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Social Darwinism - SPC 18-3 · Saberian History Lectures

• 0:00
  So now we're going to talk about 1920s in many ways is an abrupt and decisive shift in the United States culturally, economically, and these cultural and economic shifts translate, albeit later down the road, political change.
• 0:19
  So culturally you have more Americans living in the cities, culturally you have the end of the frontier, culturally you now have, since there's nowhere else to go, people have to interact with each other.
• 0:31
  And so you have conflict between high and low culture being played out in the temperance movement that's trying to reduce the amount of drinking going on versus the low brow culture which they live in the saloons.
• 0:43
  When you're not in the factory, you're in the saloon. The saloon is where you eat, the saloon is where you drink, the saloon is where you fortify your social connections, both of the platonic and the erotic varieties, as you'll read about in the text.
• 0:59
  Now, into that you also have changes in the intellectual culture. And so one of the things that the book talks about, and it kind of does it without a large degree of context, because again you still have to go back to the lecture I did on American religious practice going into the second grade awakening and really the first.
• 1:23
  And if I'm reading the book in 1302, I haven't necessarily heard that lecture, feel free to listen to it on podcast, yes shameless shill, I know.
• 1:32
  So here's the thing I've got going on. So I've got Darwin, but before I get to Darwin, well actually no, I'm going to get to Darwin and then I'm going to backwards engineering. Okay, Darwin, what does he do?
• 1:47
  He writes a book in 1859 called The Origin of the Species. Now did y'all talk about him in bio class? What did he do? What drew him to the idea of writing this book? What was he observing?
• 2:05
  Say it again. He went to the Galapagos Islands and he looked at the variety of finches. Finches are small birds and the different beak shapes of the birds and he imputed that they might have had a common ancestor and that they adapted each to their own way to get the most amount of food to survive.
• 2:28
  Okay. The ship he's riding on is the Beagle, that's not that interesting, it might be in the text, it might be on the test as sort of a multiple choice question. But what's interesting is he's riding in 1859.
• 2:45
  And he's gathering his evidence by what means? Naturalistic observation. Is he actually experimenting on the finches? Is he actually observing the evolutionary process? No.
• 3:05
  And in very many ways, and I always, and you know, could he definitively say science proves evolution? Not at his point.
• 3:17
  Because he's basing it on naturalistic observation and he is supposing, he is hypothesizing that there would be selection events and that through adaptation over successive generations you have this variety of species.
• 3:35
  Now what's interesting is there is a vast and gross difference between the evolution as taught in modern times and the idea of natural selection and the origin of the species as written by Darwin.
• 3:50
  Darwin himself was trained, his early training was religious in nature and he was buried in a church and in the original origin of the species he sought to explain the different varieties of animals in God's creation.
• 4:09
  Why do I phrase it exactly that way? Different, the variety of species in God's creation. If he uses the word variety of species in God's creation, what is he still maintaining? That God created the world.
• 4:24
  This is not a person who he himself did not seek to overthrow the existing religious order. Does that make sense?
• 4:31
  Now, also kind of going back to Bio 1. Does he pretend to, is Darwin the one who posits the idea that we evolved from lizards or amoebas?
• 4:43
  No.
• 4:44
  No. His is very specific explaining varieties within species, not varieties within genuses, not varieties within phyla, not varieties within kingdoms.
• 4:55
  So Darwin himself is not going to take us all the way back to the amoeba. You get what I'm saying?
• 5:01
  There are others who posit the idea that humans evolved from primates, but again he is just speaking to the varieties of things in the species.
• 5:10
  Now, what's interesting about it is, and this is sort of a confluence with the deistic philosophy that sort of God is a clock maker and once you set the clock in motion it does what it's going to do.
• 5:24
  What is the implication if you have a well-ordered universe that obeys all of its laws all the time?
• 5:29
  Do you actually need a manipulative God that you pray to?
• 5:32
  No.
• 5:33
  No. And so this then takes even that step even further.
• 5:38
  Okay, if creatures evolved from one another then what of the creation myth did God actually create the world in seven days?
• 5:50
  Well, six. If you have to take millions and millions of years. And this was a bit of a cultural shock.
• 5:56
  Now the other thing I want to talk to you about is, it was a cultural shock, but it wasn't.
• 6:03
  And what I mean by that is, in America, but even in Christianity in the world, you would often had two schools of religious doctrine.
• 6:15
  The first is what we would call religious fundamentalism, and the second is what I would call interpretism.
• 6:29
  Now I call it interpretism, someone else might have a better word for it.
