Darwin's Gift To Mankind (4)

“Survival of the Fittest”—when the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, he had very much in mind the CEO (the fittest) and the (less fit) employees under him. The notion that the captain (CEO) had so much responsibility for the ship that he might go down with it went out the window. Now, perhaps, only the captain was FIT to survive—thus the golden parachute at the top.
Some folk still express outrage at million dollar bonuses at companies dependent on tax-payer money just to go on breathing. President Obama says he’s appalled. They don’t fully understand the true nature of the Darwinian world we live in. The fit get bonuses; the unfit get pink slips.
Spencer, a British philosopher, wrote many books that preached his doctrine. He called it Social Darwinism. We can call Spencer, after Nietzsche, Marx and Huxley, the fourth great apostle of Darwinism. In the United States his ideas were taken up by Yale Professor William Graham Sumner.
Sumner and his (Spencer’s) ideas were well received by the new class of American plutocrats—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Leland Stanford, and we could go on. These were men who had accumulated incalculable fortunes while the thousand who worked for them, did so six days a week at a dollar a day.
(Women worked for $1.75 a week. Children, as young as eight, worked for as much as $1.25 a week.) There were no benefits, no unemployment checks, no insurance—if your twelve and fourteen hour days left you so exhausted that you cut off your hand, you and your family were on your own. Needless to say no one wasted money on guards for the machinery.
Union recruiters were repelled with gunfire and, where needed, United States troops joined in. Millions of poor European immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland and the Balkans were recruited to guarantee that an excess of labor kept wages low. (They called it “The Iron Law of Wages.)
What teensy pricklings of conscience the incredibly rich owners may have felt were nicely assuaged by Sumner’s assurance that a new morality had evolved, that the rich need feel no guilt—they were the “ubermensch”, the most fit of all in a Darwinian world.
It hardly needs saying that when Sumner lectured, the halls were filled with the rich and the wannabe rich. Here was moral reassurance (the new morality) that whatever they did to get more wealth could be justified under Darwin’s theory of the development of man.
The ravaged, half sick and dispirited workers were, after all, not as fit as the men whose cunning and wisdom had led them to huge fortunes. It was nature’s law, nature’s immutable law. (It is interesting to note that these laissez-faire capitalists were the first to line up for government aid. Government money built railroads and created U.S.Steel. It’s just that government was not supposed to regulate anything! Does this sound familiar?)
Senators were elected by poorly paid state legislatures. It was easy for the very wealthy to bribe a majority of a legislature to elect senators sympathetic to the rich. Rockefeller might own the legislature in this state; Carnegie of that state. They cooperated in making sure captive senators behaved.
(How come do you think the “Progressives” passed the Seventeenth Amendment, calling for the direct election of senators in 1913? Pet senators were a little much even for Darwinians to accept.)
We should just quote a few lines from Herbert Spencer—on “The Principles of Biology”, volumes one and two, published by 1867, seven years after the Oxford Debate. “It cannot but happen that those individuals whose functions are most out of equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces [a fancy way to say those who aren’t fully evolved, fit, in other words], will be those to die … .
“But this survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest. …” He adds that, “With a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior.” The latter statement is found in chapter XIII of volume two: “Human Population in the Future”.
Could Adolph Hitler have said it better?
In a creatorless world, with no imposed morality from an external source like a deity, we must live with whatever new morality has evolved to fit our present situation. The executives at AIG and several other banks and corporations were acting according to the best principles of the new morality laid down by men like Darwin, Spencer and Sumner.
How can we fault them for adhering to the moral and business principles implicitly taught in all of our schools? The church, which once might have challenged this cruel new morality, has lost its credibility in speaking to matters scientific—and even social. No one listens if it does.
Christians picked the wrong fields to fight on at Oxford. The Darwinians—“Survival of the Fittest” types—won. (Christians handed them their victory.) I’m sure the men who took the bonuses at AIG are both puzzled and disdainful of the outcry of the unfit beneath them.
There are many folk in our society today that fervently wish to rid themselves of the last vestiges of restrictive Christian morality. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for.