itself, and cannot be
justified beyond its effects, nor taken as an excuse to preempt changing
previous assumptions. A similar confusion occurs in Social Darwinism. What
the theory says, as to how things happen, is reapplied to statements about
how they should happen. We can debate those questions, but we must be wary
at the point where thought becomes hypnotized, 'this is a science, and
therefore, this is the way it must be'. The influence on
evolutionary thinking to come, confusing even leftist critics and Marxist
socialists, is one of the basic facts of modernism, as we know. Here
Malthus is especially transparent, and no doubt often misunderstood by
being villainized. But in the time of Revolution men are realizing their
poverty is a tranformable condition, and Malthus appears with a thesis to
show that poverty is inevitable.
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There are any
number of good books on Malthus, as the founder of demography, but one
might consider an old-fashioned leftish salvo and history of the part
left out of most accounts, Hungry Generations, The
Nineteenth-Century Case Against Malthusianism, Harold Boner, King's
Crown Press, New York, 1955
We can challenge
Darwinism, we can also challenge the economic interpretations of history
that appear at this point. The critique of Marx has been so savaged by
wild dogs, that we forget how obvious it is: men, to be free, must be
masters of, and not mastered by their economic environment. The frequent
association of evolution and the dynamic of 'free markets' is both
highly questionable and an apparently incurable theoretical addiction. No
model has ever really shown a direct connection, which doesn't mean there
isn't one. And history is not the evolution of free markets, or the
outcome of competition It is not! They are not the same thing. And species
don't appear the same way markets self-organize. Balderdash. Where's
the proof? A deep strain, in the legacy of Adam Smith, of libertarian
economics is often grafted onto the legacy of Darwin in a peculiar mix
that is very attractive to many evolutionary adherents.
These questions of
ideology pervade all attempts at social theory arising in the nineteenth
century. Now the inventors of this critique are themselves pegged as
ideologists. This issue of ideology appears at the beginning of
macroeconomics, in case one should wonder that bias might be present in an
advanced mathematical treatment of a subject. In The Age of the
Economist, Daniel Fusfeld, notes "The rise of socialism and its
demand for social justice forced the supporters of the existing order to
raise their defenses. A theoretical refutation was also needed, because
Marx's critique of capitalism was based on the assumptions of classical
economics itself--on the labor theory of value and the theory of capital
accumulation. He used the weapons of the dominant ideology to attack the
very system those weapons defended." Suddenly the labor theory of
value is pinned on Marx, who gets it from Smith, and the socialists are on
the theoretical defensive. The next generation's complex mathematical
models of economy, dressed up in calculus, are not really sciences, and
yet serve their purpose. Doesn't all this scientific mathematics show
scientific objectivity? Can higher mathematics blow in the wind of social
ideology? We can leave it to the reader to find a book on calculus, study
his way to the subject, and decide for himself. The point is that two
central theories that define modern society are easily shown to be
flawed, ideological. That should buttress the courage of those forced to
confront these establishments of scientific expertise, including those
with such expertise. You are on your own. The experts aren't of any
help.
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Any study of
evolution is well-accompanied by the study of the subtle Adam Smith,
and the history of economic theory, the history of liberalism, the
course of the idea of progress, the nineteenth century relation to the
Enlightenment, to say nothing of the history of 'evolutionism',
and the general tenor of nineteenth century social beliefs. Cf. R.
Ekelund & el., A History of Economic Theory and Method (NY:
MacGraw-Hill,1990), A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western
Liberalism (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
For a critique of mathematical hi-tech fantasies, the
application of the physics metaphor to economics, cf. Philip Mirowski,
Against Mechanism (Totowa:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).
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For Social
Darwinism, cf. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American
Thought (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1945), Robert
Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Cf.
Thought (Philadelphia: Temple, 1979), Edward Caudill, Darwinian
Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: Univ. of
Tennessee, 1997), John Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View,
(Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1981), Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical
Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985).
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Marx on
Darwin is the source of a number of myths. Terence Ball in Reappraising
Political Theory, Chapter 10, "Reapprasing Marx and
Darwin" summarizes the research finding little evidence for the
connection between Marx and Darwin, the issue of the famous letters.
Darwin is often defended from Social
Darwinism. The question is mostly sawdust, hopeless.
A new biography
of Darwin, Darwin, Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (with a
companion volume by the co-author Adrian Desmond, Huxley, From Devil's
Disciple to Evolution's High Priest), gives a closer picture of the
man behind the theory.
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'Social
Darwinism is often taken to be something extraneous, and ugly
concretion to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing
Darwin's image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free
trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality, were
written into the equation from the start--'Darwinism' was always
intended to explain human society. p. xxi
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How Many People Can the Earth Support, by Joel
Cohen, Norton, 1995, contains a good account of the 'science' appearing
from Malthus and his time.
It is no secret that Darwin's theory of evolution has
been exploited over and over again to justify various political and
economic ideologies and interests. Social Darwinism has been
examined, debated, and analyzed for over a hundred years. In virtually all
discussions of Social Darwinism there is an underlying assumption that the
theory itself is a disinterested, objective, impartial recording of
nature's operating design, untainted by social context and cultural bias.
it is assumed that what Darwin discovered is a law of nature and that
society then exploited it for political ends. A new generation of
scholars, however, is beginning to question the theory itself, suggesting
that in its very conception it might have been as socially biased as the
ends to which it was later used.
J. Rifkin, Algeny
