Darwinism and Social Policy

MORE CLEAR, BUT DARWIN was not entirely unworried in this area. For he did, like many of his contemporaries, notice a tendency in his time for the unfit, the inferior ‘in body or mind’ and even the abject poor to breed, and, though he does not say this explicitly, possibly to outbreed the prudent and the strong. If mankind is to advance, we must uncover the laws of inheritance and then legislate against marriages among the inferior. We must encourage the poor not to marry (for abject poverty ‘tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage’), while at the same time urging the prudent and the most able to rear the largest number of offspring. (Maybe Darwin would have seen himself as suffering from a related dilemma had he not been personally so rich; at the time of his marriage he was wondering whether he would be able to have both books and children.) Above all we must ensure that the struggle for existence is not softened in its severity by laws and customs: ‘otherwise (mankind) would sink into indolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted.’ (All the quotations are from The Descent of Man , second edition, John Murray, 1898, vol II, pp 438-440.)

There is in fact a degree of tension in Darwin’s own mind at this point, because as well as the struggle for existence, he wants our moral qualities to be developed (partly because he believes that a group with a strong communal morality based on mutual sympathy will do better than less coherent groups). But might it not be just those moral qualities which recognise a common good, which protect the inferior and the poor against the most severe effects of the struggle for existence, which might then undermine human progress (on his view)? Indeed it is just so. ‘It is surprising’, Darwin observed, ‘how soon a want of care… leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.’ But in our own case, and for moral reasons, a degree of such ‘ignorance’ must be tolerated. We must, Darwin admits, ‘therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind’, while at the same time doing what we can to ensure that ‘the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound.’ (The Descent of Man, Vol I, p 206)  So the general import of his message is clear. We must take as much care in our own marriages as we take in the breeding and selection of our domestic animals, and we must also maintain social structures which allow untrammelled competition; both these injunctions follow pretty directly from applying the theory of natural selection to human society, as does the view that societies are to be ranked in degrees of success.