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By Larry Butler
Survival of the Fittest is a phrase often attributed in error to Charles Darwin. But it was Herbert Spencer who actually connected these words in 1864 to describe the inevitable fate of the poor in an industrialized world. Others called his theories Social Darwinism. That's right, it is a real thing, or at least it once was in times gone by. Fox Republicans are today trying to bring this long-discredited philosophy back from the dead.
Economists of the central tradition like Smith and Malthus had dealt primarily with aggregate wealth rather than the contrast between luxury and poverty in society. They acknowledged that poverty would always be the norm, and would be limited only by access to resources needed to eat and reproduce. But nobody unashamedly celebrated widespread poverty until Spencer.
An Englishman by birth, an economist by trade, and a racist by proclivity, Spencer took the findings of Charles Darwin and applied them to the world of human enterprise, yielding some cruel and bizarre arguments. To wit: Assisting the poor interferes with the laws of nature; as does impeding the accumulation of affluence by the wealthy. The poor require depredation to evolve; to keep it from them is morally wrong. The fittest are genetically predisposed to excellence; therefore so are their spawn. Private charity is of value only in that it allows the giver to express his generosity; no such justification exists for public charity. Among the inferior poor, widespread death from starvation or exposure was the expected, even desired, consequence.
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