• 6:32
  Are there religious denominations that rely on scriptural interpretation of experts?
• 6:41
  Yes. Name one denomination in the modern parlance that relies heavily on the scriptural interpretation of experts.
• 6:52
  The Catholic Church. They have a bureaucratic hierarchy, and so Catholicism is an interpretationist religion.
• 7:04
  They are not, okay, you do not see, so let me give you an example.
• 7:12
  In the book of Leviticus, if you are a devout Jew, you are not supposed to cut the sides of your head.
• 7:23
  Do Catholics have the locks the way the Amish do? No.
• 7:28
  Because they interpreted the scripture to say that does not apply anymore.
• 7:34
  So that is an example. Or other permutations, differences between Judaism and Christianity.
• 7:42
  Even varying interpretations on, oh, there was a whole big, if you actually took all the different interpretations and commentaries,
• 7:50
  and finally the consensus of the mainline churches on reading of the book of Revelations. It really is quite fun.
• 7:58
  So you have Catholicism, Anglicanism to a degree, they come from an interpretationist tradition.
• 8:14
  What is fundamentalism? Taking the Holy Scripture literally.
• 8:24
  Are there religious denominations that literally have as their credo that God created the earth in six days? Yes.
• 8:32
  Name one. Baptists. Seventh-day Adventists. They were fun. Actually, we are going to get to those people.
• 8:46
  Well, not today, but they are fun. Guy thought that the Second Coming was coming, then the Second Coming did not happen,
• 8:54
  and it became a religious denomination. They are a thing. We will put the SDAs up there.
• 9:02
  And so to say that this was a shock and say, oh my God, the world is older than seven days, it isn't.
• 9:10
  It is a shock to the devotees of biblical fundamentalism, which are many, but not universal.
• 9:20
  Also, kind of interesting, who else relies heavily on biblical interpretation and immigrated from Eastern Europe?
• 9:28
  Orthodox.
• 9:36
  In other words, these churches that have a defined hierarchy typically allowed you to defer to, again, people of education.
• 9:44
  And one of the things that is really quite fun, if you read into some of the major doctrines of these churches,
• 9:50
  they are incorporating the Bible, Aristotle, St. Augustine. There is a lot of interpretation going on,
• 9:56
  separate and apart from the biblical text.
• 10:02
  And so to those people, the idea of, oh, okay, it was a little bit longer than six days.
• 10:12
  What would an interpretationist view the Six Day Creation story as?
• 10:18
  A metaphor, an allegory, yes. And so to people of an interpretationist tradition,
• 10:24
  this idea of evolution of species is not a direct affront to their religious conviction or to their religious beliefs.
• 10:32
  However, if you are a biblical literalist, what do you got? You have a problem, don't you?
• 10:40
  And that's a cultural shock. And so you have, and I'm going to get more into this,
• 10:46
  the question of whether they should teach evolution to children.
• 10:52
  At all. You get the idea.
• 10:56
  Now, I will get to that because here's the thing that's kind of interesting.
• 11:00
  And I say this with some degree of conviction.
• 11:04
  The original framers of the Constitution would not have seen this as a problem because whose job is it to educate children in the 18th century?
• 11:14
  The family and to a lesser extent, the religious establishment.
• 11:18
  Whereas in the 19th and into the 20th century, you have the state educating children and now all of a sudden,
• 11:25
  what the state believes matters because what is the state doing if the state's educating the children?
• 11:31
  On the state's belief.
• 11:35
  I know that kind of sounds creepy and I say that to people who are in a state public school.
• 11:47
  I was going to say...
• 11:54
  No, but I mean you get what I'm saying.
• 11:58
  Now, social Darwinism is the next logical extension of it.
• 12:02
  Now, here's the thing. Social Darwinism takes Darwin's idea of natural selection and starts applying it to humans.
• 12:10
  Now, Herbert Spencer is one of the key proponents of it.
• 12:13
  Now, again, Herbert Spencer is from England.
• 12:17
  Did you find the person?
• 12:22
  Social Darwinism.
• 12:23
  Now, here's the thing.
• 12:27
  So, the idea of social Darwinism is that the wealthy have adapted
• 12:36
  and the impoverished haven't.
• 12:41
  Now, I say this to you all with some degree of irony.
• 12:46
  Now, here's the thing that most people don't appreciate.
• 12:49
  In the 19th century, is there reliable birth control?
• 12:53
  No.
• 12:54
  What does that tell you about the breeding rates of the rich and the poor?
• 12:59
  Would they be more close or would they be more distant?
