Some Observation on Truth from Robert G. Ingersoll in time for the 2014 election

By Gary Berg-Cross

As you can probably tell, the flood of insincerity abroad in our politics. It’s a stunning mix of strange, false & brazenly cheesy with intrusive fear paralyzing ads to boot (note - Overall ad spending has broken $1 billion in federal elections and state governors’ races,according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP)). Of course there is plenty to fear with war, pestilence and poverty abroad in the land also along with "shady,deep-pocket dark money from the establishment that undermines what we call "Democracy." Indeed all these fears can get rolled into campaigns like Scott Brown who warns that ISIS might cross the border, and bring Ebola with them. All this conservative talk about things like "restoring the values of the Christian family" moves us away from reality.
 
Over 100 years ago Robert Ingersoll warned about message like this that use religious beliefs in hard times to impose faith-based values about morality and the like.  He recognized the methods of silencing people with alternate opinions and even denying the vote to those not favored by class or ethnicity.  His antidote, summarized in a booklet called “The Truth” (sometimes package with another pamphlet call Ghosts) was a dose of rationality and truth with ideas forged in the Enlightenment  after the “countless years” we had “groped and crawled and struggled and climbed and stumbled toward the light after being “hindered and delayed and deceived “  In Ingersoll’s time the foundation was given a boost by Darwin’s evidence-based theory of evolutions. So armed humanity seemed hungry for the facts and ready to accept Science as a benefactor.  Ingersoll’s apt observation was that:

 “Nothing is greater, nothing is of more importance, than to find amid the errors and darkness of this life, a shining truth. Truth is the intellectual wealth of the world. Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles, and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

Truth gives man the greatest power for good. Truth is sword and shield. It is the sacred light of the soul.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.”

Like many Ingersoll would be disappointed to find so few of us with the right sword, shield or torch to spark our inner light of understanding and to speak honestly from deep conviction. Instead we are still under the say of politically correct belief buttressed by invisible ghosts of prejudiced conclusions that steals the truth from us like a mix of a tyrant and a beggar. There are just still too many factors, as Ingersoll observed, lingering from our primitive past  that hinder us from examining issues.

“Prejudice, egotism, hatred, contempt, disdain, are the enemies of truth and progress. .... all questions presented to his mind, without prejudice, -- unbiased by hatred or love -- by desire or fear.” 

Our political process and its allies tries to prevent open inquiry by “force or fear” which  is doing all it can to “degrade and enslave” us still.
In part we have not taken up with full enthusiasm the path to the truth - by investigation, experiment and reason.  We are still prey to a truth short-circuit of that self-controlled exploratory path. Open investigation of issues is still difficult and ill-supported with some topics too sensitive to discuss.  Instead we are swallowed by the dishonest propaganda of conventional and mainstream, politically correct thinking and truthiness. It comes mixed in with talking points and slogan that hide reality like a Wall Street insider.

A final thought is that those who can cut through the fog of politics to a better understanding have the obligation to reach out as Ingersoll did and communicate and to be a concerned citizen:

“If it be good for man to find the truth -- good for him to be intellectually honest and hospitable, then it is good for others to know the truths thus found.

Every man should have the courage to give his honest thought. This makes the finder and publisher of truth a public benefactor.

Those who prevent, or try to prevent, the expression of honest thought, are the foes of civilization -- the enemies of truth. Nothing can exceed the egotism and impudence of the man who claims the right to express his thought and denies the same right to others.

It will not do to say that certain ideas are sacred, and that man has not the right to investigate and test these ideas for himself."

”

And oh yes, vote your wisdom.

E.O. Wilson and The New Enlightenment: A Call to Understanding

by Gary Berg-Cross

Biologist Edward O. Wilson’s new book is called ‘The Social Conquest of Earth.’  It’s largely provides a biological perspective on 3 grand philo-cultural questions (famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his giant Tahitian painting of 1897):

    ·     “Where do we come from?

