More people should be lead to realize what social Darwinism actually is -- not what the establishment has instructed them to believe is -- particularly those who smear partisans of individual liberty, free markets, and peace as social Darwinists as though that term, unqualified, passed as a legitimate insult. Social Darwinism unqualified is a _legitimate_ idea, and it does _not_, proper, amount to an endorsement racial, ethnic, or national supremacy nor even survival of fittest as a basis for social order. Yet this is the apparent assumption of most people, and when they throw the term around as a ridicule, they really subtract a great deal from the sum total of human knowledge and intelligence, of which there is already a severe shortage. Social Darwinism is merely the obvious, immediate conclusion arising from the discovery and subsequent proof of Darwins theory of evolution (in case you werent updated, yes, evolution has been proven): if evolution is the origin of humanity, as it is indeed of all life on Earth, then it necessarily has much to say about the emergence of human civilization. Humans formed civilizations but snakes did not. Full stop. Thats it. Its why cities like New York, Paris, or Beijing are human developments, and not developments of, say, salamanders or angler fish. Unless you reject evolution, you already accept the premises of social Darwinism whether you recognize it or not. Like all subjects, there are multiple schools of thought within social Darwinism, some of which indeed have advocated national or racial supremacy and imperialism, and that subjugating groups of people is therefore justified (and therefore these schools were psuedo-scientific), but consigning social Darwinism as a whole to these philosophies is akin to saying that because Global Warming Theology, at least as presented by the left, is refuted by the most elementary references to chemistry and biology, that therefore climatology/meteorology is a worthless or fraudulent field. Because scientists were used to create the atomic bomb, that therefore makes all scientists supporters of mass murder. These are absurd conclusions which follow no string of coherent thought. Furthermore, if we must make this a political matter, the racist/nationalist/imperialist schools of thought in social Darwinism are by necessity statist, not pro-liberty or free markets -- both by definition and as a matter of historical precedent. Social Darwinists, including but not limited to eugenicists, like Josiah Strong, John Fiske, Alfred Thayer Marshal, Theodore Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger (the white supremacist who founded Planned Parenthood, an endeavor which was not entirely separate from her desire to wipe out black people), were statists, anti-free marketeers, and so forth, and therefore believed in the power of force and subjugation. But original social Darwinists, like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, were free marketeers, and asserted society operates in accordance with survival of the fittest _goods and services_, NOT persons, when they live in peace and liberty. Statism, the prime engine of compulsion and force, results in social regression because the few profit at the expense of the many. _Dont_ throw a term around when you have not even acquainted yourself with its meaning.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 01:37:10 +0000
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