Refers to a thoroughly misguided and scientifically discredited ideology, that drew succor from the ideology of the Other, popular in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—propounded by people like Francis Galton,[1] Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and William Graham Sumner—that viewed human societies through the lens of the concept of “natural selection” that Charles Darwin had proposed as part of his theory of evolution and pithily summarized by Spencer with the oft quoted line: “survival of the fittest.” In sum, the social Darwinists believed that life was akin to a crapshoot and only those (individuals, societies, nations, races, etc.) who possessed, supposedly, “superior” genes were deservedly best suited to survive it; thereby ensuring a continuous evolutionary “purification” process which in turn would lead to societal “self-improvement.” To varying degrees (depending upon how fervent they were about their ideology), such desirable human qualities as charitableness, kindness, love, generosity, altruism, benevolence, righteousness, justness, fairness, and so on were viewed, either explicitly or subtextually, as weaknesses that interfered with the “natural law” of the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, as one can guess, proved to be of great help in providing the ideological justification for such evil projects and movements as colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, fascism, racism, and so on. In the twentieth century, social Darwinism’s vilest achievement was, of course, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It is important to note that social Darwinism in its slightly milder form continues to hold sway today, especially on the right (e.g. among political conservatives and advocates of laissez-faire capitalism). (See also Essentialism, Other/Otherness, Stereotype.)
[1]. Incidentally, Galton was the first to coin the term eugenics when he proposed the despicable fallacy of “improving” societies by selective breeding of human beings. As he wrote: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viviculture, which I once ventured to use.” (Galton, Francis. Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT: 2004 [1907] p. 17, footnote 1.)