•      What are we?
•      Where are we going?” 

 Unlike traditional philosophy or religion Wilson wants to incrementally advance on these from scientific understanding and theory.  He speaks in terms of the relatively rare, eusocial nature of humans and how this might have develop as part of pre-adaption. (Eu-Social means the highest level of organization of animal sociality, and is defined by 3 characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups).
 While it takes a while to make a scientific case Wilson argues for this approach as better than what we are handed by religion approaches.  It’s of no real help at all  he argues aside from making us feel like we know:

          “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity”

Contemporary philosophy  also comes up with a backhand irrelevant, having as Wilson argues

 “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.”

Well maybe and maybe at Harvard, but there are relevant, contemporary folks in philosophy I think.

I largely agree that the most likely approach to answering the 2 above foundational questions is to follow the scientific method as applied by the proper and emerging disciplines.   So we have Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology along with newer disciplines like neuroscience, epigenetics and evolutionary biology.  It’s a wonderful matrix of expanding understanding and especially nice when a master of one or two of these spends the time to synthesize a view understandable to non-experts.  Others in this senior synthesis of ideas worth reading and listening to are Jared Diamond whose last 3 or 4 books are enlightened warning that touches on our eroding environment in an historical context. They are wake up calls such as we have heard too from Richard Dawkins, of course, whose latest book An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist  is autobiographical.

Wilson draws on all these sources to explore the development of human society and some objective self-awareness needed to understand our collective selves. The path has bounced from ancient art, primitive religion, the founding of philosophy, and finally an integrated science perspective. As a Biologist Wilson sees a tipping point in these various views of human nature and such with Charles Darwin's 19^th century theory of evolution by natural selection. Together with other sciences this theory can be applied to understand human behavior and deal with some age old controversies.

Wilson outlines the broad human story and fills in some details to illustrate our new understanding.  Wilson does this, for example, spinning a more complex story than a simple genetic basis for shared individual- and group-level selection factors.  Both selfish and group favoring factors exist. As a result there is intense inter-group competition along with unstable group composition that results in:

 "an unavoidable and perpetual war ... between honor, virtue, and duty ... and           selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy..." 

A payoff is the later section of the book called “A New Enlightenment.” In a sequence of chapters he covers the topics of language (pre-adapted cognition evolved into the ability to create abstractions, and later to use arbitrary symbols for communication, thus leading to the evolution of language)., culture, morality ("The naturalistic understanding of morality does not lead to absolute precepts and sure judgments, but instead warns against basing them blindly on religious and ideological dogmas," p. 252)., religion and art. These provide a much different and nuanced view to approach an answer to the earlier question - “What are we?”,

His warning about the tribal aspects of religion are a meme that one hopes is widely heard. Organized religion, Wilson argues, is a simple expression of an evolution favored tribalism. So the "illogic" of religious belief is not a weakness in traditional human cultures, since it serves a social role of binding a group's members together to the exclusion of outsiders.  You may get to be part of a group by abandoning your differences and converting to the group’s core beliefs. In pre-scientific days creation- genesis stories & myths employed by the early Big religions are all explainable as cultural relics. Wilson does a back hand refutation of "phantasmagoric elements" as the result of hallucinogenic drugs.  This natural explanation, he argues, is a much more plausible as the basis for things like John's “visions” recorded in the Book of Revelation than the idea that god intervention actually happened. The same goes for nomads wandering in the desert.

“.. you can see this especially in the difficulty of harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.”

Yes, it is a good explanation and a warning too.

For a good interview with Wilson on this see the Slate article.

For a video interview see BookTV’s Social Conquest of the Earth.