• 13:03
  Distant.
• 13:04
  That's y'all's life.
• 13:05
  More close.
• 13:06
  Close.
• 13:08
  Here's the thing.
• 13:10
  Typically, people of means versus people without means typically experience pregnancy events at comparable rates.
• 13:18
  Except, if you're poor and malnourished, what happens to you?
• 13:24
  You are more likely to miscarry.
• 13:28
  And even if you have children, what is also more likely to happen to them?
• 13:35
  Not necessarily death by starvation, but death by disease.
• 13:42
  Because, again, malnourished people are not healthy people,
• 13:45
  healthy people are not able to combat the diseases, especially in the cesspool-ridden cities.
• 13:49
  And so one of the things about social Darwinism is it kind of is a selection event.
• 13:54
  Poverty is.
• 13:55
  But poverty is a selection event.
• 13:58
  Now, the other thing that most of you don't appreciate is, okay, guys, before modern food supplementation.
• 14:05
  Actually, wait, wait.
• 14:08
  Oh, none of you have any snack food.
• 14:10
  That's actually quite horrible.
• 14:11
  All right, give me.
• 14:13
  That's not what I want.
• 14:17
  And for those of you who have had me for other classes, you know where I'm going with this one.
• 14:23
  Nope.
• 14:26
  Nope.
• 14:28
  Nope.
• 14:35
  Okay, let's see.
• 14:37
  Ingredients, ingredients.
• 14:39
  Okay, explain to me why your M&Ms have iron.
• 14:50
  Why did your vitamin Cs?
• 14:52
  Yes, there's milk in milk chocolate, but no, 4% of your daily serving of calcium.
• 14:57
  That's not because it has to be in there.
• 14:59
  That's because we have been putting additives in food since the 1950s.
• 15:06
  Now, if I can go back to something I talked to you about in 1301, why does iron matter?
• 15:14
  Anemia.
• 15:17
  If you are iron deficient, you are anemic, yes?
• 15:20
  If you are calcium deficient, you are osteoporitic.
• 15:23
  If you are deficient in vitamin C, you have scurvy.
• 15:26
  If you are deficient in thiamine, you catch a really gnarly disease called barberry.
• 15:30
  All of these are nutritional deficiencies that you have not seen even in America's current impoverished population.
• 15:39
  Because even people in the food deserts, even people who live with junk food,
• 15:46
  have enough of these nutrients put in their food by supplementation to avoid massive outbreaks of these nutritionally related diseases.
• 15:55
  That's so cool.
• 15:57
  So is that good?
• 15:58
  Okay, yes, but it means that you don't see impoverished people covered in sores,
• 16:06
  losing their digits with dislocated bones because they didn't have the nutrients to avoid these diseases.
• 16:14
  Right, so what I'm saying is you would see poverty as a selection event in the 19th century, whereas now you don't.
• 16:25
  You get what I'm saying?
• 16:32
  Now, but you get the idea.
• 16:37
  So y'all have lived in a time where your impoverished class out breeds your upper class because the upper class uses birth control
• 16:47
  and because, you know, okay, yes, abstinence and sex ed and all that, but you get the idea.
• 16:53
  Whereas even into the 19th century, the rich and the poor bred at comparable rates, but the well-to-do had more surviving children.
• 17:05
  Whereas the people who lived in poverty couldn't appropriately necessarily take care of themselves while they were pregnant,
• 17:11
  higher disease of miscarriage, and couldn't necessarily take care of their children nutritionally,
• 17:16
  and so you had a higher frequency of nutritionally related diseases.
• 17:19
  And so poverty actually does become a selection event into the 19th century.
• 17:24
  It really isn't into the mid-20th century that through food supplementation you manage to avoid poverty as a selection event.
• 17:31
  I mean, food supplementation, both what we're putting in the food and then also food supplementation through the modern social welfare state.
• 17:38
  And so I'm trying to give you a feel for it just to show you, okay, these people aren't that crazy yet.
• 17:44
  You get what I'm saying?
• 17:48
  Well, I was going to make a bad joke. What year is it? No.
• 17:52
  Okay, so moving on.
• 17:56
  So also it's in this time that sociology as a discipline becomes a thing at universities.
• 18:06
  You have these social scientists trying to study society to somehow ameliorate it,
• 18:10
  or as I like to call it, a vain delusion with all compliments to my friends in social science.
• 18:15
  So if we have a species that you actually is evolving, this actually lends itself to a rather dangerous idea.
• 18:25
  The idea that we should use the state's energy to make society better.
