What Darwin Didn't Mean

Image Gallery Adam Niklewicz / www.illustratorusa.com

Nice guys finish last. Survival of the fittest. Eat or be eaten. For Americans, such catchphrases strike familiar chords. Stemming from an unwieldy synthesis of social Darwinism and (until recently) trendy Chicago School economics, this ethos claims that mercilessly competitive conditions weed out the weak while preserving and enhancing the strongest members of an institution, a market, or a civilization. Roughness and ruthlessness render us more competitive, thicker-skinned, and simply better than the rest of the pack.

When this belief system bleeds over into the realm of political discourse, it transmogrifies into a paradoxical badge of honor, a disposition toward sink-or-swim hard-heartedness. “The public be damned!” William H. Vanderbilt famously told a reporter who asked the 19th-century tycoon about social responsibility. His sentiments can still be heard today, couched in PR-friendly euphemisms or offered as hearty retorts to the soft communitarianism of Scandinavia, Continental Europe, and Canada.

Of course, there have been dissenting voices. Progressive leaders in charge of the New Deal exemplified this spirit in the early 20th century. But dissenters have rarely questioned the premise of social Darwinism itself.

Even in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, opposition to the “cachet of the cutthroat” is generally confined to ethical qualms about the suffering and personal cost imposed on hard-pressed individuals and families—deploring the scale of the misery, rather than addressing its roots.

Across the ideological spectrum, prevailing wisdom holds that institutionalized harshness generates a more productive, adaptive, and wealthy society, with “liberalism” left to debate merely whether the resulting human collateral damage is an acceptable cost of doing business. Although moral objections are clearly relevant, the most devastating counterargument to the cachet of the cutthroat is that it is simply wrong.

If there is any lesson to be gleaned from the churn of society’s various “isms,” it is that both nature and human communities are too complex to reduce to a single, linear theory. So it is with the curious history of social Darwinism.

The work of the 19th-century naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace led to a coherent theory of evolution by natural selection, culminating in Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. Neither cast his work as a recommendation for the complex, fast-changing domain of human societies, populated by intelligent members whose conduct was guided by ethical codes.