Dan Dennett's Latest Cognitive Toolbox

by Gary Berg-Cross

Daniel Dennett's new book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking", should be out in a few weeks but it already has some reviews. The book is about methods can we use to answer life's most fundamental questions. You can actually preview some of the chapters which stat by dealing with

General Thinking Tools - like Occam's razor, but also Occam's Broom. This is followed by discussing Tools for Meaning, tools for thinking about evolution, consciousness and the like.  These include "imagination extenders and focus-holders" that Dennett and others have developed for dealing with difficult topics that some of us like to read about and discuss: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. In other words topics that cross and integrate great philosophical, psychological and biological ground.

As always Dennett offers insight and ideas that are debatable. A big topic here is a continuation of Dawkins' discussion of memes and how they obey some abstracted tenets of Darwinian Evolutions.

His starting argument asking if words are things, symbolic but thingy.  This going to provoke some commentary.

 If you grant that words are" things" then we offer the possibility of consider memes some kinds of "things" also perhaps in a realm between physical things and symbolic thing. Well how about calling it a conceptual thing?

Images

Intuition: http://philosophicalchasm.blogspot.com/2010/07/intuitions-and-ethics.html

Intuition Pumps: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking-daniel-c-dennett/1113141240

Dennett: http://www.homodiscens.com/home/areas/why_philosophy/index.htm

Never Apologize, Never Explain

By Gary Berg-Cross

On July 6, 2012 Bill Moyers had humanist poet Philip Appleman on his show. Appleman, author of nine books of poetry, three novels, and six volumes of non-fiction, is famous for many works including his editing of a critical anthology Darwin as well as a poetic turn with his  books Darwin’s Ark and Darwin’s Bestiary. As Moyers noted these have earned him praise for:

       illuminating the “overwhelming sanity” of Darwin’s thought with clarity and wit.  

But for freethinkers we can add to these his recent collection Perfidious Proverbs and Other Poems—A Satirical Look at the Bible (published by Humanity Books ) is definitely one to enjoy. Bill Creasy pointed to this collection in his article published in the September 2011 issue of WASHline, the newsletter of the Washington Area Secular Humanists.

A portion of his poem GERTRUDE, celebrating his mother Gertrude Appleman, 1901-1976, is shown below.  Phillip starts with a piece from the  Catechism of Christian Doctrine which states that “God is all-knowing, all-present, and almighty.”

The poem takes this doctrine to task. It includes this:

I wish that all the people who peddle God could watch my mother die: could see the skin and gristle weighing in at seventy-nine, every stubborn pound of flesh a small death.
I wish the people who peddled God could see her young, lovely in gardens and beautiful in kitchens, and could watch the hand of God slowly twisting her knees and fingers till they gnarled and knotted, settling in for thirty years of pain.

I wish the people who peddle God could see the lightning of His cancer striking her, that small frame tensing at every shock, her sweet contralto scratchy with the Lord's infection: Philip, I want to die.
I wish I had them gathered round, those preachers, popes, rabbis, imams, priests—every pious shill on God's payroll—and I would pull the sheets from my mother's brittle body, and they would fall on their knees at her bedside to be forgiven all their faith.

The image above is from Appleman’s poem God’s Grandeur in “Karma, dharma, pudding, and pie...”.  

 The tongue in cheek poem starts out in a Jobian way

When they hunger and thirst, and I send down a famine,
When they pray for the sun, and I drown them with rain,
And they beg me for reasons, my only reply is:
I never apologize, never explain.

When the Angel of Death is a black wind around them
And children are dying in terrible pain,
Then they burn little candles in churches, but still
I never apologize, never explain.

It ends with this:

Of course, if they’re smart, they can figure it out–
The best of all reasons is perfectly plain.
It’s because I just happen to like it this way–
So I never apologize, never explain.”

You can see Appleman reading the entire poem on Moyers show at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x34fi6KQgg

More of Appleman’s thoughts are at The Labyrinth: God, Darwin and the Meaning of Life

A full version of the poem is available on the American Humanist’s site.

