As has been well reported by now, the Texas State Board of Education has just finished the first round of its work rewriting the state's social studies curriculum. This is the same group that dismantled the state's science standards last year.
They did make one change, however, that might well serve as a model that could productively be emulated. According to the report in The New York Times, "They also replaced the word 'capitalism' throughout their texts with the 'free-enterprise system.'" The move was carefully explained by one board member: "'Let's face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,' said one conservative member, Terri Leo. 'You know, 'capitalist pig!'"
Unlike "capitalism," "social Darwinism" is a concept whose woeful misnaming has led to serious damage. Social Darwinism is a bizarre name in that it has precious little to do with either Darwin or the theory of evolution to which his work gave rise.
Indeed, social Darwinism is a bastardization of the largely meaningless concept of "survival of the fittest," coined by Herbert Spencer rather than Charles Darwin. Social Darwinism has been used by its proponents to advance a wide array of causes from eugenics to the belief that government should not fund social programs because such programs simply help the poor, or, as some crassly express it, the less fit, survive.
As it has been constructed as a social policy, social Darwinism is despicable. Many have used it to attack evolutionary theory, somehow thinking that an unpopular social policy that sounds like science can undercut sound scientific ideas.
Consider a recent pronouncement from Answers in Genesis, the creationist organization that built the creation museum-cum-theme-park in Kentucky: "Social Darwinism is not a perversion of the principles of Darwinian evolution. On the contrary, it is taking them to their natural, logical conclusion. Further, if there were no connection to evolution then why is it called social Darwinism?"
Exactly! Why is it called social Darwinism? It shouldn't be -- and it is time we changed the name to stop the confusion.
Except for those, like the folks from Answers in Genesis and Ben Stein in his film Expelled, who use the term shamelessly to attack evolution, people on all sides of the political spectrum should rally around this call for change. After all, conservatives who disparage evolution love to fall back on social Darwinism when advancing their attacks on health care initiatives, welfare policies and unemployment benefits. They can't be comfortable endorsing something that seems tied to evolution when they're so opposed to the concept of evolution.
In addition to knowing that social Darwinism is unrelated to evolutionary principles, proponents of evolution also understand a larger truth. They understand that even if the two were actually linked, human society allows us to move beyond some biological imperatives. Just because we are part of the animal kingdom does not mean that we have to act in the same manner as other members of that kingdom; we can exercise choice to create a social network not observed in other species.
Perhaps the world's best known popularizer of evolution, Richard Dawkins, made this point exceedingly well in a 2005 interview published in Die Presse. He said, "No self-respecting person would want to live in a society that operates according to Darwinian laws. I am a passionate Darwinist, when it involves explaining the development of life. However, I am a passionate anti-Darwinist when it involves the kind of society in which we want to live. A Darwinian state would be a Fascist state."
Let's stop this confusion and find a better name for social Darwinism -- one that makes intellectual sense and permits people to understand its intent.
In that spirit, I'm creating a contest calling for suggestions of a name change. The new name needs to be short and catchy. It needs to be fully expressive. It needs to be divorced from the science with which it has nothing to do.
Offer your suggestions coupled with a brief explanation. The winning entry will earn a prize to be determined later. Judging will be done by a panel to be determined later. All I can say at this point is that the judging will not be conducted by the members of the Texas State Board of Education.
Follow Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mzclergyletter
Sanger told Planned parent hood the destruction of the black population would only result in positive outcomes for all society....wow
"In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W. E. B. Du Bois."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
bourgeois ideology of exclusionism and hegemony known as Social Darwinism was constructed. If you examine the five tenets of Calvinism, acronymed by the five letters T.U.L.I.P., you discover a
patently discriminatory code of patriarchal religious exclusionism, salvation, selection and control.
For me, Social Darwinism is an extension of Calvinism's system of false human identity based
on selective sprirtual and social superiority. Calvinism advanced an austere set of obsessive
and egoistic beliefs in the Battle of the Reformation against a dominionistic and mendacious
Catholic Church. Social Darwinism applied those beliefs to the socio-economic and
geopolitical arrangement of the 19th Century. Social Darwinism is misanthopism, and it is a misnomer, as you say, that co-opts the idea of 'might makes right.' In its philosophical origins, I believe it has everything to do with an inability to accept nature and accomodate nature's random diversity and limitations.
My choice is Social Dominionism, in place of Social Darwinism. It is the 19th-century ideological framewok of an inadequacy-driven assertion of human superiority that delivered much insanity to the world, including Colonialism, Militarism, Imperialism, all forms of Authoritarianism. More recently, it inspired and continues to fuel the rise in America of militant self-righteousness, class war devisiveness, resource egocentrism, political destructiveness and the venal politics of 'too big to fail' and 'personal self-enrichment' of recent history.
How can it not 'accept nature' when that's the very thing it is trying to do? The belief of the social darwinist is that society is preventing the natural evolution of the species by allowing the weaker of the species to hang around and survive. He wants 'natural selection' to take place and not be prevented by society.
And I disagree with you when you say it existed before Darwin. Some of the ideas existed in some form or another but they were never put in a Darwinian framework.
I was thinking about how many ways there are to define "human." People who see human as a biological construct (i.e., we recognize each other as members of homo sapiens) and the people who see human as a spiritual construct (i.e., God loves and recognizes us both) make similar equations about identity and mutual co-existence.
The people who can define people based on political or social factors don't recognize the common ground in either biology or spirituality. If I regard only "my kind" as people, then everyone else is an object. Objects don't need care and don't have rights. The rage of the teabagger contingency has a lot to do with anger at objects that insist upon voting. There's no problem with abusing these objects, which look so astonishingly like real people.
I think it works the other way, too. A social conservative I know can't understand my pro-choice position: to that person, I treat a "person without a voice" as an object. From my point of view, the pregnant woman can't be made an object.
That person and I can't agree, because we've identified different things as objects. Thinking on the keys, here, that's an uncomfortable thought. I'll have to think about it some more.