• 18:33
  How is that dangerous?
• 18:36
  Not just that.
• 18:39
  Think about this for a moment. A country that was founded on life, liberty, and property.
• 18:43
  Now you have a state that is interested in managing the affairs of its people.
• 18:50
  Do you see how that's a break?
• 18:54
  If you believe in life, liberty, and property, freedom is the freedom to make your bad choices,
• 19:04
  and to live with them, and to die with them.
• 19:09
  And if I carry it to its next logical conclusion from either the first or the second great awakening,
• 19:16
  to be judged for them by who? By God.
• 19:20
  And so you have a transition in the ethos from the freedom to make your bad choices,
• 19:26
  to live with them, to die with them, to now the state has an interest in your place in society.
• 19:33
  Why? Because of changes in thought.
• 19:39
  Because of changes in what is acceptable.
• 19:42
  Because also in a city you have to live with people.
• 19:47
  In the countryside what can you do? What can you be? You can be a hermit, can't you?
• 19:52
  You're pretty nice.
• 19:55
  And so now you're trying to enhance the species through education,
• 20:00
  through the assimilation of the immigrant community, which they saw as less evolved,
• 20:05
  and through eugenics. Eugenics.
• 20:10
  Kind of a scary idea.
• 20:14
  For those of you who do not speak Greek, which is most of you,
• 20:21
  No, but I know how to break words up.
• 20:25
  There's a list of languages I want to study before I expire from planet Earth.
• 20:34
  Greek is one.
• 20:37
  Well, I mean, I hope to live long, but I know at some point the game ends.
• 20:42
  But anyway, Greek is one.
• 20:46
  I figure at some point I should learn Spanish. I've been in this state all of my life.
• 20:50
  I never got around to it. I took Latin, I took German.
• 20:53
  I'm just sort of like, you know, I can learn Spanish anytime, but I can only learn Latin here.
• 20:58
  I can only take Persian here. And, you know, it just hasn't come up yet.
• 21:02
  Latin, German, Persian.
• 21:06
  What?
• 21:09
  I can read in most of them.
• 21:11
  Persian, I can understand what's being spoken to me.
• 21:14
  My response to repertoire is actually quite small, because again,
• 21:17
  you're better at listening than you are necessarily at speaking in a second language.
• 21:24
  Oh, yeah. So, U means good, and genics, good genes, basically.
• 21:30
  Now, here's the thing.
• 21:33
  If you believe that you are trying to enhance the species,
• 21:36
  are there people who obviously have bad genes in the world?
• 21:44
  And I am going to spell the genes very carefully. We're not talking about Levi's.
• 21:48
  We're talking about G-E-N-E-S.
• 21:53
  Yes, and I even spelled that right when I sounded it out.
• 21:56
  Now, here's the thing.
• 21:58
  So, who would we take out of the gene pool if we're 19th century people?
• 22:04
  Well, let's think about this. Are there people who...
• 22:08
  Oh, wait, by the way, hang on, real quick.
• 22:12
  1859, Origin of the Species gets published.
• 22:17
  When do human beings actually figure out DNA?
• 22:20
  1952.
• 22:23
  Watson and Frick do DNA.
• 22:28
  Okay, so think about this for a moment.
• 22:31
  You're doing eugenics with no genetic testing.
• 22:34
  Why? What are they?
• 22:37
  They're looking at it based on observation.
• 22:40
  Now, at this point, and again, let's think about this for a moment.
• 22:47
  At this point, does America have asylums?
• 22:51
  What's an asylum?
• 22:54
  Where do you put the crazy people, right?
• 22:56
  All right.
• 22:58
  You had prisons, you had prison reform.
• 23:00
  You did have, in the reform movement, the creation of asylums.
• 23:04
  Now, who do you put in asylums?
• 23:07
  I'm not saying crazy people, but let's be more specific.
• 23:10
  Schizophrenics.
• 23:15
  Actually, they're harder to catch.
• 23:17
  I'm just going to leave that alone.
• 23:19
  All right.
• 23:23
  Schizophrenics.
• 23:25
  Who else might we put in an institution?
• 23:27
  Do we have, in American society at this point, actually,
• 23:30
  have we not had in our species perennially people with Down syndrome?
• 23:33
  Yes.
• 23:35
  They're going to be institutionalized if they lived in a city.
• 23:43
  In addition to people with Down syndromes or schizophrenia,
• 23:46
  and I'm going to go back to a concept that I've told you before,
• 23:49
  prior to the dawn of American sign language, did deaf people have language?