Theism provides no answers

By Mathew Goldstein

Peter Harrison, a former Professor of Science and Religion, has published many books on the history of science and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. An article by Peter Harrison titled "DOES SCIENCE MAKE BELIEF IN GOD OBSOLETE?", published by Australian Broadcasting Company, tries to argue that religious beliefs are beyond the reach of, and therefore impervious to, challenge by empirical evidence.

Peter Harrison begins by pointing out that early scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, were Christians. In those days the concept of galaxies was unknown and the germ theory of disease had not yet been formulated. What people believed in the 17th century is anything but a compelling argument that religious beliefs are consistent with modern knowledge given how much of modern knowledge was unavailable four centuries ago.

Peter Harrison then argues that the "difficulties for some Christian beliefs ... are not insurmountable" by citing "the religious support for "Darwin's views", both "in the nineteenth century and in the present". However, people are capable of supporting incompatible beliefs. The mere fact that people hold two sets of beliefs does not demonstrate that by reconciling themselves to both beliefs such people have established that such a reconciliation is properly justified. Indeed, Darwin himself characterized citing "the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God" as an argument for theism this way: "I see how poor an argument this is."

Peter Harrison quotes Darwin as saying that someone can be a theist and an evolutionist. People can be astrologers and evolutionists. So what? It should be noted here that in the 1800s (and for hundreds of years before that), publicly speaking for atheism was illegal under the British Blasphemy laws. Peter Harrison must know this, yet when citing what Darwin said he omits acknowledging that Darwin had good reason to consider himself obliged to publicly counter any efforts by his critics to associate his views with atheism due to widespread intolerance against atheism.

Peter Harrison claims that Darwin lost his faith because "of suffering in the world", not because of "his theories". Yet Darwin did directly attribute his lack of Christian belief to "the habit of scientific research" in this quote: "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation". He also attributed his loss of faith to the conflicts between evidence and the stories in the Hebrew bible: "But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament; from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." In other words, contrary to what Peter Harrison claims, suffering in the world was one of several different evidences, no doubt including the evidences for evolution by natural selection as the agent for generating humans and all other varieties of life, that contributed to Darwin losing his Christian beliefs. Nor is this a mutually exclusive, either or choice, as Peter Harrison is claiming, since evolution is built on a foundation of a history of millions of years of suffering by animals that experienced pain in their struggles to live.

Peter Harrison argues "it would be a gross overgeneralization to conclude from this single episode that science and religion inevitably compete for the same explanatory territory. In any case, such a view rests on a conflation of two different kinds of explanation." That first remark misses the point, which is that religion, and ideology more generally, has no capability at all beyond that of fictions to distinguish what is true from what is false. Only logic together with evidence, the methods that undergird the natural sciences but that are utilized by everyone more generally, have the capability to increase knowledge. Religions self-assert that they offer another, similarly non-fictional basis for acquiring explanatory insight, and each religion claims it is better than the others in revealing the most important truths. Such assertions have no merit.

He then draws the distinction between atoms, molecules, neurons and brain states on the one hand versus personal interests, intentions, and concerns to illustrate his concept of two kinds of explanation. He claims that only the first kind of explanation is the scientific one and "if your reasons for thinking about these important questions boil down to nothing more than physics, why bother?" Well, I suppose all atheists could just starve ourselves to death since nothing ultimately matters, but somehow that sounds more like a childish and silly attitude that has nothing to do with determining if a theistic god exists. Peter Harrison's question about motivation is irrelevant to demonstrating that there is a non-empirical alternative for grounding explanation, let alone for demonstrating his claim that religion qualifies as such an alternative.

