REPORT ON HERBERT SPENCER

BY:

Ian AltunaPamela Carbonell

Joy IglesiaChase Castano

Sae CipriasoLeo Villar

Biography

Born in Derby, England on April 27, 1820 at the height of British Industrialism

Son of William George Spencer

A sickly child

Among his illnesses are chronic insomnia and nervous breakdown

He could only work a few hours a day, and used fairly substantial amounts of opium

British Industrialism

He experienced a strange sensation in his head which he called "the mischief", and was known for eccentricities like the wearing of ear-plugs to avoid over-excitement, especially when he could not hold his ground in an argument.

Educated at home in mathematics, natural science, history and English, among some other languages like Latin

Worked as a Civil Engineer at age 16 during the railway boom of the late 1830’s

Wrote during his free time

This vocation of his took up ten years of his life, and imbued him with a healthy optimism for life and society

Served as a sub-editor on the free trade journal The Economist

An exampleof The

Economist magazine

• Interacted with famous people like Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall

• Spencer published numerous articles in the radical press of his time, like The Leader, The Fortnightly and The Westminster Review, largely concerning the government, pushing for limiting its role as a mediator in society

• He advocated the abolishment of Poor Laws, national education and a central church

• He wanted the lifting of all restrictions on commerce and factory legislation.

• Met his assistant Marian Evans across the street from where he worked

• They developed a very close friendship, and talked of marriage but never actually married. Even so, they remained intimate companions up till her death.

Marian Evans

• His theory of evolution actually preceded Charles Darwin's, when he wrote The Developmental Hypothesis in 1852

• His theory was not taken into serious consideration largely because of a lack of an effective theoretical system for natural selection

• He is the first to popularize the term “Evolution”

• His evolutionary stance led to his most famous idea, “Social Darwinism.“

• He saw evolution as the change from a homogeneous condition that was innately unstable, to a heterogenous and stable one.

• He highlighted four main concepts: Growth, Differentiation, Integration and Adaptation,

• Spencer's last years were characterized by a collapse of his initial optimism, replaced instead by a pessimism regarding the future of mankind.

• He died in 1903, and is buried at High Gate Cemetery near George Eliot and Karl Marx.

Contributions to Societal Development

• Herbert Spencer traced the development of human life/organ from its lowest recognizable form up to human beings.

• He further says that as the mind controls entire body and organs, same way the society (through its rules), controls all organs. This statement implies that society in general has the power to control.

• Spencer thought of evolution as involving much more than biology. For him, evolution pervaded the inorganic as well as the organic realm. His voluminous work involved the study of: superorganic evolution = social evolution & superorganic products = cultural evolution

The Evolution of Society

• He thinks that sociology should not influence

social reform. He thinks that the evolution of society should be left to improve on its own. He called this principle "the survival of the fittest." He believes that when the less capable people die out, society improves over time.

• Spencer's work had a political as well as a scientific dimension. Unfortunately, he regarded the "survival of the fittest" as a sort of guide for governmental policy, which often led him to oppose programs to assist the poor. His skepticism about the ability of government to do more good than harm--not only concerning poverty but quite generally--has made him an important inspiration of what today is called libertarianism.

• Spencer's greatest contribution perhaps was to encourage people to try thinking of society and culture, no less than stones and pinecones, as belonging to the natural world. "Civilisation," he declared, "is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.

Social Darwinism

• Social Darwinism is a belief, popular in the late Victorian era in England, America, and elsewhere, which states that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die.

• The theory was chiefly expounded by Herbert Spencer, whose ethical philosophies always held an elitist view and received a boost from the application of Darwinian ideas such as adaptation and natural selection.

Implications

• The concept of adaptation allowed him to claim that the rich and powerful were better adapted to the social and economic climate of the time, and the concept of natural selection allowed him to argue that it was natural, normal, and proper for the strong to thrive at the expense of the weak. After all, he claimed, that is exactly what goes on in nature every day.

• However, Spencer did not just present his theories as placing humans on a parallel with nature. Not only was survival of the fittest natural, but it was also morally correct. Indeed, some extreme Social Darwinists argued that it was morally incorrect to assist those weaker than oneself, since that would be promoting the survival and possible reproduction of someone who was fundamentally unfit.

Applications of Social Darwinism

• It provided a justification for the more exploitative forms of capitalism in which workers were paid sometimes pennies a day for long hours of backbreaking labor. Social Darwinism also justified big business' refusal to acknowledge labor unions and similar organizations, and implied that the rich need not donate money to the poor or less fortunate, since such people were less fit anyway.

• In its most extreme forms, Social Darwinism has been used to justify eugenics programs aimed at weeding "undesirable" genes from the population; such programs were sometimes accompanied by sterilization laws directed against "unfit" individuals. The American eugenics movement was relatively popular between about 1910-1930, during which 24 states passed sterilization laws and Congress passed a law restricting immigration from certain areas deemed to be unfit. Social Darwinist ideas, though in different forms, were also applied by the Nazi party in Germany to justify their eugenics programs.

(Some) Positive results of Social Darwinism

• Though its moral basis is now generally opposed, Social Darwinism did have some favorable effects. Belief in Social Darwinism tended to discourage wanton handouts to the poor, favoring instead providing resources for the fittest of all walks of life to use, or choosing specific, genuinely deserving people as recipients of help and support. Some major capitalists, such as Andrew Carnegie, combined philanthropy with Social Darwinism; he used his vast fortune to set up hundreds of libraries and other public institutions, including a university, for the benefit of those who would choose to avail themselves of such resources. He opposed direct and indiscriminate handouts to the poor because he felt that this favored the undeserving and the deserving person equally.

Problems with Social Darwinism

• Social Darwinism's philosophical problems are rather daunting, and fatal to it as a basic theory (though some have applied similar ideas). First, it makes the faulty assumption that what is natural is equivalent to what is morally correct. In other words, it falls prey to the belief that just because something takes place in nature, it must be a moral paradigm for humans to follow.

• This problem in Social Darwinist thinking stems from the fact that the theory falls into the "naturalistic fallacy", which consists of trying to derive an ought statement from an is statement. For example, the fact that you stubbed your toe this morning does not logically imply that you ought to have stubbed your toe!!

• The same argument applies to the Social Darwinists' attempt to extend natural processes into human social structures. This is a common problem in philosophy, and it is commonly stated that it is absolutely impossible to derive ought from is (though this is still sometimes disputed); at the very least, it is impossible to do it so simply and directly as the Social Darwinists did.

Sources• http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/eh4.shtml• Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-

1945: Nature As Model and Nature As Threat by Mike Hawkins

• Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory by Peter Dickens

• Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter