A Tale of Two Worksites

Natural History, Oct, 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould

Spencer's article then lists the supposed points of valid comparison, including such far-fetched analogies as the historical origin of a middle class to the development in complex animals of the mesoderm, or third body layer, between the original ectoderm and endoderm; the likening of the ectoderm itself to the upper classes, for sensory organs that direct an animal arise in the ectoderm, while organs of production for such activities as digesting food emerge from the endoderm, or lower layer; the comparison of blood and money; the parallel courses of nerve and blood vessels in higher animals with the side-by-side construction of railways and telegraph wires; and, finally, in a comparison that even Spencer regarded as forced, the likening of a primitive, all-powerful monarchy with a simple brain, and an advanced parliamentary system with a complex brain composed of several lobes. Spencer wrote: "Strange as this assertion will be thought, our Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy, functions that are in sundry respects comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal."

The analogies were surely forced, but the social intent could not have been clearer: a stable society requires that an roles be filled and well executed -- and government must not interfere with a natural process of sorting out and allocation of appropriate rewards. A humble worker must toil and may remain forever poor, but the industrious poor, as an organ of the social body, must always be with us:

Let the factory hands be put on short time,

and immediately the colonial produce

markets of London and Liverpool are

depressed. The shopkeeper is busy or

otherwise, according to the amount of the

wheat crop. And a potato-blight may ruin

dealers consols. ... This union of many

men into one community -- this increasing

mutual dependence of units which were

originally independent -- this gradual

segregation of citizens into separate bodies

with reciprocally-subservient functions -- this

formation of a whole consisting of unlike

parts -- this growth of an organism, of

which one portion cannot be injured

without the rest feeling it -- may all be

generalized under the law of individuation.

Social Darwinism grew into a major movement, with political, academic, and journalistic advocates for a wide array of particular causes. But as historian Richard Hofstadter stated in the most famous book ever written on this subject -- social Danwinism in America Thought, first published in 1944, in press ever since, and still full of insight despite some inevitable archaicisms -- the primary impact of this doctrine lay in its buttressing of conservative political philosophies, particularly through the central, and highly effective, argument against state support of social services and governmental regulation of industry and housing:

One might, like William Graham

Sumner, take a pessimistic view of the

import of Darwinism, and conclude that

Darwinism could serve only to cause men

to face up to the inherent hardship of the