Peter Harrison then discusses a question asked by Socrates: "Why I am here?" He says that the empirical explanation cites the disposition of bones and sinews while the allegedly non-empirical explanation cites purpose in life, divine mission, and quest for truth. The latter explanation is characterized as being of greater consequence for having ultimate import to human beings. The implicit assumption here is that the latter explanations, unlike the former explanations, constitute independent, non-material phenomena. Without that assumption there is no need to associate purpose, mission, and quest with divinity, although Peter Harrison tries to sneak in divinity by pre-declaring mission to be divine. The problem here is that this independent and non-materialistic phenomena assumption is counter-evidenced. All of the evidences we have are that purpose, mission, and quest are emergent properties, that are attributed to minds, that reside in brains, which are part of living bodies. The living bodies consist entirely of matter and energy (mostly in the form of water) embedded in space and time.

Peter Harrison argues "While there is no doubt that science can offer powerful explanations in its own sphere, it seems premature to insist that the only questions worth posing are ones that science can answer." Of course, if we define science narrowly as the peer reviewed results published in scientific journals then that is correct, but what does this have to do with determining whether or not theism is properly justified? Theism is not a question, it is an answer, and answers that are contrary to the direction of the overall evidence are unjustified. Period.

Obviously, the natural sciences answer some questions, not all questions. Some evidences are forever beyond our capability to obtain, but it doesn't follow that therefore God exists. Peter Harrison sidesteps the real issue here, which again is the overall evidences being in contradiction to theism. The gaps in our knowledge do not justify beliefs beyond the "we don't know" conclusions. Furthermore, it is the overall evidences, and what those evidences logically infer, that is the basis for justifying our beliefs, not just the much smaller subset of conclusions that have been directly demonstrated by reproduceable laboratory experiments. Those experimentally demonstrated conclusions, where available, cannot be disregarded, nor are they the only conclusions that we can properly reach from the overall available evidences.

Peter Harrison then says "For all their differences, most philosophers in the Western tradition, and indeed most of the world's religious traditions, have held that a satisfactory account of the things of greatest concern to human beings requires reference to some transcendent reality." But the only transcendent reality supported by the available evidences is the laws of physics, not a creator God. Again, our empirical evidences, including evolution by natural selection, and going beyond that to also including empirical evidences from many academic areas, favors the conclusion that all religions are human created fictions.

Peter Harrison is claiming that the laws of physics are "unsatisfactory" explanations, but the opposite is true. The laws of physics as the ultimate explanations have no viable competition. No alternative "explanations" are as well-evidenced or as complete as the laws of physics. Relative to the laws of physics, theism has nothing. It isn't even clear that theism qualifies as an explanation by any proper measure. People who cite God as a catch-all "explanation" are really saying that they have no explanation. Theism has never produced any knowledge. Nothing of substance that Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton learned which contributed to modern knowledge was provided to them by a God, it was all obtained by their own pursuit of the empirical evidences.

Peter Harrison concludes that "God provides one possible answer ... to the problems of life." One possible answer to the problems of drought is a rain dance. There are many such "possible" and mistaken answers. Peter Harrison completely fails to show that the theistic God hypothesis, unlike empirically based theories such as evolution by natural selection, uniquely provides any correct and additional answers to any knowledge questions whatsoever.

Paleontologist Robert Asher's accommodationism

By Mathew Goldstein

In his Huffington Post article Science, Religion and the First Amendment, paleontologist Robert J. Asher writes "Never mind that the winning side of major U.S. court decisions supporting evolution in public schools has regularly featured experts who recognize compatibility between science and religion. If they are 'creationists,' then so was Charles Darwin." Unlike Darwin, these experts sometimes claim that ancient miracle stories, such as the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus, are true. These experts who claim compatibility between their own religious beliefs and science make arguments in defense of their claim that are in conflict with the overall evidence. In contrast, Darwin stopped attending church and stopped calling himself a Christian. He wrote "Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake." Given the contexts that atheism was a crime in those days, and that we know so much more today about plausible materialistic mechanisms for origins than we did in those days, Darwin expressed views that hinted his beliefs leaned in an atheistic direction, even though he was a Christian as a younger man.

Robert Asher then wrote: "However, it is not 'creation' itself that conflicts with science, but the implication of certain processes (involving for example a ridiculously short period of time) by which this 'creation' took place." Although theists will deny it, the implications of our knowledge about the universe are also unfavorable for a creation of humans by deity process. The evolutionary process replaces the theistic God's role as creator of humans with biology and natural selection. To keep insisting that a god created humans is thus also similarly ridiculous. Theism requires almost as much mental gymnastics to refuse accepting the evidence to the contrary as does belief in young earth creationism.

Robert Asher continues: "Asserting that a deity is behind a given process leaves the material basis for that process completely open to further investigation." This is true to the extent the person making the deity assertion is willing to abandon that assertion if the evidence better fits the assertion that no deity is behind a given a process. Evolution is behind the process of speciation. So asserting that God is behind the process of speciation can, and sometimes does, close the material basis referred to as biological evolution from at least some further investigations.

Robert Asher then argues: "Analogously, regarding Thomas Edison as the inventor of the light bulb says nothing about how it actually works, and no reasonable person would conclude his non-existence from our understanding of electricity. In other words, understanding a natural mechanism is generally independent of a potential agency behind it." Obviously, there is no conflict between a scientific understanding of electricity and the existence of Thomas Edison. On the contrary, we are rationally compelled to believe in the existence of Thomas Edison because the evidence for his existence is very strong. But it would be wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for the light bulb instead of Thomas Edison and it is similarly wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for homo sapiens instead of biological evolution. We should always be following the evidence instead of contradicting the evidence. In other words, a natural mechanism can, and more to the point in this case, does, provide an explanation that functions as the agency behind something else.

Robert Asher then comments on the first clause of the 1st amendment of the U. S. constitution: "The U.S. constitution was written by individuals who viewed nature and its laws as consistent with the existence of a deity. I too believe in God, and am grateful to the framers for crafting a system by which religious beliefs cannot be legislated. Yet this constitutional assurance is double-edged because it seeks to balance the protection of society from popular superstition with each individual's right to religious expression. This balance lends itself to one of the most pressing issues of our society today: distinguishing superstition from religion, and ensuring that the right to believe does not cripple an understanding of our planet and ourselves." This is mistaken. Our laws speak for distinguishing religion from government. There is nothing at all about distinguishing superstition from religion in our laws, nor should there be. People are free to be "superstitious" and to express their superstitions via their religion. Insofar as such "mixing" is one of the more pressing issues of our society, it is a protected right of individuals under the second clause of the 1st amendment. Taking the superstition out of religion is like removing the water from lakes. Eliminate the former and the latter becomes nothing more than an artifact from the past.

Social Darwinism 3.2

by Gary Berg-Cross

President Obama recently assailed the Ryan Republican budget plan as ‘social Darwinism. It makes sense that he is setting the stage for a budget values debate that is likely to define the fall election. To kickoff the debate he has appealed to the idea of Social Darwinism and he’s labeled the Republican budgets, drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as part of a slippery and "a prescription for decline" because it would gut such essential programs as Medicare and education. A central part of this “radical vision” is

“Disguised as deficit-reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled Social Darwinism. It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training; research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.” 

Not everyone may understand the reference to “social Darwinism” beyond an implied argument that a society's strongest members will and should flourish and that it is a mistake to help society’s “weaker members survive and reproduce. Translated to policy, it pits the poor against the wealthy in some struggle for survival. People may vaguely know that Libertarians or Randians adhere to a form of “conservative Darwinism” stressing laissez-faire markets that allow the strongest to emerge and flourish.

We should be more literate about Social Darwinism. Like the difference between chemistry and alchemy it's one of those scientific cultural things that everybody should know a bit about. In The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby describes Social Darwinism as one of the pseudoscience encouraging an American social environment of unreason and ignorance (see my blog Critical Thinking in a Time of Political Truthiness. Since unreasonable arguments are likely to be thrown about during the Presidential campaigns it might be useful to understand the history of Social Darwinism, who has favored it and how it has been critiqued. This will allow us to be more reasoned in the debate.