• 23:54
  No.
• 23:55
  No, which meant, this is why the term dumb is a slur.
• 23:59
  If you don't have language, you don't think past your own words.
• 24:03
  If you were born deaf, you never acquired language,
• 24:06
  which means you acquired no thought capacity beyond the age of three,
• 24:10
  which on a three-year-old is doable,
• 24:12
  but when you're dealing with an adult who thinks like a three-year-old,
• 24:15
  you have a problem.
• 24:16
  What was typically the outcome, especially in a city?
• 24:19
  Asylum.
• 24:20
  Institutionalization.
• 24:22
  We're talking sociopaths, we're talking people with Down syndrome,
• 24:25
  we're talking people who are deaf.
• 24:27
  Yes.
• 24:28
  Because they don't really understand any of these or how they work or talk,
• 24:32
  so what do they do in the institution?
• 24:34
  Put them in the padded room, put them in the I Love Me jacket.
• 24:37
  At this point, we're taking them out of society,
• 24:40
  but it's a nicer prison than the one with bars that they might hurt themselves with.
• 24:45
  Okay.
• 24:46
  Okay.
• 24:47
  Are they really padded rooms, like actually well-fitted?
• 24:49
  That as a concept goes back to the 1840s.
• 24:52
  Okay.
• 24:53
  Straight jackets, again, is a fairly ancient concept as well.
• 24:57
  Now, these are the people who would be institutionalized,
• 25:01
  and so if you're trying to ameliorate the species,
• 25:03
  do you want the species to have to continue to pay?
• 25:08
  No.
• 25:09
  No.
• 25:10
  And so, but now also, so you wouldn't necessarily execute these people,
• 25:15
  but what might you do to take them out of the gene pool?
• 25:18
  Castration.
• 25:19
  Castration for the males.
• 25:22
  And so the other thing I was going to say was,
• 25:28
  and also think of other genetic maladies that might,
• 25:32
  or not maladies that are genetic, but would be presumed to be genetic.
• 25:36
  Asthmatics.
• 25:40
  You get how, once you go down this road,
• 25:49
  and so you see how, but here's the thing,
• 25:53
  and this is the part that I think that no one appreciates about what is truly dangerous about this idea.
• 26:03
  This is progressivism.
• 26:07
  The most dangerous thing is when I say,
• 26:10
  I will do this terrible thing for the greater good.
• 26:17
  Do you see?
• 26:19
  Because if I'm doing it for the greater good,
• 26:21
  if I'm doing it to save the species,
• 26:23
  if I'm doing it to save the world,
• 26:26
  all of a sudden the ends justify the means.
• 26:30
  And that's the first step towards tyranny.
• 26:36
  It is in the 19th century,
• 26:41
  you have the rise of what's called machine politics.
• 26:50
  So, here's a basic idea.
• 26:55
  You have a party boss,
• 27:00
  who, he has connections either through the church or other ethnic contacts.
• 27:07
  The party boss has ties to the community.
• 27:10
  And by community I'm typically talking about an ethnic enclave.
• 27:16
  And in the world where you don't have IDs to vote,
• 27:20
  what does it mean if you have ties to the community?
• 27:23
  Who is in the community?
• 27:25
  Immigrants who can do what?
• 27:27
  And vote.
• 27:29
  They can vote.
• 27:31
  And so, part of this is in the ethnic neighborhoods,
• 27:34
  part of these are also in the nativist neighborhoods,
• 27:36
  that the party boss is a person who has people who will vote the way he tells them to.
• 27:44
  So the party boss gets people to vote the way he tells them to.
• 27:48
  In exchange for that, he gets candidates elected.
• 27:59
  Once you get candidates elected to office,
• 28:02
  and especially you saw this more in the cities,
• 28:05
  how do you reward people for getting you elected?
• 28:09
  You give them a job in the government.
• 28:12
  You call that a patronage position.
• 28:19
  Now, and I'll use our current administration,
• 28:23
  which at this point is only 30 minutes old.
• 28:28
  And he's not the first one.
• 28:31
  He's got all these cabinet secretaries who are going to be sworn in at some point.
• 28:35
  They're being voted on the Senate.
• 28:37
  Why did he choose those people?
• 28:38
  Because they were loyal to him.
• 28:39
  Because they were part of the coalition that got him elected.
• 28:42
  And Barack Obama did the same thing.
• 28:45
  And Bush the elder did, the younger did the same thing.
• 28:49
  It's a thing.
• 28:50
  All right, I'll talk to you all later.