The phrase "survival of the fittest" is central to the concept and was coined by Herbert Spencer, British philosopher, in 1851. (His picture is above sitting next to Paul Ryan) The original form of Social Darwinism (call it Social Darwinism I in the current vernacular of versioning) appeared pretty rapidly after the Origins publication and was recognizable by the late 1860s as suggesting broader implications of evolution. The actual term appeared later in 1877 for the idea that the struggle for survival seen in animal species also applies to humans. Fair enough, but is this a hypothesis or a scientific theory that gets refined by evidence over time.  If so one would expect that people like Evolutionary Biologists would be increasingly in the forefront of the discussions.  Instead we find politicians, clergy, fringe philosophers and lassez faire corporatists and their mouthpieces in the forefront of the efforts over time making arguments that appeal to people who know little of the science. 

The simple fact is that cooperation also applies to intelligent species. Darwin, himself felt that "social instincts" such as "sympathy" and "moral sentiments" were central to human life and may have also evolved through natural selection. Darwin speculated that social concerns actually strengthening the human cultures in which Anthropologists see them wrote about it this way in his later book Descent of Man:

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable- namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them

It's pretty clear that we can make plausible arguments for natural selection working on human tribes. Some tribal members will possessing in a high degree social sentiments we might think of as patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy. If they are socially conscious and ready to aid each another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, there is a good chance they will be victorious over most other tribes. If these social sentiments are able to be passed on they could be selected for.‎ That’s a big IF but no more than the selfish struggle or each against the other.  And such better angels sentiments aren’t what Social Darwinists were talking about. Ideas like sympathy for others is not what they see as being selected.

Unlike Darwin popularizes of Social Darwinism I ignored the complexity of human descent and inheritability issues and tuned out of the eventual surge of comparative data from Anthropology. They focused on socially deleterious traits, like "pauperism" and mental illness. Like Andrew Carnegie hey had a simple approach to fitness via competition:

"The law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, [but] it is best for the race , because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."
Andrew Carnegie, "The Gospel of Wealth, (1889)

The simple idea is that competition produces winners - some type of success within a culture. In the class stratified England on the 19^th century you can imagine who was seen as fit – the aristocracy and noveau rich. In such society’s with big wealth gaps, material success can easily be interpreted as evolution’s considered moral and progressive judgment. Wealth success was the proxy for fitness as the dominance of the white race could be interpreted as evolutionarily superior to other races. Likewise colonial success of countries like Britain made them superior to other nations. In American the general social theory became a practiced justification for laissez faire capitalism during the Gilded Age.

This superiority included cultural-political institutions and Religion, with some special reasoning to make conclusions come out right. Christianity is championed as better than all the rest and has out competed them. Well it fought Islam to a draw, but then perhaps we can rationalize this because Islam flourishes in inferior cultures. It is intellectually interesting that an oversimplified application of an agnostic theory like Darwinian evolution should have been picked up by 19th-century Christian ministers like Henry Ward Beecher, as an attempt to reconcile Christianity with evolution, although to be fair they did not call it Social Darwinism. To Beecher and others the Science of Evolution proved God's will in making certain that 'the poor will be with you always.' Indeed, economic success is evidence of the working of God's will through some biological imperative of natural selection set up by God for this purpose. Given this double authority in the natural order, only fools attempt to ameliorate economic inequality.Thinking like this leads to a Prosperity Gospel rather than a compassionate one.

The whole Social Darwin agrument strikes some as an inhumane, weakly formed and flawed philosophy. Like Intelligent Design or Freudian Psychology it can be used elastically to justify whatever its supporters want to justify. As previously discussed it is appealing as a racial argument. To be sure it was welcomed by the ultra-rich in 19^th century America to justify their status and world view. And it justified Gilded Age comfort while removing moral responsibility for poor immigrants floundering in Dickensian poverty and misery.

Social Darwinisn II was a later version, again popular in the post WW-I Roaring 20s with its banking wealth. One impetus was a mix of the rise of the eugenics movement which grew out of the coupled with massive immigration that threaten some with a dilution of the Caucasian and Northern European races. Eugenics had roots in Social Darwinism I with its primitive notions of fitness and that biology was destiny. Interestingly, the word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by Darwin cousin scientist Francis Galton. Galton wanted to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as it is often put, weeding out "undesirables" while promoting "desirables." This may have seen simpler in Galton's day before we knew the mechanics of genetics, although there were efforts to study identical twins to see how much intelligence is inhereted. If you take an Intro Psych course today you might learn about how the early English studies actually fabricated data. We know a lot more today about the essentially interactive nature of intelligence emerging in the environment.

Which brings us to a 3^rd phase of Social Darwinism which started a while ago (so I call the current version 3.2) as part of a conservative movement that features things like trickle down economics and shrinking safety nets. This version has its dog whistle appeal points. One focuses on poor (aka inferior) people who should not be pampered - pregnant immigrants, the poor, elderly and disabled. These are trotted out like Reagan’s welfare queens as implied 'parasites.' This phase is again associated with our rising wealth inequality and a new brand of wealth elites. The current wealth gap, like that of the 1920 and 30s, is justified as due to some type of personal fitness. You can see this embedded in Mitt Romney’s messages. (See my blog on Behind the Prosperity Message of Happy Warriors.) He is obviously fit to lead because he is wealthy and a “job creator.” This ignores the fact that he didn’t create jobs or that many have become wealthy through a fitness for influencing tax laws and getting special exemptions.Ignoring facts is again one sign of a pseudo-science and in this case it is even lighter than that and is just social fiction driven by  powerful political and their media voices.

The press of arguments justifying austere budgets and programs probably will fuel a new round of discussion with some embedded Social Darwin issues - things like 'class envy' & 'class warfare,' social compassion, what is a fair and productive society and whether preventive measures as simple as vaccination are justified. When blame is being allocated for things like the national deficit these are some of the factors focused on as opposed to specific decisions taken in the Bush years that produced the large deficits we see.

The current launch area is the “smoke and mirrors” Ryan budget which by one estimate adds something like 4 trillion dollars to the deficit, but includes $4.3 trillion in tax cuts which would again benefit those fittest among us like Mitt.

The list of possible cuts in Ryan’s budget includes Medicare, Social Security, college aid, early education, the Federal Aviation Administration, and even the weather service. As Ezra Klein identified there is real hypocrisy in Ryan's arguments arguments for deficit reduction and minimal impact :

The cuts to Medicaid and other health programs for the poor are twice the size of those to Medicare. The cuts to education, to food stamps, to transportation infrastructure and to pretty much everything else besides defense are draconian. As for the tax reform component, it cuts taxes on millionaires by more than $250,000, but it doesn’t name a single loophole or tax break that Ryan and the Republicans would close.

 Even among conservatives there are debates on such draconian approaches. Former Bush speechwriter, Mike Gerson is uncomfortable the Tea Party ‘sink or swim’ attitude that seems at odds with some older aspects of conservatism (or at least compassionate conservatism):

“It is at odds with Abraham Lincoln’s inclusive tone and his conviction that government policies could empower individuals. It is inconsistent with religious teaching on government’s responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak. It does not reflect a Burkean suspicion of radical social change.”

This new round of Social Darwinism discussion would be improved by a healthy degree of skepticism and by a respect for data, such as cited on the Ryan budget in contrast to its claims. Wisdom on policy resides at least partly in understanding the consequences of policy action. And for all the social philosophizing one wonders if the voices of experts will be hears are and whether they will be listed to. If claims about human nature and the society are at issue, we want experts in these areas to advise us. As a culture we are, unfortunately, increasingly less interested in hearing such deep analysis and are rather captured by slogans and hot button coverage.